A Most Miraculous Organ

The first to arrive was Haskell, the Eng. Lit. man, a specialist in the Elizabethan period. He had made full professor just the month before, and already he was cultivating the longish hair, the briar, the tweediness and the abstracted gaze he felt his role required. The briar kept going out. Obscenely sucking and smacking at it under a match flame, he said, "Hullo, Fairbank. Am I early?"

His host replied, "Right on time. The others are late. They'll be along presently, I imagine." Taking Haskell's coat, he added, "What are you drinking?"

"Irish, please, with just a little water. No ice." Suck, slurp, smack, puff.

Professor-Emeritus Marcus Fairbank, 70 and retired, was a widower and Haskell's senior by a good 30 years. From that (continued on page 197) Miraculous Organ (continued from page 103) perspective, he could be tolerant of the younger man's airs. "Sit down," he said. "I'll mix your drink."

Within moments, most of the others were on hand--Weiss, the composer-in-residence; Graner, the historian; and stone-deaf Temple, the painter. Pedagogues all, but none there save Haskell bore the outward stamp of academe. Temple looked like a butcher, an impression which red-smeared fingers only enhanced. Weiss looked like an aging matinee idol. Graner looked like a sourpuss, which, in fact, he was. All had been pallbearers the previous year at the funeral of Fairbank's wife.

'Anyone else expected?" asked Temple, accepting a beer.

"Just Mac," said Fairbank.

"Bill McDermott?" said Weiss. "I haven't seen him in ages. He owes me five bucks. I'll have Scotch, please."

Father William McDermott entered a couple of minutes later, profusely apologizing, demanding gin, and angrily pressing five singles into the outstretched palm of the gloating Weiss. "You were right, you buccaneer. Leoncanvallo did compose a La Bohème. I looked it up. Here, take your tained money. I'll trip you up yet, thorugh, mark my word!" Turning to Fairbank, the priest said, "Now then, Marcus. What the hell are we all doing here?"

"You're here to witness something," said Fairbank, "to be present at a historic occasion. Here's your martini, Mac. If you will all step this way? ..."

Clutching their drinks, Fairbank's guests followed their host in single file down a narrow flight of stairs to a cellar workroom.

Fairbank snapped on the lights. A semicircle of simple wooden chairs had been grouped facing a large, sheet-shrouded object. Father Mac said, "What is that thing--a coffin?"

Weiss added, "Or a piano?"

Fairbank smiled at the composer. "You're close. Sit down, all of you, please."

As they did so, they took note of the wall behind the draped object: Set into it with custom-crafted care was what looked like a 40-inch television screen.

Graner groaned, "You didn't bring us here to watch TV?!"

"That's not a TV set," Fairbank assured him. "I do make use of the cathode principle, but there the resemblance ends."

"I'm aquiver with suspense," said Haskell.

Fairbank took a position in front of the impassive screen. Habit urged him into a professorial stance and manner.

"My dear friends," he said, "what you are about to see--" (he turned toward the screen) "--is the culmination of ten years' hearbreaking work ..."

"Sorry, Marcus," said Temple, "I didn't catch that last. You turned your back."

Fairbank faced Temple and spoke distinctly, so the deaf painter could read his lips. "I said: the culmination of ten years' heartbreaking work. Heartbreaking not only because of time lost on false trails, beautiful theories shattered by inflexible facts, research halted time and again by lack of funds, failure after failure after failure but also because my devoted Thelma. who shared the toil and travail of this project, the ... the sacrifice, is not here to share the triumph."

He faltered for a moment, brushed by emotion, then he grasped one corner of the sheet in front of him. "You are the very first to see" He whipped off the sheet.

"The Fairbank Light-Organ!"

A curious instrument was revealed. At superficial glance, it looked like an ordinary concert organ. Italian Provincial in sherry walnut, available from any music dealer. Then one noticed certain modifications. Thick black cables writhing from its base. The pedals removed. One entire bank of keys replaced by a gleaming platoon of gauges and a complex of transistors. The lettering on the stops and switches revised: The harmonic drawbars, for example, now bore hand-painted numbers in the high hundreds, thousands, millions, billions; Vibrato Wide and Vibrato fast had become slow Image and Speed Image; Deep Bassoon was now Long-Shot, and Flute was close-up; Harp Sustain was Freeze Image: thorny equations stood in the stead of the designations banjo, chimes, Marimba, Guitar, Glockenspiel; and the abbreviated, enigmatic Etern, was clumsily pasted over what had been Diapason. Connected to all this, the dark eye in the wall--the television screen that was not a television screen.

