The Listeners Page 6

  MacDonald introduced Thomas to the professional staff. Olsen, the computer expert, who seemed young for his peppered hair; Sonnenborn, the intense mathematician and historian of intersteller communication, verbal, curious, incisive; Saunders, the slow-talking, pipe-smoking philosopher, the lean, sandy designer of proposals and attacks; Adams, the red-faced, round-faced, sweating electronics engineer, whose responses tolled his inner doubts....

  Thomas picked Adams to guide him through the technical aspects of the Project. The choice was natural; MacDonald could have raised no objections if he had wanted to. He smiled—it was, perhaps, a knowing smile—and said, “You will come home to dinner with me. I want you to meet Maria, and Maria will want to meet you. Bob, tell him anything he wants to know.”

  With MacDonald's instruction or without, Thomas thought, Adams would be the source of the inside information he needed, not just about techniques and goals but about people, and that was the most important of all. In every group there is an Adams.

  The offices were places of quiet, sustained effort. In spite of its continuous history of failure, the Project maintained its morale. The personnel worked as if it were the first year, not the fifty-first.

  The technical areas were different; they were lifeless. The computers and the hulking electronic consoles crouched silently, their lights extinguished, their relays stilled. Some of them had their insides spread out in front of them while men in white suits searched through them like diviners seeking oracles in the entrails of chickens. The green windows of their eyes were blank. The hum of their electronic pulse was gone. They were dead, and the sterile white walls of the rooms in which they were laid out was the operating pit in which they had died from lack of meaning.

  To Adams it was different. “Here in the daytime it looks normal enough. Everything quiet. Everything in its proper shape. But at night, when the listening begins—Do you believe in ghosts, Mr. Thomas?”

  “Every civilization has its ghosts. Usually they are the gods of the last one.”

  “The ghosts of this civilization are in its machines,” Adams said. “Year after year the machines will do your bidding, mechanically, without complaint, and then suddenly they will become possessed and do things for which they were never created, give answers for which they were never questioned, ask questions for which there are no answers. At night these machines come alive. They nod, they wink, they whisper to each other, they chuckle.”

  Thomas ran his hand along the front of a console. It was slick and dead. “And they tell you nothing.”

  Adams looked at Thomas. “They tell us a great deal. It just isn't what we asked them for. We don't know the right questions, maybe. Or we don't know how to ask them properly. The machines know. I'm sure of it. They keep telling us, over and over. We just don't understand them. Maybe we don't want to understand them.”

  Thomas turned toward Adams. “Why not?”

  “Maybe they're trying to tell us that there's nobody out there. Think of that! That there's nobody there, nobody but us in the whole wide universe. All of it is just for us, a vast show we can look at but never touch, spread out to impress the only creature capable of understanding it—and capable of feeling lonely.”

  “Then this whole Project would be folly, wouldn't it?”

  Adams shook his head. “Call it man's attempt to stay sane. Because we can't ever know for sure; we can't eliminate all possibilities. So we keep searching because it is too terrifying to give up and admit we are alone.”

  “Wouldn't it be more terrifying to learn that we are not alone?”

  “Do you think so?” Adams asked politely. “Everyone has his own great fear. Mine is that there is no one there, even though my mind tells me that this is what is. I have talked to others who dreaded to hear something, and I couldn't understand them, even though I could understand how they might have such feelings. I feel stirred by other terrors.”

  “Tell me how it works,” Thomas said politely. There would be time later to exploit Adams’ fears.

  The listening continues as it began more than fifty years ago, largely by radio waves picked up by radio telescopes; by giant arrays of antennae built into valleys, by smaller steerable dishes, by spiderwebs of metal cast into space. The listening is mostly at the twenty-one-centimeter frequency of neutral hydrogen. Other wavelengths are sampled, but the listeners keep returning to nature's standard calibrating frequency or its whole multiples. A lifetime of engineering ingenuity has gone into multiplying the sensitivity of the receivers and canceling out the natural noise of the universe and of earth. And after it all is canceled, what is left—now as then—is nothing. Zero. And still they listen. And still they strain their ears to hear.

  “Why don't you quit?” Thomas asked.

  “It's been only fifty years or so. That's only a second of galactic time.”

  “If somebody or something were signaling, those signals surely would have been heard by now. That must be clear.”

  “Perhaps there's nobody there,” Adams mused and then his eyes became aware of Thomas again. “Or maybe everybody's listening.”

  Thomas raised his eyebrows.

  “It's much cheaper to listen, you know. Much cheaper. Everybody might be sitting there glued to their receivers, and nobody's sending. Only we are sending.”

  “We're sending?” Thomas asked quickly. “Who authorized that?”

  “This place is pretty uncomfortable if you're not working,” Adams said. “Let's get a cup of coffee, and I'll tell you about it.”

  The lunchroom was a converted office filled by two small tables, each with four chairs, and lined on three sides with coin-operated machines that hummed very softly as they went about their business of keeping food and drink hot or cold.

