Vectors (2 page)

The fading photographs on the side tables showed a woman in her twenties and thirties, black-haired and vivacious. No photographs after that. Amelia Webster, wisely, had frozen her recorded image at thirty-five.

The bone structure and the alert dark eyes were still there, but everything else had changed beyond recognition. Thomas Hardy said it exactly. 'They must forget, forget! They cannot know what once they were, or memory would transfigure them and show them always fair.'

On that warm patio, sustained by endless cups of China tea from pale blue cups, we drifted for three hours, back and forth over eighty years. I didn't hurry. Now and again we circled back to 'young James,' then away again to the Christmas Ball through the deep snow, the beloved killed in the Great War, to the first automobile ride. By five o'clock I knew the real Amelia Webster, passionate and sparkling, hidden inside the accidental husk of old age. And I had built a clear and disturbing picture of James Webster.

'Bad blood.' That was the ominous key phrase that Amelia had used. The other words? Glacially intelligent. Selfish. Vain. Those are mine, not Amelia's, but her longer descriptions added to produce the unpleasant summary. After high school James Webster had attended college for two years, then quit suddenly and returned to the family estate. There was a faint impression of something about his departure that would not be mentioned to anyone outside the family. I checked it later at the college and found well-disguised traces of a tragedy involving the death of a mentally retarded girl.

All this confirmed my own instinctive reaction. The central discovery from my meeting with Amelia was more tangible. James Webster maintained a study and complete recording studio in one wing of the house. For the past year, he had spent all his time there until he began his campaign.

That night I drove back to Atlanta and again attended Webster's rally. This time, I was determined to remain aloof and analyze his speech in objective terms. Can you believe me when I tell you I failed totally? The setting was just as before, the simple outdoor meeting place, the soft music before he appeared. I made my notes about the audience, the lighting and the expectant tension in the air. Then Webster began to speak and I was gone again.

I returned to my senses and control of my own body more than an hour later. I had been carried to great heights, shown the beauties of the world, dipped far into the future, offered happiness beyond belief—if I would help James Webster in his chosen works.

Another sleepless night followed. Smoking and drinking like a fool, until the back of my throat was raw and my head spun when I lay back. But by morning I knew what I wanted to do. I made another appointment with Amelia Webster and drove again to the big house with its long oak-shaded drive. The weather had broken and it was twenty degrees cooler, so today we remained inside. Lunch was served in a dining room big enough for thirty people. Amelia made sure that I was served enough for three meals but limited herself to soup, cheese and wine. Again, we talked our way here and there through the century, while I tried to refuse a succession of well-prepared dishes.

With the coffee, Amelia Webster showed me what a mistake it would have been to underrate the mind in the fragile body.

"Now, Mr. Forrest, that was very enjoyable. I don't have too many interesting guests these days, you know. But why don't you tell me now what you came for." She smiled. "I'm well aware that men no longer court me for myself alone. What do you want?"

She was half-wrong, in my case, but half-right too. I shrugged my shoulders and smiled back at her.

"Miss Amelia, I suspect that you know already."

"I think I do. It's James' studio, isn't it? You were very polite yesterday but I could see you almost sniffing the air when I mentioned it. You see, I've had the feeling for a long time that James has been up to something—and my instincts tell me that it's not something that I'll feel proud of."

She rose with difficulty from her chair and went slowly over to a large teak sideboard.

"I don't know why I should trust you this way, but that's always a mystery. Here are the keys to the West Wing. The study and studio are on the second floor. James will not be back to the house until tomorrow evening. I ask one thing only, Mr. Forrest. Tell me nothing of what you find. Peace of mind is something I cherish these days."

Amelia Webster. A remarkable woman. We missed each other by about thirty-five years, and I've regretted it ever since. Perhaps the next time around.

It was three o'clock when I took the keys from her and left the room. It was close to midnight when I climbed back into my rented car and began to drive back to Atlanta.

