Collected Short Fiction, page 194
“But we are sending, you said.”
“We’ve been sending since the earliest days of radio,” Adams said. “Low power, most of it, unbeamed, loaded with static and other interfering transmissions, but intelligent life has made Earth the second most powerful radio source in the solar system, and in a few more decades we may equal the sun itself. If there’s anybody out there to notice, that should make Earth visible.”
“But you haven’t heard anything?”
“What would we hear on this little apparatus?” Adams asked, nodding toward the valley beyond the walls. “What we need is some time on the Big Ear upstairs, the five-mile-in-diameter net, or the new net building, but the astronomers won’t give us the time of day.”
“Why don’t you quit?”
“He won’t let us!”
“He?”
“Mac. No, that’s not right. Yes, it is. He keeps us together, he and Maria. There was a time, not so long ago, when it looked as if it would all come apart . . .”
Thomas took another sip of coffee. It was cool enough to drink now, and he swallowed it all.
The drive to MacDonald’s house in the Puerto Rican hills was pleasant as the day closed. The shadows draped themselves across the green slopes like the legs of purple giants. The evening breeze blew the sharp scent of salt in from the ocean. The elderly steam turbine under the hood hummed along with only an occasional vibration to betray its age.
This place must be the cleanest, quietest spot in the whole dirty, noisy world, Thomas thought, like paradise, innocent, before the knowledge of good and evil. Like a carrier, I bring the dirt and noise with me. He felt a moment of irritation that this place should exist in a world of misery and boredom and a flash of satisfaction that he had the power to destroy it.
“Did you learn all you wanted from Adams?”
“What?” Thomas said. “Oh, yes. That and more.”
“I thought you would. He’s a good man, Bob, a man you can call at home in the middle of the night to say that a tire has gone flat in a rainstorm, and you know he’ll come. He talks a lot and complains a lot. You shouldn’t let that keep you from seeing the person underneath.”
“What of the things he told me am I not to believe?” Thomas asked.
“Believe it all,” MacDonald said. “Bob wouldn’t tell you anything but the truth. But there is something misleading in too much truth, even more, perhaps, than too little.”
“Like your wife’s attempted suicide?”
“Like that.”
“And the resignation you tore up?”
“That, too.”
Thomas could not tell whether there was sorrow in MacDonald’s voice or fear of exposure or merely recognition of the irrepressible evils of the world.
As we drive toward his home in the hills near Arecibo, hills as silent as the voices for which he listens in the concrete building we had left, he does not deny that his wife attempted suicide a year ago nor that he wrote a letter of resignation and later tore it up.
The house was a Spanish-style hacienda looking friendly and warm in the gathering darkness, beams of yellow light pouring from door and window. Stepping into the house, Thomas felt it even more, the lived-in, loved-in feeling that he had known only once or twice before in the homes of friends. To those homes he had returned more than to others, to warm himself in their relationship, until he realized what was happening to him. He would stop writing. He would look for someone to ease the ache he had inside, and he would end with a casual affair which would turn to revulsion. He would flee back to his solitary life, back to his writing, to work out on his typewriter keys the agony that pulsed through his veins. And the writing would be twisted and angry like the infernal regions he described. Why hadn’t he written his purgatory? He knew why: under his fingers it kept turning back into hell.
Maria MacDonald was a mature, olive-skinned woman whose beauty went deep. She was dressed in a simple peasant blouse and skirt, and she held his hands in hers and bade him welcome to her home. He felt himself warming to her gentle smile and La American courtesy, and fought it. He wanted to kiss her hand. He wanted to turn it over and see the scar upon her wrist. He wanted to take her in his arms and protect her against the terrors of the night.
He did none of these. He said, “I’m here, you know, to do a piece about the Project, and I’m afraid it will not be favorable.”
