As if to reinforce my words, the oscilloscope trace suddenly erupted into the same flickering pattern. The message was being sent again.
We went through two weeks of it. The message would run through for seven hours, then stop for seven. We transcribed it on tape 48 times and ran it through the computer constantly. Always the same result—six-digit numbers; millions of them. There were six different seven-hour-long messages, being repeated one after the other, constantly.
We forgot the meteorological equipment. We ignored the weekly messages from McMurdo. The rest of the world became a meaningless fiction to us. There was nothing but the confounded, tantalizing, infuriating, enthralling message. The National Emergency, the bomb tests, families, duties—all transcended, all forgotten. We ate when we thought of it and slept when we couldn't keep our eyes open any longer. The message. What was it? What was the key to unlock its meaning?
"It's got to be something universal," I told Rizzo. "Something universal ... in the widest sense of the term."
He looked up from his desk, which was wedged in between the end of his bunk and the curving dome wall. The desk was littered with printout sheets from the computer, each one of them part of the message.
"You've only said that a half-million times in the past couple weeks. What the hell is universal? If you can figure that out, you're damned good."
What is universal? I wondered. You're an astronomer. You look out at the universe. What do you see? I thought about it. What do I see? Stars, gas, dust clouds, planets ... what's universal about them? What do they all have that....
"Atoms!" I blurted.
Rizzo cocked a weary eye at me. "Atoms?"
"Atoms. Elements. Look...." I grabbed up a fistful of the sheets and thumbed through them. "Look ... each message starts with a list of numbers. Then there's a long blank to separate the opening list from the rest of the message. See? Every time, the same length list."