'Mangon!'

The cry riveted him to the air. He dropped what was left of the frame, saw Madame Gioconda step quietly from behind one of the flats.

'Mangon, please,' she protested gently. 'You frighten me.' She sidled past him towards the bed, dismantling an enormous purple hat. 'And do clean up all that glass, or I shall cut my feet.'

She spoke drowsily and moved in a relaxed, sluggish way that Mangon first assumed indicated acute shock. Then she drew from her handbag six white vials and lined them up carefully on the bedside table. These were her favourite confectionery so LeGrande had sweetened the pill with another cheque. Mangon began to scoop the glass together with his feet, at the same time trying to collect his wits. The sounds of LeGrande's abuse dinned the air, and he broke away and ran off to fetch the sonovac.

Madame Gioconda was sitting on the edge of the bed when he returned, dreamily dusting a small bottle of bourbon which had followed the cocaine vials out of the handbag. She hummed to herself melodically and stroked one of the feathers in her hat.

'Mangon,' she called when he had almost finished. 'Come here.'

Mangon put down the sonovac and went across to her.

She looked up at him, her eyes suddenly very steady. 'Mangon, why did you break Hector's picture?' She held up a piece of the frame. 'Tell me.'

Mangon hesitated, then scribbled on his pad: I am sorry. I adore you very much. He said such foul things to you.

Madame Gioconda glanced at the note, then gazed back thoughtfully at Mangon. 'Were you hiding here when Hector came?'

Mangon shook his head categorically. He started to write on his pad but Madame Gioconda restrained him.

'That's all right, dear. I thought not.' She looked around the stage for a moment, listening carefully. 'Mangon, when you came in could you hear what Mr LeGrande said?'

Mangon nodded. His eyes flickered to the obscene phrases on the walls and he began to frown. He still felt LeGrande's presence and his attempt to humiliate Madame Gioconda.

Madame Gioconda pointed around them. 'And you can actually hear what he said even now? How remarkable. Mangon, you have a wondrous talent.'

I am sorry you have to suffer so much.

Madame Gioconda smiled at this. 'We all have our crosses to bear. I have a feeling you maybe able to lighten mine considerably.' She patted the bed beside her. 'Do sit down, you must be tired.' When he was settled she went on, 'I'm very interested, Mangon. Do you mean you can distinguish entire phrases and sentences in the sounds you sweep? You can hear complete conversations hours after they have taken place?'

Something about Madame Gioconda's curiosity made Mangon hesitate. His talent, so far as he knew, was unique, and he was not so na*ve as to fail to appreciate its potentialities. It had developed in his late adolescence and so far he had resisted any temptation to abuse it. He had never revealed the talent to anyone, knowing that if he did his days as a soundsweeper would be over.

Madame Gioconda was watching him, an expectant smile on her lips. Her thoughts, of course, were solely of revenge. Mangon listened again to the walls, focused on the abuse screaming out into the air.

Not complete conversations. Long fragments, up to twenty syllables.

Depending on resonances and matrix. Tell no one. I will help you have revenge on LeGrande.

Madame Gioconda squeezed Mangon's hand. She was about to reach for the bourbon bottle when Mangon suddenly remembered the point of his visit. He leapt off the bed and started frantically scribbling on his wristpad.

He tore off the first sheet and pressed it into her startled hands, then filled three more, describing his encounter with the musical director at V. C., the latter's interest in Madame Gioconda and the conditional promise to arrange her guest appearance. In view of LeGrande's hostility he stressed the need for absolute secrecy.

He waited happily while Madame Gioconda read quickly through the notes, tracing out Mangon's childlike script with a long scarlet fingernail. When she finished he nodded his head rapidly and gestured triumphantly in the air.

Bemused, Madame Gioconda gazed uncomprehendingly at the notes. Then she reached out and pulled Mangon to her, taking his big faunlike head in her jewelled hands and pressing it to her lap.

'My dear child, how much I need you. You must never leave me now.'

As she stroked Mangon's hair her eyes roved questingly around the walls.

The miracle happened shortly before eleven o'clock the next morning.

After breakfast, sprawled across Madame Gioconda's bed with her scrapbooks, an old gramophone salvaged by Mangon from one of the studios playing operatic selections, they had decided to drive out to the stockades the soundsweeps left for the city at nine and they would be able to examine the sonic dumps unmolested. Having spent so much time with Madame Gioconda and immersed himself so deeply in her world, Mangon was eager now to introduce Madame Gioconda to his. The stockades, bleak though they might be, were all he had to show her.

