That was undoubtedly why he was the first to puzzle out the Olympians’ interminably repeated squees and squabs. If you simply took the dit to be numeral one, and the squee to be plus sign, and the squab to be an equals sign, then “Dit squee dit squab dit dit” simply came out as “One plus one equals two.”
That was easy enough. It didn’t take a super brain like Sam’s to substitute our terms for theirs and reveal the message to be simple arithmetic—except for the mysterious “wooooo”:
Dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squab wooooo.
What was the “wooooo” supposed to mean? A special convention to represent the numeral four?
Sam knew right away, of course. As soon as he heard the message he telegraphed the solution from his library in Padua:
“The message calls for an answer. ‘Wooooo’ means question mark. The answer is four.”
And so the reply to the stars was transmitted on its way:
Dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squab dit dit dit dit.
The human race had turned in its test paper in the entrance examination, and the slow process of establishing communication had begun.
It took four years before the Olympians responded. Obviously, they weren’t nearby. Also obviously, they weren’t simple folk like ourselves, sending out radio messages from a planet of a star two light-years away, because there wasn’t any star there; the reply came from a point in space where none of our telescopes or probes had found anything at all.
By then Sam was deeply involved. He was the first to point out that the star folk had undoubtedly chosen to send a weak signal, because they wanted to be sure our technology was reasonably well developed before we tried to answer. He was one of the impatient ones who talked the collegium authorities into beginning transmission of all sorts of mathematical formulae, and then simple word relationships to start sending something to the Olympians while we waited for radio waves to creep to wherever they were and back with an answer.
Sam wasn’t the only one, of course. He wasn’t even the principal investigator when they got into the hard work of developing a common vocabulary. There were better specialists than Sam at linguistics and cryptanalysis.
But it was Sam who first noticed, early on, that the response time to our messages was getting shorter. Meaning that the Olympians were on their way towards us.
By then they’d begun sending picture mosaics. They came in as strings of dits and dahs, 550,564 bits long. Someone quickly figured out that that was the square of 742, and when they displayed the string as a square matrix, black cells for the dits and white ones for the dahs, the image of the first Olympian leaped out.
Everybody remembers that picture. Everyone on Earth saw it, except for the totally blind—it was on every broadcast screen and news journal in the world—and even the blind listened to the atomical descriptions every commentator supplied. Two tails. A fleshy, beard-like thing that hung down from its chin. Four legs. A ruff of spikes down what seemed to be the backbone. Eyes set wide apart on bulges from the cheekbones.
That first Olympian was not at all pretty, but it was definitely alien.
When the next string turned out very similar to the first, it was Sam who saw at once that it was simply a slightly rotated view of the same being. The Olympians took forty-one pictures to give us the complete likeness of that first one in the round…
Then they began sending pictures of the others.
It had never occurred to anyone, not even Sam, that we would be dealing not with one super race, but with at least twenty-two of them. There were that many separate forms of alien beings, and each one uglier and more strange than the one before.
That was one of the reasons the priests didn’t like calling them Olympians. We’re pretty ecumenical about our gods, but none of them looked anything like any of those, and some of the older priests never stopped muttering about blasphemy.
Halfway through the third course of our lunch and the second flask of wine, Sam broke off his description of the latest communiqué from the Olympians—they’d been acknowledging receipt of our transmissions about Earthly history—to lift his head and grin at me.
“Got it,” he said.
I turned and blinked at him. Actually, I hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to his monologue because I had been keeping my eye on the pretty Kievan waitress. She had attracted my attention because—well, I mean, after attracting my attention because of her extremely well-developed figure and the sparsity of clothing to conceal it—because she was wearing a gold citizen’s amulet around her neck. She wasn’t a slave. That made her more intriguing. I can’t ever get really interested in slave women, because it isn’t sporting, but I had got quite interested in this woman.
“Are you listening to me?” Sam demanded testily.
“Of course I am. What have you got?”
“I’ve got the answer to your problem.” He beamed. “Not just a sci-rom novel plot. A whole new kind of sci-rom! Why don’t you write a book about what it will be like if the Olympians don’t come?”
I love the way half of Sam’s brain works at questions while the other half is doing something completely different, but I can’t always follow what comes out of it. “I don’t see what you mean. If I write about the Olympians not coming, isn’t that just as bad as if I write about them doing it?”
“No, no,” he snapped. “Listen to what I say! Leave the Olympians out entirely. Just write about a future that might happen, but won’t.”
The waitress was hovering over us, picking up used plates. I was conscious of her listening as I responded with dignity, “Sam, that’s not my style. My sci-roms may not sell as well as yours do, but I’ve got just as much integrity. I never write anything that I don’t believe is at least possible.”
“Julie, get your mind off your gonads”—so he hadn’t missed the attention I was giving the girl—“and use that pitifully tiny brain of yours. I’m talking about something that could be possible, in some alternative future, if you see what I mean.”
I didn’t see at all. “What’s an alternative future?”
“It’s a future that might happen, but won’t,” he explained. “Like if the Olympians don’t come to see us.”
I shook my head, puzzled. “But we already know they’re coming,” I pointed out.
“But suppose they weren’t! Suppose they hadn’t contacted us years ago.”
“But they did,” I said, trying to straighten out his thinking on the subject. He only sighed.
“I see I’m not getting through to you,” he said, pulling his robe around him and getting to his feet. “Get on with your waitress. I’ve got some messages to send. I’ll see you on the ship.”
Well, for one reason or another I didn’t get anywhere with the waitress. She said she was married, happily and monogamously. Well, I couldn’t see why any lawful, free husband would have his wife out working at a job like that, but I was surprised she didn’t show more interest in one of my lineage—
I’d better explain about that.
You see, my family has a claim to fame. Genealogists say we are descended from the line of Julius Caesar himself.
I mention that claim myself, sometimes, though usually only when I’ve been drinking—I suppose it is one of the reasons that Lidia, always a snob, took up with me in the first place. It isn’t a serious matter. After all, Julius Caesar died more than two thousand years ago. There have been sixty or seventy generations since then, not to mention the fact that, although Ancestor Julius certainly left a lot of children behind him, none of them happened to be born to a woman he happened to be married to. I don’t even look very Roman. There must have been a Nordiman or two in the line, because I’m tall and fair-haired, which no respectable Roman ever was.