A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories Read online

  “I don’t care,” smiled the patient. “As the old song goes: ‘Don’t Care What Happens to Me!’ ” He hummed it.

  The psychiatrist said: “Shall we start?”

  “Fine. The first victim, or one of the first, was my telephone. Murder most foul. I shoved it in the kitchen Insinkerator! Stopped the disposal unit in mid-swallow. Poor thing strangled to death. After that I shot the television set!”

  The psychiatrist said, “Mmm.”

  “Fired six shots right through the cathode. Made a beautiful tinkling crash, like a dropped chandelier.”

  “Nice imagery.”

  “Thanks, I always dreamt of being a writer.”

  “Suppose you tell me when you first began to hate the telephone.”

  “It frightened me as a child. Uncle of mine called it the Ghost Machine. Voices without bodies. Scared the living hell out of me. Later in life I was never comfortable. Seemed to me a phone was an impersonal instrument. If it felt like it, it let your personality go through its wires. If it didn’t want to, it just drained your personality away until what slipped through at the other end was some cold fish of a voice all steel, copper, plastic, no warmth, no reality. It’s easy to say the wrong thing on telephones; the telephone changes your meaning on you. First thing you know, you’ve made an enemy. Then, of course, the telephone’s such a convenient thing; it just sits there and demands you call someone who doesn’t want to be called. Friends were always calling, calling, calling me. Hell, I hadn’t any time of my own. When it wasn’t the telephone it was the television, the radio, the phonograph. When it wasn’t the television or radio or the phonograph it was motion pictures at the corner theater, motion pictures projected, with commercials on low-lying cumulus clouds. It doesn’t rain anymore, it rains soapsuds. When it wasn’t High-Fly Cloud advertisements, it was music by Mozzek in every restaurant; music and commercials on the busses I rode to work. When it wasn’t music, it was interoffice communications, and my horror chamber of a radio wristwatch on which my friends and my wife phoned every five minutes. What is there about such ‘conveniences’ that makes them so temptingly convenient? The average man thinks, Here I am, time on my hands, and there on my wrist is a wrist telephone, so why not just buzz old Joe up, eh? ‘Hello, hello!’ I love my friends, my wife, humanity, very much, but when one minute my wife calls to say, ‘Where are you now dear?’ and a friend calls and says, ‘Got the best off-color joke to tell you. Seems there was a guy——’ And a stranger calls and cries out, ‘This is the Find-Fax Poll. What gum are you chewing at this very instant!’ Well!”

  “How did you feel during the week?”

  “The fuse lit. On the edge of the cliff. That same afternoon I did what I did at the office.”

  “Which was?”

  “I poured a paper cup of water into the intercommunications system.”

  The psychiatrist wrote on his pad.

  “And the system shorted?”

  “Beautifully! The Fourth of July on wheels! My God, stenographers ran around looking lost! What an uproar!”

  “Felt better temporarily, eh?”

  “Fine! Then I got the idea at noon of stomping my wrist radio on the sidewalk. A shrill voice was just yelling out of it at me, ‘This is People’s Poll Number Nine. What did you eat for lunch?’ when I kicked the Jesus out of the wrist radio!”

  “Felt even better, eh?”

  “It grew on me!” Brock rubbed his hands together. “Why didn’t I start a solitary revolution, deliver man from certain ‘conveniences’? ‘Convenient for whom?’ I cried. Convenient for friends: ‘Hey, Al, thought I’d call you from the locker room out here at Green Hills. Just made a sock-dolager hole in one! A hole in one, Al! A beautiful day. Having a shot of whiskey now. Thought you’d want to know, Al!’ Convenient for my office, so when I’m in the field with my radio car there’s no moment when I’m not in touch. In touch! There’s a slimy phrase. Touch, hell. Gripped! Pawed, rather. Mauled and massaged and pounded by FM voices. You can’t leave your car without checking in: ‘Have stopped to visit gas-station men’s room.’ ‘Okay, Brock, step on it!’ ‘Brock, what took you so long?’ ‘Sorry, sir.’ ‘Watch it next time, Brock.’ ‘Yes, sir!’ So, do you know what I did, Doctor? I bought a quart of French chocolate ice cream and spooned it into the car radio transmitter.”

