He repressed the desire to probe farther and stated the purpose of their call. It wasn’t until he had almost finished that he realized neither Jay nor Charma knew who he really was. He explained, wondering what their reaction would be.
“Good grief!” said Jay, his mild blue eyes growing round with astonishment. “Talk about angels unawares! When I think where poor old Rudi would be now, if it hadn’t been for you—! Thanks, Dr. Howson. I think he was worth saving. He’s going places — even if he does get on my nerves.”
“Call me Gerry,” said Howson, relieved beyond measure at the ready acceptance Jay revealed. “Anyway, I came hoping to see something of what you and Rudi have been doing together.”
“That’s no trouble. Charma, honey, suppose you clear the piano and get out that thing we were looking at yesterday. I’ll turn on the gadgets.”
At one side of the small, crowded room there stood a battered upright piano; Howson hadn’t noticed it for the tangle of electrical and other equipment hanging down over it. When Charma cleared it off, he saw that it wasn’t quite an ordinary piano — it had two additional keyboards, one governing an organ-simulator and the other controlling a battery of strips of tape, each with a separate playing head.
“That’s for special effects,” explained Jay as he went from point to point in the room turning switches. “Rudi is hell for getting everything just so. Now here’s my own particular pet.” And he took the wooden lid off a large glass box like an aquarium, at the bottom of which a pool of luminescent fluid gleamed faintly. A row of coloured lights shone down each side of the tank.
“Lights down,” said Jay, taking his place at a haywire panel of electrical controls. There was darkness as Charma hauled the curtains across the window; by the eerie green glow of the luminous liquid Howson saw her sit down to the piano.
“Watch the tank,” Jay said briefly. “Okay, honey — one, two, three.”
A succession of irregular intervals down the keyboard, ending in a swelling peal of bells from one of the special keys, and shapes began to form in the glass tank: multi-coloured, responding vaguely and randomly to the music. Within a few seconds they were growing definite, and hard square forms followed hard square chords.
Watching intently, Howson thought he detected a shallow, distorted resemblance to certain things he had seen in Rudi’s mind, but how elementary this makeshift was compared to the vivid, far-reaching volumes of association he had perceived there!
The music stopped. “That’s as far as we got with that one,” said Jay coolly. “Open the curtains, there’s a dear.”
And as Charma let in the light, he looked at Howson. He raised an inquiring eyebrow.
“It’s clever,” said Howson. “But it’s much too limited for really ambitious treatment.”
Jay looked delighted. “Precisely what I’ve been saying. I’ve gone along with almost everything Rudi has asked me to do, because he’s a genuine creative artist and I’m a tinker. But he’s taken up a hell of a lot of my time, and we don’t seem to have been very happy collaborators. If you’ll come into the other room, I’ll show you what I’m doing myself.”
In the other room there were dozens of the glass tanks ranged on shelves, some of them dusty, all dark and unprepossessing. Jay went to an electric point and plugged in a wandering lead.
“My ‘wet fireworks’, as my beloved wife will insist on calling them,” he murmured. “Watch — this is my latest.”
He connected the lead to a socket beneath one of the larger tanks. A faint light came on; after a pause, it brightened, and a stream of opalescent bubbles began to work their way through the tank in a switchback formation. Shafts of green, yellow and blue shifted through the tank in an irregular series of graceful loops; then a square form in bright red loomed up from a point till it almost filled the side of the tank nearest to the watchers. It vanished, and the graceful swerving curves continued.
“It never repeats itself,” said Jay thoughtfully. “It’s like a kaleidoscope — in fact, I guess that’s what it most resembles.”
“It’s much more successful than what you’ve been doing with Rudi,” said Howson. “But its scope isn’t so great.”
Jay connected another of the tanks; this one was darker, dark red, midnight blue and purple shot with heavy gold and rare flashes of white. His eyes fixed on it, he nodded. “And yet this is what I’m trying to do,” he said. “I’m after something quite simple: I just want to convey movement and colour in a — well, in a beautiful combination. Or an ugly one, come to that. Like this!” He snapped a switch, and a third tank lit — hesitantly moving, abrupt in its changes of colour, the drab pattern dissolving frequently into muddy brown and a sickly olive-grey.
“But you see,” he continued, “I know what I’m after. Sometimes I’ve had the impression Rudi doesn’t. I mean, I’d follow his instructions to the letter, spending hours over a single effect, and then have him go through the roof because it wasn’t what he wanted after all.”
“I’m not surprised,” Howson said musingly. “Rudi’s sensory impressions are so interlocked I doubt if he can visualize anything straightforwardly. He hears a chord struck on your piano, and he immediately links it up with — oh, let’s say the taste and texture of a slice of bread, together with a bodily sensation of anxiety and pins-and-needles in the left arm. All these interlock with still other ideas — result, chaos! He probably can’t single out the different items; he can’t separate the colour of the sky from the colour of the greenish weed on the water or the bread-colour of the bread. He mingles them all together. But no one else could possibly take them in simultaneously and achieve the same associations that he gets.”
“Except you,” said Clara.
“Yes,” Howson agreed, his eyes on her. “Except me. Or another telepathist… Jay, what are the resources of that gadget in the room where we were just now ?”
“Aside from the obvious limits imposed by the speed of response — and its small size, of course — pretty well inexhaustible. We’ve worked on it, on and off, for almost a year. At the moment it’s programmed for a particular item, but it can be controlled manually too.”
“I see. Right, let me think for a while, will you?” Howson leaned his elbow on a vacant shelf and closed his eyes, knowing that Jay and Charma would assume he was thinking for his own attention only. In fact…
Clara! Tell me something, will you? Why was it that you took such an interest in Rudi if you scarcely knew him?
Why — A sense of embarrassment and uncertainty. I guess I felt sorry for him…?
Be honest with me. It’s bigger than that, isn’t it? You find him attractive, don’t you?
Y-yes…
In fact, you’d like to know him a lot better. And the idea that you might wind up by falling in love with him has crossed your mind — hasn’t it?
You’re a peeping tom! But there was no real annoyance in the sentiment; clearly, she found the idea very acceptable.
Howson grinned like a Cheshire cat. He opened his eyes and glanced at Jay.
“Can you spare the time to do a little more work on that machine of yours?” he inquired, and on noting a momentary hesitation, hurried on, “Look, it’s going to get you out of your impasse with Rudi. I agree with you — he’s going places. Given the right opportunity, he could create what amounts to a new channel of artistic expression. It won’t happen overnight; it’ll take time and enough public interest to make resources available so that he can integrate sight, sound, smell, maybe even more complex imagery. What he needs right now, though, is chiefly hope. And I believe I know how we can give him that”