A review which is still extant stated: “It is not possible that a composition of such a high level of organization should be the first to proceed from a composer—or from an entire planet. Yet we must recognize the merit and worth of Tik’s Concerto, and applaud the force of the composer, in a higher degree than usual.”
Even more amazing than the foregoing was the speed with which Tik’s compositions followed one another. The Concerto was followed by a sonata, Tik’s Tosk, his/her Free-Fall Ballet for Centipedals, Lights! Action! Comrades!, a symphony, an Imbroglio for Unstrung Violin, and fourteen Wolfish Rhapsodies—all within the year!
Scholars visited Wolf XVI, and reported once again that there was no musical history on the planet.
Success, fame and money were Tik’s. Succeeding compositions were received with an amount of enthusiasm that would have done credit to any musician.
And Wolf XVI seemed to awaken at his/her touch. Within ten years, there was a school of composition established there, and works of astounding complexity and beauty came pouring forth. The “great flowering,” as it was called, seemed to inspire other planets as well—to name only a few, Dog XII, Goldstone IX and Trent II (whose inhabitants, dwelling underwater for the most part, had never had anything like a musical history).
Tik’s own income began to go down as the process continued. Then the astonishing truth was discovered.
Tik was not a composer at all—merely an electronics technician! He/she had recorded the sounds of the planet’s main downtown business center and slowed the recording to half-speed. Since the inhabitants of Wolf XVI converse in batlike squeals, this slowing resulted in a series of patterns which fell within sonic range, and which had all of the scope and the complexity of music itself.
The other planets had copied the trick and soon the Galaxy was glutted with this electronic “music.” The climax came when a judge on Paolo III aided in the recording of a court trial over which he presided. During the two weeks of subsonic testimony, speech and bustle, he supervised recording apparatus and, in fact, announced that he had performed the actual “arrangement” involved: speeding up the recordings so that the two-week subsonic trial became a half-hour fantasia.
The judge lost the subsequent election and irrationally placed the blame on the recording (which had not been well-received by the critics). Single-handed, he restored the state of pure music by pushing through the Galactic Assembly a censorship rule requiring that all recording companies, musicians, technicians and composers be limited to the normal sonic range of the planet on which they were working.
Tik himself, after the passage of this law, eked out a bare living as a translator from the supersonic. He died, alone and friendless, in 9501.
JUNE 4: The composition, on this date, in 8236, of Wladislaw Wladislaw’s Concertino for Enclosed Harp stirs reflections in musical minds of the inventor and first virtuoso on this instrument, the ingenious Barsak Gh. Therwent of Canopus XII. Nowadays, with compositions for that instrument as common as the chadlas of Gh. Therwent’s home planet, we are likely to pass over the startling and almost accidental circumstance that led to his marvelous discovery.
As a small boy, Gh. Therwent was enamored of music and musicians; he played the gleep-flute before the age of eight and, using his hair-thin minor arms, was an accomplished performer on the Irish (or small open) harp in his fifteenth year. A tendency to confuse the strings of the harp with his own digital extremities, however, seemed serious enough to rule out a concert career for the young flalk, and when an Earth-made piano was delivered to the home of a neighbor who fancied himself a collector of baroque instruments, young Gh. was among the first to attempt playing on it.
Unfortunately, he could not muster pressure sufficient in his secondary arms and digits to depress the keys; more, he kept slipping between them. It was one such slip that led to his discovery of the enclosed strings at the back of the piano (a spinet).
The subtle sonorities of plucked strings at the back of a closed chamber excited him, and he continued research into the instrument in a somewhat more organized manner. Soon he was able to give a concert of music which he himself had arranged—and when Wladislaw Wladislaw dedicated his composition to Gh., the performer’s future was assured.
The rest of his triumphant story is too well known to repeat here. The single observation on Gh. Therwent’s playing, however, by the composer Ratling, is perhaps worthy of note.
“He don’t play on the white keys, and he don’t play on the black keys,” said Ratling, with that cultivated lack of grammar which made him famous as an eccentric. “He plays in the cracks!”
JULY 23: On this date, the Hrrshtk Notes were discovered in a welf-shop cellar on Deneb III.
These notes are, quite certainly, alone in their originality, and in the force which they have had on the growth of subsequent musicians.
To begin at the beginning: it is well established that Ludwig Hrrshtk, perhaps the most widely known Denebian composer, died of overwork in his prime. His compositions, until the famous T85 discoveries of G’g Rash, were almost alone in their universal appeal. Races the Galaxy over have thrilled to Hrrshtk’s Second Symphony, his Concerto for Old Men, and the inspiring Classic Mambo Suite. It is, as a matter of fact, said that G’g Rash himself was led to his discovery by considering the question:
“How can many different races, experiencing totally different emotions in totally different ways, agree on the importance of a single musical composition by Hrrshtk? How can all share a single emotional experience?”
His researches delved deeply into the Hrrshtk compositions, and a tentative theory based on the Most Common Harmonic, now shown to have been totally mistaken, led to the T85 discoveries.
The Hrrshtk notes, however, found long afterward, provide the real answer.
