The Metallic Muse

by Lloyd Biggle Jr

  1319 lay on a cot in his quarters and tried to think about something that would not suggest food. Or eating. If he could have one decent meal, he thought, he might survive. But it would have to come soon.

  It was evening, and there had been considerable activity outside his door. He waited impatiently until the noise faded into the distance. Still feigning sleep in case someone was scanning him, he turned over, slowly edged a blanket over his head, and clicked a microscopic switch on his ring.

  “Jones reporting,” he said softly.

  The ring squeaked back at him. “One moment, please. Then a male voice rasped, “Nice work, Jones. That was a clever switch you pulled.”

  “Glad you think so,” Jones said. “I could see that the Wellington line was taking us nowhere. But you never know what to expect from these people. They come up with the damnedest things. Have you ever tasted camel stew?”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “May Allah spare you that pleasure. Where did they get the stuff? Are we missing a camel?”

  “Not that I know of. Ill have someone check.”

  “They carry realism too far. Which reminds me of something else. I want the reference librarian shot. Where is he getting that information about the alleged weak stomachs of historical personages? I’m starving.”

  “I’ll speak to him. You came up with some fine acting today. You deserve a bonus.”

  “May I have it in steaks?”

  “You’ll be Romeo when you wake up. Give it a good play.”

  “Sure. And by the way—”

  “What’s the matter?” “If it turns out that Romeo has a bad stomach or a passion for raw vegetables, I’m resigning.”

  He clicked off the radio, turned over abruptly, and rolled off the cot. Seconds later the door burst open and anattendant hurried in. Pushing himself into a sitting position, 1319 mumbled groggily.

  “Did you sleep well, Excellency?” the attendant said. “Do you wish to visit your harem?”

  “What harem?” 1319 demanded. “Where’s Juliet?”

  The attendant took a step backward. “Juliet?”

  “I have a date with Juliet. Can’t be late. Got to watch out for those Capulets, too. Where’s my sword?”

  The attendant unwound the turban from 1319’s head. “Of course. You’ll have to dress first, and then I’ll take you to Friar Laurence. I’ll be back as soon as I make the arrangements.”

  1319 suppressed a chuckle. He’d caught them flatfooted. Suddenly his ring tingled his finger, and he pressed it to his ear.

  “Make this good, now,” the rasping voice said. “Rogers will be your Juliet, and I think we’re going to pull her out of it.”

  1319 risked a question. He moved the ring and whispered through clenched teeth, “Who’s Rogers?”

  “Your Duchess. The girl in the harem. That trick you pulled was just what she needed. She’s been here over a month, with almost no progress, and we’ve been worried about her. She’s finally starting to think. Now if you can get her personally involved as Juliet—she has a brilliant mind, and insanity is too much of a luxury for people like that. Give it a good play.”

  The attendant came hurrying back. “Just follow me,” he said.

  Half lost in his own thoughts, 1319 stumbled after him. Where’d the story take place? Venice? Or was it Verona? Either way there should be some good seafood. He could do with a thick filet.

  Spare The Rod

  (Introduction)

  For all of the thousands of years that man has condescended to accept the fact that he is, irrefutably, an animal, he has stubbornly searched for that illusive quality that nevertheless makes him unique—makes him man.

  So he has called himself a political animal (Aristotle); a social animal (Seneca); a reasoning animal (Seneca); the only animal that knows nothing and can learn nothing without being taught (Pliny); a more perfect animal (Napoleon); the only animal that laughs” and weeps (Hazlitt); an intellectual animal (Hazlitt); tool-using animal (Carlyle); and so on, the list can be as long as one chooses to make it, but it should be noted that as man learned more and more about animals, the differences became more and more tenuous.

  Now man has another rival, the machine, and his concern as to whether he himself is or might become machine is less recent in origin than one would suppose. Burns wondered whether man was a piece of machinery; Colton, whether man was a mere breathing part of that machinery by which he works. Thoreau stated that men become the tools of their tools; Oscar Wilde declared that the real evil of machinery was in making men themselves machines. Nietzsche maintained that what we know of man today is limited precisely by the extent to which we have regarded him as a machine.

