The Metallic Muse (9 page)

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 listened 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.

“Kids don’t get any physical benefit from watching scooter ball,” he would say. “If you want to enjoy the spiritual benefits of art, you have to participate. You can’t just watch it from the sidelines.”

People understood that kind of talk, and Professor Perkins built up a big class of students. When they were advanced enough he started an orchestra, and he conducted it himself, without pay. If sections needed help for a concert, he brought professional musicians out from the city and paid them himself. He gave several recitals a year, and he had his students in regular recitals. He hired the best professional accompanists he could find to help out, and naturally he had to pay them. I knew that his savings couldn’t amount to much. He’d invested all of his, money in culture for Waterville.

These concerts and recitals were events. Everyone in the area had at least one relative on the program, and everyone came—admission free, of course. And it didn’t stop there. The professor made arrangements for a couple of young artists to spend their summers in Waterville giving inexpensive art lessons to anyone interested. I couldn’t guess what that cost him. When my father died and I took over the Gazette, the professor had me sponsoring story contests and poetry contests and essay contests and running the winners in the Gazette. At least that didn’t cost him anything—I put up the prizes myself.

But the idea was the same: Don’t watch from the sidelines, have a go at it yourself. With the professor pushing it for twenty years, that philosophy really took hold. We had everything from wood-carving clubs to oil-painting clubs, from poetry-writing clubs to musical-composition clubs. And the professor was the sponsor and guardian angel of each and every one. Almost every kid who’d grown up during the past twenty years had studied a musical instrument at one time or another, and so had a lot of the adults. The professor had become a local institution. Everyone loved him, especially the kids.

It was hard to believe that people would throw him over for Sam Beyers’s robot after the contribution he had made. I suppose the robot had the same appeal as the new kitchen or farming gadget that everyone rushes to buy. There’s something intriguing about a robot that can give music lessons.

And the lessons were free, and would be until Beyers got rid of the professor. That was bad enough, but if the robot actually could take one of the professor’s beginners and have him playing Beethoven and Berg and Morglitz after two or three lessons …

If there was a way to help the professor, I couldn’t see it. After moping about for most of the morning, I decided to have another talk with him.

He lived in a small house located on the edge of town and remote enough from the immediate neighbors so that the music lessons wouldn’t bother them. It also had room for him to exercise his talents as a horticulturist. In the summer his yard was knee-deep in flowers.

His daughter Hilda met me at the door. There were wrinkles in her plump face that I hadn’t seen before, and her mouth drooped mournfully. The professor’s life had seemed comfortably secure, and suddenly everything was falling apart.

“He’s out in the garden,” she said. “You sit down and I’ll call him.”

I preferred to pace the floor while I waited. In most homes this would have been the living room, but the professor had made it his studio. It was attractively furnished, with pictures of composers on the walls, and a framed page of that odd-looking medieval music, and photographs of orchestras the professor had played in. It was the only room in the house that was air-conditioned. After his investments in Waterville’s culture, the professor hadn’t much money left for physical comforts.

He was surprised to see me but as eagerly hospitable as ever. Hilda faced him glumly before he could speak. “Mrs. Anderson called,” she said. “Carol—”

“Ah, yes. Carol goes to Beyers and the robot gives her lessons free. Today she has troubles with the little exercises, and tomorrow she plays a Morglitz concerto without mistakes.” He winked at me. “The robot is a wonderful thing, eh, Johnnie? How many does that leave us? Twenty-two?”

“Twenty-one,” Hilda said. “You forgot about Susan Zimmer. Or didn’t I tell you?”

“You didn’t. But it’s quite all right. Well, Johnnie? What brings you to see an obsolete musician?”

We sat side by side on the sofa, and Hilda brought us coffee and a small plate of cakes. We sipped coffee and munched cakes, with me trying to think of what to say and the professor waiting politely.

“What do you know about Beyers’s robot?” I asked finally.

“Enough to know what is wrong with it,” he said. “I’ve seen similar robots demonstrated in New York. I know about the experiments that have been made with them. Beyers’s robot may be an improved model, but they all have the same basic defect.”

“How do they work?” I asked. “You see—I’m trying to put my finger on something I could use in the paper. In an editorial, perhaps.”

He smiled. “You keep on trying, don’t you. Never say die, where there’s life there’s hope, the game isn’t over until the last violin student is out.” He got up and helped himself to another cup of coffee. “Beyers says I’m a selfish old fogy standing in the way of progress, but he’s wrong! There’s a place for machines—even in art there’s a place—but the machine can’t ever replace the artist. It can assist him. It can stimulate him. It can relieve him of mechanical labor. It can’t supply imagination and feeling. Those have to come from the artist.

“Take the music-writer. The composer plays, and the music writer writes down what he is playing. The machine doesn’t compose, but it relieves the composer of the drudgery of making notes on paper, and it permits him to compose without shattering his thread of inspiration every few notes so he can write something down before he forgets it. It’s an invaluable machine. Writers and poets have the word-selector. The machine doesn’t choose the word it merely reminds the writer of the possibilities. There are the theater amplifiers. No machine can make emotional expression out of a series of words—to a machine all words are equal—but the amplifiers can deliver the actor’s natural voice to the people in the rear so he doesn’t have to shout when he should be whispering.”

“How can a machine stimulate?” I asked.

“You’ve heard of the composing machines?” “I thought they were a joke.”

“They were as long as they were designed to follow a system. The music they wrote was perfectly correct and horribly dull and naive. Then someone built a machine that had no system at all. What it produced was absolute chaos, but scattered through that chaos were magnificent tonal effects that the machine happened onto by accident. It took a great artist to understand those effects and use them properly. The last and greatest compositions of Morglitz were inspired by the random beauties he found in composing-machine chaos.”

“Then where does the robot violin teacher come in?” I asked.

“It doesn’t. With the robot teacher, the machine becomes the artist, and the artist becomes the machine. It’s difficult to explain. Consider that robot Warren’s Feed Store uses to carry and load bags of grain. Supposing that instead of carrying that grain, the machine merely strengthened a man’s spine so he could carry larger loads himself. That’s what the robot teacher does. It gives the student proficiency without understanding and without ability. He can carry a bigger load while the machine is helping him, but without the machine he’ll be worse off than he was before the robot lessons started.”

“I still don’t understand what the robot does,” I said.

“The robot is a big box with a mass of tentacles that attach to the student. It tells the student when his violin is in tune. It places his fingers and arms in the correct position. The position is perfect, because the robot won’t let it be anything else. The student can’t play out of tune, or play a wrong note, because there’s a tentacle on each finger and the robot won’t let the student put a finger in the wrong place.