For Mangon, Madame Gioconda had now become the entire universe, a source of certainty and wonder as potent as the sun. Behind him his past life fell away like the discarded chrysalis of a brilliant butterfly, the grey years of his childhood at the orphanage dissolving into the magical kaleidoscope that revolved around him. As she talked and murmured affectionately to him, the drab flats and props in the studio seemed as brightly coloured and meaningful as the landscape of a mescalin fantasy, the air tingling with a thousand vivid echoes of her voice.

They set off down F Street at ten, soon left behind the dingy warehouses and abandoned tenements that had enclosed Madame Gioconda for so long. Squeezed together in the drivingcab of the sound truck they looked an incongruous pair the gangling Mangon, in zipfronted yellow plastic jacket and yellow peaked cap, at the wheel, dwarfed by the vast flamboyant Madame Gioconda, wearing a parrotgreen cartwheel hat and veil, her huge creamy breast glittering with pearls, gold stars and jewelled crescents, a small selection of the orders that had showered upon her in her heyday.

She had breakfasted well, on one of the vials and a toothglass of bourbon. As they left the city she gazed out amiably at the fields stretching away from the highway, and trilled out a light recitative from Figaro.

Mangon listened to her happily, glad to see her in such good form. Determined to spend every possible minute with Madame Gioconda, he had decided to abandon his calls for the day, if not for the next week and month. With her he at last felt completely secure. The pressure of her hand and the warm swell of her shoulder made him feel confident and invigorated, all the more proud that he was able to help her back to fame.

He tapped on the windshield as they swung off the highway on to the narrow dirt track that led towards the stockades. Here and there among the dunes they could see the low ruined outbuildings of the old explosives plant, the white galvanized iron roof of one of the soundsweep's cabins. Desolate and unfrequented, the dunes ran on for miles. They passed the remains of a gateway that had collapsed to one side of the road; originally a continuous fence ringed the stockade, but no one had any reason for wanting to penetrate it. A place of strange echoes and festering silences, overhung by a gloomy miasma of a million compacted sounds, it remained remote and haunted, the graveyard of countless private babels.

The first of the sonic dumps appeared two or three hundred yards away on their right. This was reserved for aircraft sounds swept from the city's streets and municipal buildings, and was a tightly packed collection of soundabsorbent baffles covering several acres. The baffles were slightly larger than those in the other stockades; twenty feet high and fifteen wide, each supported by heavy wooden props, they faced each other in a random labyrinth of alleyways, like a store lot of advertisement hoardings. Only the top two or three feet were visible above the dunes, but the charged air hit Mangon like a hammer, a pounding niagara of airliners blaring down the glideway, the piercing whistle of jets jockeying at takeoff, the ceaseless mindsapping roar that hangs like a vast umbrella over any metropolitan complex.

All around, odd sounds shaken loose from the stockades were beginning to reach them. Over the entire area, fed from the dumps below, hung an unbroken phonic high, invisible but nonetheless as tangible and menacing as an enormous black thundercloud. Occasionally, when supersaturation was reached after one of the summer holiday periods, the sonic pressure fields would split and discharge, venting back into the stockades a nightmarish cataract of noise, raining on to the soundsweeps not only the howling of cats and dogs, but the multilunged tumult of cars, express trains, fairgrounds and aircraft, the cacophonic musique concrete of civilization.

To Mangon the sounds reaching them, though scaled higher in the register, were still distinct, but Madame Gioconda could hear nothing and felt only an overpowering sense of depression and irritation. The air seemed to grate and rasp. Mangon noticed her beginning to frown and hold her hand to her forehead. He wound up his window and indicated to her to do the same. He switched on the sonovac mounted under the dashboard and let it drain the discordancies out of the sealed cabin.

Madame Gioconda relaxed in the sudden blissful silence. A little further on, when they passed another stockade set closer to the road, she turned to Mangon and began to say something to him.

Suddenly she jerked violently in alarm, her hat toppling. Her voice had frozen! Her mouth and lips moved frantically, but no sounds emerged. For a moment she was paralysed. Clutching her throat desperately, she filled her lungs and screamed.

A faint squeak piped out of her cavernous throat, and Mangon swung round in alarm to see her gibbering apoplectically, pointing helplessly to her throat.

He stared at her bewildered, then doubled over the wheel in a convulsion of silent laughter, slapping his thigh and thumping the dashboard. He pointed to the sonovac, then reached down and turned up the volume.

'... aaauuuoooh,' Madame Gioconda heard herself groan. She grasped her hat and secured it. 'Mangon, what a dirty trick, you should have warned me.'

Mangon grinned. The discordant sounds coming from the stockades began to fill the cabin again, and he turned down the volume. Gleefully, he scribbled on his wristpad: Now you know what it is like!

Madame Gioconda opened her mouth to reply, then stopped in time, hiccuped and took his arm affectionately.

Four.

