Himself settling for bottle water and no local ice, the headmaster sat down at his high-back, ornately-carved chair and turned to the matter at hand. He leaned forward with folded hands that looked more like a goalie’s than a reverend minister turned headmaster. "I have good news for you. Master Marcus never so much as sneezed on a dog, cat, squirrel or rabbit the last half term training--though, to be honest with you, he sees precious few beasties on this barren rock. He shows no abnormal interest in science, while doing assigned tasks. He appears utterly changed for the better--reformed by the solid, manly training we go in for here."

"You mean--" the father hesitated, setting down the glass and glancing again at the hideous brown blocks in it. "You mean he hasn't asked for his things back--that beastly holo-something-or-other he was working on and his precious collections of skulls, animal parts, and rocks?"

"Hasn't mentioned them once!"

"Do you still have it?" ventured the mother, twisting the remnants of her handkerchief back and forth in her hands. "I refer to the invention, of course. It worried me that somehow it might get back into his clutches--”

Lord Chillingsworth looked pained. “‘Hands,’ I think you mean, dear.”

“Hands? Of course, that’s what I said! Anyway, one cannot know what he'd try to do with it after--after--"

Lord Chillingsworth touched his wife's writhing fingers, and she glanced up and shook her head.

“How did he ever think up such a cruel thing anyway?” she said, her desperation overcoming her reserve. She turned directly to the headmaster. “Do you have any idea formed, sir, now that you’ve had him under your charge and observed him these many days?”

The headmaster paused, gazing at her for a moment. He tapped his right temple. “He is bright, I can’t but admit, but really this invention is a bit advanced in theory and technology, so that I had to ponder the same question you just now put to me. And my answer is, he found help.”

“‘Help’”? the father echoed. “You mean his scientific studies gave him the ideas he needed?”

The headmaster looked grim. “No, I don’t think so, though he reviewed the entire literature on the subject, believe me, including the work of a certain American, Tom Mitchell, of Carnegie Mellon University's Machine Learning Department, who devised something called "functional magnetic resonance imaging," which amounted to a real-brain scan that could read brain activity involving words and phrases. That was foundational work, of course, for all the others who followed him up. But I have in mind something else may have helped him develop the weapon substantially--something developed beyond even our present technological and scientific ability.”

“Preposterous!” exploded the father, looking toward the door as if he wished the interview ended.

The headmaster smiled. “Maybe! But he had a scroll in his possession once, did he not? A certain, very old artifact--”

“Oh, yes!” the mother interposed. “He found it on the estate in Wales, and we so no harm in letting him keep it. I didn’t think it could be valuable, being written upon in strange script no one could read.”

The headmaster’s smile faded. “Oh, but we musn’t assume no one could read it. Your son obviously read it, proving he’s a linquistic genius or gained access to the best translation computers in the country. That scroll’s the prime source, you see, for--”

His face ashen, the father rose. “Where is it? I’ll destroy it at once! At once!”

The headmaster sighed. “I regret to tell you, it’s not possible. The scroll has vanished, or I would have destroyed it myself when I first realized what use it had been put to.”

“But the weapon, you still have it?” the mother broke in, her eyes showing something close to hysteria and terror.

The headmaster smiled. "You need not worry about it! It's locked up in a room in the boat shed--walls are three feet of reinforced Ferro-titanium composite, and no windows! We'll turn it over to you when you want his things."

"Oh, we won't be wanting it, at least not right away!" the mother said hurriedly, composing herself. “You wouldn’t see me in the same house with--with--well, not while I’m alive!”

"What my wife means, " added Lord Chillingsworth, "is that you may keep it safer than we can at the moment. When he comes on holiday I don't want anything like that around, you see. Then when he reaches legal majority age he can have it back--long as he is sane beyond question. I don't care about his utterly harmless rock collections but they might as well be kept together with his invention until his majority. By that time, when he reaches majority age of twenty three, surely he will be reformed and in his right mind, with no danger of repeating--"

"Oh, absolutely, he will be altogether a different fellow. I’ve never seen anything yet Loch Lyman cannot handle! No, he’s on his way to reformation, total reformation!”

