The Dead Beat

by Laurence M. Janifer

Illustration by Mike Aspengren

Music (there are still people who say this, for God’s sake) is the universal language—which is nonsense. Don’t misunderstand me; I like music, of several sorts, from classical to the peculiar ninth-tone bass chants you’ll hear on Alphacent. But even preSpace, anybody who quoted that silly saying should’ve been sentenced to alternating days of German, Syrian, and Thai concerts for a year. Not that you can’t like them all, though I know no one who does (I know several who pretend, but why burst bubbles?)—but the musics are as different as the languages used to be. I speak as an expert on the subject, all of a sudden, having recently spent some time on Apelles, where there are concerts of all persuasions—as well as art exhibits, network publishers and readings, dance recitals, comweb share groups, and you name it—every day of every eight-day week, all the year round as, I think, the Christmas annuals used to say.

The almost-universal language, among human beings, is something Marietta Jink (who is a musician, and a fine one) knows all about. It uses music often as a background, sometimes as a stimulus, and at least once as a food (one of the and Cleopatras, my scrappy classical training tells me, though whether Shakespeare’s Antony or Shaw’s Caesar I can’t be sure), and it is known as love, or romance, or (by the very learned in preSpace scientific junk) animal magnetism.

Marietta Jink has just about all the animal magnetism possible to a human female, as far as most human males are concerned. She had once turned it on me during a previous stopover on Apelles, relaxing in the Apelles Hotel Dome, when she had been struggling with a problem of orchestra finance (she’s conductor of the Williamson Philharmonic, and she is as accomplished as her orchestra, something which is not true of all conductors).

I’d solved her problem for her very well and very neatly, if you don’t mind the momentary preen, and when she got in touch with me again and asked me to revisit my glimpses of Apelles and see if I could provide a little more aid, I was pleased, but not entirely surprised. Some people seem born to trouble (“as the sparks fly upward,” the bible says, and if sparks are flying upward around you, you are probably in trouble at that), and Marietta Jink, though she is one of my favorite rosebuds, had always seemed to me to be one of them.

This time, it turned out when I arrived, subscribers to the Williamson season were dying out.

Well, you may be saying, lots of season subscribers are elderly people, and elderly people do have this habit of dying out quite a lot; it’s how they stop being elderly. But the fatalities seemed to be in all age groups, with a noticeable statistical preference for longer-time subscribers; someone who’d been attending Williamson Philharmonic concerts for five years, even though he was, say, twenty-seven, was more likely to have keeled over than someone of seventy-five who’d just bought his first season subscription. (Or her first season subscription, of course, but if I have to mind my pronouns all that carefully I’ll have to add in anything up to seven non-human sexes as well—my audience for these reports is small but uncommonly varied—and things will get confusing for no good reason. Let’s stick to Standard English, such as it is, and keep this as simple as we can—which is, I’m afraid, not very.) And the numbers were startling: about 11 percent of last season’s subscribers were now gone. It was the sort of death rate you expect of an infantry battalion.

The word hadn’t got out, as far as Marietta knew—it’s not quite the sort of thing your average reporter, print, net or 3V, is going to happen upon very easily—but she was terrified that it was going to get out, and ruin the Williamson for good; people won’t take to buying concert subscriptions at the risk of death.

There were, more importantly, all these fatalities. Marietta was sure coincidence wasn’t at work—and though coincidences do happen, even more often than we like to think, I tended to agree with her, once I got a look at the details—and she wanted to stop whatever was causing the deaths before any more people got killed. Maybe it was something the orchestra was doing, or something the hall was emitting, and therefore something Marietta could put a stop to.

But she couldn’t imagine what, and neither could I. Sitting in a concert hall on Apelles is not normally considered dangerous to your health, and nobody was lying in wait outside Petrarch Hall to bash people over the head with trombones.

The causes of death, in fact, varied—that was the first thing I asked about, of course—but nearly all were fairly common natural causes: stroke, aneurysm, heart attack. The remainder were scattered all over the map, everything from kidney failure to simple murder. (Apelles has a comparatively low murder rate, but “comparatively” is the word; the inhabitants may be fine artists, but they’re still human beings.) Those scattered deaths looked like the normal curve, so to speak. The immense number of deaths from heart trouble, stroke or aneurysm looked (mostly) like the inexplicable bulge.

