The Listeners

by James Gunn

  “What's with the bird?” the listener called out.

  MacDonald shook his head again. “It's a long story. I'll tell you later.” He turned back to Mitchell. “Any other time I'd take you in and show you what we have here. I'd let you listen to the music of the spheres, the sound of the infinite, the voices of the damned who cannot make themselves understood, but right now we don't have time.”

  “Don't do it,” Thomas warned Mitchell, half-seriously. “You'll never be the same. That's what makes them all so strange.”

  “You want to hear the message,” MacDonald said, smiling. “You want to know why we haven't deciphered it in six months of effort. Six months while the Solitarians gather their forces, while Congress grows nervous and thinks about appropriations, while the efforts of clever, dedicated communicators like you and George are being frittered away.”

  Mitchell shook his head.

  “You're right,” MacDonald said. “We haven't deciphered the Message, and we should have done it by now with all the minds and all the computers we've had working on it. Come on. I'll show you.”

  They passed other doors, other rooms where doors were open and men and women worked at desks or benches or panels. The computer room was at the end of the corridor. It was called the computer room, apparently, because instead of walls it had computers, and the floor was so filled with data-input keyboards and printers that there was scarcely room to walk between them.

  At a keyboard in the midst of the computers, like a witch surrounded by familiars, sat a middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair cut short.

  “Hello, Oley,” MacDonald said.

  “You brought me a present,” the other said.

  MacDonald sighed, took the ostrich out from under his arm and put it in a distant corner, and said, “No, Oley, I brought you some guests.” He introduced Mitchell to Olsen, his computer expert. Thomas had met him before.

  Mitchell looked around at all the machines, trying to guess what they all did.

  “Any breakthroughs?” MacDonald asked.

  “We're lucky we haven't lost ground,” Olsen said.

  “Play your best selection for our visitors,” MacDonald said.

  Olsen pressed two keys on his keyboard. A visual display appeared on a window in front of him, broken rows of white numbers on a gray background, but Mitchell looked at it only for a moment. Then he was listening to sounds that came from concealed speakers—a soft hiss, then silence, then a noise, silence, more noise. Sometimes the noise would be loud, sometimes soft, sometimes brief, sometimes extended, sometimes a click, sometimes a buzz or a plop.

  Mitchell looked at Thomas and they both looked at MacDonald. “I can get better messages from a thunder-storm,” Mitchell said.

  “That's part of the problem,” MacDonald said. “Part of what we get between the rebroadcasts of our old radio programs is static. Add the effect of distance, of interruption, of fading. But part of what we pick up, we think, is message. The problem is how to tell one from the other. Tell them what we're trying to do, Oley.”

  “First we try to clean up the transmission,” Olsen said, “to filter out the natural noise electronically. We try to eliminate what is clearly casual and then run a series of variables on what is questionable, hardening up the signals, reinforcing them where necessary....”

  “Show them what we get when we clean it up,” MacDonald said.

  Olsen pressed two more keys. From the speakers came a firm series of sounds and silences; like the buzz of an old-fashioned international code without the dashes, a dot and another dot, a long silence, and then six more dots, a silence, seven more dots, silence, dot, silence, dot....

  They listened, Mitchell and Thomas, trying to make sense out of it, and finally looked up, sheepishly, for there was no way they could decipher the message just by listening to it. “There's something hypnotic about it all the same,” Mitchell said.

  “But it's no better than the other,” Thomas said, “and it's not real. This isn't the way it sounds.”

  Olsen shrugged. “The other isn't either. That's just the way our particular speakers interpret the small packets of energy we have picked up on our radio telescopes in space between rebroadcasts of our own radio programs of ninety years ago. With the help of the computers, we have reinterpreted the message in sounds that seem more familiar or more meaningful.”

  “And you still can't read it,” Thomas said.

