The Listeners

by James Gunn

  White tried to imagine the incredible distances between the stars that the voices must have traveled to reach that far place and return, and he could not imagine the endless way, the emptiness between. He thought about an ant walking from Washington to San Francisco, and then coming back, and that was not enough.

  “Maybe it's closer,” he said.

  “Then we wouldn't be getting the program from ninety years ago,” John said.

  “Maybe it's been floating around in the air all these years,” White said, waving his hands in the air as if he could brush these concepts away like cobwebs. “Oh, I know. That's impossible, too. Only it's no more impossible than thinking of aliens out there sending us messages.”

  Or this, he thought. He looked at the piece of paper Jeremiah had given him. There was a drawing on it, black ink on white paper; it looked as if it had been done by a talented amateur; perhaps it had been drawn by Jeremiah himself. It was a drawing of a stylized angel, its wings spread behind it, a halo around its head, its arms out

  stretched in a kind of welcome of acceptance its face peaceful ... It was an angel of mercy, of love, carrying a message of God's love, and it was surrounded by a border of entwined flowers....

  By what impossible magic, White thought, had the voices changed into this?

  “The whole cosmological picture,” John was saying, “made it believable. There had to be intelligent life out there. It would be impossible if there were not other creatures in the galaxy, intelligent enough, curious enough, and capable of communicating with us across the light-years, wanting, needing to find other creatures like themselves who could look at themselves and at the stars and wonder....”

  White was caught in John's vision for a moment and then he looked at his son's face and saw the excitement in it and the rapture, and he thought, “You are a stranger to me, and I cannot speak to you.”

  He loved the boy, that was the trouble. He didn't want to see him get hurt the way he had been hurt. He wanted to save him the torment, save him from learning things the hard way. That was the essence of humanity, being able to learn from the mistakes and successes of others, not having to learn it all over again each generation. He knew what John would say. “That's no better than instinct. Being human is being able to do something different."

  Why was it always like this? The boy was an alien, but somehow he had to communicate.

  Puerto Rico was silent. As they went looping over the dark roads in the powerful black car that was waiting at the airport, all White could hear was the quiet hum of the steam turbine. He had asked that the windows be opened, and he could smell the trees and the grass and the more distant salt and fish of the sea.

  This was better than Washington, he thought, and better than Houston. Or any place else he could think of that he had been recently. The concern that kept coiling tighter in his stomach like the spring of a windup toy began to relax.

  What had happened to all the wind-up-toys he had known when he was a child? he wondered. Replaced, he thought, by battery-powered toys. Perhaps he was the last of the wind-up toys. A wind-up President, he thought, wound-up in the ghetto and now working out all the frustrations and aggressions that had pushed him into the White House Wind him up and see him right the ancient wrongs—but carefully, carefully, so that domestic tranquillity is not disturbed, so that international peace is not threatened....

  He laughed, a bit ruefully, and he thought, there was something in that office in Washington that did not let a man be what he had been, what he wanted to be, but forced him to be a President.

  John was looking at him, and he realized that John had not heard him laugh for a long time. He leaned over and put his hand on John's.

  “It's all right,” he said. “It was just a passing thought.” And he thought I could be a better man here. Maybe not a better President, but a better man.

  “We're almost there,” John said.

  White took his hand away. “How do you know?”

  “I've been here before,” John said.

  White settled back in his seat. He hadn't known that. He wondered why he hadn't known about John's visit to the Project. What else about John was a secret, a mystery?

  The mood had passed, and when the Project appeared out of the night, glimmering and vast and strange in the moonlight, White turned from it and would not look at it. The car puffed up beside a long, low concrete building.

  By the time they were inside the building, MacDonald was waiting for them. It did not seem to White as if he had rushed there, for he was not out of breath or nervous but as if he always was where he was needed. Again, but even stronger, White felt a. surge of empathy toward the man. No wonder, he thought, MacDonald had kept the Project alive for so long.

  White felt very sorry that he must kill what this man had given his life to.

  MacDonald was escorting the Presidential party down the painted concrete corridor. “Mr. President,” he had said, “you do us honor.” But he walked casually and talked easily as if he did this every day and this party were no different than any of the others.

  The corridors were busy with men and women moving purposefully on errands as if it were the middle of the day instead of the middle of the night, and then White realized that this was the busy part of the twenty-four hours for the Project, the nighttime when the listening was best. What would it be like, he wondered, to have the days and nights always reversed? To have light and dark turned around like a bat or an owl? And he thought, he should know the answer to that as well as anybody.

  The people passed. MacDonald did not introduce any of them, feeling without being told that this was an unofficial visit—or perhaps not wanting to stir up speculation in the Project about his visit. But some of the staff members glanced at them and then glanced a second time with a shock of recognition. White was used to that. And there were some who were busy talking to each other and glanced at them and continued their conversations without a pause. White was not used to that. He discovered that he didn't like it. He had thought that it was his loss of anonymity that he disliked, but he realized that he disliked more not being recognized at all.

