The Next Voice You Hear ...

The Next Voice You Hear …

GEORGE SUMNER ALBEE

At exactly 9.38 p.m. on the first Monday in March the strange, majestic voice was first heard over the airwaves. Just why that day and hour were chosen nobody can say. In any event, the immediate reaction was disbelief. People simply could not believe their own ears.

         Floyd Uffelman of Doylestown, USA, was down in the cellar playing with his son Lyman’s electric train and following a quiz programme on his portable radio. Suddenly the programme faded out and the voice, deep, gentle, benevolent but firm, said:

          This is God. I am sorry I must interrupt you. A plan of creation ought by rights to go forward under its own rules, but you, dear children of the sun’s third planet, are so near to destroying yourselves I must step in. I shall spend this week with you.

          Floyd stood for a moment gaping. “I’m sure Lyman’s set up a microphone in his room.”

      He climbed to his son’s room. Lyman was sitting with one foot in his hand, agonizing over arithmetic problems.

          “What did you do to the radio?” demanded his father.

          “Me? Nothing. Is it broken?” the boy asked.

          Floyd was deeply puzzled. He went next door to his neighbor, Gene Hukill.

          “Gene,” Floyd said, “were you listening to the quiz show just now?”

          “No,” answered Gene. “Lux Radio Theatre.”

          “Then I guess you wouldn’t have heard it,” Floyd said.

      “Say, did you hear it too?” asked Gene in astonishment. “Wasn’t that most peculiar?”

          Doylestown was not the only town that felt wonderment. By morning the news reports from Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and Australia were in, and it was public knowledge that the broadcast had been worldwide and multilingual. Arabs heard the announcement in Arabic, South African tribesmen in Shi Ronga dialect.

          Mysterious. “What do you think of it?” one man would ask another. Never were the humble words “I don’t know” spoken oftener than that first Tuesday in March.

          The sun went down. By eight the ammeters in the power stations were registering increased loads. Nor were listeners disappointed. Exactly at 9.38, the serene, friendly voice spoke again:

          Do not be afraid. I only want to convince you that I really am God and that I am visiting you this week.

          This time, direction finders attempted, by means of radio signals, to identify its position, while the voice was on the air. But no sign of trickery was discovered. Russia, suspected by some, was tentatively absolved.

       On Wednesday the newspapers devoted page after page to the voice. The unanimous view of those scientists who could be reached for comment – some of them seemed to be hiding – was that the voice was a man’s.

            “If it were actually God speaking,” pointed out a professor of logic, “he would not find it necessary to use the radio.”

          Ministers of the Gospel were more reserved in their statements. “Even if the voice be not the Lord’s,’’ said an Anglican bishop, “it reminds us of something too many of us forget. God is here with us.”

          Miracles. Wednesday-evening prayer meetings across the United States were enthusiastically attended; most churches had installed radios. The third utterance consisted of only three words. To the indignation of those who believed God must be somber and funereal, the words. were delivered with a fatherly chuckle. They were:

            It is I.

            Like the others, the third message somehow crept into the coils and condensers of every radio transmitter in operation, including those of ships at sea that were designed for code and did not have microphones. This suggested a possible answer to why God was using the radio. A pronouncement out of the empty sky might have caused panic. But people were used to hearing voices on the radio. The Lord was being considerate.

          His knowledge of human psychology was superb. (This is not surprising, when one comes to think of it.) The very brevity of his “It is I” message went far towards convincing those who had a liking for modesty and understatement.

         On Thursday another device was employed: a display of miracles for the ignorant and the superstitious. Miracles occurred about 80 kilometres apart all around the globe. Most were modest affairs. Oranges in a street market in Wisconsin rolled up the wall and spelt out the words, “Men are my sons and therefore brothers,” in a pretty frame of parsley. A lion in the Copenhagen zoo got out of his cage, strolled into the countryside until he spied some sheep in a field and deliberately lay down with them. In Pasadena, California, a nervous woman, whose husband gritted his teeth in bed, leapt from the Arroyo Seco Bridge. She remained suspended in mid-air for 45 minutes, until a fire engine thrust an extension ladder up to her.

          Grand Performance. These miracles, small though they were, had a wildly infuriating effect upon many persons who had been troubled hardly at all by the deep, dynamic voice on the radio. In the Chamber of Deputies in France there was a near-riot, with members hurling epithets like “Camel” back and forth and charging one another with a betrayal of rationalism and the Revolution.

          The angriest man in America was Walter Valerian of New York, president of the Association for the Advancement of Iconoclasm and Atheism. He summoned members of his association in all parts of the country to hurry to New York for a mass protest.

