Brasses? To me the steel-on-steel of streetcars and El trains always sounds like trumpets and cornets. Strident, metallic, fiery cold. Hear that siren way off? It's a clarinet. The ship horns are tubas, the diesel horn's an oboe. And that lovely dreadful french horn is an electric saw cutting down the last tree. But what a percussion section they've got! The big stuff, like streetcar bells jangling, is easy to catch, but you have to really listen to get the subtleties--the buzz of a defective neon sign, the click of a stoplight changing. Sometimes you do get human voices, I'll admit, but they're not like they are in Beethoven's _Ninth_ or Holst's _Planets_. _There's_ the real sound of the universe (the Professor concluded, shutting the window). That's your heavenly choir. That's the music of the spheres the old alchemists kept listening for--if they'd just stayed around a little longer they'd all have been deafened by it. Oh, to think that Schopenhauer was bothered by the crack of carters' whips! And now it's time for this mouse to tuck himself in his nest in the dynamo. Good night, gentlemen! End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Big Engine, by Fritz Leiber