The Listeners

by James Gunn

  “What are the words?”

  MacDonald pointed at the picture in White's hands. “They seem to apply to something that is on the same line or lines with them, usually to their right. Let's skip the top one for a moment. The next one is repeated three times. Two of them the Capellan is pointing at with his right upper limbs. Perhaps they are the Capellan word for ‘Capellan.’ You will notice that the third time the word appears it is opposite the dot underneath the Capellan, which—if it is not an accidental dot, or meaningless noise—may mean that this, too, is a Capellan—or a Capellan in embryo.” He looked at White expectantly.

  “An egg?” White ventured.

  “Very likely. It may be trying to tell us that it breeds by laying eggs.”

  “It's a bird.”

  “Or a reptile. Or an insect. But most likely a bird, which would explain the second pair of limbs.”

  “They really are wings?” White said.

  “Working wings or vestiges.”

  White glanced at Jeremiah's drawing on MacDonald's desk and back to the framed computer read-out. He was beginning to see how one could become the other, how Jeremiah could have seen the stick figure as an angel, the square thing on its head as a halo. The situation became more understandable, though no less serious. “And the other words?” he said.

  “These are even more speculative,” MacDonald said. “The third word may mean ‘wing,’ the fifth, ‘body’ or ‘chest,’ the sixth, ‘hips’ or ‘legs,’ the seventh, ‘legs’ or ‘feet.’ They may mean something else entirely, refer to function rather than parts. Some of these we're filing away until we have some repetitions.”

  White was startled. “More messages are being received?”

  MacDonald shook his head. “The same message over and over. As if, having attracted our attention, the Capellans want to tell us only the important things about themselves, and these it wants to be sure we understand before they go on.”

  “Like programmed learning,” White said. He was relieved that there were no more messages, that he had to cope with one alien communication, one problem, not a continuing series.

  “Or maybe,” MacDonald said, “they do not wish to go further, to send more messages of whatever kind, until they know we are receiving them and understand, until we have replied.”

  White quickly changed the subject. “What important things are they trying to tell us?”

  “Who they are. Where they live. What they call themselves. How they reproduce. How they think.”

  “How do they think?” White asked.

  “In words and numbers and images,” MacDonald replied, “the way we do.”

  White studied the picture as if by looking at it he could force it to yield up its secrets, but it clung to them stubbornly. “Do they think the same way we think—in terms of advantage and disadvantage, in terms of profit and loss, in terms of victory and defeat, in terms of what's in it for me?”

  MacDonald looked at White much, White thought, as he had been looking at the picture. He shook his head. “They seem very peaceful to me. All of us don't think in terms of advantage, of conflict. Increasingly, I think we become more uncompetitive. And birds always have been a symbol of peace.”

  “Only the dove,” White said gloomily. “Did you ever see a bluejay attacking other birds or cats or ever people? What about hawks and eagles and vultures? Any creature which becomes the dominant species on its world has to be aggressive. How does a bird think?”

  How does a man think? A person you have raised within your home, within your arms, within your love—how does he think? How can one reach him, tell him, make him see what he is, what the world is like? What he wanted to say was, “Look, son, you see the world as a benign, smiling place of peace and opportunity and fair play, but it's not like that. You go on thinking it is, and the first chance it gets it's going to bite your black ass off."

  And John would say, “Stop talking like a nigger, Father!"

  White lifted his eyes from the picture in his hands to MacDonald's face. “Do you have a son?” he asked, and hearing himself say it realized he had let slip something about himself. Not “do you have any children?” but “do you have a son?” In an age when one child was the norm, perhaps MacDonald would not notice.

  MacDonald's face softened. “Yes,” he said.

  That had got through to him. “We're a lot alike,” White said. “That was my son who came in with me.”

  “I know,” MacDonald, Said.

  “He acts as my personal assistant. He is very much interested in your Project,” White heard himself saying.

  “I know,” MacDonald said.

  'White hastened on. “I wouldn't know what to do without him,” he said, and it sounded in his ears almost like a plea. Perhaps it was.

  “My son is only eight months old,” MacDonald said.

  White raised his eyebrows.

  MacDonald chuckled. “I've spent my life waiting. For that I almost waited too long.”

  White thought of MacDonald waiting here at the Project among all these alien machines with their alien smells, listening for a message from the stars that never came, listening without results for fifty years. Bosh! He was sentimentalizing again. That wasn't this man. The Project itself was, fifty years old, but MacDonald had been with it only twenty years, and he was an engineer—no doubt he liked machines and their smells and their meaningless noises. Still, twenty years.... And now the message had come, and it would never be acknowledged. White felt a new flash of sympathy for MacDonald and all the people who had given their lives to the search.

  “You don't look like-a man who has been told that his life's work can't be completed,” White said.

  MacDonald smiled. It was the kind of patient smile he must have maintained throughout the long listening, White thought. “I've waited a long time,” MacDonald, said. “So have the. Capellans. We can wait some more, if necessary. But I hope that your decision can be changed. You're still here, and you're still listening.”

