by Anthology
Roy wiped a drop of sweat off his forehead. Otherwise his face was neutral. “It means that someone jammed a crowbar into your timeline, and now they’re prying it back open again.”
Marty gave Lester a look that could kill. “The Music Factory,” he said.
Harv Saltz looked grim. The others gathered around the conference table looked grim too. Except for Adam Fisk, the comptroller. He had an I-told-you-so expression on his face.
“All right, Lester, take it slow,” Harv said. “Just explain to us how it happened. First you told us that if we offered Beethoven enough money, we’d have no problem getting an exclusive on his tenth symphony. I believe the expression you used was ‘an offer he can’t refuse.’ Evidently the money wasn’t enough. He pocketed the advance you gave him—an exorbitant figure—which bought us some months of inaction, while you lived it up on the expense account.”
“It was supposed to be a slam dunk,” Larry McGavin put in.
“Please, Larry,” Harv said. He turned back to Lester. “Then you bought Beethoven back to our time with you with the promise of a miraculous operation that would restore his hearing—another offer he couldn’t refuse . . .”
“I was against it,” Adam said. “Throwing good money after bad. And quite a bit of money at that. It would have reduced our profit margin on the project to—”
“That’s water under the bridge, Adam,” Harv said. “In view of the problem we’ve got now.” He aimed his gaze at Lester again. “I’ve got a meeting with the board next week. They’re pretty upset. So tell me again, how is it that you managed to spend another three months supposedly riding herd on him, and still no symphony?”
All eyes were on Lester. He spent a couple of seconds groping for words, then said, “Well, uh, we had what seemed to be his sincere assurances that . . .”
Adam Fisk interrupted him. “But no written contract. And nothing about returning the original advance.”
Lester got unexpected help from the guy from legal who had been asked to sit in on the meeting. “A contract would have been unenforceable anyway. A hypothetical future has no standing in a hypothetical past, even assuming that we wanted to make a case out of it.”
“It might have helped turn the screws on him,” Adam persisted.
Harv rapped the table. “Please, gentlemen! Let him talk.”
Lester looked over at Marty for support. No help there. Marty was maintaining a self-protective silence.
“I think he intended to honor his promises,” he said ruefully. “But then he got back to his own milieu. He could hear again. And more to the point, he could play the piano again and hear himself play. It must have hit him like a ton of bricks. The first thing he did was to get rid of the out-of-tune pianos with the broken wires that he’d abused over the years. He fell in love with the state-of-the-art Broadwood piano that the manufacturer sent to him when word of his miraculous cure got around. And he started playing in public again.”
“I fail to see . . .” someone began.
Lester pressed on. “Don’t forget, Beethoven made his first splash in Vienna as a piano virtuoso. He played the salons, he wowed the ladies, he amazed everybody with his ability to improvise. The money was good and the adulation even better. He got to be quite a prima donna. He insulted his patrons and they put up with it. He threatened to break a chair over Prince Lichnowski’s head for asking him to improvise for some dinner guests he didn’t like. Another time, one of his groupies—a princess—got down on her knees and begged him to play, and he wouldn’t give her the time of day. He was still young and feeling his oats when he started to lose his hearing. It was a terrible blow not to be able to do the concerts and private performances any more. He never stopped regretting the life that he lost. Composing is one thing, but playing to a live audience is something else.”
“Get to the point, Lester,” Harv said. “What happened?” He was tapping the table with a finger, a bad sign.
“Right,” Larry McGavin growled. “I got the sales force all fired up about this, Lester. Now, all of a sudden, no symphony. What do I tell them?”
“I was getting to that,” Lester said. He took a deep breath. “For the first week, nothing on paper. No notes, no sketches, none of the usual scrawls. I nagged him about that, believe me, I did. But he just kept saying he was working things out in his head, and when they firmed up a little better, he’d start sketching out some ideas. He was on the verge of losing his temper, so I backed off. But he accepted an invitation from his old patron, Prince Lichnowski, to play at some fancy soiree. They had an emotional reconciliation, and rumor has it that the prince paid him six hundred florins, his old stipend. Same thing happened a week later, with Prince Lobkowitz. He played the Hammerklavier sonata, and caused quite a stir. Remember, he’d never really heard it himself. Neither had his audience. The pianists of his time thought it was unplayable.”
