Danny Dunn and the Voice from Space

by Raymond Abrashkin

  “It’s nearly two o’clock,” said Professor Bullfinch. “I hate to say it, but I really think the youngsters had better go home to bed. Will you drive them, Alvin?”

  “But—” Danny began.

  The Professor interrupted. “There won’t be any more excitement tonight, Dan. We will have to get down to the job of trying to figure out what we’ve got. Tomorrow morning, perhaps you can all come here again. What do you say, Pomfret?”

  Sir Edward, who was bent over the tape, grunted. “Yes, of course. But mind you, no monkeys.”

  “Come along, kids,” said Dr. Miller.

  They all got into the car, and he started off across the field.

  “How will they go about trying to decipher the message, Daddy?” Irene asked sleepily.

  “Oh, we’ll call in experts for that, I imagine,” Dr. Miller replied. “We’ll have a whack at it ourselves, too. No one will be able to pry us away from that station tonight. I imagine we’ll try a variety of ways. We’ll see whether the pulses seem to make mathematical symbols, or numbers. Maybe they’re binary expressions of atomic formulas—depends on what kind of information beings on another planet might want to send out.”

  Joe, who was lying back in the rear seat with Danny, said, “Maybe it’s a kind of Morse code. You said there were two kinds of pulses, a long and a short. So maybe it’s just dots and dashes.”

  Dr. Miller said, “It’s as good an idea as any.”

  And then Danny sat up straight. “Stop!” he shrieked.

  Dr. Miller stamped on the brakes. The car slammed to a halt.

  “What is it? What’s the matter?” he said, turning in his seat.

  “I know how to read that message,” said Danny. “I’ll bet I do! I’ll bet you anything I know what it is.”

  “Oh, now, really Danny—” began Dr. Miller, considerably irritated because he had had to stop so suddenly and because it was so late and he was tired.

  “But Dr. Miller, honestly!” Danny broke in. “It came to me when Joe said ‘dots and dashes.’ Professor Bullfinch told us, on the ship, how pictures were transmitted by radio. Suppose the long pulses mean that we should put a black dot in a space, and the short ones mean a blank space—?”

  Dr. Miller said nothing. He was already turning the car, and a moment later they were streaking back toward the observatory.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Voice from Space

  “That was quick,” Dr. Badger was beginning, as Dr. Miller came into the control room. Then he saw the three young people. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Something wrong?”

  “No—something right,” Dr. Miller retorted. “I think Danny is on to a wonderful idea.”

  “The boy?” Sir Edward looked his astonishment. “I’m afraid I don’t follow you. What sort of idea could a boy have?”

  “He thinks we may have received a picture message,” Dr. Miller said, bluntly.

  Professor Bullfinch had been jotting down combinations of the pulses they had received. He raised his head sharply. “Go ahead, Dan,” he said. “Tell us.”

  Danny found it hard to speak. He was very weary, but at the same time bubbling with his idea.

  “I started thinking, you know,” he said, “about what kind of message people from another planet would send. I mean, they wouldn’t have to send anything about how smart they were, because the fact that they could send us a message in the first place would show that they were intelligent. It would show that they thought something like the way we do, because they’d want to send a message. And when Professor Bullfinch said that the signals were very strong—well, that would show that they were a lot further along in science than we were.”

  “Good thinking,” growled Sir Edward. “The boy’s right.”

  “Well, they’d want to send something short and simple, too,” Danny continued. “I mean, the more there is to a message, the more danger there is that you might get all mixed up and not understand it at all. On the other hand, you wouldn’t want to go to all the trouble and expense of sending a message across space just to say, ‘Hello.’ I thought, what would I want to send?” He rubbed his eyes. “I’d send a picture of myself so that people would know what I looked like. That would tell them more than almost anything else, wouldn’t it?”

  Irene put in, “Don’t you remember, Professor, how you explained to us that you could send a picture by making a square and putting Xs in some of the spaces? Well, suppose we could figure out some way of—of making a square, or a circle, or something, and putting the signals into it, the long ones as black marks, the short ones as white spaces. Then the black marks would maybe form a picture of some kind.”

  The Professor slammed his fist into his palm. “Absolutely!” he exclaimed. “It’s a splendid idea.”

  “I can see several problems,” Sir Edward said, with a frown. “How can we establish the pattern? How can we determine how the spaces should be arranged so that a picture will emerge?”

  Dr. Miller had been staring at some figures on a pad in front of him, with his head propped on his hands. He said, “We’ve got 559 pulses. Suppose that’s the product of two prime numbers?”

  “What’s a prime number?” Joe whispered to Danny.

  “A number that can only be divided by one,” Danny answered. “If they can find just two numbers which produce 559 when they’re multiplied together, then they’ve got two sides of a rectangle.”