"Hell," Weiss growled. "Don't tell me you've reinvented the color organ! Patterns of colored light flitting across a screen while music plays? Scriabin tried that fifty years ago and it was a flop even then."

Fairbank shook his head. "No, it's nothing like that. Although the basic structure is no more than a secondhand electric organ. But that's only because it proved to be the design most easily adapted to our purpose. A bench to sit on, plenty of room for a meter panel; also, the stops are conveniently placed and were converted quite simply. But this organ plays no music. It's silent."

Fairbank clicked a switch to the left of the keyboard. The basso hum of electrical power vibrated under their feet.

"Not quite silent," said Graner.

"Private generator," Fairbank explained.

Haskell began to ask, "But how could you af----"

"Watch," said Fairbank. "Watch the screen."

He pressed several organ stops, spun a dial, then played a silent "chord" on three black keys.

Light pulsed on the screen--pure white at first, then flaming red, deep blue, golden yellow, finally an eddying of all colors. They rippled, erupted, converged.

"Op art?" muttered Temple.

The colors split, swirled, and suddenly formed a picture. It was a somewhat blurred image, in motion, of Fairbank and his five guests--drinks in hand--grouped around the organ. Fairbank adjusted a dial and the picture sharpened focus.

"Closed-circuit TV," snorted Graner, looking around for a hidden camera.

"Wait," said Father Mac. "That's us, all right, that's this room--but not now. Look at the organ. It's still covered by the sheet. That's a picture of this room five minutes ago!"

On the screen, the figure of Fairbank, mouthing silent words, peeled the sheet away from the organ.

"So what?" said Graner. "Video tape. A playback."

"No," Fairbank said. "I repeat: I did not invite you here to watch television--closed-circuit, video-tapped or otherwise. Keep watching, please."

He pressed another stop and carefully pulled out one of the drawbars an eighth of an inch.

The picture flickered and changed, showing a white Colonial door.

"That's the front door of this house," said Haskell.

Graner sighed. "I still don't see----"

Fairbank flipped the Long-Shot switch. The image of the door plunged into the distance, surrendering to a view of the entire house. It stood alone, surrounded only by empty lots.

Weiss said, "That's six, seven years ago! Before this neighborhood became built up!"

Nodding, Father Mac said, "Marcus had the first house on this block."

"Film," Graner said flatly. "Home movies."

Fairbank smiled at this. "It was precisely because of your skeptical mind, Graner, that I invited you here. The others--Haskell, Weiss, Temple, Mac--are romantics. They will want to believe. They're easy marks. I can convince them with no effort. But if I can convince even you, if I can smother the last scintilla of your doubt--then I will know that the light-organ is ready to show to the world."

He settled himself at the organ bench and his hands moved deftly among the keys and stops. Abstract shapes swam on the screen.

"Control is still a problem," he said. "About half the time I can get what I want on the screen--the rest of the time it's chance, accident, potluck. But I hope to remedy that, if I live long enough!"

Another picture was forming. "Ah," said Fairbank. "Yes."

A crowd; some of its members soldiers in union blue; their attention given over to a figure small in the background-- a tall bearded man in a stovepipe hat.

"Graner," said Fairbank, "did they have movies during the Civil War period? Color movies, at that?"

"Very funny," said Graner. "That's a film clip from some Hollywood epic. Raymond Massey or Henry Fonda or somebody."

"Really? You've made this period your specialty. You're an expert, a recognized authority. The walls of your study are lined with Mathew Brady photographs. You, of all the men I know, should be able to tell the difference between a painted actor and ..."

Fairbank's finger touched the Close-Up switch. The sad, bearded face filled the screen.

Graner slowly stood up. Softly, he spoke. "Good Lord. Good Lord, Fairbank. That's no actor. No fake. That's--why, he's saying something! Can't you get any sound, man?"

