Grieve patted James on the cheek.
— Sometimes you learn more from my father saying no than you do from his yeses.
Stark laughed.
— My daughter loves to tease. How sad I would be if you hadn't been born.
Grieve wore her winningest smile.
— You would be a nomadic horse lord who encamps each night in a tent city far larger than the faces of seven earths unsewn and stretched side by side.
Stark threw back his large head and laughed.
— My daughter, he said, is one of the great fabulists. But she does not like to be found out.
Grieve pretended to pout.
Everything from now on in is a leavetaking, James thought.
— What do you think will happen? he asked Stark. Tomorrow and in the days after?
Stark leaned back in his wide leather chair.
— At first, enormous pandemonium. The populace will discover all at once the fate that has befallen it. Millions of people will make their way through cramped, crammed streets to hospitals, causing untold devastation in motor accidents. Mobs will cause enormous damage. The hospitals, of course, won't be functioning: there is no cure for this. And furthermore, all the workers in the hospital will have gone deaf as well. The fact is, going deaf is the least of the troubles. It will be the lasting effect, and certainly the moral, but the worst danger will be in the economic collapse. The other nations of the world will be in a strange position. It will be interesting to see how they act.
Stark's face was grim, but set in a strange expression of curiosity.
— It will be seamless.
He took a deep breath. Beneath the desk, James could see his hands clench and unclench. A good person, which he may be, thought James, must be torn apart by doing what he's doing. Has any man ever believed he was this right?
Stark was still talking. James realized he had drifted off; he had not been listening.
— We have balloons hidden in hundreds of caches across the country. They will be released up into the atmosphere mechanically, from a remote location. When they reach the proper height, they will burst, and the gas inside will disperse and alter, as it meets with the atmosphere. Then the clouds will form. They will begin to drift and sing. The entire continental nation will be affected. The clouds will maintain themselves for two to three days, long enough to affect the greater part of the population.
Grieve and James were silent for a minute, then another minute, watching him.
Finally, James spoke.
— How do you know how it works? Have you tested it?
— On one person, said Stark. My partner in the laboratory. Morris, Andrew Morris. We drew straws. I would have done it if I had drawn the straw. But he was the expert. He was the one who made the gas.
He smiled vaguely, unsettlingly, as though he were looking at something far away.
— I have his description of the experience, of what it's like to hear the tone from the cloud. In fact, it's the last thing I wanted you to memorize. I've been looking for it all day. I just found it.
He held up a transcript.
— I'll read it aloud.
— And then we'll be done? asked Grieve.
— Then we're done, said James.
What was to come felt so vague and unreal that he did not feel any guilt yet at being a part of it. He remembered McHale's death. That had been real. These people had done that. He remembered the picture of Estrainger in the newspaper. How could he have been such a fool? He had been standing there outside the building talking to Estrainger himself, and hadn't known it. He could still see the scornful turn to Estrainger's lip. Where had all his scorn gone now?
Stark began:
— Eight February, nine P.M. Test of the effects of Gas E-thirty-eight. I was tied to a chair in the clean room. All precautions were taken to limit the sound to that room alone. The duration was one hour. As soon as the gas was released a visible cloud formed near the ceiling of the room. I heard nothing at first, but after a while had a feeling of dizziness. This feeling grew. If I had not been strapped to the chair, I would have lost my balance and fallen to the ground. A noise began, a quiet tone, like a single harp string. It grew in volume, but then faded. Colors swam in my sight. The dizziness was overwhelming. I began to vomit and a shuddering pain came in back of my eyes. The colors in my sight blended together and I began to hear a sort of music. It sounded like voices singing, voices underwater. I realized what it was, abstractly, but was drawn away from my own thought, and took up the sound again. The music was the memory of past sound filling the sudden void made by my loss of hearing. As the hour passed, the music faded and was gone, and I was left in a silence more profound than any I had known. I have lived with that silence nine days, and know now I shall never hear again.
At the Small Ferris Wheel Abandoned in the Woods
James blinked in the harsh light. Where was Ansilon? He felt along his shoulder with a free hand. Yes, the owl was there.
Ansilon strained slightly against his hand in greeting. Both were deathly quiet, for had they not come at last to the Small-Ferris-Wheel-Abandoned-In-The-Woods of which they had so often heard?
There it was on the far side of the clearing, all rusted and bent. The clearing was in a deep, deep depression of land, and the trees around were all very old, so although the Ferris Wheel was in fact of an incredible height, it did not rise above the highest height of trees, but stood among the treetops, veiled from any distant sight.
— Up we must go, said Ansilon.
and also,
— My friend, I have brought a gift for you, a final gift of my friendship.
For indeed, James had not seen Ansilon for many a year, he having been presumed dead and most certainly gone away.
— What is it? asked James. I have got something for you, too.
Ansilon laid on the ground a little piece of hay woven into a ribbon.
— Tie this in among your locks of hair and you will know the sound of lying when you hear it; you will know the sound of truth.
James took it and tied it in his hair.
— What then for me? asked Ansilon.
And James sang quietly a little rhyme for owls that have gone away. This Ansilon took gladly into his heart, and he perched happily on James's shoulder, sometimes moving this way and sometimes that.
Then up they climbed on the Ferris Wheel, sometimes out onto a tree limb and up and back onto the wheel, so complicated proved the ascent, yet after some minutes of climbing, they found themselves far above the ground seated in a lovely iron car.
— Here we are, said Ansilon, and here we'll stay.
— What ever do you mean? asked James. I must go back after a little while.
Must you? asked Ansilon. Must you?
And James knew then that all children at some time mistake themselves and choose to leave childhood. Yet once it is done, it cannot be undone, for it is a very small door that shuts in a long, long wall.