"Gunn, James - Listeners" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gunn James E)

THE LISTENERS

James E. Gunn
"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveler,
Knocking on the moonlit door. . . .
The voices babbled.
MacDonald heard them and knew that there was meaning
in them, that they were trying to communicate and that he
could understand them and respond to them if he could only
concentrate on what they were saying, but he couldn't bring
himself to make the effort. He tried again.
"Back behind everything, lurking like a silent shadow
behind the closed door, is the question we can never answer
except positively: Is there anybody there?"
That was Bob Adams, eternally the devil's advocate, look-
ing querulously at the others around the conference table.
His round face was sweating, although the mahogany-paneled
room was cool.
Saunders puffed hard on his pipe. "But that's true of all
science. The image of the scientist eliminating all negative
possibilities is ridiculous. Can't be done. So he goes ahead on
faith and statistical probability."
MacDonald watched the smoke rise above Saunders' head
in clouds and wisps until it wavered in the draft from the
air duct, thinned out, disappeared. He could not see it, but
the odor reached his nostrils. It was an aromatic blend easily
distinguishable from the flatter smell of cigarettes being
smoked by Adams and some of the others.
Wasn't this their task? MacDonald wondered. To detect the
thin smoke of life that drifts through the universe, to separate
one trace from another, molecule by molecule, and then force
them to reverse their entropic paths into their ordered and
meaningful original form.
All the king's horses, and alt the king's men. . . . Life itself
is impossible, he thought, but men exist by reversing entropy.
Down the long table cluttered with overflowing ash trays
and coffee cups and doodled scratch pads Olsen, said, "We
always knew it would be a long search. Not years but cen-
turies. The computers must have sufficient data, and that
means bits of information approximating the number of
molecules in the universe. Let's not chicken out now."
"// seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose," the Walrus said,
"That they could get it clear?"
". . . ridiculous," someone was saying, and then Adams
broke in, "It's easy for you to talk about centuries when
you've been here only three years. Wait until you've been at it
for ten years, like I have. Or Mac here who has been on the