She turned her head a little to one side to study him. “You are not an unfriendly man, I think. You are a disappointed man, perhaps. Perhaps bitter. But you are honest. You wonder how I know these things. I have a sense about people, Mr. Thomas. Robby brings them home to me before he hires them, and I tell him about them, and not once have I been wrong. Have I, Robby?”
MacDonald smiled. “Only once.”
“That is a joke,” Maria said. “He means I was wrong about him, but that is another story that I will tell you sometime if I come to know you better, as I hope. I have this sense, Mr. Thomas, and more—I have read your translation and I have read your novel, too, which Robby tells me you have not continued. You must, Mr. Thomas. It is not good to live in the inferno. One must know it, yes, so that one can comprehend the purging of the sins that one must go through to achieve paradise.”
“It was easy to write about hell,” Thomas said, “but I found it impossible to imagine anything else.”
“You have not yet burned away your deadly sins,” Maria said. “You have not yet found anything to believe in, anything to love. Some people never find that, and it is very sad. I feel so sad for them. Do not be one of them. But I am too personal—”
“No, no—”
“You are here to enjoy our hospitality, not to endure my missionary zeal for love and marriage. But I cannot help it, you see.” And she put one arm through her husband’s and offered the other to Thomas as they went from the entryway down the hall tiled with terra cotta to the living room. A bright Mexican rug covered part of the polished oak floor. There, in big leather chairs, they had salty margaritas and casual conversation about New York and San Francisco and friends they might have in common, the literary life, and the political scene, and where Era fitted into both, and how Thomas had started writing for the magazine.
Then Maria ushered them in to dinner. They sat down to what she called a “traditional Mexican comida.” The first course was soup swarming with dumpling-like tortilla balls, vegetables, noodles, and pieces of chicken. The second course was sopa seca, a highly seasoned dish of rice, noodles, and cut-up tortillas in an elaborate sauce; then a fish course was followed by a salad and a main course of cabrtto, roasted young goat, and several vegetables; and this was followed by refried beans smothered with grated cheese. With it all came feathery hot tortillas in napkin-lined baskets. The dinner ended, none too soon for Thomas, with a caramelized milk pudding Maria called “natillas piuranas,” with strong black coffee, and with fresh fruit.
Protesting feebly as the meal progressed that he could eat no more, Thomas surrendered to Maria’s insistence and ate something of each dish as it appeared, until MacDonald laughed and said, “You have fed him too much, Maria. He will be good for nothing for the rest of the evening, and we still have work to do. The Latin Americans, Mr. Thomas, have this kind of meal only upon special occasions, and then in the middle of the day after which they retire for a well-deserved siesta.”
MacDonald filled their glasses with a brandy he called “pisco.”
“May I propose a toast,” he said. “To beauty and good food!”
“To good listening!” said Maria.
“To truth!” Thomas said, to prove that he had not been charmed nor fed into complete subjugation, but his eyes were on the white line that cut across Maria’s olive wrist.
“You have noticed my scar,” Maria said. “That is a reminder of my folly that I will bear with me always.”
“Not your folly,” MacDonald said, “my deafness.”
“It was a little more than a year ago,” Maria said, “and I was feeling a little crazy. I could see that it was not going well with the Project, and Robby was wearing down between the demands of keeping the Project going and his worry over me. It was madness, I know now, but I thought I could remove one of Robby’s concerns by removing myself. I tried suicide with a razor blade, and I almost died But I lived, and I found my sanity again, and Robby and I found each other again.”
“We were never lost,” MacDonald said. “We had just, temporarily, out of human inattention, stopped listening to each other.”
“But you knew all this, didn’t you, Mr. Thomas?” Maria said. “Are you married?”
“I was once,” Thomas said.
“And it was wrong,” Maria said. “That is sad. You must be married. You must have someone to love, someone to love you. Then you can write your Purgatory, your Paradise.”
An infant cried somewhere in the house. Maria looked up happily. “And Robby and I found something else.”
