Collected Short Fiction, page 183
Thomas laughed. “Scientists are dangerous. They bought you off with toys, but when the toys turned out to be real they began to worry.”
“What can the Solitarians do?”
Mitchell asked. “Besides talk among themselves.”
“They’re big,” MacDonald said, “and they’re growing. “They want the Project stopped and they’re putting pressure on Senators and Congressmen. In spite of your good work, in spite of what I’ve called public acceptance, they still manage to exploit mankind’s basic fear of meeting a superior. And there’s no doubt that the Capellans are superior.”
“How so?” Mitchell asked, and as he heard the words he felt that his tone was a little sharper than he had intended.
The floor shook again. The gift counter was just ahead. MacDonald already was running his gaze along the shelves.
“They’re clearly older and more capable than we,” MacDonald said. “Their giant red suns are older than our sun by millions—perhaps billions—of years, depending, say my astronomers, on the effect of mass on stellar evolution. In any case, we have not even been able to pick up radio broadcasts from other worlds, much less rebroadcast them so that the original world could receive them again.”
“ ‘Who’s that little chatterbox?’ ” Thomas half-sang, half-chanted, his gaze distant. “PepsiCola hits the spot.” He shivered.
MacDonald bought a new book, a romantic novel about love and peril in orbit, for his wife. A three-dimensional scale model of the stars surrounding Earth to a distance of fifty light-years—including, of course, Capella—he chose for his son. And then, admitting that an eight-month-old infant would have little use for the model, at least for a year or two, he picked out for the babe a stuffed toy ostrich. It was so big that it had to go into the jet’s baggage compartment.
“ROBBY!” Maria said in the little waiting room of the airport just outside Arecibo. She was frowning as she tried not to laugh at the gigantic bird with the long legs that stood in front of her. “Hush, now,” she said to the crying child in her arms, “it won’t hurt you.” And then she said to MacDonald, “What a monstrous bird to give a baby!”
Mitchell thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He wondered what she would have been like at twenty or even thirty. Between Maria and his work, MacDonald had two magnificent reasons for remaining in Arecibo as much as possible.
“I’m a fool,” MacDonald said, stricken. “I just can’t seem to understand my own family.”
“Considering,” Thomas said, “how well he understands and communicates with everybody else.”
“Ah!” MacDonald said deprecatingly. “What of Jeremiah?”
“At least you got him to listen,” Thomas said, “and to promise to come.”
Maria’s smile burst upon MacDonald. “You did, Robby? You won him over?”
“Nothing as final as that,” MacDonald said. “Here, now, let me hold him.”
He held out his arms to the squalling boy. The baby went to him willingly, trustingly, but not looking at the stuffed bird all the same. In a moment or two the infant’s yells turned to sobs and the sobs to silence.
“Now, Bobby,” MacDonald said, “you know your father wouldn’t bring you anything that would hurt you—though, to be sure, it might frighten you at first. Well, come along,” he said to the ostrich, putting his gaze on its black eyes, enigmatic in their plastic sockets, “we will grow up to you.”
He tucked the bird under his other arm, turned toward the door and stopped. “What am I thinking of?” he asked Maria. “These are my guests. You know George, our own doubting Thomas. And this other handsome gentleman is Bill Mitchell, who is a star-crossed lover.”
“Hello, George,” Maria said, presenting her cheek to be kissed. “Hello, Bill,” she said, extending her hand. “I hope the stars are as kind to you as they have been to me.”
“It’s not all that serious,” Mitchell said, trying to keep his tone light. “You know, a stubborn father, a girl who must choose—it will all work out.”
“I know it will,” Maria said, and Mitchell was swayed for a moment by her conviction. “Come,” Maria said, “I will fix you all a good Mexican supper.”
As Maria withdrew her hand from his, Mitchell caught a glimpse of a white scar that crossed her wrist.
“Querida “ MacDonald said apologetically, “we ate on the plane.”
“You call that eating?”
