Mind Webs - The Sound Machine

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1:26Fire. Mine. Wave. Fire. Welcome to half hour of mind waves. Short stories from the worlds of speculative fiction. This is Michael Hansen. The mind web story this evening comes from the volume Someone Like You. A collection of stories by Roll Thow, published by Alfred A. Kanoff. This is the sound machine.

2:31It was a warm summer evening, and the cautionary walked quickly through the front gate and around the side of the house into the garden at the back. You went on down the garden until he came to a wooden shed and locked the door, went inside and closed the door behind him. The interior of the shed was an unpainted room. Against one wall on the left, there was a long wooden workbench. And on it, among the littering of wires and batteries and small sharp tools, there stood a black box about three feet long, the shape of a child's coffin. The classroom was moved across the room to the box. The top of the box was open, and he bent down and began to poke and peer inside it among a mass of different colored wires and silver tubes. He picked up a piece of paper that lay beside the box, studied it carefully, put it down, peered inside the box, and started running his fingers along the wires, tugging gently at them to test the connections, glancing back at the paper, then into the box,

3:31and at the paper again checking each wire. He did this for perhaps an hour. Then he put a hand around to the front of the box where there were three dials, and he began to twittle them, and watching at the same time, the movement of the mechanism inside the box. All the while, he kept speaking softly to himself, nodding his head, smiling sometimes, his hands always moving, the fingers moving swiftly, and definitely inside the box. His mouth twisting into curious shapes when a thing was delicate or difficult to do. His concentration was intense. His movements were quick. There was an air of urgency about the way he worked, of breathlessness of strong, suppressed excitement. Suddenly, he heard footsteps on the gravel path outside, and he straightened and turned swiftly. As the door opened, and the tall man came in. It was Scott. It was only Scott, the doctor. Well, well, well, well, the doctor sent. So, this is where you hide yourself in the evenings.

4:31Hello, Scott, the class nurse said. I happened to be passing, so I dropped in to see how you were. There was no one in the house, so I came on down here. How's that thrower you had been doing? It's all right, it's fine now. The doctor came up closer and bent down to look into the box. What's this? You're making a radio? No, I'm just pulling around. Scott, rather complicated looking innards. Or what is it? It's rather frightening looking thing, don't you think? It's just an idea. It has to do with sound, that's all. Or a good heavens' man, don't you got enough with that sort of thing all day in your work? I like sound. I don't know what seems. The doctor went to the door, turned and said, well, I won't disturb you. Glad your throat's not bothering you anymore. But he kept standing there looking at the box, intrigued by the remarkable complexity of its inside.

5:33Curious to know what the strange patient of his was up to? What is it really for? You've made me inquisitive. All right, I'll tell you if you're interested. It's like this. The theory is very simple, really. The human ear, you know that it can't hear everything. There are sounds that are so low pitched or so high pitched that it can't hear them. Well, speaking very roughly, any note so high that it has more than 15,000 vibrations a second, we can't hear it. Dogs have better ears than we do. You know you can buy a whistle whose note is so high pitched that you can't hear it at all, but a dog can? Yes, I've seen them. Of course. And up the scale higher than the note of that whistle, there's another note. A vibration, if you like, but I prefer to think of it as a note. You can't hear that one either. And above that, there's another, and another. And another, rising right up the scale forever and ever and ever an endless succession of notes and infinity of notes.

6:34There is a note if only our ears could hear it. At so high, you can divide it a million times a second. And another a million times as high as that and so on, so on higher and higher, as far as numbers go, which is infinity, eternity, beyond the stars. Costner was becoming more animated. He was a small, frail man, nervous and twitchy, with always moving hands, his large head and climb towards his left shoulders, though his neck were not quite strong enough to support it rigidly. His face was smooth and pale, almost white, and the pale grey eyes that blanked and peered from behind a pair of steel spectacles were bewildered, unfocused, remote. He was a frail, nervous twitchy little man, a moth of a man dreamy, distracted, suddenly fluttering and animated. And now the doctor, looking at that strange pale face and those pale grey eyes, felt that somehow, there was about this little person, a quality of distance,

