There was a silence. Somewhere in the habitat he heard a soft rhythmic knocking, a sort of thumping. And the everpresent hum of the air handlers.
Beth was staring at him. "Seeing Edmunds die must have been hard for you."
"It's funny," Norman said. "I never made the connection, until right now."
"Blocked it, I guess. Want a Valium?"
He smiled. "No."
"You looked as if you were about to cry."
"No. I'm fine." He stood up, stretched. He went over to the medicine kit and closed the white lid, came back.
Beth said, "What do you think about these messages we're getting?"
"Beats me," Norman said. He sat down again. "Actually, I did have one crazy thought. Do you suppose the messages and these animals we're seeing are related?"
"Why?"
"I never thought about it until we started to get spiral messages. Harry says it's because the thing - the famous it - believes we think in spirals. But it's just as likely that it thinks in spirals and so it assumes we do, too. The sphere is round, isn't it? And we've been seeing all these radially symmetrical animals. Jellyfish, squid."
"Nice idea," Beth said, "except for the fact that squid aren't radially symmetrical. An octopus is. And, like an octopus, squid have a round circle of tentacles, but squid're bilaterally symmetrical, with a matching left and right side, the way we have. And then there's the shrimps."
"That's right, the shrimps." Norman had forgotten about the shrimps.
"I can't see a connection between the sphere and the animals," Beth said.
They heard the thumping again, soft, rhythmic. Sitting in his chair, Norman realized that he could feel the thumping as well, as a slight impact. "What is that, anyway?"
"I don't know. Sounds like it's coming from outside."
He had started toward the porthole when the intercom clicked and he heard Barnes say, "Now hear this, all hands to communications. All hands to communications. Dr. Adams has broken the code."
Harry wouldn't tell them the message right away. Relishing his triumph, he insisted on going through the decoding process, step by step. First, he explained, he had thought that the messages might express some universal constant, or some physical law, stated as a way to open conversation. "But," Harry said, "it might also be a graphic representation of some kind - code for a picture - which presented immense problems. After all, what's a picture? We make pictures on a flat plane, like a piece of paper. We determine positions within a picture by what we call X and Y axes. Vertical and horizontal. But another intelligence might see images and organize them very differently. It might assume more than three dimensions. Or it might work from the center of the picture outward, for example. So the code might be very tough. I didn't make much progress at first." Later, when he got the same message with gaps between number sequences, Harry began to suspect that the code represented discrete chunks of information - suggesting words, not pictures. "Now, word codes fall into several types, from simple to complex. There was no way to know immediately which method of encoding had been used. But then I had a sudden insight."
They waited, impatiently, for his insight.
"Why use a code at all?" Harry asked.
"Why use a code?" Norman said.
"Sure. If you are trying to communicate with someone, you don't use a code. Codes are ways of hiding communication. So perhaps this intelligence thinks he is communicating directly, but is actually making some kind of logical mistake in talking to us. He is making a code without ever intending to do so. That suggested the unintentional code was probably a substitution code, with numbers for letters. When I got the word breaks, I began to try and match numbers to letters by frequency analysis. In frequency analysis you break down codes by using the fact that the most common letter in English is 'e,' and the second most common letter is 't,' and so on. So I looked for the most common numbers. But I was impeded by the fact that even a short number sequence, such as two-three-two, might represent many code possibilities: two and three and two, twenty-three and two, two and thirtytwo, or two hundred and thirty-two. Longer code sequences had many more possibilities."
Then, he said, he was sitting in front of the computer thinking about the spiral messages, and he suddenly looked at the keyboard. "I began to wonder what an alien intelligence would make of our keyboard, those rows of symbols on a device made to be pressed. How confusing it must look to another kind of creature! Look here," he said. "The letters on a regular keyboard go like this." He held up his pad.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
tab Q W E R T Y U I O P
caps A S D F G H J K L ;