Among a pile of sketches and musical fragments was found a long list—or, rather, a series of lists. In the form of a Galactic Dictionary, the paper is divided into many columns, each headed with the name of a different planet.
Rather than describe this document, we are printing an excerpt from it herewith:
DENEB III
TERRA
MARS
Love
Anger
Hunger
Hate
Joy
F’rit
Prayer
Madness
Sadness
Vilb
NPE
Non-F’rit
FOMALHAUT II
SIRIUS VII
Sadness
Madness
Prayer
Love
Full
Joy
Golk
NPE
In completed form, the document contains over one hundred and fifty separate listings for race, and over six hundred separate emotional or subject headings. In some places (like the Terra and Sirius listing for Vilb, above), the text is marked NPE, and this has been taken to mean No Precise Equivalent. For instance, such a marking appears after the Denebian shhr for both Terra and Mars, although Sirius has the listing grk and Fomalhaut plarat in the desert.
Hrrshtk may be hailed, therefore, as the discoverer of the Doctrine of Emotional Equivalency, later promulgated in a different form by Space Patrol Psychiatrist Rodney Garman. Further, the document alluded to above explains a phrase in Hrrshtk’s noted letter to Dibble Young, which has puzzled commentators since its first appearance.
Hrrshtk is here alluding to the composition of his Revolutionary Ode, which all Terra knows as the most perfect expression of true love to be found in music:
“It’s a Revolutionary Ode to me, my friend—but not to you. As we say here, one man’s mood is another man’s passion.”
SEPTEMBER 1: On this date in the year 9909, Treth Schmaltar died on his home planet of Wellington V. All the Galaxy knows his famous Symphonic Storm Suite; less known, but equally interesting, is the history and development of its solo instrument.
The natives of Wellingt
on V feed on airborne plankton, which is carried by the vibrations of sound or speech. This was a little-known fact for many years, but did account for the joy with which the first explorers on Wellington V were greeted. Their speech created waves that fed the natives.
When eating, the natives emit a strange humming noise, due to the action of the peculiar glottis. These facts drove the first settlers, like Treth Schmaltar, to the invention of a new instrument.
This was a large drumlike construction with a small hole in its side through which airborne plankton could enter. Inside the drum, a Wellingtonian crouched. When the drum was beaten, the air vibrations drove plankton into the native’s mouth, and he ate and hummed.
(A mechanical device has since replaced the native. This is, of course, due to the terrific expense of importing both natives and plankton to other planets than Wellington V for concerts.)
Thus, a peculiarity of native life led not only to the Symphonic Storm Suite, but to such lovely compositions as Schmaltar’s Hum-Drum Sonata.
SEPTEMBER 30: The victimization of the swanlike inhabitants of Harsh XII, perhaps the most pitiful musical scandal of the ages, was begun by Ferd Pill, born on this date in 8181. Pill, who died penitent in a neuterary of the Benedictine Order, is said to have conceived his idea after perusing some early Terran legends about the swan.
He never represented himself as the composer, but always as the agent or representative of a Harsh XII inhabitant. In the short space of three years, he sold over two hundred songs, none of great length but all, as musicians agree to this day, of a startling and almost un-Hnau-like beauty.
When a clerk in the records department of Pill’s publishers discovered that Pill, having listed himself as the heir of each of the Harsh XII composers, was in fact collecting their money, an investigation began.
That the composers were in fact dead was easily discovered. That Pill was their murderer was the next matter that came to light.
In an agony of self-abasement, Pill confessed his crime. “The Harshians don’t sing at all,” he said. “They don’t make a sound. But—like the legendary swan of old Terra—they do deliver themselves of one song in dying. I murdered them in order to record these songs, and then sold the recordings.”
Pill’s subsequent escape from the prison in which he was confined, and his trip to the sanctuary of the neuterary, were said to have been arranged by the grateful widow of one of the murdered Harshians, who had been enabled by her mate’s death to remarry with a younger and handsomer Harshian.
DECEMBER 5: Today marks the birthday of Timmis Calk, a science teacher of Lavoris II.
Calk is almost forgotten today, but his magnificent Student Orchestra created a storm both of approval and protest when it was first seen in 9734. Critics on both sides of what rapidly became a Galaxywide controversy were forced, however, to acknowledge the magnificent playing of the Student Orchestra and its great technical attainments.
Its story begins with Calk himself and his sweetheart, a lovely being named Silla.
Though Calk’s love for Silla was true and profound, Silla did not return his affectionate feelings. She was an antiscientist, a musician. The sects were split on Lavoris II to such an extent that marriage between Calk and his beloved would have meant crossing the class lines—something which Silla, a music-lover, was unwilling to contemplate.
Calk therefore determined to prove to her that a scientist could be just as artistic as any musician. Months of hard work followed, until finally he was ready.
He engaged the great Drick Hall for his first concert—and the program consisted entirely of classical works of great difficulty. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony opened the program, and Fenk’s Reversed Ode closed it. Calk had no time for the plaudits of critics and audience; he went searching for Silla.
But he was too late. She had heard his concert—and had immediately accepted the marriage proposal of a childhood sweetheart.
