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 swooped 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.”