Read A Tranquil Star for Free Online Page A

in a few years the method will be extended to all the censorship offices in the country.

    Approved by the censor
:

Knall

    It’s not the first time something like this has happened here: a habit, or an object, or an idea becomes, within a few weeks, almost universally widespread, without the newspapers or the mass media having anything to do with it. There was the craze for the yo-yo, then for Chinese mushrooms, then Pop art, Zen Buddhism, the hula-hoop. Now it is time for the knall.
    No one knows who invented it, but, to judge from the price (a four-inch knall costs the equivalent of 3,000 lire or a little more), it doesn’t contain much in the way of costly materials or inventive genius or
software
. * I bought one myself, down at the port, right in front of a cop, who didn’t bat an eyelash. Of course I have no intention of using it. I justwanted to see how it works and how it’s constructed: it seems a legitimate curiosity.
    A knall is a small, smooth cylinder, as long and thick as a Tuscan cigar, and not much heavier: it is sold loose or in boxes of twenty. Some are solid-colored, gray or red, but the majority come in wrappers printed with revoltingly tasteless little scenes and comic figures, in the style of decorations on jukeboxes and pinball machines: a bare-breasted girl fires a knall at her suitor’s enormous rear end; a pair of tiny Max and Moritz * types with insolent expressions, chased by a furious farmer, turn at the last minute, knalls in hand, and the pursuer falls backward, kicking his long, booted legs in the air.
    Nothing is known about the mechanism by which the knall kills, or at least nothing about it has been published to date.
Knall
, in German, means crack, bang, crash;
abknallen
, in the slang of the Second World War, came to mean “kill with a firearm,” whereas the firing of a knall is typically silent. Maybe the name—unless it has a completely different origin, or is an abbreviation—alludes to the moment of death, which in effect is instantaneous: the person who is struck—even if only superficially, on the hand or on the ear—falls lifeless immediately, and the corpse shows no sign of trauma, except for a small ring-shaped bruise at the point of contact, along the knall’s geometric axis.
    A knall can be used only once, then is thrown away. This is a neat, clean town, and knalls are not usually found on thesidewalks but only in the garbage cans on street corners and at tram stops. Exploded knalls are darker and more flaccid than unused ones; they are easily recognizable. It’s not that they’ve all been employed for criminal purposes: fortunately, we are still a long way from this. But in certain circles carrying a knall—quite openly, in a breast pocket, or attached to the belt, or behind one ear the way a pork butcher carries a pencil—has become de rigueur. Now, since knalls have an expiration date, like antibiotics or film, many people feel obliged to fire them before they expire, not so much out of prudence as because the firing of a knall has unusual effects, which, though they have been described and studied only in part, are already widely known among consumers. It shatters stone and cement and in general all solid materials—the harder the material the more easily. It pierces wood and paper, sometimes setting them on fire; it melts metals; in water it creates a tiny steaming whirlpool, which, however, disappears immediately. In addition, with a skillfully directed shot one can light a cigarette or even a pipe—a bravura move that, in spite of the disproportionate expense, many young people practice, precisely because of the risk involved. In fact, it has been suggested that this is why the majority of knalls are used for lawful purposes.
    The knall is undoubtedly a handy device: it isn’t metal, and hence its presence is not detected by common magnetic instruments or X rays; it weighs and costs little; its