“Somebody,” I said, “is playing hob with your audience’s circulatory systems.”

“And we haven’t programmed the Ride of the Valkyries in five years.”

We were sitting in the Apelles Hotel Dome (not a great many people even know about Apelles, which is basically an arts colony at the hell of a high level, and I’d just as soon keep it that way; it’s a wonderful place to spend a few weeks, and I hate crowds), drinking remarkably good coffee and trying to make sense out of a large pile of computer printout; the hotel is a bit old-fashioned, and we were actually working from real (well, glare-treated) paper.

The coffee was labeled Sumatra Mandheling, which I doubt, but it was at least a remarkable imitation of one of the best of all coffees. (It’s available on most of the Home Worlds, just by the way, and is worth looking up.) But at the time, I don’t think I even finished two cups; the statistics kept jumping up and biting me, which is bad for the digestion.

“Is it only subscribers,” I said, “or are casual audience members dropping like flies, too?”

Marietta shook her head. “I don’t know how you could tell,” she said, “without making a public announcement of some sort—will anybody whose friend or relative attended a Williamson Orchestra concert and died, within the past five years, please get in touch with us—that sort of thing.”

“Bound to arouse curiosity,” I said.

“I assume it hits everybody in an audience, whatever it is,” she said. She has a remarkable, elfin face, the color of a very light honey, and the expression on it was as remote as the Home Worlds, and as worried as I’d ever seen. “What would target only subscribers?”

“Well, they’re likely to attend more often,” I said, “which would expose them more often to a resident plague, if there is one. And offhand, it does look as if something is doing that—the preference for longer-term subscribers points that way, and really doesn’t point any other way.”

“But what could the Williamson be doing, to subscribers or to anybody?” she said. “It must be something in the hall itself, some sort of chemical leak, or some sort of radioactivity, or—”

“Is your orchestra the only organization that uses Petrarch Hall?”

“Of course not,” she said. “There are weekly new-jazz concerts, a monthly series on Syrian music, a lecture series—I forget the topic; does it matter?—”

“And are there lots of unexplained fatalities among subscribers to these other events?” I said.

“I wouldn’t know that, either,” Marietta said. “Look, Knave, I’ve been very careful about this. I haven’t told a soul—not friends, not close friends, not anybody. I don’t want to shake up the orchestra with it, either. And how could I find out about deaths of subscribers to other events, without bringing the whole thing out in the open? I only found out about some of ours—and only some—by noticing that the subscription turnover was awfully high.”

“How did you get these printouts?” I said.

Marietta shrugged. “I’ve got a friend in Vital Statistics; I told her I was thinking of doing a death-related series—Songs and Dances of Death, Death and Transfiguration, that sort of thing—and wanted to make some guesses about how my regular audience might react.”

It sounded just nutty enough to have been plausible to a Vital Statistician. I nodded and took in a little more good coffee. “And you want me to find out about these other groups, without letting anybody know?”

“I thought you could do it, Knave,” Marietta said.

I was stung. “Of course I can do it,” I said foolishly. “I’d just like to get straight what you want here.”

“Primarily,” she said, “I want these deaths to stop happening. And I want whatever’s making them happen stopped, too.”

It all sounded perfectly reasonable. All I had to do, I reflected as I got up, was define a miasma nobody had really seen, and then put an end to it.

I told myself I’d had tougher jobs, and of course I had, though it’s surprising how little comfort that is. I was backing away from the table and turning around when a small boy rammed me.

I looked down and to my left, and by God, it wasn’t a small boy, it was a small teenager—about four-ten to five feet, with a big shock of red-brown hair, big brown eyes, and a snub nose. And freckles, which made him almost too Hucklebuddy Finn for ready belief. Very late teens, perhaps even twenty, but with a permanent, midteener look he was probably going to have at seventy.

