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Show 288 the voice thin but unquestionably human, and he had heard it inside his head. He waited to hear more, but that was all there was. It embarrassed him to do it, but he got up and looked under the bed. He crossed the room and listened to the steam radiator under the window. He went into the bathroom and climbed into the tub and pressed his ear against the drain. Back in the bedroom he considered the bedside lamp with its erratic, flickering bulb and its bent wire harp holding its cracked shade, but after listening closely to the lamp for a minute or two, all the time hoping Sorenson would not wake up, he gave it up and crawled back into bed, knowing that his first impression was correct. He slept unevenly, and the next day tried not to think about it. That day a belligerent Negro followed them down a residential street shouting obscenities at them, and a mailman stepped out of his truck in the middle of a block and asked them why they didn't take all their wives and go back where they came from. Lorin couldn't think of a fast reply in either case, nor was he very articulate during the rest of the day of knocking on doors and speaking to the suspicious people who opened them and didn't like what they saw standing on the front steps. Nothing happened that night, or the one after, but the one after that, as he was drifting off again between the sentences in his book, he felt his brain relax its grip and suddenly heard "We do ask that you take too much of this." This time he gently placed his book face-down on the table next to the clock, reached up and pulled the chain on the lamp, crushed the pillow under the back of his neck and stared hard at the spangle of corpuscles that floated between himself and the ceiling. The voice was female this time. It was pleasant to listen to, but it faded in and out as he tipped his head this way or that, and he couldn't make out the words |