CONTENTS

Preface

Isaac Asimov: DREAMING IS A PRIVATE THING

James Blish: A WORK OF ART

James Blish: THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

Harry Harrison: PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

Damon Knight: THE COUNTRY OF THE KIND

C. M. Kornbluth: WITH THESE HANDS

Edgar Pangborn: A MASTER OF BABYLON

Robert Silverberg: A MAN OF TALENT

The difference between a master and a genius is that the master knows what he is doing...

True?

Not true?

Not true, we think, because even a master cannot tell you his every thought, feeling, experience in creating a masterpiece. Any more than a genius can tell you what happened when he created a work of art.

This is the mystery that has fascinated men since the cave drawings--and before. And will fascinate them far into the future.

Which is exactly what happens to the seven brilliant science-fiction writers in this volume.

Copyright (c) 1966 by James Blish

"Dreaming Is a Private Thing" by Isaac Asimov, (c) 1955 by Fantasy House, Inc.; by permission of the Author.

"A Work of Art" by James Blish, (c) 1956 by Columbia Publications, Inc.

"The Dark Night of the Soul" by James Blish, (c) 1956 as "The Genius Heap" by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

"Portrait of the Artist" by Harry Harrison, (c) 1964 by Mercury Press, Inc.; by permission of the Author.

"The Country of the Kind" by Damon Knight, (c) 1955 by Fantasy House, Inc.; by permission of the Author.

"With These Hands" by C. M. Kornbluth, (c) 1951 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation; by permission of Mary Kornbluth. "A Music Master of Babylon" by Edgar Pangborn, (c) 1954 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation; by permission of the Author. "A Man of Talent" by Robert Silverberg, (c) 1966 by Robert Silverberg; earlier version (c) 1956 as "The Man With Talent" by Columbia Publications, Inc.; by permission of the Author.

Quotation from T. S. Eliot is from the Collected Poems 19091935, Faber & Faber, London, 1936.

Quotation from Christopher Fry is from Venus Observed, London, 1950.

Quotation from Ezra Pound is Personae, Faber & Faber, London, 1952, and by permission of New Directions. ( This poem not included in all editions of Personae.)

First Printing: October, 1966 Manufactured in the United States of America.

BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC.

101 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10003

To

BRIAN W. ALDISS

man of letters

PREFACE

Since its beginnings in 1926, science fiction as a separate, self-conscious branch of letters has undergone a number of changes of character--some of them astonishingly rapid, even when compared to such roughly analogous genres as the detective story.

Another of these changes is in the making. Science fiction is now in the process of emerging from the status of a small category of commercial fiction, and taking on the characteristics of a literary movement.

It is too early to attempt a history of this change, but some of the men who have been contributing to it deserve to be named. Thus far it is primarily the work of such magazine editors as John W. Campbell, Jr., who insisted that stories written for him have something to say and that the characters in them act and talk like flesh-and-blood human beings, and Horace L. Gold and Anthony Boucher, who demanded stylistic distinction and who flensed away many of the pulp taboos with which the field was encumbered; of anthologists like William Sloane and Fletcher Pratt, who gave some of the best stories the relative permanence of book format; of critics like Kingsley Amis and Damon Knight, who saw nothing unreasonable in applying the same standards of judgment to science fiction as are customarily applied to any fiction of serious intentions; and of publishers like Ballantine Books and Faber & Faber, who looked for distinguished work and offered it to the public without apologies or appeals to special cults of readers. (These citations are intended to be representative, not inclusive.)

But the main responsibility for the change, as you would expect, must be assigned to a small but potent group of writers to whom science fiction was not a meal ticket but an art form, demanding the broadest vision, the deepest insights, and the best craftsmanship of which each man was capable. The roster of such men is gratifyingly long for its age, and although until recently science fiction has been primarily an American phenomenon, it is gratifyingly international, too. Again, an inclusive list would be impossible for a preface, but any such list would have to cite Algis Budrys and Theodore Sturgeon in the United States, Brian Aldiss and Arthur C. Clarke in England, and Gerard Klein in France. Most of the major editors, anthologists, and critics have also contributed as writers.

What are the characteristics of a literary movement? Everyone will have his own list of distinguishing features --the scholar, for example, will demand that the movement exert some influence on literature as a whole, and that is certainly demonstrable here--but I think they can all be summed up under the heading of self-consciousness. Among the symptoms of this awareness might be listed the emergence of histories and bibliographies of the field, such as those by Sam Moskowitz and Donald B. Day; of works of criticism, such as those by Messrs Amis, Knight, and William Atheling, Jr.; of specialized literary quarterlies, such as S-F Horizons, the international journal edited by Mr. Aldiss and Harry Harrison; and perhaps of such forms of articulate support as the "Hugo" and "Nebula" awards, which are given each year for the best work of the previous year, and publishing houses such as Advent which specialize in works about science fiction.

But these remain symptoms. A literary genre cannot also become a movement until a significant number of its primary practitioners, the writers, begin to think of themselves as artists, not just journeymen, working in what to them seems to be the most important and rewarding field of the many they might have chosen. (Most of the major science-fiction writers have contributed to other fields as well, particularly the detective story and the historical novel.)

Detecting a writer thinking about himself in this way must remain mostly a matter of reading between the lines. Although a few--Robert A. Heinlein is an example--may come right out and say that science fiction is for them worthy of more attention than anything else being written today, most tend to shy away from making such public claims. But science-fiction writers work at speculating on the possible futures of human institutions--all human institutions--and when a science-fiction writer begins to think of himself as an artist, sooner or later he will turn to speculating on the future of the arts.

The stories in this collection show just this kind of work in progress. One of its subsidiary interests, it seems to me, lies in the range of arts--and mock arts--which are taken under study. Usually, when writers take up aesthetics, they tend to write about writers, as witness such samples as Andre Gide and Thomas Wolfe, but the heroes of the stories that follow include two sculptors, a composer, a pianist, a comic-book technician (and let there be no sneers from anybody who thinks "pop art" a considerable product of the aesthetic impulse), and an artificer of dreams who may well stand forth as a speaker for all the rest of us. Very often, too, when writers write about other arts, they betray a vast ignorance of all the arts except their own (for instance, they tend to think that all music is program music, or that a cross-reference to a great painting by Dali or a great play by Molnar shows them forth as Renaissance men), but the writers here represented know the arts of which they write, as dedicated science-fiction writers must also know the sciences which they are accustomed to invoke, though they seldom practice them. There is, in short, a notable lack of narcissism here; self-conscious though these artists are, they are unprecedentedly more interested in their subjects than they are in themselves. They speak for a movement, of which they are proud, and it will have every reason to speak well of them hereafter.

Salute, gentlemen. It is well for us that we are all of one company.

JAMES BUSH

Though the ebullient Dr. Asimov was a commanding figure in science fiction for a good twenty years--his robot stories and "Foundation" novels are living classics--he has since devoted his writing time almost entirely to science popularization, at which he is also superb. It seems appropriate, then, that one of the last pieces of fiction he saw fit to give us was this deeply felt story, in which an art of the future serves him to body forth a manifesto for all arts in all times.

Dreaming Is a Private Thing

by

Isaac Asimov

Jesse Weill looked up from his desk. His old spare body, his sharp high-bridge nose, deep-set shadowy eyes, and amazing shock of white hair had trademarked his appearance during the years that Dreams, Inc. had become world-famous.

He said, "Is the boy here already, Joe?"

Joe Dooley was short and heavyset. A cigar caressed his moist lower lip. He took it away for a moment and nodded. "His folks are with him. They're all scared."

"You're sure this is not a false alarm, Joe? I haven't got much time." He looked at his watch. "Government business at two."

"This is a sure thing, Mr. Weill." Dooley's face was a study in earnestness. His jowls quivered with persuasive intensity. "Like I told you, I picked him up playing some kind of basketball game in the schoolyard. You should've seen the kid. He stunk. When he had his hands on the ball, his own team had to take it away, and fast, but just the same he had all the stance of a star player. Know what I mean? To me it was a giveaway. "

"Did you talk to him?"

"Well, sure. I stopped him at lunch. You know me." Dooley gestured expansively with his cigar and caught the severed ash with his other hand. " 'Kid,' I said--"

"And he's dream material?"

"I said, 'Kid, I just came from Africa and--"

"All right." Weill held up the palm of his hand. "Your word I'll always take. How you do it I don't know, but when you say a boy is a potential dreamer, I'll gamble. Bring him in."

The youngster came in between his parents. Dooley pushed chairs forward, and Weill rose to shake hands. He smiled at the youngster in a way that turned the wrinkles of his face into benevolent creases.

"You're Tommy Slutsky?"

Tommy nodded wordlessly. He was about ten and a little small for that. His dark hair was plastered down unconvincingly, and his face was unrealistically clean.

Weill said, "You're a good boy?"

The boy's mother smiled at once and patted Tommy's head maternally (a gesture which did not soften the anxious expression on the youngster's face). She said, "He's always a very good boy."

Weill let this dubious statement pass. "Tell me, Tommy," he said, and held out a lollipop which was first hesitantly considered, then accepted. "Do you ever listen to dreamies?"

"Sometimes," said Tommy in an uncertain treble.

Mr. Slutsky cleared his throat. He was broad-shouldered and thick-fingered, the type of laboring man that, every once in a while, to the confusion of eugenics, sired a dreamer. "We rented one or two for the boy. Real old ones."

Weill nodded. He said, "Did you like them, Tommy?"

"They were sort of silly."

"You think up better ones for yourself, do you?"

The grin that spread over the ten-year-old features had the effect of taking away some of the unreality of the slicked hair and washed face.

Weill went on, gently: "Would you like to make up a dream for me?"

Tommy was instantly embarrassed. "I guess not."

"It won't be hard. It's very easy . . . . Joe."

Dooley moved a screen out of the way and rolled forward a dream recorder.

The youngster looked owlishly at it.

Weill lifted the helmet and brought it close to the boy. "Do you know what this is?"

Tommy shrank away. "No."

"It's a thinker. That's what we call it because people think into it. You put it on your head and think anything you want."

"Then what happens?"

"Nothing at all. It feels nice."

"No," said Tommy, "I guess I'd rather not."

His mother bent hurriedly toward him. "It won't hurt, Tommy, you do what the man says." There was an unmistakable edge to her voice.

Tommy stiffened and looked as though he might cry, but he didn't. Weill put the thinker on him.

He did it gently and slowly and let it remain there for some thirty seconds before speaking again, to let the boy assure himself it would do no harm, to let him get used to the insinuating touch of the fibrils against the sutures of his skull (penetrating the skin so finely as to be almost insensible), and finally to let him get used to the faint hum of the alternating field vortices.

Then he said, "Now would you think for us?"

"About what?" Only the boy's nose and mouth showed.

"About anything you want. What's the best thing you would like to do when school is out?"

The boy thought a moment and said, with rising, inflection, "Go on a stratojet?"

"Why not? Sure thing. You go on a jet. It's taking off right now."

He gestured lightly to Dooley, who threw the freezer into circuit.

Weill kept the boy only five minutes and then let him and his mother be escorted from the office by Dooley. Tommy looked bewildered but undamaged by the ordeal.

Weill said to the father, "Now, Mr. Slutsky, if your boy does well on this test, we'll be glad to pay you five hundred dollars each year until he finishes high school. In that time all we'll ask is that he spend an hour a week some afternoon at our special school."

"Do I have to sign a paper?" Slutsky's voice was a bit hoarse.

"Certainly. This is business, Mr. Slutsky."

"Well, I don't know. Dreamers are hard to come by, I hear."

"They are. They are. But your son, Mr. Slutsky, is not a dreamer yet. He might never be. Five hundred dollars a year is a gamble for us. It's not a gamble for you. When he's finished high school, it may turn out he's not a dreamer, yet you've lost nothing. You've gained maybe four thousand dollars altogether. If he is a dreamer, he'll make a nice living and you certainly haven't lost then."

"He'll need special training, won't he?"

"Oh, yes, most intensive. But we don't have to worry about that till after he's finished high school. Then, after two years with us, he'll be developed. Rely on me, Mr. Slutsky."

"Will you guarantee that special training?"

Weill, who had been shoving a paper across the desk at Slutsky and punching a pen wrong side to at him, put the pen down and chuckled. "Guarantee? No. How can we when we don't know for sure yet if he's a real talent? Still, the five hundred a year will stay yours."

Slutsky pondered and shook his head. "I tell you straight out, Mr. Weill--after your man arranged to have us come here, I called LusterThink. They said they'll guarantee training."

Weill sighed. "Mr. Slutsky, I don't like to talk against a competitor. If they say they'll guarantee training, they'll do as they say, but they can't make a boy a dreamer if he hasn't got it in him, training or not. If they take a plain boy without the proper talent and put him through a development course, they'll ruin him. A dreamer he won't be, that I guarantee you. And a normal human being he won't be, either. Don't take the chance of doing it to your son.

"Now Dreams, Inc. will be perfectly honest with you. If he can be a dreamer, we'll make him one. If not, we'll give him back to you without having tampered with him and say, 'Let him learn a trade.' He'll be better and healthier that way. I tell you, Mr. Slutsky--I have sons and daughters and grandchildren so I know what I say--I would not allow a child of mine to be pushed into dreaming if he's not ready for it. Not for a million dollars."

Slutsky wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and reached for the pen. "What does this say?"

"This is just an option. We pay you a hundred dollars in cash right now. No strings attached. We'll study the boy's reverie. If we feel it's worth following up, we'll call you in again and make the five-hundred-dollars-a-year deal. Leave yourself in my hands, Mr. Slutsky, and don't worry. You won't be sorry."

Slutsky signed.

Weill passed the document through the file slot and handed an envelope to Slutsky.

Five minutes later, alone in the office, he placed the unfreezer over his own head and absorbed the boy's reverie intently. It was a typically childish daydream. First Person was at the controls of the plane, which looked like a compound of illustrations out of the filmed thrillers that still circulated among those who lacked the time, desire, or money for dream cylinders.

When he removed the unfreezer, he found Dooley looking at him.

"Well, Mr. Weill, what, do you think?" said Dooley with an eager and proprietary air.

"Could be, Joe. Could be. He has the overtones, and for a ten-year old boy without a scrap of training it's hopeful. When the plane went through a cloud, there was a distinct sensation of pillows. Also the smell of clean sheets, which was an amusing touch. We can go with him a ways, Joe."

"Good." Joe beamed happily at Weill's approval.

"But I tell you, Joe, what we really need is to catch them still sooner. And why not? Someday, Joe, every child will be tested at birth. A difference in the brain there positively must be, and it should be found. Then we could separate the dreamers at the very beginning."

"Hell, Mr. Weill," said Dooley, looking hurt. "What would happen to my job then?"

Weill laughed. "No cause to worry yet, Joe. It won't happen in our lifetimes. In mine, certainly not. We'll be depending on good talent scouts like you for many years. You just watch the playgrounds and the streets"--Weill's gnarled hand dropped to Dooley's shoulder with a gentle approving pressure--"and find us a few more Hillarys and Janows, and Luster-Think won't ever catch us . . . . Now get out. I want lunch, and then I'll be ready for my two o'clock appointment. The government, Joe, the government. " And he winked portentously.

Jesse Weill's two o'clock appointment was with a young man, apple-cheeked, spectacled, sandy-haired, and glowing with the intensity of a man with a mission. He presented his credentials across Weill's desk and revealed himself to be John J. Byrne, an agent of the Department of Arts and Sciences.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Byrne," said Weill. "In what way can I be of service?"

"Are we private here?" asked the agent. He had an unexpected baritone.

"Quite private."

"Then, if you don't mind, I'll ask you to absorb this." Byrne produced a small and battered cylinder and held it out between thumb and forefinger.

Weill took it, hefted it, turned it this way and that, and said with a denture-revealing smile, "Not the produce of Dreams, Inc., Mr. Byrne."

"I didn't think it was," said the agent. "I'd still like you to absorb it. I'd set the automatic cutoff for about a minute, though."

"That's all that can be endured?" Weill pulled the receiver to his desk and placed the cylinder in the unfreeze compartment. He removed it, polished either end of the cylinder with his handkerchief and tried again. "It doesn't make good contact," he said. "An amateurish job."

He placed the cushioned unfreeze helmet over his skull and adjusted the temple contacts, then set the automatic cutoff. He leaned back and clasped his hands over his chest and began absorbing."

His fingers grew rigid and clutched at his jacket. After the cutoff had brought absorption to an end, he removed the unfreezer and looked faintly angry. "A raw piece," he said. "It's lucky I'm an old man so that such things no longer bother me."

Byrne said stiffly, "It's not the worst we've found. And the fad is increasing. "

Weill shrugged. "Pornographic dreamies. It's a logical development, I suppose."

The government man said, "Logical or not, it represents a deadly danger for the moral fiber of the nation."

"The moral fiber," said Weill, "can take a lot of beating. Erotica of one form or another has been circulated all through history."

"Not like this, sir. A direct mind-to-mind stimulation is much more effective than smoking-room stories or filthy pictures. Those must be filtered through the senses and lose some of their effect in that way."

Weill could scarcely argue that point. He said, "What would you have me do?"

"Can you suggest a possible source for this cylinder?"

"Mr. Byrne, I'm not a policeman."

"No, no, I'm not asking you to do our work for us. The Department is quite capable of conducting its own investigations. Can you help us, I mean, from your own specialized knowledge? You say your company did not put out that filth. Who did?"

"No reputable dream-distributor. I'm sure of that. It's too cheaply made."

"That could have been done on purpose."

"And no professional dreamer originated it."

"Are you sure, Mr. Weill? Couldn't dreamers do this sort of thing for some small, illegitimate concern for money--or for fun?"

"They could, but not this particular one. No overtones. It's two-dimensional. Of course, a thing like this doesn't need overtones."

"What do you mean--overtones?"

Weill laughed gently. "You are not a dreamie fan?"

Byrne tried not to look virtuous and did not entirely succeed. "I prefer music."

"Well, that's all right, too," said Weill tolerantly, "but it makes it a little harder to explain overtones. Even people who absorb dreamies might not be able to explain if you asked them. Still, they'd know a dreamie was no good if the overtones were missing, even if they couldn't tell you why. Look, when an experienced dreamer goes into reverie, he doesn't think a story like in the old-fashioned television or book-films. It's a series of little visions. Each one has several meanings. If you studied them carefully, you'd find maybe five or six. While absorbing them in the ordinary way, you would never notice, but careful study shows it. Believe me, my psychological staff puts in long hours on just that point. All the overtones, the different meanings, blend together into a mass of guided emotion. Without them, everything would be flat, tasteless.

"Now, this morning I tested a young boy. A ten-year-old with possibilities. A cloud to him isn't just a cloud; it's a pillow, too. Having the sensations of both, it was more than either. Of course, the boy's very primitive. But when he's through with his schooling, he'll be trained and disciplined. He'll be subjected to all sorts of sensations. He'll store up experience. He'll study and analyze classic dreamies of the past. He'll learn how to control and direct his thoughts, though mind you. I have always said that when a good dreamer improvises--"

Weill halted abruptly, then proceeded in less impassioned tones, "I shouldn't get excited. All I'm trying to bring out now is that every professional dreamer has his own type of overtones which he can't mask. To an expert it's like signing his name on the dreamie. And I, Mr. Byrne, know all the signatures. Now that piece of dirt you brought me has no overtones at all. It was done by an ordinary person. A little talent, maybe, but like you and me, he can't think."

Byrne reddened a trifle. "Not everyone can't think, Mr. Weill, even, if they don't make dreamies."

"Oh, tush," and Weill wagged his hand in the air. "Don't be angry with what an old man says. I don't mean think as in reason, I mean think as in dream. We all can dream after a fashion, just like we all can run. But can you and I run a mile in under four minutes? You and I can talk, but are we Daniel Websters? Now when I think of a steak, I think of the word. Maybe I have a quick picture of a brown steak on a platter. Maybe you have a better pictorialization of it, and you can see the crisp fat and the onions and the baked potato. I don't know. But a dreamer . . . he sees it and smells it and tastes it and everything about it, with the charcoal and the satisfied feeling in the stomach and the way the knife cuts through it, and a hundred other things all at once. Very sensual. Very sensual. You and I can't do it."

"Well, then," said Byrne, "no professional dreamer has done this. That's something, anyway." He put the cylinder in his inner jacket pocket. "I hope we'll have your full cooperation in squelching this sort of thing."

"Positively, Mr. Byrne. With a whole heart."

"I hope so." Byrne spoke with a consciousness of power. "It's not up to me, Mr. Weill, to say what will be done and what won't be done, but this sort of thing--he tapped the cylinder he had brought will make it awfully tempting to impose a really strict censorship on dreamies."

He rose. "Good day, Mr. Weill."

"Good day, Mr. Byrne. I'll hope always for the best."

Francis Belanger burst into Jesse Weill's office in his usual steaming tizzy, his reddish hair disordered and his face aglow with worry and a mild perspiration. He was brought up sharply by the sight of Weill's head cradled in the crook of his elbow and bent on the desk until only the glimmer of white hair was visible.

Belanger swallowed. "Boss?"

Weill's head lifted. "It's you, Frank?"

"What's the matter, boss? Are you sick?"

"I'm old enough to be sick, but I'm on my feet. Staggering, but on my feet. A government man was here."

"What did he want?"

"He threatens censorship. He brought a sample of what's going around. Cheap dreamies for bottle parties."

"God damn!" said Belanger feelingly.

"The only trouble is that morality makes for good campaign fodder. They'll be hitting out everywhere. And to tell the truth, we're vulnerable, Frank."

"We are? Our stuff is clean. We play up adventure and romance."

Weill thrust out his lower lip and wrinkled his forehead.

"Between us, Frank, we don't have to make believe. Clean? It depends on how you look at it. It's not for publication, maybe, but you know and I know that every dreamie has its Freudian connotations. You can't deny it."

"Sure, if you look for it. If you're a psychiatrist--"

"If you're an ordinary person, too. The ordinary observer doesn't know it's there, and maybe he couldn't tell a phallic symbol from a mother image even if you pointed them out. Still, his subconscious knows. And it's the connotations that make many a dreamie click."

"All right, what's the government going to do? Clean up the subconscious.

"It's a problem. I don't know what they're going to do. What we have on our side, and what I'm mainly depending on, is the fact that the public loves its dreamies, and won't give them up . . . . Meanwhile, what did you come in for? You want to see me about something, I suppose?"

Belanger tossed an object onto Weill's desk and shoved his shirttail deeper into his trousers.

Weill broke open the glistening plastic cover and took out the enclosed cylinder. At one end was engraved in a too-fancy script in pastel blue: Along the Himalayan Trail. It bore the mark of Luster-Think.

"The Competitor's Product." Weill said it with capitals, and his lips twitched. "It hasn't been published yet. Where did you get it, Frank?"

"Never mind. I just want you to absorb it."

Weill sighed. "Today everyone wants me to absorb dreams. Frank, it's not dirty?"

Belanger said testily, "It has your Freudian symbols. Narrow crevasses between the mountain peaks. I hope that won't bother you."

"I'm an old man. It stopped bothering me years ago, but that other thing was so poorly done it hurt. All right, let's see what you've got here. "

Again the recorder. Again the unfreezer over his skull and at the temples. This time Weill rested back in his chair for fifteen minutes or more, while Francis Belanger went hurriedly through two cigarettes.

When Weill removed the headpiece and blinked dream out of his eyes, Belanger said, "Well, what's your reaction, boss?"

Weill corrugated his forehead. "It's not for me. It was repetitious. With competition like this, Dreams, Inc. doesn't have to worry yet."

"That's your mistake, boss. Luster-Think's going to win with stuff like this. We've got to do something."

"Now, Frank--"

"No, you listen. This is the coming thing."

"This?" Weill stared with half-humorous dubiety at the cylinder. "It's amateurish. It's repetitious. Its overtones are very unsubtle. The snow had a distinct lemon sherbet taste. Who tastes lemon sherbet in snow these days, Frank? In the old days, yes. Twenty years ago, maybe. When Lyman Harrison first made his Snow Symphonies for sale down South, it was a big thing. Sherbet and candy-striped mountaintops and sliding down chocolate-covered cliffs. It's slapstick, Frank. These days it doesn't go."

"Because," said Belanger, "you're not up with the times, boss. I've got to talk to you straight. When you started the dreamie business, when you bought up the basic patents and began putting them out, dreamies were luxury stuff. The market was small and individual. You could afford to turn out specialized dreamies and sell them to people at high prices."

"I know," said Weill, "and we've kept that up. But also we've opened a rental business for the masses."

"Yes, we have, and it's not enough. Our dreamies have subtlety, yes. They can be used over and over again. The tenth time you're still finding new things, still getting new enjoyment. But how many people are connoisseurs? And another thing. Our stuff is strongly individualized. They're First Person.

"Well?"

"Well, Luster-Think is opening dream palaces. They've opened one with three hundred booths in Nashville. You walk in, take your seat, put on your unfreezer, and get your dream. Everyone in the audience gets the same one."

"I've heard of it, Frank, and it's been done before. It didn't work the first time, and it won't work now. You want to know why it won't work? Because in the first place, dreaming is a private thing. Do you like your neighbor to know what you're dreaming? In the second place, in a dream palace the dreams have to start on schedule, don't they? So the dreamer has to dream not when he wants to but when some palace manager says he should. Finally, a dream one person likes, another person doesn't like. In those three hundred booths, I guarantee you, a hundred and fifty people are dissatisfied. And if they're dissatisfied, they won't come back."

Slowly Belanger rolled up his sleeves and opened his collar. "Boss," he said, "you're talking through your hat. What's the use of proving they won't work? They are working. The word came through today that Luster-Think is breaking ground for a thousand-booth palace in St. Louis. People can get used to public dreaming if everyone else in the same room is having the same dream. And they can adjust themselves to having it at a given time, as long as it's cheap and convenient.

"Damn it, boss, it's a social affair. A boy and a girl go to a dream palace and absorb some cheap romantic thing with stereotyped overtones and commonplace situations, but still they come out with stars sprinkling their hair. They've had the same dream together. They've gone through identical sloppy emotions. They're in tune, boss. You bet they go back to the dream palace, and all their friends go, too."

"And if they don't like the dream?"

"That's the point. That's the nub of the whole thing. They're bound to like it. If you prepare Hillary specials with wheels within wheels within wheels, with surprise twists on the third-level undertones, with clever shifts of significance, and all the other things we're so proud of, why, naturally, it won't appeal to everyone. Specialized dreamies are for specialized tastes. But Luster-Think is turning out simple jobs in Third Person so both sexes can be hit at once. Like what you've just absorbed. Simple, repetitious, commonplace. They're aiming at the lowest common denominator. No one will love it, maybe, but no one will hate it."

Weill sat silent for a long time, and Belanger watched him. Then Weill said, "Frank, I started on quality, and I'm staying there. Maybe you're right. Maybe dream palaces are the coming thing. If so, we'll open them, but we'll use good stuff. Maybe Luster-Think underestimates ordinary people. Let's go slowly and not panic. I have based all my policies on the theory that there's always a market for quality. Sometimes, my boy, it would surprise you how big a market."

"Boss-"

The sounding of the intercom interrupted Belanger.

"What is it, Ruth?" said Weill.

The voice of his secretary said, "It's Mr. Hillary, sir. He wants to see you right away. He says it's important. "

"Hillary?" Weill's voice registered shock. Then, "Wait five minutes, Ruth, then send him in."

Weill turned to Belanger. "Today, Frank, is definitely not one of my good days. A dreamer should be at home with his thinker. And Hillary's our best dreamer, so he especially should be at home. What do you suppose is wrong with him?"

Belanger, still brooding over Luster-Think and dream palaces, said shortly, "Call him in and find out."

"In one minute. Tell me, how was his last dream? I haven't absorbed the one that came in last week."

Belanger came down to earth. He wrinkled his nose. "Not so good."

"Why not?"

"It was ragged. Too jumpy. I don't mind sharp transitions for the liveliness, you know, but there's got to be some connection, even if only on a deep level."

"Is it a total loss?"

"No Hillary dream is a total loss. It took a lot of editing, though. We cut it down quite a bit and spliced in some odd pieces he'd sent us now and then. You know, detached scenes. It's still not Grade A, but it will pass."

"You told him about this, Frank?"

"Think I'm crazy, boss? Think I'm going to say a harsh word to a dreamer?"

And at that point the door opened and Weill's comely young secretary smiled Sherman Hillary into the office.

Sherman Hillary, at, the age of thirty-one, could have been recognized as a dreamer by anyone. His eyes, though unspectacled, had nevertheless the misty look of one who either needs glasses or who rarely focuses on anything mundane. He was of average height but underweight, with black hair that needed cutting, a narrow chin, a pale skin, and a troubled look.

He muttered, "Hello, Mr. Weill," and half-nodded in hangdog fashion in the direction of Belanger.

Weill said heartily, "Sherman, my boy, you look fine. What's the matter? A dream is cooking only so-so at home? You're worried about it? Sit down, sit down."

The dreamer did, sitting at the edge of the chair and holding his thighs stiffly together as though to be ready for instant obedience to a possible order to stand up once more.

He said, "I've come to tell you, Mr. Weill, I'm quitting."