She moved gracefully from the room and returned in a moment with a baby in her arms. It was two or three months old, Thomas thought, and it had dark hair and bright dark eyes in an olive face like its mother, and the eyes seemed to see Thomas where he stood.
“This is Bobby, our son,” Maria said. If she had been alive before, she was doubly alive now, Thomas thought. This was the magnetism that turned painters toward Madonnas for their subjects.
“We were lucky,” MacDonald said. “We waited a long time to have a child, but Bobby came easily and he is normal, not handicapped as are some children of older parents. I think he will grow up to be an ordinary boy burdened with the love of parents old enough to be his grandparents, and I only hope we can understand him.”
“I hope he can understand you,” Thomas said, and then, “Mrs. MacDonald, why don’t you make your husband give up this hopeless Project?”
“I don’t make Robby do anything,” Maria said. “The Project is his life, just as he and Bobby are my life. You think there is something bad about it, a treachery, a deception, but you do not know my husband or the men he has gathered to work with him if you honestly think that. They believe in what they are doing.”
“Then they are fools.”
“No, the fools are those who do not believe, who cannot believe. It may be that there is no one out there, or if there is someone out there, he will never speak to us or we to him; but our listening is an act of faith akin to living itself. If we should stop listening, we would begin dying and we would soon be gone, the world and its people, our technical civilization and even the farmers and peasants, because life is faith, life is commitment. Death is giving up.”
“You have not seen the world the way I have seen it,” Thomas said. “It is dying.”
“Not while men like these still strive,” Maria said.
“You give us too much credit,” MacDonald said.
“No, I do not,” Maria said to Thomas. “My husband is a great man. He listens with his heart. Before you leave this island, you will know that, and you will believe. I have seen others come like you, doubting, eager to destroy; and Robby has taken them in, has given them faith and hope, and they have left, believing.”
“I do not intend to be taken in,” Thomas said.
“You know what I meant.”
“I know that I wish I had someone who believed in me the way you believe in your husband.”
“We’d better go back,” MacDonald said. “I have something to show you.”
Thomas said good-by to Maria MacDonald and thanked her for her hospitality and for her personal concern for him, and he turned and left the hacienda. When he was outside in the darkness, he turned once and looked back at the house with the light pouring from it and the woman standing in the doorway of the house with a baby in her arms.
The difference between day and night is of another order than the difference between light and dark. After the sun has set, the familiar assumes different proportions: distances are elongated and objects shift their places.
As MacDonald and Thomas made their way past the valley into whose arms had been built the semisteerable radio telescope, it was not the same sterile saucer. It was a pit of mystery and shadows gathering strange echoes from the sky within its sheltered bowl, catching the stardust that drifted gently, gently through the night air.
The steerable dish that had been frozen in deathlike rigor against the sky now was alive and questing. Thomas thought he could see it quivering as it strained toward the silent dark.
The Little Ear, they called it, this giant piece of precision machinery, the largest steerable radio telescope on Earth, to distinguish it from the Big Ear, the five-mile-in-diameter network of cables in orbit. At night the visitor can sense the magic it works upon the men who think that they worked their will upon it. For these obsessed men, it is an ear, their ear, cocked responsively toward the silent stars, with supernal power and ingenious filters and by-passes listening to the infinite and hearing only the slow heartbeat of the eternal.
“We inherited it from the astronomers,” MacDonald was saying, “when they put up the first radio telescopes on the far side of the moon and then the first of the networks in space. The earthbound equipment no longer was worth anything, rather like an old crystal set when vacuum tubes were perfected. Instead of junking these instruments, however, they gave them to us with a small budget for operation.”
“Over the decades, the total must mount toward the astronomical,” Thomas said, trying to shake away the effects of the evening’s hospitality and the night’s spells.
