something lacking. Or something they were afraid of.

Like a little boy whistling loudly as he walks by a cemetery at night.

Partch got out of his chair and stared out the window again. There was a fire over on the East Side, a bad one by the smoke. The fire engines went screaming through the streets like wounded dragons. Sirens, bells. Police whistles.

All at once, Partch realized that never in his life had he experienced real quiet or solitude. That actually, he had no conception of what an absence of thunder and wailing would be like. A total absence of sound and noise.

Almost, it was like trying to imagine what a negation of space would be like.

And then he turned, and his eyes fell on Bob Wills' machine. It could reduce the noise level of a rocket motor by 25 per cent, Wills had said. Here in the office, the sound level was less than that of a rocket motor.

And the machine worked on ordinary house current, Bob had said.

Partch had an almost horrifying idea. Suppose....

But what would Dr. Coles say about this, Partch wondered. Oh, he had to get a grip on himself. This was silly, childish....

But looking down, he found that he had already plugged in the line cord. An almost erotic excitement began to shake Joseph's body. The sense of disaster had surged up anew, but he didn't recognize it yet.

An absence of sound? No! Silly!

Then a fire engine came tearing around the corner just below the window, filling the office with an ocean of noise.

Joseph's hand jerked and flicked the switch.

And then the dream came back to him, the nightmare of the night before that had precipitated, unknown to him, his mood of foreboding. It came back to him with stark realism and flooded him with unadorned fear.

In the dream, he had been in a forest. Not just the city park, but a real forest, one thousands of miles and centuries away from human civilization. A wood in which the foot of Man had never trod.

It was dark there, and the trees were thick and tall. There was no wind, the leaves were soft underfoot. And Joseph Partch was all 

 Prev. P 5/6 next