"Quitting?"

"I don't want to dream anymore, Mr. Weill."

Weill's old face looked older now than at any other time during the day. "Why, Shennan?"

The dreamer's lips twisted. He blurted out, "Because I'm not living, Mr. Weill. Everything passes me by, It wasn't so bad at first. It was even relaxing. I'd dream evenings, weekends when I felt like it, or any other time. And when I didn't feel like it, I wouldn't. But now, Mr. Weill, I'm an old pro. You tell me I'm one of the best in the business and the industry looks to me to think up new subleties and new changes on the old reliables like the flying reveries and the worm-turning skits."

Weill said, "And is anyone better than you, Sherman? Your little sequence on leading an orchestra is selling steadily after ten years."

"All right, Mr. Weill, I've done my part. It's gotten so I don't go out anymore. I neglect my wife. My little girl doesn't know me. Last week we went to a dinner party. Sarah made me and I don't remember a bit of it. Sarah says I was sitting on the couch all evening just staring at nothing and humming. She said everyone kept looking at me. She cried all night. I'm tired of things like that, Mr. Weill. I want to be a normal person and live in this world. I promised her I'd quit, and I will, so it's good-bye, Mr. Weill." Hillary stood up and held out his hand awkwardly.

Weill waved it gently away. "If you want to quit, Sherman, it's all right. But do an old man a favor and let me explain something to you. "

"I'm not going to change my mind," said Hillary.

"I'm not going to try to make you. I just want to explain something. I'm an old man, and even before you were born I was in this business, so I like to talk about it. Humor me, Sherman? Please?"

Hillary sat down. His teeth clamped down on his lower lip, and he stared sullenly at his fingernails.

Weill said, "Do you know what a dreamer is, Sherman? Do you know what he means to ordinary people? Do you know what it is to be like me, like Frank Belanger, like your wife Sarah? To have crippled minds that can't imagine, that can't build up thoughts? People like myself, ordinary people, would like to escape just once in a while this life of ours. We can't. We need help.

"In olden times it was books, plays, movies, radio, television. They gave us make-believe, but that wasn't important. What was important was that for a little while our own imaginations were stimulated. We could think of handsome lovers and beautiful princesses. We could be attractive, witty, strong, capable--everything we weren't.

"But always the passing of the dream from dreamer to absorber was not perfect. It had to be translated into words in one way or another. The best dreamer in the world might not be able to get any of it into words. And the best writer in the world could put only the smallest part of his dream into words. You understand?

"But now, with dream-recording, any man can dream. You, Sherman, and a handful of men like you supply those dreams directly and exactly. It's straight from your head into ours, full strength. You dream for a hundred million people every time you dream. You dream a hundred million dreams at once. This is a great thing, my boy. You give all those people a glimpse of something they could not have by themselves. "

Hillary mumbled, "I've done my share." He rose desperately to his feet. "I'm through. I don't care what you say. And if you want to sue me for breaking our contract, go ahead and sue. I don't care."

Weill stood up, too. "Would I sue you? . . . Ruth"--he spoke into the intercom--"bring in our copy of Mr. Hillary's contract."

He waited. So did Hillary and Belanger. Weill smiled faintly, and his yellowed fingers drummed softly on his desk.

His secretary brought in the contract. Weill took it, showed its face to Hillary, and said, "Sherman, my boy, unless you want to be with me, it's not right you should stay."

Then before Belanger could make more than the beginning of a horrified gesture to stop him, he tore the contract into four pieces and tossed them down the waste chute. "That's all."

Hillary's hand shot out to seize Weill's. "Thanks, Mr. Weill," he said earnestly, his voice husky. "You've always treated me very well, and I'm grateful. I'm sorry it had to be like this."

"It's all right, my boy. It's all right."

Half in tears, still muttering thanks, Sherman Hillary left.

"For the love of Pete, boss, why did you let him go?" demanded Belanger. "Don't you see the game? He'll be going straight to Luster-Think. They've bought him off."

Weill raised his hand. "You're wrong. You're quite wrong. I know the boy, and this would not be his style. Besides," he added dryly, "Ruth is a good secretary, and she knows what to bring me when I ask for a dreamer's contract. The real contract is still in the safe, believe me.

"Meanwhile, a fine day I've had. I had to argue with a father to give me a chance at new talent, with a government man to avoid censorship, with you to keep from adopting fatal policies, and now with my best dreamer to keep him from leaving. The father I probably won out over. The government man and you, I don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. But about Sherman Hillary, at least, there is no question. The dreamer will be back."

"How do you know?"

Weill smiled at Belanger and crinkled his cheeks into a network of fine lines. "Frank, my boy, you know how to edit dreamies so you think you know all the tools and machines of the trade. But let me tell you something. The most important tool in the dreamie business is the dreamer himself. He is the one you have to understand most of all, and I understand them.

"Listen. When I was a youngster--there were no dreamies then--I knew a fellow who wrote television scripts. He would complain to me bitterly that when someone met him for the first time and found out who he was, they would say: 'Where do you get those crazy ideas!

"They honestly didn't know. To them it was an impossibility to even think of one of them. So what could my friend say? He used to talk to me about it and tell me: 'Could I say, "I don't know"? When I go to bed, I can't sleep for ideas dancing in my head. When I shave, I cut myself; when I talk, I lose track of what I'm saying; when I drive, I take my life in my hands. And always because ideas, situations, dialogues are spinning and twisting in my mind. I can't tell you where I get my ideas. Can you tell me, maybe, your trick of not getting ideas, so I, too, can have a little peace?

"You see, Frank, how it is. You can stop work here anytime. So can I. This is our job, not our life. But not Sherman Hillary. Wherever he goes, whatever he does, he'll dream. While he lives, he must think; while he thinks, he must dream. We don't hold him prisoner; our contract isn't an iron wall for him. His own skull is his prisoner. He'll be back. What can he do?"

Belanger shrugged. "If what you say is right, I'm sort of sorry for the guy."

Weill nodded sadly. "I'm sorry for all of them. Through the years I've found out one thing. It's their business: making people happy. Other people."

Ostensibly this is a story about the future of serious music (by which adjective I mean to exclude dance music both good--Ellington and the Strausse --and bad--Beatles and other coleoptera), but actually it proposes no novelties in that field. Its real subject is the creative process itself. I chose a composer for my hero because I dislike stories about writers, but I might have used any art in which I felt at home. The story adopts a radical scientific assumption in order to make a philosophical and emotional point that could have been made in no other way--which is the highest form of science fiction and the most difficult to bring off. This sample satisfies me that I regard it as a testament and, also, as

A Work of Art

By

James Blish

INSTANTLY, he remembered dying. He remembered it, however, as if at two removes--as though he were remembering a memory, rather than an actual event; as though he himself had not really been there when he died.

Yet the memory was all from his own point of view, not that of some detached and disembodied observer which might have been his soul. He had been most conscious of the rasping, unevenly drawn movements of the air in his chest. Blurring rapidly, the doctor's face had bent over him, loomed, come closer, and then had vanished as the doctor's head passed below his cone of vision, turned sideways to listen to his lungs.

It had become rapidly darker, and then, only then, had he realized that these were to be his last minutes. He had tried dutifully to say Pauline's name, but his memory contained no record of the sound--only of the rattling breath, and of the film of sootiness thickening in the air, blotting out everything for an instant.

Only an instant, and then the memory was over. The room was bright again, and the ceiling, he noticed with wonder, had turned a soft green. The doctor's head lifted again and looked down at him.

It was a different doctor. This one was a far younger man, with an ascetic face and gloaming, almost fey eyes. There was no doubt about it. One of the last conscious thoughts he had had was that of gratitude that the attending physician, there at the end, had not been the one who secretly hated him for his one-time associations with the Nazi hierarchy. The attending doctor, instead, had worn an expression amusingly proper for that of a Swiss expert called to the deathbed of an eminent man: a mixture of worry at the prospect of losing so eminent a patient, and complacency at the thought that, at the old man's age, nobody could blame this doctor if he died. At 85, pneumonia is a serious matter, with or without penicillin.

"You're all right now," the new doctor said, freeing his patient's head of a whole series of little silver rods which had been clinging to it by a sort of network cap. "Rest a minute and try to be calm. Do you know your name?"

He drew a cautious breath. There seemed to be nothing at all the matter with his lungs now; indeed, he felt positively healthy. "Certainly," he said, a little nettled. "Do you know yours?"

The doctor smiled crookedly. "You're in character, it appears," he said. "My name is Barkun Kris; I am a mind sculptor. Yours?"

"Richard Strauss."

"Very good," Dr. Kris said, and turned away. Strauss, however, had already been diverted by a new singularity. Strauss is a word as well as a name in German; it has many meanings--an ostrich, a bouquet; von Wolzogen had had a high old time working all the possible puns into the libretto of Feuersnot. And it happened to be the first German word to be spoken either by himself or by Dr. Kris since that twice-removed moment of death. The language was not French or Italian, either. It was most like English, but not the English Strauss knew; nevertheless, he was having no trouble speaking it and even thinking in it.

Well, he thought, I'll be able to conduct The Love of Danae after all. It isn't every composer who can premiere his own opera posthumously. Still, there was something queer about all this the queerest part of all being that conviction, which would not go away, that he had actually been dead for just a short time. Of course medicine was making great strides, but...

"Explain all this," he said, lifting himself to one elbow. The bed was different, too, and not nearly as comfortable as the one in which he had died. As for the room, it looked more like a dynamo shed than a sickroom. Had modern medicine taken to reviving its corpses on the floor of the Siemanns-Schakert plant?

"In a moment," Dr. Kris said. He finished rolling some machine back into what Strauss impatiently supposed to be its place, and crossed to the pallet. "Now. There are many things you'll have to take for granted without attempting to understand them. Dr. Strauss. Not everything in the world today is explicable in terms of your assumptions. Please bear that in mind."

"Very well. Proceed."

"The date," Dr. Kris said, "is 2161 by your calendar--or, in other words, it is now two hundred and twelve years after your death. Naturally, you'll realize that by this time nothing remains of your body but the bones. The body you have now was volunteered for your use. Before you look into a mirror to see what it's like, remember that its physical difference from the one you were used to is all in your favor. It's in perfect health, not unpleasant for other people to look at, and its physiological age is about fifty."

A miracle? No, not in this new age, surely. It was simply a work of science. But what a science! This was Nietzsche's eternal recurrence and the immortality of the superman combined into one.

"And where is this?" the composer said.

"In Port York, part of the State of Manhattan, in the United States. You will find the country less changed in some respects than I imagine you anticipate. Other changes, of course, will seem radical to you; but it's hard for me to predict which ones will strike you that way. A certain resilience on your part will bear cultivating."

"I understand," Strauss said, sitting up. "One question, please; is it still possible for a composer to make a living in this century?"

"Indeed it is," Dr. Kris said, smiling. "As we expect you to do. It is one of the purposes for which we've--brought you back."

"I gather, then," Strauss said somewhat dryly, "that there is still a demand for my music. The critics in the old days--"

"That's not quite how it is," Dr. Kris said. "I understand some of your work is still played, but frankly I know very little about your current status. My interest is rather--"

A door opened somewhere, and another man came in. He was older and more ponderous than Kris and had a certain air of academicism; but he too was wearing the oddly tailored surgeon's gown, and looked upon Kris's patient with the glowing eyes of an artist.

"A success, Kris?" he said. "Congratulations."

"They're not in order yet," Dr. Kris said. "The final proof is what counts. Dr. Strauss, if you feel strong enough, Dr. Seirds and I would like to ask you some questions. We'd like to make sure your memory is clear."

"Certainly. Go ahead."

"According to our records," Kris said, "you once knew a man whose initials were RKL; this was while you were conducting at the Vienna Stoatsoper." He made the double "a" at least twice too long, as though German were a dead language he was striving to pronounce in some "classical" accent. "What was his name, and who was he?"

"That would be Kurt List--his first name was Richard, but he didn't use it. He was assistant stage manager."

The two doctors looked at each other. "Why did you offer to write a new overture to The Woman Without a Shadow, and give the manuscript to the City of Vienna?"

"So I wouldn't have to pay the garbage removal tax on the Maria Theresa villa they had given me."

"In the back yard of your house at Garmisch-Partenkirchen there was a tombstone. What was written on it?"

Strauss frowned. That was a question he would be happy to be unable to answer. If one is to play childish jokes upon oneself, it's best not to carve them in stone, and put the carving where you can't help seeing it every time you go out to tinker with the Mercedes. "It says," he replied wearily, "Sacred to the memory of Guntram, Minnesinger, slain in a horrible way by his father's own symphony orchestra."

"When was Guntram premiered?"

"In--let me see--1894, I believe."

"Where?"

"In Weimar."

"Who was the leading lady?"

"Pauline de Ahna."

"What happened to her afterward?"

"I married her. Is she . . ."

Strauss began anxiously. "No," Dr. Kris said. "I'm sorry, but we lack the data to reconstruct more or less ordinary people."

The composer sighed. He did not know whether to be worried or not. He had loved Pauline, to be sure; on the other hand, it would be pleasant to be able to live the new life without being forced to take off one's shoes every time one entered the house, so as not to scratch the polished hardwood floors. And also pleasant, perhaps, to have two o'clock in the afternoon come by without hearing Pauline's everlasting, "Richard--jetzt komponiert!"

"Next question," he said.

For reasons which Strauss did not understand, but was content to take for granted, he was separated from Drs. Kris and Seirds as soon as both were satisfied that the composer's memory was reliable and his health stable. His estate, he was given to understand, had long since been broken up--a sorry end for what had been one of the principal fortunes of Europe--but he was given sufficient money to set up lodgings and resume an active life. He was provided, too, with introductions which proved valuable.

It took longer than he had expected to adjust to the changes that had taken place in music alone. Music was, he quickly began to suspect, a dying art, which would soon have a status not much above that held by flower arranging back in what he thought of as his own century. Certainly it couldn't be denied that the trend toward fragmentation, already visible back in his own time, had proceeded almost to completion in 2161.

He paid no more attention to American popular tunes than he had bothered to pay in his previous life. Yet it was evident that their assembly-line production methods--all the ballad composers openly used a slide-rule-like device called a Hit Machine--now had their counterparts almost throughout serious music.

The conservatives these days, for instance, were the twelve- tone composers--always, in Strauss's opinions, a dryly mechanical lot, but never more so than now. Their gods--Berg, Schoenberg, Webern--were looked upon by the concert-going public as great masters, on the abstruse side perhaps, but as worthy of reverence as any of the Three B's.

There was one wing of the conservatives, however, which had gone the twelve-tone procedure one better. These men composed what was called "stochastic music," put together by choosing each individual note by consultation with tables of random numbers. Their bible, their basic text, was a volume called Operational Aesthetics, which in turn derived from a discipline called information theory; and not one word of it seemed to touch upon any of the techniques and customs of composition which Strauss knew. The ideal of this group was to produce music which would be "universal"--that is, wholly devoid of any trace of the composer's individuality, wholly a musical expression of the universal Laws of Chance. The Laws of Chance seemed to have a style of their own, all right; but to Strauss it seemed the style of an idiot child being taught to hammer a flat piano, to keep him from getting into trouble.

By far the largest body of work being produced, however, fell into a category misleadingly called "science-music." The term reflected nothing but the titles of the works, which dealt with space flight, time travel, and other subjects of a romantic or an unlikely nature. There was nothing in the least scientific about the music, which consisted of a melange of cliches and imitations of natural sounds, in which Strauss was horrified to see his own time-distorted and diluted image.

The most popular form or science-music was a nine-minute composition called a concerto, though it bore no resemblance at all to the classical concerto form; it was instead a sort of free rhapsody after Rachmaninoff--long after. A typical one--"Song of Deep Space" it was called, by somebody named H. Valerion Krafft--began with a loud assault on the tam-tam, after which all the strings rushed up the scale in unison, followed at a respectful distance by the harp and one clarinet in parallel 6/4's. At the top of the scale cymbals were hashed together, forte possibile, and the whole orchestra launched itself into a major-minor, wailing sort of melody; the whole orchestra, that is, except for the French horns, which were plodding back down the scale again in what was evidently supposed to be a countermelody. The second phrase of the theme was picked up by a solo trumpet with a suggestion of tremolo; the orchestra died back to its roots to await the next cloudburst, and at this point--as any four- year-old could have predicted--the piano entered with the second theme.

Behind the orchestra stood a group of thirty women, ready to come in with a wordless chorus intended to suggest the eeriness of Deep Space--but at this point, too, Strauss had already learned to get up and leave. After a few such experiences he could also count upon meeting in the lobby Sindi Noniss, the agent to whom Dr. Kris had introduced him, and who was handling the reborn composer's output--what there was of it thus far. Sindi had come to expect these walkouts on the part of his client, and patiently awaited them, standing beneath a bust of Gian Carlo Menotti; but he liked them less and less, and lately had been greeting them by turning alternately red and white like a totipotent barber pole.

"You shouldn't have done it," he burst out after the Krafft incident. "You can't just walk out on a new Krafft composition. The man's the president of the Interplanetary Society for Contemporary Music. How am I ever going to persuade them that you're a contemporary if you keep snubbing them?"

"What does it matter?" Strauss said. "They don't know me by sight."

"You're wrong; they know you very well, and they're watching every move you make. You're the first major composer the mind sculptors ever tackled, and the ISCM would be glad to turn you back with a rejection slip."

"Why?"

"Oh," said Sindi, "there are lots of reasons. The sculptors are snobs; so are the ISCM boys. Each of them wants to prove to the other that their own art is the king of them all. And then there's the competition; it would be easier to flunk you than to let you into the market. I really think you'd better go back in. I could make up some excuse--"

"No," Strauss said shortly. "I have work to do."

"But that's just the point, Richard. How are we going to get an opera produced without the ISCM? It isn't as though you wrote theremin solos, or something that didn't cost so--"

"I have work to do," he said, and left.

And he did: work which absorbed him as had no other project during the last thirty years of his former life. He had scarcely touched pen to music paper--both had been astonishingly hard to find--when he realized that nothing in his long career had provided him with touchstones by which to judge what music he should write now.

The old tricks came swarming back by the thousands, to be sure: the sudden, unexpected key changes at the crest of a melody; the interval stretching; the piling of divided strings, playing in the high harmonics, upon the already tottering top of a climax; the scurry and bustle as phrases were passed like lightning from one choir of the orchestra to another; the flashing runs in the brass, the chuckling in the clarinets, the snarling mixtures of colors to emphasize dramatic tension--all of them.

But none of them satisfied him now. He had been content with them for most of a lifetime, and had made them do an astonishing amount of work. But now it was time to strike out afresh. Some of the tricks, indeed, actively repelled him: where had he gotten the notion, clung to for decades, that violins screaming out in unison somewhere in the stratosphere was a sound interesting enough to be worth repeating inside a single composition, let alone in all of them?

And nobody, he reflected contentedly, ever approached such a new beginning better equipped. In addition to the past lying available in his memory, he had always had a technical armamentarium second to none; even the hostile critics had granted him that. Now that he was, in a sense, composing his first opera--his first after fifteen of them!--he had every opportunity to make it a masterpiece.

And every such intention.

There were, of course, many minor distractions. One of them was that search for old-fashioned score paper, and a pen and ink with which to write on it. Very few of the modern composers, it developed, wrote their music at all. A large bloc of them used tape, patching together snippets of tone and sound snipped from other tapes, superimposing one tape on another, and varying the results by twirling an elaborate array of knobs this way or that. Almost all the composers of 3-V scores, on the other hand, wrote on the sound track itself, rapidly scribbling jagged wiggly lines which, when passed through a photocell-audio circuit, produced a noise reasonably like an orchestra playing music, overtones and all.

The last-ditch conservatives who still wrote notes on paper, did so with the aid of a musical typewriter. The device, Strauss had to admit, seemed perfected at last; it had manuals and stops like an organ, but it was not much more than twice as large as a standard letter-writing typewriter, and produced a neat page. But he was satisfied with his own spidery, highly-legible manuscript and refused to abandon it, badly though the one pen nib he had been able to buy coarsened it. It helped to tie him to his past.

Joining the ISCM had also caused him some bad moments, even after Sindi had worked him around the political road blocks. The Society man who examined his qualifications as a member had run through the questions with no more interest than might have been shown by a veterinarian examining his four thousandth sick calf.

"Had anything published?"

"Yes, nine tone poems, about three hundred songs, an--"

"Not when you were alive," the examiner said, somewhat disquietingly. "I mean since the sculptors turned you out again."

"Since the sculptors--ah, I understand. Yes, a string quartet, two song cycles, a--"

"Good. Alfie, write down 'songs.' Play an instrument?"

"Piano."

"Hm." The examiner studied his fingernails. "Oh, well. Do you read music? Or do you use a Scriber, or tape clips? Or a Machine?"

"I read."

"Here." The examiner sat Strauss down in front of a viewing lectern, over the lit surface of which an endless belt of translucent paper was traveling. On the paper was an immensely magnified sound track. "Whistle me the tune of that, and name the instruments it sounds like."

"I don't read that Musiksticheln," Strauss said frostily, "or write it, either. I use standard notation, on music paper."

"Alfie, write down 'Reads notes only.' " He laid a sheet of grayly printed music on the lectern above the ground glass. "Whistle me that."

"That" proved to be a popular tune called "Vangs, Snifters and Store-Credit Snooky" which had been written on a Hit Machine in 2159 by a guitar-faking politician who sang it at campaign rallies. (In some respects, Strauss reflected, the United States had indeed not changed very much.) It had become so popular that anybody could have whistled it from the title alone, whether he could read the music or not. Strauss whistled it, and to prove his bona fides added, "It's in the key of B flat."

The examiner went over to the green-painted upright piano and hit one greasy black key. The instrument was horribly out of tune--the note was much nearer to the standard 440/cps A than it was to B flat--but the examiner said, "So it is. Alfie, write down, 'Also read flats.' All right, son, you're a member. Nice to have you with us; not many people can read that old-style notation any more. A lot of them think they're too good for it."

"Thank you," Strauss said.

"My feeling is, if it was good enough for the old masters, it's good enough for us. We don't have people like them with us these days, it seems to me. Except for Dr. Krafft, of course. They were great back in the old days--men like Shilkrit, Steiner, Tiomkin, and Pearl . . . and Wilder and Jannsen. Real goffin."

"Doch gewiss," Strauss said politely.

But the work went forward. He was making a little income now, from small works. People seemed to feel a special interest in a composer who had come out of the mind sculptors' laboratories; and in addition the material itself, Strauss was quite certain, had merits of its own to help sell it.

It was the opera which counted, however. That grew and grew under his pen, as fresh and new as his new life, as founded in knowledge and ripeness as his long full memory. Finding a libretto had been troublesome at first. While it was possible that something existed that might have served among the current scripts for 3-V--though he doubted it he found himself unable to tell the good from the bad through the fog cast over both by incomprehensibly technical production directions. Eventually, and for only the third time in his whole career, he had fallen back upon a play written in a language other than his own, and--for the first time--decided to set it in that language.

The play was Christopher Fry's Venus Observed, in all ways a perfect Strauss opera libretto, as he came gradually to realize. Though nominally a comedy, with a complex farcical plot, it was a verse play with considerable depth to it, and a number of characters who cried out to be brought by music into three dimensions, plus a strong undercurrent of autumnal tragedy, of leaf-fall and apple-fall--precisely the kind of contradictory dramatic mixture which von Hofmannsthal had supplied him with in The Knight of the Rose, in Ariadne at Naxos, and in Arabella.

Alas for von Hofmannsthal, but here was another long-dead playwright who seemed nearly as gifted; and the musical opportunities were immense. There was, for instance, the fire which ended act two; what a gift for a composer to whom orchestration and counterpoint were as important as air and water! Or take the moment where Perpetua shoots the apple from the Duke's hand; in that one moment a single passing reference could add Rossini's marmoreal William Tell to the musical texture as nothing but an ironic footnote! And the Duke's great curtain speech, beginning:

Shall I be sorry for myself? In Mortality's name

I'll be sorry for myself. Branches and boughs.

Brown hills, the valleys faint with brume,

A burnish on the lake ...

There was a speech for a great tragic comedian, in the spirit of Falstaff; the final union of laughter and tears, punctuated by the sleepy comments of Reedbeck, to whose sonorous snore (trombones, no less than five of them, con sordini?) the opera would gently end. . . .

What could be better? And yet he had come upon the play only by the unlikeliest series of accidents. At first he had planned to do a straight knockabout farce, in the idiom of The Silent Woman, just to warm himself up. Remembering that Zweig had adapted that libretto for him, in the old days, from a play by Ben Jonson, Strauss had begun to search out English plays of the period just after Jonson's, and had promptly run aground on an awful specimen in heroic couplets called Venice Preserv'd, by one Thomas Otway. The Fry play had directly followed the Otway in the card catalogue, and he had looked at it out of curiosity; why should a Twentieth Century playwright be punning on a title from the Eighteenth?

After two pages of the Fry play, the minor puzzle of the pun disappeared entirely from his concern. His luck was running again; he had an opera.

Sindi worked miracles in arranging for the performance. The date of the premiere was set even before the score was finished, reminding Strauss pleasantly of those heady days when Fuerstner had been snatching the conclusion of Elektra off his work table a page at a time, before the ink was even dry, to rush it to the engraver before publication deadline. The situation now, however, was even more complicated, for some of the score had to be scribed, some of it taped, some of it engraved in the old way, to meet the new techniques of performance; there were moments when Sindi seemed to be turning quite gray.

But Venus Observed was, as usual, forthcoming complete from Strauss's pen in plenty of time. Writing the music in first draft had been hellishly hard work, much more like being reborn than had been that confused awakening in Barkun Kris's laboratory, with its overtones of being dead instead; but Strauss found that he still retained all of his old ability to score from the draft almost effortlessly, as undisturbed by Sindi's half-audible worrying in the room with him as he was by the terrifying supersonic bangs of the rockets that bulleted invisibly over the city.

When he was finished, he had two days still to spare before the beginning of rehearsals. With those, furthermore, he would have nothing to do. The techniques of performance in this age were so completely bound up with the electronic arts as to reduce his own experience--he, the master Kapellmeister of them all--to the hopelessly primitive.

He did not mind. The music, as written, would speak for itself. In the meantime he found it grateful to forget the months' long preoccupation with the stage for a while. He went back to the library and browsed lazily through old poems, vaguely seeking texts for a song or two. He knew better than to bother with recent poets; they could not speak to him, and he knew it. The Americans of his own age, he thought, might give him a clue to understanding this America of 2161; and if some such poem gave birth to a song, so much the better.

The search was relaxing and he gave himself up to enjoying it. Finally he struck a tape that he liked: a tape read in a cracked old voice that twanged of Idaho as that voice had twanged in 1910, in Strauss's own ancient youth. The poet's name was Pound; he said, on the tape:

. . . the souls of all men great

At times pass through us,

And we are melted into them, and are not

Save reflexions of their souls.

Thus I am Dante for a space and am

One Frangois Villon, ballad-lord and thief

Or am such holy ones I may not write,

Lest Blasphemy be writ against my name;

This for an instant and the flame is gone.

'Tis as in midmost us there glows a sphere

Translucent, molten gold, that is the "I"

And into this some form projects itself:

Christus, or John, or eke the Florentine;

And as the clear space is not if a form's

Imposed thereon,

So cease we from all being for the time,

And these, the Masters of the Soul, live on.

He smiled. That lesson had been written again and again, from Plato onward. Yet the poem was a history of his own case, a sort of theory for the metempsychosis he had undergone, and in its formal way it was moving. It would be fitting to make a little hymn of it, in honor of his own rebirth, and of the poet's insight.

A series of solemn, breathless chords framed themselves in his inner ear, against which the words might be intoned in a high, gently bending hush at the beginning . . . and then a dramatic passage in which the great names of Dante and Villon would enter ringing like challenges to Time. . . . He wrote for a while in his notebook before he returned the spool to its shelf.

These, he thought, are good auspices.

And so the night of the premiere arrived, the audience pouring into the hall, the 3-V cameras riding on no visible supports through the air, and Sindi calculating his share of his client's earnings by a complicated game he played on his fingers, the basic law of which seemed to be that one plus one equals ten. The hall filled to the roof with people from every class, as though what was to come would be a circus rather than an opera.

There were, surprisingly, nearly fifty of the aloof and aristocratic mind sculptors, clad in formal clothes which were exaggerated black versions of their surgeon's gowns. They had bought a bloc of seats near the front of the auditorium, where the gigantic 3-V figures which would shortly fill the "stage" before them (the real singers would perform on a small stage in the basement) could not but seem monstrously out of proportion; but Strauss supposed that they had taken this into account and dismissed it.

There was a tide of whispering in the audience as the sculptors began to trickle in, and with it an undercurrent of excitement the meaning of which was unknown to Strauss. He did not attempt to fathom it, however; he was coping with his own mounting tide of opening-night tension, which, despite all the years, he had never quite been able to shake.

The sourceless, gentle light in the auditorium dimmed, and Strauss mounted the podium. There was a score before him, but he doubted that he would need it. Directly before him, poking up from among the musicians, were the inevitable 3-V snouts, waiting to carry his image to the singers in the basement.