  Olsen nodded. “We've still got problems. We're trying to find duplications, repetitions, patterns. We don't know where the message starts or where it ends, whether it's one message given over and over again or a series of messages. Sometimes we think we've found something, it works for a while, and then it falls apart.”

  “Like what?” Mitchell asked. “A statement?”

  “In what language?” Olsen asked.

  “Well, mathematics, maybe. Like one and one equal two, or the Pythagorean theorem or something.”

  MacDonald smiled. “That would be useful for catching our attention, for demonstrating that it was a message sent by intelligent beings, but they've done that, don't you see? With the rebroadcast of our radio programs.”

  “What kind of message could they send that would mean anything?” Mitchell asked.

  “Sound and silence,” Thomas mused. “Sound and silence. It must mean something.”

  “Dots and silence,” Mitchell said. “That's what Mac told Jeremiah. Dots and silence. That's what it sounds like, too. Dots and no dashes. Dots and blanks.”

  MacDonald looked quickly at Mitchell. “Say that again.”

  “Dots and silence. That's what you said. To Jeremiah.”

  “No,” MacDonald said. “What you said after that.”

  “Dots and no dashes,” Mitchell repeated. “Dots and blanks.”

  “Dots and blanks,” MacDonald mused. “What does that remind you of, Olsen? A crossword puzzle? Do you suppose—? The old Drake game?” He turned to Olsen. “Let's try it. For all the combinations of prime numbers.”

  He turned to Mitchell. “Bill, you send a message to Jeremiah over my signature. Three words. “Come. Message deciphered.'”

  “Are you sure you have the answer?” Thomas asked. “Can't you wait and make certain?”

  “You've felt that confidence before,” MacDonald said, “the feeling that you know you have the answer even before you try it out, a kind of instant communication?”

  “Yes,” Thomas said. “Jeremiah knows that feeling too.”

  “And I want Jeremiah to be here when we run it off for the first time,” MacDonald said. “I think that may be very important.”

  Mitchell paused at the door. “You aren't going to try it until then?” he asked incredulously.

  MacDonald shook his head slowly. Maybe Thomas understood MacDonald, but MacDonald was not communicating with him, Mitchell thought.

  The room already was crowded with people when Jeremiah and Judith and MacDonald came through the door. Thomas was there and Olsen and a dozen more of MacDonald's colleagues on the Project.

  Mitchell had been surprised when Jeremiah's message arrived—he had outdone MacDonald's brevity by a word, “I come"—and even more surprised when Judith's message arrived soon afterward giving the arrival time. Mitchell had never known Jeremiah to fly, and he had not thought that he really would come at all.

  The wait for Mac to return from the airport with Jeremiah had been difficult for Mitchell; how much more difficult must it have been for the others who had been working so long on the Project, he thought. But they were remarkably patient. They shifted their positions from time to time as they waited, but no one moved to leave, no one complained, no one urged Olsen to give them a preview. Perhaps, Mitchell thought, they had been selected for patience by the long years of the Project when they had achieved nothing but negatives. Or perhaps they were an exceptional group of men and women shaped into a high-morale group by MacDonald's leadership.

  Mitchell did not find himself repelled by their proxi
mity. He found himself liking them individually—even collectively.

  Jeremiah entered the room like a high priest wrapped in his robes of office, aloof, cold, unapproachable. MacDonald tried to introduce him to the members of his staff, but Jeremiah waved him away. He studied the machines around the wall and on the floor, and ignored the people.

  Judith followed him, nodding at the people they passed as if to make up for her father's absence of humanity. Mitchell's skin turned cold as he saw her again, and he wondered again why it was Judith, why it was this one girl among many, who made him shiver.

  Jeremiah stopped in front of MacDonald as if they were the only two persons in the room, and said, “It takes all this to read one small message? For the faithful it requires only a believing heart.”

  MacDonald smiled. “One small difference between us makes necessary all the apparatus. Our faith requires that all data and results must be duplicable by anyone using the same equipment and techniques. And with all the believing hearts in the world, none, I think, has received identical messages.”

