The Listeners Page 3

  But they all insisted on speaking at once. MacDonald wanted to shout at them. “Silence, everybody! All but you—there, with the purple antenna. One at a time and we'll listen to all of you if it takes a hundred years or a hundred lifetimes.”

  “Sometimes,” Adams said, “I think it was a mistake to put in the speaker system. You begin to anthropomorphize. After a while you begin to hear things. Sometimes you even get messages. I don't listen to the voices any more. I used to wake up in the night with someone whispering to me. I was just on the verge of getting the message that would solve everything, and I would wake up.” He flicked off the switch.

  “Maybe somebody will get the message,” MacDonald said. “That's what the audio frequency translation is intended to do. To keep the attention focused. It can mesmerize and it can torment, but these are the conditions out of which spring inspiration”

  “Also madness,” Adams said. “You've got to be able to continue.”

  “Yes.” MacDonald picked up the earphones Adams had put down and held one of them to his ear.

  “Tico-tico, tico-tico,” it sang. “They're listening in Puerto Rico. Listening for words that never come. Tico-tico, tico-tico. They're listening in Puerto Rico. Can it be the stars are stricken dumb?”

  MacDonald put the earphones down and smiled. “Maybe there's inspiration in that, too.”

  “At least it takes my mind off the futility.”

  “Maybe off the job, too? Do you really want to find anyone out there?”

  “Why else would I be here? But there are times when I wonder if we would be better off not knowing.”

  “We all think that sometimes,” MacDonald said.

  In his office he attacked the stack of papers and letters again. When he had worked his way to the bottom, he sighed and got up, stretching. He wondered if he would feel better, less frustrated, less uncertain, if he were working on the Problem instead of just working so somebody else could work on the Problem. But somebody had to do it. Somebody had to keep the Project going, personnel coming in, funds in the bank, bills paid, feathers smoothed.

  Maybe it was more important that he do all the dirty little work in the office. Of course it was routine. Of course Lily could do it as well as he. But it was important that he do it, that there be somebody in charge who believed in the Project—or who never let his doubts be known.

  Like the Little Ear, he was a symbol—and it is by symbols men live—or refuse to let their despair overwhelm them.

  The janitor was waiting for him in the outer office.

  “Can I see you, Mr. MacDonald?” the janitor said.

  “Of course, Joe,” MacDonald said, locking the door of his office carefully behind him. “What is it?”

  “It's my teeth, sir.” The old man got to his feet and with a deft movement of his tongue and mouth dropped his teeth into his hand.

  MacDonald stared at them with a twinge of revulsion. There was nothing wrong with them. They were a carefully constructed pair of false teeth, but they looked too real. MacDonald always had shuddered away from those things which seemed to be what they were not, as if there were some treachery in them.

  “They talk to me, Mr. MacDonald,” the janitor mumbled, staring at the teeth in his hand with what seemed like suspicion. “In the glass beside my bed at night, they whisper to me. About things far off, like. Messages like.”

  MacDonald stared at the janitor. It was a strange word for the old man to use, and hard to say without teeth. Still, the word had been “messages.” But why should it be strange? He could have picked it up around the offices or the laboratories. It would be odd, indeed, if he had not picked up something about what was going on. Of course: messages.

  “I've heard of that sort of thing happening,” MacDonald said. “False teeth accidentally constructed into a kind of crystal set, that pick up radio waves. Particularly near a powerful station. And we have a lot of stray frequencies floating around, what with the antennas and all. Tell you what, Joe. We'll make an appointment with the Project dentist to fix your teeth so that they don't bother you. Any small alteration should do it.”

  “Thank you, Mr. MacDonald,” the old man said. He fitted his teeth back into his mouth. “You're a great man, Mr. MacDonald.”

  MacDonald drove the ten dark miles to the hacienda with a vague feeling of unease, as if he had done something during the day or left something undone that should have been otherwise.

  But the house was dark when he drove up in front, not empty-dark as it had seemed to him a few hours before, but friendly-dark. Maria was asleep, breathing peacefully.

  The house was brilliant with lighted windows that cast long fingers into the night, probing the dark hills, and the sound of many voices stirred echoes until the countryside itself seemed alive.

  “Come in, Lily,” MacDonald said at the door, and was reminded of a winter scene when a Lily had met the gentlemen at the door and helped them off with their overcoats. But that was another Lily and another occasion and another place and somebody else's imagination. “I'm glad you decided to come.” He had a can of beer in his hand, and he waved it in the general direction of the major center of noisemaking. “There's beer in the living room and something more potent in the study—190 proof grain alcohol, to be precise. Be careful with that. It will sneak up on you. But—nunc est bibendum!"

  “Where's Mrs. MacDonald?” Lily asked.

  “Back there, somewhere.” MacDonald waved again. “The men, and a few brave women, are in the study. The women, and a few brave men, are in the living room. The kitchen is common territory. Take your choice.”

  “I really shouldn't have come,” Lily said. “I offered to spell Mr. Saunders in the control room, but he said I hadn't been checked out. It isn't as if the computer couldn't handle it all alone, and I know enough to call somebody if anything unexpected should happen.”

  “Shall I tell you something, Lily?” MacDonald said. “The computer could do it alone. And you and the computer could do it better than any of us, including me. But if the men ever feel that they are unnecessary, they would feel more useless than ever. They would give up. And they mustn't do that.”

  “Oh, Mac!” Lily said.

  “They mustn't do that. Because one of them is going to come up with the inspiration that solves it all. Not me. One of them. We'll send somebody to relieve Charley before the evening is over.”

  Wer immer strebens sich bemüht,

  Den können wir erlösen.

  Lily sighed. “Okay, boss.”

  “And enjoy yourself!”

  “Okay, boss, okay.”

  “Find a man, Lily,” MacDonald muttered. And then he, too, turned toward the living room, for Lily had been the last who might come.

  He listened for a moment at the doorway, sipping slowly from the warming can.

  “—work more on gamma rays—”

  “Who's got the money to build a generator? Since nobody's built one yet, we don't even know what it might cost.”

  “—gamma-ray sources should be a million times more rare than radio sources at twenty-one centimeters—”

  “That's what Cocconi said nearly fifty years ago. The same arguments. Always the same arguments.”

  “If they're right, they're right.”

  “But the hydrogen-emission line is so uniquely logical. As Morrison said to Cocconi—and Cocconi, if you remember, agreed—it represents a logical, prearranged rendezvous point. ‘A unique, objective standard of frequency, which must be known to every observer of the universe,’ was the way they put it.”

  “—but the noise level—”

  MacDonald smiled and moved on to the kitchen for a cold can of beer.

  “—Bracewell's ‘automated messengers'?” a voice asked querulously.

  “What about them?”

  “Why aren't we looking for them?”

  “The point of Bracewell's messengers is that they make themselves known to us!”

  “Maybe there's something wrong with our
s. After a few million years in orbit—”

  “—laser beams make more sense.”

  “And get lost in all that star shine?”

  “As Schwartz and Townes pointed out, all you have to do is select a wavelength of light that is absorbed by stellar atmospheres. Put a narrow laser beam in the center of one of the calcium absorption lines—”

  In the study they were talking about quantum noise.

  “Quantum noise favors low frequencies.”

  “But the noise itself sets a lower limit on those frequencies.”

  “Drake calculated the most favorable frequencies, considering the noise level, lie between 3.2 and 8.1 centimeters.”

  “Drake! Drake! What did he know? We've had nearly fifty years experience on him. Fifty years of technological advance. Fifty years ago we could send radio messages one thousand light-years and laser signals ten light-years. Today those figures are ten thousand and five hundred at least.”

  “What if nobody's there?” Adams said gloomily.

  Ich bin der Geist der stets vernient.

  “Short-pulse it, like Oliver suggested. One hundred million billion watts in a ten billionth of a second would smear across the entire radio spectrum. Here, Mac, fill this, will you?”

  And MacDonald wandered away through the clustering guests toward the bar.

  “And I told Charley,” said a woman to two other women in the corner, “if I had a dime for every dirty diaper I've changed, I sure wouldn't be sitting here in Puerto Rico—”

  “—neutrinos,” said somebody.

  “Nuts,” said somebody else, as MacDonald poured grain alcohol carefully into the glass and filled it with orange juice, “the only really logical medium is Q waves.”

  “I know—the waves we haven't discovered yet but are going to discover about ten years from now. Only here it is nearly fifty years after Morrison suggested it, and we still haven't discovered them.”

  MacDonald wended his way back across the room.

  “It's the night work that gets me,” said someone's wife. “The kids up all day, and then he wants me there to greet him when he gets home at dawn. Brother!”

  “Or what if everybody's listening?” Adams said gloomily. “Maybe everybody's sitting there, listening, just the way we are, because it's so much cheaper than sending.”

  “Here you are,” MacDonald said.

  “But don't you suppose somebody would have thought of that by this time and begun to send?”

  “Double-think it all the way through and figure what just occurred to you would have occurred to everybody else, so you might as well listen. Think about it—everybody sitting around, listening. If there is anybody. Either way it makes the skin creep.”

  “All right, then, we ought to send something.”

  “What would you send?”

  “I'd have to think about it. Prime numbers, maybe.”

  “Think some more. What if a civilization weren't mathematical?”

  “Idiot! How would they build an antenna?”

  “Maybe they'd rule-of-thumb it, like a ham. Or maybe they have built-in antennae.”

  “And maybe you have built-in antennae and don't know it.”

  MacDonald's can of beer was empty. He wandered back toward the kitchen again.

  “—insist on equal time with the Big Ear. Even if nobody's sending we could pick up the normal electronic commerce of a civilization tens of light-years away. The problem would be deciphering, not hearing.”

  “They're picking it up now, when they're studying the relatively close systems. Ask for a tape and work out your program.”

  “All right, I will. Just give me a chance to work up a request—”

  MacDonald found himself beside Maria. He put his arm around her waist and pulled her close. “All right?” he said.

  “All right.”

  Her face was tired, though, MacDonald thought. He dreaded the notion that she might be growing older, that she was entering middle age. He could face it for himself.

  He could feel the years piling up inside his bones. He still thought of himself, inside, as twenty, but he knew that he was forty-seven, and mostly he was glad that he had found happiness and love and peace and serenity. He even was willing to pay the price in youthful exuberance and belief in his personal immortality. But not Maria!

  Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

  Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

  Che la diritta via era smarrita.

  “Sure?”

  She nodded.

  He leaned close to her ear. “I wish it was just the two of us, as usual.”

  “I, too.”

  “I'm going to leave in a little while—”

  “Must you?”

  “I must relieve Saunders. He's on duty. Give him an opportunity to celebrate a little with the others.”

  “Can't you send somebody else?”

  “Who?” MacDonald gestured with good-humored futility at all the clusters of people held together by bonds of ordered sounds shared consecutively. “It's a good party. No one will miss me.”

  “I will.”

  “Of course, querida.”

  “You are their mother, father, priest, all in one,” Maria said. “You worry about them too much.”

  “I must keep them together. What else am I good for?”

  “For much more.”

  MacDonald hugged her with one arm.

  “Look at Mac and Maria, will you?” said someone who was having trouble with his consonants. “What goddamned devotion!”

  MacDonald smiled and suffered himself to be pounded on the back while he protected Maria in front of him. “I'll see you later,” he said.

  As he passed the living room someone was saying,

  “Like Edie said, we ought to look at the long-chain molecules in carbonaceous chondrites. No telling how far they've traveled—or been sent—or what messages might be coded in the molecules.”

  He closed the front door behind him, and the noise dropped to a roar and then a mutter. He stopped for a moment at the door of the car and looked up at the sky.

  E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

  The noise from the hacienda reminded him of something—the speakers in the control room. All those voices talking, talking, talking, and from here he could not understand a thing.

  Somewhere there was an idea if he could only concentrate on it hard enough. But he had drunk one beer too many—or perhaps one too few.

  After the long hours of listening to the voices, MacDonald always felt a little crazy, but tonight it was worse than usual. Perhaps it was all the conversation before, or the beers, or something else—some deeper concern that would not surface.

  Tico-tico, tico-tico...

  Even if they could pick up a message, they still would likely be dead and gone before any exchange could take place even with the nearest likely star. What kind of mad dedication could sustain such perseverance?

  They're listening in Puerto Rico....

  Religion could. At least once it did, during the era of cathedral building in Europe, the cathedrals that took centuries to build.

  “What are you doing, fellow?”

  “I'm working for ten francs a day.”

  “And what are you doing?”

  “I'm laying stone.”

  “And you—what are you doing?”

  “I am building a cathedral.”

  They were building cathedrals, most of then. Most of them had that religious mania about their mission that would sustain them through a lifetime of labors in which no progress could be seen.

  Listening for words that never come...

  The mere layers of stone and those who worked for pay alone eliminated themselves in time and left only those who kept alive in themselves the concept, the dream.

  But they had to be a little mad to begin with.

  Can it be the stars are stricken dumb?

  Tonight he had heard the voices nearly all night long. They kept trying to tell
him something, something urgent, something he should do, but he could not quite make out the words. There was only the babble of distant voices, urgent and unintelligible.

  Tico-tico, tico-tic...

  He had wanted to shout “Shut up!” to the universe. “One at a time!” “You first!” But of course there was no way to do that. Or had he tried? Had he shouted?

  They're listening with ears this big!

  Had he dozed at the console with the voices mumbling in his ears, or had he only thought he dozed? Or had he only dreamed he waked. Or dreamed he dreamed?

  Listening for thoughts just like their own.

  There was madness to it all, but perhaps it was a divine madness, a creative madness. And is not that madness that which sustains man in his terrible self-knowledge, the driving madness which demands reason of a casual universe, the awful aloneness which seeks among the stars for companionship?

  Can it be that we are all alone?

  The ringing of the telephone half penetrated through the mists of mesmerization. He picked up the handset, half expecting it would be the universe calling, perhaps with a clipped British accent, “Hello there, Man. Hello. Hello. I say, we seem to have a bad connection, what? Just wanted you to know that we're here. Are you there? Are you listening? Message on the way. May not get there for a couple of centuries. Do be around to answer, will you? That's a good being. Righto....”

  Only it wasn't. It was the familiar American voice of Charley Saunders saying, “Mac, there's been an accident. Olsen is on his way to relieve you, but I think you'd better leave now. It's Maria.”

  Leave it. Leave it all. What does it matter? But leave the controls on automatic; the computer can take care of it all. Maria! Get in the car. Start it. Don't fumble! That's it. Go. Go. Car passing. Must be Olsen. No matter.

  What kind of accident? Why didn't I ask? What does it matter what kind of accident? Maria. Nothing could have happened. Nothing serious. Not with all those people around. Nil desperandum. And yet—why did Charley call if it was not serious? Must be serious. I must be prepared for something bad, something that will shake the world, that will tear my insides.

  I must not break up in front of them. Why not? Why must I appear infallible? Why must I always be cheerful, imperturbable, my faith unshaken? Why me? If there is something bad, if something impossibly bad has happened to Maria, what will matter? Ever? Why didn't I ask Charley what it was? Why? The bad can wait; it will get no worse for being unknown.