Over The River & Through The Woods by Clifford D. Simak

Author:Clifford D. Simak [Simak, Clifford D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Science Fiction; American
ISBN: 9780964832022
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Published: 1996-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

The Golden Bugs

Clifford D. Simak

It started as a lousy day.

Arthur Belsen, across the alley, turned on his orchestra at six o’clock and brought me sitting up in bed.

I’m telling you, Belsen makes his living as an engineer, but music is his passion. And since he is an engineer, he’s not content to leave well enough alone. He had to mess around.

A year or two before he’d had the idea of a robotic symphony, and the man has talent, you have to give him that. He went to work on this idea and designed machines that could read—not only play, but read—music from a tape, and he built a machine to transcribe the tapes. Then he built a lot of these music machines in his basement workshop.

And he tried them out!

It was experimental work, quite understandably, and there was redesigning and adjusting to be done, and Belsen was finicky about the performance that each machine turned out. So he tried them out a lot—and loudly—not being satisfied until he had the instrumentation just the way he thought it should be.

There had been some idle talk in the neighborhood about a lynching party, but nothing came of it. That’s the trouble, one of the troubles, with this neighborhood of ours—they’ll talk an arm off you, but never do a thing.

As yet no one could see an end to all the Belsen racket. It had taken him better than a year to work up the percussion section and that was bad enough. But now he’d started on the strings and that was even worse.

Helen sat up in bed beside me and put her hands up to her ears, but she couldn’t keep from hearing. Belsen had it turned up loud, to get, as he would tell you, the feel of it.

By this time, I figured, he probably had the entire neighborhood awake.

‘Well, that’s it,” I said, starting to get up.

“You want me to get breakfast?”

“You might as well,” I said. “No one’s going to get any sleep with that thing turned on.”

While she started breakfast, I headed for the garden back of the garage to see how the dahlias might be faring. I don’t mind telling you I was delighted with those dahlias. It was nearly fair time and there were some of them that would be at bloom perfection just in time for showing.

I started for the garden, but I never got there. That’s the way it is in this neighborhood. A man will start to do something and never get it done because someone always catches him and wants to talk a while.

This time it was Dobby. Dobby is Dr. Darby Wells, a venerable old codger with white chin whiskers, and he lives next door. We all call him Dobby and he doesn’t mind a bit, for in a way it’s a badge of tribute to the man. At one time Dobby had been an entomologist of some repute at the university and it had been his students who had hung the name on him.

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