“Very interesting, I’m sure,” Harv said. “Get on with it.”
Lester looked over to Marty for support, but Marty was sitting there placidly, looking as detached as he could manage.
“Well, then Lobkowitz and Beethoven’s self-appointed manager, Anton Schindler, hatched this scheme of a giant subscription concert, Beethoven’s Comeback or something. I braced him about it, but he waved me off, saying the symphony ideas were still percolating in his head, and when he was ready, he’d start work. So I figured, let him get it out of his system, and I’ll tackle him afterward.”
“And?”
“The concert was a huge success. He had to repeat it four times over the next two weeks. It was the talk of Europe, not just Vienna. Beethoven didn’t bother to write anything new for it. He just played some of his surefire hits—the Appassionata sonata, the Moonlight, the Pathetique. He filled in with an hour of improvisations—showy stuff, all fireworks and no red meat. The audience lapped it up. When it was over, Beethoven was rolling in dough. Like nothing he’d seen before.”
“I presume you—what was it?—‘tackled him’ afterward?” Harv said with dangerous sarcasm. Several murmurs of assent could be heard round the table.
“He blew me off. It was more of the same. Concerts, private parties, piano lessons for adoring countesses. He was having the time of his life. He wouldn’t talk to me any more. The last I heard, he and Schindler were cooking up a tour of France and England. Then Russia.”
“Lester . . .”
Lester tried to fend off the explosion. “For God’s sake, what was I supposed to do? The man was reborn! He spruced up, got a new wardrobe, got his hair trimmed! He has a girlfriend! A countess!”
Harv’s secretary entered the conference room just in time to postpone his wrath. She whispered in his ear and handed him a piece of paper. He read it, then looked round the table with a cold, steely gaze that was worse than an explosion.
“What I feared,” he said. “The Music Factory’s releasing a new series. ‘Beethoven at the Piano: Improvisations from His World Tour.’ ”
The explosion came, but it was everybody else at the table, not Harv, who looked as if he was simply contemplating murder. They were all glaring at Lester and talking at once. “. . . cooked again, goddammit . . .” “. . . shouldn’t have listened . . .” “. . . why didn’t you record him yourself . . .”
Lester saw his whole career flashing before his eyes. He tried desperately to make himself heard. “I only had my Palm-All with me . . . who would’ve thought there’d be concerts . . .”
It was Marty who came to the rescue. He rapped on the table to get their attention, and when he had it, he spoke with all the calm authority of a creative director coming to the defense of a wayward subordinate.
“Don’t be too hard on Lester. Sometimes it hits the fan and there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s no sense dwelling on past mistakes. We need to look ahead, find a new project that will make Divergences, Inc. numero uno again. And Lester might just have come up with that project. We were talking about it this morning.”
Lester knew what a rope was when he was drowning. He squared his shoulders and faced the music. “I asked myself what would grab everybody’s attention even if they didn’t know much about music. What would compare with the appeal of something like Beethoven’s Tenth?”
He paused for a beat while he tried to think of something. They were waiting expectantly.
“And then I had it,” he said. “Schubert’s Finished.”
THE BEST-LAID SCHEME
L. Sprague de Camp
Russell F. R. Hedges did not look like a world-destroyer. He was in fact an almost annoyingly harmless-looking soul, a plump person of forty-five in neat blue serge, with dark hair streaked with gray and in need of cutting, hanging down over his steel-rimmed glasses.
The folly of trying to judge people by their looks has been pointed out by generations of psychologists and such people. Rut this form of judgment seems to be ingrained in human folkways. Perhaps that is why Coordinator Ronald Q. M. Bloss underestimated Hedges. When the chief executive officer of the great North American continent is told by the head of the Bureau of Standards to do thus-and-so, thus-and-so being a program designed to put the affairs of the continent in the said head’s hand, the Coordinator’s natural reaction is to ring the buzzer and have the erring subordinate carted off to the hatch.
