New Atlantis Read Online Free Page B

burning. But one hears nothing.
    Only on the slopes of the volcano, in the suburbs of the
city, does one begin to hear the deep thunder, and the high voices crying.
    Thus, when we became aware that we were hearing, we were
sure that the sounds we heard were fairly close to us. And yet we may have been
quite wrong. For we were in a strange place, a deep place. Sound travels fast
and far in the deep places, and the silence there is perfect, letting the least
noise be heard for hundreds of miles.
    And these were not small noises. The lights were tiny,
but the sounds were vast: not loud, but very large. Often they were below the
range of hearing, long slow vibrations rather than sounds, The first we heard
seemed to us to rise up through the currents from beneath us immense groans,
sighs felt along the bone, a rumbling, a deep uneasy whispering.
    Later, certain sounds came down
to us from above, or borne along the endless levels of the darkness, and these
were stranger yet, for they were music. A huge, calling, yearning music from
far away in the darkness, calling not to us. Where are you? I am here.
    Not to us.
    They were the voices of the
great souls, the great lives, the lonely ones, the voyagers. Calling. Not often
answered. Where are you? Where have you gone?
    But the bones, the keels and girders of white bones on icy
isles of the South, the shores of bones did not reply.
    Nor could we reply. But we listened, and the tears rose
in our eyes, salt, not so salt as the oceans, the world-girdling deep bereaved
currents, the abandoned roadways of the great lives; not so salt, but warmer.
    I am here. Where have you gone?
    No answer.
    Only the whispering thunder from below.
    But we knew now, though we could not answer, we knew
because we heard, because we felt, because we wept, we knew that we were; and
we remembered other voices.
    ~
    Max came the next night. I sat on the toilet lid to
practice, with the bathroom door shut. The FBI men on the other end of the bug
got a solid half hour of scales and doublestops, and then a quite good
performance of the Hindemith unaccompanied viola sonata. The bathroom being
very small and all hard surfaces, the noise I made was really tremendous. Not a
good sound, far too much echo, but the sheer volume was contagious, and I
played louder as I went on. The man up above knocked on his floor once; but if I
have to listen to the weekly All-American Olympic Games at full blast every
Sunday morning from his TV set, then he has to accept Paul Hindemith coming up
out of his toilet now and then.
    When I got tired I put a wad of cotton over the bug, and
came out of the bathroom half-deaf. Simon and Max were on fire. Burning,
unconsumed. Simon was scribbling formulae in traction, and Max was pumping his
elbows up and down the way he does, like a boxer, and saying “The e - lec -
tron emis - sion . . .” through his nose, with his eyes narrowed, and his mind
evidently going light-years per second faster than his tongue, because he kept
beginning over and saying “The e - lec - tron emis - sion . . .” and pumping his
elbows.
    Intellectuals at work are very strange to look at. As strange
as artists. I never could understand how an audience can sit there and look at a fiddler rolling his eyes and biting his
tongue, or a horn player collecting spit, or a pianist like a black cat
strapped to an electrified bench, as if what they saw had anything to do with the music.
    I damped the fires with a quart of black-market beer — the
legal kind is better, but I never have enough ration stamps for beer; I’m not
thirsty enough to go without eating — and gradually Max and Simon cooled down.
Max would have stayed talking all night, but I drove him out because Simon was
looking tired.
    I put a new battery in the radio and left it playing in the
bathroom, and blew out the candle and lay and talked with Simon; he was too
excited to sleep. He said that Max had solved the problems that were bothering
them before