"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.
"I'd never have given my own modest observations so high-flown a title," Dorsey said. "I'd simply have called it, country boy at heart that I am, 'Shave-and-a-Haircut, two-bits!'"
"So it is," I said. "Now we've deciphered that broadcast, and listened to the singing commercial. But I'm still puzzled, Bud. We don't have the sponsor's name and address; and I'm not at all sure I caught the name of his product. What's he advertising?"
"His presence," Dorsey said. "I interpret the message as a simple CQ."
"Yes. Radio-ham code for, I'm lonely--will somebody please talk to me?'"
"I'll accept that interpretation only till I can think of one even more fantastic," I said.
"O.K., John," Dorsey said. "Getting the address of the station was a simple exercise, thanks to my Digger confreres in Adelaide and the men at Harvard's South African radio observatory. We first heard the message two years ago. It's still being broadcast, unchanged. The fist on the key that sent out our arithmetic message belongs to someone in the neighbourhood of Alpha Centauri."
"Hot damn!" I said. "But why didn't I know about this? I read _Time_, and all. Why wasn't this headlined?"
"Because it's guesswork," Dorsey explained. "This may be the result of some cosmic coincidence as unrelated to intelligent planning as Bode's Law."
"You'll have to explain that to this groundsman," I said.
"Bode's law, too, looks like an intelligently devised code of some sort," Dorsey said. "Take the series: 0, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96, 192. Add 4 to each number, and divide by ten. The result will be, when you take the asteroid belt into consideration and fudge a little, very nearly the proportional distance from the sun of the first seven planets. Accident, or evidence of intelligent planning? Turned out there are excellent physical reasons for this relationship, reasons old Johann Elert Bode couldn't possibly have guessed. Things like this make astronomers leary of teleology. Make them avoid the splendid guess."
"Go ahead, make a splendid guess," I said. "I won't report you to the Astronomers Union."