Bloss was curious. Finger poised over the button, he asked: “How, my dear Hedges, do you propose to destroy the world?”
Hedges smiled amiably. He spoke in barely more than a whisper, suspecting the presence of dictaphones: “Simple, my dear Bloss.” (He was being offensively familiar; people normally addressed the Coordinator as “your Efficiency”.) “You recall my investigations into the nature of Time. The process of temporal forward-jumping, vulgarly known as vanwinkling, has been an established fact for several decades, being a favorite occupation among those who are dissatisfied with the present world and hope to find a better one in the future.”
“I know all that,” said Bloss irritably. “You may as well calm yourself, my dear Bloss. Being in a position to be as verbose in my explanations as I please, I intend to indulge my whims in that direction. As I was about to say, the problem of backward-jumping has not hitherto been solved. It involves an obvious paradox. If I go back and slay my own grandfather, what becomes of me? It’s all very well to say he wasn’t killed, and that something will happen to prevent my carrying out my design. Who shall see to it that my design is in fact frustrated, once I have actually gotten back to his time and located him? Yet, if I kill him, I obviously disarrange subsequent history. Subsequent history is a tough fabric, and will no doubt try to adhere to its original pattern. That it will altogether succeed in doing so, I presume to doubt. In fact, any action on my part in bygone times that affects other persons will set in train a series of events that will ultimately wrench subsequent history of its normal channels. Someone will marry or fail to marry the spouse he would otherwise have chosen, and a great statesman will be born or will fail to be born, as the case may be. So, all I have to do is go far enough back, commit a few sufficiently significant acts, and presto! you and all the other inhabitants of the continent cease to be; or rather, you cease to be the persons you now are. You see, my dear Bloss?”
Bloss thought he saw very well. He pressed the button.
Hedges saw him do so. The Chief of the Bureau of Standards looked at his wrist-watch. It was a large wrist-watch, with a lot of buttons and things around its circumference. His fingers moved to one of these.
“Ah, well,” he said, “it seems a demonstration is needed.” And he vanished.
When the guards bounced in three seconds later, they found a worried-looking coordinator. He was not especially disturbed over Hedges’ vanishment—he’d seen people do that before when they vanwinkled—but he was wondering if by some remote chance the man might not have actually gone back instead of forward.
He sent for Vincent M. S. Collingwood, head of the Continental Bureau of Investigation.
Collingwood pulled a sheaf of papers out of his briefcase. “Hah!” he said. “Here are the files on Russell F. R. Hedges. Our staff psychologist has him down as ‘shrewd, ambitious, resourceful, and persevering beneath a deceptively mild exterior.’ ” Collingwood fixed his chief with a glittering eye. “That, Your Efficiency, is what I call sinister!”
“I don’t know,” said Bloss. “Maybe I’m foolish to get excited; maybe he was bluffing and did a vanwinkle on us.”
“Hah!” grated Collingwood. “But did he? If it was an ordinary vanwinkle, he’d be stranded in the future and unable to get back. No, I’m sure there’s a dastardly plot behind this.”
Bloss began: “If—” He stopped with his mouth open. Through the White House ran a silent, motionless earthquake, if you can imagine such a thing.
Bloss stared at the wall behind Collingwood. “That picture,” he said. “That picture behind you.”
Collingwood scowled at the blank wall. “I don’t see any picture.”
“That’s just it. It was there a second ago. And you are wearing a different necktie.”
“Hah! So I am. This is sinister. He’s gone back and done something—it doesn’t matter much what—and changed subsequent history. Hah!”
“Stop saying ‘hah’ all the time,” complained Bloss. “I want you to do something.”
“Hah, you don’t have to worry about my doing something, your Efficiency. Doing something is just my job.”
“Well, what did you have in mind?”
“Why—uh—I don’t just know. But don’t worry.”
“But I am worrying. Can’t you at least put some of your men to following Hedges?”