7:35of immense, immeasurable distance, as though the mind were far away from where the body was. The doctor waited for him to go on, costner side, clasped his hands tightly together. I believe that there's a whole world of sound about us all the time that we cannot hear. It's possible that up there in those high pitched, inaudible regions, there's a new, exciting music being made with subtle harmonies and fierce grinding discords, a music so powerful that it would drive us mad if only our ears were tuned to hear the sound of it. There may be anything for all we know there may. Yes, but it's not very, but not very probable. Well, some time ago I made a simple instrument that proved to me the existence of many odd, inaudible sounds. Often I've sat and watched the needle of my instrument recording the presence of sound vibrations in the air when I myself could hear nothing. Toyota's easy choice sales event is on.

8:36Whether you're looking for the performance of the camera, the versatility of Arat 4, the efficiency of a Corolla or all electric driving in the BZ, there's a Toyota that's just right for you. And with great deals across the lineup, now's the time to find yours. But hurry, these deals won't last long. Toyota's easy choice sales event ends soon. We make it easy. Toyota, let's go places. And those are the sounds I want to listen to. I want to know where they come from and who or what is making them. And that machine on the table air is that going to allow you to hear those noises? It may. No, no. So far I've had no luck. But I've made some changes in it, and tonight I'm ready for another trial. And this machine is designed to pick up sound vibrations that are too high pitched for reception by the human ear and to convert them to a scale of audible tones. I tune it in almost like a radio.

9:36And say I wish to listen to this squeak of a bat. That's a faintly high pitch sounding sound about 30,000 vibrations a second. Now, the average human ear can't quite hear it. If there were a bat flying around in this room and I tuned into 30,000 on my machine here, I would hear the squeaking of that bat very clearly. I would even hear the correct note, F-sharp or B-flat or whatever it might be, but merely at a much lower pitch. And you're going to try the machine tonight? Yes. Well, I wish you luck. Well, my goodness, I have to leave. Well, thank you for telling me. I must call again sometime and find out what happened. The doctor went out and closed the door behind him. For a while longer, a closset area fussed about with the wires in the black box. Then he straightened up and carried the box to the door, found that he couldn't open the door without putting the box down. He carried it back, put it on the bench, opened the door,

10:38and then carried it with some difficulty into the garden. He placed the box carefully on a small wooden table that stood on the lawn. He returned to the shed and fetched a pair of earphones. He pugged the wire connections from the earphones into the machine and put the earphones over his ears. The movements of his hands were quick and precise. He was excited and breathed, loudly and quickly through his mouth. He kept on talking to himself with little words of comfort and encouragement as though he were afraid that the machine might not work and afraid also of what might happen if it did. He stood there in the garden beside the wooden table, so pale, small and thin that he looked like an ancient, consumptive, bespectacle child. The son had gone down, there was no wind, no sound at all. From where he stood, he could see over a low fence into the next garden. There was a woman walking down the garden with a flower basket on her arm. He watched her for a while without thinking about her at all.

11:40Then he turned to the box on the table and pressed to switch on its front. He put his left hand on the volume control, his right on the knob that moved and needle across the large central dial like the wavelength dial of the radio. The dial was marked with many numbers, a series of bands starting at 15,000, and going up to a million. His right hand was beginning to turn the knob. The needle was traveling slowly across the dial. So slowly he could hardly see it move, and in the earphones he could hear a faint spasmotic crackling. Behind this crackling sound he could hear a distant humming tone which was the noise of the machine itself, but that was all. As he listened, he became conscious of a curious sensation, a feeling that his ears were stretching out away from his head, that each ear was connected to his head by a thin stiff wire, like a tentacle, and that the wires were lengthening,

12:41that the ears were going up and up toward a secret and forbidden territory. A dangerous ultrasonic region where ears had never been before, and had no right to be. A little needle crept slowly across the dial, and suddenly he heard a shriek, a frightful piercing shriek, and he jumped and dropped his hands, catching hold of the edge of the table. He stared around in as if expecting to see the person on a shriek. There was no one inside except the woman in the garden, and it was certainly not she. She was bending down, cutting yellow roses, and putting them in her basket. Again, it came, a throatless, inhuman shriek sharp and short, very clear and cold. The note itself possessed a minor metallic quality that he had never heard before. Closner looked around in searching instinctively for the source of the noise. The woman next door was the only living thing in sight.