  Dr. Badger had already gone to the computer and was setting up a problem. In a few seconds, he turned back to the others. “Forty-three and thirteen,” he said. “Excellent!” Sir Edward rummaged in the desk and found a piece of graph paper. On it, he ruled off two oblong sections, each thirteen spaces wide by forty-three spaces long. “Now, which way shall we start?” he asked, biting the end of his pen. “Horizontal or vertical?”

  “I’ll toss a coin,” said Dr. Badger. “Heads for horizontal, tails for vertical.”

  He flipped one of the large English pennies. “Heads.”

  “Very well,” said Sir Edward. “You read off the pulses, short or long. I’ll leave the short ones blank, since there are more of them. When you come to a long one, I’ll fill in one of the squares on our graph.” He paused. “I have a better notion. Since it was Dan’s idea to begin with, we’ll let him fill in the squares.”

  All Danny could say, as Sir Edward handed him the pen, was “Gosh!”

  He turned the paper so that one of the oblongs was horizontal, with its forty-three spaces at the top. Dr. Badger began to read:

  “Short, short, short ...”

  When he was finished, they all crowded to look at the paper.

  “It doesn’t look like anything,” Joe said. “Like somebody dropped a crossword puzzle and it broke.”

  Dr. Miller turned the paper upside-down. “I’m afraid that’s not it,” he said. “Unless it’s a picture of something we can’t even begin to understand.”

  “Let’s try it vertically,” said Professor Bullfinch.

  Once again, Dan bent over the graph paper. He now placed it so that he had thirteen squares at the top. Dr. Badger read over the pulses again.

  Before he was half finished, Irene gasped, “It’s—it’s something.”

  “Keep going,” urged the Professor.

  Danny and Dr. Badger continued to the end. Then Danny put down the pen and drew a long breath of wonder.

  “It is a picture,” he said. “But what does it mean?”

  “Look,” said the Professor, pointing with a finger that trembled. “Here’s a cross surrounded by nine spots. Nine. What does that suggest to you?”

  “Our solar system,” said Dr. Badger. “The rays of a sun and nine planets.”

  “Then these two crosses below would be—”

  “Two suns. 61 Cygni!”

  “With one planet near one of the suns,” sa
id Sir Edward.

  “And that thing near the top looks like— could it be?—some kind of spaceship,” said Irene.

  “Possibly,” said her father. He was gripping her shoulder tightly with one hand, but she was too absorbed to feel it. “Or perhaps simply a sign for direction. Toward our solar system from theirs.”

  “And that shape at the bottom,” Danny said. “It’s like a kind of person.”

  “If it’s a person, what’s that thing across the middle?” Joe said. “And he’s awfully flat on top. He’s got pinchers or something instead of hands—he’s holding them up.”

  “No, Joe,” said the Professor. “We don’t know exactly what he has. All this shows us is that he stands erect, has some kind of legs and arms, and some sort of head.”

  “But it is a message,” Irene said. “It’s clear, too. That being lives on a planet circling one of the suns of 61 Cygni. And they’ve sent a spaceship toward our solar system.”

  “An invasion!” Joe gulped. “That’s what it is. An invasion by crab-clawed hammer-headed monsters!”

  “I don’t—” began the Professor. Then he passed a hand over his face. “I don’t want to believe that. Yet I suppose anything is possible.”

  Danny shook his head. “I know what it is,” he said, firmly.

  He looked up into the faces of the scientists. “Maybe I’m nuts,” he said, “but if you wanted to show you were coming in peace, how would you do it? You’d show that you weren’t holding anything in your hands, wouldn’t you? It seems to me that no matter what they have—claws, pinchers, or some kind of fingers—they’d hold them up empty to show that they had no weapons.”

  Professor Bullfinch smiled at him. “Perhaps that’s it. I don’t know any better way of saying such a thing.”

  Sir Edward said, softly, “Unbelievable.” Dr. Badger, in the same tone, said, “Beings from another planet—sending a spaceship to our Earth, in peace. A ship! They must have an amazing scientific knowledge. And to be able to cross all that distance—!”

  “They may be as different from us as a bee is, or an oyster,” said Dr. Miller. “They may live for centuries—or they may travel in a kind of frozen sleep.”

  Professor Bullfinch went slowly to the door. After a moment, the others followed him. They all stepped outside, into the dark August night. They looked up. The sky was brilliant with stars. Near the Pole Star was the constellation of Cygnus—the Swan.

  “There,” said Professor Bullfinch. “That’s their home.”

  “Nearly eleven light years away,” said Dr. Badger. “Millions upon millions of miles.”

  “We don’t know when they began sending that message,” said Dr. Badger. “What we received tonight was sent out eleven years ago.”

  “Only a few minutes by the clock of the Universe,” said the Professor. “How long will it take them? Will they get here at all? And when?”

  He put an arm around Danny’s shoulders.

  “Yes, when?” Danny murmured, staring at the sky. “When…?”