Temple, his eyes fixed to the lips of the bearded man, said: " 'Four ... score ... and seven years ... ago ...' "

Fairbank flipped a switch and the picture died.

"No!" cried Graner. "Don't kill it!"

"You can see it again," said Fairbank. "as often as you like. Long-shot, close-up, slowed down, speeded up, frozen. I'm sorry about the lack of sound. That will have to be the next development. It's been enough just mastering light."

Fairbank turned away from Graner and addressed them all. "What is light? Waves of various lengths that travel very fast. One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. Every schoolboy knows this. But what happens to light? Where does it go? Does it vanish? Dissipate like smoke? Change into something else? Or does it just ... keep traveling? Of course, that's exactly what it does."

"Elementary, my dear Watson," said Father Mac.

"I suppose it is. I'm sorry. Let me press on to something that isn't elementary. Something every schoolboy doesn't know. Something nobody knew or even suspected, until Thelma and I discovered it."

He pointed upward. "Up there, thousands of miles above the surface of the earth, is a strange phenomenon you have heard of, even though you are not physicists as I am. The Van Allen Belts. Shields of energy, solar electrons, cosmic albedo, encircling the world--their nature and properties but dimly understood. I now know that one of those properties is a kind of snare--a snare for light. The light that travels from our planet--and that means every visible happening--is trapped up there, just for an instant, before it continues on its journey into the depths of space. And in that instant, it is duplicated, you might even say recorded, locked forever into the charged radioactive particles of the Belts. Every visible happening, gentlemen."

He nodded toward the organ. "This is the key that unlocks those images, by probing and tapping the Van Allen Belts. An organ that plays not music but history ... prehistory ... the huge and limitless symphony of the past."

There was silence in the cellar workroom, except for the generator's hum. Finally, Father Mac spoke. "How ... far back?"

"As long as the Belts have existed. For all practical purposes, as far back as the dawn of time. For instance----"

He played with stops and switches. On the screen, they saw an image of themselves, dressed in black, in the living room upstairs.

Father Mac said, "Why--that's the day of Thelma's funeral!"

Fairbank nodded. "It's not what I meant to show you." He adjusted a drawbar. The picture wavered and was gone. "There is a strong tendency on the part of the instrument to capture the very recent past of this precise locality, this room, this house. It requires a certain amount of practice to overcome that tendency, to re-create the distant past of distant places. There--look!"

On the screen: a rain forest of impenetrable density. Festoons of drifting steam. A saurian head, attached to a long serpentine neck, stretched itself easefully to eat the brilliant green leaves at the top of a giant tree. The neck belonged to a massive quadruped--tons of flesh and bone, ending in a sinuous, flicking tail.

"Brontosaurus," smiled Fairbank, "enjoying a little salad."

The picture wobbled and disappeared. "Stability is another problem," he muttered. "The pictures tend to come and go haphazardly."

Haskell's briar had gone out again, but he didn't care. He spoke, excitedly: "Fairbank--do you think I might see ... Shakespeare? Rehearsing at the Globe?"

"I've seen him," said Fairbank, "and so shall you. Weiss--you shall see Bach. Temple--you shall see Michelangelo, painting the Sistine Chapel. Not Charlton Heston. Michelangelo. But not tonight. The machine will soon grow overheated. I must turn it off. Tomorrow----"

"Marcus, wait," said Father Mac. "Before you turn it off--may I see ..." His eyes beseeched.

Fairbank hesitated, then said, "Of course." He turned to the keyboard. In a very few moments, the screen sharpened.

They saw a place of skulls. Milling crowds under a roiling sky. Three wooden torture gobbets, each in the shape of the letter T. Fairbank caused the center T to fill the screen.

No one spoke. Father Mac, poleaxed by awe, sank to his knees. His lips trembled. "My God," he said, with perfect literalness.

The picture danced and was sucked into the vortex of time.

Father Mac rose from his knees. He blinked hot tears from his eyes. He cleared his throat and spoke, in a nonsense tone. "I see a possible moral problem here, Marcus," he said. "This organ--this great wonder--it can show us everything that ever happened, any time, anywhere on earth?"

Fairbank nodded.

"It can peer even into sealed chambers?"

