He let the recording run a bit then said, again parroting the gibberish, "'Chicago Spaceport, Interstellar Service to Spaceflight Seventy-nine. We read you five by five, go ahead. What is your distress?' We interpret the reply as, 'Base of Operations has received your distress call. Please elucidate.' What follows defies identification, Admiral Sarri. Until we can meet one of these people and learn more of their physiognomy, we cannot hope to unravel their numerical system. Damn it, we don't even know how many fingers they have."
"Or," suggested Sarri drily, "whether they might have stopped counting on their hands."
"Indeed." Linus Brein nodded thoughtfully. "However, not long after the reception of this distress signal, the entire infrawave band seemed to fill up with all sorts of signals, all of them repeating the sounds that we assume are the space coordinates of this foundered spacecraft."
"Indicating that this is not a completely anarchistic or communal, insect-type culture. The individual is important."
"I would say so."
Regin Naylo smiled. It would have been an odd-looking facial grimace to an Earthman, for it turned the corners of his pencil-thin lips down and furrowed the skin of his head between the gleaming eyes and the low, ragged hairline.
Viggon Sarri said, "What do you find so amusing?"
Regin replied, "If they are individually important, then the culture finds the individual important, as opposed to the insect-type which wouldn't mind losing a few billions so long as the inner hive is intact, or the anarchistic culture where the loss of a unit is not even noticed, because every one of them is so preoccupied with his own affairs that he can take no time to consider the next man."
"Right. So what?"
"I say let's hit 'em while they're all occupied in tracking down the survivors of this wreck."