--some of
the noises they made, especially the commands, were recognizable now to
the people--and a sharp slap. Then Mrs. Full hurried into the box,
carrying a number of two-foot-square slabs under her arm.

"What happened, ma'am?"

"Hello, Adam. The criminal Watkins played a few bars of a real song on
that device, and the brutes hit him." She laid down the slabs. "Our
harmonies enrage them, I think perhaps cause them actual pain. They held
the sides of their heads where ears ought to be, and shook themselves
and made those hideous noises."

"They hit me when I sang the other day," said Adam, "remember?"

"That's right. Look here." She sat down, pulled one of the thick slabs
onto her lap. "I found these under a shelf out there. One of the
creatures knocked them off and I picked them up. I wondered why they had
been up there, when so many stacks of them just sit around on the
floor."

"I never saw any like these, ma'am. They have that little ridge on the
edge there, and the border of different colored stuff around 'em."

"Watch what happens when I push the ridge upward, Adam. It's like an
automatic button." She pressed it and the slab, at first gay orange,
turned pale blue; on it appeared three lines of squiggly characters,
like a cross between Arabic writing and Egyptian hieroglyphics.

"A magic slate," said Adam. "That's neat!"

"You haven't seen anything yet," she told him, and pushed the ridge
again. The writing disappeared, and out of the slab leered a bull
gorilla, paws on chest, eyeing Adam with beady, ridge-browed
malevolence. It took a second for sanity to convince him that it was
only a picture: three-dimensional, on a two-dimensional sheet of
plastic, but so real he half-expected the beast to charge out at him.
"What about that?" she asked.

He hit his thigh with a fist. It was a photograph, he imagined, but made
by an illusory process so far ahead of anything humanity could produce
that it seemed he might glimpse whatever was behind the gorilla if he
put his eyes down to the side of the slate. "Gosh!" he said, feeling it
a little naive but afraid to swear in front of her. "Isn't that
something!"

"It's a book," she said, "an album of photographs. Look here."

The next picture was an equally miraculous one of half a dozen monkeys
sitting on a tree trunk. Adam looked at it, then at the farthest trunk
in their box of a room. Undeniably it was the same one.

Under the picture was a line of squiggle