The Listeners

by James Gunn

  Waiting. For what?

  “What are you waiting for?” he asked Johnson during the long evening as they sat studying the sunset, salt spray occasionally drifting over them, sweating bottles of cold beer in their hands, the trimaran under the control and guidance of the computer.

  “Me?” Johnson said lazily. “I'm not waiting for anything. I've got what I want.”

  The sea hissed by under the hulls. “No,” MacDonald insisted, “I mean—it's not that you want anything, but you're waiting for something. The whole world is waiting. Time has slowed down, and we're waiting.”

  “Oh, that!” Johnson said, “It's the Reply. You know. We picked up a Message from creatures out there. They live on a world orbiting one of twin giant red suns. Capella. And we sent an answer, and now we're waiting for a Reply.”

  “It can't be that,” MacDonald said.

  “Sure it is,” Johnson said and took a long drink from his bottle. “We can't get in any hurry, you see, because it's going to take ninety years for our answer to reach Capella and a reply to return. It's been about thirty years. So we got sixty years to wait, right? We can't speed it up. We must build it in, live with it.”

  “What difference will it make to you?” MacDonald asked. “By the time the reply gets here you'll be dead—or too old to care. Like me.”

  “What else have I got to do?” Johnson said. “I wait—and meanwhile I do what I want. No point in hurrying.”

  “But what kind of message can the Reply bring that will be worth the waiting?” MacDonald asked. “What will it mean to you or me or anybody else?”

  Johnson shrugged in the gathering darkness. “Who knows?”

  It was an echo from the past.

  Two nights and a day later, the trimaran coasted into the Arecibo harbor, and by then MacDonald had fallen into the slow, tidal rhythm of the sea itself, the inhalation-exhalation pattern which controls the ocean and the lives of those creatures that live within it and upon it.

  Arecibo was quieter, more serene than MacDonald had remembered, even in his dreams. He rented a bicycle from an agency where the brown man who waited on him moved slowly among the spoked wheels that hung from pegs on the wall and the ceiling beams and spoke to him in the language of MacDonald's mother.

  In a few minutes he was out of the city itself. The highway stretched in front of him like a white ribbon tying together the green hills, and he rode through the peace of the countryside, smelling the mingled odors of luxuriant tropic green and the salt of the nearby sea, and he remembered how slow time had seemed when he was small. It was like coming home. It was coming home, he told himself. And then he corrected himself, “No, I live in New York, where the rhythms are those of concrete and construction and the rumble of subway trains through dark tunnels.” That was where his home was. This was only the place he grew up.

  But the magic grew as he peddled through the eternal summer of this island, and soon he was a boy again, drifting over the hills like a cloud, weightless, drifting....

  A boy's will is the wind's will,

  And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.

  Before MacDonald knew where he was he came to a familiar driveway. Automatically the wheel of the bicycle turned and he was coasting toward a Spanish-style hacienda. He half decided to turn back, but he went on and stopped the bicycle in front of the house and got off and walked up to the heavy, carved, wooden door and pulled the bell. Somewhere inside the house he heard it chime. It was like a signal for another bell to go off inside his chest. Grief rose into his throat, tears welled into his eyes, and he turned away.

  "Si?" someone said.

  He turned back to the door. Half-blinded, he thought for one incoherent moment that his mother was standing there, but he blinked rapidly and it was a stranger, a pleasant, brown-faced woman. “I beg your pardon,” he said. And then he repeated his apology in Spanish, although the woman understood the English well enough. “I was—I was born here, and I've been away.”

  The woman hesitated and then said sympathetically, “Won't you come in and look around?”

  He hesitated and then he nodded and went through the familiar door and into the familiar house and looked around. But it wasn't the same. The furniture was all different. The rooms were smaller. Even the air smelled strange. The house had changed; he had changed. It was not the same place he had stood in last, a ten-year-old boy, twenty years ago.

  His father stopped just inside the door as if he had forgotten that his son was there, waiting for him. He was old, Bobby thought. He was an old man. Bobby had not realized that truth until now. His father was old, and he was smaller than he had seemed before.

  "Bobby,” his father said. And then he didn't seem to know what he was going to say, and he stopped and collected himself. “Bobby, your mother is dead. The doctors tried but they couldn't save her. Her heart stopped beating. She used too much of it, you see. On you, on me, on everybody. She cared about things, about people. And she used it all up...."

  "You did it!” Bobby said. “You killed her."

  He ran toward his father and beat at him with his fists.

  His father tried to hold his hands, not trying to keep himself from being hurt, but Bobby. “No, Bobby,” he said. “No, Bobby. No, Bobby.” But there was no force behind his words. They were like a message that had been turned on and now could not be turned off.

  The trip from the hacienda to the Project had seemed long when MacDonald was a boy, even when his father took him in the old turbine car, but the bicycle mounted the hills and coasted through the valleys and MacDonald hardly noticed that time had passed when he reached the valley lined with metal plates like a rusty saucer in the sunlight and beyond it the smaller metal dish held aloft on a framework arm and beyond it the one-story concrete building on the other side of the white parking lot.

