The Listeners Read online

  She moved gracefully from the room and returned in a moment with a baby in her arms. It was two or three months old, Thomas thought, and it had dark hair and bright dark eyes in an olive face, like its mother, and the eyes seemed to see Thomas where he stood by the dinner table.

  “This is Bobby, our son,” Maria said. If she had been alive before, she was doubly alive now, Thomas thought. This was the magnetism that turned painters toward madonnas for their subjects.

  “We were lucky,” MacDonald said. “We waited a long time to have a child, but Bobby came easily and he is normal, not handicapped as are some children of older parents. I think he will grow up to be an ordinary boy burdened with the love of parents old enough to be his grandparents, and I only hope we can understand him.”

  “I hope he can understand you,” Thomas said, and then, “Mrs. MacDonald why don't you make your husband give up this hopeless Project?”

  “I don't make Robby do anything,” Maria said. “The Project is his life, just as he and Bobby are my life. You think there is something bad about it, a treachery, a deception, but you do not know my husband or the men he has gathered to work with him if you honestly think that. They believe in what they are doing.”

  “Then they are fools.”

  “No, the fools are these who do not believe, who cannot believe. It may be that there is no one out there or if there is someone out there he will never speak to us or we to him, but our listening is an act of faith akin to living itself. If we should stop listening, we would begin dying and we would soon be gone, the world and its people, our technical civilization and even the farmers and peasants, because life is faith, life is commitment. Death is giving up.”

  “You have not seen the world the way I have seen it,” Thomas said. “It is dying.”

  “Not while men like these still strive,” Maria said.

  “You give us too much credit,” MacDonald said.

  “No, I do not,” Maria said to Thomas. “My husband is a great man. He listens with his heart. Before you leave this island, you will know that, and you will believe. I have seen others come like you, doubting, eager to destroy, and Robby has taken them in, has given them faith and hope, and they have left, believing.”

  “I do not intend to be taken in,” Thomas said.

  “You know what I meant.”

  “I know that I wish I had someone who believed in me the way you believe in your husband.”

  “We'd better go back,” MacDonald said. “I have something to show you.”

  Thomas said good-bye to Maria MacDonald and thanked her for her hospitality and for her personal concern for him, and he turned and left the hacienda. When he was outside in the darkness he turned once and looked back at the house with the light pouring from it and the woman standing in the doorway of the house with a baby in her arms.

  The difference between day and night is of another order than the difference between light and dark. After the sun has set, the familiar assumes different proportions: distances are elongated and objects shift their places.

  As MacDonald and Thomas made their way past the valley into whose arms had been built the semisteerable radio telescope it was not the same sterile saucer. It was a pit of mystery and shadows gathering strange echoes from the sky within its sheltered bowl, catching the stardust that drifted gently, gently through the night air.

  The steerable dish that had been frozen in deathlike rigor against the sky now was alive and questing. Thomas thought he could see it quivering as it strained toward the silent dark.

  The Little Ear, they called it, this giant piece of precision machinery, the largest steerable radio telescope on Earth, to distinguish it from the Big Ear, the five-mile-in-diameter network of cables in orbit. At night the visitor can sense the magic it works upon the men who think they work their will upon it. For these obsessed men, it is an ear, their ear, cocked responsively toward the silent stars, with supernal power and ingenious filters and bypasses listening to the infinite and hearing only the slow heartbeat of the eternal.

  “We inherited it from the astronomers,” MacDonald was saying, “when they put up the first radio telescopes on the far side of the moon and then the first of the networks in space. The earthbound equipment no longer was worth anything, rather like an old crystal set when vacuum tubes were perfected. Instead of junking these instruments, however, they gave them to us with a small budget for operation.”

  “Over the decades, the total must mount toward the astronomical,” Thomas said, trying to shake away the effects of the evening's hospitality and the night's spells.

