1The girl who came out of the iron mine grew up, and she did not forget the dark.
2Her brother Tom grew up too. He was sent at nineteen to the war in the rice lands on the far side of the world, the long war that America fought there and could not end. He did not come back from it. A letter came instead. Nell read it standing in the kitchen. Afterward she went upstairs and sat by the brass lamp till morning, and Lucy, who was sixteen, sat on the floor against her knees.
3Lucy wrote to him for a month after he was dead. She knew he was dead. She wrote anyway and put the letters in a drawer. Then she stopped, and something in her shut with the drawer. She thought: that is what a message is worth. You send it out, and there is no one there.
4She was good at sums, as her mother was. She went away to school on the western sea and learned the reckoning of orbits. At twenty-four she found work in the dry hills above the city of the angels, in the house where the far travellers were built and steered.
5These were machines without crews, sent out to look at the other worlds and tell what they saw. In the summer she came, two were being made ready, and they were the greatest yet. They were twins. The worlds had lined up that year as they do once in many lifetimes, so that a traveller flung past the first great world would be thrown on by its weight to the second, and so outward, world by world. And after the last world it would go on, into the dark between the stars, and never stop.
6Now there was a watcher of the sky named Carl Sagan, who taught at a school in the east and spoke of the stars so that plain people listened. He saw that these two travellers would outlast everything. The cities would fall and the mountains wear down, and still the travellers would be going on in the cold, whole and unchanged. So he asked that each should carry a letter.
7He and a few friends made it in less than a year. It was a disc of copper covered in gold. Cut into it were the sounds of the earth: rain, and a whale, and a kiss, and a mother's first words to her child. There was music of many peoples. There were greetings spoken in fifty-five tongues, old and new. There were pictures, pressed into sound: a leaf, a street, a woman in a market, a man eating grapes. On the cover was scratched how to play it, in signs that any mind which knew the stars might work out.
8No one knew if there was anyone to find it. If there was, it would not be found for longer than there had been people on the earth. It was a letter put in a drawer the size of the sky.
9The chief of the nation sent his own words to go upon it, and among them was this: "We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours."
10Lucy saw the disc once before it was bolted on. She stood with the others and looked at it under the lamps. She thought of her drawer, and felt nothing. She went back to her desk.
11The twins rose from the flat sands of Florida at the summer's end, sixteen days apart, each on a pillar of fire. Lucy's work was with the second twin, which had in fact gone up first. Her place was small. She was one of those who reckoned the pitch of the call.
12For the traveller was spoken to by a great dish on the ground, in a tone too high for any ear. But the earth turns, and the earth runs round the sun, and the traveller flies. So the tone that leaves the dish is not the tone that arrives, just as the whistle of a train drops as it goes by. Someone must reckon that shift, hour by hour, and bend the call to meet it. In the common way of things it hardly mattered. The traveller's ear was wide, and would catch a call that was a little off and follow it.
13Seven months out, in the spring, it began to matter a great deal.
14That spring the house was in a fever over the other twin, which had troubles of its own. And the second twin was flying well and needed nothing. So for some days no one called it. No one meant this. Each thought another had. A week went by.
15Now the builders had been wise, and they had walked the dark road before night. They had given the traveller a rule. If I hear nothing from home for seven days, I will take it that my ear has failed, and I will change to my second ear. It was a good rule, for no one could fly out to mend it.
16On the seventh day the traveller did as it was made to do. It shut off its good ear and woke the spare.
17And the spare was broken. One small part in it, no bigger than a seed, had failed somewhere on the long road out. The second ear could still hear. But it could no longer follow a tone. It heard one pitch only, a slot as thin as a hair, and any call that fell a little to either side of the slot was nothing to it.
18The house found out the next morning, when they called and the traveller did not answer. They called all day. The great dish poured its voice out across the dark, more strongly than it had ever spoken. And the traveller flew on, fully alive, turned toward the earth, and heard not a word.
19Lucy sat in the long room with the others, under the humming lights. A man behind her said, "Give it more power." Another said they had no more.
20She found she was thinking of her grandfather Per, whom she had known only as an old man with a pipe. And of a thing her mother said that he had said, on a night of storm, to a boy who wanted a ship to send louder. She has no louder.
21The traveller's own rule turned once more. Having heard nothing on the spare, it went back to the first ear, the good one. For half an hour the house rejoiced. Then something in the good ear burned through, like a lamp that flares and goes dark. It never worked again.
22So now there was one ear, and it was the broken one. And the traveller would not turn to it again until seven more days of silence had passed.
23That was a hard week. The men who had built the traveller went through the drawings line by line. And Lucy, with three others, was set to find the slot.
