"They're covering all the possibilities. There are messages for many different levels of understanding. We just decoded the simplest one."
"Yeah."
I noticed that as he spoke, Rizzo's hand—still tightly clutching the pencil—was trembling and white with tension.
"Well?"
Rizzo licked his lips. "Let's get to work."
We were like two men possessed. Eating, sleeping, even talking was ignored completely as we waded through the hundreds of sheets of paper. We could decode only a small percentage of them, but they still represented many hours of communication. The sheets that we couldn't decode, we suspected, were repetitions of the same message that we were working on.
We lost all concept of time. We must have slept, more than once, but I simply don't remember. All I can recall is thousands of numbers, row upon row, sheet after sheet of numbers ... and my pencil scratching symbols of the various chemical elements over them until my hand was so cramped I could no longer open the fingers.
The message consisted of a long series of formulas; that much was certain. But, without punctuation, with no knowledge of the symbols that denote even such simple things as "plus" or "equals" or "yields," it took us more weeks of hard work to unravel the sense of each equation. And even then, there was more to the message than met the eye:
"Just what the hell are they driving at?" Rizzo wondered aloud. His face had changed: it was thinner, hollow-eyed, weary, covered with a scraggly beard.