Like a little boy whistling loudly as he walks by a cemetery at night.
Partch got out of his chair and stared out the window again. There was a fire over on the East Side, a bad one by the smoke. The fire engines went screaming through the streets like wounded dragons. Sirens, bells. Police whistles.
All at once, Partch realized that never in his life had he experienced real quiet or solitude. That actually, he had no conception of what an absence of thunder and wailing would be like. A total absence of sound and noise.
Almost, it was like trying to imagine what a negation of space would be like.
And then he turned, and his eyes fell on Bob Wills' machine. It could reduce the noise level of a rocket motor by 25 per cent, Wills had said. Here in the office, the sound level was less than that of a rocket motor.
And the machine worked on ordinary house current, Bob had said.
Partch had an almost horrifying idea. Suppose....
But what would Dr. Coles say about this, Partch wondered. Oh, he had to get a grip on himself. This was silly, childish....
But looking down, he found that he had already plugged in the line cord. An almost erotic excitement began to shake Joseph's body. The sense of disaster had surged up anew, but he didn't recognize it yet.
An absence of sound? No! Silly!