The Sound Machine

🔊 Read AloudKlausner moved across the room to the box. The top of the box was open, and he bent down and began to peer inside it among a mass of different-coloured 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, then at the paper again, checking each wire. He did this for perhaps an hour.

🔊 Read AloudThen he put a hand around to the front of the box where there were three dials, and he began to twiddle them, 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 deftly inside the box, saying, 'Yes ... Yes ... And now this one ... Yes ... But is this right? ... Ah, yes ... Of course ... Yes, yes ... That's right ... Good ... Good ... Yes, yes, yes.' 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.

🔊 Read AloudSuddenly he heard footsteps on the gravel path outside and he straightened and turned swiftly as the door opened and a tall man came in. It was Scott — only Scott, the doctor. 'Well, well, well,' the Doctor said. 'So this is where you hide yourself in the evenings.' 'Hullo, Scott,' Klausner said. 'I happened to be passing,' the Doctor told him, 'so I dropped in to see how you were. How's that throat of yours been behaving?' 'It's all right. It's fine.' The Doctor began to feel the tension in the room. He came up closer and bent down to look into the box. 'What's this?' he said. 'Making a radio?' 'No, just fooling around.' 'It's got rather complicated-looking innards.'

🔊 Read Aloud'Yes.' Klausner seemed tense and distracted. 'It has to do with sound, that's all,' he said. 'I like sound.' The Doctor went to the door, turned, and said, 'Well, I won't disturb you.' But he kept standing there looking at the box, intrigued by the remarkable complexity of its inside, curious to know what this strange patient of his was up to. 'What's it really for?' he asked. 'You've made me inquisitive.'

🔊 Read AloudKlausner began to explain. 'The theory is very simple really. The human ear ... you know that it can't hear everything. Any note so high that it has more than fifteen thousand vibrations a second — we can't hear it. Dogs have better ears than us. You can buy a whistle whose note is so high-pitched that you can't hear it at all. But a dog can hear it. And up the scale, higher than the note of that whistle, there is another note, and another and another rising right up the scale for ever and ever, an endless succession of notes ... an infinity of notes ... on and on, higher and higher, as far as numbers go, which is infinity ... eternity ... beyond the stars.' Klausner was a frail, nervous, twitchy little man, a moth of a man, dreamy and distracted; and now the Doctor felt that there was about this little person a quality of distance, of immense immeasurable distance, as though the mind were far away from where the body was.

🔊 Read Aloud'I believe,' he said, speaking more slowly now, 'that there is a whole world of sound about us all the time that we cannot hear. It is possible that up there in those high-pitched inaudible regions there is 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.' 'Yes,' the Doctor said. 'But it's not very probable.' 'Why not? Why not?' Klausner pointed to a fly sitting on a small roll of copper wire on the workbench. 'You see that fly? What sort of noise is that fly making now? None — that one can hear. But for all we know the creature may be whistling like mad on a very high note, or barking or croaking or singing a song. It's got a mouth, hasn't it? It's got a throat?'

🔊 Read AloudKlausner explained that he had made a simple instrument that proved to him the existence of many odd inaudible sounds. 'This machine,' he said, touching it with his hands, 'is designed to pick up sound vibrations that are too high-pitched for reception by the human ear, and to convert them to audible tones. I tune it in, almost like a radio. Say I wish to listen to the squeak of a bat — about thirty thousand vibrations a second. I tune in to thirty thousand on my machine, and I would hear the squeaking of that bat very clearly.' The Doctor looked at the long, black coffin-box. 'And you're going to try it tonight?' 'Yes.' 'Well, I wish you luck.' He glanced at his watch. 'My goodness! I must fly. Good-bye, and thank you for telling me.' The Doctor went out and closed the door behind him.

🔊 Read AloudKlausner carried the box out into the garden and placed it carefully on a small wooden table that stood on the lawn. He fetched a pair of earphones and plugged them into the machine. He stood there beside the table, so pale, small, and thin that he looked like an ancient, consumptive, bespectacled child. From where he stood, he could see over a low fence into the next garden, where a woman was walking with a flower-basket on her arm. He pressed a switch, put one hand on the volume control and the other on the knob that moved a needle across a large central dial. As he listened he became conscious of a curious sensation, a feeling that his ears were stretching out away from his head, 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.

🔊 Read AloudThe little needle crept slowly across the dial, and suddenly he heard a shriek, a frightful piercing shriek, and he jumped and caught hold of the edge of the table. There was no one in sight except the woman next door, who was bending down, cutting yellow roses. Again it came — a throatless, inhuman shriek, sharp and short, very clear and cold — and it came at the exact moment when a rose stem was cut. 'Mrs Saunders!' Klausner shouted. 'Cut another one! Please cut another one quickly!' She humoured him and snipped another rose, and again Klausner heard that frightful shriek in the earphones, again at the exact moment the stem was cut. 'You have, this evening, cut a basketful of roses,' he told her, 'and each rose that you cut screamed in the most terrible way.' That evening he tested a small white daisy and heard a faint cry too — not pain, he decided, but something else, a neutral, stony cry, something he could only call "toin or spurl or plinuckment." The next morning, as soon as it was light, he carried the machine across the road to the park, set it by a great beech tree, put on the earphones, and swung an axe hard at the trunk. At the instant of impact he heard a harsh, enormous, low-pitched growling, screaming sound, drawn out like a sob. Klausner stared in horror at the gash, then hurried home and telephoned Dr Scott. 'You must come at once — quickly, please!'

🔊 Read AloudWhen the Doctor arrived, Klausner led him to the beech tree, handed him the earphones, and told him to listen. Then he picked up the axe and took his stance with his legs apart, ready to swing. 'Can you hear anything?' 'Just a humming noise.' Klausner lifted the axe and swung it at the tree; as he swung, he thought he felt a slight shifting of the earth beneath his feet, as though the roots were moving. The blade struck and wedged deep in the wood, and at that moment, high overhead, there was a cracking, splintering sound. The Doctor ripped off the earphones and ran, but Klausner stood spellbound as a great branch, sixty feet long, came crashing down — it fell upon the machine and smashed it to pieces. When the Doctor was asked what he had heard, he grew evasive: 'I don't know what I heard. Probably the noise of the branch breaking.' Klausner, with a tense, horrified face, made the Doctor paint iodine on the two cuts the axe had made in the tree. 'There you are,' the Doctor said. 'That should do nicely.' 'You'll come and look at them again tomorrow?' 'Oh, yes. Of course.' 'Thank you, Doctor,' Klausner said, and he dropped the axe and smiled a wild, excited smile, and the Doctor gently took him by the arm and said, 'Come on, we must go now,' and suddenly they were walking away, the two of them, rather hurriedly, across the park, over the road, back to the house.