"I'd never expected to see an astrophysicist take off on such a flight of improbabilia," I said. "John, would you like to hear a thread-recording I just got from the radio observatory at Adelaide?" Dorsey asked. "Hi-fi?" "The radio sky is strictly spark-gap quality, no fi at all," Dorsey said, getting up to lead the way from the dining-room. "This transmission you're going to hear doesn't have anything to do with the ordinary 21.12-centimeter neutral-hydrogen radiation; but of course you realize that our big paraboloid bowls can catch anything from hydrogen hiss to low-flying bats. Remember the Christmas celebration at New Caanan that was telecast to earth a couple years back? That show was caught by the six-hundred-foot receiver at Green Bank, West Virginia, and rebroadcast by C.B.S." * * * * * We entered the Big Tank's common room, where a few of our colleagues sat reading or writing notes for tomorrow's classes--talking; playing chess or bridge; or sitting behind the closed glass doors of the TV alcove watching the picture through stereo spectacles. We entered the alcove at the other end of the room, where the record-player and music library were, and closed the door. Dorsey took a three-inch spool of magnetic thread from his shirt pocket and fit it to the playback head of the machine. "I'm interested in your uninstructed reaction, John," he said. "So don't ask me any questions till you've heard the whole sequence." "Spin it, professor," I said. The Australian thread had a noisy background, sounding like a dozen rashers of bacon tossed into a too-hot skillet. Over this hissing, the code began to sound. "DIT ... DIT ... DIT-DIT ... DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT ... DIT-DIT-DIT ... DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT ... DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT...." I dutifully entered my count of each burst of DIT's in my pocket notebook. The sequence went: 1, 1; 2, 4; 3, 9; 4, 16; 5, 25; 6, 36; then 5, 2, 49; 8, 64. There the count stopped climbing and commenced again with the pair of ones, to repeat the whole set again. Dorsey cut off the machine. "I've got four hours of the same thing on this thread," he said. "Want to hear it all, or have you got it already?" "It's obvious, up to a point," I asked. "It's a table of the first eight natural integers and their squares, except for the number seven, which for some reason is split in two." "It took me quite a while to recognize what happened to that seven," Dorsey said. "Listen to it again." He spooled the thread back and I listened again to the fractured seven: "DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT ... DIT-DIT." Then again the forty-nine clicks, seven-squared. Dorsey switched off the player. "Let's have the distillate of your cerebrations now, Brother Bogardus," he said, dropping into the deep, red-leather easy chair beside the thread-player. "It's syncopation, Brother Dorsey," I said.