“Peter, I've just examined some forty-odd nearby stars of roughly solar spectral type. I've looked in the twenty-one centimeter hydrogen line, which everybody says is the obvious beacon frequency—because hydrogen is the most abundant atom in the universe, and so on. And I've done it with the highest sensitivity ever tried. There's not a hint of a signal. Maybe there's no one out there. Maybe the whole business is a waste of time.”
“Like life on Venus? That's just disillusionment talking. Venus is a hellhole of a world; it's just one planet. But there's hundreds of billions of stars in the Galaxy. You've looked at only a handful. Wouldn't you say it's a little premature to give up? You've done on-billionth of the problem. Probably much less than that, if you consider other frequencies.”
“I know, I know. But don't you have the sense that if they're anywhere, they're everywhere? If really advanced guys live a thousand light-years away, shouldn't they have an outpost in our backyard? You could do the SETI thing forever, you know, and never convince yourself that you'd completed the search.”
“Oh, you're beginning to sound like Dave Drumlin. If we can't find them in his lifetime, he's not interested. We're just beginning SETI. You know how many possibilities there are. This is the time to leave every option open. This is the time to be optimistic. If we lived in any previous time in human history, we could wonder about this all our lives, and we couldn't do a thing to find the answer. But this time is unique.
This is the first time when anybody's been able to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. You've made the detector to look for civilizations on the planets of millions of other stars. Nobody's guaranteeing success.
But can you think of a more important question? Imagine them out there sending us signals, and nobody on Earth is listening. That would be a joke, a travesty. Wouldn't you be ashamed of your civilization if we were able to listen and didn't have the gumption to do it?”
Two hundred fifty-six images of the left world swam by on the left. Two hundred fifty-six images of the right world glided by on the right. He integrated all 512 images into a wraparound view of his surroundings.
He was deep in a forest of great waving blades, some green, some etiolated, almost all larger than me. But he had no difficulty clambering up and over, occasionally balancing precariously on a bent blade, falling to the gentle cushion of horizontal blades below, and then continuing unerringly on his journey. He could tell he was centered on the trail. It was tantalizingly fresh. He would think of nothing, if that's where the trail led, of scaling an obstacle a hundred or a thousand times as tall as he was. He needed no pylons or ropes; he was already equipped. The ground immediately before him was redolent with a marker odor left recently, it must be, by another scout of his clan. It would lead to food; it almost always did. The food would spontaneously appear. Scouts would find it and mark the trail. He and his fellows would bring it back. Sometimes the food was a creature rather like himself; other times it was only an amorphous or crystalline lump. Occasionally it was so large that many of his clan would be required, working together, heaving and shoving it over the folded blades, to carry it home. He smacked his mandibles in anticipation.
“What worries me the most,” she continued, “is the opposite, the possibility that they're not trying. They could communicate with us, all right, but they're not doing it because they don't see any point to it. It's like…”—she glanced down at the edge of the tablecloth they had spread over the grass—” like the ants. They occupy the same landscape that we do. They have plenty to do, things to occupy themselves. On some level they're very well aware of their environment. But we don't try to communicate with them. So I don't think they have the foggiest notion that we exist.”
A large ant, more enterprising than his fellows, had ventured onto the tablecloth and was briskly marching along the diagonal of one of the red and white squares. Suppressing a small twinge of revulsion, she gingerly flicked it back onto the grass—where it belonged.
CHAPTER 3
White Noise
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter.
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
The pulses had been journeying for years through the great dark between the stars. Occasionally, they would intercept an irregular cloud of gas and dust, and a little of the energy would be absorbed or scattered. The remainder continued in the original direction. Ahead of them was a faint yellow glow, slowly increasing in brightness among the other unvarying lights. Now, although to human eyes it would still be a point, it was by far the brightest object in the black sky.
The pulses were encountering a horde of giant snowballs.
Entering the Argus administration building was a willowy woman in her late thirties. Her eyes, large and set far apart, served to soften the angular bone structure of her face. Her long dark hair was loosely gathered by a tortoise barrette at the nape of her neck. Casually dressed in a knit T-shirt and khaki skirt, she strolled along a hallway on the first floor and entered a door marked “E. Arroway, Director.” As she removed her thumb from the fingerprint deadlock, and observer might have noticed a ring on her right hand with an oddly milky red stone unprofessionally set in it. Turning on a desk lamp, she rummaged through a drawer, finally producing a pair of earphones. Briefly illuminated on the wall beside her desk was a quotation from the Parables of Franz Kafka:
“Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence…
Someone might possibly have escaped from their singing;
but from their silence, certainly never.”
Extinguishing the light with a wave of her hand, she made for the door in the semidarkness.
In the control room she quickly reassured herself that all was in order. Through the window she could see a few of the 131 radio telescopes that stretched for tens of kilometers across the New Mexico scrub desert like some strange species of mechanical flower straining toward the sky. It was early afternoon and she had been up late the night before. Radio astronomy can be performed during daylight, because the air does not scatter radio waves from the Sun as it does ordinary visible light. To a radio telescope pointing anywhere but very close to the Sun, the sky is pitch black. Except for the radio sources.
Beyond the Earth's atmosphere, on the other side of the sky, is a universe teeming with radio emission. By studying radio waves you can learn about planets and stars and galaxies, about the composition of great clouds of organic molecules that drift between the stars, about the origin and evolution and fate of the universe. But all these radio emissions are natural—caused by physical processes, electrons spiraling in the galactic magnetic field, or interstellar molecules colliding with one another, or the remote echoes of the Big Bang red-shifted from gamma rays at the origin of the universe to the tame and chill radio waves that fill all of space in our epoch.
In the scant few decades in which humans have pursued radio astronomy, there has never been a real signal from the depths of space, something manufactured, something artificial, something contrived by an alien mind. There have been false alarms. The regular time variation of the radio emission from quasars and, especially, pulsars had at first been thought, tentatively, tremulously, to be a kind of announcement signal from someone else, or perhaps a radio navigation beacon for exotic ship that plied the spaces between the stars. But they had turned out to be something else—equally exotic, perhaps, as a signal from beings in the night sky. Quasars seemed to be stupendous sources of energy, perhaps connected with massive black holes at the centers of galaxies, many of them observed more than halfway back in time to the origin of the universe. Pulsars are rapidly spinning atomic nuclei the size of a city. And there had been other rich and mysterious messages that had turned out to be intelligent after a fashion but not very extraterrestrial. The skies were now peppered with secret military radar systems and radio communication satellites that were beyond the entreaty of a few civilian radio astronomers. Sometimes they were real outlaws, ignoring international telecommunications agreements. There were no recourses and no penalties. Occasionally, all nations denied responsibility. But there had never been a