The audience was quiet now. This was the moment. His baton swept up and then decisively down, and the prelude came surging up out of the pit.

For a little while he was deeply immersed in the always tricky business of keeping the enormous orchestra together and sensitive to the flexing of the musical web beneath his hand. As his control firmed and became secure, however, the task became slightly less demanding, and he was able to pay more attention to what the whole sounded like.

There was something decidedly wrong with it. Of course there were the occasional surprises as some bit of orchestral color emerged with a different Klang than he had expected; that happened to every composer, even after a lifetime of experience. And there were moments when the singers, entering upon a phrase more difficult to handle than he had calculated, sounded like someone about to fall off a tightrope (although none of them actually fluffed once; they were as fine a troupe of voices as he had ever had to work with).

But these were details. It was the over-all impression that was wrong. He was losing not only the excitement of the premiere--after all, that couldn't last at the same pitch all evening--but also his very interest in what was coming from the stage and the pit. He was gradually tiring; his baton arm becoming heavier; as the second act mounted to what should have been an impassioned outpouring of shining tone, he was so bored as to wish he could go back to his desk to work on that song.

Then the act was over; only one more to go. He scarcely heard the applause. The twenty minutes' rest in his dressing room was just barely enough to give him the necessary strength.

And suddenly, in the middle of the last act, he understood.

There was nothing new about the music. It was the old Strauss all over again--but weaker, more dilute than ever. Compared with the output of composers like Krafft, it doubtless sounded like a masterpiece to this audience. But he knew.

The resolutions, the determination to abandon the old cliches and mannerisms, the decision to say something new--they had all come to nothing against the force of habit. Being brought to life again meant bringing to life as well all those deeply graven reflexes of his style. He had only to pick up his pen and they overpowered him with easy automatism, no more under his control than the jerk of a finger away from a flame.

His eyes filled; his body was young, but he was an old man, an old man. Another thirty-five years of this? Never. He had said all this before, centuries before. Nearly a half century condemned to saying it all over again, in a weaker and still weaker voice, aware that even this debased century would come to recognize in him only the burnt husk of greatness?--no; never, never.

He was aware, dully, that the opera was over. The audience was screaming its joy. He knew the sound. They had screamed that way when Day of Peace had been premiered, but they had been cheering the man he had been, not the man that Day of Peace showed with cruel clarity he had become. Here the sound was even more meaningless: cheers of ignorance, and that was all.

He turned slowly. With surprise, and with a surprising sense of relief, he saw that the cheers were not, after all, for him.

They were for Dr. Barkun Kris.

Kris was standing in the middle of the bloc of mind sculptors, bowing to the audience. The sculptors nearest him were shaking his hand one after the other. More grasped at it as he made his way to the aisle, and walked forward to the podium. When he mounted the rostrum and took the composer's limp hand, the cheering became delirious.

Kris lifted his arm. The cheering died instantly to an intent hush.

"Thank you," he said clearly. "Ladies and gentlemen, before we take leave of Dr. Strauss, let us again tell him what a privilege it has been for us to hear this fresh example of his mastery. I am sure no farewell could be more fitting."

The ovation lasted five minutes, and would have gone another five if Kris had not cut it off.

"Dr. Strauss," he said, "in a moment, when I speak a certain formulation to you, you will realize that your name is Jerom Bosch, born in our century and with a life in it all your own. The superimposed memories which have made you assume the mask, the persona, of a great composer will be gone. I tell you this so that you may understand why these people here share your applause with me."

A wave of assenting sound. 'The art of mind sculpture--the creation of artificial personalities for aesthetic enjoyment--may never reach such a pinnacle again. For you should understand that as Jerom Bosch you had no talent for music at all; indeed, we searched a long time to find a man who was utterly unable to carry even the simplest tune. Yet we were able to impose upon such unpromising material not only the personality, but the genius, of a great composer. That genius belongs entirely to you--to the persona that thinks of itself as Richard Strauss. None of the credit goes to the man who volunteered for the sculpture. That is your triumph, and we salute you for it."

Now the ovation could no longer be contained. Strauss, with a crooked smile, watched Dr. Kris bow. This mind sculpturing was a suitably sophisticated kind of cruelty for this age; but the impulse, of course, had always existed. It was the same impulse that had made Rembrandt and Leonardo turn cadavers into art works.

It deserved a suitably sophisticated payment under the lex talionis: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth--and a failure for a failure.

No, he need not tell Dr. Kris that the "Strauss" he had created was as empty of genius as a hollow gourd. The joke would always be on the sculptor, who was incapable of hearing the hollowness of the music now preserved on the 3-V tapes.

But for an instant a surge of revolt poured through his blood stream. I am I, he thought. I am Richard Strauss until I die, and will never be Jerom Bosch, who was utterly unable to carry even the simplest tune. His hand, still holding the baton, came sharply up, though whether to deliver or to ward off a blow he could not tell.

He let it fall again, and instead, at last, bowed--not to the audience, but to Dr. Kris. He was sorry for nothing, as Kris turned to him to say the word that would plunge him back into oblivion, except that he would now have no chance to set that poem to music.

John W. Campbell, Jr., invented the rationale for this story, but then turned down the story proper because "Real talented people don't behave like small children." How he could have reached such a conclusion after what was then thirty years in science fiction, I cannot begin to imagine. I know he's been at s-f conventions. The point of the story, however, is not in the antisocial ways artists sometimes behave, but in whether society (in the form, say, of Greenwich Village policemen) can really afford to purge itself of its deviants.

THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

by

James Blish

The fight began, really, with a simple comment that Mordecai Drover offered to nobody in particular while watching Dr. Helena Curtis, the Bartok Colony's resident novelist, trying to finish her research before nightfall. He couldn't fathom why the remark had set off such an explosion.

After all, all he had said was, "I can never quite get used to it."

"What?" Henry Chatterton asked abstractedly.

"Seeing a woman using an index. It's as outlandish a sight as a chimpanzee roller-skating."

At this precise moment Callisto slid into Jupiter's shadow and the nighttime clamor of the Bartok Colony began to rise rapidly toward its sustained crescendo. Typewriters began to rattle one after the other, pianos to compete discordantly, a phonograph to grunt out part of Le Sacre du Printemps for Novgorod's choreography pawns, and collapsible tubes to pop air-bubbles as paint was squeezed onto palettes. The computer, too, began humming deep in its throat, for Dr. Winterhalter of the Special Studies section was trying to make it compose a sonata derived entirely from information theory.

The clamor would last four hours and 53.9 minutes before beginning to taper off.

Helena, however, made no move toward her typewriter. She closed her reference book with a savage snap, as though trying to trap a passing moth, and stood up. Mordecai, who had already plunged deep into Canto XVII of The Drum Major and the Mask, failed to notice her glare until he became aware of an unprecedented silence in the Commons Room. He looked up.

Helena was advancing on him, step by step, each pace made more menacing by the peculiar glide Callisto's slight gravity enforced. She was graceful under any circumstances; now she looked positively serpentine, and her usually full lips were white. Alarmed, Mordecai put down his pen.

"Just what did you mean by that?" she asked.

By what? Mordecai searched his memory frantically. At first all he could come up with was the last strophe he had written, only a few seconds ago, and as yet he had no idea what he meant by that: The thing was badly flawed and needed revision before even its author could know what it meant.

Then he remembered the remark about women and indexes--indices?--already hours away in the fleet subjective time of Callistan night.

"Why, it wasn't anything," he said wonderingly. "I mean, you know how it is with chimpanzees--"

"Oh, I do, do I?"

"Well, maybe I didn't--what I mean is, they get to be

very skillful at unusual tasks--it's just that you don't

expect them to be--Helena, it was only a joke! What

good is a joke after it's explained? Don't be obstinate."

"Meaning don't be obstinately stupid?" she said

through her teeth. "I've had enough of your nasty innuendos. If there's anything I loathe, it's a would-be genius with no manners."

Henry Chatterton's smock was already spattered with egg tempera from top to bottom, and the painting on his canvas was nearly a quarter finished. Slashing away at one corner of it with a loaded brush, he said out of the corner of his mouth:

"We've had to put up with that viper's tongue of yours long enough, Helena. Why don't you go hitch your flat frontispiece over your decollete novel and let the rest of us work?"

"Now, wait a minute," John Rapaport said, flushing heavily and looking up from the dural plate on which he had been sketching. "By what right does an egg-coddler go out of his way to insult a craftsman, Chatterton? If you have to dip that brush of yours in blatherskite, save it for your daubs--never mind smearing it over Helena."

Chatterton swung around in astonishment and then began to smirk.

"So that's how it's going to be! Well, Johnny boy, congratulations. But I predict that you'll find five hours makes a very, very long night. Don't say an expert didn't warn you."

Rapaport swung. His engravers' point flew accurately at Chatterton's left eye. The painter ducked just in time; the tool stuck, quivering, in his canvas. He took one look at it and rushed on Rapaport, howling. Mordecai would have been out of the way with no difficulty if Helena's open hand had not caught him a stinging blow across the chops at the crucial moment. Then he and Chatterton went over.

The noise quickly attracted the rest of the happy family. Only fifteen minutes after Mordecai's innocentremark, the Commons Room was untidily heaped with geniuses.

It looked like a long night.

Because Mordecai, a month before, had fumbled so long and so helplessly with his space suit until an impatient crewman had decided to help him dog it down, he had almost been dumped out of the air lock, and the ship's captain barely gave him time to get clear before taking off again. Within a few seconds, it seemed, he had been more alone than he had ever been in his life.

He had stood still inside the suit, because he could do nothing else, and fumed. Actually, he knew, he was more afraid than angry, though he was thoroughly furious with himself, and with Martin Hope Eglington, his mentor. It certainly hadn't been Mordecai's idea to come to Jupiter IV. He had never even been in space before, not even so far as the Moon, and had had no desire to go.

Nevertheless, here he was, under a sky of so deep a blue that it was almost black, and full of sharp cold stars, even though it was midday. The Sun was a miniature caricature of itself, shedding little light and no apparent heat. There was nothing else to be seen but a wilderness of tumbled rocks, their sharp edges and spires protruding gauntly through deep layers of powdery snow, all the way to the near horizon. The fact that Mordecai could hear a faint sighing whistle outside his suit, as of the saddest and weakest of all winds, did not cheer him.

It had begun, as such things usually did with Mordecai, with what had seemed an innocent question, this time one asked by someone else. Eglington had been helping him with the prosody of The Drum Major and the Mask, Mordecai's major poem thus far, cast as a sirvente to Wallace Stevens. They had swinked at it all day in Eglington's beautiful and remote Vermont home. Mordecai had now been Eglington's only protege; there was a time when the Pulitzer Prize winner had maintained a sort of salon of them, but now he was too old for such rigors.

"That's enough for now," Eglington had said shortly after dinner. "It's really shaping up very well, Mordecai, if you could just get yourself past trying to compress everything you know into one phrase. In a poem of this length, at least a little openness of texture is desirable--if only to let the reader into it."

"I see that now. Whew! When I first got started, nobody told me poetry could be such hard work."

"All real poetry is hard work; that's one of the telltales. Tell me something, Mordecai--when do you do most of your work? I don't mean your best work, necessarily; at what hours of the day do you find that you work most easily, can concentrate best, put the most out?"

That had been easy to answer. Mordecai's work habits had been fixed for fifteen years. "Between about eight at night and two in the morning."

"I thought so. That's true of most creative people, including scientists. The exact hours vary, but the fact is that most of the world's creative work--and creative play; it's the same thing--is done at night."

"Interesting," Mordecai had said. "Why is that, do you suppose?"

"Oh, I don't have to suppose. The answer is known. It's because, during those hours, the whole mass of the Earth is between you and the Sun. That protects you from an extremely penetrating kind of solar radiation, made up of particles called neutrinos. The protection is negligible statistically, because all matter is almost perfectly transparent to neutrinos, but it seems that the creative processes are tremendously sensitive to even the slightest shielding effect."

"Too bad they can't be blocked off completely, then. I'd like to be able to work days. I just can't."

"You can if you want to undergo some privations in the process," Eglington had said, almost idly. "Ever hear of the Bartok Colony?"

"Yes, it's a retreat of some sort. Never went in for that kind of thing much myself. I work better alone."

"I see you don't know where it is. It's on Callisto."

The notion had startled and somewhat repelled Mordecai, for whom the neutrinos had already been almost too much. He would expect Eglington to know about such things--he was not called "the poet of physics" for nothing--but Mordecai had no interest in them. "On Callisto? Why, for heaven's sake?"

"Well, for two reasons," Eglington had said. "First of all, because at that distance from the Sun the raw neutrino flux is only about three point seven percent of what it is here on Earth. The other reason is that for nearly five hours of every two weeks--that is, every Callistan day--you have the small bulk of the satellite plus the whole mass of Jupiter between you and the Sun. For that period you're in a position to work your creative engine with almost no neutrino static. I'm told that the results, in terms of productivity, are truly fantastic."

"Oh," Mordecai had said. "It seems like an extreme measure, somehow."

Eglington had leaned forward, intensely serious. "Only extreme measures produce great work, Mordecai. Tell me--what was the big change in Man that differentiated him permanently, qualitatively, from all other species?"

"The opposable thumb," Mordecai had said promptly.

"Wrong. The opposable thumb helps Man to handle things, it stimulates curiosity, it gets the world's work done. It is, if you like, a device of daylight. But the ability to think in abstractions is the big skill that Man has, and that is an ability that works mostly at night. Second question: Why was fire Man's most important discovery?"

"Well, it helped him to get more nourishment out of his food," Mordecai said, but more cautiously now. "That's minor. What else?"

Mordecai had known he was well out of his depth by that time. He simply shook his head.

"Independence of the Sun, Mordecai. That one gain has permanently arrested Man's evolution. Without it, he was developing a number of specialized types for different environments : the bushman, the pigmy, the Eskimo, and so on. Fire not only halted the process, but reversed it; devolution set in. Now we don't have to adapt to our environments; we can carry our own wherever we go. In that way we protect ourselves from adapting away from abstract thinking and toward some purely physical change that will make it unnecessary for us to think."

Eglington had paused and sniffed reflectively at his brandy. Then, with apparent irrelevance, he had added: "Do you tell your relatives what your work hours are?"

"Not by a long shot. They're all alarm-clock types. They think I'm lazy as it is; if I told them I didn't get up until noon, they'd be sure of it."

"Exactly. Daylight encourages monkey-thinking, practicality, conformity, routine operation. It's at night that Man-thinking gets done. During the day there are the twinges about the regular paycheck, keeping the family fed, making your relatives proud of you, taking no chances, and all the rest of that rot. 'Early to bed and early to rise' is nothing but an invitation to put your head into a horse collar. The man who stays in bed all day isn't a lazy slob; he's a man who's very sensibly protecting his valuable human brains from the monkey-drive."

"You make a good case," Mordecai had said admiringly.

"I really think you ought to go, Mordecai. I'll give you a letter to the chairman; he's at the Earth headquarters at MIT. I'm quite sure I can swing it."

Mordecai had felt a belated surge of alarm. "But, Martin, wait a minute--"

"Don't worry; you'll be admitted. Anyhow, you've gone as far as you can go with me. Now you need to strike out on your own--and this is the way to do it."

And so Mordecai Drover, on Jupiter IV, frightenedly had been waiting for somebody from the Bartok Colony to pick him up. He did not feel a particle more creative than he had felt at his worst moments back home. Rather less, as a matter of fact.

A stirring in the middle distance drew his attention belatedly. Something like a bug was coming toward him. As it came closer, he saw that it was a sort of snowmobile, with huge fat tires and a completely sealed cabin. He let out a gasp of relief.

"Hello," his suit radio said in a voluptuous feminine voice. "Stand fast, Mr. Drover; we have you on the radar. Welcome to Bartok Colony."

The voice virtually transformed Callisto for Mordecai; if there was one historical period in which he would most like to have lived, it was that of Marlene Dietrich. When, half an hour later, he found that Dr. Helena Curtis strongly resembled that--alas!--longdead Helen of the age before space flight, he had been suddenly, as Eglington probably had expected, ready to stay on Callisto forever.

"Now there are only two rules here," Dr. Hamish Crenshaw, the Colony's director, had begun murmuring in Mordecai's ear while his suit was being stripped off him. "First of all, we have no facilities for children; you'll understand, I'm sure, and forgive us when I tell you that we--uh--Take Steps. Dietary steps; you'll never notice them, but we like to be honest. And the other rule is Get Along. We're all one family here, and we try not to quarrel."

"Oh, of course not," Mordecai had said, but he hadn't really been listening.

After the fight the Colony's surgeon--a staff member, not a guest--gave Mordecai a hyaluronidase injection for his black eye and dismissed him without ceremony. Evidently the brawl in the Commons Room had produced several more serious wounds. Mordecai prowled the corridors morosely for a while, but kept meeting people he had only recently been fighting with --or, at least, trying to fight out from under. He finally went back to his own cubicle and tried to resume The Drum Major and the Mask.

It was hopeless. The cacophony of noise in the station had hardly bothered him after the first strange night, but now he couldn't think through it. He wondered how the others had stood it for so long. Neutrinos or no neutrinos, his own brain was generating nothing but blots.

Besides, he felt almost intolerably guilty. After all, his remark had been unfeeling, especially after what had happened two nights ago (or a month ago, as he kept thinking of it). That had been one of the unexpected effects of night on Jupiter IV: The same shielding that liberated the creative impulse seemed to liberate the libido as well. In four hours and 53.9 minutes, two people could fall in love, become passionately and exclusively attached to each other, and fall explosively out of love before the night was over--a process that would have taken months or years on Earth.

No wonder the Colony, as Dr. Crenshaw had put it, Took Steps against the possibility of children.

But was it Mordecai's fault that Helena was the most beautiful woman in the Colony and hence the most frequent figure in these amours and explosions? Besides, he had suffered, too. He could hardly find it comfortable to be out of love with Dietrich, after having adored her image hopelessly since he was old enough to distinguish pants from trousers. He doubted that he would ever write another love poem again.

The corridors of the Colony began to resound with a series of hoots and shrieks, as loud as though they were being heard by an insect trapped in a steam calliope. Dr. Winterhalter had once again begun to hope, and had wired the computer's output directly to the Hammond organ; the computer's current notion of what a sonata ought to sound like was rattling the doors in their sockets. The computer had not yet quite solved the music of the spheres. The Cadre to Suppress Dr. Winterhalter, made up of all the musicians in the Colony, would be stampeding past Mordecai's door at any moment.

Yet after all, he told himself, the remark hadn't been any more virulent than many of the things that got said daily in the Colony, and Helena had always been one of the worst offenders; Chatterton had been right about that. Even at home, Mordecai recalled with nostalgia, nighttime was the time you said things that you regretted the next day. He had always attributed that looseness of tongue to the dulling of inhibitions by fatigue (or, of course, alcohol), but since it was so much worse here, maybe the double-damned neutrinos had been responsible for that, too. Or maybe they hadn't. If you coop thirty highly individualistic people in one sealed can on a sheerless ice ball like Callisto, you should expect tempers to get somewhat frayed.

Whatever the answer, Mordecai wanted out. There was no doubt in his mind that being in the Colony had increased his productivity markedly, but it wasn't worth the constant emotional upheavals.

He peered up and down the corridor to make sure he would not be run over by the Cadre, and then set off determinedly for the office of Dr. Hamish Crenshaw. There was no sense in postponing matters.

As he passed Helena Curtis's closed door, however, he paused. Maybe one postponement could do no harm. There was another question nagging at him, which he suddenly decided was more important. He knocked tentatively.

Helena opened the door and stared at him, her eyes coldly furious. "Beat it," she said.

"I don't mean to interrupt," Mordecai said humbly. "I apologize for my remark. It was nasty and inexcusable. Also, I've got something I'd like to discuss with you."

"Oh?" For a moment she simply continued to glare at him. Then, gradually, some of the unfriendliness seemed to die away. "Well, it's decent of you to apologize. And that beastly squabble did sour me on Rapaport, just in time; maybe I owe you an apology, too. What's on your mind?"

"I want to know what you know about old Walker Goodacre--the man who founded the Colony. I'm beginning to think there's a joker buried somewhere, and he may be it."

"Hmm. All right, come on in. But no monkeyshines, Mordecai."

"Certainly not," he said innocently. "That's part of the problem, Helena. This setup is supposed to encourage what they call Man-thinking, and it does seem to have that effect--but it also seems to bring out all the monkey-emotions. I'm starting to wonder why."

"Well," Helena said, sitting down thoughtfully, "they say the neutrinos--"

"Hang the neutrinos! I mean let's just forget about them for the time being and think about what the Colony's supposed to accomplish. We should begin with the history; there's where you can help, right at the beginning. How is the Colony actually run?"

"By a board of directors, administering the Good-acre estate," she said. "The place was originally founded by Goodacre himself; he put ten million dollars into a special trust to build the place and then bequeathed another ten to keep it going. The Colony is run off the interest from the bequest."

"All right. What kind of man was Goodacre?" Mordecai asked. "I mean aside from the fact that he was a rich man. Wasn't he also a scholar of stature? I seem to remember that he was."

"Oh, yes," Helena said. "He was a sociologist, considered one of the most eminent of his time. Mordecai, if you're suggesting that this whole thing is an experiment and we're just experimental animals, you're wasting your breath. The newspapers milked all the melodrama out of that when the Colony was first founded. Of course, it's an experiment; what of it?"

"Of course. But what kind of experiment? Look here, Helena, you know more history than I do. A lot more. Think back on the history of bequests to artists. Do they usually come from men who are artists or scholars themselves? It's my impression that they don't. More usually, they come from men who are not creative themselves and feel guilty or frustrated about it --men whose money was often made by dubious means in the first place, so some of it is given away to the most 'disinterested' people the rich man can imagine, in expiation. Like the Nobel Prizes--money made from dynamite. Only a cultural cipher could dream of an artist as 'disinterested,' in that sense."

"I can think of a few exceptions," Helena said, "but only partial ones. In that respect, old Goodacre was an unusual case. I'll grant you that."

"Right. Now it's my judgment that this experiment as it was outlined to us is working very badly. Yet Goodacre was a top sociologist, you tell me; why should the biggest experiment he ever designed, being run strictly in accordance with his wishes, be so miserable a failure?"

"Well, sociology's not an exact science--"

"I had the notion that it'd become much more exact since Rashevsky, at least. And I think it might be more sensible to assume that old Goodacre did know what he was doing and that this mess is exactly the outcome he wanted. Why did he want it?"

"Mordecai," Helena said slowly, "I apologize again, and this time I mean it. Let's see how close we can get to the bottom of this before the night's over."

"Why stop then?" Mordecai urged. "It's only a question of fact--no creativity involved."

In this, of course, he was a little underestimating himself. Deduction is creative; Mordecai had simply had too little experience with it to realize the fact.

During the succeeding days Dr. Hamish Crenshaw appeared to be indulging in a series of improvised attempts to prevent further brawls by dividing the sheep from the goats, without having quite made up his mind how to tell one animal from the other. His first move was to forbid working in the Commons Room, which did nothing but stop work in the Commons Room; it utterly failed to prevent brawling there, and it was impossible for the director to close the Commons Room entirely.

Then he tried to reshuffle the room assignments so that all the guests whose records carried the fewest marks for quarrels would wind up on one side of the Colony and the most quarrelsome guests on the other. The net gain here was fewer bruises sustained by accident by the least quarrelsome. The most quarrelsome continued to quarrel, more frequently now because they were deprived of the calming effects sometimes exerted by the cooler heads.

After this had become sufficiently obvious to all, Dr. Crenshaw decided to reshuffle the rooms according to talent. This was abortive. Everybody at Bartok Colony, except the staff, was supposed to be a leader in his field, so Crenshaw apparently concluded that the only way to measure talent was by age: Young poets, for example, were sheep, old poets goats. Since there was only one poet in the Colony at the moment--Mordecai--the plan foundered on Mordecai's obvious inability to baa and bleat at the same time from opposite sides of the donte.

But nothing seemed to discourage Dr. Crenshaw. He tried to segregate the sexes. This produced the biggest riot in the Colony's history. The next move in the game of musical chairs was to lump all the practitioners of the noisy arts--music, ballet, sculpture--into one group and those who quietly wrote or painted into the other. The concentration of noise made it worse than it had been when diffused and in no way decreased the squabbling.

The most recent solution was a curfew. The rules were that everyone had to be in his room by nightfall and had to stay there until the night was over. All gatherings were forbidden, but exceptions were made for teams ("such as composer-and-librettist," Dr. Crenshaw had added with what he seemed to think was great tact). This move really made a difference; it actually cut the quarreling in half.

It also cut productivity right back down to the daytime level, even in the naturally solitary arts.

"Which I think is what you've been aiming for all along," Mordecai told Crenshaw grimly in Crenshaw's office. "All the other silly rules were designed to convey an illusion of bumbling desperation, to disguise the curfew as just one more example of the same."

Crenshaw laughed disarmingly, but a look at Mordecai and Helena evidently convinced him that neither, had been disarmed.

He put his hands together on his desktop and leaned forward confidingly.

"Now that's a peculiar theory," he said, still smiling. "Suppose you tell me why you think so."

"It's in keeping with the whole philosophy," Mordecai said. "Dr. Curtis and I have been doing considerable research lately, and we've come up with some conclusions we don't like. Among other things, we talked to Dr. Ford."

Crenshaw frowned. Dr. Ford was the Colony's staff physicist. The statement that he had been talking to guests obviously did not please the director.

"We found out a few things about the neutrino notion that we hadn't known before," Mordecai went on. "Dr. Ford says that neutrinos go through ordinary matter as if it weren't there. Back home on Earth, the neutrino flux is so great that there are a hundred neutrinos passing through a space the size of a matchbox at any given instant--yet even detecting their existence was one of the hardest problems physicists ever tackled. He says the difference between the night and the day flux on Earth has never been measured."

"Never by instruments," Crenshaw said smoothly. "But the human brain measures it; it's a very delicate detector."

"That's pure hypothesis," Helena retorted. "Dr. Ford says that to capture the average neutrino would take a lead barrier fifty light-years thick. Under those conditions, exceptional captures within a human brain must take place on the order of once every million years or more."

"We considered all this in setting up the Colony," Crenshaw said. "We do have people like Dr. Ford on our staff, after all. Obviously the neutrino-capture theory was not proved. It was a conjecture. But we've been in operation for quite a few years now, and the empirical evidence has been adding up all during that time. Your own personal experience should confirm it. There is a definite increase in creativity out here and particularly when we are in the Jovian shadow."

He leveled a finger at them or, rather, between them. "This is one reason why I don't like to have physicists like Ford shooting off their mouths to our guests. Physicists don't understand the artistic temperament, and artists generally don't know enough about physicists to be aware of their limitations. You didn't know, for instance, the real meaning behind what Ford was telling you. I do know: He was complaining that the neutrino theory is based upon the concept that the brain acts as an organic detector, and the ground rules of his science don't allow organic detectors. Since you had no way of knowing this and, like most lay people, you regard physicists as minor gods, you're shaken up. You've allowed him to discredit not only your belief in the Colony, but even the evidence of your own experience!"

"Very plausible," Mordecai said. "But experience isn't evidence until it's put in order, and there's always more than one possible order. Dr. Curtis and I don't know much about physicists, it's true, but we do know something about artists. We know that they're highly suggestible. They have to be or they'd be in some other trade. Convince them that they're going to be more creative in the dark of the moon, or after a course of mescal, or in the Jovian neutrino shadow, and most of them will be more creative, whether there's any merit in the actual notion you've sold them or not." He grinned reminiscently. "I once knew a writer whose work was largely unsalable, so he had to have a regular job to stay alive. He developed the notion that he had to be fired at least once a year in order to maintain his productivity. Sooner or later, toward the end of each job year, he was fired--and it did increase his writing output for a while. What has that to do with neutrinos?"

"Nothing," Crenshaw said. "A single example never has anything to do with anything except itself. But let's suppose for the sake of argument that the neutrino theory is not only shaky, but entirely wrong. Have you anything better to offer? Until we discover just what creativity actually is--what goes on in the brain to produce it--we'll never really know whether it's possible for a neutrino to interfere with that process. In the meantime the empirical evidence we collect here in the Colony adds up."

"Adds up to what?" Mordecai demanded.

Crenshaw only shrugged.

"Dr. Crenshaw," Helena said, "maybe there is something in the neutrino theory all the same. I'm prepared to admit the possibility--but I don't think it makes any difference. We know that artists always produce best under stress, either personal or societal --it doesn't matter what kind. If production increases in this Colony, it's because conditions here for a resident artist are worse than those he had to work under back home--not better. No wonder production dropped when you cut down our internecine warfare. You've always had it in your power to reduce those quarrels, but you didn't choose to exercise it until now."

"Why now?" Crenshaw inquired gently.

"To cut down on the amount of our work that gets home, of course," Mordecai said, amazed that the man could continue such an obvious rear-guard defense after his major defenses had been breached. "Dr. Crenshaw, we know that old Goodacre knew what he was doing. He was interested in the role of the artist in society. He was asking himself: Does society really need these creative people? Does it really want them around? Are the things they produce worth having, weighed against the damage that they do just by being alive and impinging upon normal people? So he contrived this experiment."

