by Brin, David
Between MacDonald and the sky was a giant dish held aloft by skeletal metal fingers—held high as if to catch the stardust that drifted down at night from the Milky Way.
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil’s foot;
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy’s stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
Then the dish began to turn, noiselessly, incredibly, and to tip. And it was not a dish any more but an ear, a listening ear cupped by the surrounding hills to overhear the whispering universe.
Perhaps this was what kept them at their jobs, MacDonald thought. In spite of all disappointments, in spite of all vain efforts, perhaps it was this massive machinery, as sensitive as their fingertips, that kept them struggling with the unfathomable. When they grew weary at their electronic listening posts, when their eyes grew dim with looking at unrevealing dials and studying uneventful graphs, they could step outside their concrete cells and renew their dull spirits in communion with the giant mechanism they commanded, the silent, sensing instrument in which the smallest packets of energy, the smallest waves of matter, were detected in their headlong, eternal flight across the universe. It was the stethoscope with which they took the pulse of the all and noted the birth and death of stars, the probe with which, here on an insignificant planet of an undistinguished star on the edge of its galaxy, they explored the infinite.
Or perhaps it was not just the reality but the imagery, like poetry, that soothed their doubting souls, the bowl held up to catch Donne’s falling star, the ear cocked to catch the suspected shout that faded to an indistinguishable murmur by the time it reached them. And one thousand miles above them was the giant, five-mile-in-diameter network, the largest radio telescope ever built, that men had cast into the heavens to catch the stars.
If they had the Big Ear for more than an occasional reference check, MacDonald thought practically, then they might get some results. But he knew the radio astronomers would never relinquish time to the frivolity of listening for signals that never came. It was only because of the Big Ear that the Project had inherited the Little Ear. There had been talk recently about a larger net, twenty miles in diameter. Perhaps when it was done, if it were done, the Project might inherit time on the Big Ear.
If they could endure until then, MacDonald thought, if they could steer their fragile vessel of faith between the Scylla of self-doubt and the Charybdis of Congressional appropriations.
The images were not all favorable. There were others that went boomp in the night. There was the image, for instance, of man listening, listening, listening to the silent stars, listening for an eternity, listening for signals that would never come, because—the ultimate horror—man was alone in the universe, a cosmic accident of self-awareness which needed and would never receive the comfort of companionship. To be alone, to be all alone, would be like being all alone on earth, with no one to talk to, ever—like being alone inside a bone prison, with no way to get out, no way to communicate with anyone outside, no way to know if anyone was outside.…
Perhaps that, in the end, was what kept them going—to stave off the terrors of the night. While they listened there was hope; to give up now would be to admit final defeat. Some said they should never have started; then they never would have the problem of surrender. Some of the new religions said that. The Solitarians, for one. There is nobody there; we are the one, the only created intelligence in the universe. Let us glory in our uniqueness. But the older religions encouraged the Project to continue. Why would God have created the myriads of other stars and other planets if He had not intended them for living creatures; why should man only be created in His image? Let us find out, they said. Let us communicate with them. What revelations have they had? What saviors have redeemed them?
These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me.… Thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day: and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. And we are witnesses of these things.
And, behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you: but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high.
Dusk had turned to night. The sky had turned to black. The stars had been born again. The listening had begun. MacDonald made his way to his car in the parking lot behind the building, coasted until he was behind the hill, and turned on the motor for the long drive home.
The hacienda was dark. It had that empty feeling about it that MacDonald knew so well, the feeling it had for him when Maria went to visit friends in Mexico City. But it was not empty now. Maria was here.
He opened the door and flicked on the hall light. “Maria?” He walked down the tiled hall, not too fast, not too slow. “¿Querida?” He turned on the living room light as he passed. He continued down the hall, past the dining room, the guest room, the study, the kitchen. He reached the dark doorway to the bedroom. “Maria Chavez?”
He turned on the bedroom light, low. She was asleep, her face peaceful, her dark hair scattered across the pillow. She lay on her side, her legs drawn up under the covers.
Men che dramma
Di sangue m’e rimaso, che no tremi;
Conosco i segni dell’ antica fiamma.
MacDonald looked down at her, comparing her features one by one with those he had fixed in his memory. Even now, with those dark, expressive eyes closed, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. What glories they had known! He renewed his spirit in the warmth of his remembrances, recalling moments with loving details.
C’est de quoy j’ay le plus de peur que la peur.
He sat down upon the edge of the bed and leaned over to kiss her upon the cheek and then upon her upthrust shoulder where the gown had slipped down. She did not waken. He shook her shoulder gently. “Maria!” She turned upon her back, straightening. She sighed, and her eyes came open, staring blankly. “It is Robby,” MacDonald said, dropping unconsciously into a faint brogue.
Her eyes came alive and her lips smiled sleepily. “Robby. You’re home.”
