Nebula Awards Showcase 2008 Page 28

  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 très-bonne, à la très-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 anymore. 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 front, 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.”

  Wer immer strebens sich bemüht,

  Den können wir erlösen.

  Lily sighed. “Okay, boss.”

  “And enjoy yourself!”

  “Okay, boss, okay.”

  “Find a man, Lily,” MacDonald muttered. And then he, too, turned toward the living room, for Lily had been the last who might come.

  He listened for a moment at the doorway, sipping slowly from the warming can.

  “—work more on gamma rays—”

  “Who’s got the money to build a generator? Since nobody’s built one yet, we don’t even know what it might cost.”

  “—gamma-ray sources should be a million times more rare than radio sources at twenty-one centimeters—”

  “That’s what Cocconi said nearly fifty years ago. The same arguments. Always the same arguments.”

  “If they’re right, they’re right.”

  “But the hydrogen-emission line is so uniquely logical. As Morrison said to Cocconi—and Cocconi, if you remember, agreed—it represents a logical, prearranged rendezvous point. ‘A unique, objective standard of frequency, which must be known to every observer of the universe,’ was the way they put it.”

  “—but the noise level—”

  MacDonald smiled and moved on to the kitchen for a cold can of beer.

  “—Bracewell’s ‘automated messengers’?” a voice asked querulously.

  “What about them?”

  “Why aren’t we looking for them?”

  “The point of Bracewell’s messengers is that they make themselves known to us!”

  “Maybe there’s something wrong with ours. After a few million years in orbit—”

  “—laser beams make more sense.”

  “And get lost in all that star shine?”

  “As Schwartz and Townes pointed out, all you have to do is select a wavelength of light that is absorbed by stellar atmospheres. Put a narrow laser beam in the center of one of the calcium absorption lines—”

  In the study they were talking about quantum noise.

  “Quantum noise favors low frequencies.”

  “But the noise itself sets a lower limit on those frequencies.”

  “Drake calculated the most favorable frequencies, considering the noise level, lie between 3.2 and 8.1 centimeters.”

  “Drake! Drake! What did he know? We’ve had nearly fifty years’ experience on him. Fifty years of technological advance. Fifty years ago we could send radio messages one thousand light-years and laser signals ten light-years. Today those figures are ten thousand and five hundred at least.”

  “What if nobody’s there?” Adams said gloomily.

  Ich bin der Geist der stets vernient.

  “Short-pulse it, like Oliver suggested. One hundred million billion watts in a ten-billionth of a second would smear across the entire radio spectrum. Here, Mac, fill this, will you?”

  And MacDonald wandered away through the clustering guests toward the bar.

  “And I told Charley,” said a woman to two other women in the corner, “if I had a dime for every dirty diaper I’ve changed, I sure wouldn’t be sitting here in Puerto Rico—”

  “—neutrinos,” said somebody.

  “Nuts,” said somebody else, as MacDonald poured grain alcohol carefully into the glass and filled it with orange juice, “the only really logical medium is Q waves.”

  “I know—the waves we haven’t discovered yet but are going to discover about ten years from now. Only here it is nearly fifty years after Morrison suggested it, and we still haven’t discovered them.”

  MacDonald wended his way back across the room.

  “It’s the night work that gets me,” said someone’s wife. “The kids up all day, and then he wants me there to greet him when he gets home at dawn. Brother!”

  “Or what if everybody’s listening?” Adams said gloomily. “Maybe everybody’s sitting there, listening, just the way we are, because it’s so much cheaper than sending.”

  “Here you are,” MacDonald said.

  “But don’t you suppose somebody would have thought of that by this time and begun to send?”

  “Double-think it all the way through and figure what just occurred to you would have occurred to everybody else, so you might as well listen. Think about it—everybody sitting around, listening. If there is anybody. Either way it makes the skin creep.”

  “All right, then, we ought to send something.”

  “What would you send?”

  “I’d have to think about it. Prime numbers, maybe.”

  “Think some more. What if a civilization weren’t mathematical?”

  “Idiot! How would they build an antenna?”

  “Maybe they’d rule-of-thumb it, like a ham. Or maybe they have built-in antennae.”

  “And maybe you have built-in antennae and don’t know it.”

  MacDonald’s can of beer was empty. He wandered back toward the kitchen again.

  “—insist on equal time with the Big Ear. Even if nobody’s sending we could pick up the normal electronic commerce of a civilization t
ens of light-years away. The problem would be deciphering, not hearing.”

  “They’re picking it up now, when they’re studying the relatively close systems. Ask for a tape and work out your program.”

  “All right, I will. Just give me a chance to work up a request—”

  MacDonald found himself beside Maria. He put his arm around her waist and pulled her close. “All right?” he said.

  “All right.”

  Her face was tired, though, MacDonald thought. He dreaded the notion that she might be growing older, that she was entering middle age. He could face it for himself. He could feel the years piling up inside his bones. He still thought of himself, inside, as twenty, but he knew that he was forty-seven, and mostly he was glad that he had found happiness and love and peace and serenity. He even was willing to pay the price in youthful exuberance and belief in his personal immortality. But not Maria!

  Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

  Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

  Che la diritta via era smarrita.

  “Sure?”

  She nodded.

  He leaned close to her ear. “I wish it was just the two of us, as usual.”

  “I, too.”

  “I’m going to leave in a little while—”

  “Must you?”

  “I must relieve Saunders. He’s on duty. Give him an opportunity to celebrate a little with the others.”

  “Can’t you send somebody else?”

  “Who?” MacDonald gestured with good-humored futility at all the clusters of people held together by bonds of ordered sounds shared consecutively. “It’s a good party. No one will miss me.”

  “I will.”

  “Of course, querida.”

  “You are their mother, father, priest, all in one,” Maria said. “You worry about them too much.”

  “I must keep them together. What else am I good for?”

  “For much more.”

  MacDonald hugged her with one arm.

  “Look at Mac and Maria, will you?” said someone who was having trouble with his consonants. “What goddamned devotion!”