“It adds up,” MacDonald agreed, “and we fight for our lives every year. But there are returns. One might compare the Project to a hothouse for intellects, a giant, continuing, unsolvable puzzle against which the most promising minds pit themselves and grow strong. We get the young scientists and engineers and train them and send them on to solve problems >which have solutions. The Project has a surprising number of alumni, many of them overachieving.”
“Is that how you justify the Project, as a kind of graduate school?”
“Oh, no. That is what our predecessors used to call fall out or spin-off. Our ultimate goal and our most valuable goal is communication with other beings on other worlds. I offer you reasons that you may use to justify us if you cannot bring yourself to accept us as we are.”
“Why would I want to justify you?”
“That you will have to find out for yourself.”
Then they were inside the building, and it was different, too. The corridors which had seemed brisk and businesslike in the daytime now were charged with energy and purpose. The control room had been touched by the forefinger of God; where death had been there was life: lights came on and turned off, osciUoscopic eyes were alive with green linear motion, the relays of the consoles clicked gently, the computers chuckled to themselves, electricity whispered along wires.
Adams was seated at the control panel. He had earphones on his head, and his eyes studied the gauges and oscilloscopes spread before him.
As they entered, he looked up and waved. MacDonald’s eyebrows lifted; Adams shrugged. He pulled the earphones down around his neck. “The usual nothing.”
“Here,” MacDonald said, removing the earphones and handing them to Thomas. “You listen.”
Thomas put one of the receivers to his ear. First comes babble, like a multitude of voices heard afar or a stream rippling over a bed of rocks, squirting through crevices, and dashing itself over small waterfalls. Then the sounds grow louder, and they are voices talking earnestly but all together so that none can be heard individually but confused and one. The listener strains to hear, and all his effort only makes the voices more eager to be heard, and they talk louder still and even more indistinguishably. Like Dante, the listener “stood on the edge of the descent where the hollow of the gulf out of despair amasses thunder of infinite lament.” And the voices change from eager pleadings to angry shouts, as if, like damned souls, they demand salvation from the flames in which they bum. They turn upon the listener as if to destroy him for temerity in thrusting himself among fallen angels, in all their arrogance and sinful pride.
“Above I saw a thousand spirits in air rained down from heaven, who angry as if betrayed cried: ‘Who is this who without death doth dare the kingdom of the dead folk to invade?’ “And the listener thinks that he is one of those who shouted to be heard, damned like them in hell, able only to scream at the torment and the frustration of having no one to listen to him and to care what happens to him and to understand. “Even then I heard on all sides wailing sound, but of those making it saw no one nigh, wherefore I stood still, in amazement bound.” And the listener thinks he is among giants “whose rebellious pride Jove’s thunderings out of heaven still appall.” All of them, like him, struggle to be heard in their mighty voices and cannot be understood. “Raphael may amech zabi almi, throat brutish mouth incontinently cried; and they were fitted for no sweeter note.” And the listener feels as if consciousness were about to leave him.
And the voices were gone. MacDonald was lifting the earphones from his ears where, Thomas vaguely recalled, he had placed them himself. And he was shaken by the overpowering influence of those sounds, those voices, all kinds of voices struggling to be heard, blending together into an alien chorus. _
Thomas had a moment of self-revelation in which he knew that he was lost, like the voices, and he would have to find his way out or be damned to live forever within his fleshy prison, as alone in his torment as if he were in hell itself.
“What was that?” he asked, and his voice was shaky.
“The sound of the infinite,” MacDonald said. “We translate the radio signals into audio frequencies. It doesn’t help us pick up anything. If anything is there, it would show up on the tapes, the dials would flash, the computer would sound an alarm; it wouldn’t come out as voice communication. But there is inspiration in hearing something when you’re listening, and we need inspiration.”
“I call it hypnosis,” Thomas said. “It can help convince the doubtful that there really is something there, that they someday may be able to hear clearly what now they imagine, that there really are aliens out there—and it’s only a trick to fool yourselves and perpetrate a fraud upon the world.”
