There are a lot of ways to get from Philadelphia to Greater Los Angeles these days. The fastest is to hop down to the Hyperterminal and take an instantaneous teleport ride, if you don't mind stumbling around with hyperlag for a few hours. But teleporting is expensive, and I don't have enough miles in my Frequent Beamer account for a free trip. So that's out.

Then there's the suborbital commuter shuttle. Philly to GLAX in 45 minutes, with a quick dinner and drinks along the way. Plus, night re-entry is breathtaking if you have a window seat. But the shuttle's not cheap either, and the food on USSpace is lousy even by spaceline standards. So that's out too.

Autojet? No, thanks. My '79 Chevy Supernova has almost eight million miles on it, plus a busted air conditioner and two bad antigravs. Ah, but what the heck: It's paid for. And the new holostereo works fine, which is all that really matters to me.

I love classical music. I'm a fan of all the great composers: Bach, Beethoven, Joplin, McCartney, Loaf. But like everyone else, my favorite is the Great Master himself.

And then it struck me. For where I was going, there was only one way to travel. I switched on my craniophone and asked for Directory Information.

"What city please?", came the voice in my brain. "Philadelphia," I replied.

"Get me Amtrak."

They don't sell too many coast-to-coast train tickets anymore, but the lady at Amtrak was a good sport about it. Turns out she had just returned from a VR pilgrimage to the Great Master's house. "If I'd thought of taking the train, I would have gone out for real" she said wistfully. "But I still had a wonderful visit. Stewartland is a super place for a vacation."

Vacation? Maybe some other time. This trip was strictly business.

A few hours later, I was comfortably seated in an old-style train coach as it glided across the countryside at a leisurely 220 MPH. It was perfect, like a milieu drawn straight out of the Great Master's works! Homes and towns and hydrofarms rolled past my window. The rails -- "rail", actually -- stretched out before me, a silver trail to the setting sun. As the night rolled in, a man brought me food and drinks, and was that a stain I saw on his tunic?

All that was missing was the sound of clicking wheels along the steel tracks. Those, alas, were long gone, a half-forgotten relic of a distant era when steam engines ruled the countryside. The whirr of electromagnets over a superconducting monorail was a poor substitute. Or was it? As Louisville dissolved into Metro St. Louis, I wondered if the actual tone wasn't what was important so much as the fact that there was a sound at all, marking the passage of distance as surely as those clicking and humming wheels did 200 years ago.

I wondered what the Great Master would have thought of train travel here in the last days of the 22nd century. Or did he think of the future at all? He wrote once of being trapped in the close confines of the age he was born into. Most Stewartian scholars, myself included, agree he meant confined from the past. Ironic, isn't it? What he would have given to live in these modern times, with our teleport chambers and neural VR and avatarian time travel, where past, present, and future merge as one.

I thought of Prince Louis Battenberg and the Marie Celeste and Alexander's library and the train whirred on through the darkness and I was falling....falling....falling into a deep and silent slumber....

I awoke just as the train was gliding out of the Arizona desert and into Greater Los Angeles. When we came to the station, I hopped into an air taxi and instructed it to take me directly to my hotel -- the Broadway, of course. You pay a premium to stay on the Stewartland grounds but everyone says it's worth it.

I soared out of GLAX onto the Santa Monica Flyway. To my sub-right I saw New Dodger Stadium, which is one place I'd love to visit. It's one of those hip new retro-parks which lovingly reproduces everything about the charming multipurpose stadiums of the late 20th century, right down to the plastic grass and the reinforced concrete walkways. I think it's awesome, but then I've always been a sucker for nostalgia.

I flew past Beverly Chasm and the UCGLA campus. I caught a glimpse of a familiar Brentwood condominium and its faded yellow police ribbons (wasn't that damn trial ever going to end?) And when the cab crested the next mountain, I shivered in excitement. For there it was.

Stewartland.

Stretching out before me for miles upon miles. The world's most famous and best-loved resort. I flew over Alistair's Kingdom, with its six wonderful theme sectors: HistoryLand, PoliticsLand, TrainLand, ShipLand, WineLand, and the Critics' Graveyard. I caught a glimpse of EACOY (Experimental Al Community Of Yesterday) in the distance. There below me was the five-star Sinistro Restaurant, where the only two items on the menu are Chicken & Chablis and Grapefruit & Tea, and of course the waitress will bring you whichever you didn't order.

Ah, but those places are for the kids. Far in the distance, I saw where I was headed: Stewart Manor. 20th century home of the Great Master, now preserved in all its splendor as the centerpiece of Stewartland. Millions of visitors tour the shrine every year, either in person or through a Virtual Reality getaway. And I suppose to the guides there, I'd just be just another half-familiar face among the crowd.

But I'm not just another tourist. And this isn't just another vacation.

See, I think there's a secret hidden inside Stewart Manor. A secret that, if unlocked, will revolutionize the field of Stewartian Studies. And no one knows about it but me.

A few weeks ago, I found some of my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather's floppy disks in a dusty old trunk stowed away in a forgotten corner of my grandmother's attic. This was a tremendous thrill for me because I knew he was a contemporary fan of the Great Master himself. Of course, it would be almost 70 years before musical theorists and historians "rediscovered" the Stewartian oeuvre. Like so many geniuses who were years ahead of their times, like Van Gogh and Mendel and Escher and Barney, the Great Master didn't gain the critical recognition he deserved until many years after his death.

