The Listeners

by James Gunn

  MacDonald shrugged. “That wasn't why you asked me here either. What am I to you that you should care?”

  White spread his hands helplessly. “We do care. That's what's important. We all loved Mac, you see. And so we love Mac's son, and we want his son to love Mac, too.”

  “All for Mac,” MacDonald said. “Mac's son wants to be loved for himself.”

  “But mainly,” White said, “I want to offer you a job with the Project.”

  “What job?”

  White shrugged. “Any job. This one, if you want it.” He motioned toward the chair behind the desk. “I'd be pleased to see you sitting there.”

  “And what of you?”

  “I'd go back to what I was doing before Mac got me appointed director in his place, working with the computer. Even though Mac was nearly eighty and officially retired, I never felt like the director while he was around. It wasn't until a few days ago that I suddenly realized I had all the responsibility, that I was the director.”

  “It wasn't that Mac interfered,” Olsen said. “Actually, he wasn't the same after your mother died and you went away to school. He changed. He was detached, somehow, and he kept going only because he was part of this machine for listening and it moved and he moved, and they moved together. After John was appointed, Mac seemed relieved; he never interfered, hardly even spoke unless someone asked him for help.”

  White smiled. “That's all true. But he was around, and no one ever had any doubt who was the director. Mac was the Project, and the Project was Mac. And now it has to be the Project without Mac.”

  “You want me because of my name,” MacDonald said.

  “Partly,” White admitted. “You see I've never really had the feeling that I've been director, only that I was sitting in that chair until Mac could come back to fill it again—or at least somebody named MacDonald.”

  MacDonald looked around the office again as if he were trying to imagine himself in it. “If you're trying to persuade me,” he said, “you aren't being very persuasive.”

  “In this business of anticryptography,” White said, “you forget how to say one thing and mean another. And then there's a voice in this place that keeps asking, ‘How would Mac have handled it?’ And we know he would have been open and honest. Of course I checked up on what you've done since you left here. You're a linguist. You majored in Chinese and Japanese, and traveled extensively while you were in school.”

  “I had to do something with my vacations,” MacDonald said.

  “Your father studied languages,” Olsen said.

  “Yes?” MacDonald said. “But I did it because I wanted to.”

  “And then you went into computer programming,” White said.

  “Your father went into electrical engineering,” Olsen said.

  “I just drifted into it,” MacDonald said, “through my work on computer translation.”

  “And made some original contributions to the art, too,” White said. “Don't you see, Bobby, it's as if all these years you've been preparing yourself for us, getting ready to sit in that chair.”

  “Maybe you and Mac didn't understand each other,” Olsen said, “but you were a lot alike. You've been walking in his footsteps, Bobby, and you didn't even know it.”

  MacDonald shook his head. “All the more reason for me to stop, now that I'm aware of it. I don't want to be like my father.” No one can be like anyone else, he thought.

  “Twenty years is a long time to carry a hurt,” White said.

  MacDonald sighed and shifted his feet. He had that bored, impatient feeling he got when he knew, and knew that others knew, that the conversation was over but nobody knew how to stop it. “We carry the load that's placed on us.”

  “We need you, Bobby,” White said. “I need you.”

  Finally it got down to the personal appeal. “The Project needs me, but not for myself. It needs my father's name, my father's presence. And if I accepted I would be forever buried here in my father's image. The Project would absorb me, the way it absorbed and used up my father, leaving nothing for any other purpose.”

  White's face was sympathetic. He shook his head. “I know what you're feeling, Bobby. But you've got it all wrong. The Project didn't absorb your father; your father absorbed the Project. The Project was Mac; he made it go. Those radio telescopes were not inanimate—they were his ears listening; that computer was not a machine—it was his brain thinking, remembering, analyzing. And the rest of us—we were just different aspects of Mac with different talents, different ideas, and more time for him to expend....”

  “You make it seem worse and worse,” MacDonald said. “Don't you understand that's what I've been trying to get away from all my life, the omnipresence, yes, the benevolence of my father... ?”

  “We've been trying to be honest with you,” White said.

  “There's some things,” Olsen said, easing himself off the desk, “that are bigger than human feelings, more important, like a religion maybe or something a person does for the whole human race, and if you can find something like that and make yourself a part of it and make it happen, why then you've got real satisfaction. Nothing else matters.”

  MacDonald looked around at the walls as if they imprisoned him. “You're asking me to spend my life here, the next forty years—oh, not here, I'm not qualified to be director, but a part of this place—working with these machines and finding nothing, nothing, and dying probably before the Reply comes from Capella. What kind of life is that? What kind of goal? What kind of satisfaction?”

  White looked at Olsen as if to ask what kind of person this was who couldn't understand their dedication, the essence of their being, and how could they get through to him? “Why don't you give Bobby a tour of the place before he leaves?”

