She paused and turned around to locate everyone in the group.
“Gather in closely, please,” she said. For a second her gaze brushed mine-and without warning, the wave of feeling inside me about the Encyclopedia suddenly crested. A cold sensation like fear washed through me, and I stiffened.
“Now,” she went on, when we were all standing close together, “I want you all to keep absolutely still for sixty seconds and listen. Just listen, and see if you hear anything.”
The others stopped talking and the vast, untouchable silence of that huge chamber closed in about us. It wrapped about us, and the feeling in me sang suddenly up to a high pitch of anxiety. I had never been bothered by heights or distances, but suddenly now I was wildly aware of the long emptiness below the platform, of all the space enclosing me. My head began to swim and my heart pounded. I felt dizziness threatening me.
“And what’re we supposed to hear?” I broke in loudly, not for the question’s sake, but to snap the vertiginous sensation that seemed to be trying to sweep me away. I was standing almost behind Lisa as I said it. She turned and looked up at me. There was a shadow in her eyes again of that strange look she had given me earlier.
“Nothing,” she said. And then, still watching me strangely, she hesitated. “Or maybe-something, though the odds are billions to one against it. You’ll know if you hear it, and I’ll explain after the sixty seconds are up.” She touched me lightly, request-ingly on the arm with one hand. “Now, please be quiet-for the sake of the others, even if you don’t want to listen yourself.”
“Oh, I’ll listen,” I told her.
I turned from her. And suddenly, over her shoulder, behind us, below me, small and far off by that entrance to the Index Room by which we had come in, I saw my sister, no longer with our group. I recognized her at that distance only by the pale color of her hair and her height. She was talking to a dark, slim man dressed all in black, whose face I could not make out at that distance, but who stood close to her.
I was startled and suddenly annoyed. The sight of the thin male figure in black seemed to slap at me like an affront. The very idea that my sister would drop behind our group to speak to someone else after begging me to bring her here-speak to someone who was a complete stranger to me, and speak as earnestly as I could see she was speaking, even at this distance, by the tenseness of her figure and the little movements of her hands-seemed to me like a discourtesy amounting to betrayal. After all, she had talked me into coming.
The hair on the back of my neck rose, a cold wave of anger rose in me. It was ridiculous; at that distance not even the best human ears ever bora could have overheard their conversation, but I found myself straining against the enclosing silence of the vast room, trying to make out what it was they could be talking about.
And then-imperceptibly, but growing rapidly louder-I began to hear. Something.
Not my sister’s voice, or the voice of the stranger, whoever he was. It was some distant, harsh voice of a man speaking in a language a little like Latin, but with dropped vowels and rolled r’s that gave his talk a mutter, like the rapid rolling of the summer thunder that accompanies heat lightning. And it grew, not so much louder, as closer-and then I heard another voice, answering it.
And then another voice. And another, and another and another.
Roaring, shouting, leaping, like an avalanche, the voices leaped suddenly upon me from every direction, growing wildly greater in number every second, doubling and redoubling-all the voices in all the languages of all the world, all the voices that had ever been in the world-and more than that. More- and more-and more.
They shouted in my ear, babbling, crying, laughing, cursing, ordering, submitting-but not merging, as such a multitude should, at last into one voiceless, if mighty, thunder like the roar of a waterfall. More and more as they grew, they still remained all separate. / heard each one! Each one of those millions, those billions of men’s and women’s voices shouted individually in my ears.
And the tumult lifted me at last as a feather is lifted on the breast of a hurricane, swirling me up and away out of my senses into a raging cataract of unconsciousness.
CHAPTER 3
I remember I did not want to wake up. It seemed to me I had been on a far voyage, that I had been away a long time. But when, at last, reluctantly, I opened my eyes, I was lying on the floor of the chamber and only Lisa Kant was bending over me. Some of the others in our party had not yet finished turning around to see what had happened to me.
Lisa was raising my head from the floor.
“You heard\” she was saying, urgently and low-voiced, almost in my ear. “What did you hear?”
“Hear?” I shook my head, dazedly, remembering at that, and almost expecting to hear that uncountable horde of voices flooding back in on me. But there was only silence now, and Lisa’s question. “Hear?” I said, “-them.”
“Them?”
I blinked my eyes up at her and abruptly my mind cleared. All at once, I remembered my sister Eileen; and I scrambled to my feet, staring off into the distance at the entrance by which I had seen her standing with the man in black. But the entrance and the space about it was empty. The two of them, together-they were gone.
I scrambled to my feet. Shaken, battered, torn loose from my roots of self-confidence by that mighty cataract of voices in which I had been plunged and carried away, the mystery and disappearance of my sister shook me now out of all common sense. I did not answer Lisa, but started at a run down the ramp for the entrance where I had last seen Eileen talking to the stranger in black.
Fast as I was, with my longer legs, Lisa was faster. Even in the blue robes, she was as swift as a track star. She caught up with me, passed me and swung around to bar the entrance as I reached it.
“Where are you going?” she cried. “You can’t leave-just yet! If you heard something, IVe got to take you to see Mark Torre himself! He has to talk to anyone who ever hears anything!”
I hardly heard her.
“Get out of my way,” I muttered, and I pushed her aside, not gently. I plunged on through the entrance into the circular equipment room beyond the entrance. There were technicians at work in their colored smocks, doing incomprehensible things to inconceivable tangles of metal and glass-but no sign of Eileen, or the man in black.
I raced through the room into the corridor beyond. But that, too, was empty. I ran down the corridor and turned right into the first doorway I came to. From desks and tables a few people, reading and transcribing, looked up at me in wonder, but Eileen and the stranger were not among them. I tried another room and another, all without success.
At the fifth room, Lisa caught up with me again.
“Stop!” she said. And this time she took actual hold of me, with a strength that was astonishing for a girl no larger than she was. “Will you stop?-And think for a moment? What’s the matter?”
“Matter!” I shouted. “My sister-” and then I stopped. I checked my tongue. All at once it swept over me how foolish it would sound if I told Lisa the object of my search. A seventeen-year-old girl talking to, and even going off from a group with, someone her older brother does not know, is hardly good reason for a wild chase and a frantic search-at least in this day and age. And I was not of any mind to rehearse for Lisa’s benefit the cold unhappiness of our upbringing, Eileen’s and mine, in the house of my uncle Mathias.
I stood silent.
“You have to come with me,” she said urgently after a second. “You don’t know how terribly, inconceivably rare it is when someone actually hears something at the Transit Point. You don’t know how much it means now to Mark Torre–to Mark Torre, himself-to find someone who’s heard!”
I shook my head numbly. I had no wish to talk to anyone about what I had just been through, and least of all to be examined like some freak experimental specimen.
“You have to!” repeated Lisa. “It means so much. Not just to Mark, to the whole project. Think! Don’t just run off! Think about what you’re doing first!”