To Be Continued - 1953–58 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume One

by Robert Silverberg

  “Just leave me alone,” Mahler panted, squinting at the time-rig.

  The salesman watched uncomprehendingly as Mahler fumbled with the little dial.

  There was no vernier. He’d have to chance it and hope to hit the right year. The salesman suddenly screamed and came to life—for reasons Mahler would never understand.

  Mahler ignored him and punched the stud viciously.

  It was wonderful to step back into the serenity of twenty-eighth-century Appalachia. It was small wonder so many time-jumpers came to so peaceful an age, Mahler reflected, as he waited for his overworked heart to calm down. Almost anything would be preferable to back there.

  He looked up and down the quiet street, seeking a Convenience where he could repair the scratches and bruises he had acquired during his brief stay in the past. They would scarcely be able to recognize him at the Bureau in his present battered condition, with one eye nearly closed, and a great livid welt on his cheek.

  He sighted one at last and started down the street, only to be brought up short by the sound of a familiar soft mechanical whining. He looked around to see one of the low-running mechanical tracers of the Bureau purring up the street towards him. It was closely followed by the two Bureau guards, clad in their protective casings.

  Of course. He had arrived from the past, and the detectors had recorded his arrival, just as they would have pin-pointed any time-traveler. They never missed.

  He turned and walked toward the guards. He failed to recognize them, but this did not surprise him. The Bureau was a vast and wide-ranging organization, and he knew only a handful of the many guards who customarily accompanied the tracers. It was a pleasant relief to see the tracer. The use of tracers had been instituted during his administration, and he was absolutely sure now that he hadn’t returned too early along the time-stream.

  “Good to see you,” he called to the approaching guards. “I had a little accident in the office.”

  They ignored him, and began methodically to unpack a spacesuit from the storage trunk of the mechanical tracer.

  “Never mind talking,” one said. “Get into this.”

  He paled. “But I’m no jumper,” he protested. “Hold on a moment, fellows. This is all a terrible mistake. I’m Mahler—head of the Bureau. Your boss.”

  “Don’t play games with us, chum,” the taller guard said, while the other forced the spacesuit down over Mahler’s shoulders. To his horror, Mahler saw that they did not recognize him at all.

  “Suppose you just come peacefully and let the Chief explain everything to you, without any trouble,” the short guard said.

  “But I am the Chief,” Mahler protested. “I was examining a two-way time-rig in my office and accidentally sent myself back to the past. Take this thing off me and I’ll show you my identification card. That should convince you.”

  “Look, chum, we don’t want to be convinced of anything. Tell it to the Chief, if you like. Now, are you coming—or do we bring you?”

  There was no point, Mahler decided, in trying to prove his identity to the clean-faced young medic who examined him at the Bureau office. To insist on an immediate identification would only add more complications. No. It would be far better to wait until he reached the office of the Chief.

  He saw now what had happened. Apparently he had landed somewhere in his own future, shortly after his own death. Someone else had taken over the Bureau, and he, Mahler had been forgotten. He suddenly realized with a little shock that at that very moment his ashes were probably reposing in an urn at the Appalachia Crematorium.

  When he got to the Chief of the Bureau, he would simply and calmly explain exactly what had happened and ask for permission to go back ten or twenty or thirty years to the time in which he belonged. Once there, he could turn the two-way rig over to the proper authorities and resume his life from his point of departure. When that happened, the jumpers would no longer be sent to the Moon, and there would be no further need for Inflexible Mahler.

  But, he suddenly realized, if he’d already done that why was there still a clearance Bureau. An uneasy fear began to grow in him.

  “Hurry up and finish that report,” Mahler told the medic.

  “I don’t know what the rush is,” the medic complained. “Unless you like it on the Moon.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Mahler said confidently. “If I told you who I am, you’d think twice about—”

  “Is this thing your time-rig?” the medic asked unexpectedly.

  “Not really. I mean—yes, yes it is,” Mahler said. “And be careful with it. It’s the world’s only two-way rig.”

