"Yes," I agreed. "Now what the hell kind of a code can they assume will be known to another race that they've never seen?" Rizzo leaned back on his bunk and his face was lost in shadows. "An interstellar code," I rambled on. "Some form of presenting information that would be known to almost any race intelligent enough to understand lasers...." "Binary!" Rizzo snapped, sitting up on the bunk. "What?" "Binary code. To send a signal like this, they've gotta be able to write a message in units that're only a billionth of a second long. That takes computers. Right? Well, if they have computers, they must figure that we have computers. Digital computers run on binary code. Off or on ... go or no-go. It's simple. I'll bet we can slap that signal on a tape and run it through our computer here." "To assume that they use computers exactly like ours...." "Maybe the computers are completely different," Rizzo said excitedly, "but the binary code is basic to them all. I'll bet on that! And this computer we've got here--this transistorized baby--she can handle more information than the whole Army could feed into her. I'll bet nothing has been developed anywhere that's better for handling simple one-plus-one types of operations." I shrugged. "All right. It's worth a trial." * * * * * It took Rizzo a few hours to get everything properly set up. I did some arithmetic while he worked. If the message was in binary code, that meant that every cycle of the signal--every flick of the dancing line on our screen--carried a bit of information. The signal's wavelength was 5000 Angstroms; there are a hundred million Angstrom units to the centimeter; figuring the speed of light ... the signal could carry, in theory at least, something like 600 trillion bits of information _per second_. I told Rizzo. "Yeah, I know. I've been going over the same numbers in my head." He set a few switches on the computer control board. "Now let's see how many of the 600 trillion we can pick up." He sat down before the board and pressed a series of buttons. We watched, hardly breathing, as the computer's spools began spinning and the indicator lights flashed across the control board. Within a few minutes, the printer chugged to life. Rizzo swivelled his chair over to the printer and held up the unrolling sheet in a trembling hand. Numbers. Six-digit numbers. Completely meaningless. "Gibberish," Rizzo snapped. It was peculiar. I felt relieved and disappointed at the same time. "Something's screwy," Rizzo said. "Maybe I fouled up the circuits...." "I don't think so," I answered. "After all, what did you expect out of the computer? Shakespearean poetry?" "No, but I expected numbers that would make some sense. One and one, maybe. Something that means something. This stuff is nowhere."