“Besides,” MacDonald said, “we are on our way to the Project. We’ve still got work to do. Tomorrow—before these gentlemen must fly back to New York—you can fix a big dinner. Okay?”
Partially mollified, she gave him a comic shrug and a broad: “Hokay.”
He laughed.
They put their bags and the ostrich into the trunk of MacDonald’s car. The baby was relieved when the stuffed bird disappeared: he settled comfortably onto his father’s shoulder. Maria drove. She handled the car skillfully for a woman, Mitchell thought, particularly for a beautiful woman. The old steam turbine hummed peacefully under the hood as they climbed the quiet green hills in the night.
It had been a long day that started in New York and ended in Puerto Rico by way of Texas and Florida, and Mitchell should have been exhausted. But for him the evening was enchanted. He did not know why. Perhaps it was the Puerto Rican quiet after the urban congestion of Texas, perhaps the automobile taking them farther from civilization, perhaps the calm beauty of MacDonald’s wife, perhaps their domestic chatter in the front seat. Usually this kind of thing embarrassed him, this talk of food and family in which he played the role of an unwilling eavesdropper, but somehow this was different.
Maybe, he thought, people are not so disgusting . . .
HE LOOKED at Thomas. Even Thomas felt it. This man of tangled nerves, one-time poet and novelist, sometime muckraking reporter, now committed propagandist for the Project and its cause, was staring quietly out a window as if he had packaged all his worries and mailed them back to Manhattan.
The journey in the moonlight went on. Mitchell found himself wishing it would never end, this trip beyond time and space, but then he saw below them a valley that gleamed metallic in the night. Across the valley some giant spider had been busy spinning cables in a precise mathematical pattern; it was a web to catch the stars. Beyond it they came upon a giant ear cocked to the sky to hear the whispers of the night.
And then the car drifted onto a broad parking lot that gleamed phosphorescently in the moonlight and came to a stop beside a long, low concrete building. Mitchell blinked. The spell faded. It faded slowly. Looking back later Mitchell thought that it continued to color his impressions for as long as he stayed on the island.
They left the car. MacDonald placed the sleeping child gently in the seat and strapped him down. He kissed Maria and murmured something about his plans.
Thomas and Mitchell took their bags out of the trunk; Mitchell removed the ostrich. “I’ll keep him at the office for a while,” he said, “until Bobby gets used to him.”
The car whispered away. MacDonald opened the door to the building.
“Here we are.”
Thomas stopped in the doorway and motioned toward the distant steerable telescope, moving slowly on its supporting arm.
“You’re still searching?”
MacDonald shrugged. “Just because we picked up one message doesn’t mean there are no others, that our search is ended. And we have engineers who are good at listening but not so good at understanding what they hear—so far, of course, none of us have been very good at that—and we don’t want to lose them, to see the team broken up before the game is over.
They entered the building. The corridors were of painted concrete, the floors tiled, all lit by radiant fixtures. From the cars in the parking lot Mitchell had assumed the place was busy, but somehow he was unprepared for the bustle. Men walked purposefully along the halls, papers in their hands, nodding at MacDonald as if he had never been away, or talking eagerly to each other, not noticing MacDonald and the strangers. Or women moved past, more sociable, talking to MacDonald, asking about his trip, about Maria and Bobby, being introduced to the visitors.
And then MacDonald had them down the hall to an open door. “Here’s our listening post,” he said to Mitchell, pulling him by one arm into the doorway. For some reason Mitchell did not mind being guided.
THE room was filled with electronic equipment, a computer, recording devices; it smelled of ozone. Two men were in the room, one at a panel against a wall, tinkering with its wiring, the other sitting in a chair, earphones over his head. He looked up, waved and turned one earphone out toward MacDonald in a gesture of invitation. MacDonald waved back and shook his head.
“What’s with the bird?” the listener called out.
MacDonald shook his head again. “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you later.” He turned back to Mitchell. “Any-other time I’d take you in and show you what we have here. I’d let you listen to the music of the spheres, the sound of the infinite, the voices of the damned who cannot make themselves understood, but right now we don’t have time.”