“Yo te amo,” he murmured, and kissed her. As he pulled himself away, he said, “I’ll start dinner. Wake up and get dressed. I’ll see you in half an hour. Or sooner.”
“Sooner,” she said.
He turned and went to the kitchen. There was romaine lettuce in the refrigerator, and as he rummaged further, some thin slices of veal. He prepared Caesar salad and veal scaloppine doing it all quickly, expertly. He liked to cook. The salad was ready, and the lemon juice, tarragon, white wine, and a minute later, the beef bouillon had been added to the browned veal when Maria appeared.
She stood in the doorway, slim, lithe, lovely, and sniffed the air. “I smell something delicious.”
It was a joke. When Maria cooked, she cooked Mexican, something peppery that burned all the way into the stomach and lay there like a banked furnace. When MacDonald cooked, it was something exotic—French, perhaps, or Italian, or Chinese. But whoever cooked, the other had to appreciate it or take over all the cooking for a week.
MacDonald filled their wine glasses. “A la trés-bonne, à la trés-belle,” he said, “qui fait ma joie et ma santé.”
“To the Project,” Maria said. “May there be a signal received tonight.”
MacDonald shook his head. One should not mention what one desires too much. “Tonight there is only us.”
Afterward there were only the two of them, as there had been now for twenty years. And she was as alive and as urgent, as filled with love and laughter, as when they first had been together.
At last the urgency was replaced by
a vast ease and contentment in which for a time the thought of the Project faded into something remote which one day he would return to and finish. “Maria,” he said.
“Robby?”
“Yo te amo, corazón.”
“Yo te amo, Robby.”
Gradually then, as he waited beside her for her breathing to slow, the Project returned. When he thought she was asleep, he got up and began to dress in the dark.
“Robby?” Her voice was awake and frightened.
“¿Querida?”
“You are going again?”
“I didn’t want to wake you.”
“Do you have to go?”
“It’s my job.”
“Just this once. Stay with me tonight.”
He turned on the light. In the dimness he could see that her face was concerned but not hysterical. “Rast ich, so rost ich. Besides, I would feel ashamed.”
“I understand. Go, then. Come home soon.”
He put out two pills on the little shelf in the bathroom and put the others away again.
The headquarters building was busiest at night when the radio noise of the sun was least and listening to the stars was best. Girls bustled down the halls with coffee pots, and men stood near the water fountain, talking earnestly.
MacDonald went into the control room. Adams was at the control panel; Montaleone was the technician. Adams looked up, pointed to his earphones with a gesture of futility, and shrugged. MacDonald nodded at him, nodded at Montaleone, and glanced at the graph. It looked random to him.
Adams leaned past him to point out a couple of peaks. “These might be something.” He had removed the earphones.
“Odds,” MacDonald said.
“Suppose you’re right. The computer hasn’t sounded any alarms.”
“After a few years of looking at these things, you get the feel of them. You begin to think like a computer.”
“Or you get oppressed by failure.”
“There’s that.”
The room was shiny and efficient, glass and metal and plastic, all smooth and sterile; and it smelled like electricity. MacDonald knew that electricity had no smell, but that was the way he thought of it. Perhaps it was the ozone that smelled or warm insulation or oil. Whatever it was, it wasn’t worth the time to find out, and MacDonald didn’t really want to know. He would rather think of it as the smell of electricity. Perhaps that was why he was a failure as a scientist. “A scientist is a man who wants to know why,” his teachers always had told him.
MacDonald leaned over the control panel and flicked a switch. A thin, hissing noise filled the room. It was something like air escaping from an inner tube—a susurration of surreptitious sibilants from subterranean sessions of seething serpents.
He turned a knob and the sound became what someone—Tennyson?—had called “the murmuring of innumerable bees.” Again, and it became Matthew Arnold’s
…melancholy, long withdrawing roar
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
He turned the knob once more, and the sound was a babble of distant voices, some shouting, some screaming, some conversing calmly, some whispering—all of them trying beyond desperation to communicate, and everything just below the level of intelligibility. If he closed his eyes, MacDonald could almost see their faces, pressed against a distant screen, distorted with the awful effort to make themselves heard and understood.
But they all insisted on speaking at once. MacDonald wanted to shout at them. “Silence, everybody! All but you—there, with the purple antenna. One at a time and we’ll listen to all of you if it takes a hundred years or a hundred lifetimes.”
“Sometimes,” Adams said, “I think it was a mistake to put in the speaker system. You begin to anthropomorphize. After a while you begin to hear things. Sometimes you even get messages. I don’t listen to the voices any more. I used to wake up in the night with someone whispering to me. I was just on the verge of getting the message that would solve everything, and I would wake up.” He flicked off the switch.
“Maybe somebody will get the message,” MacDonald said. “That’s what the audio frequency translation is intended to do. To keep the attention focused. It can mesmerize and it can torment, but these are the conditions out of which spring inspiration.”