He ignored me entirely, rushing right past the scene of the accident and burbling: “Gee—Miss Jink—gee—your Ives concert last week was just splendid, just splendid, it showed me so much about—”

“Hello, Joshua,” Marietta said. “Joshua, have you met Mr.—”

“Josh,” the teenager said. “I told you it’s Josh, didn’t I? Sure I did. I never realized before last week that there are moments in the New England Portraits that directly echo the Fourth Symphony, but your reading was so clear—”

“I’m glad you liked it,” Marietta said. “Meet Mr. Knave, Josh. Gerald Knave.”

“Hi,” he said without looking around. “I just thought I’d come over, when I saw you, and tell you how good you are, because sometimes I think you don’t really know how good you are, Miss Jink. I can hardly wait for the Jerome Moross program—wow, two whole weeks away.”

“I think you’ll enjoy it,” Marietta said, “and I’m looking forward to it myself, though I’d prefer to do Frankie and Johnny the way he wrote it, as a ballet. We’ve got some fine singers, though—”

“I know,” Josh said. “Fredi Tallman—it’s going to be a wonderful trio. Three sopranos dressed in Salvation Army uniforms—”

“Yes,” Marietta said. “That’s the way Moross wrote it—a trio walking on to sing to the dancers. And I really do have to go now, Josh, so I hope I’ll see you again some time.”

“Oh, you’ll see me at the concert,” he said. “I wouldn’t miss it for anything, Miss Jink. Gee—”

Eventually—it felt like an hour and a half and was probably about seventy seconds—we did get out of there without him, and in the AHD lobby Marietta said, in a low voice:

“He’s a terrible pest, but he really does love music, and he knows more than you’d think. I suppose everybody has a fan club like that.”

“Not quite everybody,” I said, and left it at that. Later that day, I started work on the miasma.

I didn’t realize just then that I’d already met it.

Getting statistics on the other regular events was very simple. A good rule to remember—it has exceptions, but they are exceptions—is that anybody will believe anything you tell him, if he sees no profit to you in the telling. I went around disguised as a sort of scientist—Marietta gave me some nice government-type bureau names, and I was Dr. Knave of Whatever Seemed Plausible for a few days—and collected data for a survey of personal habits as a contribution to health. You listen to Syrian music a lot, are you less likely to develop Bell’s Palsy? Damned if I know. But I collected a great many facts about a great many subscribers to a great many regular events in Petrarch Hall, and ran it by some census-bureau basics any citizen could get.

And 1 discovered that the hall was an innocent bystander; the odd deaths were occurring only to Williamson Philharmonic subscribers. There were heart attacks and so on elsewhere, of course, but in numbers that didn’t surprise me in the least. The usual number of people, in other words, were dying of the usual number of things.

Query: was the orchestra in some way killing off its listeners?

That did seem the only available alternative—for a very brief while 1 did consider the notion of somebody poisoning subscription tickets, but I tossed it out because (a) unless a mail clerk had gone mad (not unheard of, I do admit), it seemed forbiddingly difficult for anyone to get hold of the things in quantity, before delivery, and (b) and much stronger, I couldn’t come up with a poison that would imitate heart disease, aneurysm, and stroke well enough to fool 100 percent of a fairly large number of doctors, spread out over the subscribers. If the planet had been Ravenal, or some other scholarly scientific refuge, I’d have thought twice about that—but there’s very little hard science on Apelles, if you except instrument-building, pigment chemistry, toe-shoe manufacture and the like, not at all the sort of background needed.

On the other hand, what the Hell could the orchestra be doing?

It is not normally fatal to play (I choose from the Williamson programs over five years) Wagner, Moross, Shostakovich, Beethoven, Ives, Sibelius, Moussorgsky or even Bernstein. There is an old actors’ superstition about Macbeth—actors won’t name the thing, they call it “the Scottish play,” and believe that every revival of it leads to a death—but the Williamson hadn’t done Macbeth as a play, an opera or a tone poem, and besides the superstition called for only one death.

The Williamson is a classical orchestra—as its programming may have told you—and includes only classical instruments; they do carry a theremin player for the occasional specialty, but Berlioz would have recognized every instrument except the saxophones, and a few twentieth-century percussion gimmicks. (He’d have loved those, of course. There’s a passage in his Requiem for sixteen kettle-drums.) I’d had some thoughts about the effects of low-frequency sound—sixteen cycles per second, that sort of thing—on the human circulatory system, but nothing in the Williamson would produce that sort of subliminal sound except, possibly, the theremin. And Marietta would have noticed the theremin reaching down anywhere close to that far, in the few pieces for which it was scheduled; as I’ve said, she was a fine conductor, and her ear was beyond cavil.

