The Listeners

  The Listeners

  James Gunn

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The letter by Giuseppe Cocconi to Sir Bernard Lovell is reprinted by permission of Professor Cocconi. The poem attributed to Kirby Congdon is “The Exploration,” published in inside outer space, Anchor Books copyright 1970 Robert Vas Dias, and is reprinted by permission by the author.

  The epigraphs for each chapter are taken from “The Listeners” by Walter de la Mare. Permission to include the excerpts has been granted by The Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare, and the Society of Authors as their representative. Quotations attributed to Freeman J. Dyson dated 1964 are from a letter in the April 1964 Scientific American and are reprinted by permission by Dyson and Scientific American. Quotations attributed to Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener are from their book, THE YEAR 2000, copyright © 1967 The Hudson Institute, Inc., published by the Macmillan Company, and are reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  The poem attributed to Alice Meynell is “Christ in the Universe.” “Christ in the Universe” is reprinted by permission of Charles Scribner's Sons from LATER POEMS by Alice Meynell.

  The quotation attributed to Carl Sagan dated 1966 are taken from INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE by I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan, published by Holden-Day, Inc., copyright 1966 Holden-Day, Inc,. and are reprinted by permission of Dr. Sagan and the publisher.

  The lines of poetry attributed to William Butler Yeats are from “The Song of Wandering Aengus” and “The Second Coming,” and are reprinted by permission of the Macmillan Company from COLLECTED POEMS by William Butler Yeats. Copyright 1906 The Macmillan Company, renewal copyright 1934 William Butler Yeats; and copyright 1924 The Macmillan Company, renewal copyright 1952 Bertha Georgie Yeats. “Robert MacDonald” was first published in Galaxy Magazine, September 1968, as “The Listeners.” “George Thomas” was first published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1972, as “The Voices.” “William Mitchell” was first published in Galaxy Magazine, May-June 1971, as “The Message.” “Andrew White” was first published in Galaxy Magazine, January-February 1972, as “The Answer.” “The Computer” was first published in Galaxy Magazine, May-June 1972, as “The Reply.”

  Copyright © 1972 by James E. Gunn

  Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media

  ISBN 978-1-4976-2932-5

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  To Walter Sullivan, Carl Sagan,

  and all the scientists whose books and articles and lectures and speculations provided, so clearly, the inspiration and source material for this book—

  may their listening be rewarded and may all their messages be answered...

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  The Listeners

  Robert MacDonald—2025

  Computer Run

  George Thomas—2027

  Computer Run

  William Mitchell—2028

  Computer Run

  Andrew White—2028

  Computer Run

  Robert MacDonald—2058

  Computer Run

  The Computer—2118

  Translations

  Acknowledgements

  PREFACE

  After a decade when there never had been a day when I wasn't working on some story or novel, I accepted a position as the first Administrative Assistant to the Chancellor for University Relations at the University of Kansas. Those were the turbulent 1960s, and between learning my job and trying to explain student unrest to the various University publics, I had no time for writing. The Joy Makers, The Immortals, and Future Imperfect were published between 1961 and 1964, but they had been written in the 1950s.

  By the middle of the 1960s I was feeling serious withdrawal symptoms, and I resolved to take the month's paid vacation that I was due. I prepared for that month—August after the end of the summer session and before the beginning of the fall semester—for months ahead so that when the time came I wouldn't have to think or do research, I could sit down and write. Beginning in 1966, I wrote the second and third novellas that completed The Burning (and published them in If and Galaxy), the second chapter of what later became Kampus, and the novelette I called “The Listeners.”

  “The Listeners” was inspired by Walter Sullivan's We Are Not Alone. Sullivan was the long-time science editor of The New York Times. He had attended a seminal conference of scientists in Washington, D.C., along with many of the people who were being attracted to the idea of listening for messages from the stars—what now is called SETI, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence—including Frank Drake and Carl Sagan. His book described the fascination people have displayed over the centuries about the possibility of life on other worlds, and various proposals for communicating with aliens. The availability of radio telescopes had led to recent discussions among such scientists as Guiseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison about the possibility of picking up signals from space, and Cocconi had written a letter (reprinted in the first Computer Run section) to Sir Bernard Lovell proposing that some time on the Jodrell Bank radio telescope be devoted to a search for signals from space.