  “I owe you that,” White said. MacDonald waited. “He could have said, ‘You don't owe me anything, Mr. President. We owe you for your sacrifices,'” White thought with fleeting irritation, and dismissed it as childish. “Those other words,” he said “the ones you passed over—what about them?”

  “If those are words at the bottom, MacDonald said, pointing out the two symbols at the bottom of the page beneath the egg, “the one in the upper left-hand corner is repeated below. It could mean ‘sun.'”

  “And the other word at the bottom?”

  “We don't know,” MacDonald said. “Perhaps ‘more sun.’ You will notice that the sun at the bottom left has rays at each of its corners. The one at the top has only a single beginning of a ray. Perhaps the distant sun is hotter and they're trying to tell us this in case we have the astronomical capability to distinguish them.”

  White studied the picture again. “All that from this?”

  “As you said, a detective story. We're detectives hunting for clues, and we have a great many clues. And a great research tool.” He waved his hand toward the wall beyond which was the computer room. “Virtually the entire written history and literature of mankind—in all his written languages—is stored in there. Everything we do or say within the Project is recorded. It's that kind of computer. It learns and compares and translates and stores and works cryptograms and breaks codes. And of course, what we are working with is not cryptography but anticryptography, the designing of a code impossible to misunderstand....”

  “Our earlier conversation, your call,” White said. “That is recorded.” It was half a question.

  “If we wished, we could recall the information upon voice command or eliminate it from the record upon written command.”

  White waved a negligent hand. “It doesn't matter. What I have done and said is a matter of record throughout the world, and when my term of office is over it will all be ferreted out by scholars and dissected and buried in a library somewhere.... What I can
't understand is why Jeremiah was here.”

  MacDonald was thoughtful. “Until you spoke, the Project was not a secret. One of my responsibilities was to keep the Project going, and one way I fulfilled that responsibility was to tell people what we were doing, to show them what it meant, how important it was.”

  Just as you are doing with me, White thought. “Public relations?” he said. “Promotion?”

  “Yes,” MacDonald said.

  Meaning, White thought, call it what you will; it is the function all administrators must perform effectively if they are to administer successfully; they must develop external and internal acceptance for what they are doing—public acceptance through public understanding. “Communication?” he said.

  “I like that best,” MacDonald said.

  “I do too,” White admitted.

  John opened the far door. “Mr. President,” he said, “we have a report from Houston.”

  “Let's have it,” White said.

  MacDonald pushed a button on his desk.

  As the familiar window opened in front of them, White said, “I hate this stuff.”

  “Me too,” MacDonald said. “It's a filtered communication; most of the sensory clues are missing.”

  White looked at MacDonald in mild surprise, and then the scene came alive. The view was in mid-air—perhaps from a hovering jet—outside the Houston temple. Men and women were marching back and forth in the street. They were carrying signs. The signs had words on them; at first they were unreadable and then, as the view zoomed in, the words became clear: THE MESSAGE IS PHONY; JEREMIAH LIES; NOT ANGELS BUT ANGLES; SHUT DOWN THE PROJECT; DESTROY RADIO TELESCOPES; NO COMMUNICATION WITH ALIENS....

  Between the pickets other men and women passed and entered the building in an irregular but persistent flow. Beyond the pickets, as the view pulled back again, were silent figures massed like a cloud around the building and waiting for something, a word, an event, a signal, and from their appearance it was difficult to determine whether the figures were spectators or participants waiting for their moment.

  The scene changed. Now the viewpoint was inside the giant dome. The view locked up at the distant ceiling and then slowly panned the seats. Every one was filled, and more people were sitting and standing in the aisles. Below them, in a circle of light, like a gleaming stick figure in black and white, was Jeremiah. He was not alone. A creature was behind him, an evanescent, transparent figure, but clearly an angel, with halo and wings outspread, and it had its right hand on Jeremiah's shoulder. And the stick figure raised his left hand to the crowd, and the crowd came to its feet in one simultaneous movement. White could not hear anything—he supposed there was sound with this transmission, but it was not turned up—but he could feel the shock wave that exploded from more than one hundred thousand throats, and shook the distant ceiling of the temple....

  “Trouble,” White said as the scene faded and MacDonald turned it off.

  “Excitement,” MacDonald said.

  “Disturbance, dissension,” White added, “trouble. We have solved many of the problems that threatened to tear this nation apart at the time the Project was started and trouble will keep us from solving the others. We need calm, serenity, and this angel of Jeremiah's means trouble. It will bring back the old problems of the chosen peoples and the outcasts, the favored and the fallen, the elect and the nonelect.... This angel of Jeremiah's brings not peace but a sword. I don't see how he could have read that into the message,” he said, forgetting his earlier perception.

  MacDonald picked up a piece of illustration board from his desk—something else he had missed, White thought, and held it out. “I had a staff artist prepare this for you. Something comparable to what I thought Jeremiah would describe.”

