Yes, he decided, he was going to have to have a long talk with Dr. Coles that afternoon. Be a pleasure to get it all off his chest, his feeling of melancholia, his latent sense of doom. Be good just to talk about it. Oh, everything was getting to him these days. He was in a rut, that was it. A rut. He spat a sesame seed against the far wall and the low whir of the automatic vacuum cleaner rose and fell briefly. Joseph winced. The speakers were playing "Slam Bang Boom" again. His mind turned away from the grating melody in self defense, to look inward on himself. Of what, after all, did Joseph Partch's life consist? He licked his fingers and thought about it. What would he do this evening after work, for instance? Why, he'd stuff his earplugs back in his inflamed ears and board the commuter's copter and ride for half an hour listening to the drumming of the rotors and the pleading of the various canned commercials played on the copter's speakers loud enough to be heard over the engine noise and through the plugs. And then when he got home, there would be the continuous yammer of his wife added to the Tri-Di set going full blast and the dull food from the automatic kitchen. And synthetic coffee and one stale cigaret. Perhaps a glass of brandy to steady his nerves if Dr. Coles approved. Partch brooded. The sense of foreboding had been submerged in the day's work, but it was still there. It was as if, any moment, a hydrogen bomb were going to be dropped down the chimney, and you had no way of knowing when. And what would there be to do after he had finished dinner that night? Why, the same things he had been doing every night for the past fifteen years. There would be Tri-Di first of all. The loud comedians, and the musical commercials, and the loud bands, and the commercials, and the loud songs.... And every twenty minutes or so, the viewer would jangle with one of Felicia's friends calling up, and more yammering from Felicia. Perhaps there would be company that night, to play cards and sip drinks and talk and talk and talk, and never say a thing at all. There would be aircraft shaking the house now and then, and the cry of the monorail horn at intervals. And then, at last, it would be time to go to bed, and the murmur of the somnolearner orating him on the Theory of Groups all through the long night. And in the morning, he would be shocked into awareness with the clangor of the alarm clock and whatever disc jockey the clock radio happened to tune in on. Joseph Partch's world was made up of sounds and noises, he decided. Dimly, he wondered of what civilization itself would be constructed if all the sounds were once taken away. _Why_, after all, was the world of Man so noisy? It was almost as if--as if everybody were making as much noise as they could to conceal the fact that there was something lacking. Or something they were afraid of. Like a little boy whistling loudly as he walks by a cemetery at night.