The Center is colossal, spectacular and magnificent. It is inspiring, edifying and amazing. It is awesome, it is overpowering, it is—everything.
And though few of its visitors know about this, or care, it is also haunted.
You are standing in the observation gallery of the towering Bach Monument. Off to the left, on the slope of a hill, you see the tense spectators who crowd the Grecian Theater for Euripides. Sunlight plays on their brightly-colored clothing. They watch eagerly, delighted to see in person what millions are watching on visiscope.
Beyond the theater, the tree-lined Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard curves into the distance, past the Dante Monument and the Michelangelo Institute. The twin towers of a facsimile of the Rheims Cathedral rise above the horizon. Directly below, you see the curious landscaping of an eighteenth-century French jardin and, nearby, the Molière Theater.
A hand clutches your sleeve, and you turn suddenly, irritably, and find yourself face to face with an old man.
The leathery face is scarred and wrinkled, the thin strands of hair glistening white. The hand on your arm is a gnarled claw. You stare, take in the slumping contortion of one crippled shoulder and the hideous scar of a missing ear, and back away in alarm.
The sunken eyes follow you. The hand extends in a sweeping gesture that embraces the far horizon, and you notice that the fingers are maimed or missing. The voice is a harsh cackle. “Like it?” he says, and eyes you expectantly.
Startled, you mutter, “Why, yes. Of course.”
He takes a step forward, and his eyes are eager, pleading. “I say, do you like it?”
In your perplexity you can do no more than nod as you turn away—but your nod brings a strange response. A strident laugh, an innocent, childish smile of pleasure, a triumphant shout. “I did it! I did it all!”
Or you stand in resplendent Plato Avenue, between the Wagnerian Theater, where the complete Der Ring des Nibelungen is performed daily, and the reconstruction of the sixteenth-century Globe Theatre, where Shakespearean drama is presented morning, afternoon and evening.
A hand paws at you. “Like it?”
If you respond with a torrent of ecstatic praise, the old man eyes you impatiently and only waits until you have finished to ask again, “I say, do you like it?”
But a smile and a nod is met with beaming pride, a gesture, a shout.
In the lobby of one of the thousand spacious hotels, in the waiting room of the remarkable library where a copy of any book you request is reproduced for you free of charge, in the eleventh balcony of Beethoven Hall, a ghost shuffles haltingly, clutches an arm, asks a question.
And shouts proudly, “I did it!”
ERLIN BAQUE SENSED her presence behind him, but he did not turn. Instead he leaned forward, his left hand tearing a rumbling bass figure from the multichord while his right hand fingered a solemn melody. With a lightning flip of his hand he touched a button, and the thin treble tones were suddenly fuller, more resonant, almost clarinetlike. (“But God, how preposterously unlike a clarinet!” he thought.)
“Must we go through all that again, Val?” he asked.
“The landlord was here this morning.”
He hesitated, touched a button, touched several buttons, and wove weird harmonies out of the booming tones of a brass choir. (But what a feeble, distorted brass choir!)
“How long does he give us this time?”
“Two days. And the food synthesizer’s broken down again.”
“Good. Run down and buy some fresh meat.”
“With what?”
Baque slammed his fists down and shouted above the shattering dissonance. “I will not rent a harmonizer. I will not turn my arranging over to hacks. If a Com goes out with my name on it, it’s going to be composed. It may be idiotic, and it may be sickening, but it’s going to be done right. It isn’t much, God knows, but it’s all I have left.”
He turned slowly and glared at her, this pale, drooping, worn-out woman who’d been his wife for twenty-five years. Then he looked away, telling himself stubbornly that he was no more to be blamed than she. When sponsors paid the same rates for good Coms that they paid for hackwork . . .
“Is Hulsey coming today?” she asked.
“He told me he was coming.”
“If we could get some money for the landlord—”
“And the food synthesizer. And a new visiscope. And new clothes. There’s a limit to what can be done with one Com.”