  As he peddled up to the parking lot he noticed that it was virtually empty, and he wondered if the Project had died. And then he realized that it was noon, and only a few people on the Project worked during the day. Night was the shift for astronomers.

  He parked the bicycle in a rack beside the door and opened the glass doors that led into the building. He stepped out of the sunshine and stood blinking in the darker corridor and smelled the old odors of the Project, the oil and ozone of electrical equipment.

  As he stood there waiting for his eyes to adjust someone said, “Mac. Mac!”

  A bony hand grasped his and shook it up and down. “No, it's not Mac. It's Bobby. You've come back.”

  MacDonald's vision returned, and an old man swam into view in front of him. “It's Olsen, Bobby,” the old man said. MacDonald remembered. Olsen, a stocky, sandy-haired computer scientist, a man of great strength and vitality who used to swing him up on his shoulders and take him through the corridors and rooms of the Project, and he felt taller than anybody. MacDonald had difficulty associating his memories with this frail old man standing in front of him shaking his hand as if he had forgotten how to stop.

  “I'm superannuated now,” Olsen said. “No use to anyone, including myself. But they let me hang around here for old time's sake, fool around with the computer a bit, you know. You gave me a start, I'll tell you, when you came in that door. Looked just like your father when I first knew him, and I thought for a minute there it was your father—you know?”

  “Kind of you,” MacDonald said. “But I really don't look much like him.” The poor old man was getting senile, he thought.

  “Nonsense. Spitting image.” Olsen kept on shaking his hand.

  “My father's eyes were blue,” MacDonald said, “and mine are dark; his hair was blond, mine is black—”

  “Got something of your mother in you too, Bobby, but I swear, when you came in that door—Should have been here a week ago, Bobby.”

  MacDonald started walking down the familiar corridor toward the office that had been his father's. The corridor had been diminished by time, and its concrete block walls had been layered with dust and p
aint by the years.

  “All sorts of people were here,” Olsen said, sidling along beside MacDonald to keep pace and still look toward his old friend's son. “Famous people—a president and a couple of ex-presidents, a prime minister or two, and the clutch of ambassadors, and the scientists—Bobby, you would have been proud. I guess every important scientist in the world was here.”

  “My father was a great man,” MacDonald said. He had reached the door of his father's old office.

  A black man with grizzled hair looked up and smiled. “Yours, too?” He stood up from behind the desk and came forward. He was a big man, with big shoulders and thick arms.

  “Hello, John,” MacDonald said. “I thought I might find you sitting here.”

  They shook hands. “You didn't know?” John White asked.

  “I haven't read anything about the Project for twenty years.”

  Olsen had gone around them toward the desk but he turned back in surprise. “Your father didn't write?”

  “I got letters from him,” MacDonald said. “I never read them. I just tossed them into a box, unopened.”

  Olsen shook his head. “Poor Mac. He never hid the fact that he didn't hear from you, but he used to bring in clippings from your school newspaper and the official school reports to show how well you were doing.”

  “He understood, Bobby,” White said. “He didn't blame you.”

  “Him blame me?” MacDonald said. He said it quietly but there was intensity behind the words.

  “Did you keep the letters, Bobby?” Olsen asked.

  “The letters?”

  “The box full of unopened letters,” Olsen said. “They'd be priceless now. In his own hand, unopened.” The word “his” almost seemed to be capitalized. “The people who were here—they all were talking about how important the Project was, how important everything connected with it had become. A holographic record of the Project written to his son.”

  “His only begotten son,” MacDonald said. “I don't know. I've moved around a lot.” But he knew where they were, all tight, in the dusty box on the shelf at the back of the apartment closet. He had moved around a lot, true, but the box had gone with him. Each time he had been about to throw it away, and something had kept him from doing it, and he had frowned and put it back. Perhaps, in spite of everything, he had shared a bit of Olsen's feeling that he had history in his hands, that he would be throwing away not just letters from his father but documents from a Great Man.

  “Is the Project dead now?” MacDonald asked.

  “Your father is dead,” White said. “The Project goes on. It is difficult to imagine it going on without your father, but that it does is a tribute to him. It must. This is his memorial, and we cannot let it die.”

  “Mac is dead, Bobby,” Olsen said. “He's gone, and it's all gone. The spirit has gone out of this place.”

  The familiar wave of grief surged up in MacDonald's chest, grief, he told himself, not for his father, but for the father he never had.

  “John thinks he can keep it going,” Olsen said, “but he can't. Mac kept the Project together for fifty years. For the first fifteen years after he became director he kept it together without results. Nothing. We just kept listening for some kind of communication from the stars, and Mac kept us going, trying new things when we got discouraged, working at different ways of doing the old things, cheering us up, him and Maria.”

  MacDonald looked around the room where his father had spent his days and many of his nights, the concrete block walls painted a neutral shade of green, an unostentatious wooden desk, shelves built into the wall behind the desk and on the shelves books with leather bindings, dark green, dark red, and brown, cracking a little now, and on either side of the room speakers built into the walls, and MacDonald tried to imagine his father sitting in this room day after day, part of him seeping into the walls and into the desk and into the books he loved, and he could not see him; he could not remember him here. He was gone.

