The Listeners Page 9

  He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

  O be prepared, my soul!

  To read the inconceivable, to scan

  The million forms of God those stars unroll

  When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

  Alice Meynell, 1913...

  But if we allow these Planetary Inhabitants some sort of Reason, must it needs, may some say, be the same with ours? Certainly it must; whether we consider it as applied to Justice and Morality, or exercised in the Principles and Foundations of Science. For Reason with us is that which gives us a true Sense of Justice and Honesty, Praise, Kindness, and Gratitude: ‘tis That that teaches us to distinguish universally between Good and Bad; and renders us capable of Knowledge and Experience in it. And can there be any where any other Sort of Reason than this? or can what we call just and generous, in Jupiter or Mars be thought unjust Villainy? ...

  Christianus Huygens, 1670...

  What is needed is a new specialty, anti-cryptography, or the designing of codes as easy as possible to decipher....

  Philip Morrison, 1963...

  The vast distances between solar systems may be a form of divine quarantine: they prevent the spiritual infection of a fallen species from spreading; they block it from playing the role of the serpent in the Garden of Eden....

  C. S. Lewis, mid-twentieth century...

  As God could create billions of galaxies, so He could create billions of human races each unique in itself. To redeem such races, God could take on any bodily form. There is nothing at all repugnant in the idea of the same Divine Person taking on the nature of many human races. Conceivably, we may learn in heaven that there has been not one incarnation of God's son but many....

  Father Daniel C. Raible, 1960...

  There can have been only one incarnation, one mother of God, one race into which God has poured His image and likeness....

  Joseph A. Breig, 1960...

  Does it not seem strange to say that His power, immensity, beauty and eternity are displayed with lavish generosity through unimaginable reaches of space and time, but that the knowledge and love which alone give meaning to all this splendor are confined to this tiny globe where self-conscious life began to flourish a few millennia ago? ...

  Father L. C. McHugh, 1960...

  solitarian headquarters in houston today announced a series of revival meetings to be held in its giant domed houston temple. the news came after a week of articles, interviews, and comments about the recent surprising discovery at the listening project in arecibo, puerto rico. “the only message that concerns us,” said jeremiah, leading evangelist and first-among-equals in the solitarian religious organization, “is the message from god."...

  William Mitchell—2028

  Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

  by the lonely Traveler's call.

  The audience waited.

  Every seat in the domed stadium was filled, and the aisles were clogged with people sitting and standing. The people were of all kinds: old, middle-aged, young, children, infants; men and women; rich and poor; black, brown, red, yellow, and pink; clothed for work, street, or party. They all waited for the message to begin.

  Missing from the audience were the criers, the coughers, the whisperers, the talkers, the catcallers and whistlers, and the feet stompers, and the minimal noises of more than one hundred thousand persons, the shuffling and shifting, were muffled by the distant thunder of air-conditioning units trying to cope with body heat and exhalations and a Texas summer.

  The bodies were packed together, shoulder to shoulder, knee to back. The sensation was not unpleasant. It was, in fact, a kind of sensual communication, as if the fleshy contact formed a kind of circuit linking each member of the audience to the rest like batteries in series, waiting for something to happen, waiting for some switch to be thrown that would put all the latent power to work digging rivers, moving mountains, destroying evil....

  At least one person did not share the general mood. Mitchell pulled away from the shoulder pressing him on the left and said, “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”

  Thomas looked at MacDonald. MacDonald raised one hand in deprecation and shook his head.

  The three men were sitting in the top row of the stadium. The floor was far below. It was packed with ranks of portable chairs; all of them were filled. The only empty space in the vast arena was the square in the middle. Over the intervening heads stretching from the foreground almost to infinity the distant square looked very small.

  Mitchell pulled away again with a barely controlled twitch of aversion, and persisted, “I've seen these things get out of control.”

  In front of them people turned and frowned; others, farther away, looked around to locate the source of the voices.

  MacDonald shook his head quickly.

  “It's not too late to go back to the booth,” Mitchell said. “With the closed-circuit television and all, we'd have a much better view and a much better idea of what's going on.” He turned to Thomas. “Tell him, George.”

  Thomas raised his shoulders and hands helplessly.

  MacDonald raised his finger to his lips. “It'll be all right, Bill,” he said softly. “It's not enough just to see it and hear it. You've got to feel it.”

  “I feel it,” Mitchell muttered.

  More faces were turning in their direction. Mitchell made an obscene gesture at them with his finger.

  Thomas leaned toward Mitchell's ear. “The difference between you and Mac,” he said softly, “is that you dislike people, and you hate situations you can't control. There's a lot like that in our business.”

  “People!” Mitchell muttered.

  The lights in the stadium went out as if the hand of God had opened and let night fall over them instead of trickling through His fingers. In the darkness the roof seemed about to fall in upon them and the sense of others nearby seemed to grow as if the audience were swelling to fill the entire space.

  Mitchell controlled a rush of panic. He breathed deeply. “Damn him!” he said. “He can't do this!”

  But there were no screams, no scuffling, only a hushed expectancy as if everyone were waiting for a miracle to be performed.

