Page:Fantastic v08n11 1959-11.djvu/51
acid and cold. We will let it stream through our beings and blow away the stuffy preoccupations of an old man who has lived too long with molecules.
That's a strange thing, Di, but I just now seemed to smell roses, an abundance of roses. Oh, is it your perfume? No—no, I see that yours is a very different scent though equally delightful. Pardon me if I seem flustered, but I don't know when a young lady has leaned her cheek so close to mine—even in the interests of scientific accuracy. You put the perfume behind the lobe of your ear?—that's charming.
You smelled the roses too? You shared my illusion?—if it was one. Roses in January in Chicago snows—a delightful circumstance. Perhaps a hearse skidded and overset nearby—or don't you enjoy macabre fancies?
In Chicago one must learn to treasure each hint of the marvelous or outlandish—there are few enough of them at best to offset the dismalness of the city, its grime, its stenches, its shrieking, roaring, growling, rumbling tumult that distantly assaults our ears even here in these gray gothic precincts. A grimly lonely city. When I first came here as a fellow (my entire academic life, Di, has been spent in this one institution) it seemed to me that Chicago's loneliness was an almost unbearable continuation, in a darker mode, of the loneliness of my childhood and youth. The whine of its elevated trains and the screech of its streetcars, the angry chug of its taxicabs and the pounding of its presses (augmented now by the drone of its aircraft, even the boom of its jets, and not to mention the heavier minatory sounds that proceed from its railway yards, docks and factory districts)—all these noises became an integral part of my consciousness.
Listen to the Song of Chicago, Di! Listen to the steel tomtoms and rattles of modern primitive man. The more noise the less message, the new men say—I sometimes understand what that means. Listen to the Music of the Spheres, Midwestern style—I might venture to call it the Jazz of the Gears. I wonder if, to more sensitive ears, the molecules in the Folly make any such muted pandemonium? What? Yes, I'll be quiet.
Di, you're right! You're right! It was incredible, but it did happen. For a moment