  “Really, now?” said the medic. “Two ways, eh?”

  “Yes. And if you’ll take me to your Chief—”

  “Just a minute. I’d like to show this to the Head Medic.”

  In a few moments the medic returned. “All right, we’ll go to the Chief now. I’d advise you not to bother arguing with him. You can’t win. You should have stayed in your own age.”

  Two guards appeared and jostled Mahler down the familiar corridor to the brightly-lit little office where he had spent eight years of his life. Eight years on the other side of the fence!

  As he approached the room that had once been his office, he carefully planned what he would say to his successor. He would explain the accident first, of course. Then he would establish his identity beyond any possibility of doubt and request permission to use the two-way rig to return to his own time. The Chief would probably be belligerent at first. But he’d quickly enough become curious, and finally amused at the chain of events that had ensnarled Mahler.

  And, of course, he would make amends, after they had exchanged anecdotes about the job they both held at the same time across a wide gap of years. Mahler vowed that he would never again touch a time machine, once he got back. He would let others undertake the huge job of transmitting the jumpers back to their own eras.

  He moved forward and broke the photoelectric beam. The door to the Bureau Chief’s office slid open. Behind the desk sat a tall, powerfully built man with hard gray eyes.

  Me!

  Through the dim plate of the spacesuit into which he had been stuffed, Mahler stared in stunned horror at the man behind the desk. It was impossible for him to doubt that he was gazing at Inflexible Mahler, the man who had sent four thousand men to the Moon, without exception, in the unbending pursuit of his duty.

  And if he’s Mahler—

  Who am I?

  Suddenly Mahler saw the insane circle complete. He recalled the jumper, the firm, deep-voiced, unafraid time-jumper who had arrived claiming to have a two-way rig and who had marched off to the Moon without arguing. Now Mahler knew who that jumper was.

  But how did the cycle start? Where did the two-way rig come from in the first place? He had gone to the past to bring it to the present to take it to the past to—

  His head swam. There was no way out. He looked at the man behind the desk and began to walk slowly toward him, feeling a wall of circumstance growing up around him, while in frustration, he tried impotently to beat his way out.

  It was utterly pointless to argue. Not with Absolutely Inflexible Mahler. It would just be a waste of breath. The wheel had come full circle, and he was as good as on the Moon already. He looked at the man behind the desk with a new, strange light in his eyes.

  “I never dreamed I’d find you here,” the jumper said. The transmitter of the spacesuit brought the jumper’s voice over deeply and resonantly.

  THE MACAULEY CIRCUIT

  This, too, was written in June of 1955. Like most of my stories at that time it made its modest way from editor to editor, steadily descending from the top-paying markets to those farther down the pecking order, and early in 1956 was bought, for a glorious $40, by Leo Margulies, who was beginning to accept my work with some regularity. He published it in the August 1956 issue of Fantastic Universe. Like the rest of my work of that period, it’s no masterpiece: I wasn’t really up to turning out a lot
of masterpieces when I was twenty years old. But it stands up pretty well, I think—an intelligent consideration of some of the problems that the still virtually unborn computer age was likely to bring. (And when you read it, please bear in mind that computers, in 1955, were still considered experimental technology—generally “thinking machines” or “electronic brains”—and music synthesizers existed only in the pages of science fiction.)

  ——————

  Gentlemen, I intend to be completely honest with you, completely unevasive. I destroyed Macauley’s diagram, and I have never denied it. Of course I did it, and for strongly motivated, very substantial reasons.

  My big mistake was in not thinking the thing through. When Macauley first brought me the circuit, I didn’t pay much attention to it—certainly not as much as its importance warranted. That was a mistake, but I couldn’t help myself. I was too busy playing nursemaid to old Kolfmann to stop and think what the Macauley circuit really meant.

  If Kolfmann hadn’t shown up just when he did, I would have been able to make a careful study of the innovation. I would have quickly grasped all of its implications, and I would have put the diagram in the incinerator and Macauley right after it. That is not to Macauley’s discredit, you understand. He’s a nice, clever boy, one of the finest minds in our whole research department. He just can’t help being too clever for his own good.

