"Easy now," I said. "It seems—it seems like the voice speaks in everybody's language, and sounds like the sort of voice everybody would know."
"But how's that possible?" Frank asked me.
"I don't know. But it's certainly logical. If the voice spoke just in Latin or Hebrew or English, none of the Arabs would understand. Or the Armenians. So, while it's speaking everybody's language, it might as well speak everybody's dialect at the same time."
"Should we call it it?" Frank asked in a whisper. He glanced over his shoulder, as though he expected to find an avenging angel there. "Shouldn't we refer to it as Him?"
"She, you mean," Minnie said. "The old masculine idea that God must be a man is just so much ego-wash. Why, the feminine principle is evident all through the universe. Why, why, you just can't say Him when—when—"
Minnie had never been too strong on ideas. She ran out of breath and stood, panting and pushing back her hair.
After a while we talked about it calmly, and listened to the radio. There were more speakers and another survey of the countries that had heard the second announcement. At two o'clock I told them to go home. It was no use trying to get any work done that day. Besides, there were no customers.
The subways were running again when I reached the BMT, and I rode to my home in Queens.
"Of course you heard it?" My wife asked me at the door.
"Of course," I said. "Was it spoken by a woman in her middle-thirties, with just the trace of a Queens accent?"