My life hasn't been the same since Danny Karodny banged on my door one night around ten, both his jacket pockets stuffed with rolls of composition paper and his oboe stuck in his belt, and started talking about Charles Fort. Talking damn loud, too, and it took enough time to get him down to a good decibel level so Maria came stumbling out of the bedroom—she's a day person, but we get along—and went into her solo about waking the kids, which runs better than six minutes uncut. About half the time it wakes the kids, but there is no sense trying to explain that to Maria any more than there would be to any other wife in the world.
She doesn't like Danny any great hell of a lot anyhow, because Danny is a sort of relic of my past life, before I became respectable. I think respectable means you worry about waking the kids. You're not respectable, what the hell, you let them stay up and watch. Right?
Charles Fort, he kept saying, and alien beings, and the end of the world, and none of this was blending very well with Maria. She didn't cut her solo any, and Danny didn't stop talking, so she kept flashing me these little looks she does. Stoned, high, wiped out on something totally weird; these cracked composer friends of yours; and what do we need with people like this now you're a steady orchestra seat, paycheck every week, why not some nice people for a change, Marty? and if you think I'm going to put up with this freaky drugged-out nonsense any longer; and so forth. Maria has never got the drug scene straight: Danny would sooner take cyanide than a small puff of the weed, let alone anything else, since the first thing to go is the time-sense, and a serious composer (Danny says) has enough trouble as it is.
But I had to admit he was acting a little strange. Not exactly the happy, nervous, ragged optimist of old, you might say. What I did, I sat out Maria's aria, and gave her to understand that I felt for her deeply and it would hardly ever happen again, and I knew how the kids needed their sleep, and also Maria. And after she had retreated to the bedroom I said: "Alien beings?"
Danny was pacing around the kitchen, which meant I had to sit in the corner chair and watch him. It's a small apartment, but any musician learns to take what he can get, there being a lot of people who object to practice scales. "Alien beings," he told me. "It's all in Charles Fort. I mean, years ago. He wrote it all down, Marty, and we laughed at him. We wrote him off as a nut, and we sneered at him."
"The hell I did," I said. "Who is he?"
Fort (maybe you know this already?) was a guy who spent his life collecting weird facts: stuff about people turning into swans, rains of frogs, disappearing ladies, God knows what. He wrote all these stories down in four books, and someplace in one of the books he said there was an alien race Out There, watching us, and they owned us. We were property, was his thing, and maybe we were lab specimens or something. As if the whole planet Earth, say, was a setup, the way scientists take some rats or flies and build an environment for them, and work things out a while.
Which could be good enough for Charles Fort, maybe, but not for the Danny Karodny I had known since Curtis Institute. He looked ragged and patchy, more than usual, and his eyes were damn wild, and he kept up this back-and-forth and flinging his arms around, and his hair was standing out about seven inches from his head all over and his beard was uncombed, which was really strange. Most of all, he sounded different. It was not anywhere clear what the hell had got into him.
I thought he had picked up on this book and, being maybe in a sensitive state, he had been hit a little too hard. So I said, in a very peaceful tone: "Just because it's written down, that doesn't mean it has to be true. There are a lot of far-out things—"
"I didn't read it somewhere," Danny said. There was a kind of desperation in his voice, like a block that kept him above A-sharp. "I mean, that isn't why I know this. I know it. That's all. It's the only thing that fits."
I said: "All right, calm down and give me all the pieces," and I broke out a beer, and Danny got to sitting down across the small table and took in some reheated coffee, which told me he was still serious about his time-sense and therefore not even remotely in some novel chemical state: alcohol shakes up the time-sense, too, just a little, and I have heard Danny do a solo on that (nine minutes even) almost as often as I have heard about waking the kids. "Let's see how the pieces fit," I said, and Danny, now he was sitting down and with a little bad coffee inside him, seemed to calm down. Not too damned much. But he nodded.
"You know about the Thespis?" he asked me.