  “Was there any special reason for selecting French chocolate ice cream to spoon into the broadcasting unit?”

  Brock thought about it and smiled. “It’s my favorite flavor.”

  “Oh,” said the doctor.

  “I figured, hell, what’s good enough for me is good enough for the radio transmitter.”

  “What made you think of spooning ice cream into the radio?”

  “It was a hot day.”

  The doctor paused.

  “And what happened next?”

  “Silence happened next. God, it was beautiful. That car radio cackling all day, Brock go here, Brock go there, Brock check in, Brock check out, okay Brock, hour lunch, Brock, lunch over, Brock, Brock, Brock. Well, that silence was like putting ice cream in my ears.”

  “You seem to like ice cream a lot.”

  “I just rode around feeling of the silence. It’s a big bolt of the nicest, softest flannel ever made. Silence. A whole hour of it. I just sat in my car; smiling, feeling of that flannel with my ears. I felt drunk with Freedom!”

  “Go on.”

  “Then I got the idea of the portable diathermy machine. I rented one, took it on the bus going home that night. There sat all the tired commuters with their wrist radios, talking to their wives, saying, ‘Now I’m at Forty-third, now I’m at Forty-fourth, here I am at Forty-ninth, now turning at Sixty-first.’ One husband cursing, ‘Well, get out of that bar, damn it, and get home and get dinner started, I’m at Seventieth!’ And the transit-system radio playing ‘Tales from the Vienna Woods,’ a canary singing words about a first-rate wheat cereal. Then—I switched on my diathermy! Static! Interference! All wives cut off from husbands grousing about a hard day at the office. All husbands cut off from wives who had just seen their children break a window! The ‘Vienna Woods’ chopped down, the canary mangled! Silence! A terrible, unexpected silence. The bus inhabitants faced with having to converse with each other. Panic! Sheer, animal panic!”

  “The police seized you?”

  “The bus had to stop. After all, the music was being scrambled, husbands and wives were out of touch with reality. Pandemonium, riot, and chaos. Squirrels chattering in cages! A trouble unit arrived, triangulated on me instantly, had me reprimanded, fined, and home, minus my diathermy machine, in jig time.”

  “Mr. Brock, may I suggest that so far your whole pattern here is not very—practical? If you didn’t like transit radios or office radios or car business radios, why didn’t you join a fraternity of radio haters, start petitions, get legal and constitutional rulings? After all, this is a democracy.”

  “And I,” said Brock, “am that thing called a minority. I did join fraternities, picket, pass petitions, take it to court. Year after year I protested. Everyone laughed. Everyone else loved bus radios and commercials. I was out of step.”

  “Then you should have taken it like a good soldier, don’t you think? The majority rules.”

  “But they went too far. If a little music and ‘keeping in touch’ was charming, they figured a lot would be ten times as charming. I went wild! I got home to find my wife hysterical. Why? Because she had been completely out of touch with me for half a day. Remember, I did a dance on my wrist radio? Well, that night I laid plans to murder my house.

  “Are you sure that’s how you want me to write it down?”

  “That’s semantically accurate. Kill it dead. It’s one of those talking, singing, humming, weather-reporting, poetry-reading, novel-reciting, jingle-jangling, rockaby-crooning-when-you-goto-bed houses. A house that screams opera to you in the shower and teaches you Spanish in your sleep. One of those blathering caves where all kinds of electronic Ora
cles make you feel a trifle larger than a thimble, with stoves that say, ‘I’m apricot pie, and I’m done,’ or ‘I’m prime roast beef, so baste me!’ and other nursery gibberish like that. With beds that rock you to sleep and shake you awake. A house that barely tolerates humans, I tell you. A front door that barks: ‘You’ve mud on your feet, sir!’ And an electronic vacuum hound that snuffles around after you from room to room, inhaling every fingernail or ash you drop. Jesus God, I say, Jesus God!”

  “Quietly,” suggested the psychiatrist.