He heard her move away, heard the door open, and waited. It did not close. “Walter-Walter called,” she said. “You’re the featured tunesmith on today’s Show Case.”
“So? There’s no money in that.”
“I thought you wouldn’t want to watch, so I told Mrs. Rennik I’d watch with her.”
“Sure. Go ahead. Have fun.”
The door closed.
Baque got to his feet and stood looking down at his chaos-strewn worktable. Music paper, Com-lyric releases, pencils, sketches, half-finished manuscripts were cluttered together in untidy heaps. Baque cleared a corner for himself and sat down wearily, stretching his long legs out under the table.
“Damn Hulsey,” he muttered. “Damn sponsors. Damn visiscope. Damn Coms.”
Compose something, he told himself. You’re not a hack, like the other tunesmiths. You don’t punch out silly tunes on a harmonizer’s keyboard and let a machine complete them for you. You’re a musician, not a melody monger. Write some music. Write a—a sonata, for multichord. Take the time now, and compose something.
His eyes fell on the first lines of a Com-lyric release. “If your flyer jerks and clowns, if it has its ups and downs—”
“Damn landlord,” he muttered, reaching for a pencil.
The tiny wall clock tinkled the hour, and Baque leaned over to turn on the visiscope. A cherub-faced master of ceremonies smiled out at him ingratiatingly. “Walter-Walter again, ladies and gentlemen. It’s Com time on today’s Show Case. Thirty minutes of Commercials by one of today’s most talented tunesmiths. Our Com spotlight is on—”
A noisy brass fanfare rang out, the tainted brass tones of a multichord.
“Erlin Baque!”
The multichord swung into an odd, dipsey melody Baque had done five years before, for Tamper Cheese, and a scattering of applause sounded in the background. A nasal soprano voice mouthed the words, and Baque groaned unhappily. “We age our cheese, and age it, age it, age it, age it, age it the old-fashioned way . . .”
Walter-Walter cavorted about the stage, moving in time with the melody, darting down into the audience to kiss some sedate housewife-on-a-holiday, and beaming at the howls of laughter.
The multichord sounded another fanfare, and Walter-Walter leaped back onto the stage, both arms extended over his head. “Now listen to this, all you beautiful people. Here’s your Walter-Walter exclusive on Erlin Baque.” He glanced secretively over his shoulder, tiptoed a few steps closer to the audience, placed his finger on his lips, and then called out loudly, “Once upon a time there was another composer named Baque, spelled B-A-C-H, but pronounced Baque. He was a real atomic propelled tunesmith, the boy with the go, according to them that know. He lived some five or six or seven hundred years ago, so we can’t exactly say that that Baque and our Baque were Baque to Baque. But we don’t have to go Baque to hear Baque. We like the Baque we’ve got. Are you with me?”
Cheers. Applause. Baque turned away, hands trembling, a choking disgust nauseating him.
“We start off our Coms by Baque with that little masterpiece Baque did for Foam Soap. Art work by Bruce Combs. Stop, look—and listen!”
Baque managed to turn off the visiscope just as the first bar of soap jet-propelled itself across the screen. He picked up the Com lyric again, and his mind began to shape the thread of a melody.
“If your flyer jerks and clowns, if it has its ups and downs, ups and downs, ups and downs, you need a WARING!”
He hummed softly to himself, sketching a musical line that swoope
d and jerked like an erratic flyer. Word painting, it was called, back when words and tones meant something. Back when the B-A-C-H Baque was underscoring such grandiose concepts as Heaven and Hell.
Baque worked slowly, now and then trying a harmonic progression at the multichord and rejecting it, straining his mind for some fluttering accompaniment pattern that would simulate the sound of a flyer. But then—no. The Waring people wouldn’t like that. They advertised that their flyers were noiseless.
Urgent-sounding door chimes shattered his concentration. He walked over to flip on the scanner, and Hulsey’s pudgy face grinned out at him.
“Come on up,” Baque told him. Hulsey nodded and disappeared.
