“That’s all. Each exposure lasts about a minute. The sequence finishes and starts over. After sixteen cycles, it becomes a plain series of flashes, that could just as well be rendered by dots and dashes in sound waves. This goes on for the same total time, after which we return to the graphics. And so on, over and over.”
Hanno sat back. He grinned a bit. “What do you make of h?”
“That isn’t fair,” Patulcius complained.
“No, don’t be a tease,” Aliyat agreed.
“Hold on.” Macandal’s eyes shone darkly bright. “It’s worthwhile making us guess. Bring more minds to bear on the problem.”
“The ship’s mind must already have solved it,” Patulcius said.
“Nevertheless— Lord, let’s have a little fun. I think those fight-points stand for stars, a map of this neighborhood in the galaxy. One of the three special ones has got to be Sol, the other Phaeacia Sun, and the third—where the aliens are!”
… “Right.” Wanderer’s tone quivered with an equal excitement. “The bars, are they spectrograms?”
“Brilliant, you two,” Svoboda said happily.
Wanderer shook his head. “Naw, it’s pretty obvious, though I do look forward to actually seeing it. A sending from the Others—”
Hanno nodded. “Pytheas ran through the astronomy database and confirmed those identifications,” he related. “The third was hardest, because the three-dimensional representation is on such a small scale. But by expanding the fractals as well as searching the records— Anyhow, it turns out to be a star on our port quarter, if I may speak two-dimensionally. About thirty degrees off our course and about three hundred fifty light-years from our present position. It’s type G seven, not as bright as Sol but not too unlike.” He paused. “It’s still less unlike that star in Pegasus, the one we believe may be the home of the nearest high-tech civilization to us, more than a thousand light-years.”
“Then they have come this far,” Yukiko said in awe.
“If they are from that civilization, if it is a civilization,” Svoboda reminded. “We know nothing, nothing.”
“What powers have they, that they know about us?”
“We’ve tried to guess, we two,” Hanno said. He drew breath. “Listen. Think. They—that third star—is about four hundred thirty light-years from Sol. That means it’s within the radio sphere of Earth. For a while, starting in the twentieth century, Earth was the brightest radio object in the Solar System, outshining Sol in that band. That was interrupted, you remember, and afterward people developed communications that didn’t clutter the spectrum so grossly; but the old wave front is still expanding. Even beyond Star Three, it’s still detectable if you have instruments as good as ours, which the aliens certainly do.
“Very well. However they got to Star Three, they soon found that Sol had a brilliant radio companion. Nobody has spotted that at Pegasi, the Mother Star, assuming that is where the aliens originated. It’s too distant; nothing from us will reach it for centuries. So the, uh, colonists or visitors at Three are on their own.
“Now take things from their viewpoint. In due course, Sol ought to be sending out ships too, if it hasn’t already begun. It will be especially interested in contacting the nearest neighbor high-tech civilization it can identify, Mother Star’s. The aliens could send robots to lie along the general path between those two. Our robots bound that way are smart and versatile. They would, at the least, beam word back to Earth. You recall they’re equipped to do that from space, as we aren’t, because they don’t boost all the while; tune touches them less than us. Unfortunately, I think, they must already have gone too far to acquire the signal—which indicates the aliens have not been at Three extremely long.
“There is another good possibility for the aliens. Sol folk should also be especially interested in stars like their own. Phaeacia Sun is that sort, and it lies in the same general, attractive direction as Mother Star. It’s much the nearest to Sol that fits both requirements. So the aliens sent robots to lie along that path too. We’ve encountered those.”
Silence closed down, eyes dropped in thought or stared at walls, until Aliyat said, “But robots went ahead of us to Phaeacia. Why haven’t they reported anything about this?”