Word: callers
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Within an hour, an anonymous caller telephoned Agence France-Presse in Paris and claimed that the killing had been carried out by Action Directe, a shadowy French terrorist group that has been linked to West Germany's Red Army Faction. Only hours before Audran's killing, three 230-ft. electric-power pylons at a nuclear-power plant near Hamburg were damaged by explosives. Also last week a suspected Red Army Faction member, Johannes Thimme, 28, became the first casualty of the new terror campaign: he was killed when a bomb he was carrying in a baby carriage detonated prematurely...
...explosion that ripped through the Hillcrest Women's Surgi-Center in Washington, D.C., last week shattered 230 windows in two nearby apartment buildings. "It sounded like a war was going on," said one woman after watching her bedroom window collapse at 12:10 on New Year's morning. A caller claiming to be a member of the apparently nonexistent Army of God took responsibility for the bombing attack...
...whatever discomfort the beep imposes, it is an excellent deterrent to the crank or obscene caller...
...Stepford Carl, once activated, will speak. And then the caller will speak, and the caller's words will likewise be frozen in time, and both of those small ancillary selves will lie side by side for a little while in their other dimension. Words can be chilled down like human seed and thus suspended in time until they are ready to come to life...
Usually, the machines are more banal than that. They do still make people uncomfortable, although that is passing with familiarity. Their use has become so widespread that callers no longer feel quite so much the instant of stage fright. Still, the tape on the end of the line, expectantly unreeling, silent as a director awaiting the audition, does intimidate. The caller feels ambushed, like one who has suddenly learned he is being bugged. He becomes more ... responsible for his words. They are not going to vanish into air. They can be replayed again and again, like the videotape...