Naturally I knew about the Thespis. Danny is by no means the Abominable Bernstein, but even with the government cutting back on the arts a fair piece, he has picked up a commission here and there, and Thespis was due to be performed in Namibia as part of a cultural-exchange deal in eighteen months, provided Danny could work his way through a couple of interesting technical snarls and finish the thing. And provided Namibia could scratch up some culture to exchange, I suppose? At any rate, the technical snarls were what had got him in an especially sensitive state, and he'd hit the point where he had started to explain exactly how he was solving them, which is the surest indicator I know that work is at a standstill. There was something about the fluidity of rigid structures, which might even have meant something if it hadn't been talk. "What about it?" I said. "Into Part II yet?"
"Vaguely," he said. "Vaguely. I have all of Part III blocked out, so all I have to do is work my way backward into the formal structure. You see, the whole trouble was the two consistent chains—" He shut up and drank some coffee. "Never mind about that," he said, surprising me slightly. "But try this on for size: the other day a man from the State Department came to see me."
"Breaks up your day," I said, "but it's a government commission; I suppose he wanted to inspect for finished pages?"
"This is no joke," Danny said, all the way down to F-below, and I looked apologetic. "He offered me a bonus on the commission money, an extra $5,000, if I would just do 'one simple little thing'." I could hear the bland A-flat-major official voice making that proposition, and I prepared for the worst.
"What simple little thing?" I said.
"Twenty-five bars," Danny said, "in the middle of Part II, a solo for clarinet and prepared piano. He gave me the score. Note for note. He told me to drop it in anywhere I thought it might fit. He said it would be worth my while."
I set my beer down and stared at him. "The Secretary of State thinks he's a composer?" I said.
"That's about what I figured," Danny said, "after I kicked the man out. Then I got a letter, four days later—" Like a fair sprinkling of musicians, especially composers, Danny owns no phone—"asking me to reconsider. Very polite, very remote, but you could feel the pressure. As if the commission depended on it. I'd sent the twenty-five bars out with the delivery boy, but the letter said the stuff would be available any time. All I had to do was ask; they'd deliver again. And it didn't quite say or else, but it came damn close."
"So they think it's important," I said. "But—" I flung out my own arms. "It doesn't make any sense."
Danny smiled at me. It was a very tired smile; he looked the way he'd looked the day his Second Orchestral Farrago had been reviewed in the Times as "dull and preposterous." I sighed.
"All right, it makes sense," I said. "Show me how."
"Marty," he said, "have you ever thought of music as a code?"
"Alfred Hitchcock," I said at once. "Tap-dancing the secret spy stuff—years and years ago, that was. Late, Late Show stuff. My God, Danny, do you mean they wanted you to put in a code message? In Namibia, at a cultural-exchange premiere?"
"Why not?" he said.
I flung out my arms again. "Why music?" I said. "I mean, sealed diplomatic pouch stuff, or electronic scramblers, or—"
"I thought about that, too," he said, with the same tired smile. "Because music is a code, all right, but it's really sort of a simple one. You can break it down to shorts and longs, like Morse—Beethoven's V-for-Victory, remember?—or you can treat it as a succession of letters—A-D-E-F-G-A-F-A or whatever—or you could work it both ways at once; but there's no way you could get it as complex as, say, a mathematical system, or the sort of thing an electronic scrambler could do."
I had to grin, for maybe a second. Trust an oboe player to fish for a musical example and come up with Swan Lake. "But if the idea of a code doesn't make sense—"
"It does, though," Danny said. "Under one very special condition. You can't crack a code if you don't know it is a code."
I thought about that for a minute. Sure: all the expectable stuff would be watched. But a musical performance? Who'd think of that, except Alfred Hitchcock for an old movie?
I drank some beer, thinking damn bitter thoughts. Government interest in the arts. There had to be a reason it hadn't been cut back to zero. And what better reason could there be, for a damn government? "Don't bother about the music making sense," I said, "just use it as a cover for a lousy code operation."
Danny nodded. "The man who pays the piper," he said.
"Calls twenty-five bars of the tune," I said, and then it hit me. "Hey—wait a minute—where do the aliens come in? And all the rest of this?"