  White accepted it, turned it over, looked at. it. It, too, had a drawing, but this one was a drawing of a tall bird-like creature with vestigial wings. On its head, was a transparent helmet. At opposite corners of the drawing was a stylized representation of a sun; below the one in the upper righthand corner was a Jupiterlike planet with four satellites, two small ones like the moon and two larger ones, one resembling Venus, the other resembling Earth. Numbers from one to nine were written underneath along the righthand edge. Running down the left-hand side were words that said, “Sun—Capellan—wing—Capellan—chest—hips—legs—Capellan.” And below the figure was a large, well-shaped egg; below that were two more words—"sun” and “hotter sun.”

  Through the creature's transparent helmet could be seen the face of an alien obviously avian in evolution but also intelligent, and intelligence had molded its features into a distant relative of man. The bird looked interested, gentle, benevolent....

  sun

  Capellan

  wing

  Capellan

  Chest

  Hips

  legs

  Capellan

  “I suppose,” White said, “one is just as reasonable as the other.”

  “That's (one reason I couldn't tell Jeremiah he was wrong,” MacDonald said. “He had just as much a right to his interpretation is I to mine.”

  “Another reason,” White said, “his acceptance of the message was an advantage for the Project.”

  MacDonald shrugged. “Certainly. Although what I was trying to tell him was that the message was no threat to him or his religious beliefs. And that is true.”

  White was a little surprised at MacDonald's cynicism. Not much, because he was never really surprised by anyone's opportunism, but somehow he had been building a different image of MacDonald. “What you are saying is that you allowed him to deceive himself.”

  “No,” MacDonald said steadily. “We don't know what the message says. We're interpreting it on a simple mechanistic basis, reading it at a kind of childish, stick-figure level; Jeremiah is interpreting it at a more adult level, translating symbols into images. The two drawings—ours and Jeremiah's—are of roughly equal value. The only reality we have is the computer grid.”

  White said softly, “Such a small thing. So much disturbance.”

  “Temporary,” MacDonald said. “If you allow us to release what we believe is the substance of the message, let the knowledgeable scientists of the world supply their interpretations, let us come up with an answer and transmit it to the Capellans....”

  White looked at the drawing in his hand. He did not answer MacDonald directly. “Do you have a pencil?” he asked. “Or a crayon or pen?”

  MacDonald rummaged in his desk and produced a broadtipped pen. White worked over the face of the bird for a moment and then handed the illustration board to MacDonald.

  Now the bird was no longer humanoid. Its beak was longer and curved at the end, a beak made for biting and tearing. The bird's eyes were hooded and cruel. It was a bird of prey looking for its next meal. “What if it really looks like that?” White asked.

  "The question,” he should have said, “is what the world is really like. Is it the world you see or the world I know? If some doubt remains, wouldn't it be better to consider the past, to learn the history of your people, to be black until you are certain the present has changed its old ways, its old habits of mind?"

  But he hadn't said that. “By God, I know the world, John, and you don't. You've got to take my word for it if you can't see for yourself."

  And John had told him, “The past is irrelevant."

  But even that was a statement out of the past.

  Time was running out. White felt. Soon he would have to terminate this conversation and decide what to do about the trouble that was coming, that he could feel in his hips. But he hated to cut off this man—this good man, he thought—until he was satisfied.

  “What difference can it make,” MacDonald was saying, “forty-five light-years away? They want to communicate. They're looking for other minds, for fellow intelligent creatures in the universe.”

  “But why?” White asked. “Why go to all the trouble?”

  “So they won't be alone. For the sam
e reason we've listened. So we wouldn't be alone. It is a terrible thing to be alone.”

  What does he know? White thought. “Yes,” he said.

  “Besides,” MacDonald said, “they already know we're here.”

  “What?” White asked, surprised, a little alarmed.

  “The voices,” MacDonald said.

  The voices. Of course. The aliens had picked up the old radio broadcasts, so they knew there were people at the other end. “They don't know who we are or what we are,” White said. “They don't know whether we have received their message or whether we have deciphered it or whether we will respond to it—or whether we can do any of these things.”

  MacDonald put his fingertips together. “Does it matter?”

  White shrugged a bit impatiently. “You and your colleagues are the experts in aliens and in alien potentials, but even a layman can imagine a situation in which it might matter.”

  MacDonald smiled. “The boogeyman from the stars?”

  “There are boogeymen,” White said. “The tribe from the East or the North. The bad men from the hills. The lynch mob from the village.”

  “None of them civilized,” MacDonald said. “None of them trying to communicate.”

  “I can find examples of that, too. Maybe the Capellans are signaling a number of different worlds, and they will determine which one to invade according to which one responds.”

  “Even if interstellar travel is possible—which it probably is not—even if interstellar warfare is possible—which it almost certainly is not,” MacDonald said, “even then, why would they want to do it?”

  White spread his hands wide. “Why would they want to expend the effort to signal us in the first place?” MacDonald started to speak but White continued. “'Dear Miss Lonelyhearts, I have been waiting here for a million years....’ Perhaps they need to be sure we have not ruined our planet with radioactivity since we discovered radio. Perhaps they intend to send us instructions for constructing a matter transmitter. Perhaps they require a certain level of technology to make us worthwhile as a subject world.”