Crenshaw said, "I don't see the point." But he was sweating.

"We do. Above all, old Goodacre wanted to know this: What would happen to society if, generation after generation, the cream of its artists is skimmed off, the artists sent into exile--and their work returned to Earth only at a measurable, controllable rate? Take architecture, for instance: You skim Gropius off one generation, Wright off another, and so on, and what's left? Draftsmen, renderers, workhorses, without anybody to stir them into a ferment. Sooner or later, Earth has no creativity left in its gene-pool but the kind that makes men into engineers and scientists--and mightn't that be just as well, in the long run? That's the question this Colony, is set up to answer, and brilliantly, too."

Crenshaw sighed.

After a while Helena said: "Well?"

"Well, what?" Crenshaw asked tiredly. "I'm not going to tell you you're right or wrong or way off base. No matter what conclusions you come to, I still have to stay here and administer this madhouse. I'm not Goodacre; I just work here."

"That's what the guards at Dachau said," Mordecai said.

"The question is, what do you plan to do?"

"Go home," Mordecai stated immediately.

"And how do you plan to do that? You signed a contract when you came here. In addition to your legal ties, you can't leave here until I personally say you can. I can simply deny you passage, deny you knowledge of the ship schedules--there are half a hundred other knots I can tie you in. Why not just sit and take it? It won't last forever."

"Of course it won't," Helena said grimly. "But we're not sheep or Judas-goats. Suppose the experiment ends by proving that society can get along without us?

Then we'd never get home at all, no matter what the contract says."

Crenshaw looked down at his hands, and then up again. His expression was now one of frank boredom. "That may well be true. However, I deny it for the record. And now I have work to do. Thank you for coming to see me."

Mordecai grinned. Crenshaw had obviously never thought of him as a conspirator, and Mordecai was savoring the surprise.

"There are other people waiting to see you," he said. He got up and opened the door.

There were others, all right. There was Novgorod and his highly muscular group of dancers; Henry Chatterton, his beard bristling and his smock pockets loaded with eggs far too far gone to make decent egg tempera; John Rapaport with his bottles of acid and his beltful of nastily pointed little engravers' tools; Dr. Winterhalter with a sheaf of papers full of calculations on orbits and schedules to Earth; and quite a few additional "harmless artists." They looked anything but harmless now.

"We're going home," Mordecai said. "Maybe society would like to get along without us, but we aren't going to let it. It won't catch us again by offering us a nice workroom, where it's always as quiet as three o'clock in the morning. We' don't need that kind of phony solitude--we carry the real thing with us wherever we go, even when we're fighting among ourselves. Do you understand that?"

"No," Crenshaw said hoarsely. "I don't think I do understand."

Mordecai took Helena's hand as she rose. "Then you didn't study your experimental animals thoroughly enough. If you had, you would have found that one of them, F. Scott Fitzgerald, knew the flaw in your experiment a whole century ago and wrote it down."

"What--was it?"

"`In a real dark night of the soul,' " quoted Mordecai, "' it is always three o'clock in the morning.'"

The automation of the arts is not a new prospect --indeed, in the fields of abstract painting and the popular song it is already a fact--and if the comic book is next to succumb, presumably nobody will mind very much. Accumulated experience as critic, editor, illustrator, novelist, and publisher suggests to Mr. Harrison, however, that no problem is made smaller simply by looking at it through the wrong end of the telescope, and that in the long run there is only one fluid into which the artist can dip his brush.

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

by

Harry Harrison

ELEVEN A.M.!!! The note blared at him, pinned to the upper right-hand corner of his drawing board. MARTIN'S OFFICE!! He had lettered it himself with a number seven brush, funereal india ink on harsh yellow paper, big letters, big words.

Big end to everything. Pachs tried to make himself believe that this was just another one of Martin's royal commands: a lecture, a chewing-out, a complaint. That's what he had thought when he had knocked out the reminder for himself, before Miss Fink's large, watery eyes had blinked at him and she had whispered hoarsely, "It's on order, Mr. Pachs, coming today; I saw the receipt on his desk. A Mark IX." She had blinked moistly again, rolled her eyes toward the closed door of Martin's office, then scurried away.

A Mark IX. He knew that it would have to come someday, knew without wanting to admit it, and had only been kidding himself when he said they couldn't do without him. His hands spread out on the board before him, old hands, networked wrinkles and dark liver spots, always stained a bit with ink and marked with a permanent callus on the inside of his index finger. How many years had he held a pencil or a brush there? He didn't want to remember. Too many, perhaps. . . . He clasped his hands tightly together, making believe he didn't see them shaking.

There was almost an hour left before he had to see Martin, plenty of time to finish up the story he was working on. He pulled the sheet of illustration board from the top of the pile and found the script. Page three of a thing called Prairie Love for the July issue of Real Rangeland Romances. Love books with their heavy copy were always a snap. By the time Miss Fink had typed in the endless captions and dialogue on her big flat-bed varityper, at least half of every panel was full. The script, panel one:

In house, Judy C/U cries and Robert in BG very angry.

A size-three head for Judy in the foreground; he quickly drew the right-size oval in blue pencil, then a stick figure for Robert in the background. Arm raised, fist closed, to show anger. The Mark VIII Robot Comic Artist would do all the rest. Pachs slipped the sheet into the machine's holder, then quickly pulled it out again. He had forgotten the balloons. Sloppy, sloppy. He quickly blue-penciled their outlines and V's for tails.

When he thumbed the switch, the machine hummed to life, electronic tubes glowing inside its dark case. He punched the control button for the heads, first the girl--GIRL HEAD, FULL FRONT, SIZE THREE, SAD HEROINE. Girls, of course, all had the same face in comic books; the HEROINE was just a note to the machine not to touch the hair. For a VILLAINESS it would be inked in black; all villainesses have black hair, just as all villains have mustaches as well as the black hair, to distinguish them from the hero. The machine buzzed and clattered to itself while it sorted through the stock cuts, then clicked and banged down a rubber stamp of the correct head over the blue circle he had drawn. MAN HEAD, FULL FRONT, SIZE SIX, SAD, HERO brought a smaller stamp banging down on the other circle that topped the stick figure. Of course, the script said angry, but that was what the raised fist was for, since there are only sad and happy faces in comics.

Life isn't that simple, he thought to himself, a very unoriginal idea that he usually brought out at least once a day while sitting at the machine. MAN FIGURE, BUSINESS SUIT he set on the dial, then hit the DRAW button. The pen-tipped arm dropped instantly and began to ink in quickly a suited man's figure over the blue direction lines he had put down. He blinked and watched it industriously knocking in a wrinkle pattern that hadn't varied a stroke in fifty years, then a collar and tie and two swift neck lines to connect the neatly inked torso to the rubber-stamped head. The pen leaped out to the cuff end of the just-drawn sleeve and quivered there. A relay buzzed, and a dusty red panel flashed INSTRUCTIONS PLEASE at him. With a savage jab he pushed the button labeled FIST. The light went out and the flashing pen drew a neat fist at the end of the arm.

Pachs looked at the neatly drawn panel and sighed. The girl wasn't unhappy enough; he dipped his crow-quill into the ink pot and knocked in two tears, one in the corner of each eye. Better. But the background was still pretty empty in spite of the small dictionary in each balloon. BALLOONS he punched automatically while he thought, and the machine pen darted down and inked the outlines of the balloons that held the lettering, ending each tail the correct distance from the speaker's mouth. A little background--it needed a touch. He pressed code 473 which he knew from long experience stood for HOME WINDOW WITH LACE CURTAINS. It appeared on the paper quickly, automatically scaled by the machine to be in perspective with the man's figure before it. Pachs picked up the script and read panel two:

Judy falls on couch Robert tries to console her mother rushes in angrily wearing apron.

There was a four-line caption in this panel, and after the three balloons had been lettered as well, the total space remaining was just about big enough for a single close-up, a small one. Pachs didn't labor this panel, as he might have, but took the standard way out. He was feeling tired today, very tired. HOUSE, SMALL, FAMILY produced a small cottage from which emerged the tails of the three balloons, and let the damned reader figure out who was talking.

The story was finished just before eleven, and he stacked the pages neatly, put the script into the file, and cleaned the ink out of the pen in the Mark VIII; it always clogged if he left it to dry.

Then it was eleven and time to see Martin. Pachs fussed a bit, rolling down his sleeves and hanging his green eyeshade from the arm of his dazor lamp, yet the moment could not be avoided. Pulling his shoulders back a bit, he went out past Miss Fink hammering away industriously on the varityper, and walked in through the open door to Martin's office.

"Come ON, Louis," Martin wheedled into the phone in his most syrupy voice. "If it's a matter of taking the word of some two-bit shoestring distributor in Kansas City or of taking my word, who you gonna doubt? . . . That's right . . . okay ... right, Louis. I'll call you back in the morning. . . . Right, you too. . . . my best to Helen." He banged the phone back onto the desk and glared up at Pachs with his hard beebee eyes.

"What do you want?"

"You told me you wanted to see me, Mr. Martin."

"Yeah, yeah," Martin mumbled half to himself. He scratched flakes of dandruff loose from the back of his head with the chewed end of a pencil and rocked from side to side in his chair.

"Business is business, Pachs, you know that, and expenses go up all the time. Paper--you know how much it costs a ton? So we gotta cut corners. . . ."

"If you're thinking of cutting my salary again, Mr. Martin, I don't think I could . . . Well, maybe not much . . ."

"I'm gonna have to let you go, Pachs. I've bought a Mark IX to cut expenses, and I already hired some kid to run it."

"You don't have to do that, Mr. Martin," Pachs said hurriedly, aware that his words were tumbling one over the other and that he was pleading, but not caring. "I could run the machine, I'm sure, just give me a few days to catch on . . ."

"Outta the question. In the first place, I'm paying the kid beans because she's just a kid and that's the starting salary, and in the other place, she's been to school about this thing and can really grind the stuff out. You know I'm no bastard, Pachs, but business is business. And I'll tell you what, this is only Tuesday and I'll pay you for the rest of the week. How's that? And you can take off right now."

"Very generous, particularly after eight years," Pachs said, forcing his voice to be calm.

"That's all right, it's the least I could do." Martin was congenitally immune to sarcasm.

The lost feeling hit Pachs then, a dropping away of his stomach, a sensation that everything was over. Martin was back on the phone again, and there was really nothing that Pachs could say. He walked out of the office, walking very straight, and behind him he heard the banging of Miss Fink's machine halt for an instant. He did not want to see her, to face those tender and damp eyes, not now. Instead of turning to go back to the studio, where he would have to pass her desk, he opened the hall door and stepped out. He closed it slowly behind him and stood with his back to it for an instant, until he realized it was frosted glass and she could see his figure from the inside; he moved hurriedly away.

There was a cheap bar around the corner where he had a beer every payday, and he went there now. "Good morning and top of the morning to you . . . Mr. Pachs," the robot bartender greeted him with recorded Celtic charm, hesitating slightly between the stock phrase and the search of the customer-tapes for his name. "And will you be having the usual?"

"No, I will not be having the usual, you plastic and gaspipe imitation of a cheap stage Irishman--I'll be having a double whiskey."

"Sure and you are the card, sir," the electronically affable bartender nodded, horsehair spit curl bobbing, as it produced a glass and bottle and poured a carefully measured drink.

Pachs drank it in a gulp, and the unaccustomed warmth burned through the core of cold indifference that he had been holding onto. Christ, it was all over, all Over. They would get him now with their Senior Citizens' Home and all the rest; he was good as dead.

There are some things that don't bear thinking about. This was one. Another double whiskey followed the first; the money for this was no longer important because he would be earning no more after this week, and the unusual dose of alcohol blurred some of the pain. Now, before he started thinking about it too much, he had to get back to the office. Clean his personal junk out of the taboret and pick up his paycheck from Miss Fink. It would be ready; he knew that; when Martin was through with you, he liked to get you out of the way, quickly.

"Floor, please?" the voice questioned from the top of the elevator.

"Go straight to hell!" he blurted out. He had never before realized how many robots there were around. Oh, how he hated them today.

"I'm sorry, that firm is not in this building, have you consulted the registry?"

"Twenty-three," he said, and his voice quavered, and he was glad he was alone in the elevator. The doors closed.

There was a hall entrance to the studio, and this door was standing open; he was halfway through it before he realized why--then it was too late to turn back. The Mark VIII that he had nursed along and used for so many years lay on its side in the corner, uprooted and very dusty on the side that had stood against the wall.

Good, he thought to himself, and at the same time knew it was stupid to hate a machine, but still relishing the thought that it was being discarded, too. In its place stood a columnar apparatus in a gray crackle cabinet. It reached almost to the ceiling arid appeared as ponderous as a safe.

"It's all hooked up now, Mr. Martin, ready to go with a hundred percent lifetime guaranty, as you know. But I'll just sort of preflight it for you and give you an idea just how versatile this versatile machine is."

The speaker was dressed in gray coveralls of the exact same color as the machine's finish, and was pointing at it with a gleaming screwdriver. Martin watched, frowning, and Miss Fink fluttered in the -background. There was someone else there, a thin young girl in a pink sweater who bovinely chewed at a cud of gum.

"Let's give Mark IX here a real assignment, Mr. Martin. A cover for one of your magazines, something I bet you never thought a machine could tackle before, and normal machines can't . . ."

"Fink!" Martin barked, and she scrambled over with a sheet of illustration board and a small color sketch.

"We got just one cover in the house to do, Mr. Martin," she said weakly. "You okayed it for Mr. Pachs to do . . ."

"The hell with all that," Martin growled, pulling it from her hand and looking at it closely. "This is for our best book, do you understand that, and we can't have no hack horsing around with rubber stamps. Not on the cover of Fighting Real War Battle Aces."

"You need not have the slightest worry, I assure you," the man in the coveralls said, gently lifting the sketch from Martin's fingers. "I'm going to show you the versatility of the Mark IX, something that you might find it impossible to believe until you see it in action. A trained operator can cut a Mark IX tape from a sketch of a description, and the results are always dramatic, to say the least." He seated himself at a console with typewriter keys that projected from the side of the machine, and while he typed, a ribbon of punched tape collected in the basket at one side.

"Your new operator knows the machine code and breaks down any art concept into standard symbols, cut on tape. The tape can be examined or corrected, stored or modified and used over again if need be. There--I've recorded the essence of your sketch, and now I have one more question to ask you--in what style would you like it to be done?"

Martin made a porcine interrogative sound.

"Startled, aren't you, sir--well, I thought you would be. The Mark IX contains style tapes of all the great masters of the Golden Age. You can have Kubert or Caniff, Giunta or Barry. For figure work you can use Raymond--for your romances capture the spirit of Drake."

"How's about Pachs?"

"I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't know of . . ."

"A joke. Let's get going. Caniff, that's what I want to see."

Pachs felt himself go warm all over, then suddenly cold. Miss Fink looked over and caught his eye and looked down, away. He clenched his fists and shifted his feet to leave, but listened instead. He could not leave, not yet.

". . . and the tape is fed into the machine, the illustration board centered on the impression table and the cycle button depressed. So simple, once a tape has been cut, that a child of three could operate it. A press on the button and just stand back. Within this genius of a machine the orders are being analyzed and a picture built up. Inside the memory circuits are bits and pieces of every object that man has ever imagined or seen and drawn for his own edification. These are assembled on the collator's screen. When the final picture is complete, the all-clear light flashes--there it goes--and we can examine the completed picture on the screen here."

Martin bent over and looked in through the hooded opening.

"Just perfect, isn't it? But if for any reason the operator is dissatisfied, the image can be changed now in any manner desired by manipulation of the editorial controls. And when satisfied, the print button is depressed, the image is printed on a film of reusable plastic sheet, charged electrostatically in order to pick up the powdered ink, and then the picture is printed in a single stroke onto the paper below."

A pneumatic groan echoed theatrically from the bowels of the machine as a rectangular box crept down on a shining plunger and pressed against the paper. It hissed and a trickle of vapor oozed out. The machine rose back to position, and the man in the coveralls held up the paper, smiling.

"Now, isn't that a fine piece of art?"

Martin grunted.

Pachs looked at it and couldn't take his eyes away; he was afraid he was going to be sick. The cover was not only good, it was good Caniff, just as the master might have drawn it himself. Yet the most horrible part was that it was Pachs's cover, his own layout. Improved. He had never been what might be called a tremendous artist, but he wasn't a bad artist. He did all right in comics, and during the good years he was on top of the pack. But the field kept shrinking, and when the machines came in, it went bust and there was almost no spot for an artist, just a job here and there as sort of layout boy and machine minder. He had taken that--how many years now?--because old and dated as his work was, he was still better than any machine that drew heads with a rubber stamp.

Not any more. He could not even pretend to himself any more that he was needed, or even useful.

The machine was better.

He realized then that he had been clenching his fists so tightly that his nails had sunk into the flesh of his palms. He opened and rubbed them together and knew that they were shaking badly. The Mark IX was turned off and they were all gone; he could hear Miss Fink's machine talking away in the outer office. The little girl was telling Martin about the special supplies she would need to buy to operate the machine, and when Pachs closed the connecting door, he cut off the grumbling reply about extra expenses not being mentioned.

Pachs warmed his fingers in his armpits until the worst of the tremors stopped. Then he carefully pinned a sheet of paper onto his old drawing board and adjusted the light so it would not be in his eyes. With measured strokes he ruled out a standard comic page and separated it into six panels, making the sixth panel a big one, stretching the width of the page. He worked steadily at the penciling, stopping only once to stretch his back and walk over to the window and look out. Then he went back to the board, and as the afternoon light faded, he finished the inking. Very carefully he washed off his battered--but still favorite--Windsor & Newton brush and slipped it back into the spring holder.

There was a bustle in the outer office, and it sounded like Miss Fink getting ready to leave, or maybe it was the new girl coming back with the supplies. In any case it was late, and he had to go now.

Quickly, before he could change his mind, he ran full tilt at the window, his weight bursting through the glass, and hurtled the twenty-three stories to the street below.

Miss Fink heard the breaking glass and screamed, then screamed louder when she came into the room. Martin, complaining about the noise, followed her, but shut up when he saw what had happened. A bit of glass crunched under his shoes when he looked out of the window. The doll-like figure of Pachs was visible in the center of the gathering crowd, sprawled from sidewalk to street and bent at an awful angle as it followed the step of the curb.

"Oh, God, Mr. Martin! Oh, God, look at this. . . ." Miss Fink wailed.

Martin went and stood next to her in front of the drawing board and looked at the page still pinned there. It was neatly done, well drawn and carefully inked...

In the first panel was a self-portrait of Pachs working on a page, bent over this same drawing board. In the second panel he was sitting back and washing out his brush, in the third standing. In the fourth panel the artist stood before the window, nicely rendered in chiaroscuro with back lighting. Five was a forced perspective shot from above, down the vertical face of the building with the figure hurtling through the air toward the pavement below.

In the last panel, in clear and horrible detail, the old man was bent broken and bloody over the wrecked fender of the car that was parked there; the spectators looked on, horrified.

"Look at that, will you," Martin said disgustedly, tapping the drawing with his thumb. "When he went out the window, he missed the car by a good two yards. Didn't I always tell you he was no good on getting the details right?"

The Age of Cheap Soap has given a new poignancy to the old cliche that the rebel is always in bad odor in a settled society--a metaphor Mr. Knight here seizes upon to suggest that in editing violence out of the human order, a society as pacifist as it is antiseptic may lose a good deal more than half of its soul. Despite the elegance with which it is told, this may be one of the most uncomfortable parables in our language.

The Country of the Kind

By

Damon Knight

The attendant at the car lot was daydreaming when I pulled up--a big, lazy-looking man in black satin checkered down the front. I was wearing scarlet, myself; it suited my mood. I got out, almost on his toes.

"Park or storage?" he asked automatically, turning around. Then he realized who I was, and ducked his head away.

"Neither," I told him.

There was a hand torch on a shelf in the repair shed right behind him. I got it and came back. I kneeled down to where I could reach behind the front wheel, and ignited the torch. I turned it on the axle and suspension. They glowed cherry red, then white, and fused together. Then I got up and turned the flame on both tires until the rubberoid stank and sizzled and melted down to the pavement. The attendant didn't say anything.

I left him there, looking at the mess on his nice clean concrete.

It had been a nice car, too, but I could get another any time. And I felt like walking. I went down the winding road, sleepy in the afternoon sunlight, dappled with shade and smelling of cool leaves. You couldn't see the houses; they were all sunken or hidden by shrubbery, or a little of both. That was the fad I'd heard about; it was what I'd come here to see. Not that anything the dulls did would be worth looking at.

I turned off at random and crossed a rolling lawn, went through a second hedge of hawthorn in blossom, and came out next to a big sunken games court.

The tennis net was up, and two couples were going at it, just working up a little sweat--young, about half my age, all four of them. Three dark-haired, one blonde. They were evenly matched, and both couples played well together; they were enjoying themselves.

I watched for a minute. But by then the nearest two were beginning to sense I was there, anyhow. I walked down onto the court, just as the blonde was about to serve. She looked at me frozen across the net, poised on tiptoe. The others stood.

"Off," I told them. "Game's over."

I watched the blonde. She was not especially pretty, as they go, but compactly and gracefully put together. She came down slowly, flatfooted without awkwardness, and tucked the racquet under her arm; then the surprise was over and she was trotting off the court after the other three.

I followed their voices around the curve of the path, between towering masses of lilacs, inhaling the sweetness, until I came to what looked like a little sunning spot. There was a sundial. and a birdbath and towels lying around on the grass. One couple, the dark-haired pair, was still in sight farther down the path, heads bobbing along. The other couple had disappeared.

I found the handle in the grass without any trouble. The mechanism responded, and an oblong section of turf rose up. It was the stair I had, not, the elevator, but that was all right. I ran down the steps and into the first door I saw, and was in the top-floor lounge, an oval room lit with diffused simulated sunlight from above. The furniture was all comfortably bloated, sprawling and ugly; the carpet was deep, and there was a fresh flower scent in the air.

The blonde was over at the near end with her back to me, studying the autochef keyboard. She was half out of her playsuit. She pushed it the rest of the way down and stepped out of it, then turned and saw me.

She was surprised again; she hadn't thought I might follow her down.

I got up close before it occurred to her to move; then it was too late. She knew she couldn't get away from me; she closed her eyes and leaned back against the paneling, turning a little pale. Her lips and her golden brows went up in the middle.

I looked her over and told her a few uncomplimentary things about herself. She trembled, but didn't answer. On impulse, I leaned over and dialed the autochef to hot cheese sauce. I cut the safety out of circuit and put the quantity dial all the way up. I dialed soup tureen and then punch bowl.

The stuff began to come out in about a minute, steaming hot. I took the tureens and splashed. them up and down the wall on either side of her. Then when the first punch bowl came out, I used the empty bowls as scoops. I clotted the carpet with the stuff; I made streamers of it all along the walls, and dumped puddles into what furniture 'I could reach. Where it cooled it would harden, 'and where it hardened it would cling.

I wanted to splash it across her body, but it would've hurt, and we couldn't have that. The punch bowls of hot sauce were still coming out of the autochef, crowding each other around the vent. I punched cancel, and then port wine.

It came out well chilled in open bottles. I took the first one and had my ann back just about to throw a nice line of the stuff right across her midriff, when a voice said behind me:

"Watch out for cold wine."

My arm twitched and a little stream of the wine splashed across her thighs. She was ready for it; her eyes had opened at the voice, and she barely jumped.

I whirled around, fighting mad. The man was standing there where he had come out of the stairwell. He was thinner in the face than most, bronzed, wide-chested, with alert blue eyes. If it hadn't been for him, I knew it would have worked--the blonde would have mistaken the cold splash for a hot one.

I could hear the scream in my mind, and I wanted it.

I took a step toward him, and my foot slipped. I went down clumsily, wrenching one knee. I got up shaking and tight all over. I wasn't in control of myself. I screamed, "You--you--" I turned and got one of the punch bowls and lifted it in both hands, heedless of how the hot sauce was slopping over onto my wrists, and I had it almost in the air toward him when the sickness took me--that damned buzzing in my head, louder, louder, drowning everything out.

When I came to, they were both gone. I got up off the floor, weak as death, and staggered over to the nearest chair. My clothes were slimed and sticky. I wanted to die. I wanted to drop into that dark furry hole that was yawning for me and never come up, but I made myself stay awake and get out of the chair.

Going down in the elevator, I almost blacked out again. The blonde and the thin man weren't in any of the second-floor bedrooms--I made sure of that--then I emptied the closets and bureau drawers onto the floor, dragged the whole mess into one of the bathrooms and stuffed the tub with it, then turned on the water.

I tried the third floor: maintenance and storage. It was empty. I turned the furnace on and set the thermostat up as high as it would go. I disconnected all the safety circuits and alarms. I opened the freezer doors and dialed them to defrost. I propped the stairwell door open and went back up in the elevator.

On the second floor I stopped long enough to open the stairway door there--the water was halfway toward it, creeping across the floor--and then searched the top floor. No one was there. I opened book reels and threw them unwinding across the room; I would have done more, but I could hardly stand. I gotup to the surface and collapsed on the lawn; that furry pit swallowed me up, dead and drowned.

While I slept, water poured down the open stairwell and filled the third level. Thawing food packages floated out into the rooms. Water seeped into wall panels and machine housings; circuits shorted and fuses blew. The air-conditioning stopped, but the pile kept heating. The water rose.

Spoiled food, floating supplies, grimy water surged up the stairwell. The second and first levels were bigger and would take longer to fill, but they'd fill. Rugs, furnishings, clothing, all the things in the house would be waterlogged and ruined. Probably the weight of so much water would shift the house, rupture water pipes and other fluid intakes. It would take a repair crew more than a day just to clean up the mess. The house itself was done for, not repairable. The blonde and the thin man would never live in it again..

Serve them right.

The dulls could build another house; they built like beavers. There was only one of me in the world.

The earliest memory I have is of some woman, probably the crechemother, staring at me with an expression of shock and horror. Just that. I've tried to remember .what happened directly before or after, but I can't. Before, there's nothing but the dark formless shaft of.no-memory that runs back to birth. Afterward, the big calm.

From my fifth year, it must have been, to my fifteenth, everything I can remember floats in a pleasant dim sea. Nothing was terribly important. I was languid and soft; I drifted. Waking merged into sleep.

In my fifteenth year it was the fashion in love-play for the young people to pair off for months or longer. "Loving steady," we called it. I remember how the older people protested that it was unhealthy; but we were all normal juniors, and nearly as free as adults under the law.

All but me.

The first steady girl I had was named Elen. She had blonde hair, almost white, worn long; her lashes were dark and her eyes pale green. Startling eyes; they didn't look as if they were looking at you. They looked blind.

Several times she gave me strange, startled glances, something between fright and anger. Once it was because I held her too tightly and hurt her; other times it seemed to be for nothing at all.

In our group a pairing that broke up sooner than four weeks was a little suspect--there must be something wrong with one partner or both, or the pairing would have lasted longer.

Four weeks and a day after Elen and I made our pairing, she told me she was breaking it.

I'd thought I was ready. But I felt the room spin half around me till the wall came against my palm and stopped.

The room had been in use as a hobby chamber; there was a rack of plasticraft knives under my hand. I took one without thinking, and when I saw it I thought, I'll frighten her.

And I saw the startled, half-angry look in her pale eyes as I went toward her, but this is curious: she wasn't looking at the knife. She was looking at my face.

The elders found me later with the blood on me, and put me into a locked room. Then it was my turn to be frightened, because I realized for the first time that it was possible for a human being to do what I had done. And if I could do it to Elen, I thought, surely they could do it to me.

But they couldn't. They set me free; they had to.

And it was then I understood that I was the king of the world.

Something else in me, that had been suppressed and forgotten, rose up with my first blow struck in anger. The sculpture began years afterward, as an accident, but in that moment I was free, and I was an artist.

One winter, in the AC Archives in Denver, I found a storeroom full of old printed books. I spent months there, reading them, because until then I'd thought I had invented sculpture and drawing. The thing I chiefly wanted to know was; why had it stopped? There was no answer in so many words in any of the books. But reading the histories of those times before the Interregnum, I found one thing that might explain it. Whenever there was a long period of peace and plenty anywhere in the ancient world, art grew poor--decoration, genre painting, imitations of imitations. And as for the great artists, they all belonged to violent periods--Praxiteles, da Vinci, Rembrandt van Rijn, Renoir, Picasso...

It had been bred out of the race, evidently. I don't suppose the genetic planners wanted to get rid of it, but they would have shed almost anything to make a homogeneous, rational, sane, and healthy world.

So there was only one man to carve the portrait of the Age of Reason. All right; I would have been content, only...

The sky was turning clear violet when I woke up, and shadow was spilling out from the hedges. I went down the hill until I saw the ghostly blue of photon tubes glowing in a big oblong, just outside the commerce area. I went that way, by habit.

Other people were lining up at the entrance to show their books and be admitted. I brushed by them, seeing the shocked faces and feeling their. bodies flinch away, and went on into the robing chamber.

