And Now the News (4 page)

“Boo,” said Zeitgeist.

“I beg your … huh?”

Zeitgeist laughed. “You say it.” He pointed. “Boooo.”

Joe looked up at the oscilloscope. The worm had changed to a wiggling, scraggly child's scrawl, which, when Zeitgeist's long-drawn syllable was finished, changed into a green worm again. Zeitgeist touched a control knob on one of the benches and the worm became a straight line. “Go ahead.”

“Boo,” said Joe self-consciously. The line was a squiggle and then a line again. “Come on, a good loud long one,” said Zeitgeist. This time Joe produced the same sort of “grass” the other man had. Or at least, it looked the same. “Good,” said Zeitgeist. “What do you do for a living?”

“Advertising. You mean I didn't tell you?”

“You were more interested in talking about your boss than your work. What kind of advertising?”

“Well, I mean, it isn't advertising like in an agency. I mean, I work for the advertising section of the public relations division of a big corporation.”

“You write ads? Sell them? Art, production, research—what?”

“All that. I mean, a little of all those. We're not very big. The company is, I mean, but not our office. We only advertise in trade magazines. The engineer'll come to me with something he wants to promote and I check with the … I mean, that Barnes, and if he OKs it I write copy on it and check back with the engineer and write it
again and check back with Barnes and write it again; and after that I do the layout, I mean I draft the layout just on a piece of typewriter paper, that's all, I can't draw or anything like that, I mean; and then I see it through Art and go back and check with Barnes, and then I order space for it in the magazine and—”

“You ever take a vocational analysis?”

“Yes, I mean, sure I did. I'm in the right sort of job, according to the test. I mean, it was the Kline-Western test.”

“Good test,” said Zeitgeist approvingly.

“You think I'm not in the right sort of job?” He paused, and then with sudden animation, “You think I should quit that lousy job, I mean, get into something else?”

“That's your business. All right, that's enough.”

The man could be as impersonal as a sixpenny nail when he wanted to be. He worked absorbedly at his controls for a while. There was a soft whine from one piece of apparatus, a clicking from another, and before Joe knew what was happening he heard someone saying, “All that. I mean, a little of all those. We're not very big. The company is, I mean, but not our office. We only advertise—” on and on, in his exact words. His exact voice, too, he realized belatedly. He listened to it without enthusiasm. From time to time a light blazed, bright as a photoflash but scalding red. Patiently, brilliantly, the oscilloscope traced each syllable, each pulse within each syllable. “… and check with Barnes, and then I order sp—” The voice ceased abruptly as Zeitgeist threw a switch.

“I didn't know you were recording,” said Joe, “or I would have … I mean, said something different maybe.”

“I know,” said Zeitgeist. “That red light bother you?”

“It was pretty bright,” said Joe, not wanting to complain.

“Look here.” He opened the top of the recorder. Joe saw reels and more heads that he had ever seen on a recorder before, and a number of other unfamiliar components. “I don't know much about—”

“You don't have to,” said Zeitgeist. “See there?” He pointed with one hand, and with the other reached for a button on the bench and
pressed it. A little metal arm snapped up against the tape just where it passed over an idler. “That punched a little hole in the tape. Not enough to affect the recording.” Zeitgeist turned the reel slowly by hand, moving the tape along an inch or so. Joe saw, on the moving tape, a tiny bright spot of light. When the almost invisible hold moved into it, the red light flared. “I pushed that button every time you said ‘I mean.' Let's play it again.”

He played it again, and Joe listened—an act of courage, because with all his heart he wanted to cover his ears, shut his eyes against that red blaze. He was consumed with embarrassment. He had never heard anything that sounded so completely idiotic. When at last it was over, Zeitgeist grinned at him. “Learn something?”

“I did,” said Joe devoutly.

“O.K.,” said Zeitgeist, in a tone which disposed of the matter completely as far as he was concerned, at the same time acting as prelude to something new. The man's expressiveness was extraordinary; with a single word he had Joe's gratitude and his fullest attention. “Now listen to this.” He made some adjustments, threw a switch. Joe's taped voice said, “… go back and check it with Ba-a-a-a-a-ah—” with the “ah” going on and on like an all-clear signal. “That bother you?” called Zeitgeist over the noise.

