'Hell,' he said at last, 'both your television and radio are…'

'No,' said Antonelli, simply.

Willy lay back down in the chair and closed his eyes.

Antonelli leaned forward, breathing hard.

"Listen,'he said.

'Imagine four weeks ago, a late Saturday morning, women and children staring at clowns and magicians on TV. In beauty shops, women staring at TV fashions. In the barbershop and hardware stores, men staring at baseball or trout fishing. Everybody everywhere in the civilized world starling. No sound, no motion, except on the little black and white screens.

‘And then, in the middle of all that staring…’

Antonelli paused to lift up one corner of the broiling cloth.

‘Sunspots on the sun,’ he said.

Willy stiffened.

‘Biggest damn sunspots in the history of mortal man, said Antonelli. ‘Whole damn world flooded with electricity Wiped every TV screen clear as a whistle, leaving nothing and, after that, more nothing.’

His voice was remote as the voice of a man describing an Arctic landscape. He lathered Willy’s face not looking at what he was doing. Willy peered across the barber–shop, at the soft snow falling down and down that humming screen in an eternal winter. He could almost hear the rabbit–thumping of all the hearts in the shop.

Antonelli continued his funeral oration.

‘It took us all that first day to realize what had happened. Two hours after that first sunspot storm hit, every TV repairman in the United States was on the road. Everyone figured it was just their own set. With the radios conked out too it was only that night when newsboys, like in the old days, ran headlines through the streets that we got the shock about the sunspots maybe going on — for the rest of our lives!’

The customers murmured.

Antonelli’s hand, holding the razor, shook. He had to wait.

‘All that blankness, that empty stuff falling down, falling down inside our television sets, oh, I tell you, it gave everyone the willies It was like a good friend who talks to you in your front room and suddenly shuts up and lies there, pale, and you know he’s dead and you begin to turn cold yourself.