  “It isn't necessary,” Jeremiah said.

  “I understand that your communications are highly personal,” MacDonald said, “but wouldn't it be wonderful if the important messages were received by all the faithful?”

  Jeremiah looked at MacDonald. It seemed to Mitchell that these two men were alone in the room and that they were battling for each other's souls. He reached out and took Judith's hand. She glanced at him and then down at their hands and then away, not speaking. But she didn't take her hand away, and Mitchell thought he felt her fingers tighten.

  “You did not bring me here to scoff at my faith,” Jeremiah said.

  “No,” MacDonald said, “to show you mine. I, too, have had my revelation. I do not compare it with yours. It has no identifiable source. It is an inner conviction that has grown from a small thought to a large certainty that there is other life in the universe, that to prove its existence is the most gloriously human thing man can do, that to communicate with it would make this vast, incomprehensible place in which man lives, this unexplored forest of the night, a friendlier, happier, more wonderful, more exciting, holier place in which to be.”

  Mitchell looked at the other faces in the room. They were staring at MacDonald, and Mitchell had the feeling that they, too, were hearing MacDonald's credo for the first time, that he had lived it but never explained it like this before. Now he was exposing himself before this skeptical stranger as if Jeremiah's belief in him mattered more than anything else. Mitchell's hand tightened on Judith's.

  Jeremiah was frowning. “I did not come all this way to argue theology,” he said harshly.

  “I'm not arguing,” MacDonald said earnestly. “And I'm not dealing in theology, not the way I see it, although it may infringe upon those areas you have declared sacred to your beliefs. I'm trying to explain myself, you see—”

  “Why?” Jeremiah asked.

  “Because it's important to me that you understand,” MacDonald said. “I want you to know that I am a man of good will.”

  “Most dangerous of all are men of good will,” Jeremiah said, looking like a prophet in his old-fashioned black suit, “for they are easily deluded.”

  “I am not easily deluded,” MacDonald said.

  “You want to believe. You are easily deluded. And you will find what you wish to find.”

  “No,” MacDonald said, “it cannot be that way. I will find what anyone can find, whatever his beliefs and desires, what you would find if you should look and listen. What I am trying to tell you is that no matter what my intentions, my hopes, my fears, my message is not like yours. It can be checked. It must read the same to everyone, every time, or it is wrong and will be discarded.”

  Jeremiah's lips curled. “You do not interpret? You read it directly as it comes to you?”

  MacDonald sighed. “We clean it up,” he admitted. “The natural universe makes a great deal of noise, somewhat like the noise of a city, and we must filter that out.”

  Jeremiah smiled.

  “We have techniques,” MacDonald said. “They are verifiable. They work. And then there is the signal itself. It must be identified, analyzed.”

  Jeremiah nodded. “And then?”

  “And then,” MacDonald admitted, “we must interpret the message. It is not a simple matter, you understand, because the message comes from far away, so far it takes forty-five years for the signal to reach us, and it comes from an alien mind.”

  “Then you will never read your message,” Jeremiah said, “or you will read into it whatever you wish, because there is no possible communication between alien minds.”

  “What about man and God?”

  “Man is made in God's image,” Jeremiah said.

  MacDonald made a gesture of frustration and then continued. “What alien minds have in common is intelligence and the natural universe. Everywhere in the universe, matter reacts in the same way, forming the same elements which combine in the sane way to form molecules, the same kinds of energy are available, all obedient to the same physical laws. Everywhere beings must cope with their environment in the same basic ways to satisfy the same basic needs. And if they communicate with each other in a variety of ways, they will find ways which compare with the experience of other intelligent creatures, and if they try to communicate with other worlds they will refer to these common experiences: measurements, mathematics, sensory impressions, images, abstractions....”

  “Faith?” Jeremiah asked.

  Judith's hand tightened on Mitchell's.

