“The worst of which is that it so damned near makes sense.”
“Baby,” said Morrison, “I’ve got kind of a vested interest in this system. With one leg buried on Mars and the other on Venus you might say I sort of straddle it. All our kind of people a hundred years ago, they thought once we forgot nationalism and got world government everything was going to be as easy as a high jump on Mars. Well, we’ve got world government, no phony league but an honest Federation based on the individual as a unit—and that Federation is smack up against the most important election in its history without any possibility of electing the right party. If the Academy wins, we’re a laboratory—which I give maybe one generation before it becomes a technological autocracy. If the Populists win—and may their jets clog forever for stealing that fine old word—we’ll have book burnings and lab smashings and a fine fast dive into the New Dark Ages. And in between are the guys who don’t care, the guys who can’t be bothered, the guys who’d like to but. . .”
“And us,” Arthur concluded, “keeping underground so we won’t wind up in the Belsens of either side . . . I’m seeing Weddergren tonight,” he suddenly announced his decision. “We’ve got to make one more try.”
The system’s greatest scientist but one, the Academy’s candidate for President of the World Federation, was surprisingly accessible to Jon Arthur. A technician (the Academy was firmly opposed to a servant class, but a man needs technical assistants) ushered Arthur into the study the moment he heard his name.
Dr. Weddergren advanced, white mane and all, to greet him warmly. “Delighted, my boy! I was hoping you’d come around in person to congratulate me on my pupil.” This seemed a peculiar gambit even for an Academy politician. “Your pupil?”
“The Parva. Faustina Parva. The contralto who—”
For a moment Arthur was distracted from his mission. “Phenomenal,” he admitted. “Tire greatest voice, I swear, that I have ever heard. But your pupil . . . ?”
Dr. Weddergren allowed himself a patronizing smile. “So you didn’t know? You’re like the rest, eh? The Weddergren Drive . . . the Weddergren Orbit Calculator . . . The shoemaker should stick to his last, perhaps, as those unscientific Populists keep striving to assert?”
Arthur had never quite realized that unscientific could be the most obscene term of invective in the language. “I knew, of course, that you were fond of music . . .” he began.
“Fond?” There was a brief glimpse of a sincerity which the Weddergren features had never revealed on a telescreen. “You might say that. You might also, if you wish, say that it is my life—in a way that the Weddergren Drive or even the Academy can never be. And this part of my life,” his features took on again their reasonable persuasiveness, “offers fresh evidence of the nature in which science can guide and mold life in any of its aspects. As a music critic, you are, I imagine, somewhat familiar with vocal training and its methods?”
“I am.” Arthur smiled. “It is difficult to imagine a less scientific field.”
“Precisely. And yet what is its objective? To enable a machine to produce optimum results. The nature of that machine is exactly and minutely known. There is not the slightest mystery attached to the functioning of any of its parts. Yet instead of feeding into that machine an accurately punched tape, furnishing it with complete instruction on the control and articulation of each of its parts for every specified result desired, what do vocal teachers do? They teach by example, by metaphor, by analogy, by feeling and intuition! It is as though, instead of allowing a calculator the normal functioning of its binary synapses, you read it a lecture on the mystique of the theory of numbers!”
“There’s something in what you say,” Arthur admitted, with an eerie echo of his partial agreement with the doctrine of the System as Laboratory.
“The Parva,” Weddergren announced, “is my proof. A good vocal organ to start with, of course. One does not waste time on a shoddily constructed machine. Careful analysis of the precise physiology of the voice. A long and detailed course of training, on strictest scientific principles with no mystical flubdubbery. Intensive hypnopedagogy until the mind has learned in sleep every minutest aspect of the volitional control of the vocal apparatus. That is all, and the result you heard this afternoon.”
Jon Arthur’s mental ear heard again the beauty, the perfection . . . and the hint of coldness. It was that hint which enabled him to say, “Music is so often allied with science, isn’t it? One has read of Einstein, and wasn’t Kleinbach much interested too?”
Again Weddergren nearly forgot to be telegenic. “Kleinbach . . .” he said softly. “I studied under him, you know. I suppose if this century has produced a great man . . .”
“I’ve met others of his pupils, but they never could explain him to me. Perhaps you can, Dr. Weddergren. Do you understand why he did . . . what he did?”
“Vanish, you mean? Remove himself? To think we do not even know whether he is alive or . . . Frankly, I think I do. He understood the necessity for the Academy and for the steps that we shall take after the election. But he could not bring himself to face those steps in actuality. With all his greatness he was . . . a romantic, shall we say? Perhaps even an atavist. And yet I have sometimes thought . . . It was an equation of Kleinbach’s, you know, that started me on the road to the Drive. And it was Kleinbach taking me to hear Storm that