“Of course, your Efficiency,” cried Collingwood. “Just what I had in mind, hah! I’ll put De Witt after him. He’s the toughest man we have. Besides, he has an artificial eye.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Hah! Wouldn’t you like to know!”
Hedges popped back into sight, in the chair just recently vacated by Collingwood. Bloss jumped.
“Ah, my dear Bloss,” said Hedges. “The demonstration was convincing, I trust?”
“Uh—huh,” said Bloss warily. “What do you want me to do now?”
“I’ve told you already. Force a bill through giving the head of the Bureau” of Standards the powers I enumerated.”
“All right. But it will take time to prepare it and to get it passed.”
“I know that. I’m in no rush. I shall continue with my usual duties. You will of course not try anything so rash as to have me arrested—or assaulted. If you do, I shall go back quite a way, and I shall devote my efforts particularly to your own ancestors, all of whom I have looked up to be sure I can locate them. Good-day, Your Efficiency.”
Bloss watched him leave in a more conventional manner. The Coordinator thought of telling Collingwood to dispose of Hedges in any way he chose, so long as Hedges was gotten rid of. But he had hesitated. He was a stickler for legality, and the assassination of inconvenient citizens without due process of law was highly felonious in the North America of 2365. Besides, there was a close election coming up, and his opponents would be sure to find his sins out and use them.
Now, there was an even better reason for preserving Hedges’ immunity: if the C. B. I. attacked Hedges with gun or blackjack, but were not successful at the very first try, Hedges would disappear into the past, and would, in revenge, do something really drastic to the fabric of history. Maybe Bloss would find himself no longer Coordinator—or no longer Bloss. As Bloss had considerable affection for himself, the thought of such separation was painful.
Meanwhile Vincent M. S. Collingwood had called in his toughest operative, Mendez S. D. De Witt. This De Witt was in disgrace for having killed a man; he said it was necessary to keep the man from escaping; others said it was not. Nothing had been done to De Witt, but he was made to feel that he’d have to go some to get back in the Department’s graces. He was a thick-bodied man with short black hair stand
ing on end. Nobody would have suspected his artificial eye, which he had made some curious uses of in his work. He had a carefully cultivated slovenliness of dress and manner.
“This Hedges,” said Collingwood impressively, “is a dastardly scoundrel. He threatens not merely the foundations of our government and the fabric of our society, but our very existence.”
“Yeah,” said Mendez De Witt.
“He must be stopped! Our glorious land cannot tolerate such a viper in her bosom.”
“Yeah.”
“You have been selected for this—” Collingwood’s ‘phone rang, and he listened to Bloss. Bloss told him that under no circumstances must R. F. R. Hedges be assaulted, assassinated, kidnapped, or otherwise molested.
Collingwood continued: “You have been selected for the perilous task of unmasking this sinister force. But in the accomplishment of your aim, Hedges must on no account be assaulted, assassinated, kidnapped, or otherwise molested. You understand?”
“Yeah,” said De Witt. “Whatcha wamme to do, stick out my tongue at him?”
“Hah! You’re as funny as a wheel-chair, De Witt. No, you will first go to work in the Bureau of Standards, where you can keep an eye on him. You will learn whence he derives his time-traveling power, and whether he can be deprived of it without much risk.”
“That ail?”
“That’s all. Good luck, my boy.”
“Some day,” said De Witt, “a guy is gonna call another guy ‘my boy’ once too often. Be seem’ ya.”
Mendez S. D. De Witt had several artificial eyes, none of which was quite what it seemed. He occupied a section of laboratory desk in the B. of S. building, and, with soldering-iron and tweezers, deftly assembled the mechanism for yet another spurious optic. This one was to be a paralyzing-ray machine. The mechanism would be installed in the methyl-methacrylate shell at another time; he didn’t want the other Bureau of Standards technicians to learn about his eyes.
One of these technicians sneezed. He ran a finger around the base of his faucet and held it up with a faint smudge of yellow powder on it. He crumbled this trace of powder over his burner, and sniffed.
