Ray Bradbury - The Fog Horn

The psychiatrist said: “Shall we start?”

“Fine. The first victim, or one of the first, was my telephone. Murder most foul. I shoved it in the kitchen Insinkerator! Stopped the disposal unit in mid-swallow. Poor thing strangled to death. After that I shot the television set!”

The psychiatrist said, “Mmm.”

“Fired six shots right through the cathode. Made a beautiful tinkling crash, like a dropped chandelier.”

“Nice imagery.”

“Thanks, I always dreamt of being a writer.”

“Suppose you tell me when you first began to hate the telephone.”

“It frightened me as a child. Uncle of mine called it the Ghost Machine. Voices without bodies. Scared the living hell out of me. Later in life I was never comfortable. Seemed to me a phone was an impersonal instrument. If it felt like it, it let your personality go through its wires. If it didn’t want to, it just drained your personality away until what slipped through at the other end was some cold fish of a voice all steel, copper, plastic, no warmth, no reality. It’s easy to say the wrong thing on telephones; the telephone changes your meaning on you. First thing you know, you’ve made an enemy. Then, of course, the telephone’s such a convenient thing; it just sits there and demands you call someone who doesn’t want to be called. Friends were always calling, calling, calling me. Hell, I hadn’t any time of my own. When it wasn’t the telephone it was the television, the radio, the phonograph. When it wasn’t the television or radio or the phonograph it was motion pictures at the corner theater, motion pictures projected, with commercials on low-lying cumulus clouds. It doesn’t rain rain any more, it rains soapsuds. When it wasn’t High-Fly Cloud advertisements, it was music by Mozzek in every restaurant; music and commercials on the busses I rode to work. When it wasn’t music, it was inter-office communications, and my horror chambers of a radio wrist watch on which my friends and my wife phoned every five minutes. What is there about such ‘conveniences’ that makes them so temptingly convenient? The average man thinks? Here I am, time on my hands, and there on my wrist is a wrist telephone, so why not just buzz old Joe up, eh? “Hello, hello!” I love my friends, my wife, humanity, very much, but when one minute my wife calls to say, ‘Where are you now dear?’ and a friend calls and says, ‘Got the best off-color joke to tell you. Seems there was a guy -‘ And a stranger calls and cries out, ‘This is the Find-Fax Poll. What gum are you chewing at this very instant !’ Well!”

“How did you feel during the week?”

“The fuse lit. On the edge of the cliff. That same afternoon I did what I did at the office.”

“Which was?”

“I poured a paper cup of water into the intercommunications system.”

The psychiatrist wrote on his pad.

“And the system shorted?”

“Beautifully! The Fourth of July on wheels! My God, stenographers ran around looking lost ! What an uproar!”

“Felt better temporarily, eh?”

“Fine! Then I got the idea at noon of stamping my wrist radio on the sidewalk. A shrill voice was just yelling out of it at me, ‘This is People’s Poll Number Nine. What did you eat for lunch?’ when I kicked the Jesus out of the wrist radio!”

“Felt even better , eh?”

“It grew on me!” Brock rubbed his hands together. “Why didn’t I start a solitary revolution, deliver man from certain ‘conveniences’? ‘Convenient for whom?’ I cried. Convenient for friends: ‘Hey, Al, thought I’d call you from the locker room out here at Green Hills. Just made a sockdolager hole in one! A hole in one, Al! A beautiful day. Having a shot of whiskey now. Thought you’d want to know, Al!’ Convenient for my office, so when I’m in the field with my radio car there’s no moment when I’m not in touch. In touch ! There’s a slimy phrase. Touch, hell. Gripped! Pawed, rather. Mauled and massaged and pounded by FM voices. You can’t leave your car without checking in: ‘Have stopped to visit gas-station men’s room.’ ‘Okay, Brock, step on it!’ ‘Brock, what took you so long?’ ‘Sorry, sir.’ ‘Watch it next time, Brock.’ ‘Yes, sir!’ So, do you know what I did, Doctor? I bought a quart of French chocolate ice cream and spooned it into the car radio transmitter.”

“Was there any special reason for selecting French chocolate ice cream to spoon into the broadcasting unit?”

Brock thought about it and smiled. “It’s my favorite flavor.”

“Oh,” said the doctor.

“I figured, hell, what’s good enough, for me is good enough for the radio transmitter.”

“What made you think of spooning ice cream into the radio?”

“It was a hot day.”

The doctor paused.

“And what happened next?”

“Silence happened next. God, it was beautiful . That car radio cackling all day. Brock go here. Brock go there. Brock check in. Brock check out, okay Brock, hour lunch, Brock, lunch over, Brock, Brock, Brock. Well, that silence was like putting ice cream in my ears.”

“You seem to like ice cream a lot.”

“I just rode around feeling of the silence. It’s a big bolt of the nicest, softest flannel ever made. Silence. A whole hour of it. I just sat in my car, smiling, feeling of that flannel with my ears. I felt drunk with Freedom!”

“Go on.”

“Then I got the idea of the portable diathermy machine. I rented one, took it on the bus going home that night. There sat all the tired commuters with their wrist radios, talking to their wives, saying, ‘Now I’m at Forty-third, now I am at Forty-fourth, here I am at Forty-ninth, now turning at Sixty-first.’ One husband cursing, ‘Well, get out of that bar, damn it, and get home and get dinner started, I’m at Seventieth!’ And the transitsystem radio playing ‘Tales from the Vienna Woods,’ a canary singing words about a first-rate wheat cereal. Then I switched on my diathermy! Static! Interference! All wives cut off from husbands grousing about a hard day at the office. All husbands cut off from wives who had just seen their children break a window! The ‘Vienna Woods’ chopped down, the canary mangled! Silence! A terrible, unexpected silence. The bus inhabitants faced with having to converse with each other. Panic! Sheer, animal panic!”

“The police seized you?”

“The bus had to stop. After all, the music was being scrambled, husbands and wives were out of touch with reality. Pandemonium, riot, and chaos. Squirrels chattering in cages! A trouble unit arrived, triangulated on me instantly, had me reprimanded, fined, and home, minus my diathermy machine, in jig time.”

“Mr. Brock, may I suggest that so far your whole pattern here is not very-practical? If you didn’t like transit radios or office radios or car business radios, why didn’t you join a fraternity of radio haters, start petitions, get legal and constitutional rulings? After all, this is a democracy.”

“And I,” said Brock, “am that thing called a minority. I did join fraternities, picket, pass petitions, take it to court. Year after year I protested. Everyone laughed. Everyone else loved bus radios and commercials. I was out of step.”

“Then you should have taken it like a good soldier, don’t you think? The majority rules.”

“But they went too far. If a little music and ‘keeping in touch’ was charming, they figured a lot would be ten times as charming. I went wild! I got home to find my wife hysterical. Why? Because she had been completely out of touch with me for half a day. Remember, I did a dance on my wrist radio? Well, that night I laid plans to murder my house.”