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

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 the cigarettes
being smoke 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 all 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 centuries. 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."
_"If 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 Project for twenty years and head of it for fifteen."
"What's the use of arguing about something we can't know anything
about?" Sonnenborn said reasonably. "We have to base our position on
probabilities. Shklovskii and Sagan estimated that there are more than one
thousand million habitable planets in our galaxy alone. Von Hoerner estimated
that one in three million have advanced societies in orbit around them; Sagan
said one in one hundred thousand. Either way it's good odds that there's
somebody there -- three hundred or ten thousand in our segment of the
universe. Our job is to listen in the right place or in the right way or
understand what we hear."
Adams turned to MacDonald. "What do you say, Mac?"
"I say these basic discussions are good for us," MacDonald said mildly,
"and we need to keep reminding ourselves what it is we're doing, or we'll get
swallowed in a quicksand of data. I also say that it's time now to get down to
the business at hand -- what observations do we make tonight and the rest of
the week before our next staff meeting?"
Saunders began, "I think we should make a methodical sweep of the
entire galactic lens, listening on all wavelengths -- "
 "We've done that a hundred times," said Sonnenborn.
"Not with my new filter -- "
"Tau Ceti still is the most likely," said Olsen. "Let's really give it
a hearing -- "
MacDonald heard Adams grumbling, half to himself, "If there is anybody,
and they are trying to communicate, some amateur is going to pick it up on his
ham set, decipher it on his James Bond coderule, and leave us sitting here on
one hundred million dollars of equipment with egg all over our faces -- "
"And don't forget," MacDonald said, "tomorrow is Saturday night and
Maria and I will be expecting you all at our place at eight for the customary