  And a single, powerful shaft of light descended from the top of the dome, split the darkness, created a white circle in the center of the stadium floor.

  In the center of the circle, almost as if it had descended with the light, stood a single figure. In the entire stadium only the figure was visible. Everyone looked at it; they could not help but look at it.

  Only the part of the audience that sat in the portable chairs close to the circle could be sure what the figure was. From where Mitchell sat it seemed almost like the kind of stick drawing of a person a child might make.

  Only an impression came to him—of white and flesh-pink and black, of thin, of tall, of arms held up, outstretched to encompass the audience as the figure turned, if one could imagine an audience in the darkness. There was no other way to reconstruct the audience; it could not be seen or heard.

  Slowly, however, the impression of an audience returned, only this time it was one entity, one living thing, the fleshy circuit that had connected the individual members now grown solid. The audience waited for the message.

  It stared down at the figure. It stood alone in the circle of light embracing the audience. That was all. No microphone, no platform, no table or chairs, only the lonely figure in the midst of a silent audience of tens on tens of thousands.

  “Speak, damn it, speak!” Mitchell muttered, but he knew the man in the circle would wait, draw out the moment into a fine, glittering wire of expectation just about to break.... The old bastard knew what he was doing.

  The audience seemed to hold its breath.

  And then the figure spoke and the voice, magically, filled the domed stadium like the voice of God, coming from nowhere, coming from everywhere. The voice moved the audience, shook it, united it. The voice reinforced the linkages, stepped up
the power.

  The voice spoke and there was wisdom, there was truth.

  “We are alone.”

  The audience moaned an antiphonal response.

  “That is the message,” the voice said. “The message is from God.

  “They say to you that the message is from another world like ours, from people like us. But they do not know. They have heard the voice of God, and they do not understand. They try to read it with their minds; they cannot do it. They must read it with their hearts. They must have faith.

  “The message is from God, and it is carried by the angels who are the messengers of God. How can a message come from someone else?”

  The audience waited for an answer it knew would come.

  “There is no one else but man and God. We are alone with God in the universe. That is the way it is. That is the way it was meant to be.”

  The words rippled the audience like a wind blowing across a valley of wheat.

  “Why should we be afraid?” the voice said. “Why should we refuse to recognize the truth when it is laid before us? God created the universe for his glory. God created man to wonder at the magnificence of the universe and to glorify God.”

  The audience took a deep breath.

  “This is the meaning of the message—of man's words returned to him, of his frivolity shown him as if in a mirror—there are no others; we are alone....”

  The words continued to come, unbidden, uncompelled, like a great natural phenomenon, like revelation. The force built up within the audience like magnets being aligned until each field reinforced the next and the total field exerted by more than one hundred thousand persons thinking and feeling as one entity was great enough to pervade the entire city, to encompass the world, and even, perhaps, to shift the stars themselves....

  They walked down the empty corridor underneath the stadium, their footsteps echoing from concrete walls and floor and ceiling, little puffs of dust and powdered concrete rising as their shoes fell. Dimly lighted by occasional ceiling bulbs, the corridor seemed to go on forever.

  “Well?” Thomas said and cringed from the reverberations. “Speak of ‘man's words returned to him,'” he said.

  “Bastard!” Mitchell said.

  "'On doit se regarder soi-même un fort long temps,'” MacDonald said. "'Avant que de songer à condamner les gens.’”

  “What did he say?” Mitchell asked Thomas.

  “That's a quotation from Moliere's ‘Misanthrope’ about not judging others until you've taken a good long look at yourself,” Thomas said.

  Mitchell shrugged. “I've taken a good, long look at him,” he said.

  “Are you sure this is the way?” MacDonald asked.

  “This is what Judith told me,” Mitchell said.

  The corridor broadened into a room. Giant pistons supported the ceiling like so many hydraulic lifts. In the middle was a metal cage. Inside the cage were control panels with levers and vernier rheostats and large buttons painted red and green. The cage was locked and so were each of the controls.

  The room was deserted; only their footsteps, pausing now, disturbed its silence.

  “The magic,” MacDonald said appreciatively.

  “The son of a bitch,” Mitchell said. “I think it's this way.”

  He led them past the control room and down another corridor to a door painted gray. He knocked lightly. When there was no response he knocked harder.

  The door opened a crack. “Judith?” he said.

  “Bill?” The door opened wider. A girl slipped into the corridor and gave Mitchell her hand. “Bill.”

  She was small and slender with dark hair and large dark eyes that seemed as if they were all pupil. She was not exceptionally pretty Mitchell thought in his more rational moments; perhaps it was the impact on him of the large pupils. He could be objective about the matter and yet feel an attraction to her that made her seem unique in all the world and therefore beautiful.

  He squeezed her hand in place of a kiss. She disliked a public display of affection. Her Puritan upbringing, he had called it when they were first going together as undergraduates. “Is the old bastard in there?” he asked.

  “Bill!” she protested but without heat. “He is my father! And he's inside, resting. He's not well, you know. These sermons take a great deal of strength.”

