"You think they are friendly, then?" said the _Herald_, equally positive on the opposite tack. A fleeting smile touched Nathen's lips. "Those I know are." There was no lead in this direction, and they had to get the basic facts of the story before the ship came. The _Times_ asked, "What led up to your contacting them?" Nathen answered after a hesitation. "Static. Radio static. The Army told you my job, didn't they?" * * * * * The Army had told them nothing at all. The officer who had conducted them in for the interview stood glowering watchfully, as if he objected by instinct to telling anything to the public. Nathen glanced at him doubtfully. "My job is radio decoder for the Department of Military Intelligence. I use a directional pickup, tune in on foreign bands, record any scrambled or coded messages I hear, and build automatic decoders and descramblers for all the basic scramble patterns." The officer cleared his throat, but said nothing. The reporters smiled, noting that down. Security regulations had changed since arms inspection had been legalized by the U.N. Complete information being the only public security against secret rearmament, spying and prying had come to seem a public service. Its aura had changed. It was good public relations to admit to it. Nathen continued, "I started directing the pickup at stars in my spare time. There's radio noise from stars, you know. Just stuff that sounds like spatter static, and an occasional squawk. People have been listening to it for a long time, and researching, trying to work out why stellar radiation on those bands comes in such jagged bursts. It didn't seem natural." He paused and smiled uncertainly, aware that the next thing he would say was the thing that would make him famous--an idea that had come to him while he listened--an idea as simple and as perfect as the one that came to Newton when he saw the apple fall. "I decided it wasn't natural. I tried decoding it." Hurriedly he tried to explain it away and make it seem obvious. "You see, there's an old intelligence trick, speeding up a message on a record until it sounds just like that, a short squawk of static, and then broadcasting it. Undergrounds use it. I'd heard that kind of screech before." "You mean they broadcast at us in code?" asked the _News_.