  “Perhaps—” MacDonald began.

  “Don't patronize me—” Jeremiah said.

  “But we would not know how to depict faith,” MacDonald went on without pausing.

  Jeremiah gestured impatiently. “I believe you are sincere. You may be deluded, but you are sincere. Show me what you brought me here to see, and let me return to my mission.”

  “All right,” MacDonald said. He seemed like a defeated man. Mitchell felt sorry for him, but he could have told him that any effort to reason with Jeremiah would never succeed. Mitchell had tried it too often in the past. Jeremiah was immovable. How can you reason with a fanatic? “I just want you to understand what we have done,” MacDonald continued, “so that the result is intelligible to you when it comes from the computer. Olsen?”

  “We kept searching for a meaningful pattern in the brief bursts of energy we were receiving,” Olsen began.

  “You tell me!” Jeremiah said to MacDonald.

  MacDonald shrugged. “Dots and silence. That's what I said to you. Dots and silence. And then Bill here said, ‘Dots and blanks.’ and something fell into place. The Capellans might be trying to send us a visual message with the sounds standing for black dots and the silences for white spaces. Frank Drake suggested the possibility more than fifty years ago. He sent a message to fellow scientists made up of a series of ones and zeroes and his colleagues made a picture out of it. Perhaps we should have thought of it. Our excuse, I suppose, is that we didn't have a neat little row of binary symbols; instead we had dots and long silences, and we weren't sure when the message began or when it ended. Now I think we can do it. We have asked the computer to plot the Message onto a grid, using prime numbers for the sides of the grid, breaking up the silence into signals equaling the dots in duration, like a switch turning on and off.”

  “Or like a computer,” Olsen interjected, “with only two numbers, one and zero.”

  “If we plot the signals as dark and light,” MacDonald said, “then we may come up with a recognizable picture.”

  “May?” Jeremiah asked. “You haven't tried it yet?”

  “Not yet,” MacDonald said. “Sometimes a man has a conviction—you might call it a revelation—that he has found the answer. I think we have found it. I wanted you to see it with us, the first time.”

  “You had a revelation?”

  “Perhaps. We'll see.”

  “I don't believe it,” Jeremiah
said, turning away. “You are trying to deceive me. You would not bring me here without having tested your theory first.”

  MacDonald put out a hand as if to touch Jeremiah and stopped. “Wait. You have come this far. At least see what we have to show you.”

  Jeremiah stopped. “Do not tell me any more lies,” he said harshly. “Show me your deception from the machine and let me go.”

  “For God's sake,” said someone from among MacDonald's colleagues, “let's get it over with.” The man's voice was shaky.

  In the corner the stuffed ostrich looked over the proceedings with inscrutable eyes. There were some advantages, Mitchell thought, to not caring if you understood others or they understood you.

  MacDonald sighed and nodded at Olsen. The computer expert punched a sequence of buttons on the keyboard in front of him. The tapes turned on one of the computer consoles and then on another. In front of Olsen a series of ones and zeroes appeared on the screen, faded, and were replaced by others. In front of Jeremiah a continuous roll of paper began to reel silently out of the printer.

  The first few grids were meaningless.

  “Folly,” Jeremiah muttered and again began to turn.

  MacDonald was in his way. “Wait!” he repeated. “The computer is running through the small prime numbers across and down and then the other way, exploring all the possibilities.”

  The computer reached nineteen plotted against all the smaller prime numbers and then the larger ones. Suspense grew at the same rate as disappointment. The computer hummed. Paper reeled from the printer.

  Then it began, something that looked intelligible, printed from the bottom, line by line.

  “There's something,” MacDonald said. “Look!”

  Sourly, skeptically, Jeremiah looked and then with growing disbelief continued to look.

  “That square in the corner,” MacDonald said, “that could be a sun. Those dots on the right. They look like—look like—”

  “Binary numbers,” Olsen said.

  “But not quite.” MacDonald said.