  To a little boy the Project was a place of mystery and magic. In the daytime it was interesting, but at night it was splendid. Bobby loved to go there when he was allowed to stay up late on special occasions. First he saw the metal valley gleaming in the moonlight, a place where the elves slid to polish the surface to a mirror brightness so that it would catch the stardust the elves bottled to work their spells. And then the Ear, a giant cuplike Ear held up on an arm like an arm of Earth itself to listen to all the whispered secrets of the universe, and they were the secrets a boy had to know if he was going to make his dreams come true. Someday, he told himself, he would find the place where the secrets were stored and he would learn them all and then he could do anything he wanted to.

  And one day his father took him to the listening room where you could hear the secrets being whispered, and Bobby was excited to hear them on the earphones, hissing, mumbling, just too low for a boy to understand, and then, when his father turned them up louder, he was disappointed to discover that they were in a secret language that he could not understand.

  "No one can understand it, Bobby,” his father said.

  "I can,” Bobby insisted. He couldn't, of course, but he promised himself that someday he would learn all the languages of Earth and under Earth and above Earth, too, and then he would be able to understand the secrets and know everything there was to know, and when his father wanted to know something he could ask Bobby instead of going off to the Project....

  Why does a boy have to grow up? MacDonald asked himself. Life for a boy was so simple and uncomplicated and full of undestroyed hopes. Only it wasn't, he corrected; it was filled with fears and unfulfilled desires and ambitions bigger than the child could ever achieve.

  Walking through these old corridors and rooms was like walking through a wonderland deserted by the little people, left to gather dust and tarnish, exposed to the light of the sun to fade and rust.

  The building was old: there was no doubt about that—sixty, seventy, maybe eighty years old. And though it had been built to last—like the Project—for centuries, the years had weathered it. Successive layers of paint could not hold the concrete together, and the outsides of the blocks had powdered and come off with the paint, and in
some places chunks of concrete had fallen out and been patched. And where generations of clerks and astronomers had walked along the corridors, swinging their arms, the occasional brush of knuckles had worn grooves in the walls. The tiled floors did not show the wear; but then they were more easily replaced.

  Olsen introduced him to all the secretaries and maintenance men and occasional astronomers around at this time of day. “This is Bobby MacDonald,” Olsen would say, and invariably he would add, “Mac's son, you know.”

  There would be greetings and shakings of hands and happy sounds and the expectation or hope that MacDonald had come home ard would be staying now and the embarrassment when he said “no,” so that he finally stopped saying it and merely smiled.

  The old listening room had grown a bit shabby as if while nobody had been watching. The glass that covered the dials had been scratched so that in some places they were difficult to read, and dust had collected in places around the rims. The panels themselves had grown worn until in some places the metal gleamed through the dark plastic with which it had originally been covered. Even the earphones had been worn smooth by generations of ears.

  Nobody was in the room, although MacDonald had the feeling that someone had just left, and he stopped just inside the door and looked at the place that magic had deserted. It was dead, the spirit that transfigured it fled to some more congenial clime.

  “Do you want to hear the Voices, Bobby?” Olsen asked. “Do you want to hear the Message?”

  “No,” MacDonald said. “I've heard them often enough.” And he didn't want to hear them again, not here, not now.

  Olsen scurried to the control panel. “We're still listening, you know,” he said, as if he had picked up fringes of MacDonald's thoughts. “Still searching for signs in the skies.” He chuckled as if it were an old joke. He flipped a worn switch and whisperings filled the room.

  And it was as if MacDonald had returned again to the boy he had been. In spite of himself, in spite of his skepticism, in spite of the sunlight and its pitiless exposure of lies and deceits, he was back again listening to the uninterpretable communications from other worlds, the agonies of distant alien creatures trying to make themselves heard and understood. He thought, “God! If I could only help. If I could only answer that cry. If I could only close that broken circuit, tear down that impassable wall of distance, bring intelligence together with intelligence.” And he held out his hand as if to take his father's hand and said, “Turn it off!”

  It wasn't that the voices were so powerful, he thought, but that he was so weak. He was a spoiled creation, a man ruined in his childhood.

  “Have you picked up anything else?” he asked when the whispers were silenced and he had regained control of his imagination.

  Olsen shook his head. “It's like before,” he said, not discouraged but perhaps a little weary. “We searched for fifty years, you know, before we picked up the message from Capella, and we've only been searching thirty years since then. We picked up the Message the year you were born, Bobby.”

  “You had better luck with it than with me,” MacDonald said. The baby and the Message. There was no question which arrival had meant more to his father, which his father had understood. “Maybe that's all there is,” he said.

  Olsen shook his head again with a stubbornness that seemed confirmed by occupation and habit. “That's what they used to say, the skeptics, the doubters. Used to say, ‘Maybe there's nobody there.’ But we kept listening. We had faith. And we proved they were wrong. We picked up the Message, and we deciphered, and we answered it. There's others out there, and we'll pick them up, too. Maybe tonight. Nobody can imagine how vast it is out there, how many stars, how much sky we have to search, how many different ways of signaling we have to explore. If there's one, there's others. And even if there isn't, we still have Capella. That will have made it all worthwhile when we hear from them.”