  And Science Fiction has already pondered what might happen if a computer began to reason, “I think, therefore I am.”

  One can but wonder whether future philosophers will strain to see man as the unique machine where past philosophers strove to see him as the unique animal: political machine, the social machine, the reasoning machine, the only machine that knows nothing and can learn nothing without being taught, the more perfect machine, the intellectual machine, and so on.

  As with our increasing knowledge of animals, the increasingly awesome capabilities of machines make man’s uniqueness more and more tenuous. Man has already lost his distinction as an artistic, a creative machine— machines now compose music and write stories.

  There is one glimmer of hope: there are machines that tell jokes, but as yet there is no machine that has a sense of humor. One may perforce be clinging to a feeble reed, but one can still confidently expect man to triumph in the end simply because he, and he alone, is able not merely to laugh, but to laugh at himself.

  page 70

  CHAPTER THREE

  Spare the Rod

  Professor Oswald J. Perkins was the last person I want to meet that morning, so naturally I walked through the door of the post office and found him standing directly in front of me with his hand extended. I either had to accept the hand or turn and run, so I shook it, and inquired after his health, and asked him if he thought the hot weather would last and how his daughter was getting along with her allergy shots and how the grandson at M.I.T. was making out and whether the weather forecast had said anything about rain.

  In four minutes I’d exhausted every conversational cliche I could think of, and I was beginning to feel embarrassed. At that moment Postmaster Schantz came to my rescue. He stuck his head through the stamp window and bellowed, “It’s a damned dirty shame!”

  The professor’s thin lips twisted into a faintly ironic smile, and his long, white hair rippled as he shook his head. “Machines have been putting men out of work ever since men started making machines,” he said. “Most of the men find other jobs, and everyone profits because the machines produce more. Do things better, too. Any time a machine can do my job better than I can do it, I’ll cheerfully retire. But they haven’t built that machine yet, and I don’t think they ever will.”

  We went into a spontaneous huddle around the stamp window. I looked past the postmaster, and through the rear window of the post office I could see an air car liftingf slowly. It’s bright red, white and blue stripes glistened in the early morning sunlight. Young Bill Wade was at the controls, leaving on his rural delivery route. I made a mental note to ride along with him some day and do a story about him. The farmers all admire young Bill. They say he can hit a mail funnel from five hundred feet.

  “I just had a talk with Sam Beyers,” I said to the professor. “He’s taking a full-page ad in Sunday’s Gazette. He’s announcing that his robot now has more than eighty violin students and that all of them are making six months’ progress with every lesson. He told me confidentially that in another week you won’t have a student left.”

  “I know two students he’ll have left,” the postmaster growled. “I’m not having my grandchildren taking no violin lessons from no robot.”

  “That’s nice of you,” Professor Perkins
murmured. “But Sam Beyers isn’t far wrong, you know. This morning I had twenty-four students. When I get home, there’ll be three or four cancellations, and then I’ll have maybe twenty. Another week and I’ll be down to your two grandchildren. Why not? Why should anyone pay for something he can get free.”

  “Sam Beyers is a crook,” the postmaster said to me. “You shouldn’t take his advertising.”

  “Sam isn’t a bad guy,” I said. “I don’t like what he’s doing with that robot, but as long as there’s nothing improper in his advertising, I can’t refuse it.”

  The postmaster shook his head gloomily. “Maybe if the professor would advertise—”

  “I offered him free space,” I said. “He wouldn’t take it.”

  “It isn’t necessary,” the professor said. “In another week, Beyers will have almost all of my students. In a month or so, I’ll start getting them back. I can wait. Did my music come in?”

  He stretched out long, graceful fingers for the slender package of music.

  I picked up the Gazette’s mail and thumbed through it to see how many checks might be enclosed before I hurried off after the professor. He was standing at the edge of Waterville Park watching a game of scooter ball.