* * *

That was on March 19, 1980. If you look at the newspapers for that year, you will find that James Webster was murdered on the evening of March 28th. Shot by an unknown assassin in the middle of an evening political rally. The shot was fired from a considerable distance using a high-powered rifle and a telescopic sight.

No, I must correct that. The telescopic sight wasn't in any of the news reports—they never found the rifle.

I shot James Webster. I didn't regret it then, and although the idea of murder for political ends appalls me, I have never regretted it since. In the eyes of the world, I might have been able to justify James Webster's murder for good political reasons.

But seen through those same eyes, I committed the greatest treason. I did the right deed for the wrong reason.

Let me come now to the heart of it.

It all boils down to this: what was it I found in the Webster house? Well, what had I been expecting? It was hard to put a name to it, but mass hypnotism comes close. A 'hypnotic generator,' maybe, that would allow one man to mesmerize a whole crowd. That was what was floating around in my mind.

I found worse than that. First was Webster's diary. Not for the past; for the future. Meticulously noted, day by day and meeting by meeting, the path to the Presidency of the United States.

Five primaries, the convention, the television speeches, the pre-election addresses.

Alone, that would have been nothing. Men have dreamed of power, and it is certain that many have made detailed plans to get it, but failed along the way. Webster would not have failed. What I found in his studio proved that.

It took a while for me to put the pieces together. First there was the general theory. Three heavy black loose-leaf binders, full of mathematics and right over my head. Next to them I found a whole series of Webster 'speeches.' Each had a title and a date, running through the end of 1980. Inside the folder for each speech it looked like the score for a complicated opera, plus lots of added notation that I couldn't follow.

The words—I recognized some of them, from Webster's speeches in Atlanta—had their own diacritical and pitch marks, above and below them. The music that went with them was precisely annotated as to volume, crescendi, diminuendi and instrumentation.

On a desk in the corner I found another set of books. Famous speeches by Demosthenes, Cicero, William Jennings Bryan, Adolf Hitler and others. Each had numerous changes, added by Webster, plus again his strange 'orchestration' and added symbols. I finally realized that these were test pieces of Webster's theory and techniques.

The whole studio was packed with sophisticated recording equipment. Monitors for recording and varying pitch and intonation. Complex tape decks to permit multiple-track recordings, dubbing and splicing. Oscilloscopes to permit the display of wave forms, filters for signal processing, and signal synthesizers. I consider I know a fair amount about recording techniques but I was out of my depth. Webster had a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment in that single room.

I might never have fathomed the mystery without Webster's direct assistance. The key was in a thin blue book, over on the low table by the bricked-up fireplace of the studio. James Webster had kept a private log and diary for all his work.

Perhaps everybody needs someone to talk to—a Boswell, a Horatio, a wife or a confessor. James Webster had followed Samuel Pepys and used a private diary.

From it I at last understood the true scope of his work, his ego and his ambition.

James Webster, with his failings, was a genius. He had developed the basic theory of human communication, the underlying eternal rules that govern human action and reaction. From that theoretical beginning, he had gone on to find the precise combinations of sounds that would stimulate a particular emotional response. It was an exact science. The calculations were long and complex and exact results hard to achieve, but Webster had developed an 'approximation theory' that used combinations of English words and musical sounds to approximate the mathematically optimal signals.

His 'speeches' were approximations of this type. As he said in his diary, "all the efforts of the great orators through history have been crude and intuitive attempts to do empirically and unreliably what I can now do with absolute assurance."

A great man could have found noble uses for his discoveries. Webster had no such objective. The pursuit of personal power, above and beyond any leader in history, was his ambition.

Did I mention at the beginning that this is a confession? It is. Why didn't I reveal Webster's plans to the world and let society deal with him? Wouldn't I have been regarded as a hero, the man who saved the country (and the world) from an absolute dictatorship? Aye, there's the rub.

I told you I am appalled at the very idea of killing for political reasons. This is the simple truth. I shot Webster for different and more selfish reasons.