Five minutes later he waddled through the door, sank into a chair that sagged dangerously under his bulky figure, plunked his briefcase onto the floor, and mopped his face. “Whew! Wish you’d get yourself a place lower down. Or into a building with modern conveniences. Elevators scare me to death!”
“I’m thinking of moving,” Baque said.
“Good. It’s about time.”
“But it’ll probably be somewhere higher up. The landlord has given me two days’ notice.”
Hulsey winced and shook his head sadly. “I see. Well, I won’t keep you in suspense. Here’s the check for the Sana-Soap Com.”
Baque took the card, glanced at it, and scowled.
“You were behind in your guild dues,” Hulsey said. “Have to deduct them, you know.”
“Yes. I’d forgotten.”
“I like to do business with Sana-Soap. Cash right on the line. Too many companies wait until the end of the month. Sana-Soap wants a couple of changes, but they paid anyway.” He unsealed the briefcase and pulled out a folder. “You’ve got some sly bits in this one, Erlin my boy. They like it. Particularly this ‘sudsy, sudsy, sudsy’ thing in the bass. They kicked on the number of singers at first, but not after they heard it. Now right here they want a break for a straight announcement.”
Baque nodded thoughtfully. “How about keeping the ‘sudsy, sudsy’ ostinato going as a background to the announcement?”
“Sounds good. That’s a sly bit, that—what’d you call it?”
“Ostinato.”
“Ah—yes. Wonder why the other tunesmiths don’t work in bits like that.”
“A harmonizer doesn’t produce effects,” Baque said dryly. “It just—harmonizes.”
“You give them about thirty seconds of that ‘sudsy’ for background. They can cut it if they don’t like it.”
Baque nodded, scribbling a note on the manuscript.
“And the arrangement,” Hulsey went on. “Sorry, Erlin, but we can’t get a French horn player. You’ll have to do something else with that part.”
“No horn player? What’s wrong with Rankin?”
“Blacklisted. The Performers’ Guild nixed him permanently. He went out to the West Coast and played for nothing. Even paid his own expenses. The guild can’t tolerate that sort of thing.”
“I remember,” Baque said softly. “The Monuments of Art Society. He played a Mozart horn concerto for them. Their final concert, too. Wish I could have heard it, even if it was with multichord.”
“He can play it all he wants to now, but he’ll never get paid for playing again. You can work that horn part into the multichord line, or I might be able to get you a trumpet player. He could use a converter.”
“It’ll ruin the effect.”
Hulsey chuckled. “Sounds the same to everyone but you, my boy. I can’t tell the difference. We got your violins and a cello player. What more do you want?”
“Doesn’t the London Guild have a horn player?”
“You want me to bring him over for one three-minute Com? Be reasonable, Erlin! Can I pick this up tomorrow?”
“Yes. I’ll have it ready in the morning.”
Hulsey reached for his briefcase, dropped it again, leaned forward scowling. “Erlin, I’m worried about you. I have twenty-seven tunesmiths in my agency. You’re the best by far. Hell, you’re the best in the world, and you make the least money of any of them. Your net last year was twenty-two hundred. None of the others netted less than eleven thousand.”
“That isn’t news to me,” Baque said.
“This may be. You have as many accounts as any of them. Did you know that?”
Baque shook his head. “No, I didn’t know that.”
“You have as many accounts, but you don’t make any money. Want to know why? Two reasons. You spend too much time on a Com, and you write it too well. Sponsors can use one of your Coms for months—or sometimes even years, like that Tamper Cheese thing. People like to hear them. Now if you just didn’t write so damned well, you could work faster, and the sponsors would have to use more of your Coms, and you could turn out more.”
“I’ve thought about that. Even if I didn’t, Val would keep reminding me. But it’s no use. That’s the way I have to work. If there was some way to get the sponsors to pay more for a good Com—”
“There isn’t. The guild wouldn’t stand for it, because good Coms mean less work, and most tunesmiths couldn’t write a really good Com. Now don’t think I’m concerned about my agency. Of course I make more money when you make more, but I’m doing well enough with my other tunesmiths. I just hate to see my best man making so little money. You’re a throwback, Erlin. You waste time and money collecting those antique—what do you call them?”