  Sullivan's book was fascinating, and included a good deal of material that later found its way into my novel, but what stimulated my writer's instinct was the concept of a project that might have to be pursued for a century without results. What kind of need would produce that kind of dedication, I pondered, and what kind of people would it enlist—and have to enlist if it were to continue? I wrote “The Listeners,” which in the novel is called “Robert MacDonald.” My then literary agent thought it was overwritten for its audience, had too many foreign-language quotations, and anyway, he wrote, I should make my hero a young man fighting against the tyranny of tired old men. Another agent didn't care for it enough to take me on as a client, but when Galaxy announced that it was going back to monthly publication (and would need more material) I sent it to Fred Pohl and he wrote back saying that he'd be happy to publish it if I'd include translations of the foreign-language quotes. The following year Donald Wollheim included it in his World's Best Science Fiction anthology.

  In the next few years (I was working on other projects as well), I wrote vie more chapters and saw all but the final chapter published in Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy. Meanwhile Charles Scribner's Sons had decided to develop a science-fiction line under editor Norbert Slepyan, and one of the novels he signed up was The Listeners. He asked me once if I was going to add anything to the six chapters and I said I was planning on broadening the perspective to include some of the materials that were being gathered by the computer to aid in its recognition (and translation) of alien communications, as well as the beginnings of artificial intelligence (interested readers may watch it happen).

  The novel was published in hard covers in 1972 as “a novel” (not a science-fiction novel). The same year it became a selection of the Science Fiction Book Club. The following year it was published by Signet Books and a decade later it was reprinted by Del Rey Books.
It has been translated into Italian, German, Polish, Japanese, and Chinese. Three decades have passed since the novel was published, and more than a fourth of the century-long project. SETI projects on both coasts are still hard at work, trying to pick up messages from the stars, and they continue—without positive results. If the novel has any claims to vision, its insight may be found in its evaluation of human desire and persistence in the face of continuing discouragement. But we are approaching the period when the novel begins, and maybe the signal we all have been awaiting—that we are not alone—will soon be received.

  If it is, if our search is rewarded, maybe The Listeners will have played a part in it, and the book that started in 1966 in a hot August sunroom, in a college town in eastern Kansas, will have made a difference. After all, one of the SETI project directors told me recently that The Listeners had done more to turn people on to the search than any other book. My thanks go to Walter Sullivan's We Are Not Alone. I hope the title is right.

  James Gunn

  August 2000

  The Listeners

  Our civilization is within reach of one of the greatest steps in its evolution: knowledge of the existence, nature, and activities of independent civilizations in space. At this instant, through this very document, are perhaps passing radio waves bearing the conversations of distant creatures—conversations that we could record if we but pointed a telescope in the right direction and tuned to the proper frequency....

  Indeed there exist the know-how and instruments to search for extraterrestrial civilizations.... each passing year has seen our estimates of the probability of life in space increase, along with our capabilities for detecting it. More and more scientists feel that contact with other civilizations is no longer something beyond our dreams but a natural event in the history of mankind that will perhaps occur in the lifetime of many of us. The promise is now too great, either to turn away from it or to wait much longer before devoting major resources to a search for other intelligent beings. For the time being, the discovery may come by chance, for many of the observations we now make of natural objects are done using methods that are suitable for detecting intelligent life—the studies of pulsars and of infrared sources are examples. In the relatively near future we foresee the construction of major facilities, such as a giant radio receiving array, and the operation of a project that will have as its goal the detection of intelligent life elsewhere.

  In the long run this may be one of science's most important and most profound contributions to mankind and to our civilization.

  Report of the Astronomy Survey Committee to the National Academy of Sciences

  July 1, 1972

  Robert MacDonald—2025

  "Is there anybody there?” said the Traveler,

  Knocking on the moonlit door....

  The voices babbled.

  MacDonald heard them and knew that there was meaning in them, that they were trying to communicate and that he could understand them and respond to them if he could only concentrate on what they were saying, but he couldn't bring himself to make the effort.

  “Back behind everything, lurking like a silent shadow behind the closed door, is the question we can never answer except positively: Is there anybody there?”

  That was Bob Adams, eternally the devil's advocate, looking querulously at the others around the conference table. His round face was sweating, although the mahogany-paneled room was cool.

  Saunders puffed hard on his pipe. “But that's true of all science. The image of the scientist eliminating all negative possibilities is ridiculous. Can't be done. So he goes ahead on faith and statistical probability.”

  MacDonald watched the smoke rise above Saunders’ head in clouds and wisps until it wavered in the draft from the air duct, thinned out, disappeared. He could not see it, but the odor reached his nostrils. It was an aromatic blend easily distinguishable from the flatter smell of the cigarettes being smoke by Adams and some of the others.

  Wasn't this their task? MacDonald wondered. To detect the thin smoke of life that drifts through the universe, to separate one trace from another, molecule by molecule, and then force them to reverse their entropic paths into their ordered and meaningful original form.