“It's awful!” shouted Joe. This time he did cover his ears. It didn't help. Zeitgeist switched off the noise and laughed at him. “That's understandable. Your own voice, and it goes on and on like that. What's bothering you is, it doesn't breathe. I swear you could choke a man half to death, just by making him listen to that. Well, don't let it worry you. That thing over there”—he pointed to a massive cabinet against the wall—“is my analyzer. It breaks up your voice into all the tones and overtones it contains, finds out the energy level of each, and shoots the information to that tone-generator yonder. The generator reproduces each component exactly as received, through seventy-two band-pass filters two hundred cycles apart. All of which means that when I tell it to, it picks out a single vowel sound—in this case your ‘a' in ‘Barnes'—and hangs it up there on the 'scope like a photograph for as long as I want to look at it.”

“All that, to do what I do when I say ‘ah?' ”

“All that,” beamed Zeitgeist. Joe could see he was unashamedly proud of his equipment. He leaned forward and flicked Joe across the Adam's apple. “That's a hell of a compact little machine, that pharynx of yours. Just look at that wave-form.”

Joe looked at the screen. “Some mess.”

“A little tomato sauce and you could serve it in an Italian restaurant,” said Zeitgeist. “Now let's take it apart.”

From another bench he carried the cable of a large control box, and plugged it into the analyzer with a many-pronged jack. The box had on it nearly a hundred keys. He fingered a control at the end of each row and the oscilloscope subsided to its single straight line. “Each one of these keys controls one of those narrow two-hundred-cycle bands I was talking about,” he told Joe. “Your voice—everybody's voice—has high and low overtones, some loud, some soft. Here's one at the top, one in the middle, one at the bottom.” He pressed three widely separated keys. The speaker uttered a faint breathy note, than a flat tone, the same in pitch but totally different in quality; it was a little like hearing the same note played first on a piccolo and then on a viola. The third key produced only a murmuring hiss, hardly louder that the noise of the amplifier itself. With each note, the 'scope showed a single wavy line. With the high it was a steep but even squiggle. In the middle it was a series of shallow waves like a child's drawing of an ocean. Down at the bottom it just shook itself and lay there.

“Just what I thought. I'm not saying you're a soprano, Joe, but there's five times more energy in your high register than there is at the bottom. Ever hear the way a kid's voice climbs the scale when he's upset—whining, crying, demanding? 'Spose I told you that all the protest against life that you're afraid to express in anger, is showing up here?” He slid his fingers across the entire upper register, and the speaker blasted. “Listen to that, the poor little feller.”

In abysmal self-hatred, Joe felt the sting of tears. “Cut it out,” he blurted.

“Caht eet ow-oot,” mimicked Zeitgeist. Joe thought he'd kill him, then and there, but couldn't because he found himself laughing. The
imitation was very good. “You know, Joe, the one thing you kept droning on about in the other room was something about ‘they won't listen to me. Nobody will listen.' How many times, say, in the office, have you had a really solid idea and kept it to yourself because ‘nobody will listen?” How many times have you wanted to do something with your wife, go somewhere, ask her to get something from the cleaners—and then decided not to because she wouldn't listen?” He glanced around at Joe, and charitably turned away from the contorted face. “Don't answer that: you know, and it doesn't matter to me.

“Now get this, Joe. There's something in all animals just about as basic as hunger. It's the urge to attack something that's retreating, and its converse: to be wary of something that won't retreat. Next time a dog comes running up to you, growling, with his ears laid back, turn and run and see if he doesn't take a flank steak out of your southern hemisphere. After you get out of the hospital, go back and when he rushes you, laugh at him and keep going on about your business, and see him decide you're not on his calorie chart for the day. Well, the same thing works with people. No one's going to attack you unless he has you figured out—especially if he figures you'll retreat. Walk around with a big neon sign on your head that says ‘HEY EVERYBODY I WILL RETREAT,' and you're just going to get clobbered wherever you go. You've got a sign like that and it lights up every time you open your mouth. Caht eet owoot.”