  “Remember that Gilbert and Sullivan song—’I’ve Got It on My List, It Never Will Be Missed’? All night I listed grievances. Next morning early I bought a pistol. I purposely muddied my feet. I stood at our front door. The front door shrilled, ‘Dirty feet, muddy feet! Wipe your feet! Please be neat!’ I shot the damn thing in its keyhole. I ran to the kitchen, where the stove was just whining, ‘Turn me over!’ In the middle of a mechanical omelet I did the stove to death. Oh, how it sizzled and screamed, ‘I’m shorted!’ Then the telephone rang like a spoiled brat. I shoved it down the Insinkerator. I must state here and now I have nothing whatever against the Insinkerator; it was an innocent bystander. I feel sorry for it now, a practical device indeed, which never said a word, purred like a sleepy lion most of the time, and digested our leftovers. I’ll have it restored. Then I went in and shot the televisor, that insidious beast, that Medusa, which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little, but myself always going back, going back, hoping and waiting until—bang! Like a headless turkey, gobbling, my wife whooped out the front door. The police came. Here I am!”

  He sat back happily and lit a cigarette.

  “And did you realize, in committing these crimes, that the wrist radio, the broadcasting transmitter, the phone, the bus radio, the office intercoms, all were rented or were someone else’s property?”

  “I would do it all over again, so help me God.”

  The psychiatrist sat there in the sunshine of that beatific smile.

  “You don’t want any further help from the Office of Mental Health? You’re ready to take the consequences?”

  “This is only the beginning,” said Mr. Brock. “I’m the vanguard of the small public which is tired of noise and being taken advantage of and pushed around and yelled at, every moment music, every moment in touch with some voice somewhere, do this, do that, quick, quick, now here, now there. You’ll see. The revolt begins. My name will go down in history!”

  “Mmm.” The psychiatrist seemed to be thinking.

  “It’ll take time, of course. It was all so enchanting at first. The very idea of these things, the practical uses, was wonderful. They were almost toys, to be played with, but the people got too involved, went too far, and got wrapped up in a pattern of social behavior and couldn’t get out, couldn’t admit they were in, even. So they rationalized their nerves as something else. ‘Our modern age,’ they said. ‘Conditions,’ they said. ‘Highstrung,’ they said. But mark my words, the seed has been sown. I got worldwide coverage on TV, radio, films; there’s an irony for you. That was five days ago. A billion people know about me. Check your financial columns. Any day now. Maybe today. Watch for a sudden spurt, a rise in sales for French chocolate ice cream!”

  “I see,” said the psychiatrist.

  “Can I go back to my nice private cell now, where I can be alone and quiet for six months?”

  “Yes,” said the psychiatrist quietly.

  “Don’t worry about me,” said Mr. Brock, rising. “I’m just going to sit around for a long time stuffing that nice soft bolt of quiet material in both ears.”

  “Mmm,” said the psychiatrist, going to the door.

  “Cheers,” said Mr. Brock.

  “Yes,” said the psychiatrist.

  He pressed a code signal on a hidden button, the door opened, he stepped out, the door shut and locked. Alone, he moved in the offices and corridors. The first twenty yards of his walk were accompanied by “Tambourine Chinois.” Then it was “Tzigane,” Bach’s “Passacaglia” and Fugue in something Minor, “Tiger Rag,” “Love Is Like a Cigarette.” He took his broken wrist radio from his pocket like a dead praying mantis. He turned in at his office. A bell sounded; a voice came out of the ceiling, “Doctor?”

  “Just finished with Brock,” said the psychiatrist.

  “Diagnosis?”

  “Seems completely disorientated, but convivial. Refuses to accept the simplest realities of his environment and work with them.”

  “Prognosis?”

  “Indefinite. Left him enjoying a piece of invisible material.”

  Three phones rang. A duplicate wrist radio in his desk drawer buzzed like a wounded grasshopper. The intercom flashed a pink light and click-clicked. Three phones rang. The drawer buzzed. Music blew in through the open door. The psychiatrist, humming quietly, fitted the new wrist radio to his wrist, flipped the intercom, talked a moment, picked up one telephone, talked, picked up another telephone, talked, picked up the third telephone, talked, touched the wrist-radio button, talked calmly and quietly, his face cool and serene, in the middle of the music and the lights flashing, the two phones ringing again, and his hands moving, and his wrist radio buzzing, and the intercoms talking, and voices speaking from the ceiling. And he went on quietly this way through the remainder of a cool, air-conditioned, and long afternoon; telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio …

  The Golden Kite, The Silver Wind

  In the shape of a pig?” cried the Mandarin.