In the natural course of events, nothing the orchestra was doing would cause longtime subscribers to keel over. Their programming hadn’t changed significantly, either; they were playing much the same sort of thing, in the last five years, that they’d been playing before that. But the deaths hadn’t been happening six years ago, or eight, or eleven.

I was slowly backing myself into a very uncomfortable corner; we were not dealing with any sort of accident. The deaths were being deliberately caused—there just wasn’t anything else to think.

That brought up an additional question; now it wasn’t only How, but Why. Imagining a motive looked to be just a bit difficult.

Of course, I didn’t really have to imagine a motive, because the person who was killing off all these other people was a human being. That meant that he could easily be even crazier than I thought he had to be, and crazy people, it has been noticed, do crazy things. Perhaps voices in his head told him to kill off people who liked classical music, or people who nodded their heads in time to classical music. Or, in fact, anything at all—voices in one’s head don’t have to meet even minimal standards of plausibility, as judged from the outside.

With some relief, I stopped wondering about why within hours of the word’s arrival in my head.

How was the vital word, and how was going to be tough enough.

The difficulty was that why wouldn’t go away. It was going (it promised me faithfully—and inaccurately, as things turned out) to help define how; what was being aimed at was going to tell me something about the thing doing the aiming, so to speak.

For instance: was it supposed to cause death, to cause severe disablement (with death as an unfortunate side-effect), to cause death of a particular sort… ?

Why would anyone want to kill (or severely disable) a group of people who had nothing in common except their season subscriptions to the Williamson?

Or (a wildly old-fashioned light bulb went on over my head) did they have something else in common? I hadn’t really looked at that.

That question, though, was a job for an army, not a single inquirer. On another world this may not have been so; most of the Comity worlds, and some of die others, are technologically well-supplied. But Apelles has never taken to computers except in the way of computer art and the like; basic records exist on computer because where else would you put them, but, for anything more than the bare basics, computer records simply aren’t there. (Artists tend to want to play individual little games with their computers in any case; while I was there, Apelles was much taken up by arguments over the identity of the person loading extremely rude poems about a famous novelist—no names, please—into all the bookstore catalogues, the programs of three dance companies, and the inventory list of a chain of shoe stores.) On Apelles I was going to need that army—so I went back to talk to Marietta again.

Apelles does have a murder rate, and a police force; what it doesn’t really have is a private detective. There is not much in the way of industrial espionage, for one thing—dance companies (for instance) do spy on each other, and viciously, but the work is handled by amateurs. Capable amateurs, even fiercely dedicated amateurs, but still…

And the divorce rate is very low on Apelles—possibly because the marriage rate is also very low. People do get married, but getting married on Apelles is like coming down with Bell’s Palsy: some people do, but not too many, and nobody ever expects to.

We had only one army, and Marietta had to be persuaded to use it. She felt strongly that we shouldn’t tell anyone about the deaths—murders, I was now calling them—and 1 had to point out several times, as gently as possible, that continuing to keep things as quiet as that was the sure way of continuing to keep things.

With many sighs and protestations… well, a preSpace poet named Byron something-or-other (or something-or-other Byron, possibly Lord) said it best, though like many poets he was talking about sex at the time: “…swearing she would ne’er consent, consented.”

Marietta, swearing she would ne’er, agreed to meet me at ten-thirty the next morning in Petrarch Hall, along with her army—the Williamson, of course. I spent the night hard at work, I’m afraid, making up lists and checking them twice, and by morning I was ready.

I had one hundred and fifteen musicians, and a list of one hundred and fifteen names. Given a very brief course in question-asking as applied to census records, neighbors and shopping lists, I thought I might just possibly get eighty or ninety musicians to fill a basket full of facts about one dead subscriber each—if I got all the hundred and fifteen I’d be well ahead, and seventy-five was acceptable.