13:42He saw her reach down, take a rose stem, and the fingers of one hand and snip the stem with a pair of scissors. Again, he heard the scream. It came at the exact moment when the rose stem was cut. At this point, the woman straightened up, put the scissors in the basket with the roses and turned to walk away. Messesandas! Messesandas! Looking around, the woman saw her neighbor standing on his lawn, a fantastic arm waving little person with a pair of earphones on his head, calling to her in a voice so high and so loud that she became alarmed. Cut another one, please! Please cut another one! Why, Mr. Closner, what's the matter? Please do as I ask, just cut one more rose. Messesandas had always believed her neighbor to be a rather peculiar person. Now it's seen that he had gone completely crazy. She wanted whether she should run into the house in fact your husband.

14:45No, she thought. No, he's harmless, I'll just humor him. Sir, please, Mr. Closner, if you like. And she took her scissors from the basket, bent down, and snipped another rose. Again, Closner heard that frightful, throatless creep in the earphones. Again, it came at the exact moment the rose stem was cut. She took off the earphones and ran to the fence that separated the two gardens. All right, all right, that's enough. No more, please, no more. The woman stood there, a yellow rose in one hand, clippers in the other, looking at him. I'm going to tell you something, Mr. Sonders, something that you won't believe. You have this evening cut a basket full of roses. You have with a sharp pair of scissors cut through the stems of living things and each rose that you cut screened in the most horrible, terrible way. Did you know that, Mrs. Sonders? I know. I certainly didn't know that.

15:47Well, it happens to be true. I heard them shrieking. Each time you cut one, I heard the cry of pain. A very high pitch sound, approximately 132,000 vibrations a second. You couldn't possibly have heard it yourself, but I heard it. How did you really, Mr. Clausner? She decided she would make a dash for the house in about five seconds. You might say that a rose bush has no nervous system to feel with, no throat to cry with. You'd be right, it hasn't, not like ours anyway, but how do you know, Mrs. Sonders? How do you know that a rose bush doesn't feel as much pain when someone cuts it stem and too because you would feel if someone cut your wrist off with a garden cheers? Toyota's easy choice sales event is on. Whether you're looking for the performance of the camera, the versatility of Arat 4, the efficiency of a Corolla, or all electric driving in the BZ,

16:47there's a Toyota that's just right for you. And with great deals across the lineup, now's the time to find yours. But hurry, these deals won't last long. Toyota's easy choice sales event ends soon. We make it easy. Toyota, let's go places. How do you know that? It's alive, isn't it? Oh, yes, yes, Mr. Clausner. Oh, yes. And good night. Quickly, she turned and ran up the garden to her house. Clausner went back to the table, he put on the earphones and stood for a while listening. He could still hear the faint crackling sound and the humming noise of the machine. But nothing more. He bent down and took hold of a small white daisy growing on the lawn. He took it between thumb and forefinger and solely pulled it upward in sideways until the stem broke. From the moment that he started pulling to the moment when the stem broke, he heard. He distinctly heard in the earphones a faint high-pitched cry, curiously inanimate.

17:53He took another daisy and did it again. Once more he heard the cry. He wasn't so sure now that it expressed pain. No, it wasn't pain. It was a surprise. Or was it? It didn't really express any of the feelings or emotions known to a human being. It was just cry, a neutral, stony cry, a single, emotional note expressing nothing. It had been the same with the roses. He had been wrong in calling it a cry of pain. A flower probably did not feel pain. It felt something else which we didn't know about. Something called toign or spurl or planknuckment or anything you like. He stood up and removed the earphones. It was getting dark and he could see pricks of light shining in the windows of the houses all around him. Carefully he picked up the black box from the table, carried it into the shed and put it on the workbench.

