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Alchemist, v. 2, issue 1, Autumn 1946
Page 18
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18 igent beings inhabited that system. With in four years Yonrav solved the almost impossible problem of translating the supposed message into a restatement in terms of mathematical formulae, but another half country of blind groping followed before Breh Shco broke down those baffling equations by treating them as a simple transposition cipher. A premature announcement, fortunately incomplete and inaccurate, brought a storm of hysterical excitement to the people of the four inhabited worlds of the solar system. At this point, strict government censorship was clamped down, and the full text of that message was never made public. All sorts of reasons for this action were given, but nobody dared give the true one. The truth was that the simple six word question received from our sister sun and its family of worlds revealed such a hell of pessimism and despair that our various governments agreed upon the necessity for complete suppression of the message, at least until a reply could be sent, and some sort of answer received from Kappa Cassiopeiae. It was feared, with some justification that once the public had felt the dreadful impact of that message and realized the dire implications for ourselves, nothing could hold them. All controls would immediately break down, anarchy would result, and in the first access of despair some of the unsound ones might destroy our entire system by plunging it into the holocaust of complete atomic disintegration.
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18 igent beings inhabited that system. With in four years Yonrav solved the almost impossible problem of translating the supposed message into a restatement in terms of mathematical formulae, but another half country of blind groping followed before Breh Shco broke down those baffling equations by treating them as a simple transposition cipher. A premature announcement, fortunately incomplete and inaccurate, brought a storm of hysterical excitement to the people of the four inhabited worlds of the solar system. At this point, strict government censorship was clamped down, and the full text of that message was never made public. All sorts of reasons for this action were given, but nobody dared give the true one. The truth was that the simple six word question received from our sister sun and its family of worlds revealed such a hell of pessimism and despair that our various governments agreed upon the necessity for complete suppression of the message, at least until a reply could be sent, and some sort of answer received from Kappa Cassiopeiae. It was feared, with some justification that once the public had felt the dreadful impact of that message and realized the dire implications for ourselves, nothing could hold them. All controls would immediately break down, anarchy would result, and in the first access of despair some of the unsound ones might destroy our entire system by plunging it into the holocaust of complete atomic disintegration.
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