  “Yes,” MacDonald said. “I suppose it will.” He tried to say good-bye to Olsen politely, tried to get away gently, but some of his pain came through, and then Olsen didn't listen.

  “I've been saving the best till last,” Olsen said. “I want to show you the computer.”

  MacDonald tried to wave it away. “I've seen computers,” he said.

  “Not like this one,” Olsen said. MacDonald remembered that Olsen was a computer specialist. “And besides, there's something else.”

  The computer room—the biggest in the entire building—with three and a half of its walls given over to panels and dials and shiny wheels inside glass windows and blinking, many colored lights, and in the center of the room were other units like squat monsters spitting out wide strips of paper that folded themselves into stacks if nobody was looking at them, and all the while the computer clicked and chuckled to itself.

  The only places in the walls the computer did not cover were two doors. One was the entrance from the hall; the other, an entrance from his father's office so that his father, any time he wanted, could ask the computer what he wanted to know, or he could order the computer to do whatever he wanted it to do.

  Cables like black snakes reached through the walls into other rooms for more information, and perhaps, the boy thought, the computers went on forever.

  And he thought that here was a creature, finally, that knew everything there was to know, even the secrets that were whispered in the listening room, and all you had to do was ask it, and it would tell you.

  "Daddy,” Bobby said, “why don't you ask the computer what the whispers are saying?"

  "We do, Bobby,” his father said, “but maybe we don't know the right questions or we don't know how to ask them in the right way, because it doesn't tell us."

  With his feet planted wide apart and his hands on his hips, Bobby faced the computer from his father's door, the big and comforting presence of his father behind him, and he said, “When I grow up I'll make the computer tell me everything."

  "That would make me very happy and proud,” his father said.

  Even the computer room had shrunk over the years, and what had once been gleaming glass and painted metal seemed to have melted into the walls with a kind of weary acceptance of time's tyranny. Here and there a unit had been replaced and no doubt memories and readers and printers and even operators had been strung on, but it was basically the same computer that had been standing here for MacDonald's three decades and more.

  In terms of memory and linkages, it still was the biggest computer in the world, though by no means the fastest. MacDonald himself had worked on computers that in many ways were superior to this one.

  “We've kept up,” Olsen said behind him. “It may not look like much in comparison to the newer models with their fancy outsides and micro-miniaturization and room-temperature super-conductors but every important new development has been incorporated somewhere. We didn't like to change the memory, that's all, or the looks. After you've worked with a machine for years, it begins to seem almost like a person, and you expect to see a familiar face when you come in here.”

  A few comfortable chairs had been placed about the room between the readers and the printers and in far corners, and here and there darkness had accumulated in areas where bulbs had burned out and never been replaced. As he turned away from one shadowy corner, MacDonald thought he saw someone sitting there in a chair, but he blinked his eyes and saw that the chair was empty and the room was empty except for MacDonald and Olsen and the computer.

  The room was not silent. It clicked and muttered and chuckled, and the air smelled of oil and ozone.

  “Sit down,” Olsen said, motioning toward one of the chairs in the center of the room. “There's something you should listen to.”

  “Really,” MacDonald said. “I don't want—” But he was sitting down when Olsen pressed a button at the end of a cord and eased himself into the chair beside MacDonald.

  “We need to keep reminding ourselves what we are doing,” a voice out of the past was saying, “or we'll get swallowed in a
quicksand of data....”

  “Gentlemen, to our listening posts...”

  Another voice: “These might be something.”

  The first voice: “Odds.”

  A third voice, a bit tinny: “Mac, there's been an accident.... It's Maria.”

  A bit later the same voice said, “You can't do this, Mac.... This isn't just you. It affects the whole Project.”

  And the first voice that MacDonald knew too well: “I'm a failure, Charley. Everything I touch—ashes.... A poor linguist? An indifferent engineer? I have no qualifications for this job.... You need someone with ideas to head the Project, someone dynamic, someone who can lead, someone with charisma.”

  “You give a good party, Mac,” said a voice that sounded like a younger Olsen.

  A fifth voice: “Mac, you're what I believe in instead of God.”

  A sixth voice: “You are the Project. If you go, it all falls apart. It's over.”

  And the unbearably familiar voice said, “It seems like it always, but it never happens to those things that have life in them. The Project was here before I came. It will be here after I leave. It must be longer lived than any of us, because we are for the years and it is for the centuries....”

  And a tinny voice said, “She's going to be all right, Mac.”

  “They say you're leaving, Mr. MacDonald,” said a new voice, a little older and less educated than the others. “Don't go, Mr. MacDonald.... You're the one who cares.”

  The voices went on in the computer room, constructing in MacDonald's imagination a time gone by. Olsen spoke over them. “You see, everything that went on here has been recorded since Mac took over as director. ‘Who knows,’ he said, ‘when something one of us says in casual conversation or in jest may be the key that unlocks the locked room, the clue that solves the mystery. We have an unlimited memory and an infinite capacity for creating interconnections. We've got a computer; let's use it.’ My job,” Olsen said, “was to write the programs that ordered the information so that we didn't keep getting junk when we asked for correlations.”