Programmed to sound like Chip of the classic old Chip and Dale cartoon series, the beeper was in Chi Chi’s hand and on its way to the waste basket when the door opened.

“How many have I scrubbed for you, Old Buddy?” Chi Chi protested. “I don’t count, but, obviously, you do.”

Trimble, with a double major in physics and music, looked shocked as if he could not believe his ears.

“But this latest group is just your thing--working housewives from Newark, New Jersey!” he cried in injured tones. “They’re the artistic type too, and absolutely rabid about the cultural history of hyperinstrumentation. Only you can do them justice, Chi Chi! You have such a way with the common man, or I should say, ordinary, unacademic folk. That’s why I should step aside and let the better man handle it.”

“I’ll see you pay for this!” vowed Chi Chi, rising from the comfortable chair. “I’ll think of something while I’m out there, so don’t--”

“No, you’ll forget all about it as you’re extolling the great Machover’s immortal achievements,” laughed Trimble, throwing himself into Chi Chi’s chair. “You’re just too nice a guy to hold grudges. They don’t make ‘em like you anymore!”

Seeing it was useless to argue, Chi Chi went out, pasting a guide’s smile on his face that soon turned to the real thing as he introduced thirty or so aging but appreciative housewives from Newark to the world of early hyperinstrumentation. Forty minutes later, they had all gone out, raving, with words like “fantastic” and “real nice young man” echoing behind them in the hall.

The last station on his tour held the sprawled form of the exhausted guide as he relaxed for a moment. Thanks to him, the ladies had been introduced to the Music Man himself.

“...equipped to initiate a musical revolution, already exposed to rock, classical music, and computers in the home, Dr. Tod Machover, played cello in Italy, transferred to Manhattan’s Julliard School for a degree in composing but soon found the atmosphere there too conservative and confining to his genius...”

“But what did he look like?” one lady interrupted. “I heard he was quite--”

In response, Machover flashed on the screen, authentic down to his button-down shirt and head of curly brown hair. The ladies, impressed, could not get enough of Machover, so he let the screen drop to Machover’s ankles and shoewear before went on with his remarks.

“ ...he left Julliard and moved to IRCAM, an experimental music institute in Paris in the late 1970s. There he constructed his first hyperinstruments, by which computers took the sounds from ordinary instruments and instantaneously altered them...”

Then he was interrupted again, but by the group’s leader, someone who considered herself a reasonably good drummer after taking a crash three week course at a music trade school.

“But we came here to play the instruments! Now show me which one does drums! That’s what I came for, Fuzz-Head!”

“We’ll get to that,” he told her curtly, thinking to stop a messy stampede she was determined to head up.

First on the program, he showed them BYTE OVERTURE in F Major, Machover’s famed “computer opera” that employed then living opera stars, acoustic instruments, and computerized hyperinstruments he had invented.

The ladies liked the opera. Of course, everybody did, but they would not be put off any longer from taking their turns on the instruments--particularly, the drummer lady, who drummed her fingers maddeningly on her notebook as he discoursed on the mechanics of Machover’s HEX DUMP OPERA, a musical voyage for an entire audience in which they become performer and audience at the same time.

To demonstrate the HEX DUMP OPERA, they followed him into the giant ear divided into three rooms, where they would learn to play the simplest hyperinstruments before graduating to playing complex musical games. That portion of the repertoire did not pull off so well. Wannabe impresario drummer lady wasn’t interested in creating her part of the opera or playing “Fuzz-Head” games, so the result was somewhat discouraging and sounded at the end like Tchaikovsky’s worst nightmare. The gesture organ, the hyper-cello, and all the rest might have been tin toy whistles and Jews’ harps for the combined sound they made. In despair, for Chi Chi’s good heart could not bear what was happening to his tour, he let the wannabe hyper-drummer do her thing while everybody else listened. He gave her some basic preliminary instructions and let her sit down before the operating “command window.” The “on-button” was the seat itself, and since she happened to be a large woman the circuit overloaded and he had to do some hasty, highly illegal programming to keep it from shutting down permanently.