"Yes. Light cannot be contained. It has to go somewhere. It all ends up in the Van Allen Belts."

"You could show us, for example, George Washington courting Martha?"

"Easily."

"Then you must ask yourself this, Marcus: Do you, do we, does anyone have the right to see George and Martha at every moment of their lives?"

Fairbank frowned. "I think I see what you're driving at, Mac, but----"

The priest went on: "We hear a great deal these days about the invasion of privacy. In unethical hands, couldn't this organ be the cause of the grossest invasions of privacy ever imagined? In discriminate snooping into the private lives of the great and the humble, the living and the dead, prying into their very bedrooms and bathrooms?"

"You have a point, Father." said Haskell. "but even so----"

"Uh, speaking of bathrooms." said Weiss, jerking a thumb in the direction of the screen.

They all looked up. Fairbank had forgotten to turn off the organ. On the screen was a faithfull rendering of the larger of the two Fairbank bathrooms, and, sitting calmly in the rub, a grayhaired lady--the late Thelma Fairbank.

"Turn it off, Marcus," Father Mac said, gently.

Fairbank moved toward the organ.

"Hold it," said Graner harshly, grabbing Fairbank's arm. "Let's watch this."

Haskell snapped, "What kind of creep are you, Graner?"

"Shut up and watch the screen," said Graner. "Don't you remember how Thelma is supposed to have died?"

On the screen, Fairbank had entered the bathroom and was standing over the tub. As they watched, horrified, he pushed his wife's head under the water and held it there, while the bubbles rose, for what seemed an age. She did not appear to struggle. When the image of Fairbank straightened and turned away from the tub, it was gruesomely obvious that his wife was dead. The grim picture slid off the screen.

The real Fairbank was shaking and backing away from the organ, his eyes haunted.

Father Mac was the first to find his voice. "May God forgive you!"

A single hoarse syllable sprung from the throat of Temple: "Why?"

Fairbank had grown small. He stood, shrunken, in the middle of the cellar, still on his feet but collapsed, destroyed, ringed by the shocked, accusing faces of his friends.

Weiss repeated Temple's question. "Why, Marcus?"

Several heavy seconds passed. And then:

"It was the money, you see," Fairbank said in a barely audible whisper. "We were so close to the completion of the project ... so close to success ... but we had no more money. We couldn't wait--I was close to seventy years old, Thelma was sixty-five--we couldn't afford to wait. Then she thought of her insurance. Twenty thousand dollars! More than enough to finish the project! She said to me: 'I'm an old woman, Marcus. Let me do this thing for us, for you, for our work.' But I couldn't let her." Fairbank turned, with agonized eyes, to the priest. "You understand why I couldn't let her do that, don't you? Suicide--a mortal sin! So I took the sin upon myself, and committed murder."

He buried his face in his hands. Spasms shook his body. At last, looking up, he spoke again, but incoherently. He spoke of the Devil. He asked the priest if he had ever wondered what the Devil looked like. He pointed to the organ, and his voice rose to a screech. He said the Devil looked like that, a machine, cables and switches and dials. He said the Devil smiled with those white keys ... tempted in the sacred name of Science ... tempted one to evolve noble excuses for the vilest sins ... even for murder.

Then, insanely shrinking, he fell upon the organ. "Devil!" he cried. "Damn you! ... damn you! ..." Savagely, he ripped out wires, smashed tubes, disrupted circuits.

"Marcus!" shouted the priest.

"Don't destroy it!" Haskell howled.

But, in a shower and sizzle of sparks that stung the nostrils and whitened the cellar workroom for a hideous instant, both the organ and Fairbank died.

• • •

Later, after the police and the questions, the five friends sat stunned in a nearby bar, nursing glasses of badly needed brandy.

Father Mac, in a faded voice, said to Haskell, "Well. Your friend Shakespeare had the words for it, didn't he?"

"Hm?" Haskell was attempting to relight his cold briar.

"Murder will out," the priest explained.

"Oh. Yes." (Smack, slurp.) "Yes, I see. It's a (suck, smack) common misquotation. Actually, it's Murder will speak, not Murder will out." (Slurp, slurp.) "For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak (suck, slurp, smack-smack, puff) with most miraculous organ."