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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 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, bespectacled child. The sun 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 and 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. Then he turned to the box on the table and
pressed a switch on its front. He put his left hand on the
volume control and his right hand on the knob that moved a
needle across a large central dial, like the wave-length
dial of a radio. The dial was marked with many numbers, in a
series of bands, starting at 15,000 and going on up to
1,000,000.
And now he was bending forward over the machine. His head
was cocked to one side in a tense, listening attitude. His
right hand was beginning to turn the knob. The needle was
travelling slowly across the dial, so slowly he could hardly
see it move and in the earphones he could hear a faint,
spasmodic 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, that the ears were going up and up
towards a secret and forbidden territory, a dangerous
ultrasonic* region where ears had never been before and had
no right to be.
The 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 table.
He stared around him as if expecting to see the person who
had shrieked. There was no one in sight except the woman in
the garden next door 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.
Klausner looked around him, searching instinctively for the
source of the noise. The woman next door was the only living
thing in sight. He saw her reach down, take a rose stem in
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. "Mrs Saunders!" Klausner shouted, his voice shrill
with excitement. "Oh, Mrs Saunders!"
And looking round, the woman saw her neighbour 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 loud that she became alarmed.
"Cut another one! Please cut another one quickly!"
She stood still, staring at him. "Why, Mr Klausner," she
said, "what's the matter?"
"Please do as I ask," he said. "Cut just one more rose!"
Mrs Saunders had always believed her neighbour to be a
rather peculiar person; now it seemed that he had gone
completely crazy. She wondered whether she should run into
the house and fetch her husband. No, she thought. No, he's
harmless. I'll humour him. "Certainly, Mr Klausner, if you
like," she said. She took her scissors from the basket, bent
down and snipped another rose.
Again Klausner heard that frightful, throatless shriek in
the earphones; again it came at the exact moment the rose
stem was cut. He took off the earphones and ran to the fence
that separated the two gardens. "All right," he said,
"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, Mrs Saunders," he said,
"something that you won't believe." He put his hands on top
of the fence and peered at her intently through his thick
spectacles. "You have, this evening, cut a basketful of
roses. You have with a sharp pair of scissors cut through
the sterns of living things and each rose that you cut
screamed in the most terrible way. Did you know that, Mrs
Saunders?"
"No," she said. "I certainly didn't know that."
"It happens to be true," he said. He was breathing rather
rapidly, but he was trying to control his excitement. "I
heard them shrieking. Each time you cut one, I heard the cry
of pain. A very high-pitched sound, approximately one
hundred and thirty-two thousand vibrations a second. You
couldn't possibly have heard it yourself. But I heard it."
"Did you really, Mr Klausner?" She decided she would make
a dash for the house in about five seconds.
"You might say," he went on, "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 Saunders" - and here he leaned far over the
fence and spoke in a fierce whisper - "how do you know that
a rose bush doesn't feel as much pain when someone cuts its
stem in two as you would feel if someone cut your wrist off
with a garden shears? How do you know that? It's alive,
isn't it?"
"Yes, Mr Klausner. Oh, yes - and goodnight." Quickly she
turned and ran up the garden to her house. Klausner went
hack 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 slowly pulled it upward and 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.
He took another daisy and did it again. Once more he heard
the cry, but he wasn't so sure now that it expressed pain.
No, it wasn't pain, it was surprise. Or was it? It didn't
really express any of the feelings or emotions known to a
human being. It was just a cry, a neutral, stony cry - a
single emotionless 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 didn't feel pain. It felt
something else which we didn't know about - something called
toin or spurl or plinuckment, 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. Then he went out, locked the door
behind him and walked up to the house.
The next morning Klausner was up as soon as it was light.
He dressed and went straight to the shed. He picked up the
machine and carried it outside, clasping it to his chest
with both hands, walking unsteadily under its weight. He
went past the house, out through the front gate and across
the road to the park. There he paused and looked around him;
then he went on until he came to large tree, a beech tree,
and he placed the machine on the ground close to the trunk
of the tree. Quickly he went back to the house and got an
axe from the coal cellar and carried it across the road into
the park. He put the axe on the ground beside the tree.
Then he looked around him again, peering nervously
through his thick glasses in every direction. There was no
one about. It was six in the morning.
He put the earphones on his head and switched on the
machine. He listened for a moment to the faint familiar
humming sound; 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 wood
and stuck there and 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 the 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.
Klausner stared in horror at the place where the blade of
the axe had sunk into the woodflesh of the tree; then gently
he took the axe handle, worked the blade loose and threw the
thing to 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 to close the wound, and
he kept saying, "Tree... oh, tree... I am sorry ... I am so
sorry ... but it will heal ... it will heal ... it will heal
fine ..."
For a while he stood there with his hands upon the trunk
of the great tree, then suddenly he turned away and hurried
off out of the park, across the road, through the front gate
and back into his house. He went to the telephone, consulted
the hook, dialled a number and waited. He held the receiver
tightly in his left hand and tapped the table impatiently
with his right. He heard the telephone buzzing at the other
end and then the click of a lifted receiver and a ...
To be continued |