18:53Then he went out, locked the door behind him and walked up to the house. The next morning, the cosoner was up as soon as it was light. He dressed and went straight to the shed. He picked up the machine, carried it outside, clasping it to his chest with both hands, walking unstudily under its weight. He went past the house out the front gate and across the road to the park. There he paused, looked around him and went on until he came to a large tree, a beach tree. And he placed the machine on the ground close to the trunk of the tree. Then he went back to the house and cut an axe from the cold cellar and brought it across the road into the park. He put on the earphones and switched on the machine. He listened for a moment to the faint familiar humming. Then he picked up the axe, took a stance with his legs wide apart and swung the axe as hard as he could at the base of the tree trunk. The blade cut deep into the wooden stuck there.

19:55And at the instant of impact, he heard a most extraordinary noise in the earphones. It was a new noise. Unlike any he had heard before, a harsh, noteless, enormous noise, a growling, low-pitched, screaming sound, not quick and short like a noise of the roses, but drawn out like a sob, lasting for fully a minute. Loudest at the moment when the axe struck, fading gradually, fainter and fainter until it was gone. Cloth-n'er stared in the horror at the place where the blade of the axe had sunk into the wood flesh of the tree. Then gently he took the axe handle, worked the blade loose and threw the thing on the ground. With his fingers, he touched the gash that the axe had made in the wood, touching the edges of the gash, trying to press them together, close the wound, and he kept saying, tree, oh tree I am sorry, I am so sorry, but it will heal, it will heal fine.

20:55For a while he stood there with his hands upon the trunk of the great tree, then suddenly turned away and hurried off out of the park across the road through the gate and back into his house. He went to the telephone, consulted the book, dialed a number, and waited, hearing the telephone buzzing at the other end, and the click of a lifted receiver. Dr. Scott, you must come at once quickly please. Cloth-n'er here, remember what I told you last night about my experience with sound and how I hoped I... No, I am not ill, but please come, Dr. come quickly, I want someone to hear it, it is driving me mad, I can't believe it, come now, and once please. Cloth-n'er sat down, he sounded telephone and waited. He tried to remember what the tree of the tree had sounded like, but he couldn't. He could remember only that it had been enormous and frightful, and that it had made him feel sick with horror.

21:58He tried to imagine what sort of noise a human would make if he had to stand anchored to the ground while someone deliberately swung a small sharp thing at his legs so that the blade cut in deep and wedged itself in the cut. Same sort of noise perhaps? No, quite different. The noise of the tree was worse than any known human noise because of that frightening, toneless, throatless quality. He began to wonder about other living things, and he thought immediately of a field of wheat, a field of wheat standing up straight in yellow and alive with a mower going through it cutting the stems, five hundred stems a second, every second. Oh my God, what would that noise be like? Five hundred wheat plants screaming together and every second another five hundred being cut and screaming, and no he thought, no I do not want to go to a wheat field with my machine. I would never eat bread after that. But what about potatoes and cabbages and carrots and onions? And what about apples? I know apples are all right. They fall off naturally when they're ripe.

23:11Apples are right if you let them fall off instead of tearing them from a tree branch, but not vegetables, not a potato for example. A potato would surely shriek so that carrots and an onion and a cabbage. A customer heard the click of the front gate latch and he jumped up and went out and saw the tall doctor coming down the patch, a little black bag in hand. Well, well, what's all the trouble? Come with me doctor, I want you to hear it. I called you because you're the only one I've told. It's over the road in the park. When you come now, they went across the road into the park, and costarily the way to the great beach tree at the foot of which stood the long black coffin box of the machine and the axe. Why did you bring it out here? I wanted to tree. There aren't any big trees in the garden. Why the axe? You'll see in a moment. Now, please put on these earphones and listen. Listen carefully and tell me afterwards precisely what you hear. I want to make quite sure the doctor smiles and took the earphones and put them over his ears, caution her bent down and flipped the switch on the panel of the machine. And he picked up the axe and took his stance with his legs apart.