  He came in while I was outlining my graph for the Beethoven Seventh which we were going to do the following week. I was adding some ultrasonics that would have delighted old Ludwig—not that he would have heard them, of course, but he would have felt them—and I was very pleased with my interpretation. Unlike some synthesizer-interpreters, I don’t believe in actually changing the score.

  I’m convinced that Beethoven knew what he was doing, and it would have been quite insane to attempt to patch up his symphony. I was simply strengthening it by adding the ultrasonics. They wouldn’t change the actual notes in the least, but there’d be that feeling in the air which is the great artistic triumph of synthesizing.

  So I was working on my graph, and making splendid progress. When Macauley came in I was engaged in changing the frequencies for the second movement, which is the difficult one. You see, the movement is solemn but not too solemn. Just so. Macauley had a sheaf of papers in his hand, and I knew immediately that he’d hit on something important. As a rule no one interrupts an Interpreter for something trivial.

  “I’ve developed a new circuit, sir,” he said. “It’s based on the imperfect Kennedy Circuit of the year 2261.”

  I remembered Kennedy. He had been a brilliant boy, rather like Macauley in most respects. He had worked out a circuit which would have made the task of synthesizing a symphony as easy as playing a harmonica. But it hadn’t quite worked. Something in the process had fouled up the ultrasonics and what came out was hellish to hear. We never found out how to straighten things out. Kennedy disappeared about a year later and was never heard from again. All the young technicians had acquired the habit of tinkering with his circuit for diversion, hoping they’d stumble on the secret. And now Macauley had apparently succeeded.

  I looked at his diagram, and then directly at him. He was standing there calmly enough with a blank expression on his handsome, intelligent face, waiting for me to quiz him.

  “Am I right in assuming that this circuit controls the interpretative aspects of music?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Exactly right, sir. You can set the synthesizer for whatever esthetic you have in mind, and it’ll faithfully follow your instruction. You merely have to establish the esthetic coordinates—the work of a moment—and the synthesizer will handle the rest of the interpretation for you. But that’s not exactly the goal of my circuit, sir,” he said, tactfully, as if to hide from me the fact that he was telling me I had missed his point. “With minor modifications—”

  He didn’t get a chance to tell me, because at that precise moment Kolfmann came dashing into my studio. You see, I never lock my doors. For one thing no one would dare disturb me without good and sufficient cause, and for another my analyst had pointed out that working behind locked doors has a bad effect on my sensibilities.

  I always work with my door unlocked, and that’s how Kolfmann got in. And his arrival at just that moment saved Macauley’s life, for if he had gone on to tell me what was on the tip of his tongue I would have regretfully incinerated him and his circuit without an instant’s hesitation.

  Kolfmann was a famous name to music lovers everywhere. He was perhaps eighty now—possibly ninety, if he had a good gerontologist—and he had been a brilliant concert pianist many years before. Those of us who knew something about pre-synthesizer musical history linked his name with that of Paganini, and regarded him almost with awe.

  But the man I saw now was a tall, terribly gaunt old specter in ragged clothes who burst unannounced into my studio and headed straight for the synthesizer, which covered the entire north wall with its gleaming, complicated bulk.

  He had a wrench in his hand heavier than a crow-bar, and he was about to destroy a million credits’ worth of cybernetics when Macauley effortlessly intercepted him and took the instrument away from him. I was so flabbergasted I could only stand behind my desk and stare.

  Macauley brought him over to me and I looked at him as if he were a mass murderer in the flesh.

  “You poor, misguided fool,” I said. “What’s the idea? You can get a long prison sentence for wrecking a cyber—or didn’t you know that?”

  “My life is ended anyway,” he said in a thick, deep, despairing voice. “It ended when your machines started desecrating music.”

  He took off his battered cap and ran his thin fingers through his hair. He hadn’t shaved for several days, and his face was speckled with stiff-looking white stubble.

