Waiting for the Olympians

“Hells,” I said ruefully, and decided to come clean. “It wouldn’t be the first time I asked you, Sam. Only this time I really need it.” And I told him the story of the novel the censors obstatted and the editor who was after a quick replacement - or my blood, choice of one.

He nibbled thoughtfully at the knuckle of his thumb. “What was this novel of yours about?” he asked curiously.

“It was a satire, Sam. An Ass’ Olympiad. About the Olympians coming down to Earth in a matter transporter, only there’s a mix-up in the transmission and one of them accidentally gets turned into an ass. It’s got some funny bits in it.”

“It sure has, Julie. Has had for a couple dozen centuries.”

“Well, I didn’t say it was altogether original only—”

He was shaking his head. “I thought you were smarter than that, Julie. What did you expect the censors to do, jeopardize the most important event in human history for the sake of a dumb sci-rom?”

“It’s not a dumb—”

“It’s dumb to risk offending them,” he said, overruling me firmly. “Best to be safe and not write about them at all.”

“But everybody’s been doing it!”

“Nobody’s been turning them into asses,” he pointed out. “Julie, there’s a limit to sci-rom speculation. When you write about the Olympians you’re right up at that limit. Any speculation about them can be enough reason for them to pull out of the meeting entirely, and we might never get a chance like this again.”

“They wouldn’t—”

“Ah, Julie,” he said, disgusted, “you don’t have any idea what they would or wouldn’t do. The censors made the right decision. Who knows what the Olympians are going to be like?”

“You do,” I told him.

He laughed. There was an uneasy sound to it, though. “I wish I did. About the only thing we do know is that they don’t appear to be just any old intelligent race; they have moral standards. We don’t have any idea what those standards are, really. I don’t know what your book says, but maybe you speculated that the Olympians were bringing us all kinds of new things - a cure for cancer, new psychedelic drugs, even eternal life—”

“What kind of psychedelic drugs might they bring, exactly?” I asked.

“Down, boy! I’m telling you not to think about that kind of idea. The point is that whatever you imagined might easily turn out to be the most repulsive and immoral thing the Olympians can think of. The stakes are too high. This is a once-only chance. We can’t let it go sour.”

“But I need a story,” I wailed.

“Well, yes,” he admitted, “I suppose you do. Let me think about it. Let’s get cleaned up and get out of here.”

While we were in the hot drench, while we were dressing, while eating a light lunch, Sam chattered on about the forthcoming conference in Alexandria. I was pleased to listen. Apart from the fact that everything he said was interesting, I began to feel hopeful about actually producing a book for Mark. If anybody could help me, Sam could, and he was a problem addict. He couldn’t resist a challenge.

That was undoubtedly why he was the first to puzzle out the Olympians’ interminably repeated squees and squabs. If you simply took the dit to be numeral one, and the squee to be plus sign, and the squab to be an equals sign, then “Dit squee dit squab dit dit” simply came out as “One plus one equals two.”

That was easy enough. It didn’t take a super brain like Sam’s to substitute our terms for theirs and reveal the message to be simple arithmetic - except for the mysterious “wooooo”:

Dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squab wooooo.

What was the “wooooo” supposed to mean? A special convention to represent the numeral four?

Sam knew right away, of course. As soon as he heard the message he telegraphed the solution from his library in Padua:

“The message calls for an answer. ‘Wooooo’ means question mark. The answer is four.”

And so the reply to the stars was transmitted on its way:

Dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squab dit dit dit dit.

The human race had turned in its test paper in the entrance examination, and the slow process of establishing communication had begun.

It took four years before the Olympians responded. Obviously, they weren’t nearby. Also obviously, they weren’t simple folk like ourselves, sending out radio messages from a planet of a star two light-years away, because there wasn’t any star there; the reply came from a point in space where none of our telescopes or probes had found anything at all.

By then Sam was deeply involved. He was the first to point out that the star folk had undoubtedly chosen to send a weak signal, because they wanted to be sure our technology was reasonably well developed before we tried to answer. He was one of the impatient ones who talked the collegium authorities into beginning transmission of all sorts of mathematical formulae, and then simple word relationships to start sending something to the Olympians while we waited for radio waves to creep to wherever they were and back with an answer.