"Daniel Da Cruz - Mixed Doubles" - читать интересную книгу автора (Da Cruz Daniel)

On May 2 Pope opened his mailbox to find a letter with the single hand-printed word "Baptistini."
No doubt about it: Somebody was on to him.
 Who could it be: someone in his composition class, where students each Monday played their work in
prog-ress for criticism? A member of the faculty with an en-cyclopedic knowledge of obscure and dusty
compositions and a taste for cat and mouse? A librarian with access to records of publications
withdrawals? It could have been any of those. No more evident than his tormentor's iden-tity was his
motive. Did his nemesis plan to wait until the moment when, Pope's hand outstretched for his di-ploma,
awarded with highest honors before thousands, he would denounce Pope as a fraud? Or perhaps he
would wait until Pope had landed his professorship and force him to resign in disgrace when the truth
was revealed.
After he had received the third letter, Pope briefly con-sidered throwing in the towel, moving away
from Berke-ley, and starting all over in some distant country. After all, Handel had left his homeland for
England in mid-career, and Scarlatti had abandoned Italy for Spain, and Delius England for an orange
orchard in Florida, so why not PopeтАФfor Paris, say? But the defeatist mood quickly passed. The
well-muscled frame of the tall, broad-shouldered, wide-browed young man, brimming with
self-confidence and optimism, had no room for self-doubt. Everything would work out fine, he decided.
It had to: an inner voice had complacently assured him that one day he would put his mark on the world.
It was, therefore, a serene young man who sloshed through the rain toward the Omar Haffar
Molecular Sci-ences Building, where he performed the light night la-bors that justified his full scholarship
at the university. Twice a week he swept the floor and dusted the furniture in the office and laboratory of
Prof. Dr. Dr. Thaddeus Klemper, late of G├╢ttingen, Distinguished Research Scholar at the Percival
Coates Memorial Electromagnetic Research Facility. Pope's qualifications for the job were the ability to
wield broom and dust cloth and a total ig-norance of physics, for the good doctor was rabid about
secrecy regarding his researches, which had something to do with terrestrial magnetism.
Pope snicked back the three Yale locks that secured the door to Prof. Dr. Dr. Klemper's domain,
entered, made sure the door was locked behind him, and switched on the lights. He slung his dripping
raincoat across a chair in the corner and surveyed the cavernous labora-tory. It looked more like a mad
scientist's attic store-house than a research facility. It was crowded with equipment, much of it still in
wooden crates, piles of electrical supplies covered with a tarpaulin, a dolly supporting what seemed to be
an intricate television an-tenna, steel filing cabinets, a massive generator still strapped to its wooden
pallet, and, along one wall, a long instrument panel with blinking lights. Spreading over all, like a web
spun by some gigantic but demented spider, was festooned a maze of wires attached to glass insula-tors
suspended from a framework of steel pylons. The wires led to banks of squat green boxes whose fronts
were adorned with dials and meters whose purpose PopeтАФwho could not tell a joule from a jewel, a
coulomb from a column, a volt from a coltтАФdid not even try to guess.
Pope opened the door to the broom closet and took out a feather duster, which he flicked
abstractedly across whatever piece of equipment lay in his path as he lei-surely walked the length of the
lab. His mind was far away, on the Baptistini theme of the Malibu Symphony. Insensibly he began
beating time with the duster to the music pulsating through his mind. Then, without warn-ing, another
melodic line intruded, blotting out the Baptistini. The notes racing through his mind were truly sublime,
and he realized with a sudden flush that the music was entirely original, that the inspiration was his own.
His beat became more agitated as he pursued the theme, deep in wonder, ready to follow wherever it
would lead. Mesmerized by the unprecedented melodic inven-tion coming from himтАФJustin PopeтАФhe
marveled at its transcendent beauty as it unrolled before his unseeing eyes like a brilliantly hued magic
carpet of interwoven sound. When the theme abruptly ended and the music returned to the movement's
familiar dissonance, Pope threw down the feather duster, pulled his notebook from his hip pocket, and
began to transcribe the music he had just heard before it could escape his memory. He wrote standing
up, his notebook resting on a filing cabinet, page after page, and when he had written down the melodic
sequence, he went straight back to the beginning, or-chestrating the entire sixty-four-bar passage just as
he had heard it in his mind's ear.