The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sound of Silence, by Barbara Constant

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Title: The Sound of Silence

Author: Barbara Constant

Illustrator: Schelling

Release Date: October 19, 2009 [EBook #30283]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact & Fiction June 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright
on this publication was renewed.

THE SOUND

OF SILENCE

BY BARBARA CONSTANT

Most people, when asked to define the ultimate in
loneliness, say it's being alone in a crowd. And it takes
only one slight difference to make one forever alone in the
crowd....

ILLUSTRATED BY SCHELLING

* * * * *

Nobody at Hoskins, Haskell & Chapman, Incorporated, knew jut why
Lucilla Brown, G.G. Hoskins' secretary, came to work half an hour
early every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Even G.G. himself, had he
been asked, would have had trouble explaining how his occasional
exasperated wish that just once somebody would reach the office ahead
of him could have caused his attractive young secretary to start doing
so three times a week ... or kept her at it all the months since that
first gloomy March day. Nobody asked G.G. however--not even Paul
Chapman, the very junior partner in the advertising firm, who had
displayed more than a little interest in Lucilla all fall and winter,
but very little interest in anything all spring and summer. Nobody
asked Lucilla why she left early on the days she arrived early--after
all, eight hours is long enough. And certainly nobody knew where
Lucilla went at 4:30 on those three days--nor would anybody in the
office have believed it, had he known.

"Lucky Brown? seeing a psychiatrist?" The typist would have giggled,
the office boy would