We should have called McMurdo, or Washington. Or perhaps we should have attempted to get a message through to the United Nations. But we never even thought of it. This was our problem. Perhaps it was the sheer isolation of our dome that kept us from thinking about the rest of the world. Perhaps it was sheer luck.
"If they're using lasers," Rizzo reasoned, "they must have a technology something like ours."
"Must have had," I corrected. "That message is seven hundred years old, remember. They were playing with lasers when King John was signing the Magna Charta and Genghis Khan owned most of Asia. Lord knows what they have now."
Rizzo blanched and reached for another cigaret.
I turned back to the oscilloscope. The signal was still flashing across its face.
"They're sending out a signal," I mused, "probably at random. Just beaming it out into space, hoping that someone, somewhere will pick it up. It must be in some form of code ... but a code that they feel can be easily cracked by anyone with enough intelligence to realize that there's a message there."
"Sort of an interstellar Morse code."
I shook my head. "Morse code depends on both sides knowing the code. There's no key."
"Cryptographers crack codes."
"Sure. If they know what language is being used. We don't know the language, we don't know the alphabet, the thought processes ... nothing."