“Place your hands in the air inside the composer’s frame, Madame,” he told her, “and you automatically become a part of the instrument. As you move your hands and fingers in the window, you activate up to a thousand zones, each of which produces a tone or variety of tones. If you touch in-between two zones, you get a blend, and if you want a special mood superimposed, merely speak the word or words--like “hot and jazzy beach umbrellas on the French Cote d’Azur” or “gentle, rolling, pastel hills and cottages of the Cotswold country” and any other mood-transforming terms or scenes--”

That was as far as he got. The woman took over from there and the hyper-drum, under her somewhat hard-handed direction, nearly exploded. At one point, he thought he actually saw her using her feet to kick out the window completely.

After a while, Chi Chi, recovering from the experience, started to rise from the on-button. Then, without anything particular in mind, he stuck his hand in the window and began playing a rhythm. In a nanosecond it grabbed him, and he couldn’t stop playing. He knew he was creating an entire new opera with the hyper-drum, it evolved with such complexity of theme and nuance. Captivated, he finished and hit the record zone, preserving it for his own reference later. Excited, he thought he might even submit it for his master’s thesis if it he checked it out and it was good enough.

“So you’re in here, you jerk! You know perfectly well I can’t close shop without you!”

Trimble’s voice nearly swung Chi Chi’s head off at the neck, he was so surprised.

“Yes, I’ve been improvising on this old thing,” he explained, getting up, and feeling immediately that he had lost all sense in his feet and lower legs. Stumbling away, he followed Trimble back to the lounge, but he couldn’t put his new opera out of his mind and mentioned it to his fellow guide.

“All right, I’ll see it, since you think so much of it,” grumbled Trimble. “I have to cut a lecture for this, but here goes nothing!”

Since they were the last guides of the day, they closed the museum and ran the opera. The moment it concluded, Chi Chi turned expectantly to his friend. Trimble, however, avoided his eyes.

“Well?” prompted Chi Chi. “Tell me it’s garbage then. I want the truth!”

Trimble threw himself up on his feet from his chair and went to the coffee and got himself some dregs--very black, very cold and stiff--and threw it down with a gasp for a chaser. Then he faced Chi Chi with a strange smile. “I know very well you didn’t study exo-astronomy--but this thing you just did is full of it.”

Chi Chi was aghast and Trimble went on. “Full of it!” he laughed. “And physics too! I can tell by the patterns, they’re all algorithms and symbolic logic, and the equations I derive are highly interesting--” He broke off and went to a monitor and keyboard, and without saying more he ran some of the opera into the system for analysis and confirmation. “What is this?” he burst out to the befuddled Chi Chi. “See, I told you, it really isn’t an opera, you’re actually writing the manual for some kind of proto-starship!”

Chi Chi stared at the equations and took his friend’s word for it, since Trimble was known to be the current darling of the physics department.

“Where did you get this stuff, monkey brain?” Trimble demanded. “Things like this just don’t happen everyday!”

Chi Chi shook his weary head. He was also feeling light-headed with the possibilities of what he had done. “Beats me. I thought if I showed it to you, you might tell me.”

Trimble began humming, then with a twinkle in his eye actually began to sing as he headed to the door.

Fetch a clinging quark, oh plug it in a socket,

With quark power, starships could reach almost any point in the Universe in fractional time, complete their missions, then return to base before crews aged to hump-backed Methusalahs.

He knew, if the world did not, that Trimble was mistaken on one point. The monkey on the typewriter had struck, right there in the music department, composing a magnum opus that seemingly surpassed Machover’s musical revolution with its possibilities. And, bye and bye, there was a ripple effect, at least, with second thoughts.

In the years ahead, Chong often wondered if the wheel hadn’t been rounded from a square and Einstein’s theories formulated in much the same fashion--proving, for one thing, genius was far more a happy accident than the experts would ever give it credit.

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