Joe's lower lip protruded childishly. “I can't help what kind of voice I've got.”

“Probably you can't. I can, though.”

“But how—”

“Shut up.” Zeitgeist returned all the keys to a neutral position and listened a moment to the blaring audio. Then he switched it off and began flicking keys, some up, some down. “Mind you, this isn't a matter of changing a tenor into a baritone. New York City once had a mayor with a voice like a Punch and Judy show, and he hadn't an ounce of retreat in him. All I'm going to do is cure a symptom. Some people say that doesn't work, but ask the gimpy guy who
finds himself three inches taller and walking like other people, the first time he tries his built-up shoes. As the guy who wears a well-made toupee.” He stared for a while at the 'scope, and moved some more keys. “You want people to listen to you. All right, they will, whether they want to or not. Of course,
what
they listen to is something else again. It better be something that backs up this voice I'm giving you. That's up to you.”

“I don't under—”

“You'll understand a lot quicker if we fix it so you listen and I talk. O.K.?” Zeitgeist demanded truculently, and sent over such an engaging grin that the words did not smart. “Now, like I said, I'm only curing a symptom. What you have to get through your thick head is that the disease doesn't exist. All that stuff about your sister Anna, and Joey, that doesn't exist because it happened and it's finished and it's years ago and it doesn't matter any more. Lutie, Barnes … well, they bother you mostly because they won't listen to you.
They'll listen to you now
. So that botherment is over with, too; finished, done with, nonexistent. For all practical purposes yesterday is as far beyond recall as twenty years ago; just as finished, just as dead. So the little boy who got punished by his big sister until he thought he deserved being punished
—he
doesn't exist. The man with the guilty feeling killing a kid called Joey, he doesn't exist either any more, and by the way he wasn't guilty in the first place. The copy man who lets a pipsqueak sadist prick him with petty sarcasms—he's gone too, because now there's a man who won't swallow what he wants to say, what he knows is right. He'll say it, just because
people will listen
. A beer stein is pretty useless to anyone until you put beer in it. The gadget I'm going to give you won't do you a bit of good unless you put yourself, your real self into it.” He had finished with the keys while he spoke, had turned and was holding Joe absolutely paralyzed with his strange light eyes.

Inanely, Joe said, “G-gadget?”

“Listen.” Zeitgeist hit the master switch and Joe's voice came from the speaker. “We only advertise in trade magazines. The engineer'll come to me with something he wants to promote and—”

And the voice was his voice, but it was something else, too. Its
pitch was the same, inflection, accent; but there was a forceful resonance in it somewhere, somehow. It was a compelling voice, a rich voice; above all it was assertive and sure. (And when the ‘I means' came, and the scalding light flashed, it wasn't laughable or embarrassing; it was simply unnecessary.)

“That isn't me.”

“You're quite right. It isn't. But it's the way the world will hear you. It's behind the way the world will treat you. And the way the world treats a man is the way the man grows, if he wants to and he's got any growing left in him. Whatever is in that voice you can
be
because I will help and the world will help. But you've got to help, too.”

“I'll help,” Joe whispered.

“Sometimes I make speeches,” said Zeitgeist, and grinned shyly. The next second he was deeply immersed in work.

He drew out a piece of paper with mimeographed rulings on it, and here and there in the ruled squares he jotted down symbols, referring to the keyboard in front of him. He seemed then to be totaling columns; once he reset two or three keys, turned on the audio and listened intently, then erased figures and put down others. At last he nodded approvingly, rose, stretched till his spine cracked, picked up the paper and went over to the third bench.

From drawers and cubbyholes he withdrew components—springs, pads, plugs, rods. He moved with precision and swift familiarity. He rolled out what looked like a file drawer, but instead of papers it contained ranks and rows of black plastic elements, about the size and shape of miniature match boxes, each with two bright brass contacts at top and bottom.