Straps, aqualungs, masks, and flippers were all for the taking. I stripped, dropping the clothes where I stood, and put the underwater equipment on. I strode out to the poolside, monstrous, like a being from another world. I adjusted the lung and the flippers and slipped into the water.

Underneath, it was all crystal blue, with the forms of swimmers sliding through it like pale angels. Schools of small fish scattered as I went down. My heart was beating with a painful joy.

Down, far down, I saw a girl slowly undulating through the motions of a sinuous underwater dance, writhing around and around a ribbed column of imitation coral. She had a suctiontipped fish lance in her hand, but she was not using it; she was only dancing, all by herself, down at the bottom of the water.

I swam after her. She was young, and delicately made, and when she saw the deliberately clumsy motions I made in imitation of hers, her eyes glinted with amusement behind her mask. She bowed to me in mockery, and slowly glided off with simple, exaggerated movements, like a child's ballet.

I followed. Around her and around I swam, stiff-legged, first more childlike and awkward than she, then subtly parodying her motions,.then improvising on them until I was dancing an intricate, mocking dance around her.

I saw her eyes widen. She matched her rhythm to mine then, and together, apart, together again we coiled the wake of our dancing. At last, exhausted, we clung together where a bridge of plastic coral arched over us. Her cool body was in the bend of my arm; behind two thicknesses of vitrin--a world away!--her eyes were friendly and kind.

There was a moment when, two strangers, yet one flesh, we felt our souls speak to one another across that abyss of matter. It was a truncated embrace--we could not kiss, we could not speak--but her hands lay confidingly on my shoulders; and her eyes looked into mine.

That moment had to end. She gestured toward the surface and left me. I followed her up. I was feeling drowsy and. almost at peace, after my sickness, I thought . . . I don't know what I thought.

We rose together at the side of the pool. She turned to me, removing her mask, and her smile stopped and melted away. She stared at me with a horrified disgust, wrinkling her nose.

"Pyah!" she said, and turned, awkward in her flippers. Watching her, I saw her fall into the arms of a white-haired man, and heard her hysterical voice tumbling over itself.

"But don't you remember?" the man's voice rumbled. "You should know it by heart." He turned. "Hal, is there a copy in the clubhouse?"

A murmur answered him, and in a few moments a young man came out holding a slender brown pamphlet.

I knew that pamphlet. I could even have told you what page the white-haired man opened it to, what sentences the girl was reading as I watched.

I waited. I don't know why.

I heard her voice rising: "To think that I let him touch me!" And the white-haired man reassured her, the words rumbling, too low to hear. I saw her back straighten. She looked across at me... only a few yards in that scented, blue-lit air; a world away... and folded up the pamphlet into a hard wad, threw it, and turned on her heel.

The pamphlet landed almost at my feet. I touched it with my toe, and it opened to the page I had been thinking of:

...sedation until his fifteenth year, when for sexual reasons it became no longer practicable. While the advisers and medical staff hesitated, he killed a girl of the group by violence.

And farther down:

The solution finally adopted was threefold.

1. A sanction--the only sanction possible to our humane, permissive society. Excommunication; not to speak to him, touch him willingly, or acknowledge his existence.

2. A precaution. Taking advantage of a mild predisposition to epilepsy, a variant of the so-called Kusko analogue technique was employed, to prevent by an epileptic seizure any future act of violence.

3. A warning. A careful alteration of his body chemistry was effected to make his exhaled and exuded wastes emit a strongly pungent and offensive odor. In mercy, he himself was rendered unable to detect this smell.

Fortunately, the genetic and environmental accidents which combined to produce this atavism have been fully explained, can never again...

The words stopped meaning anything, as they always did at that point. I didn't want to read any farther; it was all nonsense, anyway. I was the king of the world.

I got up and went away, out into the night, blind to the dulls who thronged the rooms I passed.

Two squares away was the commerce area. I found a clothing outlet and went in. All the free clothes in the display cases were drab: Those were for worthless floaters, not for me. I went past them to the specials and found a combination I could stand--silver and blue, with a severe black piping down the tunic. A dull would have said it was "nice." I punched for it. The automatic looked me over with its dull glassy eye, and croaked. "Your contribution book, please."

I could have had a contribution book, for the trouble of stepping out into the street and taking it away from the first passerby, but I didn't have the patience. I picked up the onelegged table from the refreshment nook, hefted it, and swung it at the cabinet door. The metal shrieked and dented opposite the catch. I swung once more to the same place, and the door sprang open. I pulled out clothing in handfuls till I got a set that would fit me.

I bathed and changed, and then went prowling in the big multioutlet down the avenue. All those places are arranged pretty much alike, no matter what the local managers do to them. I went straight to the knives, and picked out three in graduated sizes, down to the size of my fingernail. Then I had to take my chances. I tried the furniture department, where I had had good luck once in a while, but this year all they were using was metal. I had to have seasoned wood.

I knew where there was a big cache of cherry wood, in goodsized blocks, in a forgotten warehouse up north at a place called Kootenay. I could have carried some around with me--enough for years--but what for, when the world belonged to me?

It didn't take me long. Down in the workshop section, of all places, I found some antiques--tables and benches, all with wooden tops. While the dulls collected down at the other end of the room, pretending not to notice, I sawed off a good oblong chunk of the smallest bench, and made a base for it out of another.

As long as I was there, it was a good place to work, and I could eat and sleep upstairs, so I stayed.

I knew what I wanted to do. It was going to be a man, sitting, with his legs crossed and his forearms resting down along his calves. His head was going to be tilted back, and his eyes closed, as if he were turning his face up to the sun.

In three days it was finished. The trunk and limbs had a

shape that was not man and not wood, but something in between: something that hadn't existed before I made it.

Beauty. That was the old word.

I had carved one of the figure's hands hanging loosely, and the other one curled shut. There had to be a time to stop and say it was finished. I took the smallest knife, the one I had been using to scrape the wood smooth, and cut away the handle and ground down what was left of the shaft to a thin spike. Then I drilled a hole into the wood of the figurine's hand, in the hollow between thumb and curled finger. I fitted the knife blade in there; in the small hand it was a sword.

I cemented it in place. Then I took the sharp blade and stabbed my thumb and smeared the blade.

I hunted most of that day and finally found the right place--a niche in an outcropping of striated brown rock, in a little triangular half-wild patch that had been left where two, roads forked. Nothing was permanent, of course, in a community like this one that might change its houses every five years or so, to follow the fashion, but this spot had been left to itself for a long time. It was the best I could do.

I had the paper ready: it was one of a batch I had printed up a year ago. The paper was treated, and I knew it would stay legible a long time. I hid a little photo capsule in the back of the niche and ran the control wire to a staple in the base of the figurine. I put the figurine down on top of the paper and anchored it lightly to the rock with two spots of all-cement. I had done it so often that it came naturally; I knew just how much cement would hold the figurine steady against a casual hand, but yield to one that really wanted to pull it down.

Then I stepped back to look, and the power and the pity of it made my breath come short, and tears start to my eyes.

Reflected light gleamed fitfully on the dark-stained blade that hung from his hand. He was sitting alone in that niche that closed him in like a coffin. His eyes were shut and his head tilted back, as if he were turning his face up to the sun.

But only rock was over his head. There was no sun for him.

Hunched on the cool bare ground under a pepper tree, I was looking down across the road at the shadowed niche where my figurine sat.

I was all finished here. There was nothing more to keep me, and yet I couldn't leave.

People walked past now and then--not often. The community seemed half deserted, as if most of the people had flocked off to a surf party somewhere, or a contribution meeting, or to watch a new house being dug to replace the one I had wrecked... There was a little wind blowing toward me, cool and lonesome in the leaves.

Up the other side of the hollow there was a terrace, and on that terrace, half an hour ago, I had seen a brief flash of color--a boy's head, with a red cap on it, moving past and out of sight.

That was why I had to stay. I was thinking how that boy might come down from his terrace and into my road, and passing the little wild triangle of land, see my figurine. I was thinking he might not pass by indifferently, but stop and go closer to look, and pick up the wooden man: and read what was written on the paper underneath.

I believed that sometime it had to happen. I wanted it so hard that I ached.

My carvings were all over the world, wherever I had wandered. There was one in Congo City, carved of ebony, dustyblack; one on Cyprus, of bone; one in New Bombay, of shell; one in Changteh, of jade.

They were like signs printed in red and green in a colorblind world. Only the one I was looking for would ever pick one of them up and read the message I knew by heart.

TO YOU WHO CAN SEE, the first sentence said. I OFFER YOU A WORLD...

There was a flash of color up on the terrace. I stiffened. A minute later, here it came again, from a different direction: it was the boy, clambering down the slope, brilliant against the green, with his red sharp-billed cap like a woodpecker's' head.

I held my breath.

He came toward me through the fluttering leaves, ticked off by pencils of sunlight as he passed. He was a brown boy, I could see at this distance, with a serious thin face. His ears stuck out, flickering pink with the sun behind them, and his elbow and knee pads made him look knobby.

He reached the fork in the road and chose the path on my side. I huddled into myself as he came nearer. Let him see it, let him not see me, I thought fiercely.

My fingers closed around a stone.

He was nearer, walking jerkily with his hands in his pockets, watching his feet mostly..

When he was almost opposite me, I threw the stone.

It rustled through the leaves below the niche in the rock. The boy's head turned. He stopped, staring. I think he saw the figurine then: I'm sure he saw it.

He took one step.

"Risha!" came floating down from the terrace.

And he looked up. "Here," he piped.

I saw the woman's head, tiny at the top of the terrace. She called something I didn't hear; I was standing up, squeezed tight with anger.

Then the wind shifted. It blew from me to the boy. He whirled around, his eyes big, and clapped a hand to his nose.

"Oh, what a stench!".

He turned to shout, "Corning!" and then he was gone, hurrying back up the road, into the unstable blur of green.

My one chance, ruined. He would have seen the image, I knew, if it hadn't been for that damned woman, and the wind shifting... They were all against me, people, wind, and all.

And the figurine still sat, blind eyes turned up to the rocky sky.

There was something inside me that told me to take my disappointment and go away from there and not come back.

I knew I would be sorry. I did it, anyway: took the image out of the niche, and the paper with it, and climbed the slope. At the top I heard his clear voice laughing.

There was a thing that might have been an ornamental mound, or the camouflaged top of a buried house. I went around it, tripping over my own feet, and came upon the boy kneeling on the turf. He was playing with a brown-and-white puppy.

He looked up, with the laughter going out of his face. There was no wind, and he could smell me. I knew it was bad. No wind, and the puppy to distract him--everything about it was wrong. But I went to him blindly, anyhow, and fell on one knee, and shoved the figurine at his face.

"Look--" I said.

He went over backwards in his hurry; he couldn't even have seen the image, except as a brown blur coming at him. He scrambled up, with the puppy whining and yapping around his heels, and ran for the mound.

I was up after him, clawing up moist earth and grass as I rose. In the other hand I still had the image clutched, and the paper with it.

A door popped open and swallowed him and popped shut again in my face. With the flat of my hand I beat the vines around it until I hit the doorplate by accident and the door opened. I dived in, shouting, "Wait," and was in a spiral passage, lit pearl-gray, winding downward. Down I went, headlong, and came out at the wrong door--an underground conservatory, humid and hot under the yellow lights, with dripping rank leaves in long rows. I went down the aisle raging, overturning the tanks, until I came to a vestibule and an elevator.

Down I went again to the third level and a labyrinth of guest rooms, all echoing, all empty. At last I found a ramp leading upwards, past the conservatory, and at the end of it voices.

The door was clear vitrin, and I paused on the near side of it, looking and listening. There was the boy, and a woman old enough to be his mother, just--sister or cousin, more likely--and an elderly woman in a hard chair holding the puppy. The room was comfortable and tasteless, like other rooms.

I saw the shock grow on their faces as I burst in; it was always the same; they knew I would like to kill them, but they never expected that I would come uninvited into a house. It was not done.

There was that boy, so close I could touch him, but the shock of all of them was quivering in the air, smothering, like a blanket that would deaden my voice. I felt I had to shout.

"Everything they tell you is lies!" I said. "See here--here, this is the truth!" I had the figurine in front of his eyes, but he didn't see.

"Risha, go below," said the young woman quietly. He turned to obey, quick as a ferret.

I got in front of him again. "Stay," I said, breathing hard. "Look--"

"Remember, Risha, don't speak," said the woman.

I couldn't stand any more. Where the boy went I don't know; I ceased to see him. With the image in one hand and the paper with it, I leaped at the woman. I was almost quick enough; I almost reached her, but the buzzing took me in the middle of a step, louder, louder, like the end of the world.

It was the second time that week. When I came to, I was sick and too faint to move for a long time.

The house was silent. They had gone, of course... the house had been defiled, having me in it. They wouldn't live here again, but would build elsewhere.

My eyes blurred. After a while I stood up and looked around at the room. The walls were hung with a gray closewoven cloth that looked as if it would tear, and I thought of ripping it down in strips, breaking furniture, stuffing carpets and bedding into the oubliette... But I didn't have the heart for it. I was too tired.

At last I stooped and picked up the figurine and the paper that was supposed to go under it--crumpled now, with the forlorn look of a message that someone has thrown away unread.

I smoothed it out and read the last part.

YOU CAN SHARE THE WORLD WITH ME. THEY CAN'T STOP YOU. STRIKE NOW--PICK UP A SHARP

THING AND STAB, OR A HEAVY THING AND CRUSH. THAT'S ALL. THAT WILL MAKE YOU FREE. ANYONE CAN DO IT.

Anyone. Anyone.

As noted earlier, the lament for the obsolescence of the handicraftsman is not a new theme; readers who were startled by the novel-writing machines of George Orwell's 1984 must simply have forgotten William Morris. The late Cyril Kornbluth, who was himself virtually a one-man literary factory, here remembers what such laments often overlook: that the poet is always a displaced person, but poetry is permanent.

With These Hands

By

C.M. Kornbluth

HALVORSEN WAITED in the Chancery office while Monsignor Reedy disposed of three persons who had preceded him. He was a little dizzy with hunger and noticed only vaguely that the prelate's secretary was beckoning to him. He started to his feet when the secretary pointedly opened the door to Monsignor Reedy's inner office and stood waiting beside it.

The artist crossed the floor, forgetting that he had leaned his portfolio against his chair, remembered at the door and went back for it, flushing. The secretary looked patient.

"Thanks," Halvorsen murmured to him as the door closed.

There was something wrong with the prelate's manner.

"I've brought the designs for the Stations, Padre," he said, opening the portfolio on the desk.

"Bad news, Roald," said the monsignor. "I know how you've been looking forward to the commission--"

"Somebody else get it?" asked the artist faintly, leaning against the desk. "I thought his eminence definitely decided I had the--"

"It's not that," said the monsignor. "But the Sacred Congregation of Rites this week made a pronouncement on images of devotion. Stereopantograph is to be licit within a diocese at the discretion of the bishop. And his eminence--"

"S.P.G.--slimy imitations," protested Halvorsen. "Real as a plastic eye. No texture. No guts. You know that, Padre!" he said accusingly.

"I'm sorry, Roald," said the monsignor. "Your work is better than we'll get from a Stereopantograph--to my eyes, at least. But there are other considerations."

"Money!" spat the artist.

"Yes, money," the prelate admitted. "His eminence wants to see the St. Xavier U. building program through before he dies. Is that wrong, Roald? And there are our schools, our charities, our Venus mission. S.P.G. will mean a considerable saving on procurement and maintenance of devotional images. Even if I could, I would not disagree with his eminence on adopting it as a matter of diocesan policy."

The prelate's eyes fell on the detailed drawings of the Stations of the Cross and lingered.

"Your St. Veronica," he said abstractedly. "Very fine. It suggests one of Caravaggio's careworn saints to me. I would have liked to see her in the bronze."

"So would I," said Halvorsen hoarsely. "Keep the drawings, Padre." He started for the door.

"But I can't--"

"That's all right."

The artist walked past the secretary blindly and out of the Chancery into Fifth Avenue's spring sunlight. He hoped Monsignor Reedy was enjoying the drawings and was ashamed of himself and sorry for Halvorsen. And he was glad he didn't have to carry the heavy portfolio any more. Everything was heavy lately--chisels, hammer, wooden palette. Maybe the padre would send him something and pretend it was for expenses or an advance, as he had in the past.

Halvorsen's feet carried him up the Avenue. No, there wouldn't be any advances any more. The last steady trickle of income had just been dried up, by an announcement in Osservatore Romano. Religious conservatism had carried the church as far as it would go in its ancient role of art patron. When all Europe was writing on the wonderful new vellum, the church stuck to good old papyrus. When all Europe was writing on the wonderful new paper, the church stuck to good old vellum. When all architects and municipal monument committees and portrait bust clients were patronizing the stereopantograph, the church stuck to good old expensive sculpture. But not any more.

He was passing an S.P.G. salon now, where one of his Tuesday night pupils worked: one of the few men in the classes. Mostly they consisted of lazy, moody, irritable girls. Halvorsen, surprised at himself, entered the salon, walking between asthenic semi-nude stereos executed hi transparent plastic that made the skin of his neck and shoulders prickle with gooseflesh. Slime! he thought. How can they-- "May I help--oh, hello, Roald. What brings you here?" He knew suddenly what had brought him there. "Could you make a little advance on next month's tuition, Lewis? I'm strapped." He took a nervous look around the chamber of horrors, avoiding the man's condescending face.

"I guess so, Roald. Would ten dollars be any help? That'll carry us through to the twenty-fifth, right?"

"Fine, right, sure," he said, while he was being unwillingly towed around the place.

"I know you don't think much of S.P.G., but it's quiet now, so this is a good chance to see how we work. I don't say it's Art with a capital A, but you've got to admit it's an art, something people like at a price they can afford to pay. Here's where we sit them. Then you run out the feelers to the reference points on the face. You know what they are?"

He heard himself say dryly: "I know what they are. The Egyptian sculptors used them when they carved statues of the pharaohs."

"Yes? I never knew that. There's nothing new under the Sun, is there? But this is the heart of the S.P.G." The youngster proudly swung open the door of an electronic device in the wall of the portrait booth. Tubes winked sullenly at Halvorsen.

"The esthetikon?" he asked indifferently. He did not feel indifferent, but it would be absurd to show anger, no matter how much he felt it, against a mindless aggregation of circuits that could calculate layouts, criticize and correct pictures for a desired effect-- and that had put the artist of design out of a job.

"Yes. The lenses take sixteen profiles, you know, and we set the esthetikon for whatever we want--cute, rugged, sexy, spiritual, brainy, or a combination. It fairs curves from profile to profile to give us just what we want, distorts the profiles themselves within limits if it has to, and there's your portrait stored in the memory tank waiting to be taped. You set your ratio for any enlargement or reduction you want and play it back. I wish we were reproducing today; it's fascinating to watch. You just pour in your cold-set plastic, the nozzles ooze out a core and start crawling over to scan--a drop here, a worm there, and it begins to take shape.

"We mostly do portrait busts here, the Avenue trade, but Wilgus, the foreman, used to work in a monument shop in Brooklyn. He did that heroic-size war memorial on the East River Drive--hired Garda Bouchette, the TV girl, for the central figure. And what a figure! He told me he set the esthetikon plates for three-quarters sexy, one-quarter spiritual. Here's something interesting--standing figurine of Orin Ryerson, the banker. He ordered twelve. Figurines are coming in. The girls like them because they can show their shapes. You'd be surprised at some of the poses they want to try--"

Somehow, Halvorsen got out with the ten dollars, walked to Sixth Avenue, and sat down hard in a cheap restaurant. He had coffee and dozed a little, waking with a guilty start at a racket across the street. There was a building going up. For a while he watched the great machines pour walls and floors, the workmen rolling here and there on their little chariots to weld on a wall panel, stripe on an electric circuit of conductive ink, or spray plastic finish over the "wired" wall, all without leaving the saddles of their little mechanical chariots.

Halvorsen felt more determined. He bought a paper from a vending machine by the restaurant door, drew another cup of coffee, and turned to the help-wanted ads.

The tricky trade-school ads urged him to learn construction work and make big money. Be a plumbing-machine setup man. Be a house-wiring machine tender. Be a servotruck driver. Be a lumber-stacker operator. Learn pouring-machine maintenance.

Make big money!

A sort of panic overcame him. He ran to the phone booth and dialed a Passaic number. He heard the ring-ring-ring and strained to hear old Mr. Krehbeil's stumping footsteps growing louder as he neared the phone, even though he knew he would hear nothing until the receiver was picked up.

Ring-ring-ring. "Hello?" grunted the old man's voice, and his face appeared on the little screen. "Hello, Mr. Halvorsen. What can I do for you?"

Halvorsen was tongue-tied. He couldn't possibly say: I just wanted to see if you were still there. I was afraid you weren't there any more. He choked and improvised: "Hello, Mr. Krehbeil. It's about the banister on the stairs in my place. I noticed it's pretty shaky. Could you come over sometime and fix it for me?"

Krehbeil peered suspiciously out of the screen. "I could do that," he said slowly. "I don't have much work nowadays. But you can carpenter as good as me, Mr. Halvorsen, and frankly you're very slow pay and I like cabinet work better. I'm not a young man and climbing around on ladders takes it out of me. If you can't find anybody else, I'll take the work, but I got to have some of the money first, just for the materials. It isn't easy to get good wood any more."

"All right," said Halvorsen. "Thanks, Mr. Krehbeil. I'll call you if I can't get anybody else."

He hung up and went back to his table and newspaper. His face was burning with anger at the old man's reluctance and his own foolish panic. Krehbeil didn't realize they were both in the same leaky boat. Krehbeil, who didn't get a job in a month, still thought with senile pride that he was a journeyman carpenter and cabinetmaker who could make his solid way anywhere with his toolbox and his skill, and that he could afford to look down on anything as disreputable as an artist--even an artist who could carpenter as well as he did himself.

Labuerre had made Halvorsen learn carpentry, and Labuerre had been right. You build a scaffold so you can sculp up high, not so it will collapse and you break a leg. You build your platforms so they hold the rock steady, not so it wobbles and chatters at every blow of the chisel. You build your armatures so they hold the plasticine you slam onto them.

But the help-wanted ads wanted no builders of scaffolds, platforms, and armatures. The factories were calling for setup men and maintenance men for the production and assembly machines.

From upstate, General Vegetables had sent a recruiting team for farm help--harvest setup and maintenance men, a few openings for experienced operators of tank caulking machinery. Under "office and professional" the demand was heavy for computer men, for girls who could run the I.B.M. Letteriter, esp. familiar sales and collections corresp., for office machinery maintenance and repair men. A job printing house wanted an esthetikon operator for letterhead layouts and the like. A.T. & T. wanted trainees to earn while learning telephone maintenance. A direct-mail advertising outfit wanted an artist --no, they wanted a sales-executive who could scrawl picture ideas that would be subjected to the criticism and correction of the esthetikon.

Halvorsen leafed tiredly through the rest of the paper. He knew he wouldn't get a job, and if he did he wouldn't hold it. He knew it was a terrible thing to admit to yourself that you might starve to death because you were bored by anything except art, but he admitted it.

It had happened often enough in the past--artists undergoing preposterous hardships, not, as people thought, because they were devoted to art, but because nothing else was interesting. If there were only some impressive, sonorous word that summed up the aching, oppressive futility that overcame him when he tried to get out of art-only there wasn't.

He thought he could tell which of the photos in the tabloid had been corrected by the esthetikon.

There was a shot of Jink Bitsy, who was to star in a remake of Peter Pan. Her ears had been made to look not pointed but pointy, her upper lip had been lengthened a trifle, her nose had been pugged a little and tilted quite a lot, her freckles were cuter than cute, her brows were innocently arched, and her lower lip and eyes were nothing less than pornography.

There was a shot, apparently uncorrected, of the last Venus ship coming in at LaGuardia and the average-looking explorers grinning. Caption: "Austin Malone and crew smile relief on safe arrival. Malone says Venus colonies need men, machines. See story on p. 2."

Petulantly, Halvorsen threw the paper under the table and walked out. What had space travel to do with him? Vacations on the Moon and expeditions to Venus and Mars were part of the deadly encroachment on his livelihood and no more.

II

He took the subway to Passaic and walked down a long-still traffic beltway to his studio, almost the only building alive in the slums near the rusting railroad freightyard.

A sign that had once said "F. Labuerre, Sculptor--Portraits and Architectural Commissions" now said "Roald Halvorsen; Art Classes --Reasonable Fees." It was a grimy two-story frame building with a shopfront in which were mounted some of his students' charcoal figure studies and oil still-lifes. He lived upstairs, taught downstairs front, and did his own work downstairs, back behind dirty, ceiling-high drapes.

Going in, he noticed that he had forgotten to lock the door again. He slammed it bitterly. At the noise, somebody called from behind the drapes: "Who's that?"

"Halvorsen!" he yelled in a sudden fury. "I live here. I own this place. Come out of there! What do you want?"

There was a fumbling at the drapes and a girl stepped between them, shrinking from their dirt.

"Your door was open," she said firmly, "and it's a shop. I've just been here a couple of minutes. I came to ask about classes, but I don't think I'm interested if you're this bad-tempered."

A pupil. Pupils were never to be abused, especially not now.

"I'm terribly sorry," he said. "I had a trying day in the city." Now turn it on. "I wouldn't tell everybody a terrible secret like this, but I've lost a commission. You understand? I thought so. Anybody who'd traipse out here to my dingy abode would be simpatica. Won't you sit down? No, not there--humor an artist and sit over there. The warm background of that still-life brings out your color--quite good color. Have you ever been painted? You've a very interesting face, you know. Some day I'd like to--but you mentioned classes.

"We have figure classes, male and female models alternating, on Tuesday nights. For that I have to be very stern and ask you to sign up for an entire course of twelve lessons at sixty dollars. It's the models' fees--they're exorbitant. Saturday afternoons we have still-life classes for beginners in oils. That's only two dollars a class, but you might sign up for a series of six and pay ten dollars in advance, which saves you two whole dollars. I also give private instructions to a few talented amateurs."

The price was open on that one--whatever the traffic would bear. It had been a year since he'd had a private pupil and she'd taken only six lessons at five dollars an hour.

"The still-life sounds interesting," said the girl, holding her head self-consciously the way they all did when he gave them the patter. It was a good head, carried well up. The muscles clung close, not yet slacked into geotropic loops and lumps. The line of youth is helio-tropic, he confusedly thought. "I saw some interesting things back there. Was that your own work?"

She rose, obviously with the expectation of being taken into the studio. Her body was one of those long-lined, small-breasted, coltish jobs that the pre-Raphaelites loved to draw.

"Well--" said Halvorsen. A deliberate show of reluctance and then a bright smile of confidence. "You'll understand," he said positively and drew aside the curtains.

"What a curious place!" She wandered about, inspecting the drums of plaster, clay, and plasticine, the racks of tools, the stands, the stones, the chisels, the forge, the kiln, the lumber, the glaze bench.

"I like this," she said determinedly, picking up a figure a half-meter tall, a Venus he had cast in bronze while studying under Labuerre some years ago. "How much is it?"

An honest answer would scare her off, and there was no chance in the world that she'd buy. "I hardly ever put my things up for sale," he told her lightly. "That was just a little study. I do work on commission only nowadays."

Her eyes flicked about the dingy room, seeming to take in its scaling plaster and warped floor and see through the wall to the abandoned slum in which it was set. There was amusement in her glance.

I am not being honest, she thinks. She thinks that is funny. Very well, I will be honest. "Six hundred dollars," he said flatly.

The girl set the figurine on its stand with a rap and said, half angry and half amused: "I don't understand it. That's more than a month's pay for me. I could get an S.P.G. statuette just as pretty as this for ten dollars. Who do you artists think you are, anyway?"

Halvorsen debated with himself about what he could say in reply:

An S.P.G. operator spends a week learning his skill and I spend a lifetime learning mine.

An S.P.G. operator makes a mechanical copy of a human form distorted by formulae mechanically arrived at from psychotests of population samples. I take full responsibility for my work; it is mine, though I use what I see fit from Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Augustan and Romantic and Modern Eras.

An S.P.G. operator works in soft, homogeneous plastic; I work in bronze that is more complicated than you dream, that is cast and acid-dipped today so it will slowly take on rich and subtle coloring many years from today.

An S.P.G. operator could not make an Orpheus Fountain--

He mumbled, "Orpheus," and keeled over.

Halvorsen awoke in his bed on the second floor of the building. His fingers and toes buzzed electrically and he felt very clear-headed. The girl and a man, unmistakably a doctor, were watching him.

"You don't seem to belong to any Medical Plans, Halvorsen," the doctor said irritably. "There weren't any cards on you at all. No Red, no Blue, no Green, no Brown."

"I used to be on the Green Plan, but I let it lapse," the artist said defensively.

"And look what happened!"

"Stop nagging him!" the girl said. "I'll pay you your fee."

"It's supposed to come through a Plan," the doctor fretted.

"We won't tell anybody," the girl promised. "Here's five dollars. Just stop nagging him."

"Malnutrition," said the doctor. "Normally I'd send him to a hospital, but I don't see how I could manage it. He isn't on any Plan at all. Look, I'll take the money and leave some vitamins. That's what he needs--vitamins. And food."

