fact, John Campbell once jokingly defined that indefinable field as follows: "Science fiction is what science fiction editors buy."
Nowadays, however, all sorts of editors buy it, and I am prepared to receive requests from the unlikeliest sources. For instance, in the summer of 1975, I received a request from a magazine named High Fidelity to do a science fiction story that was 2,500 words long, that was set about twenty-five years in the future, and that dealt with some aspect of sound recording.
I was intrigued by the narrowness of the boundary conditions, since that made it quite a challenge. Of course, I explained to the editor that I knew nothing about music or about sound recording, but that was pushed impatiently to one side as irrelevant. I started the story on September 18, 1975, and when I was through the editor liked it. He suggested some changes that would remove a bit of the aura of musical illiteracy on my part and then it appeared in the April 1976 issue of the magazine.
Marching In
Jerome Bishop, composer and trombonist, had never been in a mental hospital before.
There had been times when he had suspected he might be in one, someday, as a patient (who was safe?), but it had never occurred to him that he might ever be there as a consultant on a question of mental aberration. A consultant.
He sat there, in the year 2001, with the world in pretty terrible shape, but (they said) pulling out of it, and then rose as a middle-aged women entered. Her hair was beginning to turn gray, and Bishop was thankfully conscious of his own hair still in full shock and evenly dark.
"Are you Mr. Bishop?" she asked.
"Last time I looked."
She held out her hand. "I'm Dr. Cray. Won't you come with me?"
He shook her hand, then followed. He tried not to be haunted by the dull beige uniforms worn by everyone he passed.
Dr. Cray put a finger to her lip, and motioned him into a chair. She pressed a button and the lights went out, causing a window, with a light behind it, to spring into view. Through the window, Bishop could see a woman in something that looked like a dentist's chair, tilted back. A forest of flexible wires sprang from her head, a thin narrow beam of light extended from pole to pole behind her, and a somewhat less narrow strip of paper unfolded upward.
The light went on again; the view vanished.
Dr. Cray said, "Do you know what we're doing in there?"
"You're recording brain waves? Just a guess."
"A good guess. We are. It's a laser recording. Do you know how that works?"
"My stuff's been recorded by laser," said Bishop, crossing one leg over the other, "but that doesn't mean I know how it works. It's the engineers who know the details...Look, Doc, if you have an idea I'm a laser engineer, I'm not."
"No, I know you're not," said Dr. Cray hurriedly. "You're here for something else...Let me explain it to you. We can alter a laser beam very delicately; much more rapidly and much more precisely than we can alter an electric current, or even a beam of electrons. That means that a very complex wave can be recorded in far greater detail than has ever been imagined before. We can make a tracing with a microscopically narrow laser beam and get a wave we can study under a microscope and get accurate detail invisible to the naked eye and unobtainable in any other fashion."
Bishop said,,.It that's what you want to consult me about, then all I can say is that it doesn't pay to get all that detail. You can only hear so much. It you sharpen a laser recording past a certain amount, you bring up the expense but you don't bring up the effect. In fact, some people say you get some kind of buzz that begins to drown out the music. I don't hear it myself, but I tell you that if you want the best, you don't narrow the laser beam all the way...Of course, maybe it's different with brain waves but what I told you is an I can tell you, so I'll go and there's no charge except for carfare."
He made as though to get up, but Dr. Cray was shaking her head vigorously.
"Please sit down, Mr. Bishop. Recording brain waves is different. There we do need all the detail we can get. Till now, all we've ever had out of brain waves