Calk nearly committed suicide. But at the last moment, he tossed the spraying-bottle away and went back to Silla.
“Why?” he said. “Why did you reject me, after hearing the marvelous music which I created?”
“You are not a musician, but a scientist,” Silla said. “Any musician would have refrained from growing his orchestra from seeds.”
Unable to understand her esthetic revulsion, Calk determined there and then to continue his work with the Student Orchestra (it made a great deal more money than science-teaching). Wrapping his rootlets around his branches, he rolled away from her with crackling dignity.
There are BEMs, as every reader and writer of science fiction knows, and then there are BEMs. And in no other story is that conundrum better demonstrated than in “Puppet Show”—a powerful and beautifully deceptive tale of extraterrestrials and humans meeting for the first time in the Arizona desert.
Fredric Brown (1906-1972) wrote mysteries and science fiction with equal distinction throughout his long career. He was one of the first and most prolific contributors of science fiction to Playboy (where “Puppet Show” first appeared) and other magazines outside the genre; and he was universally conceded to be the best writer of the mordant short-short—most of the finest of which can be found in his 1961 (and recently reissued) collection Nightmares and Geezenstacks—in either field. His What Mad Universe (1949) and Martians Go Home (1955), both of which have also been reprinted in recent days, are splendid examples of his gifts as a novelist. And “Puppet Show” is likewise a splendid example of his gifts as a writer of short stories, ranking with “Arena,” “The Weapon ,” and “Come and Go Mad” as his finest contribution to the short literature of science fiction.
Puppet Show
Fredric Brown
Horror came to Cherrybell at a little after noon on a blistering hot day in August.
Perhaps that is redundant; any August day in Cherrybell, Arizona, is blistering hot. It is on Highway 89 about forty miles south of Tucson and about thirty miles north of the Mexican border. It consists of two filling stations, one on each side of the road to catch travelers going in both directions, a general store, a beer-and-wine-license-only tavern, a tourist-trap type trading post for tourists who can’t wait until they reach the border to start buying serapes and huaraches, a deserted hamburger stand, and a few ’dobe houses inhabited by Mexican-Americans who work in Nogales, the border town to the south, and who, for God knows what reason, prefer to live in Cherrybell and commute, some of them in Model T Fords. The sign on the highway says, “Cherrybell, Pop. 42,” but the sign exaggerates; Pop died last year—Pop Anders, who ran the now-deserted hamburger stand—and the correct figure is 41.
Horror came to Cherrybell mounted on a burro led by an ancient, dirty and gray-bearded desert rat of a prospector who later—nobody got around to asking his name for a while—gave the name of Dade Grant. Horror’s name was Garth. He was approximately nine feet tall but so thin, almost a stick-man, that he could not have weighed over a hundred pounds. Old Dade’s burro carried him easily, despite the fact that his feet dragged in the sand on either side. Being dragged through the sand for, as it later turned out, well over five miles hadn’t caused the slightest wear on the shoes—more like buskins, they were—which constituted all that he wore except for a pair of what could have been swimming trunks, in robin’s-egg blue. But it wasn’t his dimensions that made him horrible to look upon; it was his skin. It looked red, raw. It looked as though he had been skinned alive, and the skin replaced upside down, raw side out. His skull, his face, were equally narrow or elongated; otherwise in every visible way he appeared human—or at least humanoid. Unless you counted such little things as the fact that his hair was a robin’s-egg blue to match his trunks, as were his eyes and his boots. Blood red and light blue.
Casey, owner of the tavern, was the first one to see them coming across the plain, from the direction of the mountain range to the east. He’d stepped out of the back door of his tavern for a breath of fresh, if hot, air. They were about a hundred yards away
at that time, and already he could see the utter alienness of the figure on the lead burro. Just alienness at that distance, the horror came only at closer range. Casey’s jaw dropped and stayed down until the strange trio was about fifty yards away, then he started slowly toward them. There are people who run at the sight of the unknown, others who advance to meet it. Casey advanced, however slowly, to meet it.
Still in the wide open, twenty yards from the back of the little tavern, he met them. Dade Grant stopped and dropped the rope by which he was leading the burro. The burro stood still and dropped its head. The stick-man stood up simply by planting his feet solidly and standing, astride the burro. He stepped one leg across it and stood a moment, leaning his weight against his hands on the burro’s back, and then sat down in the sand. “High-gravity planet,” he said. “Can’t stand long.”
“Kin I get water for my burro?” the prospector asked Casey. “Must be purty thirsty by now. Hadda leave water bags, some other things, so it could carry—” He jerked a thumb toward the red-and-blue horror.
Casey was just realizing that it was a horror. At a distance the color combination seemed a bit outre, but close—The skin was rough and seemed to have veins on the outside and looked moist (although it wasn’t) and damn if it didn’t look just like he had his skin peeled off and put back upside down. Or just peeled off, period. Casey had never seen anything like it and hoped he wouldn’t ever see anything like it again.
Casey felt something behind him and looked over his shoulder. Others had seen now and were coming, but the nearest of them, a pair of boys, were ten yards behind him. “Muchachos ” he called out, “Agua por el burro. Un pazal. Pronto!”
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