I have no idea what, if anything, this means, but brass players were the most reluctant to volunteer. The orchestra in general took the news with some shock and some argument (“Couldn’t it just be a coincidence?” was a favorite question, and the proper answer was No, but I went into a lot of graceful detail), but they were truly fond of Marietta, and I ended with ninety-one investigators, including a terribly serious-minded bassoonist, and a startlingly lovely cellist—and cellists do seem to run to lovely quite a lot.

Each was cautioned to keep quiet about the murders, and to find another reason for inquiries, and I invented a towering pile of such reasons. The session began at ten-forty in the morning, and ended—with short breaks for meals, for reassuring wives and husbands and SOs and children, and so on—at eleven that night. (Apelles has a twenty-three-hour day, if you care about such things, plus eight seconds each hour.) What had originally been scheduled as a three-hour rehearsal session for the Moross, without the vocal trio, never reached the musical stage of things at all.

I now had an entire eight-day week in which to think of other things to do while facts were being collected. And the only thing to think about was how.

I put the back of my head to work on the puzzle—it’s much brighter than the front of my head, but it works its own hours—and enjoyed Apelles for a while, looking in on galleries, visiting bookstores and pay-screens, and smiling through a jazz concert in the Dome. I didn’t go to concerts in Petrarch Hall, or to symphony concerts at all—not that I had any real reason to avoid them, but they didn’t seem just the thing to do, somehow.

And in eight days, the back of my head had either gone on strike, or fallen terribly ill (without bothering to phone in an excuse) or else was still working hard to no result—because there was no result.

I did have a large pile of facts, and I used what influence Marietta had with the hotel to work with their large-sized computers during the slow hours (for them, nine in the evening to one A.M.). Checking every fact against every other fact was a little too daunting a job for those rigs, but I tossed out a lot of cross-checks that seemed highly implausible (how many people who jog once a week also use Cute Az Buttons Shampoo?) and got matters down to something the computers could digest.

And there was, again, no result. If the subscribers had anything in common, beyond their tickets, and at least some faint interest in classical music, it was beyond me to dig it out.

Which meant that the season subscribers were being killed simply because they were season subscribers. The only other tie, an interest in classical music, was shared by too many others in the audience. And in other audiences.

All right, I said to myself sadly—because I dislike throwing myself straight lines, it is not useful work—all right, who hates season subscribers?

The answer was, of course, immediate. Business managers for other attractions hate season subscribers. There is a limited amount of money and time in circulation, so to speak. Money being spent on season tickets to the Williamson is money not being spent at concerts of Syrian music. Or at circuses, dance recitals, bookstores, comweb share groups—or for that matter fancy groceries or lacy underpants.

But this, though a fair if wordy response to a straight line, was not an answer I could use. If several such groups had been targeted, I’d have looked into it—and looked hard at some of the groups not targeted. But no one would be odd enough to try to increase his own market share by killing off subscribers to only one other market out of hundreds—unless that market were doing a perfectly fantastic amount of business.

The Williamson was successful. It wasn’t that successful. Other orchestras did nearly as well, and some seasons better. (The Williamson seven years before, I heard from Marietta, had decided to unearth a lost composer, and scheduled an entire Mahler cycle. The season did not lose money. Not quite.)

All right, I said grimly: Who else hates season subscribers?

The answer to that was going to be the answer I needed. I think I knew that even then—when I had no damned idea in the world what the answer was going to be.

So I thought, and I constructed insane theories that didn’t work. Poisoned rosin from violin (viola, cello, bass) bows floating out into the audience, and season subscribers the only ones there often enough to absorb enough poison; I do remember that one. Only one real objection, but a beaut: why was the Williamson string section itself still alive? And I ate and drank very well, thank you—the Apelles Hotel defies tradition by actually serving the sort of food one always expects good hotels to serve, though they very seldom do. And when the Moross concert rolled around, I decided to go to one Williamson concert anyhow, and went and heard it. Fascinating stuff.

Frankie and Johnny was the centerpiece of an evening that included Beethoven’s Coriolan overture, Copland’s Appalachian Spring, a group of songs by a living composer, Peter Bardolph, and, after Frankie and Johnny, the overture to The Threepenny Opera to play the audience out with. A short program, but the Williamson under Marietta has always been more interested in quality than quantity.