“Phonograph records.”
“Yes. And those moldy old books about music. I don’t doubt that you know more about music than anyone alive, and what does it get you? Not money, certainly. You’re the best there is, and you keep trying to be better, and the better you get the less money you make. Your income drops lower every year. Couldn’t you manage just an average Com now and then?”
“No,” Baque said brusquely. “I couldn’t manage it.”
“Think it over.”
“These accounts I have. Some of the sponsors really like my work. They’d pay more if the guild would let them. Supposing I left the guild?”
“You can’t, my boy. I couldn’t handle your stuff—not and stay in business long. The Tunesmiths’ Guild would turn on the pressure, and the Performers’ and Lyric Writers’ Guilds would blacklist you. Jimmy Denton plays along with the guilds and he’d bar your stuff from visiscope. You’d lose all your accounts, and fast. No sponsor is big enough to fight all that trouble, and none of them would want to bother. So just try to be average now and then. Think about it.”
Baque sat staring at the floor. “I’ll think about it.”
Hulsey struggled to his feet, clasped Baque’s hand briefly, and waddled out. Baque closed the door behind him and went to the drawer where he kept his meager collection of old phonograph records. Strange and wonderful music.
Three times in his career Baque had written Coms that were a full half-hour in length. On rare occasions he got an order for fifteen minutes. Usually he was limited to five or less. But composers like the B-A-C-H Baque wrote things that lasted an hour or more—even wrote them without lyrics.
And they wrote for real instruments, among them amazing-sounding things that no one played anymore, like bassoons, piccolos and pianos.
“Damn Denton. Damn visiscope. Damn guilds.”
Baque rummaged tenderly among the discs until he found one bearing Bach’s name. Magnificat. Then, because he felt too despondent to listen, he pushed it away.
Earlier that year the Performers’ Guild had blacklisted its last oboe player. Now its last horn player, and there just weren’t any young people learning to play instruments. Why should they, when there were so many marvelous contraptions that ground out the Coms without any effort on the part of the performer? Even multichord players were becoming scarce, and if one wasn’t particular about how well it was done, a multichord could practically play itself.
The door jerked open, and Val hurried in. “Did Hulsey—”
Baque handed her the check. She took it eagerly, gla
nced at it, and looked up in dismay.
“My guild dues,” he said. “I was behind.”
“Oh. Well, it’s a help, anyway.” Her voice was flat, emotionless, as though one more disappointment really didn’t matter. They stood facing each other awkwardly.
“I watched part of Morning with Marigold,” Val said. “She talked about your Coms.”
“I should hear soon on that Slo-Smoke Com,” Baque said. “Maybe we can hold the landlord off for another week. Right now I’m going to walk around a little.”
“You should get out more—”
He closed the door behind him, slicing her sentence off neatly. He knew what followed. Get a job somewhere. It’d be good for your health to get out of the apartment a few hours a day. Write Coms in your spare time—they don’t bring in more than a part-time income anyway. At least do it until we get caught up. All right, if you won’t, I will.
But she never did. A prospective employer never wanted more than one look at her slight body and her worn, sullen face. And Baque doubted that he would receive any better treatment.
He could get work as a multichord player and make a good income—but if he did he’d have to join the Performers’ Guild, which meant that he’d have to resign from the Tunesmiths’ Guild. So the choice was between performing and composing; the guilds wouldn’t let him do both.
“Damn the guilds! Damn Coms!”
When he reached the street, he stood for a moment watching the crowds shooting past on the swiftly moving conveyer. A few people glanced at him and saw a tall, gawky, balding man in a frayed, badly fitting suit. They would consider him just another derelict from a shabby neighborhood, he knew, and they would quickly look the other way while they hummed a snatch from one of his Coms.
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