Kent woke when Pard set the clopter down lightly on a restricted portion of the USC Arts Complex roof, but he was content to observe as Pard slid the sonata volume into his hand satchel and climbed from the craft. A roof attendant waved from some distance away, and started forward when Pard waved back.
Pard ducked under the clopter's cabin to peer up at its belly. He found the hole quickly, but after a glance at it he sidled another step toward the craft's centerline. Here he gazed up at a curious, bright-green circular spot, about eight inches in diameter, which appeared painted on the craft's underside.
If the projectile had hit that spot, Kent realized, it would have hit him as well.
"They had a target to aim at." Kent formed the words soundlessly.
Of course, Pard twitched, combining a nod and a shrug. He picked at the edge of the spot with a fingernail until he had enough of it free to grip between his fingers. Then with one clean motion he peeled the entire spot from the metal surface. It looked like a disk of adhesive paper. Pard opened the hand satchel, slid the disk inside, and slapped it against the back of a music volume.
"Mr. Lindstrom?" called the roof attendant, peering under the craft. "Is anything wrong?"
"No," Kent replied. He took over, snapped the satchel shut, and crept out. "Something hit the clopter. I was taking a look at the hole it made."
The attendant's eyes widened. "That could've killed you!"
"Well, it didn't," Kent replied curtly. "Now if you'll direct me to my dressing room, and inform my manager Mr. Siskind that I've arrived . . ."
His recital went excellently. He played for a packed house in the main auditorium of the Arts Complex, with the program televised nationwide via the noncommercial channels. It was a golden opportunity to win public affirmation of the acclaim of the critics—that Kent Lindstrom was by all odds the foremost young pianist of the decade.
The reaction of the house proved he was doing exactly that. The audience did not wait until the end to give him a standing ovation; he got one for the final work before the intermission break, a fantasia composed by himself.
Beethoven's "Hammer-Klavier" sonata, almost as demanding of sheer physical endurance as of technical and interpretive skills, was the sole work following intermission. The sonata is analogous to the same composer's Ninth Symphony, in that it imposes such superhuman demands on performers that a merely adequate rendition is something to marvel at.
But Kent Lindstrom considered himself two pianists rather than one. There was Kent himself, the dominant consciousness, the boss, the inhabitant of the left hemisphere of the brain, who directed the right hand at the keyboard. And there was Pard, the voiceless secondary consciousness isolated in the severed right hemisphere, who directed the left hand.
Kent Lindstrom was, therefore, the one pianist of whom it could truly be said that his right hand didn't know what his left hand was doing. Complicated counterpoint and devilishly tricky cross-rhythms, that would swamp the brain of a normal pianist with the mere task of playing notes, were handled readily by Kent Lindstrom on a division-of-labor basis, leaving both his minds with attention to spare for interpretive niceties.
He did more than play the "Hammer-Klavier" sonata. He did the piece justice.
The applause was tremendous and demanding, but Kent had looked forward to this moment—when he was assuredly entered among the immortals of music—with too much anticipation to waste its essence on some crowd-pleasing little triviality of an encore.
He knew what to do instead. After several bows, he returned to the piano while a complete hush fell over the house. With his hands in his lap and his gaze on the keyboard, he counted twenty seconds of silence. Then he stood suddenly and faced the audience.
"Anything I could play after the great 'Hammer-Klavier' would be a terrible anticlimax," he proclaimed in a ringing voice. "Thank you, and good evening."
He strode from the stage to a final approving roar.
At the jubilant post-concert reception, attended by numerous civic and university bigwigs plus a selection of music students and faculty, Kent quickly spotted a girl he wanted.
His head gave a barely perceptible shake: Lay off, Pard warned him.
Kent frowned in dull anger, but obeyed. He had been through all this several times before, and knew that when Pard told him to stay away from a girl, he had better stay away. Even if Kent was the dominant consciousness, he could not keep up a continuous guard against Pard's sneaking enough control to make him do something absurdly embarrassing, and usually with the girl watching contemptuously.
There was the time in Washington, for instance, when Pard had him flitting around like a gay homosexual for five minutes before Kent even realized what was going on. An incident like that could be damaging, and very hard for a well-known musician to live down.
Kent griped to himself. On this night, of all nights, why can't I have a choice girl? Why's Pard so nonsensical about women, anyway?
But the giggly, blond student violinist Pard finally let him accept for the evening wasn't at all bad, even though she was a type that Kent couldn't get enthused about. He wasn't sorry to see her go when his unobtrusive business manager, Dave Siskind, routed her politely from Kent's hotel suite around two a.m.
Kent yawned and settled down with the intention of sleeping at least until noon . . .
. . . And woke before dawn, fully clothed, crouched behind a dumpster in a dark alley, with a wavering ringing in his ears that he took a moment recognizing as police sirens.
He stared around wildly. The police, he could tell by the sound, were stopping at the mouth of the alley, while more sirens wailed a couple of blocks away. He turned to retreat deeper into the alley, but Pard stopped him.
That won't work.
"Blind alley?" Kent asked.
Yes.
Kent squatted back down and thought furiously. He had found indications before that Pard was an occasional night stroller: mud on shoes that had been clean when he went to bed, a few unaccounted-for scratches and bruises—and those photos of the "mystery girl" had to come from somewhere.
But Pard had never before wakened him during one of his after-hours jaunts. Why this time? Because Pard couldn't talk?
"You're in a mess I'm supposed to talk us out of," Kent guessed.
Yes.
Kent sighed unhappily, stood up, and walked out of the alley, into the glare of the police lights. Several officers rushed forward, and he was quickly frisked.
"Got any identification?" one demanded.
Kent felt in his empty pockets. "No. I left my wallet at the hotel. What's all this about?"
"Which hotel?"
"Sheraton Sunset. I'm Kent Lindstrom. Now, officers . . ."
"Lindstrom?" a policeman interrupted, staring at him closely. "Yeah, I guess you are at that. Hey, Mike! Call in that we've found Lindstrom. He looks O.K., except for some skinned knuckles."
Kent hadn't noticed the twinges of pain in his hands until then. He lifted them and glared at the bruised and bleeding knuckles. That goofy Pard! His hands were his tools! And tools were not to be abused in silly, back-alley brawls!
"Who'd you have a fight with?" the officer asked.
"I didn't ask their names," Kent replied, slightly pleased with his inspiration to make his opponents plural. "All I know is I couldn't sleep and went out for a stroll. After a while these guys jumped me. Let's see"—he peered around with a show of puzzlement. "I'm sort of turned around, but I think it happened over that way," he pointed, "maybe where those sirens are sounding."
It was a good guess. The policeman nodded. "That's about the luckiest stroll you ever took, Lindstrom," he said. "You'll have to come down to headquarters and make a statement. I'll fill you in on the way."
"Lucky?" groaned Kent. "I'm a piano player, officer. And look at the mess I've got my hands in!"
"They'll heal," the policeman replied, "but if you'd been in your bed at three o'clock you wouldn't have. A bomb went off under it."
There were complications at police headquarters, and Kent wound up in a cell. Whoever he had bloodied his knuckles on did not show up to complain, but there was also a question of attempted arson near the scene of the fight. The police were inclined to keep a tight grip on anyone found near the scene of a set fire without a good excuse for being there.
Kent phoned his manager Siskind to get him an attorney. Then he was ushered to his private niche in the cell block, where he flopped on the bunk and quickly went to sleep.