Norman had no excuse ready, so he accompanied the Sawtelles to the rooms of the speech department at the other end of Morton, wondering how the speech department ever found any use for someone with as nasal and affected a voice as Evelyn Sawtelle, even if she did happen to be a professor's wife.
The sound booth was dim and quiet, a solid box with soundproof walls and double windows. Mrs. Sawtelle took a disk from the cabinet, put it on one of the three turntables, and adjusted a couple of dials.
From the amplifier came a strangely intermittent wailing or roaring, as of wind prying at a house. It struck a less usual chord, though, in Norman's memory.
Mrs. Sawtelle darted back and lifted the needle, hurriedly, so it grated against the disk.
"I made a mistake," she said. "That's some modernistic music or other. Hervey, switch on the light. Here's the record I wanted."
"It sounded awful, whatever it was," her husband observed.
Norman had identified his memory. It was of an Australian bull-roarer a colleague had once demonstrated for him. The curved slat of wood, whirled at the end of a cord, made exactly the same sound. The aborigines used it in their magic making.
But now his own voice was coming out of the amplifier, and he had an odd sense of jerking back in time.
"Surprised?" she questioned coyly. "It's that talk on civilian defense you gave the students last week. We had a mike spotted by the speaker's rostrum—I suppose you thought it was for amplification—and we made a sneak recording, as we call it. We cut it down here."
She indicated the heavier, cement-based turntable for making recordings.