  All the king's horses, and all the king's men.... Life itself is impossible, he thought, but men exist by reversing entropy.

  Down the long table cluttered with overflowing ash trays and coffee cups and doodled scratch pads Olsen said, “We always knew it would be a long search. Not years but centuries. The computers must have sufficient data, and that means bits of information approximating the number of molecules in the universe. Let's not chicken out now.”

  "If seven maids with seven mops

  Swept it for half a year,

  Do you suppose,” the Walrus said,

  "That they could get it clear?"

  “...Ridiculous,” someone was saying, and then Adams broke in. “It's easy for you to talk about centuries when you've been here only three years. Wait until you've been at it for ten years, like I have. Or Mac here who has been on the Project for twenty years and head of it for fifteen.”

  “What's the use of arguing about something we can't know anything about?” Sonnenborn said reasonably. “We have to base our position on probabilities. Shklovskii and Sagan estimated that there are more than one thousand million habitable planets in our galaxy alone. Von Hoerner estimated that one in three million have advanced societies in orbit around them; Sagan said one in one hundred thousand. Either way it's good odds that there's somebody there—three hundred or ten thousand in our segment of the universe. Our job is to listen in the right place or in the right way or understand what we hear.”

  Adams turned to MacDonald. “What do you say, Mac?”

  “I say these basic discussions are good for us,” MacDonald said mildly, “and we need to keep reminding ourselves what it is we're doing, or we'll get swallowed in a quicksand of data. I also say that it's time now to get down to the business at hand—what observations do we make tonight and the rest of the week before our next staff meeting?”

  Saunders began, “I think we should make a methodical sweep of the entire galactic lens, listening on all wavelengths—”

  “We've done that a hundred times,” said Sonnenborn.

  “Not with my new filter—”

  “Tau Ceti still is the most likely,” said Olsen. “Let's really give it a hearing—”

  MacDonald heard Adams grumbling, half to himself, “If there is anybody, and they are trying to communicate, some amateur is going to pick it up on his ham set, decipher it on his James Bond coderule, and leave us sitting here on one hundred million dollars of equipment with egg all over our faces—”

  “And don't forget,” MacDonald said, “tomorrow is Saturday night and Maria and I will be expecting you all at our place at eight for the customary beer and bull. Those who have more to say can save it for then.”

  MacDonald did not feel as jovial as he tried to sound. He did not know whether he could stand another Saturday-night session of drink and discussion and dissension about the Project. This was one of his low periods when everything seemed to pile up on top of him, and he could not get out from under, or tell anybody how he felt. No matter how he felt, the Saturday nights were good for the morale of the others.

  Pues no es posible que esté continuo el arco armado

  ni la condición y flaqueza humana se pueda sustenar

  sin alguna lícita recreación

  Within the Project, morale was always a problem. Besides, it was good for Maria. She did not get out enough. She needed to see people. And then...

  And then maybe Adams was right. Maybe nobody was there. Maybe nobody was sending signals because there was nobody to send signals. Maybe man was alone in the universe. Alone with God. Or alone with himself, whichever was worse.

  Maybe all the money was being wasted, and the effort, and the preparation—all the intelligence and education and ideas being drained away into an e
ndlessly empty cavern.

  Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,

  Juristerei und Medizin,

  Und leider auch Theologie

  Durchaus studiert, mit heissem Bemühn.

  Da steh’ ich nun, ich armer Tor!

  Und bin so klug als wie zuvor;

  Heisse Magister, heisse Doktor gar,

  Und ziehe schon an die zehen Jahr

  Herauf, herab und quer und krumm

  Meine Schüler an der Nase herum—

  Und sehe, dass wir nichts wissen können!

  Poor fool. Why me? MacDonald thought. Could not some other lead them better, not by the nose but by his real wisdom? Perhaps all he was good for was the Saturday-night parties. Perhaps it was time for a change.

  He shook himself. It was the endless waiting that wore him down, the waiting for something that did not happen, and the Congressional hearings were coming up again. What could he say that he had not said before? How could he justify a project that already had gone on for nearly fifty years without results and might go on for centuries more?

  “Gentlemen,” he said briskly, “to our listening posts.”

  By the time he had settled himself at his disordered desk, Lily was standing beside him.

  “Here's last night's computer analysis,” she said, putting down in front of him a thin folder. “Reynolds says there's nothing there, but you always want to see it anyway. Here's the transcription of last year's Congressional hearings.” A thick binder went on top of the folder. “The correspondence and the actual appropriation measure are in another file if you want them.”