  Adams sipped his coffee and went over the entire history of the Project, beginning with Project Ozma and the inspired speculations of Cocconi, Morrison, and Drake, and the subsequent contributions of Bracewell, Townes, and Schwartz, Oliver, Golay, Dyson, Von Hoerner, Shklovsky, Sagan, Struve, Atchley, Calvin, Huang, and Lilly whose efforts to communicate with the dolphin gave to the infant group the name “order of the dolphin.”

  From the first it was clear that there ought to be other intelligent creatures in the universe. The process of planet formation, once thought to be the chance (and unlikely) near-collision of two stars, was recognized as a natural occurrence when stars were forming out of gaseous clouds and rock and metal fragments. One or two per cent of the stars in our galaxy probably had planets which could support life. Since there were 150 billion stars in our galaxy, at least a billion, perhaps two or three, had habitable planets.

  “One billion solar systems where life can develop!” Adams said. “And it seems reasonable to assume that where life can develop it will develop.”

  “Life, yes, but man is unique,” Thomas said.

  “Are you a Solitarian?” Adams asked.

  “No, but that is not to say that I do not consider some of their beliefs well founded.”

  “Perhaps man is unique,” Adams said, “although there are many galaxies. But is intelligence unique? It has high survival value. Once it has occurred, even by accident, it is likely to prevail.”

  “But technology is another thing,” Thomas said, sipping his hot black coffee.

  “Quite another thing,” Adams agreed. “It happened to us only very recently, you know, about midway during the main sequence time of our sun during which life can be expected to exist. Hominids have lived on Earth only for one-tenth of one per cent of Earth's existence, civilization has existed for about one-millionth of Earth's lifespan, and technical civilization, only one-billionth. Considering the late emergence of all three and the fact that there must be older planets, if there is intelligent life on other worlds some of it must be farther advanced than we, and some, much farther advanced. But—”

  “But—”

  “But why don't we hear from them?” Adams cried out.

  “Have you tried everything?”r />
  “Not only the radio frequencies—we've explored gamma rays, lasers, neutrinos, even long-chain molecules in carbonaceous meteorites and absorption lines in the spectrum of stars. The only thing we haven't tried is ‘Q’ waves.”

  “What are those?”

  Adams was absently sketching diagrams on the gray surface of the table. Thomas noticed that the table was covered with fainter, washed-away marks where others had sketched. “What Morrison many years ago called the method we haven't discovered yet but are going to discover ten years from now,” Adams said. “Only we haven't discovered it. The only other thing we haven't tried is sending messages. That's more expensive. We could never find the funds—not now, not without some hope of success. Even then we would have to decide whether we wish to broadcast to the universe or even to one solar system the presence here of intelligent, civilized life.”

  “But we are sending, you said.”

  “We've been sending since the earliest days of radio,” Adams said. “Low power, most of it, unbeamed, loaded with static and other interfering transmissions, but intelligent life has made Earth the second most powerful radio source in the solar system, and in a few more decades we may equal the sun itself. If there's anybody out there to notice, that should make Earth visible.”

  “But you haven't heard anything?”

  “What would we hear on this little apparatus?" Adams asked, nodding toward the valley beyond the walls. “What we need is some time on the Big Ear upstairs, the five-mile-in-diameter net, or the new net being built, but the astronomers won't give us the time of day.”

  “Why don't you quit?”

  “He won't let us!”

  “He?”

  “Mac. No, that's not right. Yes, it is. He keeps us together, he and Maria. There was a time, not so long ago, when it looked as if it would all come apart....”

  Thomas took another sip of coffee. It was cool enough to drink now, and he swallowed it all.

  The drive to MacDonald's house in the Puerto Rican hills was pleasant as the day closed. The shadows draped themselves across the green slopes like the legs of purple giants. The evening breeze blew the sharp scent of salt in from the ocean. The elderly steam turbine under the hood hummed along with only an occasional vibration to betray its age.

  This place must be the cleanest, quietest spot in the whole dirty, noisy world, Thomas thought, like paradise, innocent, before the knowledge of good and evil. Like a carrier I bring the dirt and noise with me. He felt a moment of irritation that this place should exist in a world of misery and boredom and a flash of satisfaction that he had the power to destroy it.

  “Did you learn all you wanted from Adams?”

  “What?” Thomas said. “Oh, yes. That and more.”

  “I thought you would. He's a good man, Bob, a man you can count on when you need a friend, a man you can call at home in the middle of the night to say that a tire has gone flat in a rainstorm, and you know he'll come. He talks a lot and complains a lot. Don't let that keep you from seeing the person underneath.”

  “What of the things he told me am I not to believe?” Thomas asked.

  “Believe it all,” MacDonald said. “Bob wouldn't tell you anything but the truth. But there is something misleading in too much truth, even more, perhaps, than too little.”

  “Like your wife's attempted suicide?”

  “Like that.”

  “And the resignation you tore up?”

  “That, too.”

  Thomas could not tell whether there was sorrow in MacDonald's voice or fear of exposure or merely recognition of the irrepressible evils of the world.

  As we drive toward his home in the hills near Arecibo, hills as silent as the voices for which he listens in the concrete building we had left, he does not deny that his wife attempted suicide a year ago or that he wrote a letter of resignation and later tore it up.