Bardolph, whose stuff I hadn’t heard, turned out to be a Beat. There seem to have been some Beats before the Clean Slate War, but mostly poets, or thought to be so. Some very odd, and one or two very interesting. Now the Beats are musicians, working with beatnotes.

A beat-note is easy to describe, and comparatively hard to hear. Let’s say somebody plays a concert A, 440 cycles per second. At the same time, some other rude body plays another note, this one at 445 cycles a second. What many people will hear is a single note, probably the 440 because that’s what they’re used to hearing.

What many others, and musicians and music-lovers certainly, will hear is a) two notes very close together, an uncomfortable sound, and b) a third note at 5 cycles per second (No, they won’t hear an actual note; people do not hear at 5 cps. They don’t hear at much below 20, at best. But what will be heard is an increase and decrease in sound, 5 such increases and 5 decreases a second, a 5-a-second beat. They are hearing the difference between the two notes being played, as well as the notes. This difference is called a beat-note.)

A Beat composer—who works a great deal with such beat-notes—presents a Hell of a challenge to singers. Most singers can’t dependably produce three- or five- or eight-cycle shadings in notes. Some can, and Fredi Tallman was one of them. Bardolph had written the cycle for her, and it was a pleasure, in its way, to hear her negotiate the damned thing.

In a way. I am not much on tiny differences. I can hear them, thanks, and they make me uncomfortable. If God had meant man to concertize in tiny differences He would not have invented the piano.

The Moross was pure Moross, brash and very early-20th and never quite altogether serious. As called for in the score, the three sopranos did deliver the final chorus with beer mugs in hands, one foot each up on a coffin (brought out and just left there front-stage for the second half), as if it were a bar-rail.

This story—ain’t got no moral—

This story—ain’t got no end—

This story—just goes to show you—Never put your trust in any man.

And then the whizz-thump of Moross’ chords, and a little closing, and one long final chord like a chorale squeezed all the way down to that one.

Silence, and applause.

The Threepenny overture was almost an anticlimax, which is something that tiny piece almost never is.

On the way out, I ran into Josh.

The teenage pest was drifting for the doors, being pushed by whichever group he happened to land in front of from second to second. He was being pushed along like a scrap of paper in front of a broom, nodding his head, his eyes shut and whistling under his breath, which is a sound you might go your entire lifetime without hearing. I hope you have, too; it’s rather a grating little noise.

A small active group shoved him to one side, and he landed in front of me, still whistling. He was carrying a small suitcase, like a lot of young musicians, and I assumed it was full, as they mostly are, of scores and sandwiches. I said: “Hello, Josh,” and was audible over the crowd-mutters.

Of course he had never seen me before. I’d been a blank during his talk with Marietta. He hesitated, then nodded, and stared a little.

“I met you last week,” I said. “I was with Miss Jink when you met her at the AHD.”

“Oh, sure,” he said distantly. “I remember seeing her there.”

Charming young fellow. It occurred to me to ask: “By the way, Josh, are you a season subscriber?”

“Me?” He gave me a hollow laugh. I don’t hear those much, either. “Think I’ve got that kind of money yet? No, I’m a second-balcony angel. Up by the dead spot—but usually I go down to the balcony rail to listen. People complain they can’t see through me down by the rail, but who goes to a concert to see?”

Charming. I did know about the dead spot: Petrarch Hall was built about as well as most concert halls, and up in that second balcony was an acoustic dead spot, hard to hear much of anything from. Hard for the orchestra to hear applause from, too, but then, there usually wouldn’t be much.

“Well, some day you’ll work your way down,” I said.

“Sure I will,” he said. “And soon, too—you wait and see. And a hundred old corpses with season tickets will still be holding every one. The waiting list is three years, last I heard.”

I marked it down in my head. Another reason to hate season subscribers.

And Josh allowed himself to be pushed forward and off to my left, and I was out the center door. It was a full twenty minutes later, with most of a gimlet inside me at a fairly noisy bar a block away from the hall, that the back of my head kicked in.

Idiot, it said to me. It does that a lot, and I have learned to live with it. I waited patiently for it to tell me why, this time.