  As we looked, one of the boys got the ball squarely in his sights and scored a direct hit. It looked like a triple mark. In fact, it looked as if the ball would carry all the way to the river. It didn’t—the wind held it up—but it would have made the river on the first bounce if it hadn’t been for a nervy little red-headed boundaryman on a red scooter. He rode straight for the water, executed as neat a skid as I’ve ever seen right on the edge of the bank, and netted the ball. He had it jammed in his launcher by the time he’d completed the skid, and he laid a perfect shot, right on the central bag. The rider was out by three lengths.

  “Neat play,” I said.

  “That Pinky Jones is a live one,” Professor Perkins agreed. a “Student of yours?” I asked.

  The professor grinned. “He was up until last week. I almost feel sorry for the robot. Pinky tries to play with the violin upside down. He files the strings so they break during the lesson. One day he comes with a cricket inside his violin. He has it trained somehow so it chirps when he wants it to. ‘Professor,’ he says, ‘something’s wrong with my violin. It makes the funniest sounds.’ He goes through the motions with the bow and the cricket chirps. That’s easily corrected,’ I say. ‘An extra twenty minutes a day on the exercises.’ That’s the last time he brings the cricket. He laughed. “Yes, I almost feel sorry for the robot.”

  “You don’t seem to realize how serious this Beyers things is,” I said.

  “Of course I realize it’s serious. I’m losing money, and 1 can’t afford to lose money. But people will soon find out that a robot can’t give violin lessons. Does a machine know when a student needs maybe a little more padding on the shoulder? Does it know when a student needs a heavier bow? Does it know what student needs to be coaxed and what one needs a kick in the pants? Does it make the student know the difference between a nicely played phrase and one that isn’t? No. No machine can do the thousand things any good violin teacher has to do.. People will find that out soon enough, and the Beyers robot will go back to the factory.”

  “I think you’re wrong,” I said. “As long as Beyers is giving the lessons free, people will send their children to him. What have they got to lose? Long before they become dissatisfied with the robot, you’ll have got tired waiting and moved. Just what is Beyers up to, anyway?”

  The professor smiled and said nothing.

  “I can tell you what I think he’s trying to do,” I said. “He’ll give free lessons until he’s forced you to leave, and

  then he can charge whatever he wants. Students will have to pay it or lose all the time and money they’ve already invested in their music education. He’ll charge double what you charge for lessons. He’ll have to, to get back his investment in that robot. Those things are expensive.”

  The professor looked amused. “So you think Sam Beyers is after a profit.”

  “It isn’t like Sam,” I admitted. “He came up the hard way himself and he’s always been pretty square. I know back nine or ten years ago, when Hardson’s appliance store was going broke, Sam loaned him money to try and keep him in business. Sam said business thrives on competition. Hardson went broke anyway, but Sam helped him as much as he could. That’s why I don’t understand this at all. But how else can you figure it?”

  We turned together and walked slowly along Main Street. I watched an air car settle down in front of Warren’s Feed Store. A burly farmer hurried in, and a moment later a robot rumbled out with half a dozen bags of feed. One of the Warren boys directed it from the doorway as it loaded the feed into the air car.

  Half a block down the street we came to Beyers, Inc. Beyers sells a little of everything, but until lately most of his business had been in atomic appliances and machinery. This morning he had a new, glaring red sign in the window: ALL KINDS OF ROBOTS. In the rooms above the store was the new Beyers School of Music. And the robot violin teacher.

  As we passed the store, the door opened and a girl tripped out gaily. Her long, golden curls fluttered after her as she ran. She wasn’t more than ten, but already a womanly loveliness was blended with angelic, childish mischief in her glowing face. It was Sam’s daughter, Sharon, and she darted past us laughing merrily. Then she glanced over her shoulder and came to a sudden stop.

  “Hello, Sharon,” the professor called.

