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check it with Ba-a-a-a-a-ah—” with the “ah” going on and on like an all-clear signal. “That bother you?” called Zeitgeist over the noise.
    â€œIt’s awful!” shouted Joe. This time he did cover his ears. It didn’t help. Zeitgeist switched off the noise and laughed at him. “That’s understandable. Your own voice, and it goes on and on like that. What’s bothering you is, it doesn’t breathe. I swear you could choke a man half to death, just by making him listen to that. Well, don’t let it worry you. That thing over there”—he pointed to a massive cabinet against the wall—“is my analyzer. It breaks up your voice into all the tones and overtones it contains, finds out the energy level of each, and shoots the information to that tone-generator yonder. The generator reproduces each component exactly as received, through seventy-two band-pass filters two hundred cycles apart. All of which means that when I tell it to, it picks out a single vowel sound—in this case your ‘a’ in ‘Barnes’—and hangs it up there on the ’scope like a photograph for as long as I want to look at it.”
    â€œAll that, to do what I do when I say ‘ah?’ ”
    â€œAll that,” beamed Zeitgeist. Joe could see he was unashamedly proud of his equipment. He leaned forward and flicked Joe across the Adam’s apple. “That’s a hell of a compact little machine, that pharynx of yours. Just look at that wave-form.”
    Joe looked at the screen. “Some mess.”
    â€œA little tomato sauce and you could serve it in an Italian restaurant,” said Zeitgeist. “Now let’s take it apart.”
    From another bench he carried the cable of a large control box, and plugged it into the analyzer with a many-pronged jack. The box had on it nearly a hundred keys. He fingered a control at the end of each row and the oscilloscope subsided to its single straight line. “Each one of these keys controls one of those narrow two-hundred-cycle bands I was talking about,” he told Joe. “Your voice—everybody’s voice—has high and low overtones, some loud, some soft. Here’s one at the top, one in the middle, one at the bottom.” He pressed three widely separated keys. The speaker uttered a faint breathy note, than a flat tone, the same in pitch but totally different in quality; it was a little like hearing the same note played first on a piccolo and then on a viola. The third key produced only a murmuring hiss, hardly louder that the noise of the amplifier itself. With each note, the ’scope showed a single wavy line. With the high it was a steep but even squiggle. In the middle it was a series of shallow waves like a child’s drawing of an ocean. Down at the bottom it just shook itself and lay there.
    â€œJust what I thought. I’m not saying you’re a soprano, Joe, but there’s five times more energy in your high register than there is at the bottom. Ever hear the way a kid’s voice climbs the scale when he’s upset—whining, crying, demanding? ’Spose I told you that all the protest against life that you’re afraid to express in anger, is showing up here?” He slid his fingers across the entire upper register, and the speaker blasted. “Listen to that, the poor little feller.”
    In abysmal self-hatred, Joe felt the sting of tears. “Cut it out,” he blurted.
    â€œCaht eet ow-oot,” mimicked Zeitgeist. Joe thought he’d kill him, then and there, but couldn’t because he found himself laughing. Theimitation was very good. “You know, Joe, the one thing you kept droning on about in the other room was something about ‘they won’t listen to me. Nobody will listen.’ How many times, say, in the office, have you had a really solid idea and kept it to yourself because ‘nobody will listen?”