ries, I cannot understand how the thing was
so controversial. The Rashes wrote of it harshly in all their papers.
The Rejects almost unanimously agreed that it was a masterpiece. I
myself, when I heard it, became aware that Wainer was a great man.

* * * * *

Because of the controversy which raged for a while, Wainer made some
money, but the effect of the criticism was to keep him from writing for
years. There is something in that First Symphony of the Wainer of later
years, some of the hungry, unfinished, incomprehensible strength. Wainer
knew that if he wrote anything else, it would be much like the First,
and he recoiled from going through it all again. He went back to the
beaches.

He had something rare in those days--a great love for the sea. I suppose
it was to him what space is to others. I know that the next thing he
wrote was a wild, churning, immortal thing which he called Water Music;
and I know that he himself loved it best of anything he wrote, except,
of course, the Tenth Symphony. But this time was worse than the last.
The only ones who paid any attention to Water Music were the Rejects,
and they didn't count.

If Wainer had been a true composer, he would have gone on composing
whether anyone cared or not, but as I have said, he was not really an
artist. Despite the fact that he was the greatest composer we have ever
known, music was only a small thing to him. He had a hint, even then,
that although he had been born on Earth there was something in him that
was alien, and that there was so much left to do, so much to be seen,
and because he could not understand what it was that fired him, he
ground himself raw, slowly, from within, while walking alone by the
rocks on the beaches.

When I saw him again, after I took ship as a surgeon to Altair, he was
forty, and he looked--I borrow the phrase--like a man from a land where
nobody lived. Having written no music at all, he was living again on
government charity. He had a room, of sorts, and food, but whatever
money he got he drank right up, and he was such a huge and haggard man
that even Rejects left him carefully alone. I did what I could for him,
which wasn't much except keep him drunk. It was then that he told me
about his feeling for space, and a great many other things, and I
remember his words:

"I will have to go out into space some day. It is almost as if I used to
live there."

Shortly after that, the coughing