And then, abruptly, there was silence.

THE NEXT MESSAGES

An hour later, the jellyfish disappeared as mysteriously as they had come. They could see Edmunds’s body outside the habitat, lying on the bottom, rocking back and forth gently in the current. There were small ragged holes in the fabric of the suit.

They watched through the portholes as Barnes and the chief petty officer, Teeny Fletcher, crossed the bottom into the harsh floodlights, carrying extra air tanks. They lifted Edmunds’s body; the helmeted head flopped loosely back, revealing the scarred plastic faceplate, dull in the light.

Nobody spoke. Norman noticed that even Harry had dropped his manic effect; he sat unmoving, staring out the window.

Outside, Barnes and Fletcher still held the body. There was a great burst of silvery bubbles, which rose swiftly to the surface.

“What’re they doing?”

“Inflating her suit.”

“Why? Aren’t they bringing her back?” Ted said.

“They can’t,” Tina said. “There’s nowhere to put her here. The decomposition by-products would ruin our air.”

“But there must be some kind of a sealed container-”

“-There isn’t,” Tina said. “There’s no provision for keeping organic remains in the habitat.”

“You mean they didn’t plan on anyone dying.”

“That’s right. They didn’t.”

Now there were many thin streams of bubbles rising from the holes in the suit, toward the surface. Edmunds’s suit was puffed, bloated. Barnes released it, and it floated slowly away, as if pulled upward by the streaming silver bubbles.

“It’ll go to the surface?”

“Yes. The gas expands continuously as outside pressure diminishes.”

“And what then?”

“Sharks,” Beth said. “Probably.”

In a few moments the body disappeared into blackness, beyond the reach of the lights. Barnes and Fletcher still watched the body, helmets tilted up toward the surface. Fletcher made the sign of the cross. Then they trudged back toward the habitat.

A bell rang from somewhere inside. Tina went into D Cyl. Moments later she shouted, “Dr. Adams! More numbers!”

Harry got up and went into the next cylinder. The others trailed after him. Nobody wanted to look out the porthole any longer.

Norman stared at the screen, entirely puzzled.

But Harry clapped his hands in delight. “Excellent,” Harry said. “This is extremely helpful.”

“It is?”

“Of course. Now I have a fighting chance.”

“You mean to break the code.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Why?”

“Remember the original number sequence? This is the same sequence.”

“It is?”

“Of course,” Harry said. “Except it’s in binary.”

“Binary,” Ted said, nudging Norman. “Didn’t I tell you binary was important?”

“What’s important,” Harry said, “is that this establishes the individual letter breaks from the original sequence.” “Here’s a copy of the original sequence,” Tina said, handing them a sheet.

00032125252632 032629 301321 04261037 18 3016 06180821

32 29033005 1822 04261013 0830162137 1604 08301621 1822 0  

  33013130432   

“Good,” Harry said. “Now you can see my problem at once. Look at the word: oh-oh-oh-three-two-one, and so on. The question is, how do I break that word up into individual letters? I couldn’t decide, but now I know.”

“How?”

“Well, obviously, it goes three, twenty-one, twenty-five, twenty-five…”

Norman didn’t understand. “But how do you know that?”

“Look,” Harry said impatiently. “It’s very simple, Norman. It’s a spiral, reading from inside to outside. It’s just giving us the numbers in-”

Abruptly, the screen changed again.

“There, is that clearer for you?”

Norman frowned.

“Look, it’s exactly the same,” Harry said. “See? Center outward? Oh-oh-oh-three-twenty-one-twenty-five-twentyfive… It’s made a spiral moving outward from the center.”

“It?”

“Maybe it’s sorry about what happened to Edmunds,” Harry said.

“Why do you say that?” Norman asked, staring curiously at Harry.

“Because it’s obviously trying very hard to communicate with us,” Harry said. “It’s attempting different things.”

“Who is it?”

“It,” Harry said, “may not be a who.”

The screen went blank, and another pattern appeared.

“All right,” Harry said. “This is very good.”

“Where is this coming from?”

“Obviously, from the ship.”

“But we’re not connected to the ship. How is it managing to turn on our computer and print this?”

“We don’t know.”

“Well, shouldn’t we know?” Beth said.

“Not necessarily,” Ted said.

“Shouldn’t we try to know?”

“Not necessarily. You see, if the technology is advanced enough, it appears to the naive observer to be magic. There’s no doubt about that. For example, you take a famous scientist from our past-Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, even Isaac Newton. Show him an ordinary Sony color-television set and he’d run screaming, claiming it was witchcraft. He wouldn’t understand it at all.

“But the point,” Ted said, “is that you couldn’t explain it to him, either. At least not easily. Isaac Newton wouldn’t be able to understand TV without first studying our physics for a couple of years. He’d have to learn all the underlying concepts: electromagnetism, waves, particle physics. These would all be new ideas to him, a new conception of nature. In the meantime, the TV would be magic as far as he was concerned. But to us it’s ordinary. It’s TV.”

“You’re saying we’re like Isaac Newton?”

Ted shrugged. “We’re getting a communication and we don’t know how it’s done.”

“And we shouldn’t bother to try and find out.”

“I think we have to accept the possibility,” Ted said, “that we may not be able to understand it.”

Norman noticed the energy with which they threw themselves into this discussion, pushing aside the tragedy so recently witnessed. They’re intellectuals, he thought, and their characteristic defense is intellectualization. Talk. Ideas. Abstractions. Concepts. It was a way of getting distance from the feelings of sadness and fear and being trapped. Norman understood the impulse: he wanted to get away from those feelings himself.

Harry frowned at the spiral image. “We may not understand how, but it’s obvious what it’s doing. It’s trying to communicate by trying different presentations. The fact that it’s trying spirals may be significant. Maybe it believes we think in spirals. Or write in spirals.”

“Right,” Beth said. “Who knows what kind of weird creatures we are?”

Ted said, “If it’s trying to communicate with us, why aren’t we trying to communicate back?”

Harry snapped his fingers. “Good idea!” He went to the keyboard.

“There’s an obvious first step,” Harry said. “We just send the original message back. We’ll start with the first grouping, beginning with the double zeroes.”

“I want it made clear,” Ted said, “that the suggestion to attempt communication with the alien originated with me.”

“It’s clear, Ted,” Barnes said.

“Harry?” Ted said.

“Yes, Ted,” Harry said. “Don’t worry, it’s your idea.”

Sitting at the keyboard, Harry typed:

  00032125252632

The numbers appeared on the screen. There was a pause. They listened to the hum of the air fans, the distant thump of the diesel generator. They all watched the screen.

Nothing happened.

The screen went blank, and then printed out:

 0001132121051808012232

Norman felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.

It was just a series of numbers on a computer screen, but it still gave him a chill. Standing beside him, Tina shivered. “He answered us.”