"I don't think so," I answered. "After all, what did you expect out of the computer? Shakespearean poetry?"
"No, but I expected numbers that would make some sense. One and one, maybe. Something that means something. This stuff is nowhere."
Our nerves must have really been wound tight, because before we knew it we were in the middle of a nasty argument—and it was over nothing, really. But in the middle of it:
"Hey, look," Rizzo shouted, pointing to the oscilloscope.
The message had stopped. The 'scope showed only the calm, steady line of the star's basic two-day-long pulsation.
It suddenly occurred to us that we hadn't slept for more than 36 hours, and we were both exhausted. We forgot the senseless argument. The message was ended. Perhaps there would be another; perhaps not. We had the telescope, spectrometer, photocell, oscilloscope, and computer set to record automatically. We collapsed into our bunks. I suppose I should have had monumental dreams. I didn't. I slept like a dead man.
When we woke up, the oscilloscope trace was still quiet.
"Y'know," Rizzo muttered, "it might just be a fluke ... I mean, maybe the signals don't mean a damned thing. The computer is probably translating nonsense into numbers just because it's built to print out numbers and nothing else."
"Not likely," I said. "There are too many coincidences to be explained. We're receiving a message, I'm certain of it. Now we've got to crack the code."