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If there was one thing he loathed above all others it was the gunner humorist who, with malice aforethought, deliberately waited to fire his gun until some helpless passer by was about a yard from the muzzle. But at the moment everything seemed quiet. The evening hate was not due yet; and Vane reached Brandhoek cross roads without having his eardrums burst.
There was something fine in battling with the elements like this in a stanch craft they had perfected. He felt that no other airship then in existence would have been able to keep up the fight. All at once there came a crash that drove his eardrums in. The Wondership staggered and then seemed to leap into lambent flame.
In the cold, dim silence of the earliest dawn Curtis Jadwin went to bed, only to lie awake, staring up into the darkness, planning, devising new measures, reviewing the day's doings, while the faint tides of blood behind the eardrums murmured ceaselessly to the overdriven brain, "Wheat wheat wheat, wheat wheat wheat. Forty million bushels, forty million, forty million."
The racking concussion-wave of hexynitrate will break human eardrums at an incredible distance. But no sound came, though the seconds went by.... Then, two miles away, there was a second gigantic flash.... Then a third.... But there was no sound at all. The quiet of the hills remained unbroken, though Thorn knew that such cataclysmic detonations should be audible at twenty miles or more.
Certainly he was an hour working at it; then he heard a sound that made his blood jump. From far away in the north it came, faint but reaching; "Ye-hoo-o." Rolf dropped his knife and listened with the instinctively open mouth that takes all pressure from the eardrums and makes them keen. It came again: "Ye-hoo-o." No mistake now, and Rolf sent the ringing answer back: "Ye-hoo-o, ye-hoo-o."
He saw Alexander wiping the steaming moisture from her brow with the sleeve of her shirt and heard her speak through a confused pounding upon eardrums that still seemed full of cumulative din. "Unless ther flood carries ther river five foot higher then hit's ever gone afore, we've done saved thet timber," she said slowly.
"Oh, my God!" cried Garth. He picked up his rifle, and ran like a madman from the cabin. Garth had no conscious design in running; his muscles merely reacted in obedience to the grinding tumult in his brain. His eardrums rang with the fancied sound of Natalie's cries; and his eyeballs were seared with the picture of her shrinking in the brutal hands of Grylls.
A cruel smile broke over Urga. "I understand, Magnificent. Make a public warning of him like that fool Peabody. Rip out his tongue and his eyes, smash his eardrums, and ride him from city to city, in chains." "Exactly." Joan shuddered, convulsively. "No, no," she cried aloud in her terror, "don't do that. I'll tell you everything; I'll do " "Joan," Hilary interrupted sharply, "not another word."
A ship in overdrive feels exactly as if it were buried deep in the core of a planet. There is no vibration. There is no sign of anything but solidity and if one looks out a port there is only utter blackness plus an absence of sound fit to make one's eardrums crack. But within seconds random tiny noises began.
It thunders louder than the thunder. And it's the deadliest. What drives men mad who are put in solitary confinement? The darkness? The solitude? Well, they help. But it's silence that does the trick silence that roars in their ears until it cracks their eardrums and addles their brains." "Mallard is a national peril, we'll concede. Very well then, he should be destroyed.
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