The Listeners

by James Gunn

  MacDonald rose thoughtfully. “Is there nothing I can say to change your mind?”

  White shook his head. “You have said it all. Believe me, you have done everything any man could do.”

  “I know what kind of legacy I wish to leave my son,” MacDonald said. “What kind of legacy do you wish to leave yours?”

  White looked at him sadly. “That's unfair. I do what I must. Will you do what you must?”

  MacDonald sighed, and White saw the life go out of him, and felt sad. “Let me handle it my way,” MacDonald said. “We will continue to study the message, continue to riddle its meaning. Gradually I will shift the listening to other locations.”

  “You want a chance to wait me out?” White said. “You hope for better luck with my successor?”

  “Our time scale is different. The Project can wait.”

  “You have in me,” White said, “someone who still believes in change. My successor will believe in none, and his successor will want to take conditions back.” He shrugged with regret, and held out his hand to be shaken, protecting it automatically the way he had learned to do in campaigning. “But perhaps your way is best. Keep hoping; keep your Project going; keep your men working. But do not—I will put this in writing immediately, even though it has been recorded by your computer—do not send an answer. I have my own men on your project, and they have their instructions.”

  MacDonald hesitated and then took White's hand. “I'm sorry,” he said.

  White didn't know why MacDonald was sorry. Perhaps he was sorry that he had to preside over the betrayal of the Project, perhaps he was sorry for a President who had to compromise himself and his country's ideals, perhaps he was sorry for the human race that would receive no more messages from the stars, or perhaps he was sorry for the Capellans who would receive no answer to their hopeful message.... Perhaps he was sorry for all of them. “I never asked you,” White said, “what you would have answered if you had been permitted to send an answer.”

  MacDonald reached past White and picked up the last sheet of paper on his desk. He handed it to White. “It's very simple, very obvious,” he said, paused, and added,

  “anticryptography. It's not even very original. Bernard Oliver suggested something like this more than fifty years ago. It tries to tell the Capellans pretty much the same things they told us: who we are, where we live, what we call ourselves, how we breed, how we think....”

  White looked at the sheet of paper.

  “You're holding it sideways,” MacDonald said. “We had to stretch it out the other way to keep the same grid dimensions.”

  White turned the sheet of paper around and looked at it for several seconds. Then he began to laugh.

  After a few moments, MacDonald said, “What's funny?”

  White's laughter stopped as quickly as it had begun. He wiped his eyes and blew his nose. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I wasn't laughing at the answer. I don't begin to understand half of what's here. But that's obviously a father and a mother. and a son—a child—and the Capellans would have no way of knowing whether they were white or black.”

  When he and John had returned to Washington, what would he say to John? That he had ordered a great man to hide his greatness, to destroy what he had built? He knew what that would do to John, what it would do to their relationship. On the one hand he preached leadership of the revolution; on the other, he rejected leadership in others.

  "It's only your own vision you can see,” John would say. “To others’ visions you are blind."

  What would he say? What if John was right?

  What if the revolution were done, as much as leaders could do for it, and now it was up to the individual? What if the important battle now was to allow individual greatness once more to be expressed, to open up society again?

  What was it John had said? What was it he had tried to forget? He remembered. He remembered too well.

  "Politics is dead, Father,” John had said. “Don't you understand that? Why do you think they let you be President? Being President doesn't matter any more!"

  The speakers on either side of the room were saying, “Mac! Mac!”

  “Yes, Oley,” MacDonald said.

  “John White has just had an inspiration about the message,” the speakers said. “I hate to break in on your conference, but I don't think it ought to wait.

  “That's all right,” MacDonald said, glancing questioningly at White. “We were just finishing.”

  Almost before the words had faded, a stocky, sandyhaired, middle-aged man was in the room. John followed him.

  “Olsen,” MacDonald said, “this is—”

  “I know,” the other said. “Mr. President,” he said, giving it the least possible break in the flow of his enthusiasm. “It falls into place like the last piece of a puzzle.”

  White looked at his son. John was clearly pleased and excited but reluctant to speak. “Is this your idea?” White said skeptically. “Really your idea?”

  John nodded. “Yes.”

  “You tell them,” Olsen said, turning to John.

  “You,” John said.

  Olsen turned back to MacDonald. “The symbols for the two suns were different, right?” he said, speaking rapidly, not waiting for an answer. “The sun in the upper righthand corner had a single mark extending from it. The one in the lower left had two marks at each corner, like rays. The words in the upper left and at the bottom to the right of the lower sun seem to be the symbol for ‘sun.'”

  “Yes,” MacDonald said, looking at White and then back at Olsen.

  “And the next symbol at the bottom we interpreted as ‘more sun,’ or ‘bigger sun,’ or ‘hotter sun.’ I was showing it to John, and he said, ‘Maybe that isn't just an idle description. Maybe it's the answer to another question about themselves they want us to know: what's happening to them. Maybe the distant sun is increasing its energy output, radiating more heat, turning nova perhaps.'”