"I'll see that he eats," the girl said, and the doctor left.

"How long since you've had anything?" she asked Halvorsen.

"I had some coffee today," he answered, thinking back. "I'd been working on detail drawings for a commission and it fell through. I told you that. It was a shock."

"I'm Lucretia Grumman," she said, and went out.

He dozed until she came back with an armful of groceries.

"It's hard to get around down here," she complained.

"It was Labuerre's studio," he told her defiantly. "He left it to me when he died. Things weren't so rundown in his time. I studied under him; he was one of the last. He had a joke--'They don't really want my stuff, but they're ashamed to let me starve.' He warned me that they wouldn't be ashamed to let me starve, but I insisted and he took me in."

Halvorsen drank some milk and ate some bread. He thought of the change from the ten dollars in his pocket and decided not to mention it. Then he remembered that the doctor had gone through his pockets.

"I can pay you for this," he said. "It's very kind of you, but you mustn't think I'm penniless. I've just been too preoccupied to take care of myself."

"Sure," said the girl. "But we can call this an advance. I want to sign up for some classes."

"Be happy to have you."

"Am I bothering you?" asked the girl. "You said something odd when you fainted--'Orpheus.'"

"Did I say that? I must have been thinking of Milles's Orpheus Fountain in Copenhagen. I've seen photos, but I've never been there."

"Germany? But there's nothing left of Germany."

"Copenhagen's in Denmark. There's quite a lot of Denmark left. It was only on the fringes. Heavily radiated, but still there."

"I want to travel too," she said. "I work at LaGuardia and I've never been off, except for an orbiting excursion. I want to go to the Moon on my vacation. They give us a bonus in travel vouchers. It must be wonderful dancing under the low gravity."

Spaceport? Off? Low gravity? Terms belonging to the detested electronic world of the stereopantograph in which he had no place.

"Be very interesting," he said, closing his eyes to conceal disgust.

"I am bothering you. I'll go away now, but I'll be back Tuesday night for the class. What time do I come and what should I bring?"

"Eight. It's charcoal--I sell you the sticks and paper. Just bring a smock."

"All right. And I want to take the oils class too. And I want to bring some people I know to see your work. I'm sure they'll see something they like. Austin Malone's in Jirom Venus--he's a special friend of mine."

"Lucretia," he said. "Or do some people call you Lucy?"

"Lucy."

"Will you take that little bronze you liked? As a thank you?"

"I can't do that!"

"Please. I'd feel much better about this. I really mean it." She nodded abruptly, flushing, and almost ran from the room. Now why did I do that? he asked himself. He hoped it was because he liked Lucy Grumman very much. He hoped it wasn't a coldblooded investment of a piece of sculpture that would never be sold, anyway, just to make sure she'd be back with class fees and more groceries.

III

She was back on Tuesday, a half-hour early and carrying a smock. He introduced her formally to the others as they arrived: a dozen or so bored young women who, he suspected, talked a great deal about their art lessons outside, but in class used any excuse to stop sketching.

He didn't dare show Lucy any particular consideration. There were fierce little miniature cliques in the class. Halvorsen knew they laughed at him and his line among themselves, and yet, strangely, were fiercely jealous of their seniority and right to individual attention.

The lesson was an ordeal, as usual. The model, a muscle-bound young graduate of the barbell gyms and figure-photography studios, was stupid and argumentative about ten-minute poses. Two of the girls came near a hair-pulling brawl over the rights to a preferred sketching location. A third girl had discovered Picasso's cubist period during the past week and proudly announced that she didn't feel perspective.

But the two interminable hours finally ticked by. He nagged them into cleaning up-not as bad as the Saturdays with oils-and stood by the open door. Otherwise they would have stayed all night, cackling about absent students and snarling sulkily among themselves. His well-laid plans went sour, though. A large and flashy car drove up as the girls were leaving.

"That's Austin Malone," said Lucy. "He came to pick me up and look at your work."

That was all the wedge her fellow-pupils needed.

"Aus-tin Ma-lone! Well!"

"Lucy, darling, I'd love to meet a real spaceman."

"Roald, darling, would you mind very much if I stayed a moment?"

"I'm certainly not going to miss this and I don't care if you mind or not, Roald, darling!"

Malone was an impressive figure. Halvorsen thought: He looks as though he's been run through an esthetikon set for "brawny" and "determined." Lucy made a hash of the introductions and the spaceman didn't rise to conversational bait dangled enticingly by the girls.

In a clear voice, he said to Halvorsen: "I don't want to take up too much of your time. Lucy tells me you have some things for sale. Is there any place we can look at them where it's quiet?"

The students made sulky exits.

"Back here," said the artist.

The girl and Malone followed him through the curtains. The spaceman made a slow circuit of the studio, seeming to repel questions.

He sat down at last and said: "I don't know what to think, Halvorsen. This place stuns me. Do you know you're in the Dark Ages?"

People who never have given a thought to Chartres and Mont St. Michel usually call it the Dark Ages, Halvorsen thought wryly. He asked, "Technologically, you mean? No, not at all. My plaster's better, my colors are better, my metal is better--tool metal, not casting metal, that is."

"I mean hand work," said the spaceman. "Actually working by hand."

The artist shrugged. "There have been crazes for the techniques of the boiler works and the machine shop," he admitted. "Some interesting things were done, but they didn't stand up well. Is there anything here that takes your eye?"

"I like those dolphins," said the spaceman, pointing to a perforated terra-cotta relief on the wall. They had been commissioned by an architect, then later refused for reasons of economy when the house had run way over estimate. "They'd look bully over the fireplace in my town apartment. Like them, Lucy?"

"I think they're wonderful," said the girl.

Roald saw the spaceman go rigid with the effort not to turn and stare at her. He loved her and he was jealous.

Roald told the story of the dolphins and said: "The price that the architect thought was too high was three hundred and sixty dollars."

Malone grunted. "Doesn't seem unreasonable--if you set a high store on inspiration."

"I don't know about inspiration," the artist said evenly. "But I was awake for two days and two nights shoveling coal and adjusting drafts to fire that thing in my kiln."

The spaceman looked contemptuous. "I'll take it," he said. "Be something to talk about during those awkward pauses. Tell me, Halvorsen, how's Lucy's work? Do you think she ought to stick with it?"

"Austin," objected the girl, "don't be so blunt. How can he possibly know after one day?"

"She can't draw yet," the artist said cautiously. "It's ah ... coordination, you know--thousands of hours of practice, training your eye and hand to work together until you can put a line on paper where you want it. Lucy, if you're really interested in it, you'll learn to draw well. I don't think any of the other students will. They're in it because of boredom or snobbery, and they'll stop before they have their eye-hand coordination."

"I am interested," she said firmly.

Malone's determined restraint broke. "Damned right you are. In--" He recovered himself and demanded of Halvorsen: "I understand your point about coordination. But thousands of hours when you can buy a camera? It's absurd."

"I was talking about drawing, not art," replied Halvorsen. "Drawing is putting a line on paper where you want it, I said." He took a deep breath and hoped the great distinction wouldn't sound ludicrous and trivial. "So let's say that art is knowing how to put the line in the right place."

"Be practical. There isn't any art. Not any more. I get around quite a bit and I never see anything but photos and S.P.G.s. A few heirlooms, yes, but nobody's painting or carving any more."

"There's some art, Malone. My students--a couple of them in the still-life class--are quite good. There are more across the country. Art for occupational therapy, or a hobby, or something to do with the hands. There's trade in their work. They sell them to each other, they give them to their friends, they hang them on their walls. There are even some sculptors like that. Sculpture is prescribed by doctors. The occupational therapists say it's even better than drawing and painting, so some of these people work in plasticine and soft stone, and some of them get to be good."

"Maybe so. I'm an engineer, Halvorsen. We glory in doing things the easy way. Doing things the easy way got me to Mars and Venus and it's going to get me to Ganymede. You're doing things the hard way, and your inefficiency has no place in this world. Look at you! You've lost a fingertip--some accident, I suppose."

"I never noticed--" said Lucy, and then let out a faint, "Oh!"

Halvorsen curled the middle finger of his left hand into the palm, where he usually carried it to hide the missing first joint.

"Accidents are a sign of inadequate mastery of material and equipment," said Malone sententiously. "While you stick to your methods and I stick to mine, you can't compete with me."

His tone made it clear that he was talking about more than engineering.

"Shall we go now, Lucy? Here's my card, Halvorsen. Send those dolphins along and I'll mail you a check."

IV

The artist walked the half-dozen blocks to Mr. Krehbeil's place the next day. He found the old man in the basement shop of his fussy house, hunched over his bench with a powerful light overhead. He was trying to file a saw.

"Mr. Krehbeil!" Halvorsen called over the shriek of metal.

The carpenter turned around and peered with watery eyes. "I can't see like I used to," he said querulously. "I go over the same teeth on this damn saw, I skip teeth, I can't see the light shine off it when I got one set. The glare." He banged down his three-cornered file petulantly. "Well, what can I do for you?"

"I need some crating stock. Anything. I'll trade you a couple of my maple four-by-fours."

The old face became cunning. "And will you set my saw? My saws, I mean. It's nothing to you--an hour's work. You have the eyes."

Halvorsen said bitterly, "All right." The old man had to drive his bargain, even though he might never use his saws again. And then the artist promptly repented of his bitterness, offering up a quick prayer that his own failure to conform didn't make him as much of a nuisance to the world as Krehbeil was.

The carpenter was pleased as they went through his small stock of wood and chose boards to crate the dolphin relief. He was pleased enough to give Halvorsen coffee and cake before the artist buckled down to filing the saws.

Over the kitchen table, Halvorsen tried to probe. "Things pretty slow now?"

It would be hard to spoil Krehbeil's day now. "People are always fools. They don't know good hand work. Some day," he said apocalyptically, "I laugh on the other side of my face when their foolish machine-buildings go falling down in a strong wind, all of them, all over the country. Even my boy--I used to beat him good, almost every day--he works a foolish concrete machine and his house should fall on his head like the rest."

Halvorsen knew it was Krehbeil's son who supported him by mail, and changed the subject. "You get some cabinet work?"

"Stupid women! What they call antiques-they don't know Meissen, they don't know Biedermeier. They bring me trash to repair sometimes. I make them pay; I swindle them good."

"I wonder if things would be different if there were anything left over in Europe . . ."

"People will still be fools, Mr. Halvorsen," said the carpenter positively. "Didn't you say you were going to file those saws today?"

So the artist spent two noisy hours filing before he carried his crating stock to the studio.

Lucy was there. She had brought some things to eat. He dumped the lumber with a bang and demanded: "Why aren't you at work?"

"We get days off," she said vaguely. "Austin thought he'd give me the cash for the terra-cotta and I could give it to you."

She held out an envelope while he studied her silently. The farce was beginning again. But this time he dreaded it.

It would not be the first time that a lonesome, discontented girl chose to see him as a combination of romantic rebel and lost pup, with the consequences you'd expect.

He knew from books, experience, and Labuerre's conversation in the old days that there was nothing novel about the comedy--that there had even been artists, lots of them, who had counted on endless repetitions of it for their livelihood.

The girl drops in with groceries and the artist is pleasantly surprised; the girl admires this little thing or that after payday and buys it and the artist is pleasantly surprised; the girl brings her friends to take lessons or make little purchases and the artist is pleasantly surprised. The girl may be seduced by the artist or vice versa, which shortens the comedy, or they may get married, which lengthens it somewhat.

It had been three years since Halvorsen had last played out the farce with a manic-depressive divorcee from Elmira: three years during which he had crossed the mid-point between thirty and forty; three more years to get beaten down by being unwanted and working too much and eating too little.

Also, he knew, he was in love with this girl.

He took the envelope, counted three hundred and twenty dollars, and crammed it into his pocket. "That was your idea," he said. "Thanks. Now get out, will you? I've got work to do."

She stood there, shocked.

"I said get out. I have work to do."

"Austin was right," she told him miserably. "You don't care how people feel. You just want to get things out of them."

She ran from the studio, and Halvorsen fought with himself not to run after her.

He walked slowly into his workshop and studied his array of tools, though he paid little attention to his finished pieces. It would be nice to spend about half of this money on open-hearth steel rod and bar stock to forge into chisels; he thought he knew where he could get some--but she would be back, or he would break and go to her and be forgiven and the comedy would be played out, after all.

He couldn't let that happen.

V

Aalesund, on the Atlantic side of the Dourefeld Mountains of Norway, was in the lee of the blasted continent. One more archeologist there made no difference, as long as he had the sense to recognize the propellor-like international signposts that said with their three blades, Radiation Hazard, and knew what every schoolboy knew about protective clothing and reading a personal Geiger counter.

The car Halvorsen rented was for a brief trip over the mountains to study contaminated Oslo. Well muffled, he could make it and back in a dozen hours and no harm done.

But he took the car past Oslo, Wennersborg, and Goteborg, along the Kattegat coast to Helsingborg, and abandoned it there, among the three-bladed polyglot signs, crossing to Denmark. Danes were as unlike Prussians as they could be, but their unfortunate little peninsula was a sprout off Prussia that radio-cobalt dust couldn't tell from the real thing. The three-bladed signs were most specific.

With a long way to walk along the rubble-littered highways, he stripped off the impregnated coveralls and boots. He had long since shed the noisy counter and the uncomfortable gloves and mask.

The silence was eerie as he limped into Copenhagen at noon. He didn't know whether the radiation was getting to him or whether he was tired and hungry and no more. As though thinking of a stranger, he liked what he was doing.

I'll be my own audience, he thought. God knows 1 learned there isn't any other, not any more. You have to know when to stop. Rodin, the dirty old, wonderful old man, knew that. He taught us not to slick it and polish it and smooth it until it looked like liquid instead of bronze and stone. Van Gogh was crazy as a loon, but he knew when to stop and varnish it, and he didn't care if the paint looked like paint instead of looking like sunset clouds or moonbeams. Up in Hartford, Browne and Sharpe stop when they've got a turret lathe; they don't put caryatids on it. I'll stop while my life is a life, before it becomes a thing with distracting embellishments such as a wife who will come to despise me, a succession of gradually less worthwhile pieces that nobody will look at.

Blame nobody, he told himself, lightheadedly.

And then it was in front of him, terminating a vista of weeds and bomb rubble--Milles's Orpheus Fountain.

It took a man, he thought. Esthetikon circuits couldn't do it. There was a gross mixture of styles, a calculated flaw that the esthetikon couldn't be set to make. Orpheus and the souls were classic or later; the three-headed dog was archaic. That was to tell you about the antiquity and invincibility of Hell, and that Cerberus knows Orpheus will never go back into life with his bride.

There was the heroic, tragic central figure that looked mighty enough to battle with the gods, but battle wasn't any good against the grinning, knowing, hateful three-headed dog it stood on. You don't battle the pavement where you walk or the floor of the house you're in; you can't. So Orpheus, his face a mask of controlled and suffering fury, crashes a great chord from his lyre that moved trees and stones. Around him the naked souls in Hell start at the chord, each in its own way: the young lovers down in death; the mother down in death; the musician, deaf and down in death, straining to hear.

Halvorsen, walking uncertainly toward the fountain, felt something break inside him, and a heaviness in his lungs. As he pitched forward among the weeds, he didn't care that the three-headed dog was grinning its knowing, hateful grin down at him. He had heard the chord from the lyre.

"What thou lowest well remains; the rest is dross." As poetry this line is compelling, but like many such mottoes it might be hard to live by. Mr. Pangborn shucks away "the rest," leaving behind only a love of music, and asks--in the high ultraviolet poetry peculiar to him--how much life might indeed remain. He is not, of course, the first to notice that performers lead a borrowed life, but supposing the borrowed life is all that's left; how then shall a man live?

A MASTER OF BABYLON

by

Edgar Pangborn

For twenty-five years no one came.

In the seventy-sixth year of his life Brian Van Anda was still trying not to remember a happy boyhood. To do so was irrelevant and dangerous, although every instinct of his old age tempted him to reject the present and live in the lost times. He would recall stubbornly that the present year, for example, was 2096 according to the Christian calendar, that he had been born in 2020, seven years after the close of the civil war, fifty years before the last war, twenty-five years before the departure of the First Interstellar. The First and Second Interstellar would be still on the move, he supposed. It had been understood, obvious, long ago, that after radio contact faded out the world would not hear of them again for many lifetimes, if ever. They would be on the move, farther and farther away from a planet no longer capable of understanding such matters.

Brian sometimes recalled his place of birth, New Boston, the fine planned city far inland from the old metropolis which a rising sea had reclaimed after the earthquake of 1994. Such things, places and dates, were factual props, useful when Brian wanted to impose an external order on the vagueness of his immediate existence. He tried to make sure they became no more than that, to shut away the colors, the poignant sounds, the parks and the playgrounds of New Boston, the known faces (many of them loved), and the later years when he had experienced a curious intoxication called fame.

It was not necessarily better or wiser to reject these memories, but it was safer, and nowadays Brian was often sufficiently tired, sufficiently conscious of his growing weakness and lonely unimportance, to crave safety as a meadow mouse craves a burrow.

He tied his canoe to the massive window which for many years had been a port and a doorway. Lounging there with a suspended sense of time, he hardly knew he was listening. In a way, all the twenty-five years had been a listening. He watched Earth's patient star sink toward the rim of the forest on the Palisades. At this hour it was sometimes possible, if the sun-crimsoned water lay still, to cease grieving at the greater stillness.

There must be scattered human life elsewhere, he knew--probably a great deal of it. After twenty-five years alone, that also often seemed irrelevant. At other times than mild evenings--on hushed noons or in the mornings always so empty of human commotion--

Brian might lapse into anger, fight the calm by yelling, resent the swift dying of his own echoes. Such moods were brief. A kind of humor remained in him, not to be ruined by any sorrow.

He remembered how, ten months or possibly ten years ago, he had encountered a box turtle in a forest clearing, and had shouted at it: "They went thataway!" The turtle's rigidly comic face, fixed in a caricature of startled disapproval, had seemed to point up some truth or other. Brian had hunkered down on the moss and laughed uproariously until he observed that some of the laughter was weeping.

Today had been rather good. He had killed a deer on the Palisades, and with bow and arrow, not spending a bullet--irreplaceable toy of civilization.

Not that he needed to practice such economy. He could live, he supposed, another ten years at the outside. His rifles were in good condition, his hoarded ammunition would easily outlast him. So would the stock of canned and dried food stuffed away in his living quarters. But there was satisfaction in primitive effort, and no compulsion to analyze the why of it.

The stored food was more important than the ammunition; a time was coming soon enough when he would no longer have the strength for hunting. He would lose the inclination to depart from his fortress for trips to the mainland. He would yield to such timidity or laziness for days, then weeks. Sometime, after such an interlude, he might find himself too feeble to risk climbing the cliff wall into the forest. He would then have the good sense, he hoped, to destroy the canoe, thus making of his weakness a necessity.

There were books. There was the Hall of Music on the next floor above the water, probably safe from its lessening encroachment. To secure fresh water he need only keep track of the tides, for the Hudson had cleaned itself and now rolled down sweet from the lonely uncorrupted hills. His decline could be comfortable. He had provided for it and planned it.

Yet now, gazing across the sleepy water, seeing a broad-winged hawk circle in freedom above the forest, Brian was aware of the old thought moving in him: If I could hear voices--just once, if I could hear human voices ...

The Museum of Human History, with the Hall of Music on what Brian thought of as the second floor, should also outlast his requirements. In the flooded lower floor and basement the work of slow destruction must be going on: Here and there the unhurried waters could find their way to steel and make rust of it; the waterproofing of the concrete was nearly a hundred years old. But it ought to be good for another century or two.

Nowadays the ocean was mild. There were moderate tides, winds no longer destructive. For the last six years there had been no more of the heavy storms out of the south; in the same period Brian had noted a rise in the water level of a mere nine inches. The windowsill, his port, stood six inches above high-tide mark this year. Perhaps Earth was settling into a new amiable mood. The climate had become delightful, about like what Brian remembered from a visit to southern Virginia in his childhood.

The last earthquake had come in 2082--a large one, Brian guessed, but its center could not have been close to the rock of Manhattan. The Museum had only shivered and shrugged--it had survived much worse than that, half a dozen times since 1994. Long after the tremor, a tall wave had thundered in from the south. Its force, like that of others, had mostly been dissipated against the barrier of tumbled rock and steel at the southern end of the submerged island--an undersea dam, man-made though not man intended--and when it reached the Museum it did no more than smash the southern windows in the Hall of Music, which earlier waves had not been able to reach; then it passed on up the river enfeebled.

The windows of the lower floor had all been broken long before that. After the earthquake of '82 Brian had spent a month in boarding up all the openings on the south side of the Hall of Music--after all, it was home--with lumber painfully ferried over from mainland ruins. By that year he was sixty-two years old and not moving with the ease of youth. He deliberately left cracks and knotholes. Sunlight sifted through in narrow beams, like the bars of dusty gold Brian could remember in a hayloft at his uncle's farm in Vermont.

That hawk above the Palisades soared nearer over the river and receded. Caught in the evening light, he was himself a little sun, dying and returning.

The Museum had been finished in 2003. Manhattan, strangely enough, had never taken a bomb, although in the civil war two of the type called "small clean fission" had fallen on the Brooklyn and New Jersey sides--so Brian recalled from the jolly history books which had informed his adolescence that war was definitely a thing of the past. By the time of the next last war, in 2070, the sea, gorged on melting ice caps, had removed Manhattan Island from current history.

Everything left standing above the waters south of the Museum had been knocked flat by the tornadoes of 2057 and 2064. A few blobs of empty rock still demonstrated where Central Park and Mount Morris Park had been: not significant. Where Long Island once rose, there was a troubled area of shoals and small islands, probably a useful barrier of protection for the receding shore of Connecticut. Men had yielded their great city inch by inch, then foot by foot; a full mile in 2047, saying: "The flood years have passed their peak, and a return to normal is expected." Brian sometimes felt a twinge of sympathy for the Neanderthal experts who must have told each other to expect a return to normal at the very time when the CroMagnons were drifting in.

In 2057 the Island of Manhattan had to be yielded. New York City, half-new, half-ancient, sprawled stubborn and enormous upstream, on both sides of a river not done with its anger. Yet the Museum stood. Aided by sunken rubble of other buildings of its kind, aided also by men because they still had time to love it, the museum stood, and might for a long time yet--weather permitting.

The hawk floated out of sight above the Palisades into the field of the low sun.

The Museum of Human History covered an acre of ground north of 125th Street, rising a modest fifteen stories, its foundation secure in that layer of rock which mimics eternity. It deserved its name; here men had brought samples of everything man-made, literally everything known in the course of human creation since prehistory. Within human limits it was definitive.

No one had felt anything unnatural in the refusal of the Directors of the Museum to move the collection after the building weathered the storm of 2057. Instead, ordinary people donated money so that a mighty abutment could be built around the ground floor and a new entrance designed on the north side of the second. The abutment survived the greater tornado of 2064 without damage, although during those seven years the sea had risen another eight feet in its old ever-new game of making monkeys out of the wise. (It was left for Brian Van Anda, alone, in 2079, to see the waters slide quietly over the abutment, opening the lower regions for the use of fishes and the more secret water-dwellers who like shelter and privacy. In the '90s, Brian suspected the presence of an octopus or two in the vast vague territory that had once been parking lot, heating plant, storage space, air-raid shelter, etc. He couldn't prove it; it just seemed like a decent, comfortable place for an octopus.) In 2070 plans were under consideration for building a new causeway to the Museum from the still expanding city in the north. In 2070, also, the last war began and ended.

When Brian Van Anda came down the river late in 2071, a refugee from certain unfamiliar types of savagery, the Museum was empty of the living. He spent many days in exhaustive exploration of the building. He did this systematically, toiling at last up to the Directors' meeting room on the top floor. There he observed how they must have been holding a conference at the very time when a new gas was tried out over New York in a final effort to persuade the Western Federation that the end justifies the means. (Too bad, Brian sometimes thought, that he would never know exactly what had become of the Asian Empire. In the little splinter state called the Soviet of North America, from which Brian had fled in '71, the official doctrine was that the Asian Empire had won the war and the saviors of humanity would be flying in any day now. Brian had inadvertently doubted this out loud and then stolen a boat and gotten away safely under cover of night.)

Up in the meeting room, Brian had seen how that up-to-date neurotoxin had been no respecter of persons. An easy death, however, by the look of it. He observed also how some things endure. The Museum, for instance: virtually unharmed.

Brian often recalled those moments in the meeting room as a sort of island in time. They were like the first day of falling in love, the first hour of discovering that he could play Beethoven. And a little like the curiously cherished, more than life-size half-hour back there in Newburg, in that ghastly year 2071, when he had briefly met and spoken with an incredibly old man, Abraham Brown. Brown had been President of the Western Federation at the time of the civil war. Later, retired from the uproar of public affairs, he had devoted himself to philosophy, unofficial teaching. In 2071, with the world he had loved in almost total ruin around him, Brown had spoken pleasantly to Brian Van Anda of small things--of chrysanthemums that would soon be blooming in the front yard of the house where he lived with friends, of a piano recital by Van Anda back in 2067 which the old man still remembered with warm enthusiasm.

Only a month later more hell was loose and Brian himself in flight.

Yes, the Museum Directors had died easily. Brooding in the evening sunlight, Brian reflected that now, all these years later, the innocent bodies would be perfectly decent. No vermin in the Museum. The doorways and the floors were tight, the upper windows unbroken.

One of the white-haired men had had a Ming vase on his desk. He had not dropped out of his chair, but looked as if he had fallen asleep in front of the vase with his head on his arms. Brian had left the vase untouched, but had taken one other thing, moved by some stirring of his own never-certain philosophy and knowing that he would not return to this room, ever.

One of the Directors had been opening a wall cabinet when he fell; the key lay near his fingers. Their discussion had not been concerned only with war, perhaps not at all with war. After all, there were other topics. The Ming vase must have had a part in it. Brian wished he could know what the old man had meant to take from the cabinet. Sometimes he dreamed of conversations with that man, in which the Director told him the truth of this and other matters, but what was certainty in sleep was in the morning gone like childhood.

For himself Brian had taken a little image of rock-hard clay, blackened, two-faced, male and female. Prehistoric, or at any rate wholly savage, unsophisticated, meaningful like the blameless motion of an animal in sunlight. Brian had said: "With your permission, gentlemen." He had closed the cabinet and then, softly, the outer door.

"I'm old, too," Brian said to the red evening. He searched for the hawk and could no longer find it in the deepening sky. "Old, a little foolish--talk aloud to myself. I'll have some Mozart before supper."

He transferred the fresh venison from the canoe to a small raft hitched inside the window. He had selected only choice pieces, as much as he could cook and eat in the few days before it spoiled, leaving the rest for the wolves or any other forest scavengers which might need it. There was a rope strung from the window to the marble steps leading to the next floor of the Museum, which was home.

It had not been possible to save much from the submerged area, for its treasure was mostly heavy statuary. Through the still water, as he pulled the raft along the rope, the Moses of Michelangelo gazed up at him in tranquillity. Other faces watched him; most of them watched infinity. There were white hands that occasionally borrowed motion from ripples made by the raft. "I got a deer, Moses," said Brian Van Anda, smiling down in companionship, losing track of time. . . . "Good night, Moses." He carried his juicy burden up the stairway.

Brian's living quarters had once been a cloakroom for Museum attendants. Four close walls gave it a feel of security. A ventilating shaft-now served as a chimney for the wood stove Brian had salvaged from a mainland farmhouse. The door could be tightly locked. There were no windows. You do not want windows in a cave.

Outside was the Hall of Music, a full acre, an entire floor of the Museum, containing an example of every musical instrument that was known or could be reconstructed in the twenty-first century. The library of scores and recordings lacked nothing--except electricity to make the recordings speak. A few might still be made to sound on a hand-cranked phonograph, but Brian had not bothered with that toy for years; the springs were probably rusted.

Brian sometimes took out orchestra and chamber music scores to read at random. Once, reading them, his mind had been able to furnish ensembles, orchestras, choirs of a sort, but lately the ability had weakened. He remembered a day, possibly a year ago, when his memory refused to give him the sound of oboe and clarinet in unison. He had wandered, peevish, distressed unreasonably, alarmed, among the racks and cases of woodwinds and brasses and violins. He tried to sound a clarinet; the reed was still good in the dust-proof case, but he had no lip. He had never mastered any instrument except the pianoforte.

He recalled--it might have been that same day--opening a chest of double basses. There was a three-stringer in the group, old, probably from the early nineteenth century, a trifle fatter than its more modern companions. Brian touched its middle string in an idle caress, not intending to make it sound, but it had done so. When in: use, it would have been tuned to D; time had slackened the heavy murmur to A or something near it. That had throbbed in the silent room with finality, a sound such as a programmatic composer, say Tchaikovsky, might have used as a tonal symbol for the breaking of a heart. It stayed in the air as other instruments whispered a dim response. "All right, gentlemen," Brian said, "that was your A. . . ."