  The house was a Spanish-style hacienda looking friendly and warm in the gathering darkness, beams of yellow light pouring from door and window. Stepping into the house, Thomas felt it even more, the lived-in, loved-in feeling that he had known only once or twice before in the homes of friends. To those homes he had returned more than to others, to warm himself in their relationship, until he realized what was happening to him. He would stop writing. He would look for someone to ease the ache he had inside, and he would end with a casual affair which would turn to revulsion. He would flee back to his solitary life, back to his writing, to work out on his computer keys the agony that pulsed through his veins. And the writing would be twisted and angry like the infernal regions he described. Why hadn't he written his purgatory? He knew why: under his fingers it kept turning back into hell.

  Maria MacDonald was a mature, olive-skinned woman whose beauty went deep. She was dressed in a simple peasant blouse and skirt, and she held his hand in hers and bade him welcome to her home. He felt himself warming to her gentle smile and Latin American courtesy, and fought it. He wanted to kiss her hand. He wanted to turn it over and see the scar upon her wrist. He wanted to take her in his arms and protect her against the terrors of the night.

  He did none of these. He said, “I'm here, you know, to do a piece about the Project, and I'm afraid it will not be favorable.”

  She turned her head a little to one side to study him. “You are not an unfriendly man, I think. You are a disappointed man, perhaps. Perhaps bitter. But you are honest. You wonder how I know these things. I have a sense about people, Mr. Thomas. Robby brings them home to me before he hires them, and I tell him about them and not once have I been wrong. Have I, Robby?”

  MacDonald smiled. “Only once.”

  “That is a joke,” Maria said. “He means I was wrong about him, but that is another story that I will tell you some time if I come to know you better, as I hope. I have this sense, Mr. Thomas, and more—I have read your translation and I have read your novel, too, which Robby tells me you have not continued. You must, Mr. Thomas. It is not good to live in the inferno. One must know it, yes, so that one can comprehend the purging of the sins that one must go through to achieve paradise.”

  “It was easy to write about hell,” Thomas said, “but I found it impossible to imagine anything else.”

  “You have not yet burned away your deadly sins,” Maria said. “You have not yet found anything to believe in, anything to love. Some people never find that, and it is very sad. I feel so sad for them. Do not be one of them. But I am too personal—”

  “No, no—”

  “You are here to enjoy our hospitality, not to endure my missionary zeal for love and marriage. But I cannot help it, you see.” And she put one arm through her hus-band's and offered the other to Thomas as they went from the entryway down the hall tiled with terra cotta to the living room. A bright Mexican rug covered part of the polished oak floor. There, in big leather chairs, they had salty margaritas and casual conversation about New York and San Francisco and friends they might have in common, the literary life, and the political scene, and where Era fitted into both, and how Thomas had started writing for the magazine.

  Then Maria ushered them into dinner. They sat down to what she called a “traditional Mexican comida." The first course was soup swarming with dumpling-like tortilla balls, vegetables, noodles, and pieces of chicken. The second course was sopa seca, a highly seasoned dish of rice, noodles, and cut-up tortillas in an elaborate sauce; then a fish course was followed by a salad and a main course of cabrito, roasted young goat, and several vegetables, and this was followed by refried beans smothered with grated cheese. With it all came feathery hot tortillas in napkin-lined baskets. The dinner ended, none too soon for Thomas, with a caramelized milk pudding Maria called “natillas piuranas,” with strong black coffee, and with fresh fruit.

  Protesting feebly, as the meal progressed, that he could eat no more, Thomas surrendered to Maria's insistence and ate something of each dish as it appeared, until MacDonald laughed and said, “You have fed him too much, Maria. He will be good
for nothing for the rest of the evening, and we still have work to do. The Latin Americans, Mr. Thomas, have this kind of meal only upon special occasions, and then in the middle of the day after which they retire for a well-deserved siesta.”

  MacDonald filled their glasses with a brandy he called pisco.” “May I propose a toast,” he said. “To beauty and good food!”

  “To good listening!” said Maria.

  “To truth!” Thomas said, to prove that he had not been charmed nor fed into complete subjugation, but his eyes were on the white line that cut across Maria's olive wrist.

  “You have noticed my scar,” Maria said. “That is a reminder of my folly that I will bear with me always.”

  “Not your folly,” MacDonald said, “my deafness.”

  “It was a little more than a year ago,” Maria said, “and I was feeling a little crazy. I could see that it was not going well with the Project and Robby was wearing down between the demands of keeping the Project going and his worry over me. It was madness, I know now, but I thought I could remove one of Robby's concerns by removing myself. I tried suicide with a razor blade, and I almost died. But I lived, and I found my sanity again, and Robby and I found each other again.”

  “We were never lost,” MacDonald said. “We had just, temporarily, out of human inattention, stopped listening to each other.”

  “But you knew all this, didn't you, Mr. Thomas?” Maria said. “Are you married?”

  “I was once,” Thomas said.

  “And it was wrong.” Maria said. “That is sad. You must be married. You must have someone to love, someone to love you. Then you can write your Purgatory, your Paradise."

  An infant cried somewhere in the house. Maria looked up happily. “And Robby and I found something else.”