It did. It told me I had found someone with a real reason, however odd and personal, to hate season subscribers, and only season subscribers.

The reason didn’t make a great deal of sense. But, as I vaguely remembered thinking before, it didn’t have to—why was always at least fairly likely to be crazy. And this was less crazy than many such reasons: a waiting list, in the first place, that simply had to be cut down fast, and a group of people who clearly needed killing, in the second place.

And, given the reasoner, the reason did look as if it led straight to the actions. If you were Josh, why shouldn’t you shorten that list by any means handy? Why shouldn’t you erase these ugly people who were just taking up space at concerts, and probably not even appreciating the music very much? Not as well as you appreciated it, not anywhere near as well.

If you were Josh—not a reason in the world why you shouldn’t. And every casual, sunny, satisfying reason why you should.

I got that far, and the back of my head nodded in some (and somber) satisfaction. And all the rest of me said: “Now, wait a minute. A teenage boy? Josh?”

The back of my head began churning out a list of known teenaged murderers. Known teenaged mass-murderers. It was quite a long list, and even when I narrowed it down to just a planet or two, it was not negligible.

“I don’t believe it,” the rest of me said.

“Of course you don’t,” the back of my head told me, in what was almost a friendly tone. “And neither will anybody else—all you have is an idea, just a free-floating idea—unless you can pin down just how Josh is doing all this.”

And that, it came to me sadly as I finished my gimlet and ordered one more for the long road back to my room, was a tune I had heard before.

Season subscribers were dying. Dying of diseases related to the circulatory system. Poison, despite the charm of poisoned tickets or poisoned rosin, seemed to be out, because no doctor had spotted any, and the list of Secret Poisons Unknown to Science has shrunk a lot since the Clean Slate War.

And what affects the circulatory system?

Sound will do it. Very, very loud sounds, for instance, will damage not only the ear but quite a lot of veins and arteries. The effect is especially pronounced in the head, but can occur anywhere—people have died from being tied helpless under large bells which went on bonging.

Unfortunately, the effect is not cumulative. Either it gets you or it doesn’t—if you walk away, and come back a second night for more loud sounds, you start effectively from scratch. There is a case to be made that there is some residual damage if the first bout was prolonged enough, but any residual damage would be so very damned small it would have no noticeable contribution to make to any second-time or eighth-time effect.

And what in God’s name could the Williamson have played that would have been that loud, to people merely sitting in good seats in the audience? That bit in the Berlioz Requiem for sixteen kettledrums wouldn’t do it. Nor would anything the orchestra could have played, I saw—or there would have been a lot of dead people anywhere the same piece was programmed.

I went on back to my hotel room. I sat there and thought for some time, while the gimlets wore off. The back of my head waited with its arms folded, looking superior.

Then, at about three in the morning, I picked up the phone and called Marietta.

Three in the morning, after a concert, is not a bad time to call a conductor. Most of them are very much awake, and still coming down from the excitement. Marietta’s voice was just starting to get back to normal tempos, with a few spells of rapid-fire still turning up, and when I asked her to come over she agreed with not the slightest hesitation.

Dimly, that bothered me. She could at least have been polite enough to pretend to worry about her honor.

But Marietta and I were old friends—and, damn it, nothing more. She arrived, and I fed her some oolong—coffee being contraindicated at three-forty A.M.—and sat her down on a sofa. I sat down in a chair nearby, and began to talk about sound.

Very, very loud sound, I said, could have real effects on the human body. She nodded. “What other kinds of sound might do things to people?” I said.

She thought for a minute. “Kinds of sound?”

“Well—overtones, for instance. Something a trumpet might do that a cello or a tambourine wouldn’t.”

Marietta shook her head. “As far as I know, nothing,” she said. “There might be some sort of effect, a specialist might know—”

“It can’t take a specialist,” I said. “Our murderer is in his teens, and his specialized knowledge is music.”

She stared at me. I told her what I had begun to think about Josh, and she strangled on a swallow of oolong.

“Josh?”

I laid it out. Slowly, very slowly, she began to nod.

“There was always something so—odd about him,” she said thoughtfully. “Single-minded. As if nobody and nothing else existed but whatever Josh was interested in.”

