could only have been hers.
By the time the vision faded, the song on the phonograph had come to an end. The needle reached the lead-out and rose by itself, and the record stopped turning.
The darkness was no longer oppressive to him, nor was Miss Palsgrave’s colossal chair. Worse was the thought that Miss Palsgrave herself would come closer, to put on a new record.
He retreated farther into the darkness, and the air grew warmer as he walked. There was a stale, burning odor in the air, like electrical discharge or the breath of the oversleeping. From all around came coughing sounds, rasps, weird mumblings. Unwin was not alone. But did those who made the sounds know that he was among them?
Something snagged his foot, nearly tripping him. He knelt and searched with his hand, found a rubberized cord stretched over the floor. This he followed several feet to the leg of a table. The table was knee-high, and there was a lamp on top of it. He found the switch and flipped it.
The shaded bulb cast its dim yellow light over a low, narrow bed. Its occupant was an underclerk—he wore an unfashionable gray suit and lay with his bowler perched on his chest. The bed was made up with drab, olive-colored blankets, but the underclerk slept on top of them rather than beneath. His little mustache trembled with each softly whistled exhalation, and his feet were bare. On the floor beside the bed were a pair of furry brown slippers, like two rabbits.
A little machine whirred softly on the table beside the lamp. It was a phonograph, though of a simpler, more utilitarian design than the one at the center of the archive. A ghost-white record, like the one Unwin had found in Lamech’s office, revolved under the needle. The phonograph produced no sound that he could hear; it had no amplifying bell. Instead it was equipped with a pair of bulbous headphones, which the underclerk wore as he slept.
Other beds nearby were arranged, like the desks of the fourteenth floor, in three long rows. In each of them an underclerk lay sleeping. Some made use of their blankets, some did not. Some slept in their suits, some in pajamas, and some had black sleeping masks strapped over their eyes. All wore identical headphones plugged in to quietly humming phonographs.
Unwin leaned close to the underclerk’s head, gently lifted the earpiece, and listened. All he heard was static, but the static was richly patterned, rising and falling in waves, cresting, breaking, receding. In time other sounds became apparent. He heard a muted honking, like traffic at a distance of several city blocks or birds circling over the sea. He heard animals calling from the depths of that sea and smaller animals scuttling over the sand at its bottom. He heard someone turning the pages of a book.
The underclerk opened his eyes and looked at him. “They’ve sent extra help, have they? Not a moment too soon.”
Unwin let go of the earpiece and stood straight.
The underclerk’s eyes closed, and for a moment it seemed he might fall asleep again, but then he shook his head and removed the headphones. “It’s unprecedented,” he said. “What is it, almost two in the afternoon? And they’re still sending fresh recordings.”
He sat up and rubbed his face with both hands. “It’s as though no one is waking up. But the subjects lack culpability modulations of any kind, and the delineations are too vivid to be self-generated. And then there’s the smaller bunch, all sharing the same image array—a whole subset with nearly identical eidetic representations, and it’s a juvenile construct to boot.” He raised the arm of the phonograph and switched off the machine.
“What is it?” Unwin asked.
“What is what?”
“The repeated . . . eidetic representation,” Unwin managed.
“Oh. It’s a carnival.” The underclerk smirked and rolled his eyes.
There was another flash of light from Miss Palsgrave’s machine, and both men turned to look at it.
“At first I thought it was a transduction error,” the underclerk said, whispering now. “But try telling that to her.” He removed the phonograph record and slid it into its slipcase, slid his feet into the slippers beside the bed. Then he stood, tightened the blankets over the edges of the mattress, and fluffed the pillow. “Well,” he said, “it’s all yours. Feel free to recycle my report if you get one from the circus crowd. You’ll grow tired of hearing it: ‘Something to do, someplace to go.’ What kind of