For some years we have devoted our every effort to suppressing the Voice, for we are convinced that for some years it has devoted its every effort to suppressing us. It is perhaps a sign that mankind has crossed into a territory nothing that lives was ever meant to see, or it is perhaps a scientific phoenomenon, or it is perhaps simply a figment of our imagination, but we have been able to divine ntohing with absolute certainty save what the Voice does. The Voice has spoken without cessation, so far as any of us can tell, for all time yet, and will continue to speak without cessation, so far as any of us can tell, for all time to come.

The nearest human being not part of our expedition is separated from us by ten light-years, and so the radio transmissions we send into the void will not reach another human soul for a long time. No man will hear the Voice who has not already heard it for years. The Voice has spoken without cease, although at times we cannot detect its speech. It has been restricted to a small chamber, as soundproof as we know how to make a chamber of any size, for there is a general terror of listening to it without protection: its speech consists of every sound possible emitted at every frequency and amplitude possible. It is beautiful and terrifying; while one moment of sound is undetectable to any human faculty, it speaks without cessation, and so it emits continuously a sound unlike any we have ever heard.

It does not appear to be a machine, nor any form of life. Analysis of the Voice has failed, and further analysis, invasive analysis, it is feared, would destroy it. When we first heard it, there was certainly no calling it the Voice or claiming it spoke, but now there is no doubt. It has on three hundred and seventy-four occasions emitted sounds which we could identify as either words or strings thereof. The first time it spoke was on the first day: the word 'never', not repeated since and in a warbling, inconsistent tongue, in French, lasting twelve seconds. The Voice was placed on the intercom system with a five-second delay, to be used if it began to emit sounds obviously harmful to our health.

The next instance of the Voice speaking was the word 'an', lasting five seconds and with a brief delay between the first tone and the second, filled with static. This concluded the science officer to establish it was an automaton, either deaf to all outside stimuli or ignorant of them, which would continue to make every sound we could imagine for the remainder of time.

It was at this time the Voice launched into the third instance of speaking, declaring in quiet, normally timed, and only minimally staticked tones, what we heard to be "God lives".

People have seemed to go more or less mad. The quartermaster has abandoned his God -- the thing most precious to him -- and the navigator's mate has taken to worshipping the Voice. He spends his days listening to it -- for his services are not usually needed -- and declaring that it speaks to him in the original language. The navigator's mate has become the prophet of this manned probe, a service every manned probe needs. He has said that the Voice wishes to enlighten us -- but cannot know us -- and is so like the voice of the Abrahamic God. It is a thing of such power that it cannot help but redeem us or destroy us. It is the latter part that worries us. It makes what must be millions of tones every day, and there exists one in the universe, the common resonant frequency of all mankind, and so soon as this tone is made it shall liquify us all, and shall spread by radio to the nearest station, and for ten years they shall be blissfully unaware that riding towards them at the speed of light is the doom of humanity.

The first ears to hear and understand the death sentence of the human race shall likely be the navigator's mate.

I write this as I do so that any to come after -- be you human, in which case the reading of this text shall be far easier than otherwise, or be you not so long as you have discovered the secret of our tongue -- will know what we have discovered, and why I am doing what I am about to do in case I fail and all goes to naught.

Every day at what we assume to be roughly 15:30 for the last three hundred and seventy-one days, the Voice has demanded in a tone and inflection exactly like that of the science officer that we kill the science officer. On first hearing it, every man mistook the Voice for his own, crawling in his head, and then shrugged it off. To the most part, we still do, but the medic is in the terminal stages of preparation to do the deed, and I shall side with him. I imagine the navigator's mate shall as well, and that is why I am siding with the medic. I do not trust the medic so far as I can throw him but I feel the loss of the navigator's mate would be a tragedy leaving us without leadership.

When I first heard the Voice, I wanted to leave it to wiser men than I, but today I have come to realize those wiser men can provide no explanation even as the Voice calls for their death. Who is wiser than the science officer, who has for some years devoted his every effort to suppressing the Voice? Will a committee of him help or hurt the matter? I do not know. All I know is that the most fearsome and beautiful thing in the Universe as I know it, that which has promised to bring salvation or damnation, that which has for some years sang to us a long, winding poetic epic which no man can fully understand, has ordered us to kill him three hundred and seventy-one times.

If he understood he would forgive me.