Siren's Song?

[Dave Monroe]

Cf. ...

   "The sound of a siren takes you both unaware. 
Zhlubb looks up sharply into his mirror.  'You're not
holding, are you?' 
   "But the sound is greater than police.  It wraps
the concrete and the smog, it fills the basin and
mountains further than any mortal could ever move ...
could move in time.... 
   "'I don't think that's a police siren.'  Your guts
in a spasm, you reach for the knob of the AM radio. 
'I don't think--'" (GR, Pt. IV, p. 757)

"AM radio"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Broadcast_System

http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/c3i/ebs.htm

http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/eas.html

http://www.conelrad.com/index.php

This is one of the key moments in teh book for me. 
It's at elast one of the most chilling.  But there are
an awful lot of sirens in GR (thank you, amazon.com's
"Search Inside this book" feature).  Me, I'm all for 
throwing everything that'll stick--V-2, air raid
siren, train whistle, uh, screaming, what have you--at
virtually everything in the book, esp. those seeming
keywords.  My peculiar fascination there are all the
"thunderbolts," "lightning," et al. ...

--- ruudsaurins at aol.com wrote:

> A squeaming comes aquoss this guy......
>            ......and its while of the list....as a
> child growing up (trying to) in suburban Chicago, I
> was fascinated by the periodic testing of the civil
> defence siren whose piercing noise (screaming?)
> could not be missed and would interrupt whatever was
> going on at the time.  Since it was never
> accompanied by any air raids, it assumed the
> peculiar traits of being simultaneously obnoxious
> and reassuring.  It was as if our government wished
> to let us know in no uncertain terms that they could
> warn us if needed.
>            I was always puzzled by the "screaming"
> at the opening of GR, knowing that the V-2 was
> faster than sound.  That the screaming could be a
> siren never occurred to me.  Now (Thanx!, posters!)
> it seems quite possible that the screaming is a
> siren, and that the inspiration may have been TRP's
> adolescent exposure to the civil defence sirens of
> Long Island, assuming they employed the same
> technology.  Does anyone out there know if Long
> Island had those obnoxious little buggers?


		
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