  “In the shape of a pig,” said the messenger, and departed.

  “Oh, what an evil day in an evil year,” cried the Mandarin. “The town of Kwan-Si, beyond the hill, was very small in my childhood. Now it has grown so large that at last they are building a wall.”

  “But why should a wall two miles away make my good father sad and angry all within the hour?” asked his daughter quietly.

  “They build their wall,” said the Mandarin, “in the shape of a pig! Do you see? Our own city wall is built in the shape of an orange. That pig will devour us, greedily!”

  “Ah.”

  They both sat thinking.

  Life was full of symbols and omens. Demons lurked everywhere, Death swam in the wetness of an eye, the turn of a gull’s wing meant rain, a fan held so, the tilt of a roof, and, yes, even a city wall was of immense importance. Travelers and tourists, caravans, musicians, artists, coming upon these two towns, equally judging the portents, would say, “The city shaped like an orange? No! I will enter the city shaped like a pig and prosper, eating all, growing fat with good luck and prosperity!’’

  The Mandarin wept. “All is lost! These symbols and signs terrify. Our city will come on evil days.”

  “Then,” said the daughter, “call in your stonemasons and temple builders. I will whisper from behind the silken screen and you will know the words.”

  The old man clapped his hands despairingly. “Ho, stonemasons! Ho, builders of towns and palaces!”

  The men who knew marble and granite and onyx and quartz came quickly. The Mandarin faced them most uneasily, himself waiting for a whisper from the silken screen behind his throne. At last the whisper came.

  “I have called you here,” said the whisper.

  “I have called you here,” said the Mandarin aloud, “because our city is shaped like an orange, and the vile city of Kwan-Si has this day shaped theirs like a ravenous pig——”

  Here the stonemasons groaned and wept. Death rattled his cane in the outer courtyard. Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.

  “And so,” said the whisper, said the Mandarin, “you raisers of walls must go bearing trowels and rocks and change the shape of our city!”

  The architects and masons gasped. The M
andarin himself gasped at what he had said. The whisper whispered. The Mandarin went on: “And you will change our walls into a club which may beat the pig and drive it off!”

  The stonemasons rose up, shouting. Even the Mandarin, delighted at the words from his mouth, applauded, stood down from his throne. “Quick!” he cried. “To work!”

  When his men had gone, smiling and bustling, the Mandarin turned with great love to the silken screen. “Daughter,” he whispered, “I will embrace you.” There was no reply. He stepped around the screen, and she was gone.

  Such modesty, he thought. She has slipped away and left me with a triumph, as if it were mine.

  The news spread through the city; the Mandarin was acclaimed. Everyone carried stone to the walls. Fireworks were set off and the demons of death and poverty did not linger, as all worked together. At the end of the month the wall had been changed. It was now a mighty bludgeon with which to drive pigs, boars, even lions, far away. The Mandarin slept like a happy fox every night.

  “I would like to see the Mandarin of Kwan-Si when the news is learned. Such pandemonium and hysteria; he will likely throw himself from a mountain! A little more of that wine, oh Daughter-who-thinks-like-a-son.’’

  But the pleasure was like a winter flower; it died swiftly. That very afternoon the messenger rushed into the courtroom. “Oh, Mandarin, disease, early sorrow, avalanches, grasshopper plagues, and poisoned well water!”

  The Mandarin trembled.

  “The town of Kwan-Si,” said the messenger, “which was built like a pig and which animal we drove away by changing our walls to a mighty stick, has now turned triumph to winter ashes. They have built their city’s walls like a great bonfire to burn our stick!”

  The Mandarin’s heart sickened within him, like an autumn fruit upon an ancient tree. “Oh, gods! Travelers will spurn us. Tradesmen, reading the symbols, will turn from the stick, so easily destroyed, to the fire, which conquers all!”

  “No,” said a whisper like a snowflake from behind the silken screen.