  “And then, after the Message, it was a different problem,” Olsen said. “We had a result. Oh, that was a great time. We were crazy with enthusiasm. Our fifty years had paid off, like so many coins invested in a slot machine; we hit the jackpot, and we kept counting and gloating and congratulating ourselves. And Mac had to keep us going through that, too, settle us back for the long pull, get us back into harness. And there were problems he handled we didn't even know about at the time; like the Solitarians who felt we were going to destroy their religion and the politicians like John's father, here, who thought we should not answer the Message. And after that, after we had answered, what was there to do? We had to wait for a reply. Ninety years we had to wait. We had to keep going so that when the Reply came we would be here to receive it. Mac put us back to work searching for new signals, new messages. But who will keep us going now? How can we keep going without a MacDonald?

  “What gives us nightmares,” Olsen said, his voice dropping into a lower range, “is not the fear of dying but the fear that the Reply will come and no one will be here. We'll have stopped listening. The Project will have closed down.” Olsen's voice faded away, and he looked down at his old hands.

  MacDonald looked at John. It was John whose leadership was being questioned, whose ability was being challenged.

  White didn't seem disturbed by the comparison. He moved back and sat down beside Olsen on the edge of the desk. It creaked under him. “What Oley has said is not new. We talk about these things now, how we keep going. We didn't talk about that sort of thing when your father was alive. We didn't need to. As long as Mac kept going the Project would. But now he's dead.”

  “'The whole world is the sepulcher of famous men,'” MacDonald said.

  “Since I've been sitting in that chair,” White said, motioning with his head, “five years now, I've learned a lot of things—like what Mac kept bottled up inside him, didn't let out because it would hurt the Project. Questions—will the Project continue, how will the Project continue?—those were questions nobody asked because Mac kept them to himself. Now everybody's asking himself and everybody else, too. I'm not Mac. I can't operate the way Mac did; but I've got to do the same job with what I've got and what I can get. That's why I sent for you.”

  He stood up and put one big hand on MacDonald's shoulder and looked into his face, as if he could read there the answer to a question he had not yet asked. “Welcome home, Bobby,” he said.

  They landed at the airport, the olive-skinned, dark-eyed woman and the little boy, and they walked from the airplane to the waiting room because it was only a small airport, the woman walking eagerly, pulling the boy along, and the boy hanging back, tugging at her hand.

  And then the big man was there, throwing his arms around the woman, hugging her, kissing her, telling her how glad he was that she was back, how much he had missed her. And finally he knelt to the boy and tried to put his arms around him, too, and the boy stepped back, shaking his head.

  The man held out his arms. “Welcome home, Bobby."

  "I didn't want to come home,” the boy said. “I wanted us to keep on going, madre and me, just the two of us forever."

  MacDonald shook his head. “This isn't my home. I left it twenty years ago when I was only ten years old, and I haven't been back since. I only came now because you sent a telegram.”

  White let his hand drop to his side. “I was afraid you wouldn't come just because of your father's death.”

  MacDonald looked at the desk and the empty chair behind it, its arms worn down by decades of hands and elbows. “Why should he mean more to me dead than alive?”

  “Why did you hate him, Bobby?” Olsen asked.

  MacDonald shook his head as if he could shake away the old memories. “I didn't hate him. Oh, I had all sorts of Freudian reasons for hating him—I've had enough analysis to recognize those ghosts and live with them—but it was more than that: I needed a father and he was too busy. I never had a father, and I had a mother who worshiped him, and there was not
room between them for a little boy.”

  “He loved you, Bobby,” Olsen said. There were tears in the old man's eyes.

  MacDonald wished they would stop calling him “Bobby,” but he knew he would never be able to tell them so. “He loved my mother, too. But there was no room for her, either, because he loved what he was doing most of all. That was what he lived for, and she knew it and he knew it; we all knew it. Oh, he was a great man, all right, and great men dedicate themselves to their callings, sacrificing everything else. But what of those who get sacrificed? And he was a good man, too. He knew what it was doing to us, to my mother and to me, and he hated it and he tried to make it up to us, but there was nothing left.”

  “He was a genius,” White said.

  “'Genius does what it must,'” MacDonald quoted dryly, “'and Talent does what it can.'”

  “You sound just like your father,” Olsen said. “Always quoting things.”

  “Why did you ask me to come back?” MacDonald said to White.

  “There are things of your father's,” White said. “Books.” He swept his hand at the shelves behind the desk. “Those were all his. They belong to you now, if you want them. Other things. Papers, letters, files....”

  “I don't want them,” MacDonald said. “They belong to the Project. Not to me. He had nothing for me.”

  “All of it?” White asked.

  “Everything. But that wasn't why you asked me to return, either.”

  “I thought you might make your peace with your father,” White said. “I did, you know. With my father. Twenty years ago. He finally realized that I wasn't going to be what he wanted, that I couldn't dream his dream, and I finally realized that he loved me anyway. And I told him, and we cried together.”

  MacDonald looked at the chair again and blinked. “My father's dead.”

  “But you aren't,” White said. “At least you can make peace with his memory.”