[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction December 1951.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
No self-respecting artist can object to
suffering for his art ... but not in a
society where art is outdated by technology!
I
Halvorsen waited in the Chancery office while Monsignor Reedy disposed
of three persons who had preceded him. He was a little dizzy with
hunger and noticed only vaguely that the prelate's secretary was
beckoning to him. He started to his feet when the secretary pointedly
opened the door to Monsignor Reedy's inner office and stood waiting
beside it.
The artist crossed the floor, forgetting that he had leaned his
portfolio against his chair, remembered at the door and went back for
it, flushing. The secretary looked patient.
"Thanks," Halvorsen murmured to him as the door closed.
There was something wrong with the prelate's manner.
"I've brought the designs for the Stations, Padre," he said, opening
the portfolio on the desk.
"Bad news, Roald," said the monsignor. "I know how you've been looking
forward to the commission--"
"Somebody else get it?" asked the artist faintly, leaning against the
desk. "I thought his eminence definitely decided I had the--"
"It's not that," said the monsignor. "But the Sacred Congregation
of Rites this week made a pronouncement on images of devotion.
Stereopantograph is to be licit within a diocese at the discretion of
the bishop. And his eminence--"
"S.P.G.--slimy imitations," protested Halvorsen. "Real as a plastic
eye. No texture. No guts. _You_ know that, Padre!" he said accusingly.
"I'm sorry, Roald," said the monsignor. "Your work is better than we'll
get from a stereopantograph--to my eyes, at least. But there are other
considerations."
"Money!" spat the artist.
"Yes, money," the prelate admitted. "His eminence wants to see the St.
Xavier U. building program through before he dies. Is that a mortal
sin? And there are our schools, our charities, our Venus mission.
S.P.G. will mean a considerable saving on procurement and maintenance
of devotional images. Even if I could, I would not disagree with his
eminence on adopting it as a matter of diocesan policy."
The prelate's eyes fell on the detailed drawings of the Stations of the
Cross and lingered.
"Your St. Veronica," he said abstractedly. "Very fine. It suggests one
of Caravaggio's care-worn saints to me. I would have liked to see her
in the bronze."
"So would I," said Halvorsen hoarsely. "Keep the drawings, Padre." He
started for the door.
"But I can't--"
"That's all right."
The artist walked past the secretary blindly and out of the Chancery
into Fifth Avenue's spring sunlight. He hoped Monsignor Reedy was
enjoying the drawings and was ashamed of himself and sorry for
Halvorsen. And he was glad he didn't have to carry the heavy portfolio
any more. Everything seemed so heavy lately--chisels, hammer, wooden
palette. Maybe the padre would send him something and pretend it was
for expenses or an advance, as he had in the past.
Halvorsen's feet carried him up the Avenue. No, there wouldn't be
any advances any more. The last steady trickle of income had just
been dried up, by an announcement in _Osservatore Romano_. Religious
conservatism had carried the church as far as it would go in its
ancient role of art patron.
When all Europe was writing on the wonderful new vellum, the church
stuck to good old papyrus. When all Europe was writing on the wonderful
new paper, the church stuck to good old vellum. When all architects
and municipal monument committees and portrait bust clients were
patronizing the stereopantograph, the church stuck to good old
expensive sculpture. But not any more.
He was passing an S.P.G. salon now, where one of his Tuesday night
pupils worked: one of the few men in the classes. Mostly they consisted
of lazy, moody, irritable girls. Halvorsen, surprised at himself,
entered the salon, walking between asthenic semi-nude stereos executed
in transparent plastic that made the skin of his neck and shoulders
prickle with gooseflesh.
_Slime!_ he thought. _How can they--_
"May I help--oh, hello, Roald. What brings you here?"
He knew suddenly what had brought him there. "Could you make a little
advance on next month's tuition, Lewis? I'm strapped." He took a
nervous look around the chamber of horrors, avoiding the man's
condescending face.
"I guess so, Roald. Would ten dollars be any help? That'll carry us
through to the 25th, right?"
"Fine, right, sure," he said, while he was being unwillingly towed
around the place.
"I know you don't think much of S.P.G., but it's quiet now, so this is
a good chance to see how we work. I don't say it's Art with a capital
A, but you've got to admit it's _an_ art, something people like at a
price they can afford to pay. Here's where we sit them. Then you run
out the feelers to the reference points on the face. You know what they
are?"
He heard himself say dryly: "I know what they are. The Egyptian
sculptors used them when they carved statues of the pharaohs."
"Yes? I never knew that. There's nothing new under the Sun, is there?
But _this_ is the heart of the S.P.G." The youngster proudly swung open
the door of an electronic device in the wall of the portrait booth.
Tubes winked sullenly at Halvorsen.
"The esthetikon?" he asked indifferently. He did not feel indifferent,
but it would be absurd to show anger, no matter how much he felt
it, against a mindless aggregation of circuits that could calculate
layouts, criticize and correct pictures for a desired effect--and that
had put the artist of design out of a job.
"Yes. The lenses take sixteen profiles, you know, and we set the
esthetikon for whatever we want--cute, rugged, sexy, spiritual, brainy,
or a combination. It fairs curves from profile to profile to give us
just what we want, distorts the profiles themselves within limits if it
has to, and there's your portrait stored in the memory tank waiting to
be taped. You set your ratio for any enlargement or reduction you want
and play it back. I wish we were reproducing today; it's fascinating to
watch. You just pour in your cold-set plastic, the nozzles ooze out a
core and start crawling over to scan--a drop here, a worm there, and it
begins to take shape.