Out in the main part of the hall, a place of honor was given to what may have been the oldest of the instruments, a seven-note marimba of phonolitic schist discovered in Indo-China in the twentieth century and thought to be at least 5,000 years of age. The xylophone-type rack was modern. Brian for twenty-five years had obeyed a compulsion to keep it free of cobwebs. Sometimes he touched the singing stones, not for amusement but because there was comfort in it. They answered to the light tap of a fingernail. Beside them on a little table of its own he had placed the Stone Age god of two faces.

On the west side of the Hall of Music, a rather long walk from Brian's cave, was a small auditorium. Lectures, recitals, chamber music concerts had been given there in the old days. The pleasant room held a twelve-foot concert grand, made in 2043, probably the finest of the many pianos in the Hall of Music, a summit of technical achievement. Brian had done his best to preserve this beautiful artifact, prayerfully tuning it three times a year, robbing other pianos in the Museum to provide a reserve supply of strings, oiled and sealed against rust. When not in use his great piano was covered by stitched-together sheets. To remove the cover was a somber ritual. Before touching the keys, Brian washed his hands with needless fanatical care.

Some years ago he had developed the habit of locking the auditorium doors before he played. Yet even then he preferred not to glance toward the vista of empty seats, not much caring whether this inhibition derived from a Stone Age fear of finding someone there or from a flat civilized understanding that no one could be. It never occurred to him to lock the one door he used, when he was absent from the auditorium. The key remained on the inside; if he went in merely to tune the piano or to inspect the place, he never turned it.

The habit of locking it when he played might have started (he could not remember) back in the year 2076, when so many bodies had floated down from the north on the ebb tides. Full horror had somehow been lacking in the sight of all that floating death. Perhaps it was because Brian had earlier had his fill of horrors, or perhaps in 2076 he already felt so divorced from his own kind that what happened to them was like the photograph of a war in a distant country. Some had bobbed and floated quite near the Museum. Most of them had the gaping obvious wound: of primitive warfare, but some were oddly discolored--a new pestilence? So there was (or had been) more trouble up there in what was (or had been) the shortlived Soviet of North America, a self-styled "nation" that took in east central New York and most of New England. So . . . Yes, that was probably the year when he had started locking the doors between his private concerts and an empty world.

He dumped the venison in his cave. He scrubbed his hands, showing high blue veins now, but still tough, still knowing. Mozart, he thought, and walked, not with much pleasure of anticipation but more like one externally driven, through the enormous hall that was so full and yet so empty and growing dim with evening, with dust, with age, with loneliness. Music should not be silent.

When the piano was uncovered, Brian delayed. He exercised his hands unnecessarily. He fussed with the candelabrum on the wall, lighting three candles, then blowing out two for economy. He admitted presently that he did not want the emotional clarity of Mozart at all, not now. The darkness of 2070 was too close, closer than he had felt it for a long time. It would never have occurred to Mozart, Brian thought, that a world could die. Beethoven could have entertained the idea soberly enough, and Chopin probably; even Brahms. Mozart, Haydn, Bach would surely have dismissed it as somebody's bad dream, in poor taste. Andrew Carr, who lived and died in the latter half of the twentieth century, had endured the idea deep in his bloodstream from the beginning of his childhood.

The date of Hiroshima was 1945; Carr was born in 1951. The wealth of his music was written between 1969, when he was eighteen, and 1984, when he died among the smells of an Egyptian jail from injuries received in a street brawl.

"If not Mozart," said Brian Van Anda to his idle hands, "there is always the Project."

To play Carr's last sonata as it should be played--as Carr was supposed to have said he couldn't play it himself: Brian had been thinking of that as the Project for many years. It had begun teasing his mind long before the war, at the time of his triumphs in a civilized world which had been warmly appreciative of the polished interpretive artist (once he got the breaks) although no more awake than in any other age to the creative sort. Back there in the undestroyed society, Brian had proposed to program that sonata in the company of works that were older but no greater, and to play it--well, beyond his best, so that even music critics would begin to see its importance in history.

He had never done it, had never felt the necessary assurance that he had entered into the sonata and learned the depth of it. Now, when there was none to hear or care, unless the harmless brown spiders in the corners of the auditorium had a taste for music, there was still the Project. I hear, Brian thought. I care, and with myself for audience I wish to hear it once as it ought to be, a final statement for a world that was (I think) too good to die.

Technically, of course, he had it. The athletic demands Carr made on the performer were tremendous, but, given technique, there was nothing impossible about them. Anyone capable of concert work could at least play the notes at the required tempi. And any reasonably shrewd pianist could keep track of the dynamics, saving strength for the shattering finale. Brian had heard the sonata played by others two or three times in the old days--competently. Competency was not enough.

For example, what about the third movement, the mad scherzo, and the five tiny interludes of quiet scattered through its plunging fury? They were not alike. Related, but each one demanded a new climate of heart and mind--tenderness, regret, simple relaxation. Flowers on a flood--no. Window lights in a storm--no. The innocence of a child in a bombed city--no, not really. Something of all those. Much more, too, defying words.

What of the second movement, the largo, where in a way the pattern was reversed, the midnight introspection interrupted by moments of anger, or longing, or despair like the despair of an angel beating his wings against a prison of glass?

It was a work in which something of Carr's life, Carr's temperament, had to come into you, whether you dared welcome it or not; otherwise your playing was no more than reproduction of notes on a page. Can's life was not for the contemplation of the timid.

The details were superficially well-known; the biographies were like musical notation, meaningless without interpretation and insight. Carr was a drunken roarer, a young devil-god with such a consuming hunger for life that he choked to death on it. His friends hated him for the way he drained their lives, loving them to distraction and the next moment having no time for them because he loved his work more. His enemies must have had times of helplessly admiring him if only because of a translucent honesty that made him more and less than human. A rugged Australian, not tall but built like a hero, a face all forehead and jaw and glowing hyperthyroid eyes. He wept only when he was angry, the biographic storytellers said. In one minute of talk he might shift from gutter obscenity to some extreme of altruistic tenderness, and from that perhaps to a philosophic comment of cold intelligence. He passed his childhood on a sheep farm, ran away on a freighter at thirteen, was flung out of two respectable conservatories for drunkenness and "public lewdness," then studied like a slave in London with single-minded desperation, as if he knew the time was short. He was married twice and twice divorced. He killed a man in a silly brawl on the New Orleans docks, and wrote his First Symphony while he was in jail for that. He died of stab wounds from a broken bottle in a Cairo jail, and was recognized by the critics. It all had relevancy; relevant or not, if the sonata was in your mind, so was the life.

You had to remember also that Andrew Carr was the last of civilization's great composers. No one in the twenty-first century approached him--they ignored his explorations and carved cherrystones. He belonged, to no school, unless you wanted to imagine a school of music beginning with Bach, taking in perhaps a dozen along the way, and ending with Carr himself. His work was a summary as well as an advance along the mainstream into the unknown; in the light of the year 2070, it was also a completion.

Brian was certain he could play the first movement of the sonata as he wished to. Technically it was not revolutionary, and remained rather close to the ancient sonata form. Carr had even written in a double bar for a repeat of the entire opening statement, something that had made his cerebral contemporaries sneer with great satisfaction; it never occurred to them that Carr was inviting the performer to use his head.

The bright-sorrowful second movement, unfashionably long, with its strange pauses, unforeseen recapitulations, outbursts of savage change--that was where Brian's troubles began. ("Reminiscent of Franck," said the hunters for comparisons whom we have always with us.) It did not help Brian to be old, remembering the inner storms of forty years ago and more.

His single candle fluttered. For once Brian had forgotten to lock the door into the Hall of Music. This troubled him, but he did not rise from the piano chair. He chided himself instead for the foolish neuroses of aloneness--what could it matter? Let it go. He shut his eyes. The sonata had long ago been memorized; printed copies were safe in the library. He played the opening of the first movement as far as the double bar, opened his eyes to the friendly black-and-white of clean keys, and played the repetition with new light, new emphasis. Better than usual, he thought--

Yes. Good. . . . Now that naive-appearing modulation into A major, which only Carr would have wanted just there in that sudden obvious way, like the opening of a door on shining fields. On toward the climax--I am playing it, I think--through the intricate revelations of development and recapitulation. And the conclusion, lingering, half-humorous, not unlike a Beethoven I'm-not-gone-yet ending, but with a questioning that was all Andrew Carr. After that--

"No more tonight," said Brian aloud. "Some night, though . . . Not competent right now, my friend." He replaced the cover of the piano and blew out the candle. He had brought no torch, long use having taught his feet every inch of the small journey. It was quite dark. The never-opened western windows of the auditorium were dirty, most of the dirt on the outside, crusted windblown salt.

In this partial darkness something was wrong.

At first Brian found no source for the faint light, dim orange with a hint of motion. He peered into the gloom of the auditorium, fixing his eyes on the oblong of blacker shadow that was the doorway into the Hall of Music. The windows, of course!--he had almost forgotten there were any. The light, hardly deserving the name of light, was coming through them. But sunset was surely past. He had been here a long time, delaying and brooding before he played. Sunset should not flicker.

So there was some kind of fire on the mainland. There had been no thunderstorm. How should fire start, over there where no one ever came?

He stumbled a few times, swearing petulantly, locating the doorway again and groping through it into the Hall of Music. The windows out here were just as dirty; no use trying to see through them. There must have been a time when he had looked through them, enjoyed looking through them. He stood shivering in the marble silence, trying to remember.

Time was a gradual, continual dying. Time was the growth of dirt and ocean salt, sealing in, covering over. He stumbled for his cloakroom cave, hurrying now, and lit two candles. He left one by the cold stove and used the other to light his way down the stairs to his raft; once down there, he blew it out, afraid. The room a candle makes in the darkness is a vulnerable room. Having no walls, it closes in a blindness. He pulled the raft by the guide-rope, gently, for fear of noise.

He found his canoe tied as he had left it. He poked his white head slowly beyond the sill, staring west.

Merely a bonfire gleaming, reddening the blackness of the cliff.

Brian knew the spot, a ledge almost at water level, at one end of it the troublesome path he usually followed in climbing to the forest at the top of the Palisades. Usable driftwood was often there, the supply renewed by the high tides.

"No," Brian said. "Oh, no! . . ."

Unable to accept or believe, or not believe, he drew his head in, resting his forehead on the coldness of the sill, waiting for dizziness to pass, reason to return.

It might have been a long time, a kind of blackout. Now he was again in command of his actions and even rather calm, once more leaning out over the sill. The fire still shone and was therefore not a disordered dream of old age. It was dying to a dull rose of embers.

He wondered about the time. Clocks and watches had stopped long ago; Brian had ceased to want them. A sliver of moon was hanging over the water to the east. He ought to be able to remember the phases, deduce the approximate time from that. But his mind was too tired or distraught to give him the data. Maybe it was somewhere around midnight.

He climbed on the sill and lifted the canoe over it to the motionless water inside. Useless, he decided, as soon as the grunting effort was finished. That fire had been lit before daylight passed; whoever lit it would have seen the canoe, might even have been watching Brian himself come home from his hunting. The canoe's disappearance in the night would only rouse further curiosity. But Brian was too exhausted to lift it back.

And why assume that the maker of the bonfire was necessarily hostile? Might be good company. . . . He pulled his raft through the darkness, secured it at the stairway, and groped back to his cave.

He locked the door. The venison was waiting; the sight made him ravenous. He lit a small fire in the stove, one that he hoped would not still be sending smoke from the ventilator shaft when morning came. He cooked the meat crudely and wolfed it down, all enjoyment gone at the first mouthful. He was shocked to discover the dirtiness of his white beard. He hadn't given himself a real bath in--weeks, was it? He searched for scissors and spent an absentminded while in trimming the beard back to shortness. He ought to take some soap--valuable stuff--down to Moses's room, and wash.

Clothes, too. People probably still wore clothes. He had worn none for years, except for sandals. He used a carrying satchel for trips to the mainland. He had enjoyed the freedom at first, and especially the discovery that in his rugged fifties he did not need clothes even for the soft winters, except perhaps a light covering when he slept. Later, total nakedness had become so natural it required no thought at all. But the owner of that bonfire could have inherited or retained the pruderies of the lost culture.

He checked his rifles. The .22 automatic, an Army model from the 2040s, was the best--any amount of death in that. The tiny bullets carried a paralytic poison: graze a man's finger and he was almost painlessly dead in three minutes. Effective range, with telescopic sights, three kilometers; weight, a scant five pounds. Brian sat a long time cuddling that triumph of military science, listening for sounds that never came. Would it be two o'clock? He wished he could have seen the Time Satellite, renamed in his mind the Midnight Star, but when he was down there at his port, he had not once looked up at the night sky. Delicate and beautiful, bearing its everlasting freight of men who must have been dead now for twenty-five years and who would be dead a very long time--well, it was better than a clock, if you happened to look at the midnight sky at the right time of the month when the man-made star caught the moonlight. But he had missed it tonight. Three o'clock?. . .

At some time during the long dark he put the rifle away on the floor. With studied, self-conscious contempt for his own weakness, he unlocked the door and strode out noisily into the Hall of Music, with a fresh-lit candle. This same bravado, he knew, might dissolve at the first alien noise. While it lasted, it was invigorating.

The windows were still black with night. As if the candle flame had found its own way, Brian was standing by the ancient marimba in the main hall, the gleam slanting carelessly away from his gaunt hand. And nearby sat the Stone Age god.

It startled him. He remembered clearly how he himself had placed it there, obeying a half-humorous whim. The image and the singing stones were both magnificently older than history, so why shouldn't they live together? Whenever he dusted the marimba, he dusted the image respectfully, and its table. It would not have needed much urging from the impulses of a lonely mind to make him place offerings before it--winking first, of course, to indicate that rituals suitable to a pair of aging gentlemen did not have to be sensible in order to be good.

The clay face remembering eternity was not deformed by the episode of civilization. Chipped places were simple honorable scars. The two faces stared mildly from the single head, uncommunicative, serene.

A wooden hammer of modern make rested on the marimba. Softly Brian tapped a few of the stones. He struck the shrillest one harder, waking many slow-dying overtones, and laid the hammer down, listening until the last murmur perished and a drop of wax hurt his thumb. He returned to his cave and blew out the candle, never thinking of the door, or if he thought, not caring.

Face down, he rolled his head and clenched his fingers into his pallet, seeking in pain, finding at last the relief of stormy childish weeping in the dark.

Then he slept.

They looked timid. The evidence of it was in their tense squatting pose, not in what the feeble light allowed Brian to see of their faces, which were blank as rock. Hunkered down just inside the doorway of the dim cloakroom cave, a morning grayness from the Hall of Music behind them, they were ready for flight, and Brian's intelligence warned his body to stay motionless. Readiness for flight could also be readiness for attack. He studied them through slit eyelids, knowing he was in deep shadow.

They were very young, sixteen or seventeen, firm-muscled, the boy slim but heavy in the shoulders, the girl a fully developed woman. They were dressed alike: loincloths of some coarse dull fabric, and moccasins that were probably deerhide. Their hair grew nearly to the shoulders and was cut off carelessly, but they were evidently in the habit of combing it. They appeared to be clean. Their complexion, so far as Brian could guess it in the meager light, was brown, like a heavy tan. With no immediate awareness of emotion, he decided they were beautiful, and then within his own poised and perilous silence Brian reminded himself that the young are always beautiful.

The woman muttered softly: "He wake."

A twitch of the man's head was probably meant to warn her to be quiet. He clutched the shaft of a javelin with a metal blade which had once belonged to a breadknife. The blade was polished, shining, lashed to a peeled stick. The javelin trailed, ready for use at a flick of the young man's arm. Brian sighed deliberately. "Good morning."

The man, or boy, said: "Good morning, sa."

"Where do you come from?"

"Millstone." The man spoke automatically, but then his facial rigidity dissolved into astonishment and some kind of distress. He glanced at his companion, who giggled uneasily.

"The old man pretends to not know," she said, and smiled, and seemed to be waiting for the young man's permission to go on speaking. He did not give it, but she continued: "Sa, the old ones of Millstone are dead." She thrust her hand out and down, flat, a picture of finality, adding with nervous haste: "As the Old Man knows. He who told us to call him Jonas, she who told us to call her Abigail, dead. They are still-without-moving the full six days, then we do the burial as they told us. As the Old Man knows."

"But I don't know!" said Brian, and sat up on his pallet too quickly, startling them. But their motion was backward, a readying for flight. "Millstone? Where is Millstone?"

They looked wholly bewildered and dismayed. They stood up with animal grace, stepping backward out of the cave, the girl whispering in the man's ear. Brian caught two words: "--is angry."

He jumped up. "Don't go! Please don't go!" He followed them out of the cave, slowly now, aware that he might be an object of terror in the half-dark, aware of his gaunt, graceless age, and nakedness, and dirty hacked-off beard. Almost involuntarily he adopted something of the flat stilted quality of their speech. "I will not hurt you. Do not go."

They halted. The girl smiled dubiously. The man said: "We need old ones. They die. He who told us to call him Jonas said, many days in the boat, not with the sun-path, he said, across the sun-path, he said, keeping land on the left hand. We need old ones, to speak the--to speak . . . The Old Man is angry?"

"No. I am not angry. I am never angry." Brian's mind groped, certain of nothing. No one came, for twenty-five years.

Millstone?

There was red-gold on the dirty eastern windows of the Hall of Music, a light becoming softness as it slanted down, touching the long rows of cases, the warm brown of an antique spinet, the clean gold of a twentieth century harp, the gray of singing stones five thousand years old and a two-faced god much older than that. "Millstone." Brian pointed in inquiry, southwest.

The girl nodded, pleased and not at all surprised that he should know, watching him now with a squirrel's stiff curiosity. Hadn't there been a Millstone River in or near Princeton, once upon a time? Brian thought he remembered that it emptied into the Raritan Canal. There was some moderately high ground there. Islands now, no doubt. Perhaps they would tell him. "There were old people in Millstone," he said, trying for peaceful dignity, "and they died. So now you need old ones to take their place."

The girl nodded vigorously many times. Her glance at the young man was shy, possessive, maybe amused. "He who told us to call him Jonas said no marriage without the words of Abraham."

"Abr--" Brian checked himself. If this was religion, it would not do to speak the name Abraham with a rising inflection. "I have been for a long time--" He checked himself again: A man old, ugly, and strange enough to be sacred, should never stoop to explain anything.

They were standing by the seven-stone marimba. His hand dropped, his thumbnail clicking against the deepest stone and waking a murmur. The children drew back, alarmed. Brian smiled. "Don't be afraid." He tapped the other stones lightly. "It is only music. It will not hurt you." They were patient and respectful, waiting for more light. He said carefully: "He who told you to call him Jonas--he taught you all the things you know?"

"All things," the boy said, and the girl nodded three or four times, so that the soft brownness of her hair tumbled about her face, and she pushed it back in a small human motion as old as the clay image.

"Do you know how old you are?"

They looked blank. Then the girl said: "Oh--summers!" She held up her two hands with spread fingers, then one hand. "Three fives." She chuckled, and sobered quickly. "As the Old Man knows."

"I am very old," said Brian. "I know many things, but sometimes I wish to forget, and sometimes I wish to hear what others know, even though I may know it myself."

They looked uncomprehending and greatly impressed. Brian felt a smile on his face and wondered why it should be there. They were nice children. Born ten years after the death of a world; twenty, perhaps. I think I am seventy-six, but what if I dropped a decade somewhere and never noticed the damned thing? . . . "He who told you to call him Jonas--he taught you all you know of Abraham?"

At the sound of the name, both made swift circular motions, first at the forehead, then at the breast. "He taught us all things," the young man said. "He, and she who told us to call her Abigail. The hours to rise, to pray, to wash, to eat. The laws for hunting, and I know the Abraham-words for that: Sol-Amra, I take this for my need."

Brian felt lost again, and looked down to the clay faces of the image for counsel, and found none. "They who told you to call them Jonas and Abigail, they were the only ones who lived with you?--the only old ones?"

Again that look of bewilderment and disappointment. "The only ones, sa," the young man said. "As the Old Man knows."

I could never persuade them that, being old, I know very nearly nothing. . . .

Brian straightened to his full great height. The young people were not tall. Though stiff and worn with age, Brian knew he was still overpowering. Once, among men, he had gently enjoyed being more than life-size. As a shield for loneliness and fright within, he now adopted a phony sternness. "I wish to examine you for your own good, my children, about Millstone and your knowledge of Abraham. How many others live at Millstone, tell me."

"Two fives, sa," said the boy promptly, "and I the one who may be called Jonason and this girl who may be called Paula. Two fives and two. We are the biggest. The others are only children, but the one who may be called Jimi has killed his deer; he sees after them now while we go across the sun-path."

Under Brian's questioning, more of the story came, haltingly, obscured by the young man's conviction that the Old Man already knew everything. Sometime, probably in the middle 2080s, Jonas and Abigail (whoever they were) had come on a group of twelve wild children who were keeping alive somehow in a ruined town where their elders had all died. Jonas and Abigail had brought them all to an island they called Millstone. Jonas and Abigail came originally from "up across the sun-path"--the boy seemed to mean north--and they were very old, which might mean, Brian guessed, anything between thirty and ninety. In teaching the children primitive means of survival, Jonas and Abigail had brought off a brilliant success: Jonason and Paula were well-fed, shining with health and the strength of wildness, and clean. Their speech, limited and odd though it was, had not been learned from the ignorant. Its pronunciation faintly suggested New England, so far as it had any local accent. "Did they teach you reading and writing?" Brian asked, and made writing motions on the flat of his palm, which the two watched in vague alarm.

The boy asked: "What is that?"

"Never mind." I could quarrel with some of your theories, Mister-whom-I-may-call-Jonas. But maybe, he thought, there had been no books, no writing materials, no way to get them. What's the minimum of technology required to keep the human spirit alive?. . . "Well--well, tell me what they taught you of Abraham. I wish to hear how well you remember."

Both made again the circular motion at forehead and breast, and the young man said with the stiffness of recitation: "Abraham was the Son of Heaven who died that we might live." The girl, her obligation discharged with the religious gesture, tapped the marimba shyly, fascinated, and drew her finger back, smiling up at Brian in apology for naughtiness. "He taught the laws, the everlasting truth of all time," the boy gabbled, "and was slain on the wheel at Nuber by the infidels; therefore since he died for us, we look up across the sun-path when we pray to Abraham Brown who will come again." The boy Jonason sighed and relaxed.

Abraham--Brown? But--

But I knew him. I met him. Nuber? Newburg, temporary capital of the Soviet of--oh, damn that . . . Met him, 2071--the concert of mine he remembered . . The wheel? The wheel? "And when did Abraham die, boy?"

"Oh--" Jonason moved fingers helplessly, embarrassed. Dates would be no part of the doctrine. "Long ago. A--a--" He glanced up hopefully. "A thousand years? I think--he who told us to call him Jonas did not teach us that."

"I see. Never mind. You speak well, boy." Oh, my good Doctor, ex-President--after all! Artist, statesman, student of ethics, agnostic philosopher--all that long life you preached charity and skepticism, courage without the need of faith, the positive uses of the suspended judgment. All so clear, simple, obvious--needing only that little bit more of patience and courage which your human hearers were not ready to give. You must have known they were not, but did you know this would happen?

Jonas and Abigail--some visionary pair, Brian supposed, full of this theory and that, maybe gone a bit foolish under the horrors of those years. Unthinking admirers of Brown, or perhaps not even that, perhaps just brewing their own syncretism because the: thought a religion was needed, and using Brown's name--why? Because it was easy to remember? They probably felt some pride of creation in the job; possibly belief even grew in their own minds as they found the children accepting it and building a ritual life around it.

It was impossible, Brian thought, that Jonas and Abigail could have met the living Abraham Brown. Brown accepted mysteries because he faced the limitations of human intelligence; he had only contempt for the needless making of mysteries. He was without arrogance. No one could have talked five minutes with him without hearing a tranquil: "I don't know."

The wheel at Nuber?--but Brian realized he would never learn how Brown actually died. I hope you suffered no more than most prophets. . . .

He was pulled from the pit of abstraction by the girl's awed question: "What is that?"

She was pointing to the clay image in its dusty sunlight. Brian was almost deaf to his own words until they were past recovering: "Oh, that--that is very old. Very old and very sacred." She nodded, round-eyed, and stepped back a pace or two. "And that was all they taught you of Abraham Brown?"

Astonished, the boy asked: "Is it not enough?" There is always the Project.

"Why, perhaps--"

"We know all the prayers, Old Man."

"Yes, yes, I'm sure you do."

"The Old Man will come with us." It was not a question.

"Eh?" There is always the Project. . . . "Come with you?"

"We look for old ones." There was a new note in the young man's fine firm voice, and it was impatience. "We traveled many days, up across the sun-path. We want you to speak the Abraham-words for marriage. The old ones said we must not mate as the animals do without the words. We want--"

"Marry, of course," Brian grumbled. Poor old Jonas and Abigail, faithful to your century, such as it was! Brian felt tired and confused, and rubbed a great long-fingered hand across his face so that the words might have come out blurred and dull. "Naturally, kids. Beget. Replenish the earth. I'm damned tired. I don't know any special hocus-pocus--I mean, any Abraham words--for marriage. Just go ahead and breed. Try again--"

"But the Old Ones said--"

"Wait!" Brian cried. "Wait! Let me think. . . . Did he--he who told you to call him Jonas--did he teach you anything about the world as it was in the old days, before you were born?"

"Before--the Old Man makes fun of us."

"No, no." Since he now had to fight down a certain physical fear as well as confusion, Brian spoke more harshly than he intended: "Answer my question! What do you know of the old days? I was a young man once, do you understand that?--as young as you. What do you know about the world I lived in?"

The young man laughed. There was new-born suspicion in him as well as anger, stiffening his shoulders, narrowing his innocent gray eyes. "There was always the world," he said, "ever since God made it a thousand years ago."

"Was there? ... I was a musician. Do you know what a musician is?"

The young man shook his head lightly, watching Brian, too alertly, watching his hands, aware of him in a new way, no longer humble. Paula sensed the tension and did not like it. She said worriedly, politely: "We forget some of the things they taught us, sa. They were Old Ones. Most of the days they were away from us in places where we were not to go, praying. Old Ones are always praying."

"I will hear this Old Man pray," said Jonason. The butt of the javelin rested against Jonason's foot, the blade swaying from side to side, a waiting snake's head. A misstep, a wrong word--any trifle, Brian knew, could make them decide he was evil and not sacred. Their religion would inevitably require a devil.

He thought also: It would merely be one of the ways of dying, not the worst.

"You shall hear me make music," he said sternly, "and you shall be content with that. Come this way!" In fluctuating despair, he was wondering if any good might come of anger. "Come this way! You shall hear a world you never knew." Naked and ugly, he stalked across the Hall of Music, not looking behind him, though he sensed every glint of light from that bread-knife javelin. "This way!" he shouted. "Come in here!" He flung open the door of the auditorium and strode up on the platform. "Sit down!" he, roared at them. "Sit down over there and be quiet, be quiet!"

He thought they did--he could not look at them. He knew he was muttering between his noisy outbursts as he twitched the cover off the piano and raised the lid, muttering bits and fragments from the old times and the new: "They went thataway. . . . Oh, Mr. Van Anda, it just simply goes right through me--I can't express it. Madam, such was my intention, or as Brahms is supposed to have said on a slightly different subject, any ass knows that. . . . Brio, Rubato, and Schmalz went to sea in a--Jonason, Paula, this is a pianoforte; it will not hurt you. Sit there, be quiet, and I pray you listen. . . ."

He found calm. Now, if ever, when there is living proof that human nature, some sort of human nature, is continuing--now if ever, the Project--

With the sudden authority that was natural to Andrew Carr, Andrew Carr took over. In the stupendous opening chords of the introduction, Brian very nearly forgot his audience. Not quite. The children had sat down out there in the dusty region where none but ghosts had lingered for twenty-five years, but the piano's first sound brought them to their feet. Brian played through the first four bars, piling the chords like mountains, then held the last one with the pedal and waved his right hand at Jonason and Paula in a furious downward motion.

He thought they understood. He thought he saw them sit down again. But he could pay them no more attention, for the sonata was coming alive under his fingers, waking, growing, rejoicing.

He did not forget the children. They were important, too important, terrifying at the fringe of awareness. But he could not look toward them any more, and presently he shut his eyes.

He had never played like this in the flood of his prime, in the old days, before audiences that loved him. Never.

His eyes were still closed, holding him secure in a world that was not all darkness, when he ended the first movement, paused very briefly, and moved on with complete assurance to explore the depth and height of the second. This was true statement. This was Andrew Carr; he lived, even if after this late morning he might never live again.

And now the third, the storm and the wrath, the interludes of calm, the anger, denials, affirmations. . . . Without hesitation, without awareness of self, of age or pain or danger or loss, Brian was entering on the broad reaches of the last movement when he glanced out into the autitorium and understood the children were gone.

Too big. It had frightened them away. He could visualize them, stealing out with backward looks of panic, and remembering apparently to close the exit door. To them it was incomprehensible thunder. Children--savages--to see or hear or comprehend the beautiful, you must first desire it. He could not think much about them now, when Andrew Carr was still with him. He played on with the same assurance, the same sense of victory. Children and savages, so let them go, with leave and goodwill.

