Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (10 page)

 
          
 
"Oh," said the Emperor, closing his
eyes, "look at the birds, look at the birds!"

 
          
 
Music moved with him in the white halls. He
passed an office door: "The Merry Widow Waltz." Another door:
"Afternoon of a Faun." A third: "Kiss Me Again." He turned
into a cross corridor: "The Sword Dance" buried him in cymbals,
drums, pots, pans, knives, forks, thunder, and tin lightning. All washed away
as he hurried through an anteroom where a secretary sat nicely stunned by
Beethoven's Fifth. He moved himself before her eyes like a hand; she didn't see
him.

 
          
 
His wrist radio buzzed.

 
          
 
"Yes?"

 
          
 
"This is Lee, Dad. Don't forget about my
allowance."

 
          
 
"Yes, son, yes. I'm busy."

 
          
 
"Just didn't want you to forget,
Dad," said the wrist radio. Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet"
swarmed about the voice and flushed into the long halls.

 
          
 
The psychiatrist moved in the beehive of
offices, in the cross-pollination of themes, Stravinsky mating with Bach, Haydn
unsuccessfully repulsing Rachmaninoff, Schubert slain by Duke Ellington. He
nodded to the humming secretaries and the whistling doctors fresh to their morning
work. At his office he checked a few papers with his stenographer, who sang
under her breath, then phoned the police captain upstairs. A few minutes later
a red light blinked, a voice said from the ceiling:

 
          
 
"Prisoner delivered to Interview Chamber
Nine."

 
          
 
He unlocked the chamber door, stepped in,
heard the door lock behind him.

 
          
 
"Go away," said the prisoner,
smiling.

 
          
 
The psychiatrist was shocked by that smile. A
very sunny, pleasant warm thing, a thing that shed bright light upon the room. Dawn
among the dark hills. High noon at midnight,
that smile
.
The blue eyes sparkled serenely above that display of self-assured dentistry.

 
          
 
"I'm here to help you," said the
psychiatrist, frowning. Something was wrong with the room. He had hesitated the
moment he entered. He glanced around. The prisoner laughed. "If you're
wondering why it's so quiet in here, I just kicked the radio to death."

 
          
 
Violent, thought the doctor.

 
          
 
The prisoner read this thought, smiled, put
out a gentle hand. "No, only to machines that yak-yak-yak."

 
          
 
Bits of the wall radio's tubes and wires lay
on the gray carpeting. Ignoring these, feeling that smile upon him like a heat
lamp, the psychiatrist sat across from his patient in the unusual silence which
was like the gathering of a storm.

 
          
 
"You're Mr. Albert Brock, who calls
himself The Murderer?"

 
          
 
Brock nodded pleasantly. "Before we start
. . ." He moved quietly and quickly to detach the wrist radio from the
doctor's arm. He tucked it in his teeth like a walnut, gritted, heard it crack,
handed it back to the appalled psychiatrist as if he had done them both a
favor. "That's better."

 
          
 
The psychiatrist stared at the ruined machine.
"You're running up quite a damage bill."

 
          
 
"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 comer theater, motion pictures projected, with
commercials on low-lying cumulus clouds. It doesn't rain rain any more, 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 wrist watch 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 who?' I cried. Convenient for
friends: 'Hey, Al, thought I'd call you from the locker room out here at Green
Hills. Just made a sockdolager 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 best 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."