Each system, existing in nature, contains imperfect details, which make it possible.”
Norman and the Lieutenant were standing in front of the blue screen and did not believe their eyes.
The figures appeared from the top like an avalanche, as if coming from nothing, and the new ones quickly pushed the old ones down. They were an endless row, which did not make any sense at first glance.
“Are you sure it’s coming from the ship?”
“No, Sir, I rather believe it comes from the Cube.”
“Like the music in the air, doesn’t it?” Norman already knew the answers to these questions before even asking them.
39210466161052325153920539205466160546616055
5437055232520392104661610523251546616054661605
3920539220001039210466161052325153920539205466
1605466160555437055232520392104661610523251546
6160546616053920539220001039210466161052325153
9205392054661605466160555437055232520392104661
6105232515466160546616053920539220001039210466
1610523251539205392054661605466160555437055232
5203921046616105232515466160546616053920539220
0010392104661610523251539…
“I know what the music is”, Hans began.
“You have cracked the code, haven’t you?” Norman was triumphant.
“The music is the key.”
“The key to what?” Sergey asked uncomprehending.
“To everything.” Hans sat in front of the computer and the rest of the group encircled him. “The music of Deep Purple is undeniably great but let’s focus on what we received.”
“’Smoke on the water’.”
“Yes, but which came first… The key is there! The first was the guitar riff. The intro, music without vocals on it.” Hans played it again, as if they had forgotten it and hummed: “Tamtam-taaammm… tam ta ta ta taaaaam…If you were an alien, how would you begin conversation with another civilization? You have several options. You could be direct, as long as you know the language… which, having in mind what’s written in the lower part of the Cube, is not a problem…”
“Then why don’t they send us a direct message in plain English but waste our time with some stupid songs?!” Ivanov was completely at a loss to understand.
“Yes, but try to step in their shoes…”
“If I have a nuclear submarine and I were in their place, I’d never waste time on music but would attack first. Attack is the best defense…”
Ivanov’s and Hans’s ways of thinking were on the opposite ends of a deep precipice.
“Or you could approach delicately and courteously as elegant communication demands… You would make the effort to explore the other person and would find out that one of the most pleasant forms of communication and, respectively, exchange of information for a man is melody. Thus, our life begins – with a nursery rhyme – and thus it ends…”
“I’d have only rap at my funeral, not any of that burial tunes”, Michael joked.
“You mean, they know everything about us?” Norman asked worried.
“I mean a far more advanced civilization, as theirs seems to be, would know more about us than we about them… Don’t you agree?”
“If we take as an example the representatives of the green euglena and our civilization, does that mean that we know more about unicellular organisms than they about us?” Marcela directed her question at Hans.
“It’s quite relative. We think we know more about the populations of amoebas or ants, for instance, and they know nothing about us as a higher form of life… But maybe amoebas have perceptions of six more dimensions for which we possess no senses and any idea of their existence… Or, the amoeba is just the ‘visible’ for our senses part of a much higher creature, which we are unable to even notice.”
“Or maybe ants understand our words and are even able to read our thoughts, but they are not fitted with speech apparatus and we are totally mistaken in considering them lower forms of life, compared to man”, Marcela offered.
“Yes, but it’s also a fact that the ‘cubic creatures’ from the damn submarine are superior to us, because if they were amoebas or ants, we would hardly listen to hard rock on the speaker and lead this conversation now”, Sergey concluded.
“And they seem to be somehow better in traveling through time and space than we are”, Michael added.
“Please, Hans, go on about the message”, Norman urged him.
“As I said, if you want to start a friendly conversation with a stranger, you begin with something that is familiar to him and definitely in the pleasant mode… It’s called getting on the right side of someone, and what we merely term as ‘good upbringing’…”
“So, we have cool aliens who are on top of it gentlemen”, Alan said and the rest were not sure whether he was joking or trying to pick up on Hans again.
“I feel a little awkward” Hans went on, without reflecting on this, businesslike, as if he were reading a scientific report about laboratory experiments, “but I need to admit that I failed and the understanding of such a simple code took me more than thirty minutes.”
“Hans, what on earth are the fucking aliens saying to us?” Norman raised sharply his voice.
“This here is the introduction of the piece, noted. Two tones sound simultaneously, plus the bass guitar underlining them, of course…”
“The top line is the most important.”
“It actually contains the melody, that we hum.” Hans started singing and pressing simultaneously the keys of the digital keyboard on the screen. They sounded the same: the intro. “I remembered what Bach said: ‘It is quite easy to play the organ, the only thing you must know is which key to press and after how much time to release it’. The most important characteristics of the tone are pitch and duration. From the point of view of Physics, the musical tones that are represented by notes are just sound waves with specified frequency and duration.
G = 392 Hz,
B♭= 466,16 Hz,
C = 523,25 Hz,
D♭= 554,37 Hz.
To us they might sound like a favorite song, but basically these are only figures, that are transmitted through the oscillations of the air and are caught by our hearing”, Hans added.
“All right, but what connects these numbers with the code?”
“Since I studied music a little as a boy, though later I chose another field… as you well know I started my career with a doctor’s degree on…”
“Hans, please”, Norman insisted, “focus on the code!”
“For instance, the first tone is G, which is a crotchet, i.e. it has a note value of one, the second is B♭ with the same note value, the third is C, which has a note value of one and a half”, Hans went on and started writing on the screen:
G 1,0
B♭ 1,0
C 1,5
“Here is the entire riff, written in this way:
G1,0 B♭1,0 C1,5 G0,5 G0,5 B♭0,5 B♭0,5 D♭0,5 C2,0 G1,0 B♭1,0 C1,5 B♭0,5 B♭0,5 G0,5 G2,0.”
“You mean that the frequency of the tone plus its duration are the key to the code?”, Marcela asked.
“Yes, that’s right. When we put the note value and abolish the decimal point, we get: G10B♭10C15G05G05B♭05B♭05D♭05C20 G10B♭10C15B♭05B♭05G05G20 + pause.
And when we replace the musical tone with the respective frequencies in Hertz: