The Listeners Page 5

  morrison, drake, struve, dyson, cocconi,

  galileo, burke, brown, tsiolkovsky,

  purcell, mascall, sagan, hoyle, shklovskii,

  hoerner, stormer, spitzer, urey,

  blackett, bussard, berkner, lilly,

  lowell, lovell, whipple, franklin,

  greenstein, haskins, ledenberg, ewen,

  freudenthal, michael, raible, pearman,

  golay, boehm, mead, smith, handlesman,

  schachter, van de hulst, townes, killian,

  oppenheimer, oliver, schwarz, cameron,

  froman, simpson, calvin, sacchi,

  jansky, atchley, webb, huang, macquarrie...

  We submit that the foregoing line of argument demonstrates that the presence of interstellar signals is entirely consistent with all we know, and that if signals are present the means of detecting them is now at hand. Few will deny the profound importance, practical and philosophical, which the detection of interstellar communication would have. We therefore feel that a discriminating search for signals deserves a considerable effort. The probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search, the chance of success is zero....

  Morrison and Cocconi, 1959...

  the united states bureau of environment today proposed that weather control be centralized under the general direction of the united nations. “we have had considerable success in modifying weather in this country,” a bureau spokesman said, “but weather is a worldwide, interdependent phenomenon, and. weather control will never be completely successful until it can be approached on a global basis.”

  Within fifty years we will have developed radio technology to the point where further improvements will no longer influence our ability to communicate with other worlds. The limitations, henceforth, will be background noise in space and other natural factors. Since our radio technology is now fifty years old, this means that civilizations characteristically jump, in the brief span of one century, from having no capacity for interstellar communication to having the maximum capability. On an astronomical time scale, a civilization passes abruptly from a state of no radio ability to one of perfect radio ability. If we could examine a large number of life-bearing planets, we might expect to find in virtually every case either complete ignorance of radio techniques, or complete mastery....

  Frank d. Drake, 1960...

  Do we really expect a superior community to be on the nearest of those stars which we cannot at the moment positively rule out? Unless superior communities are extremely abundant, is it not more likely that the nearest is situated at least ten times farther off, say, beyond one hundred light years?...

  Even ruling out unlikely candidates, we must still scan one thousand stars to find the highly advanced civilization that we are looking for and that civilization, in turn, must direct its calling signal at one thousand stars in the hope, ultimately, of finding someone else. Remember that throughout most of the thousands of millions of years of the Earth's existence such attention would have been fruitless....

  Ronald N. Bracewell, 1960...

  We must expect most societies that have crossed the threshold of civilization to be more advanced than our own....

  Frank D. Drake, 1960...

  a new strain of corn developed by genetic scientists is producing record yields of a high protein supercorn which promises to eliminate remaining pockets of starvation and protein deficiency as soon as sufficient quantities of seed can be distributed and the public in various parts of the world educated to its minor differences in taste and texture, and to its harmlessness.

  It would be more logical to assume that superior civilizations would send automated messengers to orbit each candidate star and await the possible awakening of a civilization on one of that star's planets....

  Ronald N. Bracewell, 1960...

  We are not far from the development of lasers able to communicate on wavelengths of visible light, or in adjacent portions of the spectrum between planets of two stars separated by a number of light years. The rapid progress of science implies that another civilization more advanced than ourselves by only a few thousand years, might possess capabilities we now rule out. They may have already been able to send us an exploratory instrumented probe. Since none has yet been seen, perhaps it would be appropriate to examine high-resolution stellar spectra for lines which are unusually narrow, at peculiar frequencies, or varying in intensity....

  Charles H. Townes and Robert N. Schwartz, 1961...

  The long-chain molecules now being extracted from certain meteorites might have been put there by some remote civilization and hurled toward us in great numbers. Might these long molecules contain coded information? Should we, perhaps, intercept comets in flight to see if they have any messages from afar? ...

  Leslie C. Edie, 1962...

  One's own sun could be used as a signaling light by placing a cloud of particles in orbit around it. The cloud would cut off enough light to make the sun appear to be flashing when seen from a distance....

  Philip Morrison, 1963...

  Canst thou bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? ...

  Job, before third century b.c....

  arab and israeli officials today commemorated the tenth anniversary of the completion of the big dam on the jordan river which has made the negev desert the breadbasket of the middle east.

  meanwhile unrest in siberia has brought the russian premier flying back to moscow from friendship pact talks with chinese spokesmen in beijing....

  Lights come and go in the night sky. Men, troubled at last by the things they build, may toss in their sleep and dream bad dreams, or lie awake while the meteors whisper greenly overhead. But nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness. There may be wisdom; there may be power; somewhere across space great instruments, handled by strange, manipulative organs, may stare vainly at our floating cloud wrack, their owners yearning as we yearn. Nevertheless, in the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever....

  Loren Eiseley, 1946...

  as the first astronaut to set foot on the planet mars and return, tell us—is there any life on mars

  well, there's a little bit on saturday night, but the rest of the week it's pretty dull.

  Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!

  O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

  The bright boroughs, the circle citadels there!

  Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes!

  The gray lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!...

  Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877...

  "Something like this has been talked about and speculated about for years.... Mathematically, it's been an odds-on bet that somewhere in our galaxy there'd be another race with a civilization equal to or further advanced than ours. Nobody could ever guess where or when we'd meet them. But it looks like we've done it now!"

  "D'you suppose they'll be friendly, sir?"

  "It's moving.... Heading for us. Just what we'd do if a strange spaceship appeared in our hunting grounds! Friendly? Maybe! We're going to try to contact them. We have to. But I suspect this is the end of this expedition. Thank God for the blasters!” ...

  Murray Leinster, 1945...

  Those who feel that the goal justifies the great amount of effort required will continue to carry on this research, sustained by the possibility that sometime in the future, perhaps a hundred years from now, or perhaps next week, the search will be successful....

  Frank D. Drake, 1960...

  George Thomas—2027

  ...a host of phantom listeners

  That stood in the lone house then

  Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

  To that voice from the world of men...

  He came past the saucer-shaped valley lined with metal plates, past the big metal dish fixed against the sky, past the parking lot sur
faced with packed white sea shells.

  A crater shaped to hold the silence of the stars; an empty cup waiting patiently to be filled...

  He came out of the vertical sunlight into the dark, through the glass doors into the one-story concrete building, down its cool, brightening corridors to the office marked “Director,” and past the middle-aged secretary to the office she guarded, where a man stood up behind a desk piled with papers.

  They came into the corridor to watch the intruder, he pallid scientists and their own brown clerks, their faces furrowed with facts, their eyes empty of meaning like blind oscilloscopes...

  “My name is George Thomas,” the newcomer said.

  “I'm Robert MacDonald,” said the man behind the desk.

  They shook hands. MacDonald had a good handshake, Thomas thought, almost gentle but not feeble, as if he didn't have to prove anything.

  “I know,” Thomas said. “You're director of this Project.” A sensitive man could draw inferences from the way he said it; Thomas didn't care.

  The room was cool and pleasant and spare, a little like the man who worked in it. The air in the corridor had smelled of machine oil and ozone, but here was a smell that Thomas knew better, a smell that made him feel comfortable, of paper and old books. Behind the simple desk were tall bookshelves built into the wall and on the shelves were books with real leather bindings in brown and dark red and dark green. From where he sat Thomas could not quite make out the titles, but from a word or two he could tell that some of them, at least, were in foreign languages.

  His fingers twitched to take one in his hands, to feel the grainy, slightly slick texture of its binding, to turn the brittle pages....

  "Era magazine has commissioned me to do a profile in depth of the Project,” Thomas said.

  “And kill it.”

  Thomas was past showing surprise, almost past feeling it, he thought. “To prepare it for burial. It's already dead.”

  “Do you have reasons for saying so or merely prejudice?”

  Thomas shifted in his chair. “The Project has continued for more than fifty years without a positive result. In fifty years even hope dies.”

  “'There's life in the old girl yet.'”

  Thomas recognized the quotation. “Literature survives,” he conceded, “but little else.” He looked at MacDonald again.

  The Director of the Project is forty-nine. He looks it. But his eyes are blue and unfaded, and his long face holds within it the musculature. that often accompanies strength of will and sometimes even strength of character.

  “Why do you think I intend to kill the Project?”

  MacDonald smiled; it illuminated his face. Thomas wondered what it would be like to smile like that.

  "Era is the magazine of the upper classes, many of whom are mandarins, others are technocrats, and some of both are Solitarians; Era reinforces their prejudices, bolsters their self-esteem, and supports their interests. The Project threatens all three, in particular the effortless working of our technological society.”

  “You give our upper classes too much credit; they don't think that deeply.”

  "Era does that for them. And even if this all were not true, the Project still represents for Era a tempting target for its arrows of wit, and today's game is to see what you can kill with laughter.”

  “You do Era and me an injustice,” Thomas protested casually. “The magazine's motto is ‘Truth and Wit.’ Note that truth comes first.”

  "'Fiat justitia, et pereat mundus,’” MacDonald murmured.

  “'Let justice be done, though the world perish,'” Thomas translated automatically. “Who said that?”

  “Emperor Ferdinand I. Do you know of him?”

  “There were so many Ferdinands.”

  “Of course,” MacDonald said. “Of course! George Thomas. You did that magnificent translation of the Commedia, what, ten-fifteen years ago?”

  “Seventeen,” Thomas said. He did not like the way the word came out, but it was too late to call it back. He pretended to be trying to read the papers on MacDonald's desk.

  “You're a poet, not a reporter. You wrote a novel a few years later, The Inferno. About today's damned, with a vision and sensitivity virtually equal to that of its immortal predecessor. It was meant to be the first book of a trilogy, surely. Did I miss the later books?”

  “No.”

  MacDonald had a way of stabbing him with kindliness, Thomas thought. “What a man must be is wise enough to recognize failure and turn to something in which he has some chance of success.”

  “And a man must believe sufficiently in himself—or in his cause—that he persists in spite of disappointments and the inexorable metronome of the years.”

  They looked at each other, the older man who was not yet old and the younger man who was no longer young, and they understood each other, Thomas thought.

  First a talented linguist, then an indifferent electrical engineer—as if he. were deliberately preparing himself for the Project—MacDonald joined the Project twenty-one years ago. Five years later he was named Director. He is said to have a beautiful wife and a marriage in which there is some hint of scandal. He has grown old listening for voices he has yet to hear. And what of George Thomas, poet and novelist, who found success too soon and fame too young and discovered that success can be just another face of failure and fame can be a kind of death that draws the jackals of both sexes who eat up time and talent....

  “I'm recording this, you know,” Thomas said.

  “I thought you were,” MacDonald said. “Is this how you achieve the sound of reality?”

  “Partly. But it's not for that. I have a good memory, and reality doesn't sound as real as you might think. Mostly I record to placate Era's libel lawyers.”

  “You are in the right business.”

  “Reporter?”

  “Undertaker.”

  “I see death all around me.”

  “I see life.”

  “Despair.”

  “Hope. L'amor che muove il sole e l'altro stelle."

  He thinks I am still in hell, Thomas thought, that I have not finished my Inferno, and that he is in paradise. He is a subtle man and knows me better than he lets on.

  "Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate! We understand each other,” Thomas said. “Hope and faith keep this Project going—”

  “And scientific probability.”

  Thomas felt the gentle humming against his belly of the recorder clipped to his waistband. “That's another name for faith. And after more than fifty years even scientific probability becomes more than a little improbable. Perhaps that is what my profile will demonstrate.”

  “Fifty years is but the flicker of an eyelash on God's face.”

  “Fifty years is a man's working life. It has been most of your life. I don't expect you to give it up without a struggle, but it won't do you any good. Are you going to cooperate with me or fight me?”

  “Is there anything we can tell you or show you that will change your mind?”

  “I'll be as honest with you as I hope you will be with me: I doubt it, not because my mind is closed but because I doubt that there is anything to show. Like any good reporter, I start from a point of basic skepticism; to me this Project looks like the biggest and longest boondoggle of all time, and the only thing that can change my mind is a message.”

  “From the publisher or from God?”

  “From another world. That's what this project is all about, isn't it?”

  MacDonald sighed. “Yes, that's what it's all about. Suppose we strike a bargain.”

  “You know what happens to those who strike bargains with the devil.”

  “I'll take the chance that you are not the devil but his advocate, a man like the rest of us, lost in hell, with human fears, hopes, and desires—including the desire to seek the truth and, finding it, to communicate it to his fellow beings wherever they are.”

  “'What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate...”

  “'A
nd would not stay for an answer.’ We will stay. The bargain concerns your willingness to do as much. We will cooperate with your investigation if you will listen to what we have to say, and hear, and look at what we have to show, and see.”

  “Of course. That's what I'm here to do.”

  “I should tell you that we would have cooperated without your promise.”

  Thomas smiled. It may have been his first real smile since he entered the room, he thought. “I should tell you that I would have listened and looked without your cooperation.”

  The sparring was over, and Thomas was not sure who had gained an advantage. He was not used to feeling uncertain at this point, and it bothered him. MacDonald was a formidable opponent—all the more because he truly did not think of himself as an opponent but a colleague in the search for truth—and Thomas knew that he could never relax. He had no doubt that he could destroy MacDonald and the Project, but the game was more complex than that: it had to be played in such a way that the destruction did not include Era and Thomas. It was not that Thomas cared about Era or Thomas, but he could not lose the game.

  Thomas asked MacDonald's permission to photograph him and his papers at his desk and to leaf through the papers on it. MacDonald shrugged.

  Upon MacDonald's desk there are books and papers intermingled. The books are Intelligent Life in the Universe and The Voices of the Thirties. The papers are of three kinds: all kinds of letters from many parts of the world, some scientific, some fan mail, some news inquiries, some crackpot notes; inter-Project memorandums, technical and formal; official reports and graphs describing the continuing work of the Project. The last are at the bottom of the neat stack on the left-hand side of the desk, like a reward for plowing through the rest, and the rest are scattered on the right-hand side with brief notes on them about the nature of the response, if any, or routing.

  When Thomas had completed his inspection, MacDonald guided his tour of the building. It was efficient but spartan: painted concrete walls, tiled floors, radiant ceiling fixtures. The offices were standard cubicles, each with its blackboard scribbled with equations or circuit diagrams, individualized only by choice of books, an occasional drape on a window or rug on a floor, and a collection of personal items like clocks, radios, recorders, TVs, pipes, pictures, paintings....