"We mostly do portrait busts here, the Avenue trade, but Wilgus,
the foreman, used to work in a monument shop in Brooklyn. He did
that heroic-size war memorial on the East River Drive--hired Garda
Bouchette, the TV girl, for the central figure. And what a figure!
He told me he set the esthetikon plates for three-quarter sexy,
one-quarter spiritual. Here's something interesting--standing figurine
of Orin Ryerson, the banker. He ordered twelve. Figurines are coming
in. The girls like them because they can show their shapes. You'd be
surprised at some of the poses they want to try--"
* * * * *
Somehow, Halvorsen got out with the ten dollars, walked to Sixth Avenue
and sat down hard in a cheap restaurant. He had coffee and dozed a
little, waking with a guilty start at a racket across the street. There
was a building going up. For a while he watched the great machines pour
walls and floors, the workmen rolling here and there on their little
chariots to weld on a wall panel, stripe on an electric circuit of
conductive ink, or spray plastic finish over the "wired" wall, all
without leaving the saddles of their little mechanical chariots.
Halvorsen felt more determined. He bought a paper from a vending
machine by the restaurant door, drew another cup of coffee and turned
to the help-wanted ads.
The tricky trade-school ads urged him to learn construction work and
make big money. Be a plumbing-machine setup man. Be a house-wiring
machine tender. Be a servotruck driver. Be a lumber-stacker operator.
Learn pouring-machine maintenance.
_Make big money!_
A sort of panic overcame him. He ran to the phone booth and dialed a
Passaic number. He heard the _ring-ring-ring_ and strained to hear
old Mr. Krehbeil's stumping footsteps growing louder as he neared the
phone, even though he knew he would hear nothing until the receiver was
picked up.
* * * * *
_Ring--ring--ring._ "Hello?" grunted the old man's voice, and his face
appeared on the little screen. "Hello, Mr. Halvorsen. What can I do for
you?"
Halvorsen was tongue-tied. He couldn't possibly say: I just wanted to
see if you were still there. I was afraid you weren't there any more.
He choked and improvised: "Hello, Mr. Krehbeil. It's about the banister
on the stairs in my place. I noticed it's pretty shaky. Could you come
over sometime and fix it for me?"
Krehbeil peered suspiciously out of the screen. "I could do that," he
said slowly. "I don't have much work nowadays. But you can carpenter
as good as me, Mr. Halvorsen, and frankly you're very slow pay and I
like cabinet work better. I'm not a young man and climbing around
on ladders takes it out of me. If you can't find anybody else, I'll
take the work, but I got to have some of the money first, just for the
materials. It isn't easy to get good wood any more."
"All right," said Halvorsen. "Thanks, Mr. Krehbeil. I'll call you if I
can't get anybody else."
He hung up and went back to his table and newspaper. His face was
burning with anger at the old man's reluctance and his own foolish
panic. Krehbeil didn't realize they were both in the same leaky boat.
Krehbeil, who didn't get a job in a month, still thought with senile
pride that he was a journeyman carpenter and cabinetmaker who could
make his solid way anywhere with his tool-box and his skill, and
that he could afford to look down on anything as disreputable as an
artist--even an artist who could carpenter as well as he did himself.
Labuerre had made Halvorsen learn carpentry, and Labuerre had been
right. You build a scaffold so you can sculp up high, not so it will
collapse and you break a leg. You build your platforms so they hold
the rock steady, not so it wobbles and chatters at every blow of the
chisel. You build your armatures so they hold the plasticine you slam
onto them.
But the help-wanted ads wanted no builders of scaffolds, platforms and
armatures. The factories were calling for setup men and maintenance men
for the production and assembly machines.
From upstate, General Vegetables had sent a recruiting team for farm
help--harvest setup and maintenance men, a few openings for experienced
operators of tank-caulking machinery. Under "office and professional"
the demand was heavy for computer men, for girls who could run the
I.B.M. Letteriter, esp. familiar sales and collections corresp., for
office machinery maintenance and repair men. A job printing house
wanted an esthetikon operator for letterhead layouts and the like. A.T.
& T. wanted trainees to earn while learning telephone maintenance. A
direct-mail advertising outfit wanted an artist--no, they wanted a
sales-executive who could scrawl picture-ideas that would be subjected
to the criticism and correction of the esthetikon.
Halvorsen leafed tiredly through the rest of the paper. He knew he
wouldn't get a job, and if he did he wouldn't hold it. He knew it was
a terrible thing to admit to yourself that you might starve to death
because you were bored by anything except art, but he admitted it.
It had happened often enough in the past--artists undergoing
preposterous hardships, not, as people thought, because they were
devoted to art, but because nothing else was interesting. If there
were only some impressive, sonorous word that summed up the aching,
oppressive futility that overcame him when he tried to get out of
art--only there wasn't.
He thought he could tell which of the photos in the tabloid had been
corrected by the esthetikon.
There was a shot of Jink Bitsy, who was to star in a remake of _Peter
Pan_. Her ears had been made to look not pointed but pointy, her upper
lip had been lengthened a trifle, her nose had been pugged a little and
tilted quite a lot, her freckles were cuter than cute, her brows were
innocently arched, and her lower lip and eyes were nothing less than
pornography.
There was a shot, apparently uncorrected, of the last Venus ship coming
in at La Guardia and the average-looking explorers grinning. Caption:
"Austin Malone and crew smile relief on safe arrival. Malone says Venus
colonies need men, machines. See story p. 2."
Petulantly, Halvorsen threw the paper under the table and walked
out. What had space travel to do with him? Vacations on the Moon and
expeditions to Venus and Mars were part of the deadly encroachment on
his livelihood and no more.