  She turned sullenly, her eyes on the professor. Slowly, deliberately, she stuck out her tongue.

  “You shouldn’t do that, Sharon,” I said. “It isn’t polite.”

  She stuck out her tongue at me, and then she dashed away.

  “Now what brought that on?” I asked.

  “I’m not very popular with the Beyers family,” the professor said.

  If any other kid in Waterville had behaved that way, I’d have had a few words with the parents. Speaking to Sam Beyers about Sharon would have wasted my time and also made me an enemy. He worshiped the kid. She was pretty and smart and talented and probably a great comfort to him after the way his son turned out to be a dunce, and all she really needed was a good spanking. She’d never get it from her father.

  We stopped suddenly as the bright tones of a violin drifted down to us. The professor pulled on my arm, and we moved away from Beyers, Inc., past the fancy facade of the Waterville Cafe ( Air Car Parking in the Rear—’ Visit Our Roof Gardens for Gala Evening Entertainment,) and paused to stare unseeing at the glamorous young ladies’ frocks in the window of Terrestrial Styles Ltd., Waterville Branch.

  “Beethoven,” Professor Perkins said, his smooth, ageless face taut with excitement. “Sonata in C Minor, Opus Thirty, Number Two.”

  “I know,” I told him. “You made me play it, once.”

  He nodded. “This robot merits some respect. Few, teachers know the violin’s historical repertory well enough to be aware of the existence of such a forgotten masterpiece.”

  “The robot plays well,” I remarked.

  The professor looked at me quickly. “Do you think so?”

  “It also plays like a robot,” I said. There was something grimly mechanical in its indifference to technical barriers, in its rhythmic severity, in its scorning of emotional values. The robot’s students would sound like machines, every one of them, and unfortunately the good people of Waterville and environs would never know the difference. Nor would they care if they did know—the finer points of musical taste and expression meant nothing to them as long as their grubby offspring played.

  We crossed the street and took up a position in the doorway of Saylor’s Pharmacy, where we could hear better, and we stood there listening to the dazzling thread of violin music that came drifting down with the sunlight. The robot played one excerpt after another, and I recognized a passage from an old concerto by Alban Berg and some modern pieces by Morglitz. The professor listene
d intently and said nothing.

  The music stopped precisely on the half-hour. A moment later the street door of the Beyers School of Music was flung open violently. Jeffery Gadman, aged eleven, charged out, flung himself onto the waiting scooter, and putted away toward the park and the game of scooter ball.

  “Now that’s odd,” I said. “I didn’t hear him playing once.”

  The professor smiled. “You haven’t seen the robot in action or heard how it works? I thought not. The robot does not play the violin. It can’t play the violin. It only assists the student.”

  I stared at him.

  “Yes,” he said. “What you heard was young Mr. Gadman playing. Three weeks ago he does not even play the scales smoothly. He does not even play a nice little folk song and stay in tune. Then the robot gives him two, maybe three lessons, and he plays Beethoven and Berg and Morglitz like a mature artist. The robot is a wonderful thing, don’t you think?”

  He laughed and patted me gently on the back and hurried away.

  I went back to the Gazette and locked myself in my private office and settled down to have a good worry. The professor didn’t seem greatly concerned about robot competition, but as editor of the only newspaper in the county, I knew the people. .

  And I knew we were going to lose the professor.

  Sam Beyers had plenty of money. There wasn’t any limit to the time he could go on giving free lessons, but there was a limit to the time the professor could sit around waiting for his students to come back to him. Eventually he’d have to go where he could earn money teaching.

  Waterville needed the professor. He was our last remaining defender of culture. He’d come to Waterville twenty years before to escape the high-pressure life led by artists in the big cities. At the time it must have seemed like an unpromising place for a music teacher, but the Professor was young—in his early forties—and he had plenty of drive and enthusiasm. He finally got across the idea that art was not something to be housed in a museum or experienced as a kind of passive shower bath from visiscope. The average person could learn to create or recreate art for himself.