InterstellarNet: Origins by Edward M. Lerner Page B

God’s honest truth—I think she’s pissed you were invited onto the Steering Committee and she wasn’t.” As Alex snapped shut his briefcase, his voice rose an octave. “Another slap in the face of developing countries.”
    In his own voice Alex went on unhappily, “We have nothing to trade, the long odds of getting a reply authorized are about to get worse, and time is running out. Mere Luddites are the least of our problems.”
    “I’m stumped,” Dean admitted. “If you ask me, the whole task force is. We need new ideas. I’m going overseas to meet someone with a fresh take on ET’s message. Wish me luck.”
    ■□■
    “Where shall I begin?” Joachim Frisch wondered aloud. He was a frail, gray-haired gentleman of seventy-three years, wheelchair-bound.
    “How did you become interested?’ Dean asked.
    On the flight to Germany Dean had done his homework. Frisch, until his retirement, had been a customer-support engineer at Siemens, the big German electronics firm. He freelanced occasionally, troubleshooting electronic systems. Sadly, he had never fully recovered from a car crash two years earlier.
    “In a report from the Analysis group.” Frisch looked around his cluttered dining room for something—the report?—and shrugged. “As many have noted, there are obvious subassemblies for signal modulation and amplification. There is an impressive design for focusing and steering a beam using a phased-array antenna, like we use for radars. It is elegant work.” He tapped the printout spread across his dining room table. The schematic was easily two meters by three. Bits had been printed on A4-sized stationery and taped together. “And then, my young friend, we have this complicated mess.
    “Forty years moving from customer to customer, application to application, builds a skill set. I had thought that mastering yet one more transmitter design, even an alien one, would be easy. I have seen many radio circuits in my time.”
    Dean nibbled on one of the biscuits set out by the bespectacled and apfel -cheeked Frau Frisch. Honigkuchen ? “Your web posting suggests that you had more success than the task force.”
    “Ah, but I cheated. I have my hobby to help.” Frisch rolled into the adjoining living room and opened a cabinet. A rack-mounted set of ancient stereo components filled the cabinet.
    To a crisp, metronome-like performance of the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, Dean reconsidered his mental dating of the equipment. The sound quality was exquisite, at least as good as that of his own “modern” stereo. The orange glow of vacuum tubes had clouded his judgment.
    “I admit it, Joachim, I’m a transistor chauvinist. These tubes produce a better, truer sound. How long did this take to build?”
    Frisch laughed. “I began in college and I am not done. In these times I must make many of my own tubes. Later, if you wish, I will show you my workshop.”
    “So what do you find most interesting about ET’s radio design?”
    “Our symbols for electronic components of course differ from ET’s. We learned ET’s symbols early in the message, in the physics tutorial. Do you agree?”
    “I think so,” Dean said. “I am not an expert in that part of the message.”
    “ET drew a wet-cell battery and showed it with a new icon. This is how we know his symbol for a voltage source. He made an animation of electrons moving, and another symbol, and we know how he shows current.
    “Then ET drew the simplest possible circuit, the voltage symbol in series with one new symbol. The drawing is above the most familiar of electrical equations.”
    Ohm’s law, recalled Matthews. Junior-high physics .
    “Obviously, the new symbol was for a resistor,” Frisch continued. “There was also a graph. It was not drawn as we would, but from context it is recognizable: current versus voltage in the new device. The graph described a resistor, so the plot is a straight line.”
    Dean nodded. “We don’t know how ET builds a