24:24Ready to swing for a moment he paused. Then he lifted the axe and swung it at the tree and as he swung, he thought he felt he could swear he felt a movement of the ground on which he stood. He felt a slight shifting of the earth beneath his feet as though the roots of the tree were moving underneath the soil. But it was too late to check the blow and the axe blade struck the tree and wedged deep into the wood. At that moment high overhead there was the crackling sound of wood spruttering and the swishing sound of leaves brushing against other leaves and they both looked up and the doctor cried. Watch out! Run man! Quickly run! The doctor had ripped off the earphones and was running away fast. But the carciner stood spellbombs staring up at the great branch. 60 feet long at least. It was bending slowly downward, breaking and crackling and spruttering at its thickest point where it joined the main trunk of the tree. The branch came crashing down and the clasner left aside just in time. It fell upon the machine and smashed it into pieces.

25:28Great heavens! That was a near one I thought it had got you! The clasner was staring at the tree. His large head was leaning to one side and upon his smooth white face it was a tense, horrified expression. Slowly he walked up to the tree and gently he pried the blade loose from the trunk. Did you hear it? In the earphones did you hear anything when the axe struck? Well, as a matter of fact, no, I'm not sure. I couldn't be sure. I don't suppose I had the earphones on more than a second after that. The axe struck. Yes, yes, but did you hear? I don't know. I don't know what I heard. Probably the noise of that branch breaking. What did it sound like? Exactly. What did it sound like? Oh hell, I really don't know, clasner. I was more interested in getting out of the way. Let's leave it. Dr. Scott, what did it sound like? For God's sake, man, how could I tell what with half the tree falling on me and having to run for my life?

26:33Well, come on now. Let's be getting back. Look, look, you stitched this up. Clasner pointed to the last gash that the axe had made in the tree trunk. Dr. you stitched this up quickly. Oh, clasner, don't be silly. You do as I say. I stitched it up. Clasner was gripping the axe handle and he spoke in a curious, almost threatening tone. Dr. Don't be silly. I can't stitch through wood. Come on. Let's get back to the house. So you can't stitch through wood? No, of course not. Well, have you got any iodine in your bag? What if I have? Then paint the cut with iodine. It'll sting, but that can't be helped. No, no, look. Let's not be ridiculous. Let's get back to the house and then we'll paint the cut with iodine.

27:39The doctor has itated. He saw Clasner's hands tightening on the handle of the axe. He decided that his only alternative was to run away fast and he certainly wasn't going to do that. Oh, all right. There I'll paint it with iodine. He got his black bag, which was lying on the grass about ten yards away, opened it and took out a bottle of iodine and some cotton wool. He went up to the tree trunk, uncoorked the bottle, tipped some of the iodine onto the cotton wool, bent down and began to dab it into the cut. The doctor kept one eye on Clasner who was standing motionless with the axe and his hands watching him. Make sure you get it right. Oh, yes, of course. Now, do the other one. The one just above it. The doctor did as he was told. Oh, here you are. It's done. He straightened up and surveyed his work in a very serious manner.

28:45That should do it nicely. Clasner came closer and gravely examined the two wounds. Yes, yes, that will do nicely. He stepped back at pace. You'll come and look at them again tomorrow. Oh, yes, of course. And put some more iodine on. If necessary, yes. Thank you, doctor. I said, Clasner, and he knited his head again and dropped the axe and all at once he smiled. A wild, excited smile. And quickly the doctor went over to him and gently he took him by the arm and he said, Come on, we must go now. And suddenly they were walking away, the two of them walking silently, rather hurriedly across the park over the road back to the house.

29:57You have heard the sounds machine. A story by Rol Dal that appears in this book, someone like you, published in 1954 by Alfred Hayes. This is Michael Hanson, technical operation for this broadcast by Richie. Mindwebs is a production of WHA radio and Madison, the service of University of Wisconsin Extension.