Captain Algase was no beauty even when garbed in his officer's blues; in pajamas and slippers he was something out of a nightmare. His bare legs were like cylindrical hair mattresses, his pajama slacks bulged at the equator as if he were concealing there a half watermelon. His eyes were red and gummy, his temper like something that could be poured out of a cruet. As Dan and Bud entered the control turret he was battering the bewildered radioman's defenses into oblivion with a salvo of verbal thermite.
"Message!" he was howling. "You call this thing a message! I'll have you stewed in slow gravy for waking me up like this, Sparks! Of all the damn, dumb—" He saw his two lieutenants. "Never mind, you two. Go back and finish your breakfast. False alarm."
"We've finished, Skipper," said Dan. "What's all the commotion?"
"This &![oe])$$[oe]09!—" began Algase.
Sparks said miserably, "But it was Marlowe's hand on the keys, Cap'n! I swear it was. I know the message don't make sense, but you can't fool a bug-pounder. Every radioman has a distinctive sending style. Ask anybody. Even one of them wise-cracking Donovan boys. They'll tell you. And this was Marlowe's hand—"
"Let's see," said Mallory. He took the flimsy from his senior's fingers, frowned as he ran an eye over the cryptic symbols. "Numerals! All numerals. Sparks—?"
"It was like this. The static interference is still going on. The audio wouldn't bring in voice at all. But as I was twisting the dials, I got this power wave from Lunar III, Joe Marlowe's station. It had a—a sort of cadence. I began putting down the things it sounded like, and—and that's what come out."
Chandler, peering over his comrade's shoulder, said,
"Well, hell's bells, are you all nuts? It must be a code of some sort. Sparks, we use several numerical codes, don't we?"