  “It adds up,” MacDonald agreed, “and we fight for our lives every year. But there are returns. One might compare the Project to a hothouse for intellects, a giant continuing, unsolvable puzzle against which the most promising minds pit themselves and grow strong. We get the young scientists and engineers and train them and send them on to solve problems which have solutions. The Project has a surprising number of alumni, many of them overachieving.”

  “Is that how you justify the Project, as a kind of graduate school?”

  “Oh, no. That is what our predecessors used to call fall-out or spin-off. Our ultimate goal and our most valuable goal is communication with other beings on other worlds. I offer you reasons that you may use to justify us if you cannot bring yourself to accept us as we are.”

  “Why would I want to justify you?”

  “That you will have to find out for yourself.”

  Then they were inside the building, and it was different, too. The corridors which had seemed brisk and businesslike in the daytime now were charged with energy and purpose. The control room had been touched by the forefinger of God; where death had been there was life: lights came on and turned off, oscilloscopic eyes were alive with green linear motion, the relays of the consoles clicked gently, the computers chuckled to themselves, electricity whispered along wires.

  Adams was seated at the control panel. He had earphones on his head, and his eyes studied the gauges and oscilloscopes spread before him. As they entered, he looked up and waved. MacDonald's eyebrows lifted; Adams shrugged. He pulled the earphones down around his neck. “The usual nothing.”

  “Here,” MacDonald said, removing the earphones and handing them to Thomas. “You listen.”

  Thomas put one of the receivers to his ear.

  First comes babble, like a multitude of voices heard afar or a stream rippling over a bed of rocks, squirting through crevices, and dashing itself over small waterfalls. Then the sounds grow louder, and they are voices talking earnestly but all together so that none can be heard individually but confused and one. The listener strains to hear, and all his effort only makes the voices more eager to be heard, and they talk louder still and even more indistinguishably. Like Dante, the listener “stood on the edge of the descent where the hollow of the gulf out of despair amasses thunder of infinite lament.” And the voices change from eager pleadings to angry shouts, as if, like damned souls, they demand salvation from the flames in which they burn. They turn upon the listener as if to destroy him for temerity in thrusting himself among fallen angels, in all their arrogance and sinful pride. “Above I saw a thousand spirits in air rained down from heaven, who angry as if betrayed cried: ‘Who is this who without death doth dare the kingdom of the dead folk to invade?'” And the listener thinks that he is one of those who shouts to be heard, damned like them in hell, able only to scream at the torment and the frustration of having no one to listen to him and to care what happens to him and to understand. “Even then I heard on all sides wailing sound, but of those making it saw no one nigh, wherefore I stood still, in amazement bound.” And the listener thinks he is among giants “whose rebellious pride Jove's thunderings out of heaven still appall.” All of them, like him, struggle to be heard in their mighty voices and cannot be understood. “Raphael may amech zabi almi, throat brutish mouth incontinently cried; and they were fitted for no sweeter note.” And the listener felt as if conscio
usness were about to leave him.

  And the voices were gone. MacDonald was lifting the earphones from his ears where, Thomas vaguely recalled, he had placed them himself. And he was shaken by the overpowering influence of those sounds, those voices, all kinds of voices struggling to be heard, blending together into an alien chorus, each participant singing a different song....

  Thomas had a moment of self-revelation in which he knew that he was lost, like the voices, and he would have to find his way out or be damned to live forever within his fleshy prison, as alone in his torment as if he were in hell itself.

  “What was that?” he asked, and his voice was shaky.

  “The sound of the infinite,” MacDonald said. “We translate the radio signals into audio frequencies. It doesn't help us pick up anything. If anything is there it would show up on the tapes, the dials would flash, the computer would sound an alarm; it wouldn't come out as voice communication. But there is inspiration in hearing something when you're listening, and we need inspiration.”

  “I call it hypnosis,” Thomas said. “It can help convince the doubtful that there really is something there, that they someday may be able to hear clearly what now they imagine, that there really are aliens out there trying to communicate—and it's only a trick to fool yourselves and perpetrate a fraud upon the world.”

