There was virtually no end to that one. Howson drew back a little and tried again.
He was walking through a forest of ferns a hundred feet high with gigantic animals browsing off their bark; he was rather tired, as if he had come a long way, and the sun was extremely hot. But he came to a blue river and became an icefloe bobbing on a gentle current, melting slowly into the water around. He/the water plunged over a precipice; the pain of striking rock after rock in the long descent was somehow satisfying and fulfilling because he was standing back watching the white spray as he flowed down and there was solidity being worn away as the water eroded the underlying rocks and the spray diffused out with vastness and blackness and far down below a sensation of warmth and redness not seen but imagined (infra-redness ?) as though he was on an airless world with a red sun, a giant red sun, crawling over the horizon to turn into something scuttering and four-legged on an endless black plain which was only a few feet across and around which giants, unheeding, went about their business with bass footsteps and bass voices—
Only all the time he was listening to an orchestra.
Howson felt very tired. Someone was slapping his cheeks gently with a towel dipped in ice-water. He opened his eyes and found he was still on the chair by Rudi’s bed.
“Are you all right?” said Clara anxiously, peering over the shoulder of the nurse who was wielding the wet towel. “You—you were frightened—?”
“How long was I away?” demanded Howson in a hoarse voice.
“It’s been nearly three hours,” said the surgeon, glancing at her watch.
“Less than I thought — still, you were right to pull me back.” Howson got gingerly to his feet and took a step to ease the pins-and-needles in his legs. He glanced at Clara.
What did you make of it?
I don’t quite know… There was a lot of fear.
Your own. Howson frowned. Something wouldn’t come clear to consciousness — something he had half-sensed in the chaos of Rudi’s mental imagery. Still, it was no good trying to rush things. He spoke aloud to the surgeon.
“Thank you for letting me study him. I hope I haven’t put a strain on him. Would you check how well he stood it, and say how soon you think he’ll be able to face full-scale therapy?”
“Are you proposing to treat him here?” said the surgeon. She was torn between being flattered that a curative telepathist of such renown should want to work here, and annoyance at the intrusion of an outsider. Flattery won; Howson made gently sure of that.
She checked Rudi thoroughly and swiftly. “Pulse strong—blood-pressure not too bad — respiration fair…” She rolled back an eyelid and flashed a light into the pupil. “Yes, Dr. Howson, he seems to have stood up to it well. He should be strong enough for you in — well, at a fair guess, a week to ten days.”
Howson repressed his disappointment. He wanted to get to grips with Rudi’s fascinating mind as soon as possible. How would he contain himself for a full week after the tantalizing glimpse of riches in that mental store ?
Well, that would have to take care of itself.
He and Clara found a restaurant near the hospital and sat long over a meal and several cups of coffee, while he sorted out his memories of Rudi’s mind and put them up clearly and in order for her to inspect But the prolonged strain began to mist her perception, so they reverted to words at last.
“Poor Rudi,” Clara said, absently stirring emptiness in her coffee-cup. “No wonder he was so frustrated… How can he ever hope to communicate with an audience?’
“Oh, I know he recognizes that no one else shares precisely his association of one sensation with another. In one sense, a telepathist is the only ideal audience for him. But consciously he would be satisfied if he could create a passable objective facsimile of his mental images, to which his audience could add their own associations. What he can’t reconcile himself to is the fact that, since practically no one else can perform feats of mental cross-connexion on such a grand scale, no one has ever seen exactly what he was driving at”
“Until you ?” suggested Clara.
“Until me. Put it in concrete terms. You’ve mentioned his run-in with the university authorities. I take it he was doing experimental composition of some kind, though not the kind of thing the authorities expected — right ?”
Clara nodded. “Some of it was really weird! But they might have put up with that. The main trouble came when he enlisted Jay Home’s support. He started, as they said, interfering with Jay’s own work, which is far more accessible, and they warned him not to take up so much of Jay’s time. That was what sparked the row and led to the cancellation of his grant. At least, so Charma told me — I’ve known her longer than Jay.”
“I see. So anyway, it goes like this: Rudi produces an experimental work, whose logic is that of his own associations and not that of the orchestral sounds. He’d be satisfied with even minimal comprehension on the part of the listener; instead, his audience listens only for the sake of the sounds themselves, thus missing the whole point of the work. His hopes dwindle. He gets more and more helpless even when he deliberately restricts the range of associations on which he bases his music, and as he approaches nearer to the conventional, he more and more feels that he’s abandoning what he wants — rather: needs — to achieve.
“If he enlists Jay’s help, it’s because he’s cut himself down to the absolute bearable minimum. Discarding all other sensory cross-references such as those he himself experiences, he thinks he might as well convey plain images of colour and movement rather than nothing at all. Right ? I haven’t a very clear impression of Jay’s work, except for the description Rudi gave me, but he made me feel he didn’t regard it too highly.”
“He does, though. He doesn’t regard Jay himself too highly, which isn’t the same thing.”
“Hmmm!” Howson rubbed his chin. “But the difficulty one always runs up against in every attempt to integrate music and visual impressions is that the machinery is expensive, complicated and generally inadequate. What one needs is an instrument as simple and versatile as a piano, which combines the resources of a colour-organ with those of an unlimited film library.”
Clara stared at him. “Do you know, those are almost exactly the same words that Charma once used to me when things were going badly between Rudi and Jay ?”
“Not surprising. Probably they were the words Rudi himself used.” Howson stared into space. “Clara, let’s go and call on the Homes. There are things I ought to know before I try any therapy for Rudi.”
“You said,” Clara reminded him timidly, “you were on vacation… ?”
“A man at Ulan Bator hospital asked me why I didn’t use my talents for my own satisfaction,” said Howson with a hint of bitterness. “So that’s what I propose to do. I can’t deny that I look forward to seeing Rudi Allef thank me for all I’ve done for him. Only first I’ve got to find something I can do for him. Let’s go.”
29
Jay and Charma lived in a two-room apartment on the top of an old house not far from Grand Avenue. The air was full of dust from the demolition work in progress near by. When the visitors arrived Charma was attempting to cope with the additional housework this caused under a barrage of furious complaints from Jay about the disturbance to his precious equipment. Howson and Clara exchanged glances; they could sense the raised tempers from outside the door.
However, they knocked and were let in, and when Charma had cleared off a couple of chairs and conjured a pot of coffee out of the wrecked-looking kitchenette Howson realized that he could detect a harmony of attitude between the couple which underlay and supported their superficial eternal disagreement. It rather took him aback, but evidently it was a workable arrangement.