“Don’t do it,” Thomas warned Mitchell, half-seriously. “You’ll never be the same. That’s what makes them all so strange.”
“You want to hear the Message,” MacDonald asked, smiling. “You want to know why we haven’t deciphered it in six months of effort. Six months and the Solitarians gather their forces, Congress grows nervous about appropriations and the efforts of clever, dedicated communicators like you and George are in danger of being frittered away.”
Mitchell shook his head.
“You’re right,” MacDonald said. “We haven’t deciphered the Message and we should have done it by now with all the minds and all the computers we’ve had working on it. Come on. I’ll show you.”
They passed other doors, other rooms where doors were open and men and women worked at desks or benches or panels. The computer room was at the end of the corridor. It was called the computer room apparently, because instead of walls it had computers and the floor was so filled with data-input keyboards and printers that there was scarcely room to walk between them.
At the keyboard amid the computers, like a witch surrounded by familiars, sat a middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair cut short.
“Hello, Oley,” MacDonald said.
“You brought me a present,” the other said.
MacDonald sighed, took the ostrich out from under his arm, put it in a distant corner and said, “No, Oley, I brought you some guests.” He introduced Mitchell to Olsen, his computer expert. Thomas had met him before.
Mitchell looked around at all the machines, trying to guess what they all did.
“Any breakthroughs?” MacDonald asked.
“We’re lucky we haven’t lost ground,” Olsen said.
“Play your best selection for our visitors,” MacDonald said.
Olsen pressed two keys on his keyboard. A visual display appeared on a window in front of him, broken rows of white numbers on a gray background, but Mitchell looked at it only for a moment. They he was listening to sounds that came from concealed speakers—a soft hiss, then silence, then a noise, silence, more noise. Sometimes the noise would be loud, sometimes soft, sometimes brief, sometimes extended, sometimes a click, sometimes a buzz or a plop.
MITCHELL looked at Thomas and they both looked at MacDonald. “I can get better messages from a thunderstorm,” Mitchell said.
“That’s part of the problem,” MacDonald said. “Part of what we get between the rebroadcasts of our old radio programs is static. Add the effect of distance, of interruption, of fading. But part of what we pick up, we think, is communication. The problem is how to distinguish one from the other. Tell them what we’re trying to do, Oley.”
“First we try to clean up the transmission,” Olsen said. “Filter out the natural noise electronically, I mean. We try to eliminate what is clearly casual, then run a series of variables on what is questionable, hardening up the signals, reinforcing them where necessary—”
“Show them what we get when we clean it up,” MacDonald said.
Olsen pressed two more keys. From the speakers came a firm series of sounds and silences, like the buzz of an old-fashioned international code without the dashes: a dot and another dot, a long silence—six more dots, a silence—seven more dots, silence—dot, silence—dot . . .
They listened, Mitchell and Thomas, trying to make sense out of it, and finally looked up sheepishly for there was no way they could decipher the message just by listening to it.
“There’s something hypnotic about it all the same,” Mitchell said.
“But that’s no better than the other,” Thomas said, “and it’s not real. This isn’t the way it originally sounds.”
Olsen shrugged. “The unfiltered stuff isn’t, either. It’s just the way our particular speakers interpret the small packets of energy picked up on our radio programs of ninety years ago. With the help of the computers we have reinterpreted the message in sounds that seem more familiar or more meaningful.”
“And you still can’t read it,” Thomas said.
Olsen nodded. “We’ve still got problems. We’re trying to find duplications, repetitions, patterns. We don’t know where the message starts or where it ends, whether it’s one message given over and over again or a series of messages. Sometimes we think we’ve found something; it works for a while and then it falls apart.”
“Found what?” Mitchell asked. “A statement?”
“In what language?” Olsen asked.
“Well, mathematics, maybe. Like one and one equal two—or the Pythagorean theorem or something.”
