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

I woke you."
But her voice wasn't sleepy any more. "You won't have to go back
tonight, will you? Well have the evening together?"
"We'll see," he promised.
But he knew he would have to return.
MacDonald paused outside the long, low concrete building that housed
the offices and laboratories and computers. It was twilight. The sun had
descended below the green hills, but orange and purpling wisps of cirrus
trailed down the western sky.
Between MacDonald and the sky was a giant dish held aloft by skeletal
metal fingers -- held high as if to catch the stardust that drifted down at
night from the Milky Way.
_ Go and catch a falling star,_
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil's foot;
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
 Serves to advance an honest mind.
Then the dish began to turn, noiselessly, incredibly, and to tip. And
it was not a dish any more but an ear, a listening ear cupped by the
surrounding hills to overhear the whispering universe.
Perhaps this was what kept them at their jobs, MacDonald thought. In
spite of all disappointments, in spite of all vain efforts, perhaps it was
this massive machinery, as sensitive as their fingertips, that kept them
struggling with the unfathomable. When they grew weary at their electronic
listening posts, when their eyes grew dim with looking at unrevealing dials
and studying uneventful graphs, they could step outside their concrete cells
and renew their dull spirits in communion with the giant mechanism they
commanded, the silent, sensing instrument in which the smallest packets of
energy, the smallest waves of matter, were detected in their headlong, eternal
flight across the universe. It was the stethoscope with which they took the
pulse of the all and noted the birth and death of stars, the probe with which,
here on an insignificant planet of an undistinguished star on the edge of its
galaxy, they explored the infinite.
Or perhaps it was not just the reality but the imagery, like poetry,
that soothed their doubting souls, the bowl held up to catch Donne's falling
star, the ear cocked to hear the shout from the other side of the universe
that faded to an indistinguishable murmur by the time it reached them. And one
thousand miles above them was the giant, five-mile-in-diameter network, the
largest radio telescope ever built, that men had cast into the heavens to
catch the stars.
If they had the Big Ear for more than an occasional reference check,
MacDonald thought practically, then they might get some results. But he knew
the radio astronomers would never relinquish time to the frivolity of
listening for signals that never came. It was only because of the Big Ear that
the Project had inherited the Little Ear. There had been talk recently about a
larger net, twenty miles in diameter. Perhaps when it was done, if it were