24There was no way to ask the traveller what pitch it could hear. They could only reason it out from what was known of the broken part, as you guess the note of a cracked bell from its shape. Then they must lay the earth's turning on top of that, and the earth's running, and the traveller's flight. The call had to arrive in the slot. It was like throwing a thread from a moving cart through the eye of a needle on another moving cart, at a distance the light itself took most of half an hour to cross.
25She worked through three nights. She was the youngest in the room and no one would have blamed her for an error. But she kept seeing, at the edge of her mind, a white chalk cross on wet stone. A way tried and shut. She wrote down each pitch they had already sent that had fallen dead, so that no one, tired at four in the morning, would send it again.
26On the fourth night she found something. The slot was not still. It crept. She laid the dead calls out in a row with the hours beside them, and saw that the pitch the ear would take had been sliding all week. For a while she could not see why. Then she saw it. Whenever the traveller turned a part of itself on or off, it grew a little warmer or a little cooler, by less than a hand could feel. And the broken ear, having lost the part that held it true, drifted with the warmth like a fiddle string in a damp room.
27She took it to the chief of her section, an old engineer named Haskell who had flown nothing and steered everything. He looked at her row of figures a long while.
28"So we must know how warm it is," he said, "to know what it can hear."
29"Yes. And each time we tell it to do anything, we change how warm it is. So we change what it can hear next."
30"God help us," said Haskell mildly. "It's like talking to my father." He kept the page.
31On the seventh day the rule turned, and the traveller woke its one ear. The house was ready. They had the pitch reckoned to a hair, and the warmth, and the turning of the earth. They sent a short word. Stay on this ear. Do not go back to the other. For if the traveller changed over once more to the dead one, it would wait there another week, and the pitch would have wandered again.
32The word left the dish. Then there was nothing to do. The call needed the better part of half an hour to go out, and the answer the same to come home. All that was the Far Hand's work. The room was very quiet. Someone had made coffee and no one drank it.
33Lucy sat with her hands in her lap. She had not prayed since Tom. She did not pray now. She found that she was simply listening, with all of her. She had not listened so since she was nine years old with her palm on a wet wall, counting steps.
34She thought: it is out there, and it is not dead. It is only hard of hearing. Nothing was the matter with our voice. We were calling to it in the wrong place.
35At the fifty-third minute a line of small green figures on the glass in front of Haskell changed. He leaned in. He took off his spectacles and put them on again.
36"It took it," he said. "It heard us."
37There was no cheering, any more than there had been under the rock ledge in the snow ten thousand years before, when the coal caught. People put their heads down on their arms. A man laughed in a way that was near to something else. Haskell came down the row, and stopped by Lucy's chair, and put two fingers on her page of dead calls, and tapped it once, and went on.
38She drove home in the grey of morning and telephoned her mother, three hours ahead in the iron hills. Nell was already up.
39"We got it back," said Lucy. "It can hear. Only on one pitch, Mama. For the rest of its life we'll have to reckon the pitch each time we speak to it, and know how warm it is, and aim. It will never be easy again. But it hears."
40"How far will it go?" Nell asked.
41"Past all the worlds. Then on. Forty thousand years before it so much as passes another star."
42"Carrying that gold letter."
43"Yes."
44Nell was quiet on the wire. Then she said, "You wrote to your brother after. I found them, when I was looking for stamps. I never said."
45Lucy could not speak.
46"I didn't think it was foolish," said Nell. "I want you to know that. Your grandfather sent I am here for three hours to a ship that couldn't answer. He didn't know if one stroke of it got through. He told me once he'd have sent it all the same if he had known for sure that none did." She stopped to steady her voice. "It's not only for the one who hears, Lucy. It keeps the sender's own door from shutting."
47Lucy stood in her kitchen in the dry hills with the sun coming up yellow. She had spent a week learning the exact shape of another's deafness, so that she could speak into it. She had not known she was able to care so much whether a thing heard her.
48She thought of the disc. For the first time she understood it. It had not been made in the belief that it would be found. Those who made it could not bear to be a people who had not tried.
49Now hear what became of the traveller. It flew on with its one narrow ear. It passed the first great world and the ringed one. Then, because it had been saved that spring, it went on alone to the two cold outer worlds that no machine had ever seen, and sent home their faces. No other traveller has been to them since.
50It is flying now, as you read this. It has gone out past the sun's last wind into the dark between the stars. It still hears, on its one pitch, and people still reckon the pitch and call to it.
51And the gold letter is with it. No one can call that letter back or change it. It says what the people of one small world thought worth saying in the years when they were not sure they would last.
52Lucy Brandt stayed in the house of the far travellers for thirty years. She took the letters to Tom out of the drawer and kept them where she could see them. And when the first twin, far ahead of the second, was asked to turn round once and look back, she was in the room for that also. But that is told later, for a night was coming on the other side of the world when it seemed there might be no one left to look back at.