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

"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