The line never stood still; millions of little peaks and nulls calling to us, speaking to us, never still, never quiet, constantly flickering its unknown message to us.
"Can it be ... people?" Rizzo wondered. His face, bathed in the greenish light, was suddenly furrowed, withered, ancient: a mixture of disbelief and fear.
"What else could it be?" I heard my own voice answer. "There's no other explanation possible."
We sat mutely for God knows how long.
Finally Rizzo asked, "What do we do now?"
The question broke our entranced mood. What do we do? What action do we take? We're thinking men, and we've been contacted by other creatures that can think, reason, send a signal across seven hundred lightyears of space. So don't just sit there in stupified awe. Use your brain, prove that you're worthy of the tag sapiens.
"We decode the message," I announced. Then, as an after-thought, "But don't ask me how."