  “What does that mean?” White asked. He was asking the question of anyone, but he was looking at John. His voice was troubled, he realized, and he didn't know why. And then he thought that to have the sun change in the sky was a basic alteration in the scheme of things that would be frightening beyond terror. He tried to imagine what it would be like on earth if the sun began to glow brighter, hotter. What would men do? Would they tell other intelligent races in the universe about themselves? Or would they hide?

  MacDonald was saying something. “—which may explain the helmets, if that is what they are. Perhaps they have to wear the helmets—and protective suits as well—whenever they go outside. To keep out of the heat.”

  “I'm sorry,” White said. “What did you say?”

  “The temperature increase from the more distant sun,” MacDonald said, “may not be a great problem. But now their sun—the sun the superjovian planet orbits—shows signs of going nova as well.”

  “They're going to die,” White said.

  “Yes,” MacDonald said.

  White realized that MacDonald believed it, the man named Olsen believed it, John believed it—they all were convinced that it was true, mourned the Capellans as if they were friends. Perhaps they were: MacDonald had lived with them in anticipation for twenty years now. And now that he had found them, and communicated with them, he had discovered that they were doomed.

  “The message carries no suggestion of an attempt to escape. The helmet, if that is what it is, implies an acceptance of conditions as they exist,” MacDonald said. “Spaceships are a possibility for the few, perhaps,” he went on, “and with the other satellites of the superjovian, they surely must have developed spaceflight, but there are no ships in the message. Perhaps their philosophy breeds acceptance....”

  “They're going to die,” White said again.

  “That changes the situation,” John said. “You feel it, don't you, Father?”

  “We can't go there any more than they can come here,” MacDonald said. “We can't help them, but we can let them kn
ow that they did not live in vain, that their last great effort to communicate was successful, that someone knows and cares and wishes them well.”

  He picked up the sheet of paper from the desk where White had placed it and the broad-tip pen and over the head of the child sketched in the head and shoulders of a Capellan arm in arm with the humans.

  White looked at the picture and considered the question, but he knew in his hips what the answer was. The public would accept this message; it would please the people that an answer would be sent, and the exchange would enlarge their vision and their understanding, bring them closer together, give them courage and a belief in themselves.

  “Yes,” he said. “Send the answer.”

  Later, as he and John stood at the entrance of the building, he realized that John was hanging back. “What is it, son?” he asked.

  “I'd like to stay for a while,” John said. “I'd like to find out what I would have to do to join the Project, to be able to contribute something.” He hesitated and then he added, “If it's all right, Dad.”

  Something froze inside White's chest and then slowly went away like ice melting. “Of course, son,” he said, “if that's what you want to do.”

  In a moment John was gone, and White looked out across the phosphorescent white parking lot to where a slowly moving radio telescope was outlined against the night sky, held aloft on an arm like a searchlight ready to be turned on, ready to pierce the night with its brilliance and thrust its way to the stars.

  Some time soon the answer to a message from the stars would be flinging upward in wave after wave started on its long journey to a distant world. Or if not from this particular antenna, some other.

  He imagined it going now and tried to feel in his hips that he was right, but he wasn't sure. He hoped he was right—right for John, right for the black people, right for his country, right for all humanity now and to come, right for intelligent life everywhere.... And his vision fled outward and upward into the infinite where there were other creatures incredibly different from him, and he thought they said, “Well done, Andrew White.”

  Computer Run

  Would beings from another world covet our gold or other rare substances? Do they want us as cattle or as slaves? Hardly, considering the astronomical cost of transport between solar systems. Any civilization able to cover interstellar distances would hardly need us for food or raw material, which they could far more easily synthesize at home. The most interesting item to be transferred from star to star is information, and this can be done by radio. ...

  Ronald N. Bracewell, 1962...

  One of the primary motivations for the exploration of the New World was to convert the inhabitants to Christianity—peacefully, if possible; forcefully, if necessary. Can we exclude the possibility of an extraterrestrial evangelism? While American Indians were not useful for any concrete task in the courts of Spain and France, they were nonetheless transported there for prestige purposes.... Or perhaps human beings have some relatively uncommon talent, of which they are themselves entirely unaware.... While any organism or artifact of Earth could be duplicated by an advanced extraterrestrial society, the original and the duplicate are still different.... Finally, can we exclude even darker motives? Might an extraterrestrial society want to be alone at the summit of Galactic power, and make a careful effort to crush prospective contenders? Or might there even be the “cockroach response"—to stamp out an alien creature simply because it is different. ...

  Carl Sagan, 1966...

  the milky way,

  sombrero: whirlpool,

  our local galaxy,

  and the great spiral in andromeda

  is only one

  (not to mention ngc 819)

  among billions.

  black eye, theta orionis,

  not only stars

  and the globular cluster m. 3

  without number

  (not to mention ngc 253)

  but galaxies—

  pleiades, coma hyades,

  elliptical, spiral,

  praesepe, stefan's quintet

  barred spiral, globular—

  (not to mention fleet 3C295)

  great gatherings

  hercules, coma-virgo,

  of stars

  large and small magellanic clouds

  without

  (not to mention ngc 3190,

  number.

