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Broadcast receivers began to appear in the shops, either with headphones or large horn loudspeakers, but we never had one at home. In 1926 we moved to Athens, Greece, where I went to school. Strangely enough, as I found out later, that was the year when Norman also came to Athens for the first time.
It was its utter incongruity which reached Dewforth through the robotic clamor, and which touched him ... a mewing, as of a kitten trapped in a closet. It came, as he discovered, from The Operator. He was quite alone among his levers, wheels, switches, buttons, cranks, gauges, lights, bells, buzzers, horns, ticker-tapes, creeping scrolls, barking loudspeakers and cryptic dials.
Over the loudspeakers came Grim Hagen's shriek of wild laughter. Odin turned another knob and the bubble loomed larger. Grim Hagen stood there, one lean hand rubbing his chin as he laughed at them. And the figure lying prone upon a couch beside him was swathed by a sheet which came almost to its eyes. But the shadows were leaving the bubble now. And Odin saw that it was Maya. Asleep. Statuesque.
Somewhere beyond this maze of control panels, he also reasoned, there must be an area like the bridge of an enormous ship where the clamor of the bells, buzzers, klaxons and whistles and the silent warnings and importunings of dials, gauges, colored lights, ticker-tapes which spewed from metal mouths, the palsied styles which scribbled on creeping scrolls, were somehow collated and made meaningful, where the yammering loudspeakers could be answered, and where the operators could look out and down and see what they were doing.
A world-shaking voice bellowed the word to a million waiting loudspeakers, and the applause of the audience echoed back in a wave of sound. "One minute," a voice said, and the time buzzer sounded. Brion had carefully conditioned the reflex in himself. A minute is not a very large measure of time and his body needed every fraction of it.
You talked to me on the telephone from Serena!" Lockley did recognize the voice. It was that of the general who'd sounded pompous and indignant as he refused to listen to Lockley's statements. Now, coming out of many loudspeakers and echoing hollowly from cliffs, it was the same voice but with an intonation that was persuasive and forthright. "You startled me," said the voice crisply.
I got back in the jeep and returned to where Joe Kivelson was keeping track of what was going on in five screens, including one from a pickup on a lifter at the ceiling, and shouting orders that were being reshouted out of loudspeakers all over the place.
And a harsh voice now rasped out of loudspeakers everywhere, uttering threats, cursing Mekin few could believe their ears and rousing hopes which Bors knew regretfully were bound to be disappointed. The rasping broadcast cut off in the middle of a syllable. Somebody had come to believe that he really heard what he thought he heard. Now there would be reaction.
Whatever else it demanded of him would be minor. "Not true," a directionless voice said. Kranath gasped in shock as he made a fast scan of the featureless white room he now stood in. It was empty, with no trace left of the elevator door, or any other exit. Nobody was there, and he saw no loudspeakers but there had to be something! Finally it sank in. The voice had spoken in his mind!
There was only an instant's pause. Then Vale's voice came out of the loudspeakers spread all about. "Lockley, this is Vale. The whole thing's faked. There's a good reason for it, but you stumbled on the facts. They had to be kept secret. I didn't even tell Jill. This isn't treason, Lockley. We aren't traitors! Come out and I'll explain everything. Here's Sattell."
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