  “My name is Gregor Kolfmann,” he said. “I’m sure you haven’t heard of me.”

  I had, of course, but decided to pretend otherwise. “Kolfmann, the pianist?” I asked.

  My admiration was not lost on him. He nodded, pleased despite everything. “Yes, Kolfmann, the former pianist. You and your machine have taken away my life.”

  Suddenly all the hate which any normal person feels for a cyber-wrecker evaporated, and I felt guilty and very humble before this truly great old man. As he continued to speak, I realized that I, as a musical artist, had a responsibility to him. I still think that what I did was wise—and entirely justified.

  “Even after synthesizing became the dominant method of presenting music,” he went on, “I continued my concert career. There were always a few discerning people who would rather see a man play a piano than watch a technician feed a tape through a machine. But I couldn’t compete with the machines.”

  He sighed. “After a while anyone who went to live concerts was looked upon as a reactionary, and I stopped getting bookings. I turned to teaching as a means of livelihood. But no one wanted to take piano lessons. A few have studied with me for antiquarian reasons, but they are not artists. They are just curiosity-seekers. They have no artistic drive. You and your machine have much to answer for!”

  I looked at Macauley’s circuit and then at Kolfmann. I put away my graph for the Beethoven, partly because all the excitement would make it impossible for me to get anywhere with it and partly because I knew it would only make things worse if Kolfmann actually saw what Macauley had done.

  Macauley was still standing expectantly before my desk, waiting to explain his circuit to me. I knew it was important. But I felt deeply indebted to old Kolfmann, and I decided I’d take care of him before I let Macauley do any more talking.

  “Come back later,” I told him. “I’d like to discuss the implications of this innovation—as soon as I’m through talking to Mr. Kolfmann.”

  “Yes, sir,” Macauley said, like the obedient puppet a technician becomes when he is confronted by an unbending superior. As soon as the door closed behind him I gathered up the papers he had left and stacked them in a ne
at pile on my desk. I didn’t want Kolfmann to see them for one moment, even though I knew they wouldn’t mean anything to him except as symbols of the machine he hated.

  As soon as we were alone I gestured Kolfmann to a plush pneumochair, into which he settled with the distaste for excess comfort that had been so characteristic of his generation. I saw my duty plainly. I must make things better for the old man.

  “We’d be glad to have you come to work for us, Mr. Kolfmann,” I said smiling. “A man of your great brilliance—”

  He was up and out of that chair in a second, his eyes blazing. “Work for you? I’d sooner see you dead and your machines crumbling! Your scientists dealt a death blow to art, and now you’re trying to bribe me!”

  “I was just trying to help you,” I said, soothingly. “Since, in a manner of speaking, we’ve interfered with your livelihood, I consider it my duty to make amends in any way I can.”

  He said nothing, but stared at me coldly, with the anger of half a century burning uncompromisingly in him.

  “Look,” I said. “Let me show you what a great musical instrument the synthesizer actually is.”

  I rummaged in my cabinet and withdrew the tape of the Hohenstein Viola Concerto, which we had performed in ’69. It was a rigorous twelve-tone work and it was probably the most demanding, unplayable piece of music ever written.

  It was, of course, no harder for the synthesizer to counterfeit than the notes of a Strauss waltz. But a human violist would have needed three hands and prehensile nose to convey any measure of Hohenstein’s musical thought. I activated the playback of the synthesizer and fed the tape in.

  The music burst forth in a magnificent opening stanza and Kolfmann watched the machine suspiciously. The pseudo-viola danced up and down the tone-row while the old pianist struggled painfully to place the work.

  “Hohenstein?” he finally asked, his voice tremulous with awe.

  I saw that a conflict was raging within him. For more years than he cared to remember he had hated us with a burning hate because we had made his art obsolete. And here I was showing him a use for the synthesizer which more than justified its existence. It was synthesizing a work impossible for a man or woman to play. He was unable to reconcile the paradox in his mind, and the struggle to do so hurt. He got up uneasily and started for the door.