  “This is Mr. MacDonald,” Mitchell said. “He's in charge of the Project.”

  “Golly!” Judith said. “I'm honored.” She really seemed impressed.

  “And this is Mr. Thomas,” Mitchell continued. “He's my boss.”

  “It's a collaboration,” Thomas said.

  “Judith Jones,” Mitchell said. “My fiancée.”

  “Now, Bill,” she said, “that's not strictly true.”

  They were talking in hushed voices like conspirators, and the reverberations in the corridor made the voices even stranger. Mitchell had an eerie sense of playing a part in a play in which the characters tried to communicate through endless, echoing caverns.

  “Does your father know we're coming to see him?” MacDonald asked.

  Judith shook her head. “He wouldn't still be here, if he knew. He doesn't like to meet people. He doesn't like people who want things, who want him to do things, who want to argue with him. He doesn't have time, he says, but mainly he doesn't like it.”

  “Are we just going to break in on him?” MacDonald asked.

  Judith frowned as if she were bracing herself for something unpleasant. “I'll introduce you. Try not to disturb him—too much.” She turned toward the door and then turned back. “And try not to mind that he seems rude. He really isn't. He protects himself.”

  She opened the door and slid back into the room, leaving the door ajar behind her. “Father,” Mitchell heard her say, “some men are here to see you.”

  Judith opened the door quickly before her father could speak. “This is Mr. MacDonald,” she said. “He's in charge of the Project. And Mr. Thomas. He works with Bill Mitchell. And you know Bill.”

  The man was sitting in an old metal chair beside an old make-up table and mirror, and he seemed as old as they were, old enough to be MacDonald's father instead of Judith's. His hair was pure white, and his face was lined. His eyes, as dark as Judith's, blazed up as the men entered, and then the fire was gone, as if a door had been shut in front of it, and the man looked down.

  “I know Mitchell,” the voice said. It was a tired voice, an old voice, a ghost of the voice that had filled the stadium above them. “I know him as a foul-mouthed blasphemer, an atheist who scoffs at the beliefs of others, a lecher with the morals of a monkey. I know, too, that I told you not to see him again. Nor do I wish to see these others....”

  “Mr. Jones—” MacDonald began.

  “Get out!” the old man said.

  “We are both older men, Mr. Jones,” MacDonald began.

  “Jeremiah,” the old man said.

  “Mr. Jeremiah—”

  “Just Jeremiah, and Jeremiah does not talk to atheists.”

  “I am a scientist—”

  “An atheist.”

  “I want to talk to you about the Message.”

  “I have heard the Message.”

  “Directly?”

  Jeremiah placed one long, translucent hand on each bony knee and leaned toward MacDonald, looking up. “I have heard it from God,” he said harshly. “Have you heard it more directly than that?”

  “Did you hear it before the Project picked it up or afterward?” MacDonald asked.

  Jeremiah sat back and sighed. “Good-bye, Mr. MacDonald. You wish to trap me—”

  “To talk with you—”

  “The Message I speak of is not your message which comes in riddles over waves. The Message—my message—is from God, and it tells me about your message. Is your message from God?”

  “It may be,” MacDonald said.

  Jeremiah was about to turn his back upon them, but he stopped and looked at MacDonald. So did Mitchell.

  �
�I do not know who it is from,” MacDonald said, “so it may be from God.”

  “But you do not think so,” Jeremiah said.

  “I do not think so,” MacDonald said. “But I do not know. I have not had a revelation like yours. My mind is not closed; is yours?”

  “A mind is not closed which is open to truth but not to falsehood,” Jeremiah said. “You have not read your message, then?”

  “No,” MacDonald admitted. “But we will.”

  “When you do,” Jeremiah said, dismissing them, “then come talk to me if you must.”

  “If—when—we do, if I send for you, will you come?”

  Jeremiah's dark eyes looked into MacDonald's. “Before it is announced to the rest of the world?”

  “Yes.”

  “I will come.” A pale hand came up to support a head that drooped to meet it. When the others did not move, Jeremiah looked up. “What do you want of me?” he asked wearily.

  “Your public meetings are stirring people up against the Project,” MacDonald said.

  The banked fires flickered. “I am speaking the truth.”

  “Your truth is creating an atmosphere in which people may shut down the Project, keep us from deciphering the Message, prevent us from listening for more messages.”

  “I speak truth,” Jeremiah said. “We are alone. Nothing can change that. What happens when people know the truth is as God wills.”

  “But if the Message is from God—a message to all of us, not just to you alone—should we not read it? And hear more?”

  Jeremiah's long face grew longer. “The Message may be from Satan.”

  “In your sermon you said it was from God.”

  “That is true,” Jeremiah said. “But Satan can deceive even those who listen to God.” A translucent hand stroked a pale chin in thought. “I could be mistaken,” he said.

  MacDonald took half a step toward Jeremiah, starting a gesture that he stopped in mid-air. “If you change your interpretation now, it would only confuse the faithful. Give us a chance to decipher the Message. I don't ask you to stop telling the truth as you see it, but at least do not incite your followers against the Project.”