To those people who have heard of me at all, I am a political writer. I have been one for so long that they cannot imagine me as anything else. But every harlot was a virgin once. Scratch a hack writer, and underneath you often find a poet. That's me. Fifty years ago I decided that I had to earn a living and turned my back on poetry. Only the longing and the love lived on.

When I left the Webster estate that night, so many years ago, I went to my hotel and I thought, long and painfully. I knew that all the great orators of the past had become fumbling amateurs, blindly stumbling towards Webster's exact knowledge.

But I knew more than that, much more. I thought of Keats, Coleridge, Milton, Eliot and Wordsworth—of Shakespeare. Their words, long cherished, flooded my mind. And music. I heard the complex web of the final Ricercare of the 'Musical Offering'— the
de profundis
opening of the Ring—the whirlwind and lightning finale of Schubert's C Major Symphony. All now to be dismissed, discarded, crude approximations to a single attainable absolute. My world was to become obsolete.

Take your fifty favorite pieces of music, your hundred best-loved poems. Imagine them gone from the world, swept away by a final and terrible progress. Now you know why I killed James Webster, or you will never know.

 
Afterword.

This was the first story I sold. That makes it awfully hard for me to be objective, but I'll try.

The hero (or villain, depending on your viewpoint) claims to be a poet who was forced to do other things with his working life. I'm not a poet, and I was afraid that would be obvious from my prose. So when I first wrote the story I tried to do it almost wholly in quotations. The result had a certain strange charm. Read aloud, it was like gargling with porridge. I'm sorry now that I threw the first draft away.

When I rewrote it I cut the literary references to a reasonable level—I think there are now fourteen direct quotes in it, including the title. Still too many, probably, but I needed them to bolster my confidence.

As for the plot, I have often wondered how Adolf Hitler, such a funny looking ridiculous figure, could exercise the power he did over the German people. The effects of his oratory went well beyond his words, which were often banal. Did he have some other technique to augment what he said? That led me to James Webster.

One other point for the seekers for hidden significance: I wrote this story in early 1976, before I had heard of Jimmy Carter. The names and the Georgia setting are pure coincidence.

FIXED PRICE WAR

As the sun set, the first line of attackers came silently over the brow of the hill. They were the scouts, shadowy figures moving with no apparent coordination down to and across the river, on to the waist-high savannah scrub on the near side. When the last man was across, the second wave appeared, a line of hover-tanks with chopper cover, advancing at no more than walking pace. The counterattack waited until the tanks had reached the river. Then a bright mesh of ruby pulsed-laser beams lanced out from the nearer hillside, probing for the soft underskirts of the hover-tanks and the chopper rotors. Yellow and red tracers replied. The air became a multicolored confusion of stabbing pencils of light, smoke from burning vegetation and the fitful glare of crippled tanks and choppers.

Suddenly the whole hillside was lit by an intense blue-white fireball, spreading from a point close to the river bank. It grew rapidly, changing color to a greenish-yellow.

Merle Walters gave a grunt of surprise, leaned forward and hit a button on the console in front of him. The display stopped, frozen with the fireball about forty meters across. He swiveled in his chair and pressed the intercom. "Franny, get Alex Burns on the line. I think I've finally caught him."

He waited impatiently as the connection to Redondo Beach was made, looking at his watch as he did so. Eight-thirty, that made it five-thirty in California. Alex would still be around. When the intercom buzzed he reached out his right arm to pick up the phone. The left sleeve was empty, pinned to his dark jacket. As he placed the receiver to his ear, the screen lit up to show a trim, ruddy-faced man in his early forties.

"Alex, I think you've finally goofed." Walters grinned in triumph at the man on the screen. "If I had another arm I'd be rubbing my hands together here. I'm reviewing the simulation you've done for Exhibit Three of our proposal. One of your boys has gone wild and thrown in a tactical nuke. You know that's right out."