Mangon slowed down as they approached a side road. Two hundred yards away on their left a small pinkwashed cabin stood on a dune overlooking one of the stockades. They drove up to it, turned into a circular concrete apron below the cabin and backed up against one of the unloading bays, a battery of redpainted hydrants equipped with manifold gauges and release pipes running off into the stockade. This was only twenty feet away at its nearest point, a forest of doorshaped baffles facing each other in winding corridors, like a set from a surrealist film.

As she climbed down from the truck Madame Gioconda expected the same massive wave of depression and overload that she had felt from the stockade of aircraft noises, but instead the air seemed brittle and frenetic, darting with sudden flashes of tension and exhilaration.

As they walked up to the cabin Mangon explained: Party noises company for me.

The twenty or thirty baffles nearest the cabin he reserved for those screening him from the miscellaneous chatter that filled the rest of the stockade. When he woke in the mornings he would listen to the laughter and small talk, enjoy the gossip and wisecracks as much as if he had been at the parties himself.

The cabin was a single room with a large window overlooking the stockade, well insulated from the hubbub below. Madame Gioconda showed only a cursory interest in Mangon's meagre belongings, and after a few general remarks came to the point and went over to the window. She opened it slightly, listened experimentally to the stream of atmospheric shifts that crowded past her.

She pointed to the cabin on the far side of the stockade. 'Mangon, whose is that?'

Gallagher's. My partner. He sweeps City Hall, University, V.C., big mansions on 5th and A. Working now.

Madame Gioconda nodded and surveyed the stockade with interest. 'How fascinating. It's like a zoo. All that talk, talk, talk. And you can hear it all.' She snapped back her bracelets with swift decisive flicks of the wrist.

Mangon sat down on the bed. The cabin seemed small and dingy, and he was saddened by Madame Gioconda's disinterest. Having brought her all the way out to the dumps he wondered how he was going to keep her amused. Fortunately the stockade intrigued her. When she suggested a stroll through it he was only too glad to oblige.

Down at the unloading bay he demonstrated how he emptied the tanker, clipping the exhaust leads to the hydrant, regulating the pressure through the manifold and then pumping the sound away into the stockade.

Most of the stockade was in a continuous state of uproar, sounding something like a crowd in a football stadium, and as he led her out among the baffles he picked their way carefully through the quieter aisles. Around them voices chattered and whined fretfully, fragments of conversation drifted aimlessly over the air. Somewhere a woman pleaded in thin nervous tones, a man grumbled to himself, another swore angrily, a baby bellowed. Behind it all was the steady background murmur of countless TV programmes, the easy patter of announcers, the endless monotones of racetrack commentators, the shrieking audiences of quiz shows, all pitched an octave up the scale so that they sounded an eerie parody of themselves.

A shot rang out in the next aisle, followed by screams and shouting. Although she heard nothing, the pressure pulse made Madame Gioconda stop.

'Mangon, wait. Don't be in so much of a hurry. Tell me what they're saying.'

Mangon selected a baffle and listened carefully. The sounds appeared to come from an apartment over a launderette. A battery of washing machines chuntered to themselves, a cash register slammed interminably, there was a dim almost subthreshold echo of 60cycle hum from an SP recordplayer.

He shook his head, waved Madame Gioconda on.

'Mangon, what did they say?' she pestered him. He stopped again, sharpened his ears and waited. This time he was more lucky, an overemotional female voice was gasping '... but if he finds you here he'll kill you, he'll kill us both, what shall we do...' He started to scribble down this outpouring, Madame Gioconda craning breathlessly over his shoulder, then recognized its source and screwed up the note.

'Mangon, for heaven's sake, what was it? Don't throw it away! Tell me!' She tried to climb under the wooden superstructure of the baffle to recover the note, but Mangon restrained her and quickly scribbled another message.

Adam and Eve. Sorry.

'What, the film? Oh, how ridiculous! Well, come on, try again.'

Eager to make amends, Mangon picked the next baffle, one of a group serving the staff marriel quarters of the University. Always a difficult job to keep clean, he struck paydirt almost at once.

'... my God, there's Bartok all over the place, that damned Steiner woman, I'll swear she's sleeping with her..

Mangon took it all down, passing the sheets to Madame Gioconda as soon as he covered them. Squinting hard at his crabbed handwriting, she gobbled them eagerly, disappointed when, after half a dozen, he lost the thread and stopped.

'Go on, Mangon, what's the matter?' She let the notes fall to the ground. 'Difficult, isn't it. We'll have to teach you shorthand.'

They reached the baffles Mangon had just filled from the previous day's rounds. Listening carefully he heard Paul Merrill's voice: '... month's Transonics claims that... the entire city will come down like Jericho.'