          The Lord’s Thursday evening broadcast was lengthy and had a theological tone:

          Every pebble beneath your feet, every drop of water, is a miracle, but since you have lost your ability to feel awe I have had to perform today these other miracles, which require a suspension of natural law. My willingness to break the law should show you how deeply I love you, for even an omnipotent deity must limit his own powers. However, this will not convince the diehards. Hence on the morrow, Friday, I shall perform several sizeable miracles during the forenoon. And promptly at noon I shall sink the continent of Australia beneath the sea for one minute.

          After the Thursday-evening broadcast disbelief melted away. People by the tens of millions became certain that the voice was God’s. Virtually the entire Muslim world was trudging the roads towards Mecca. Fire-crackers rattled day and night in the yellow dust of China. Members of a little-known sect in the mountains of South American Ozark wrapped themselves in sheets and gathered on a hilltop to await the imminent end of the world.

          Then the Australian radio stations took over the air. God had chosen the right continent for his final demonstration. People of another country might have put on a craven scramble for row-boats. Not the Australians! The good-humoured Melbourne announcer observed, “Nobody’s nervous or alarmed. The general attitude is that a minute under water can do nobody any harm and may do some of our citizens a lot of good.” Arrangements were made for blimps to circle over Melbourne and Sydney and transmit eyewitness accounts of Great Flood II.

          Wings and Halos. God had promised “sizeable” miracles for Friday forenoon, and they were quite sizeable. In the US, every last bit of metal owned by the Army, the Navy and the Air Force was gone from its accustomed place. The whole huge tonnage of it, from buckles to battleships, was neatly cut up into scrap.

          By mid-morning the other nation whose war potential was feared by the world had also lost all its military equipment. The outrage felt by the Kremlin was sufficient to blast aside its own censorship. All of the shining rows of Russian tanks, planes and siege guns were gone. In their place stood rank upon rank of manure carts, each bearing a neat placard with a quotation from Lenin: “Peace, Bread and the Land.”

          As for the protest meeting of the atheists in New York, barely had the group of demonstrators marched into Times Square than God turned every one of them into an angel. Arched, sweeping wings with feathers of purest white grew abruptly out of their shoulder blades, and over their heads appeared halos of bright gold. They had a frightfully embarrassing time trying to sneak away in taxis.

          The announcers and reporters flying over Australia grew almost incoherent with tension as the second hands of their watches swept away 11:58, 11:59 and, finally, the dot of noon. The BBC man, however, chatted along as coolly as if he were describing a cricket match. “As predicted,” he said, “the continent is now sinking. The rate is quite rapid; about that of a modern passenger lift. There…the last church steeple has disappeared. The water is aswirl with floating objects. What a clutter people do keep about their houses! Now the hilltops are under…fifty seconds, fifty-five…yes, she’s popping up again. Right-o! Up she comes, good old Australia, none the worse for her little drenching!”

          The Awakening. Landing craft raced for the shore the instant there was a shore to race for. The first citizen to be reached by an announcer carrying a portable transmitter was a certain Colonel Humphrey Arbuthnot, DSC, Retired. “Tell the radio audience, sir,’’ panted the announcer. “Did you really go under?”

          “I’m dripping, aren’t I,” trumpeted the colonel. “Beastly ocean poured right into the room. I say, you wouldn’t have a dry towel, would you?”

          God’s broadcast of Friday evening was devoted to picking up loose ends:

          Must my visit mean that the world is coming to an end? For Heaven’s sake, listen to your soul; do as it bids you. Good-night.

          Saturday was a busy, busy day. Consciences long buried were sending up tender green stalks [it is interesting that My poetic name Kishalay means ‘tender green stalk’ – G] like tulip bulbs. The dictators of half a dozen Latin countries resigned. An international banking cartel went out of business because its directors felt that their methods, never too admirable, had become unwelcome if not obsolete. Small businessmen by the hundreds of thousands experienced a similar change of heart. One garage owner called his mechanics together and said, “From now on when we charge a customer for a new distributor coil, let us actually put in the coil.”

          Lesser malefactors spent Saturday returning stolen books to public libraries, repaying old loans, sending gifts to forgotten aunts in old ladies’ homes and so on. For 99 per cent of the human race, it was astounding what a happy, friendly, pleasant place the earth had become by Saturday night.

          The Lord’s Saturday-evening broadcast was his farewell. Across the world the radios hummed. Then there came silence and the beautiful voice. It said:

          Now I shall take my leave. You will find that most of your problems remain. You still have pain and unhappiness; you still need to feed and to clothe and to govern yourselves. Need I tell you why? A planet is a school. Live, dear children, and learn. And now – until we meet again, good-bye.

          On the seventh day, we presume, he rested.

(From GREAT SHORT STORIES, Reader’s Digest, Inc. This entertaining story will, I hope, revive the fortunes of wonderful Reader’s Digest, Inc., which sadly went out of business – went bankrupt, to call a spade a spade – according to a CNN report I heard two or three years ago. – G)

Kishalay Sinha [G]