MacDonald smiled. “That would be useful for catching our attention, for demonstrating that it was a message sent by intelligent beings, but they’ve done that, don’t you see? With the rebroadcast of our radio programs.”
“What kind of message could they send that would mean anything?” Mitchell asked.
“Sound and silence,” Thomas mused. “Sound and silence. It must mean something.”
“Dots and silence,” Mitchell said. “That’s what Mac told Jeremiah. Dots and silence. That’s what it sounds like, too. Dots and no dashes. Dots and blanks.”
MacDonald looked quickly at Mitchell. “Say that again.”
“Dots and silence. That’s what you said. To Jeremiah.”
“No,” MacDonald said. “What you said after that.”
“Dots and no dashes,” Mitchell repeated. “Dots and blanks.”
“Dots and blanks,” MacDonald repeated. “Dots and blanks.”
“Dots and blanks,” MacDonald mused. “What does that remind you of, Olsen? A crossword puzzle? Do you suppose—The old Drake game?” He turned to Olsen. “Let’s try it. For all the combinations of prime numbers.”
He turned to Mitchell. “Bill you send a message to Jeremiah over my signature. Three words. ‘Come. Message deciphered.’ ”
“Are you so sure you have the answer?” Thomas asked. “Can’t you wait to make certain?”
“You’ve felt that confidence before,” MacDonald’s tone made it a question, “the feeling that you know you have the answer even before you try it out, a kind of instant communication?”
“Yes,” Thomas said. “Yes.”
“And I want Jeremiah to be here when we run it off for the first time,” MacDonald said. “I think that may be very important.”
Mitchell paused at the door. “You aren’t going to try it until then?” he asked incredulously.
MacDonald shook his head slowly.
THE room already was crowded with people when Jeremiah and Judith and MacDonald came through the door. Thomas was there and Olsen and a dozen more of MacDonald’s colleagues on the Project.
Mitchell had been surprised when Jeremiah’s message arrived—he had outdone MacDonald’s brevity by a word, “I come—” and even more surprised when Judith’s message arrived soon afterward giving the arrival time. Mitchell had never known Jeremiah to fly, and he had not thought the old man would come at all.
The wait for Mac to return from the airport with Jeremiah had been nearly unendurable for Mitchell; how much more difficult must it have been for the others who had been working so long on the Project? But they were remarkably patient. They shifted their positions from time to time as they waited, but no one moved to leave, no one complained, no one urged Olsen to give them a preview. Perhaps, Mitchell thought, they had been selected for patience by the long years of the Project when they had achieved nothing but negatives. Or perhaps they were an exceptional group of men and women shaped into a high-morale group by MacDonald’s leadership.
Mitchell did not find himself repelled by their proximity. He found himself liking them individually—even collectively.
Jeremiah entered the room like a high priest wrapped in his robes of office, aloof, cold, unapproachable. MacDonald tried to introduce him to the members of his staff, but Jeremiah waved him away. He studied the machinery on wall and floor, ignoring the people.
Judith followed him, nodding at the people they passed as if to make up for her father’s absence of humanity. Mitchell’s flesh grew taut as he saw her again and he wondered why it was Judith, why it was this one girl among many, who made him shiver.
Jeremiah stopped in front of MacDonald, as if they were the only two persons in the room, and said, “It takes all this to read one small Message? For the faithful it requires only a believing heart.”
MACDONALD smiled. “One small difference between us makes necessary all the apparatus. Our faith requires that all data and results can be duplicated by anyone using the same equipment and techniques. And with all the believing hearts in the world, none, I think, has received identical Messages.”
“It isn’t necessary,” Jeremiah said.
“I understand that your communications are highly personal,” MacDonald said, “but wouldn’t it be wonderful if the important Messages could be received by all the faithful?”
Jeremiah looked at MacDonald. It seemed to Mitchell that these two men were alone in the room and that they were battling for each other’s souls. He reached out and took Judith’s hand. She glanced at him and then down at their hands and then away, not speaking. But she didn’t take her hand away and Mitchell thought he felt her fingers tighten.