“Also madness,” Adams said. “You’ve got to be able to continue.”
“Yes.” MacDonald picked up the earphones Adams had put down and held one of them to his ear.
“Tico-tico, tico-tico,” it sang. “They’re listening in Puerto Rico.… Listening for words that never come. Tico-tico, tico-tico. They’re listening in Puerto Rico. Can it be the stars are stricken dumb?”
MacDonald put the earphones down and smiled. “Maybe there’s inspiration in that, too.”
“At least it takes my mind off the futility.”
“Maybe off the job, too? Do you really want to find anyone out there?”
“Why else would I be here? But there are times when I wonder if we would be better off not knowing.”
“We all think that sometimes,” MacDonald said.
In his office he attacked the stack of papers and letters again. When he had worked his way to the bottom, he sighed and got up, stretching. He wondered if he would feel better, less frustrated, less uncertain, if he were working on the Problem instead of just working so somebody else could work on the Problem. But somebody had to do it. Somebody had to keep the Project going, personnel coming in, funds in the bank, bills paid, feathers smoothed.
Maybe it was more important that he do all the dirty little work in the office. Of course it was routine. Of course Lily could do it as well as he. But it was important that he do it, that there be somebody in charge who believed in the Project—or who never let his doubts be known.
Like the Little Ear, he was a symbol—and it is by symbols men live—or refuse to let their despair overwhelm them.
The janitor was waiting for him in the outer office.
“Can I see you, Mr. MacDonald?” the janitor said.
“Of course, Joe,” MacDonald said, locking the door of his office carefully behind him. “What is it?”
“It’s my teeth, sir.” The old man got to his feet and with a deft movement of his tongue and mouth dropped his teeth into his hand.
MacDonald stared at them with a twinge of revulsion. There was nothing wrong with them. They were a carefully constructed pair of false teeth, but they looked too real. MacDonald always had shuddered away from those things which seemed to be what they were not, as if there were some treachery in them.
“They talk to me, Mr. MacDonald,” the janitor mumbled, staring at the teeth in his hand with what seemed like suspicion. “In the glass beside my bed at night, they whisper to me. About things far off, like. Messages like.”
MacDonald stared at the janitor. It was a strange word for the old man to use, and hard to say without teeth. Still, the word had been “messages.” But why should it be strange? He could have picked it up around the offices or the laboratories. It would be odd, indeed, if he had not picked up something about what was going on. Of course: messages.
“I’ve heard of that sort of thing happening,” MacDonald said. “False teeth accidentally constructed into a kind of crystal set, that pick up radio waves. Particularly near a powerful station. And we have a lot of stray frequencies floating around, what with the antennas and all. Tell you what, Joe. We’ll make an appointment with the Project dentist to fix your teeth so that they don’t bother you. Any small alteration should do it.”
“Thank you, Mr. MacDonald,” the old man said. He fitted his teeth back into his mouth. “You’re a great man, Mr. MacDonald.”
MacDonald drove the ten dark miles to the hacienda with a vague feeling of unease, as if he had done something during the day or left something undone that should have been otherwise.
But the house was dark when he drove up in fr
ont, not empty-dark as it had seemed to him a few hours before, but friendly-dark. Maria was asleep, breathing peacefully.
The house was brilliant with lighted windows that cast long fingers into the night, probing the dark hills, and the sound of many voices stirred echoes until the countryside itself seemed alive.
“Come in, Lily,” MacDonald said at the door, and was reminded of a winter scene when a Lily had met the gentlemen at the door and helped them off with their overcoats. But that was another Lily and another occasion and another place and somebody else’s imagination. “I’m glad you decided to come.” He had a can of beer in his hand, and he waved it in the general direction of the major center of noisemaking. “There’s beer in the living room and something more potent in the study—190 proof grain alcohol, to be precise. Be careful with that. It will sneak up on you. But—nunc est bibendum!”
“Where’s Mrs. MacDonald?” Lily asked.
“Back there, somewhere.” MacDonald waved again. “The men, and a few brave women, are in the study. The women, and a few brave men, are in the living room. The kitchen is common territory. Take your choice.”
“I really shouldn’t have come,” Lily said. “I offered to spell Mr. Saunders in the control room, but he said I hadn’t been checked out. It isn’t as if the computer couldn’t handle it all alone, and I know enough to call somebody if anything unexpected should happen.”
“Shall I tell you something, Lily?” MacDonald said. “The computer could do it alone. And you and the computer could do it better than any of us, including me. But if the men ever feel that they are unnecessary, they would feel more useless than ever. They would give up. And they mustn’t do that.”
“Oh, Mac!” Lily said.
“They mustn’t do that. Because one of them is going to come up with the inspiration that solves it all. Not me. One of them. We’ll send somebody to relieve Charley before the evening is over.”