Danny gave me the smile once more: tired, distant, ultimately certain. Then he said one word:
"Shostakovich."
* * * * *
It took a few weeks. Maria wasn't happy, and explaining didn't do any good because Danny Karodny was involved in it, which is how her mind works: she doesn't like him, so the hell with it.
But for once I let her go through her whole unhappiness repertoire, from The most promising contralto at Juilliard to My mother warned me about you. I was too busy to spend time on my own counter-repertoire (The most promising loused up the only four chorus jobs she ever had, and Your mother warned you about everybody, why should I be different?, among other selections); for one thing, I had to hunt up a cryptanalyst, which is sort of a rare bird.
I found him, though, with Danny's help. His commissions had given him maybe five numbers to call among official-type people, and one of the numbers turned out to be a helpful young lady who had a friend whose father knew of a…It was like that, and the first cryptanalyst we got to thought we were escapees from a buggery, or nuthatch.
The second one was worse. Cryptanalysts, she told me, tend to have very open minds, because it goes with the territory, like fairy chess, and I knew about fairy chess, which is make-up-your-own-rules chess or thereabouts, because pit violinists on Broadway play a lot of it as well as the regular kind, having to do something to stay alive during the nineteenth month of a good run.
This cryptanalyst had an open mind. She was willing to think about the possibility of aliens on Earth passing each other messages by way of musical codes. (It isn't a true code anyway, but a cipher. A true code, she says, can scarcely ever be broken without the code-book or a very fair knowledge of the sort of messages being transmitted; a cipher can always be broken, because it doesn't work on a book, it works on a simple rule, and you can find the rule by proper analysis. Alien beings, apparently, don't want to have code-books lying around. They don't seem to take a lot of chances—at any rate, not until lately.) However, she went on, and she used the word like an axe:
However: if the aliens are transmitting, they're using their own language, not ours, which would not be so simple to break without some sort of Rosetta Stone; this made sense after I had looked up Rosetta Stone in a handy encyclopedia.
And, second: how do the aliens tell code messages from accidental code-type patterns any composer might just happen to toss in?
Danny just about went into orbit. It had to be aliens, he kept saying, and there had to be a way of cracking the code. The cryptanalyst said: "Cipher," and: "How? For that matter, why?"
Why, according to Danny, was easy. Look: government support, and even control, of the arts is beginning to exist almost everywhere. Maybe even in Namibia, depending on what you mean by "government" and "arts." Shostakovich is just the most famous Russian case—forced to recant his own Fourth Symphony, for God's sake.
And government support or control really does have to have a reason. And, if it's everywhere…
Well, what human agency is looking for codes (sorry: ciphers) in music?
(This may not be limited to music, of course: there's always modern painting and sculpture, and some of the new writing coming out seems to make little enough sense to qualify. But I'm no judge, and I'd rather not say anything bad about any artist—or any other member of the human race.)
"Assuming that an alien cipher exists," the cryptanalyst said, very, very calmly—a lady who surprised me by looking very attractive indeed, with a chalumeau clarinet voice around the bottom F that kept my ears much happier than they had expected to be—"assuming that, why must this cipher be anything we can work with—in under four real-time computer years, I mean? Without a Rosetta Stone—"
Danny gave her a grin, sort of spastic but the first real grin I had seen on his face in some while. "Because," he said, "the aliens might be confused by accidental 'messages' some Earth composer might invent. And because—remember this, Doc—the aliens are on Earth, and there may be more than one kind. A sort of Equal Employment Opportunity Alien group. It'd make sense—if they're here to study us or check up or—whatever—a lot of different aliens might be interested."
"And?" the cryptanalyst said, just as calmly.
Danny grinned again. "Well, they need a common language," he said. "And they have to have ours anyhow—maybe more than one, but sure as hell they have to have English."
"And Chinese, I should think," she added. "And—but I agree: English would be the best bet. However—"
Danny took the remains of the axe out of her hands. "What we have to look for," he said, "is a short message that says: This is a cipher. It has to be very, very common; it has to appear just about everywhere, and more often than any other message. Without it, an accidental message gets ignored—right? And the chances of a human composer running into both messages, in the right order, are pretty damn small. Right?"