  “Some are more susceptible than others,” MacDonald said. “I'm sorry you took it as a personal attack. We aren't playing tricks. You knew there was no communication there.”

  “Yes,” Thomas said, and it angered him that his voice still was shaky.

  “But this is not what I wanted you to hear. This is background. Let's go to my office. You too, Bob. Leave the watch to the technician. It doesn't matter.”

  They went to the office, the three of them, and settled into chairs. MacDonald's desk was clear now, waiting for the next day's deposit. But the scent of old books remained. Thomas rubbed his hands over the slick wooden arms of his chair and watched MacDonald.

  “It isn't going to work,” Thomas said. “Not all the hypnotic sounds in the world or the pleasant company or delightful meals or beautiful women or touching family scenes can ever compensate for the fact that this Project has been going on for more than fifty years and you haven't yet received a message.”

  “That's what I brought you here to say,” MacDonald said. “We have.”

  “You haven't!” Adams said. “Why didn't I know?”

  “We haven't been sure. We weren't sure until last night. We have had false alarms before, and they have been our most difficult moments. Saunders knew. It was his baby.”

  “The tapes from the Big Ear,” Adams said.

  “Yes. Saunders has been working with them, trying to clean them up. Now we're sure. Tomorrow morning I'm calling together the whole crew. We'll announce it.” He turned to Thomas. “But I want your advice.”

  “You aren't going to try to trick me with something like this, are you, MacDonald?” Thomas asked. “The coincidence is too much.”

  “Coincidences happen,” MacDonald said. “History is full of them. The projects that succeed, the concepts that prevail, somehow are rescued from destruction by the coincidence that arrives just before the moment of final success.”

  “And then to ask for my help,” Thomas continued. “That is the oldest ploy of all.”

  “Don't forget, Mr. Thomas,” MacDonald said, “we are scientists. We have been searching for fifty years and more without success; we have stopped thinking, if we ever did, about what we would do if we succeeded. We need help. You know people and how to move them, what they will accept and reject, how they will react to the unknown. It is all quite logical and natural.”

  “It's too pat. I don't believe it.”

  “Believe him, George,” Adams said. “He never lies.”

  “Everyone lies,” Thomas said.

  “He's right, Bob,” MacDonald said. “But you will believe it, Mr. Thomas, because it's true and because it's verifiable and reproducible, and when it is released, if that is what we do with it, all the scientists will say, ‘Why yes. It's right. That's the way it would be.’ Why would I fabricate something that could be so easily disproved and wreck this Project more thoroughly than anything you might write?”

  “I've heard that someone who wants out of service should complain of pains in the back or voices in the head, neither of which can be disproved,” Thomas said.

  “The physical sciences are not subjective. And anything this big will be checked and checked again by every astronomer everywhere.”

  “Perhaps you hope to con me into killing the whole thing in the name of public morale.”

  “Can I con you, Mr. Thomas?”

  “No,” Thomas said, and remembered the voices and said, “I don't know. Why now? Why at this moment when I came to do this profile?”

  “I don't want to minimize the significance of your assignment,” MacDonald said, “but you are not the first writer to come here to do a story. We have a reporter here every week or so. It would be strange if we did not have a reporter here within a day or two of the time we received our first message. It just happened to be you.”

  “Well,” Thomas said, “what is it? How did you stumble across it?”

  “We began getting tapes from the Big Ear about a year ago—tapes of their routine radio telescopy—and began to analyze them. Saunders ran them through the computer, earphones and all, and one day he thought he heard music and voices.

  “His first thought was ‘delusion,’ but the computer said no. Saunders did what he could to clarify them, reinforce them, subtract the noise and interference. We've developed a lot of tricks in the past fifty years. The music came through recognizably and the voices, in snatches, even better. And the voices were speaking English.

