Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

doubtless, from the message itself.”
    The visitor listened to his sleeve for a moment. After a suitable interval he posed the question in his own voice, a little less rudely than it probably had been asked. “And how will you know that you have not been deceived by natural phenomena, as you were before?”
    The director sent a ripple of laughter down his arm. “One of your touch brothers is very astute. The incident he refers to took place in the early days of radio astronomy, when our observations were still planet-bound. I was hardly past my apprenticeship at the time. A stellar radio source was found whose pulses were so regular that it was thought at first to be an artificial signal. Today, of course, we know about such things as neutron stars. We won’t jump to that conclusion again.”
    “And if you find nothing at all?”
    “Then we’ll try another galaxy.”
    Across the dome an aproned assistant waved a signal, and the director forestalled more questions by saying, “We’re aiming now. Look outside. It’s a sight you won’t want to miss.”
    Beyond the transparent wall the surface of the moon seemed to writhe like a live thing as the closely packed bowls all turned simultaneously to face in a new direction. The silent rumble of the vast collective movement could be felt through the floor of the observatory itself.
    And the world changed, never to be the same again.
    The first signals were detected almost at once. They were found mostly in the part of the spectrum between the hydrogen and hydroxyl radical lines, where theory had long predicted that water-based life would be apt to concentrate its communication efforts.
    An excited assistant hurried up. “We’re locked onto them now. There’s remarkably little frequency drift. They’re also utilizing the first harmonic of the hydrogen frequency.”
    He passed over a touch pad that was beating rhythmically with repeating data. The director pulsated with emotion. “The very first time!” he murmured to himself. “We’ve found them the very first time!”
    He’d forgotten completely about his visitor, who was still sharing his thoughts through a patch of contact. A diffident query reached his consciousness: “Can you be sure?”
    “Eh? Yes. It’s unmistakable.” He thrust the throbbing datapad at him. “Have a look at this. It’s the first ten prime numbers—counted out plainly in a steady rhythm and sitting in the middle of what looks like an ongoing message in binary code. That’s to get our attention. It’s their beacon. I’m willing to bet that it’s repeated every few minutes.”
    And then the director linked with assistants and with data input devices and became very busy. The visitor discreetly withdrew a short distance.
    Several hours later, when the excitement had died down somewhat and matters could be safely left to the scribes and the mechanical recorders, the director belatedly remembered his patiently waiting visitor—remembered, too, that every conceivable touch group on the Father World would soon be vying for a say in the allocation of resources—and apologetically groped for contact again.
    “We’ve only begun the job, of course. We astronomers will go on recording as long as the message lasts and continue refining our techniques in case we’re missing anything. And we’ll try to learn more about the signal source itself—its orbital motion and so forth—through Doppler analysis and other methods. But now it will be the task of others—our greatest group minds—to interpret this … gift from the stars.”
    “What can you tell so far?”
    “They must be a very advanced race. Our entire civilization does not generate enough power to broadcast such a signal across so great a distance and with so high an information rate.”
    “But what are they like! ”
    The director thought it over. “To begin with, their arithmetic is to the base ten, so they must have ten limbs like ourselves.”
    “That much is obvious,” the visitor said with a trace of impatience. “Any intelligent life form would necessarily resemble us more or less.”
    Not wanting to give offense, the director said cautiously, “I’ve heard religious people advance the argument that sentience cannot exist except in the image of the Father-of-All.”
    “No, no, I’m talking about the scientific argument. That whatever evolutionary path life takes to arrive at intelligence, it will need tool-handling limbs, vision, a sense of touch for