“Well,” I said, “he was doing his best to make that one come true.” I shook my head. Around Marietta one does not smoke, so I didn’t. Determinedly. “But how in Hell was he doing it?” I said. “What would affect people like that? What sort of sound?”

Marietta shut her eyes. It’s how some people think. After almost a minute she opened them and said: “A sound you can’t hear.”

My turn to stare. “A what?”

“Well, for instance,” she said. “Almost nobody can hear sixteen cycles per second. Too low. Some people can—I can—but most can’t, and go below rhat and nobody can. But broadcast a nice, loud sixteen cps, and people who can’t hear it at all will get very nervous. Afraid. Make it loud enough, for a couple of hours., and I think you could cause panics.”

“Exactly y’cteen?” I said. I remembered dimlv wondering about subsonics, a long, long time before, altogether too damned long a time before. The back of my head did not have to say Idiot at me. I was doing the job all by myself.

“It would have to be very close,” Marietta said. “Make it, say, fourteen instead, and you—” She stopped with the cup halfway to her lips. “Oh, my God,” she said very quietly.

I took a very deep breath. “Oh my God what?”

“At fourteen, you can get circulatory damage,” she said.

There was a little silence while I cursed myself (a) for abandoning that thought a full damned week before (and more), and (b) for letting Josh go home with his little suitcase. Then I said: “But—if he broadcast fourteen cps—wouldn’t somebody notice? It wouldn’t be a sound. But it would be something, and something very unusual. And the actual sounds would interfere—hash up his signal. Even if nobody noticed, there’d be too much interference; it wouldn’t work.”

Marietta shook her head. “He isn’t broadcasting fourteen cps,” she said.

He’s broadcasting long, held notes the orchestra is playing. Lots of them, in every piece ever written, very nearly. He’s broadcasting those—almost.”

And of coursd he was. When we got to his apartment, nearly five in the morning, the little suitcase proved it.

Josh knew the scores very well. And he knew the orchestra just as well. Some orchestras tune to a 440 A, some to a 448, some to a 435. Josh knew the Williamson tuning, exactly.

He attended rehearsals when he could. He knew the tempos Marietta would use for a given piece on a given program.

And he set his machine—not a complicated one, you can make one out of most simple sound systems—to play just fourteen cycles out of key with long notes in piece after piece.

As long as he stood near the second-balcony rail, he could blanket the orchestra seats with the beat note—the fourteen-cps difference between what the orchestra was playing and what he was sending—and never be detected. The volume didn’t have to match, and if anyone heard his small-volume broadcast it would go down as an acoustic glitch in the hall, of course. The people behind him wouldn’t get much, if any at ail, any more than he would—he had directional speakers, of course, nicely miniaturized, or he himself would have been dead long before—and Marietta and the orchestra, far ahead of him, got a sound so attenuated that it would have taken better ears than hers to pick it up. Human beings do not have much better ears than hers.

That effect was cumulative. The more fourteen-cps sound you took in, over time, the sicker you were likely to get. Season subscribers would, of course, take in the most.

“Killing them softly with his song,” I said, one day long after Josh had been quietly put away. (No trial, no publicity—the Williamson would not have done well—just a hearing before a judge and a couple of psychiatrists. And a new home for Josh, where he could listen to music all day long, though only through machinery, and even play some on a ward piano, but would not have the chance to build any new machines of his own.)

Marietta said: “What?”

“An old song,” I said. “PreSpace, I think, or nearly. What Josh was doing.”

“Well, at least it’s over,” Marietta said. “And the Williamson can go on playing.”

“The Berlioz Requiem next month?” I said, and she nodded. “I’ll have to stay around for that.”

Marietta grinned. “You have a lifetime season pass, you know that,” she said. “But seriously, Knave, don’t you have other places to go?”

“Not,” I said, “immediately.” And then I said: “We’d better be going back to the AHD now, though—it is getting late, and you know how I need my sleep.”

And we got up, and left Marietta grinning there.

I did say cellists ran to lovely, didn’t I? And I did say—didn’t I?—that this one ran in a class all her own.

Content

The Dead Beat
by Laurence M. Janifer