  He also disliked the sterile corridor, echoing with footsteps and voices, and the room filled with electronic equipment through which he was ushered. He recognized oscilloscopes and recorders, but much of it was alien to him and he was pleased that it should remain so. A man was sitting in front of a panel with earphones over his head. MacDonald waved to him as they passed, and he waved back, but his eyes were glazed as if they were focused on something hundreds of miles away. Billions of miles, light-years, White corrected.

  They passed through another room that was virtually all computer. Instead of walls, there was a computer, cables snaked into other rooms, apparently to other computers or units of the same one, and the floor was crowded with data-inputs and printers. It was the biggest computer setup White had ever seen, bigger even than the Pentagon or State Department's simulators or the Information Department's data files. The place smelled of oil and electricity, and it talked to itself of information and events and correlations, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, and it added one and one and one very fast, over and over again. Being in that room was like being inside a computer, a modern Jonah inside a great fish not yet born, and he was relieved when it opened a mouth and spat them out into an office.

  The office did not reveal the evidences of a man's life, of twenty years of effort and dedication. Like the rest of the building it was plain, a simple desk set in front of tall bookshelves built into the wall, and the shelves and real books on them with leather bindings. Some of the books had titles in foreign languages, and White remembered from John's briefing that MacDonald had been a linguist before he became an engineer.

  “Set up my information center,” he said to John.

  “You can plug it right into the computer,” MacDonald said, “My assistant will show you where.”

  They were alone. They faced each other, and White hardened hi
s heart against the man.

  If MacDonald recognized the situation, he did not acknowledge it. Instead he said casually, “Jeremiah?”

  White shook his head. “He refused to be moved. He is going to release the message to the faithful. His message, he called it.”

  MacDonald motioned him to a chair. “And so it is,” he said. “His message, my message, your message.”

  White shook his head. “Not my message. Here is a copy of his message.” He handed MacDonald the piece of paper Jeremiah had given him.

  MacDonald looked at the drawing of Jeremiah's angel, pursed his lips, and nodded. “Yes, that's what Jeremiah saw. You didn't stop him?”

  “There are some things a President can do and should do, there are some things he can do and should not do, and there are some things he cannot do. Stopping Jeremiah falls somewhere between the second and the third. But that"—he indicated the piece of paper—"cannot be the message.”

  “How much do you know about the Project?” MacDonald asked.

  “Enough,” White said, hoping to forestall a repetition of John's briefing.

  “You know about the long listening without results?” MacDonald asked.

  “I know all that,” White said.

  “And then the voices?” MacDonald continued, and pushed a button on his desk.

  “I've heard them,” White said, but it was too late. The voices had already started.

  The acoustics were better here or something had been lost along the path of reproduction. The whisperings that began it were more urgent here; they held a note of pleading, of insistence, of anger, of despair, and they shook White so that when they became the voices he relaxed as if the effort to hear and understand had taken all his strength. The voices, too were a little different, as if they started at another point in an endless loop, and they were more distinct.

  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....

  White shook himself to break the spell. “That wasn't the message,” he said.

  MacDonald adjusted a dial on the desk. The voices continued in the background like a distant Greek chorus commenting on their predicament. “That was only what they used to attract our attention.”

  cracklecracklepop hello everybody popcracklepop.

  “The message was in the static between the voices,” MacDonald continued. “When we slowed it, stretched it, the static turned into a sound and silence pattern that we tried to decipher for months.”

  popcrackle ice regusted cracklepop.

  “I'se regusted,” White repeated in a deep voice and laughed.

  “You know that one?” MacDonald asked.

  “One of our folk heroes,” White said in a self-deprecating tone. “Does it bother you to have a black President?”

  “About as much,” MacDonald said, “as it bothers you to have a white Project director.”

  MacDonald was not only wise; he was shrewd. He knew that there were differences between men and these differences inevitably affected how they felt about each other, about themselves. White had liked MacDonald from the start; now he was beginning to admire him, and that was dangerous.

  What John wanted to do was even more dangerous. He thought there were no more differences, that he could forget his color and his people, that he could live like a white man, concerned with himself alone. How could he be so blind to the realities of racism? You still had to be on guard; to trust yourself in their world without the protection of power or of righteous anger was to risk your soul. His son—Andrew White's son—could not go over.

  “Finally it came to us,” MacDonald said. “Those dots and silences between the voices could be translated as spaces filled and unfilled, like a crossword puzzle, and the computer finally worked it out, figured out the length of the message and where it began and where it stopped, and what was false message—static, noise—and what was the real message endlessly repeated, and it printed out the message for us.”