Some external sound troubled him, something that must have begun under cover of these rising, pealing octave passages--storm waves, each higher than the last, until even the superhuman swimmer must be exhausted. It was some indefinable alien noise, a humming. Wind perhaps. Brian shook his head in irritation, not interrupting the work of his hands. It couldn't matter--everything was here, in the labors his hands still had to perform. The waves were growing more quiet, subsiding, and he must play the curious arpeggios he had never quite understood--but for this interpretation he understood them. Rip them out of the piano like showers of sparks, like distant lightning moving farther and farther away across a world that could never be at rest.

The final section at last. Why, it was a variation--and why had he never quite recognized it?--on a theme of Brahms, from the German Requiem. Quite plain, simple--Brahms would have approved. Blessed are the dead. . . . Something more remained to be said, and Brian searched for it through the mighty unfolding of the finale. No hurrying, no crashing impatience any more, but a moving through time without fear of time, through radiance and darkness with no fear of either. That they may rest from their labors, and their works do follow after them.

Brian stood up, swaying and out of breath. So the music was over, and the children were gone, but a jangling, humming confusion was filling the Hall of Music out there--hardly a wind--distant but entering with some violence even here, now that the piano was silent. He moved stiffly out of the small auditorium, more or less knowing what he would find.

The noise became immense, the unchecked overtones of the marimba fuming and quivering as the smooth, high ceiling of the Hall of Music caught them and flung them about against the answering strings of pianos and harps and violins, the sulky membranes of drums, the nervous brass of cymbals.

The girl was playing it. Brian laughed once, softly, in the shadows, and was not heard. She had hit on a primeval rhythm natural for children or savages and needed nothing else, banging it out on one stone and another, wanting no rest or variation.

The boy was dancing, slapping his feet and pounding his chest, thrusting out his javelin in time to the clamor, edging up to his companion, grimacing, drawing back in order to return. Neither one was laughing, or close to laughter. Their faces were savage-solemn, grim with the excitement and healthy lust. All as spontaneous as the drumming of partridges. It was a long time before they saw Brian in the shadows.

Reaction was swift. The girl dropped the hammer. The boy froze, his javelin raised, then jerked his head at Paula, who snatched at something--only moments later did Brian understand she had taken the clay image before she fled.

Jonason covered her retreat, stepping backward, his face blank and dangerous with fear. So swiftly, so easily, by grace of great civilized music and a few wrong words, had a sacred Old One become a Bad Old One.

They were gone, down the stairway, leaving the echo of Brian's voice crying: "Don't go! Please don't go!"

Brian followed them. Unwillingly. He was slow to reach the bottom of the stairway; there he looked across the shut-in water to his raft, which they had used and left at the windowsill port. Brian had never been a good swimmer, and would not attempt it now, but clutched the rope and hitched himself hand over hand to the windowsill, collapsing awhile until he found strength to scramble into his canoe and grope for the paddle.

The children's canoe was already far off. Heading up the river, the boy paddling with deep powerful strokes. Up the river, of course. They had to find the right kind of Old Ones. Up across the sun-path.

Brian dug his blade in the quiet water. For a time his rugged, ancient muscles were willing. There was sap in them yet. Perhaps he was gaining. He shouted hugely: "Bring back my two-faced god! And what about my music? You? Did you like it? Speak up!"

They must have heard his voice booming at them. At least the girl looked back, once. The boy, intent on his paddling, did not. Brian roared: "Bring back my little god!"

He was not gaining on them. After all they had a mission. They had to find an Old One with the right Abraham-words. Brian thought: Damn it, hasn't MY world some rights? We'll see about this!

He lifted his paddle like a spear, and flung it, knowing even as his shoulder winced with the backlash of the thrust that his action was at the outer limit o absurdity. The children were so far away that even an arrow from a bow might not have reached them. The paddle splashed in the water. Not far away. A small infinity.

It swung about, adjusting to the current, the heavy end pointing downstream, obeying the river and the ebb tide. It nuzzled companionably against a gray-faced chunk of driftwood, diverting it, so that presently the chunk floated into Brian's reach. He flung it back toward the paddle, hoping it might fall on the other side and send the paddle near him, but it fell short. In his unexpectedly painless extremity Brian was not surprised, but merely watched the gray face floating and bobbing along beside him out of reach, and his irritation became partly friendliness. The driftwood fragment suggested the face of a music critic he had once met--New Boston, was it? Denver? London? --no matter.

"Why," he said aloud, detachedly observing the passage of his canoe beyond the broad morning shadow of the Museum, "why, I seem to have killed myself."

"Mr. Van Anda has abundantly demonstrated a mastery of the instrument and of the"--Oh, go play solfeggio on your linotype!--"literature of both classic and contemporary repertory. While we cannot endorse the perhaps overemotional quality of his Bach, and there might easily be two views of his handling of the passage in double thirds which--"

"I can't swim it, you know," said Brian. "Not against the ebb, that's for sure."

"--so that on the whole one feels he has earned himself a not discreditable place among--" Gaining on the canoe, passing it, the gray-faced chip moved on benignly twittering toward the open sea, where the canoe must follow. With a final remnant of strength Brian inched forward to the bow and gathered the full force of his lungs to shout up the river to the children: "Go in peace!"

They could not have heard him. They were too far away, and a new morning wind was blowing, fresh and sweet, out of the northwest.

All the stories in this book acknowledge, in one way or another, that creation is essentially a lonely trade and is likely to remain so. Mr. Silverberg's, like THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL, deals with a possible variant of the Macdowell Colony--but, more importantly, with the uses and abuses of the Ivory Tower. This story was revised by the author especially for this collection.

A MAN OF TALENT

by

Robert Silverberg

There was a scrap of a clipping that Emil Vilai carried about with him, a review of his first and onl3 volume of poetry. Now, on this new world, he drew it out and read it for the ten-thousandth time. It was yellow with age, and the print was blurred, but that hardly mattered; the words were graven deep in Emi Vilar's memory.

We welcome Emil Vilar both for his technical gifts and his breadth of understanding. He speaks with the authentic poetic voice. His book, certainly the most promising debut volume in many years, perhaps heralds the arrival of a major poet. Yet it must be doubted that Mr. Vilar will have the opportunity to fulfill this promise, working as he must in a world where such art as his is doomed to be stillborn. With the audience for poetry of any quality already nearly extinct, how can an Emil Vilar sustain and develop his talent?

Vilar had reddened with shame when that review appeared. He had known, inwardly, that it was the truth, that he had the stuff of a major poet within him, but he neither dared to take that resonant label upon himself nor welcomed another's saying it. But it had not mattered much. With or without the burden of that reputation, he had failed to find his following. It was not an age of poetry but of verse: the occasional ode, the snappy quatrain, the glorified limerick. The craft of poetry was nearly dead, the poet's function distorted. Practical matters, the immediately useful thing--they had triumphed on Earth. It was no century for the artist. A crowded, harried world could not afford such luxuries.

He had tried. For twenty years after, he had continued to write and to try. And finally he had admitted the truth of what the anonymous reviewer had said --and he had left Earth forever.

He looked up from the clipping at the landscape of his new world. He had selected it at random, from the thick volume of catalogued worlds in the library. Which world it was did not matter to him. All that mattered was that it was not Earth.

"Rigel Seven," he said aloud. The words were strange in his mouth, and he savored the interplay of the not-quite-assonant vowels of the two mild trochees that named his new home.

He was faintly disappointed, now that he was here, that he had picked a Terraformed planet. His motives had been clear enough at the start: He wanted a world as much like and as far from Earth as possible, where he could work in peace, unknown and undisturbed--where people would not plague him with their well-meant misinterpretations of his work, sting him with accusations of ivory-towerisin or artistic irresponsibility, or call him any of the other names they had called him because he insisted on writing his poetry for himself and himself alone.

Earth didn't understand. Earth wanted him to be a rhymer, not a poet--and so Emil Vilar had quietly removed himself from the Terran scene. He had chosen a Terraformed planet as his new home. But as he looked at the gently sloping green hills and the familiar-seeming puffs of white fleece in the soft blue sky, he realized he had made one of his rare mistakes. How much richer his imagination would have been, he thought sadly, had he selected an Alienform world--one which had not yet been converted into a carbon copy of the mother planet. Here he had the same sky and the same clouds as on Earth; only the Sun was different, a hard, distant dot of incalculably ferocious intensity.

Well, he was here, and here he would stay. Carefully he folded his clipping and slid it into his wallet. Rigel Seven was as good a place as any, and any would be better than Earth.

The robot in the Earthside routing office had told him, with a smirk on its mirrored face, that he was the first emigrant to Rigel Seven in over five hundred years. That had been all right, too.

The planet had been settled eight hundred years earlier by sixteen wealthy Terran families, who had purchased it jointly as a private estate. The conditions of the sale, of course, had been that the planet remain open to all comers for emigration, but that was a safe risk. The sky was full of stars, and each had its cluster of worlds; who would cross five hundred light-years to settle on Rigel Seven, when Sirius and Vega and Procyon and the Centauri stars beckoned just a few light-years from Earth?

Who but Emil Vilar, fleeing quietly from the world that would never understand him?

He had saved, in his fifty years, some five thousand dollars. That had nearly covered the transit fee. The rest had been supplied by his friends.

There had been six of them, men with faith in Emil Vilar. They had fought his going, but when they saw he was determined to go, they helped him. They contributed the needed thousand to see him through the journey, and they established a trust fund that would provide a monthly remittance for him for the rest of his life.

He took a deep breath. Rigel Seven was Terraformed, but they had left out the stink of Earth's air and the filth of her cities. The air was fresh and clear here. He smiled at the sight of his shadow, stretched mightily ahead of him over the grass.

For the first time in his memory, he felt happy.

The Rigel Seven spaceport was at the edge of a broad field that swept up the side of the hill in the distance like a green carpet. Farther back, on the hill, Vilar could see the shimmering paleness of a domed house. Someone was coming down the brown, winding path that led from the hill to the field.

He hefted his small suitcase and started to walk forward rapidly. The man met him in the middle of the field. He was tall and bronzed, shirtless, with long, rippling muscles lying flat and firm on his arms and chest. Vilar felt suddenly ashamed of his own dumpy body.

"You're the emigrant, aren't you?"

"I am Emil. Vilar. The ship has just left me here."

"I know," the tall man said, grinning affably. "We saw it come down. It was quite a novelty for us. We don't get much traffic here, you know."

"I can imagine," Vilar said quietly. "Well, I shan't bother you much. I keep to myself most of the time."

"We have a place all ready for you. My name's Carpenter, by the way--Melbourne Hadley Carpenter. Come, I'll show you to your shack, and then you can come visit us later. We'll tell you how things work here."

"Work? But--I do not plan to participate in any communal activ--"

He paused, frowning, and shook his head gently. This was no time to spout a declaration of principles. "Never mind," he said. "Show me where I stay."

Carpenter led him back up the path to the foot of the hill, where there was a small shack looking upward at the great domed house.

"This is ideal," said Vilar. It was just what he had envisioned when he had made arrangements to live here.

"See you later," Carpenter told him, waved cheerily, and left. Vilar put a hand on the door-opener, broke the photonic circuit, and stepped in.

One bookcase, one bed, one closet, one dresser. Ideal.

Vilar unpacked his single suitcase rapidly. It had been no struggle for him to break away from his Earthly possessions; he had been able to bring everything he owned and still make the fifty-pound mass limit of the subspace liner with ease.

First came the books, just eight of them. There was the slim blue-bound copy of Poems, by Emil Vilar (London 2743, 61 pp) After that, Pound's Cantos, the complete hundred and forty. Next came the King James Bible, Swann's Way, the complete Yeats, Davis's On Historical Analysis (both volumes in one), the plays of Cyril Toumeur, and the Greek Anthology. These were all Vilar had kept from a lifetime of reading, and he had added the most recent--the single volume of Proust--sixteen years before. Now he considered his library closed.

His meager wardrobe followed, and he arrayed it in the closet and dresser with customary methodical precision. After that his linens and other household goods. Next the thin file envelope containing his poetic output since the 2743 volume. It was all unpublished, and the world had seen little of it.

Those works which had somehow passed muster and been shown to a few friends--those poems Vilar now regarded as tainted, though he kept them. Each seemed stained by the muddleheaded criticism it had inspired.

"A wonderful thing, Emil--but isn't it a shade too long?"

"Marvelous imagery, Emil. But when you bring in Dido, I think you're reaching too far for effect--" "Splendid, but--"

"Magnificent, but--"

"Why all these tensions, Vilar? Why not relax the texture a trifle? If you had only--"

"Am I being too blunt in saying that I feel your work lately has been tending toward a dead end, a geometrical stasis that can only damage your standing? The failure of sensibility--"

He had listened patiently to each of them, digested their often conflicting critical views with dignity, and, finally, turned his back on the lot of them. They were chatterers. They made knowing noises. but what they

really wanted to tell him was that his lines did not jingle enough. Retreating to Rigel Seven was the easiest solution. There had been no other way. Had he remained on Earth, he would have spent the rest of his days unchangingly, plagued by the cultists, the center of a tiny, well-meaning circle of admirers who longed to share his gift, though they had no notion of the anguish they brought to its possessor. Better to be ignored, as he was by most of the world, than to have such a claque. So he had gone away.

He continued unpacking. He drew out two reams of paper: all he would need for the rest of his life. His pen. His notebook. He looked around. Everything was as it should be. The room was complete.

Vilar sat down at his desk and reached for a book. His hand lingered momentarily over his own little volume, quivered a bit, and moved on. He drew forth Yeats, then reconsidered and put him back. Fugitive lines from Eliot, whom he had long since memorized and so had not needed to bring with him, flickered through his mind:

.. Gull against the wind,

in the windy straits

Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,

White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,

And an old man driven by the Trades

To a sleepy corner.

Tenants of the house,

Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

He worked, for most of that night, on a free fantasy based on the opening lines of The Revenger's Tragedy. Toward dawn, he rose, tore up the sheet, and blotted what he had written from his mind. He went outside on his tiny porch to watch the strange sun creep above the horizon of Rigel Seven. At this distance, bloated Rigel looked far smaller than Sol--but the savage blaze of its hot blue-white light betrayed the alien star's true power.

Shortly after sunrise, Melbourne Hadley Carpenter returned.

"Have a good night?"

Vilar, rumpled-looking and red-eyed, nodded. "Excellent."

"Glad to hear it. Suppose you come up to the house now. My father's waiting to meet you, and so are all the others."

Vilar frowned suspiciously. "Why do they want to meet me?"

"Oh, just curiosity, I guess. You're the only one here who's not one of the Families, you know."

"I know," Vilar said, relieved. "You're sure you've never heard of me then?"

Carpenter shrugged. "How would we ever hear of you? We're completely out of touch with things, you know."

"True." One major worry was thereby avoided--he would be a complete stranger here, as he had hoped. A fresh start would be possible. The old man's brain was not dry; here in this sleepy corner, he could scale the greatest heights without attracting the clumsy attention that was so fatal to artistic endeavor.

He followed the tall young man up the hill and into the domed house. The lines of the building were clear and simple; in his amateur's way, Vilar approved of the architecture wholeheartedly. It had none of the falseness of Earth's current pseudo-archaism.

In the spacious central hall, an immense table had been set, and at least fifty people sat around it. A tall man looking much like Melbourne Hadley Carpenter, but much older, with iron-gray hair and faintly stooping shoulders, rose from his seat at the head of the table.

"You're Emil Vilar," he said ringingly. "We're very happy to see you. I'm Theodore Hadley Carpenter, and this is my family."

Awed, Vilar nodded hesitantly. With a sweeping gesture of his hand, Theodore Hadley Carpenter indicated six almost identical younger men sitting to his right.

"My sons," he said.

Farther down the table were still younger men--this was the generation of Melbourne Hadley Carpenter, Vilar decided. "My grandsons," the patriarch said, confirming this.

"You have a very fine family, Mr. Carpenter," Vilar said.

"One of the best, sir," Carpenter replied blandly. "Will you join us now for breakfast? We can talk afterward."

Vilar had no objections, and took a vacant seat at the table. Breakfast proceeded--served, he noted, by pretty young girls who were probably Carpenter's granddaughters. There were no outsiders on this planet, no servants, no one who was not part of a Family.

Except me, he thought with wry amusement. Always the outsider.

Breakfast had been as efficiently Terraformed as the planet itself. Bacon and eggs, warm rolls, coffee--why, it was ludicrous to travel--what was it, five hundred and forty-five light years, untold trillions of miles?--and have warm rolls and coffee for breakfast. But people tend to cling, Vilar thought. What was the entire Terra-forming project but a mighty whimper, a galaxy-shaking yawp of puny defiance (barbaric yawp, his well-stocked mind footnoted automatically)? Man was progressively carving the worlds of space into the image of Earth, and eating rolls for breakfast.

Vilar considered the thought. Later, he knew, it would emerge concealed in the webwork of one of his poems, and still later he would see it there, and destroy the poem as a silly timebound polemic.

He sat back in his chair when he had finished eating. The table was cleared. Then, to his astonishment, old Carpenter clapped his hands and one of his look-alike sons fetched a musical instrument. It was stringed, the strings stretched tight over a graven sounding board. A dulcimer, Vilar thought in wonderment as the patriarch began to play, striking the strings with two carved ivory sticks.

The melody was a strange and complex one; the poet, who had a sound but far from detailed knowledge of musical theory, listened carefully. The short piece ended plaintively in the minor, coming to an abrupt halt with three descending thirds.

"My own composition," the old man said, in the silence that followed. "It's sometimes hard to get used to our music at first, but--"

"I thought it was fine," Vilar said shortly. He was anxious to finish this meal and return to work, and hoped there would be no further talk or performing. He rose from his chair.

"Leaving so soon?" the old man asked. "Why, we haven't even talked."

"Talked? About what?"

Carpenter knotted his fingers together. "About your contribution to our group, of course. We can't happily let you stay with us and eat our food if you're not going to offer us anything, stranger. Come now--what do you do?"

"I'm a poet," Vilar said uneasily.

The old man chuckled. "A poet? Indeed, yes--but what do you do?"

"I don't understand you. If you mean what is my trade, I have none. I'm merely a poet."

"Grandfather means can you do anything else," whispered one of the younger Carpenters near him. "Of course, you're a poet--who ever said you wouldn't be?"

Vilar shook his head. "Nothing but a poet." It sounded like an indictment, self-spoken.

"We had hoped you were a medical man, or a bookbinder, or perhaps a blacksmith. Coming from Earth, as you were--who would have expected a poet? Why, we have poets aplenty here! Of all things for Earth to give us!"

Emil Vilar moistened his lips and fidgeted nervously. "I'm sorry to disappoint you," he said weakly, turning up the palms of his hands. "Terribly sorry."

The joke was on them, he thought later that morning. No wonder they had been so anxious to have him come. To them, Earth meant something rugged and harsh, strange and jagged. They had hoped to have the smooth rhythm of their life disrupted by the man from Earth.

Yes, the joke's on them, he decided. Instead of a blacksmith, they got Earth's last poet, her one and only poet. And Rigel Seven had plenty of those.

Emil Vilar looked up from his seat in the arboretum outside of the domed house. One of the tall grandsons --was it Melbourne Hadley Carpenter, or Theodore Hadley III, or one of the others?--stood near him.

"Grandfather would like to know if you would come inside now, Emil Vilar. He would like to see you alone."

"Very well," Vilar said. He rose and followed the tall young man inside and up the stairs to a richly paneled room in which sat the eldest of the Carpenter clan.

"Come in, please," the old man said gently.

Vilar took the seat offered him and waited tensely for old Carpenter to speak. At close range, he could see that the old man was ancient, but well-preserved even at a probable age of a hundred and fifty.

"You say you're a poet," Carpenter said, hitting the plosive sound fiercely. "Would you mind reading this, and giving me your honest opinion of it?"

Vilar took the proffered sheet of paper, as he had taken so many other amateur poetic attempts back on Earth, and read the poem very carefully. It was a villanelle, smoothly accomplished except for a slip in scansion in the third line of the quatrain. It was also shallow and completely lacking in poetic vision. For once, Vilar determined to be absolutely unsparing in his criticism.

"A pretty exercise," he said casually. "Neatly hauled, except for this blunder in the next line to last." He indicated the blemish, and added, "Other than that, the work's totally devoid of value. It doesn't even have the virture of being entertaining; its emptiness is merely offensive. Have I made myself clear?"

"You have," Carpenter said stiffly. "The verses were mine."

"You asked for honest criticism," Vilar reminded him.

"So I did--and I received it, perhaps. What of those paintings on the wall?"

They were abstracts, strikingly handled, in the neoindustrialist manner. "I'm not a painter, you realize," Vilar said haltingly. "But I'd say they were excellent--quite good, certainly."

"Those are mine, too," Carpenter said.

Vilar blinked in surprise. "You're very versatile, Mr. Carpenter. Musician, composer, poet, painter--you hold all the arts at your command."

"Nothing unusual about it," Carpenter said. "Customary. A tenet of our society since the first settlers came here. Art's part of life, like breathing. We make no fuss about it. A man's got to have certain skills if he's to call himself civilized, and we develop them. Why set a few men aside as artists and canonize them? We've never let ourselves be mere spectators. We pride ourselves on our artistic ability--every last one of us. We are all poets, Mr. Vilar. We all paint, we all play instruments, we all compose. And we regard it as unremarkable to do so."

"Whereas I'm limited to my one paltry art, is that it? I'm merely a poet?"

A sudden feeling of inferiority swept over him for the first time in ages. He had felt humble before--humble before Milton or Aeschylus, before Yeats or Shakespeare, as he struggled to equal their accomplishments, or even approach them. But there was a shade of difference between humility and inferiority. What he felt now was inadequacy, not merely as a poet, but as a person. For a man as self-assured as Vilar, it was a painful thing.

He looked up at old Carpenter.

"Will you excuse me?" he said, his voice strangely harsh and edgy.

Alone, in his shack, he stared at the sheet of paper regretfully, and read the lines he had written:

Slippery shadows of daylight stand

Between each man and himself; each cries out,

But--

That was where they ended. He had just composed them--or so he had thought, at the moment. Now, five minutes later, he recognized them for what they were: lines from a poem he had composed in his youth and rightfully burned for the adolescent twaddle it was.

Where was his technique, his vaunted vowel sense, his intricate rhythms, and subtle verbal conflicts? He looked sadly at the clumsy nonsense his fear-numbed brain had dictated, and swept the sheet contemptuously to the floor.

Have I lost the gift?

It was a cold, soul-withering question, but it was followed hastily by another even more deadly: Did I ever have the gift?

But that was an easily answered question. There was the slim blue-bound volume, right over here--The book was gone.

He stared at the quarter of an inch left vacant in the bookcase for a moment. The book had been taken. One of the Carpenters was evidently curious about his poetry.

Well, never mind, he thought. I still carry the poems with me.

To prove it, he recited The Apples of Idun, one of the longest, and, to his mind, the best. When he was finished, his old confidence had returned. His gift had been no illusion.

But neither was the Carpenter family. And he could no longer stay here in their presence.

Dejectedly, he recalled the performance of the patriarch: With astonishing versatility, the old man flitted from one art form to the next--as did the others. There wasn't a man in the family who couldn't turn a verse, set his own song to music, perform the piece on one of a dozen instruments, and render a nonobjective interpretation of it in oils, to boot. Beside formidable talent of this sort, Vilar felt his own paltry gift fade into insignificance. Art was as natural to these people as breathing. They had been bred to it; no one wore the label "artist" on Rigel Seven, no specialist lurked in his private nook or category.

And Emil Vilar was aware that there was no place for him in a world of this sort. His talent was too ephemeral to survive among these genial philistines--for philistines they were, despite or perhaps because of their great range of abilities. They had no awareness that art was a sacred rite. To them it was an amusement, a pastime for gentlemen. Whatever they did, they did well, for they were trained toward excellence, but it was all on the same level of affable skilled amateurism. That was to be admired, certainly, more than the crude boorishness of Earth, but such an environment was also fatal to the real poetic fire.

These people were omniartistic--and omnivorous, too. They would devour Emil Vilar.

He took his suitcase from the closet and calmly began to pack. Returning to Earth was out of the question, but he would go somewhere, somewhere where life was more complex and art more highly valued.

"Why are you packing?" a resonant voice asked.

Vilar whirled. It was old Carpenter, standing in the doorway. "I've decided to go. That's reason enough."

Carpenter smiled pleasantly. "Go? Where could you go? Back to Earth?"

"No--but anywhere away from here."

"You'll find the other fifteen Families much the same," the old man said. "Take my advice; stay here. We like you, Vilar. We don't want to lose you so soon."

Vilar was silent and motionless for a while. Then, without saying a word, he resumed packing.

Carpenter crossed the cabin quickly and put his hand on Vilar's arm. The old man's grip was surprisingly strong.

"Please," he said urgently. "Don't go."

Vilar loosened the grip and stepped away. "I can't stay here. I have to leave."

"But why?"

"Because you're driving me crazy!" Vilar shouted suddenly. It was the first time he had lost his temper in more than thirty years.

Quivering, he turned toward the older man. "You paint, you sing, you write, you compose. You do everything! And what of me? I'm a poet, nothing more. A mere poet. In this world that's like being a man with only one arm--someone to be pitied."

"But--"

"Let me finish," Vilar said. "Let me pass this information along to you: You're not artists, any one of you. You're artists-manque, would-be artists, not-quite artists.

"Art's an ennobling thing--a gift, a talent. If everyone's talented, no talent exists. When gold lines the street, it's worth no more than dross. And so you people who are so proud of yourselves for many talents--why, you have none at all. Only skills."

Carpenter seemed to ignore Vilar's tirade. "Is that why you're leaving?" he asked.

"I'm--I'm--" Vilar paused, confused. "I'm leaving because I want to leave. Because I'm a real artist, and I know I am. I don't want to be polluted by the pretended art I see here. I have something real and wonderful, and I don't want to lose it. And I will lose it here."

"How wrong you are," Carpenter said. "In just that last, I mean. You do have a gift--and we need it. We want you to stay. Will you?"

"But you said this morning that I couldn't stay, not unless I brought something new to this place. And I haven't. What good is one more poet in a town full of them? Even," he added belligerently, "if that poet's worth all the rest in one?"

"You misunderstand," Carpenter said. "True, we need no more poets. But we need you. Vilar, we need an audience!"

Suddenly Emil Vilar understood. The joke was on him, after all. He had failed to see the real texture of life here, just as he had failed all these years to see his own role in human society. These people needed him, all right; what kind of army was it that had a thousand generals and no foot soldiers?

He started to laugh, slowly at first, then in violent upheaving gasps that brought tears to his eyes. After nearly a minute he grew silent again.

It was ideal, after all. So far as they were concerned, he had but a single talent: that of being an audience. Very well. They had no understanding of high art, and to them he was pitiful, useful only because of his limits. Good. Let them think that. Privately, he knew he was a poet, not an audience. But one had to pay a price in services rendered, in order to be a poet for one's self alone.

"I see," he said softly. "Very well, then. I'll be your audience."

He saw how the days to come would be. His value to them would be as a nonpainter, a noncomposer, an onlooker and critic. His private poetic endeavors would seem beneath contempt to them. Which was as he wanted it. The real artist was always alone, whether on Rigel Seven or in the midst of Earth's most teeming city. The audience might find him, but he must not fret about finding the audience. On Earth he had found no audience at first, and that had been all right, really; only when he had acquired the wrong kind of audience, a falsely knowing one, had he decided it was time to flee. A mistake, for the solace he sought was not to be had anywhere. Now he had come to a place that would neither reject him as a person nor meddle in his art, and he saw the conclusion that had escaped him before. It was senseless to flee again. He would be misunderstood anywhere; he saw now that it had always been pointless to go on from place to place in quest of the true environment of art. That environment was a myth, unattainable, unreal. Or, rather, that environment was within him, wherever he was. The wise thing was to hold his ground, play some useful role in society, and privately practice his art.

Alone among these gifted but complicated people, he could work out his artistic destiny on this strange and familiar planet without fear of the watchers. The Carpenters, that closed family group, hungered for spectators, for the love and appreciation of outsiders who would admire them for their attainments. Vilar did not need that.

"By the way," the old man said, smiling guiltily, "while you were in the park this morning, I took the liberty of borrowing this." He reached inside his jacket and drew forth Vilar's collected poems.

"Oh? What did you think of them?" Vilar asked. The patriarch frowned, fidgeted, coughed. "Ah--" "An honest opinion," Vilar said. "As I gave this morning."

"Well, to be frank--two of my sons looked at them with me. And none of us could see any meaning or value in the lot, Vilar. I don't know where you got the idea you had any talent for poetry. You really don't, you know."

"I've often suspected that myself," Vilar said happily. He took the book and fondled it with satisfaction. Already he was envisioning a second volume--a volume that would appear in an edition of one, for his eyes alone.

Table of Contents

Preface

Isaac Asimov: DREAMING IS A PRIVATE THING

James Blish: A WORK OF ART

James Blish: THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

Harry Harrison: PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

Damon Knight: THE COUNTRY OF THE KIND

C. M. Kornbluth: WITH THESE HANDS

Edgar Pangborn: A MASTER OF BABYLON

Robert Silverberg: A MAN OF TALENT