  “His second thought was that the Big Ear had picked up some stray transmissions from Earth or maybe something bounced off one of the other planets. But the net wasn't pointed toward Earth or another planet. It was pointed off into space. There were other tapes going back several years, and when the Big Ear was pointed in a certain direction it got the same signals.”

  “What were they?” Thomas asked.

  “For God's sake, Mac, let's hear it!” Adams said.

  MacDonald pushed one of the buttons on his desk.

  “Understand,” MacDonald said, “that there was much more interference, but for this purpose Saunders cut out almost all the nonintelligible parts. The ratio of noise to sound was about fifty to one, so you're hearing only about one-fiftieth of what we have.”

  The sound was monophonic, although it came from two speakers built into the walls to the right and left. The impact was nothing like that of the headphones in the control room, but the sounds had a fascination akin perhaps, to that of the early days of radio when people sat around a crystal set straining at faint sounds, trying to pick up Schenectady or Pittsburgh or Fort Worth. The sounds were radiant, Thomas thought, with the possibility that they came from another world—or with the improbability that they could have come from anywhere but Earth.

  The sounds are earthly. That is certain. There is music, all based on the chromatic scale, and some of it familiar, the William Tell Overture, for instance, And there are the voices, speaking English most of them but also Russian, French, Italian, German, Spanish. English. Music. From another world? It doesn't make sense. And yet we listen.

  The transmission is bad. Static and other random interruptions at times obscure whatever is being transmitted, and what comes through is broken into fragments, occasionally understandable, mostly cryptic, none complete, each in a different voice. Here, indeed, is Babel, but Babel in which enough is clear that the listeners feel that all should make sense.

  For a few moments the music or the voices come through clearly, fading in and fading back out as the noise level rises. The listeners waver between the impression that the voices are the dominant element occasionally interrupted by noise and the impression that the transmission of
noise is occasionally interrupted by voices.

  Like a Greek chorus, the voices chant their lines and imbue them with a Delphic obscurity. The listeners lean forward as if it will help them hear a little better....

  popcrackle ice regusted cracklepop music: that little chatterbox the one with the pretty poppopcrackle wanna buy a duck popcracklepop masked champion of justice cracklepoppop music poppoppopcrackle ter eleven book one hundred and popcracklepop here they come jack poppop music Crackle yoo hoo is anybody popcrackle is raymond your popcracklepoppop music poppopcrackle music: wave the flag for hudson cracklepop um a bad boy poppoppop lux presents holly cracklecrackle music poppopcrackle rogers in the twenty popcracklepop music: cola hits the spot twelve CRACKLE say goodnight grace poppop music cracklepop could have knocked me over with a fender popcracklecrackle knee this is rochest cracklepop music cracklepoppoppop matinee idol larry poppop music: au revoir pleasant cracklecrackle the little theater off poppopcrackle eye doodit cracklepop music poppoppop who knows what evil popcracklepop voss you dare shar cracklepop you have a friend and adviser in cracklecrackle music popcracklepop another trip down allens poppopcrackle stay tuned for popcrackle music: bar ba sol bar POP you termites flophouse cracklepoppoppop at the chime it will be ex cracklecracklepop people defender of poppop music popcrackle the only thing we have to fear CRACKLE and now vic and poppoppop duffy ain't here cracklepop music popcracklepop information plea cracklecrackle music: boo boo boo boo poppopcrackle can a woman over thirty-five cracklepoppoppop adventures of sher popcracklecrackle music poppop it's a bird CRACKLE only genuine wrigley's popcrackle born edits the news cracklecracklepop hello everybody popcracklepop music poppopcrackle that's my boy CRACKLE check and double pop

  After the voices and the static had stopped, Thomas turned to look at MacDonald. He had more than half an hour of it on his own recorder, but he wasn't sure what he was going to do with it or even what he thought about it. “What does it mean?”

  “It's from Earth,” Adams said.