  7331, 1300, 5128, 2362, 4038, 4039, 3193, 3187... )

  the respen manufacturing company today put on the market a home model capable of most responses available from commercial installations. it requires no more space than the average bathroom and sells for only $50,000.

  It was the face that made Otis stare. The mouth was toothless and probably constructed more for sucking than chewing. But the eyes! They projected like ends of a dumbbell from each side of the skull where the ears should have been, and focused with obvious mobility. Peering closer, Otis saw tiny ears below the eyes, almost hidden in the curling of the neck....

  H. B. Fyfe, 1951...

  Intelligence may indeed be a benign influence creating isolated groups of philosopher-kings far apart in the heavens and enabling them to share at leisure their accumulated wisdom. On the other hand, intelligence may be a cancer of purposeless technological exploitation, sweeping across a galaxy as irresistibly as it has swept across our own planet. Assuming interstellar travel at moderate speeds, the technological cancer could spread over the whole galaxy in a few million years, a time very short compared with the life of a planet.

  What our detectors will pick up is a technological civilization, but it will not necessarily be intelligent, in the pure sense of the word. In fact, it may even be that the society we are inherently likely to detect is more probably a technology run wild, insane, or cancerously spreading than a technology firmly in control and supporting the rational needs of a superior intelligence. It is possible that a truly intelligent society might no longer feel the need of, or be interested in, technology. Our business as scientists is to search the universe and find out what is there. What is there may conform to our moral sense or it may not.... It is just as unscientific to impute to remote intelligences wisdom and serenity as it is to impute to them irrational and murderous impulses. We must be prepared for either possibility and conduct our searches accordingly....

  Freeman J. Dyson, 1964...

  In a direct confrontation with superior creatures from another world, the reins would be torn from our hands and we would, as a tearful old medicine man once said to me, find ourselves “without dreams,” that is, we would find our intellectual and spiritual aspirations so outmoded as to leave us completely paralyzed....

  Carl Gustav Jung, early twentieth century...

  What would happen if all Galactic civilizations worked only on receiving and not on transmitting interstellar radio signals? ...

  I. S. Shklovskii, 1966...

  after fifty weeks, a boy and his bird still nests atop the best-seller list. although critical reaction to the novel has been mixed, with some reviewers calling it “the worst book of this or any other year” and others describing it as “a book for our times” and “a frank account of passion between aliens,” the public reaction has been unanimous: the public loves it.

  the gross national product reached $4.5 trillion yesterday, the united states bureau of economics announced today. total gross world product reached almost $28 trillion, nearly ten times its value fifty years ago.

  the bureau attributes the solution of many of the problems that troubled the world a half century ago to the dramatic growth in the gross world product through automation, fusion power, greater use of computers and cybernation, and new educational methods.

  It may be that these gruesome possibilities are real. Or the fact that we can imagine them may be itself only a reflection of how much further we have to go before we will be ready for full membership in a galactic community of societies. But in either case, there is no way back. It is no use to maintain an in
terstellar radio silence; the signal has already been sent. Forty light years out from Earth, the news of a new technical civilization is winging its way among the stars. If there are beings out there, scanning their skies for the tidings of a new technical civilization, they will know of it, whether for good or for ill. If interstellar spaceflight by advanced technical civilizations is commonplace, we may expect an emissary, perhaps in the next several hundred years. Hopefully, there will then still be a thriving terrestrial civilization to greet the visitors from the far distant stars....

  Carl Sagan, 1966...

  holovision, until now available only to government, industry, and the very rich, now has been produced in a set capable of being installed in the home at a price the average citizen can afford. like its larger and more expensive predecessors, the hv, as general electric calls it, operates without an image tube; it makes its picture visible by exciting the air particles in front of the concealed projector. the effect is like having a person or a scene in the room with you. experts predict that it will take over all broadcasting as seen as sufficient sets can be manufactured.

  that, of course, is what the experts said about television and radio, and we have just seen a remarkable resurgence in radio...

  Assuming that the energy of the solar-fusion process could be used with 100 per cent efficiency, it would still require: 16 billion tons of hydrogen fuel to accelerate a tenton capsule to 99 per cent of the speed of light, and to slow it down for the landing would require another 16 billion tons.... Even with the perfect matter-antimatter fuel, my hypothetical journey would still require 400,000 tons of fuel, equally divided between matter and antimatter.... Well, this is preposterous, you are saying. That is exactly my point. It is preposterous. And remember, our conclusions are forced on us by the elementary laws of mechanics. ...

  Edward M. Purcell, 1960...

  A way out of these difficulties which approaches elegance in its conception has been provided by the American physicist Robert W. Bussard ... an interstellar ramjet which uses the atoms of the interstellar medium both as a working fluid (to provide reaction mass) and as an energy source (through thermonuclear fusion)....