  MacDonald reached for a frame that until now had been face down on his desk. White had not noticed it before. How much else had he not noticed? he wondered. How much of the message had he missed?

  “Here it is,” MacDonald said. He turned it over and reached it out to White. “This is the original message, the first one transferred from electronic signals in the computer onto paper. We had it framed for you; we thought you might like to keep it for a while, to look at, to wonder about a bit, perhaps, and when you're finished with it, when you're tired of showing it to visitors, you might send it over to the Smithsonian.”

  White took the frame reluctantly as if the message were one he did not really want to receive, like a summons or a subpoena or a warrant. He did not want to look at it; he did not want to wonder about it; he did not want it translated for him. He wanted to destroy it, to forget it; it was bad news, and he understood the Egyptian tradition of executing the messenger who brought evil tidings.

  He looked at the message. It consisted of little marks scattered in random fashion across a blank sheet of paper:

  White looked up. “This is a message?”

  MacDonald nodded. “I know it's not impressive at first glance. What is impressive is its origin in the minds of alien creatures born under two alien suns—red giants—forty-five light-years from here. That's how far it traveled to reach us, to reshape itself into the picture you hold in your hands.”

  “It's still not much,” White said, turning the frame over to look at the blank back as if there might be something more important, more revealing, on that side.

  “Perhaps it doesn't seem like much,” MacDonald said patiently, “but the information contained in that sketch is surprising. ‘A picture is worth a thousand words,’ the Chinese are reputed to have said, and we can learn at

  least that much more from this than from words—in some arbitrary symbols—even if we could read the symbols. What we have is 589 dots and dashes, dots and blanks, a grid made up to nineteen spaces across and thirty-one spaces down, and in those spaces the Capellans have drawn a portrait of themselves.”

  White looked at it again. He was beginning to see forms and shapes in it, and he realized that his first reaction was conditioned by his desire to believe that the computer marks were random, that the message was in fact meaningless. “Damn poor portrait,” he muttered. “Like the stick figures children drawn.”

  “Or like the figures adults draw for children, the kind of images children can identify because they can draw them—the kind of pictures you must draw with a blunt crayon or a grid. It looks like something intelligible even to the unsophisticated.”

  White glanced up, amused. “Like me?”

  “Like you. But unlike most stick figures, this picture rewards study. Much about it still is ambiguous, but some of what it means seems reasonably clear. In the lower left-hand corner is a square four spaces to a side; another one is in the upper right. Those probably are suns.”

  “Two suns?” White said and then felt foolish. “Of course. Capella has two suns. John told me and you told me, but I can't seem to remember things like that.”

  “'My words fly up, my thoughts remain below,'” MacDonald quoted.

  “'Words without thoughts never to heaven go,'” White continued, and enjoyed the look of admiration and new respect in MacDonald's glance, and knew he was being subtly flattered and appreciated the skillful way it was being handled.

  “Below the symbol in the upper right is a smaller square with single marks and double marks seemingly grouped around it. If a large square is a sun, a smaller square i
s a—”

  “A planet,” White supplied.

  “That's right,” MacDonald said.

  White felt as if he were back in school and had just received the teacher's approval.

  “And those single and double marks,” MacDonald continued, “probably are satellites of the big planet. Theory suggests that only large superjovian planets would be able to maintain an orbit in a double-sun system. Life on a superjovian seems unlikely. But a superjovian could have earth-sized satellites on which an intelligent race of creatures could evolve. And the Capellan—if that is what he is—seems to be pointing with two of his, or her, arms—or an arm and a wing—toward one of the suns, the one in the upper right-hand corner, and one of the satellites, if that is what they are. The implication is: this is its sun, not the other, which may be at considerable distance, and this is its home world.”

  White nodded. In spite of himself he had become involved. “Ingenious. Almost like a detective story.” He felt MacDonald's eyes on him and realized he was being played upon and enjoyed it.

  “We've been working at it, trying to put together the clues and solve the mystery,” MacDonald said. “I have an excellent staff, Mr. President—dedicated, brilliant, much more capable than I; my job is to keep them supplied with pencils and rubber bands and paper clips.”

  “I know that feeling,” White said dryly. How much about him did MacDonald know, he wondered. How much did he guess? How much was common to all administrators?

  “Below the satellites are numbers from one to nine written in a binary system, establishing a system of counting, the beginning of a common mathematics, and the fact that the Capellans’ intellectual processes are similar to ours. Down the left-hand side is what appears to be words; numbers on the right, words on the left; numbers written horizontally, words with a vertical component.”

  “Why words?”

  MacDonald shrugged. “We're still guessing about a lot of things. Perhaps they're building a vocabulary for later use when a word may be worth at least one picture, perhaps they're necessary to make a statement in the message that we have not yet deciphered, or perhaps it is because they help explain the picture.”