He wondered if he could persuade Madame Gioconda to wait for fifteen minutes, when he would be able to repeat a few carefully edited fragments from Alto's promise to arrange her guest appearance, but she seemed eager to move deeper into the stockade.

'You said your friend Gallagher sweeps out Video City, Mangon. Where would that be?'

Hector LeGrande. Of course, Mangon realized, why had he been so obtuse. This was the chance to pay the man back.

He pointed to an area a few aisles away. They climbed between the baffles, Mangon helping Madame Gioconda over the beams and props, steering her full skirt and wide hat brim away from splinters and rusted metalwork.

The task of finding LeGrande was simple. Even before the baffles were in sight Mangon could hear the hard, unyielding bite of the tycoon's voice, dominating every other sound from the Video City area. Gallagher in fact swept only the senior dozen or so executive suites at V. C., chiefly to relieve their occupants of the distasteful echoes of LeGrande's voice.

Mangon steered their way among these, searching for LeGrande's master suite, where anything of a really confidential nature took place.

There were about twenty baffles, throwing off an unending chorus of 'Yes, H. L. ', 'Thanks, H. L. ', 'Brilliant, H. L.' Two or three seemed strangely quiet, and he drew Madame Gioconda over to them.

This was LeGrande with his personal secretary and PA. He took out his pencil and focused carefully.

'... of Third National Bank, transfer two million to private holding and threaten claim for stock depreciation... redraft escape clauses, including nonliability purchase benefits..

Madame Gioconda tapped his arm but he gestured her away. Most of the baffle appeared to be taken up by dubious financial dealings, but nothing that would really hurt LeGrande if revealed.

Then he heard '... Bermuda Hilton. Private Island, with anchorage, have the beach cleaned up, last time the water was full of fish... I don't care, poison them, hang some nets out... Imogene will fly in from Idlewild as Mrs Edna Burgess, warn Customs to stay away...'

'... call Cartiers, something for the Contessa, 17 carats say, ceiling of ten thousand. No, make it eight thousand...'

'... hatcheck girl at the Tropicabana. Usual dossier...'

Mangon scribbled furiously, but LeGrande was speaking at rapid dictation speed and he could get down only a few fragments. Madame Gioconda barely deciphered his handwriting, and became more and more frustrated as her appetite was whetted. Finally she flung away the notes in a fury of exasperation.

'This is absurd, you're missing everything!' she cried. She pounded on one of the baffles, then broke down and began to sob angrily. 'Oh God, God, God, how ridiculous! Help me, I'm going insane...'

Mangon hurried across to her, put his arms round her shoulders to support her. She pushed him away irritably, railing at herself to discharge her impatience. 'It's useless, Mangon, it's stupid of me, I was a fool '

'STOP!'.

The cry split the air like the blade of a guillotine.

They both straightened, stared at each other blankly. Mangon put his fingers slowly to his lips, then reached out tremulously and put his hands in Madame Gioconda's. Somewhere within him a tremendous tension had begun to dissolve.

'Stop,' he said again in a rough but quiet voice. 'Don't cry. I'll help you.'

Madame Gioconda gaped at him with amazement. Then she let out a tremendous whoop of triumph.

'Mangon, you can talk! You've got your voice back! It's absolutely astounding! Say something, quickly, for heaven's sake!'

Mangon felt his mouth again, ran his fingers rapidly over his throat. He began to tremble with excitement, his face brightened, he jumped up and down like a child.

'I can talk,' he repeated wonderingly. His voice was gruff, then seesawed into a treble. 'I can talk,' he said louder, controlling its pitch. 'I can talk, I can talk, I can talk!' He flung his head back, let out an earshattering shout. 'I CAN TALK! HEAR ME!' He ripped the wristpad off his sleeve, hurled it away over the baffles.

Madame Gioconda backed away, laughing agreeably. 'We can hear you, Mangon. Dear me, how sweet.' She watched Mangon thoughtfully as he cavorted happily in the narrow interval between the aisles. 'Now don't tire yourself out or you'll lose it again.'

Mangon danced over to her, seized her shoulders and squeezed them tightly. He suddenly realized that he knew no diminutive or Christian name for her.

'Madame Gioconda,' he said earnestly, stumbling over the syllables, the words that were so simple yet so enormously complex to pronounce. 'You gave me back my voice. Anything you want ' He broke off, stuttering happily, laughing through his tears. Suddenly he buried his head in her shoulder, exhausted by his discovery, and cried gratefully, 'It's a wonderful voice.'

Madame Gioconda steadied him maternally. 'Yes, Mangon,' she said, her eyes on the discarded notes lying in the dust. 'You've got a wonderful voice, all right.' Sotto voce, she added: 'But your hearing is even more wonderful.'

Paul Merrill switched off the SP player, sat down on the arm of the sofa and watched Mangon quizzically.