"Right," she said. This was one tough lady, it turned out. She dragged us both through weeks of work, trying to pull out a single identical message—the This is a cipher warning. We had a little computer help, but not much. "Cryptanalysts have open minds—or most of us do," she said. "But the people who allocate computer time can't afford to have. Ten real-time minutes will demand more than just a nice, oddball theory about aliens. And besides," she went on, with a nice smile of her own, "you two are musicians. If the single warning message is all that common, you ought to be able to find it with very little trouble."
We did, too. The pattern looks to be straight notation—no short-and-long stuff, just the notes. And the message is as common as a C chord:
C-C-D-E-C-E-D.
The form of that you probably know is Yankee Doodle. But the pattern seems to be universal. It shows up again and again, in Sibelius, Shostakovich (for sure!), Glinka, Delius, Bartok, Berlioz, Ives, even Beethoven—quite a list. There are appearances of it in Japanese music, too, if you call it music.
And it's still appearing—the tempos vary, of course, but those seven notes turn up everywhere you look—once you start looking.
There's a time-lag between warning and message; our pet cryptanalyst dug that fact out after wasting a lot of effort on the notes that immediately followed the warning. The time-lag is six minutes, even.
When we brought the warning in to her, she said: "Congratulations. But of course it had to be there, if your theory were to make sense." And she shook my hand, and Danny's.
I had expected something a little warmer. However—Maria still thinks the cryptanalyst was a little old white-haired man with a cracked voice and very thick glasses: why stir up arias?
We turned up a lot of messages, some of which do not seem to make much sense. What would you do with this one? (Act III of a Swedish opera, by the way, and so bad I still can't forget it.)
Deciphered:
experimental results satisfactory
roaches and cocker spaniels
synergistic with humanity
external limbs of beings non-radiant
We got that one after a couple of recent Rumanian works, for God's sake, that gave the cryptanalyst enough to work with to bring out some fairly long messages and check the cipher—which does turn out to be in English, by the way. Good luck for us, I suppose. Or maybe not…
At any rate, the last Rumanian message, very long for a single cipher job, lets us know why the aliens aren't being quite so careful any more—working directly on Danny, for instance, via the State Department. (Danny did go back to State—and got a further request, which involved seven notes we already knew—six minutes before those twenty-five bars, which was no surprise.) And this is the one that's worrying me:
experimental run satisfactory to highest degree
command orders end of run
proper time our joint decision
to be made by heads of departments
all others on or near planet will be informed before atomic sterilization of test area
please await information and prepare to leave planet and system
sterilization of test area must be complete
Great. Wonderful.
And one more (the slow movement of a fairly dull Canadian string quartet) gives the method of information for all aliens currently living (in disguise, I suppose—some of them, anyhow) on Earth. I don't know how much time they'll be allowed to get clear, and I have no idea whether any human beings can get clear at all. But the message will be very simple. And maybe, if we show that we've figured it out, we'll be saved—for another experiment, or maybe better.
Hell. Even at the worst, damn it, I want to know.
And if you can think of anything at all—let's get together on this. Let me know. Right?
The message will show up on at least three radio stations, and two TV broadcasts. It will be a piano solo, ten seconds long. I have no idea of the year or month or day, except that it's going to be damned soon, but it will show up at precisely 1618 Eastern Standard Time.
So: this time, they don't need their warning message. You don't need to listen for that.
1618 is 4:18 p.m., and it sort of disrupts my life, since the kids are up and about around then, and I have to shut them up, and shut Maria up too. But I've been managing it, every day.
Check the three radio stations, or the two TV jobs, which have the highest listener rating in your area. They'll be the ones.
The message, for piano solo, goes like this:
E-F-F#-G-D-C-G-F#-F-E.
When you hear it—well, now you know.
It's a nice pattern, usually played sort of slow. Very symmetrical.
If you happen not to be musical, you'll still recognize it. It's Melancholy Baby.