(ed. note: if you think I'm laying it on thick now, you ain't seen nothing yet. -- NPS)

I took the disks home and ran them through my Universal Restoration Unit. I hoped I might find a passing reference or two to the Great Master. If I was lucky, perhaps there would be an account of one of my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather's meetings with him after performances in Philadelphia (or so went the family lore.)

What I discovered instead was beyond my wildest dreams. There were pages upon pages of hitherto unknown works, by unrecognized but unmistakeably brilliant 20th-century authors, and all on subjects directly or indirectly related to the Great Master himself! I felt a rush of excitement course through my veins the way Carter must have felt when he first set eyes on the tomb of Tutankhamen, or Rivera when he opened the vault of Capone and gazed at the riches therein.

I spent the next two weeks poring over the documents. As an Ancient Languages major, I had little trouble deciphering the Old English text. From the appearance of certain passages, they were all transmitted on the primitive First Internet in the decade of the 1990's and were composed by at least two hundred different writers.

I learned about a secret society called the ASML, which I believe stood for Alistairian Society of Mutual Learning. They appear to have descended directly from the medieval Knights Templars by way of the Illuminati. Their hallmark were black t-shirts which they wore to periodic ritual gatherings. The Great Master himself seemed to be aware of their existence, making an oblique reference to them in one song as "letters bordered in black".

It seemed my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was a charter member of the ASML. Early in the year nineteen hundred and ninety-six, he had a correspondence with a fellow member which went as follows:

"Hey Nick, could you E-Mail me the '95 BOAP results? I think I accidentally deleted the file this weekend. -M@"

"No problem. They're in the next message. Wonder if Al's found the copies we all left around his house last September? - Nick"

"I doubt it. The way they're hidden, his great-great-grandkids might never find them either! :-) -M@"

Naturally, my interest was piqued. What was a BOAP? Who was this "Al" to which they were referring? Could it possibly be the Great Master himself? What event in September of 1995 would cause members of the ASML to abandon their virtual existence and meet face-to-face? And why in the world would someone name their child after a punctuation symbol?

Several hours later, I had the answers. BOAP stood for Best Of Al Poll, a periodic survey of the Great Master's works by his contemporary disciples. My great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was the pollster. Members of the ASML rated his 139 songs to date on a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 was outstanding, 5 was average, and 0 was obviously the work of an impostor. His 21 Al-bums (for that was how they were known to the cognoscenti) were scored on a similar scale. There were 18 supplementary survey questions on various topics, ranging from "What Great Master song has the best lyrics?" to "If they were to make a holomovie of the Great Master's life, what actor should portray him?" The poll concluded with a variety of demographic questions.

Further research revealed that the BOAP in question was the third in the series. The first was conducted in late 1992 A.D. when the ASML numbered only a few dozen disciples. The second was in January of 1994, with 40 respondents. Additional polls were held approximately two months after each release of a new album by the Great Master, dozens in all.

I found only limited references to the results of the first two polls. It appears that "On The Border" was the top vote-getter in the first BOAP, but it was narrowly edged out by "Roads To Moscow" in the second. The top rated album both times was the epic Year Of The Cat. (I do not subscribe to the silly superstition of concert musicians who believe that it is unlucky to refer to this album by name. They use the euphemism 'The Scottish Album', which....ouch! A colorful seabird just flew by and clipped me in the ear. A coincidence, I'm sure.)

But to my despair, the results of the third, most comprehensive, most illuminating poll were nowhere to be found. I searched my grandmother's attic from top to bottom. I checked the PanGalacticNet, the Library of Congress, the Carlsbad Archives, the Stewartian Studies departments of 300 top universities.....nothing. The results of that study were beyond my reach, lost in the hazy mists of time.

There was still one chance. My great-great-great-great-great-grandfather made reference to copies hidden in the house of someone named Al. No one by that name authored any of the messages in the collection.

At first, I considered it unlikely that this "Al" could be the Great Master himself. But as I slowly pieced together the many disparate clues in the essays, I could find no other reasonable conclusion. The members of the ASML spoke frequently of a convocation in September of 1995. The Chapman Diaries indicate that the only performance by the Great Master in that timeframe was in the city of Greater Los Angeles. Stewart Manor sustained minor damage in late '95, usually attributed to a minor earthquake although seismological records of the day give no indication of any temblor of magnitude. Roughly concurrant to that, his legendary wine collection decreased in number from 1,400 bottles to 185 almost overnight; no reason is known.

Further evidence comes from his 1997 album "The March Of Time", containing the famous song "They Came And Trashed My House". While generations of scholars have assumed this to be about the horrors of Krystalnacht, I now believe the Great Master intended a somewhat more literal interpretation. There is also the famous unsolved mystery of the Italian Bedroom at Stewart Manor, an explanation of which will be offered in due time. The final, incontrovertible piece of evidence, which sent a chill up my spine when I recognized it: the Great Master's 50th birthday was September 5th, 1995.

From these and other clues, I put together a shocking but altogether feasible hypothesis of events. Using primitive methods of air and ground travel, the various members of the ASML met in Greater Los Angeles 200 years ago to celebrate the golden anniversary of the Great Master's birth. They chose one of his performances as a logical gathering point. Touched, the Great Master invited them back to his nearby home for a brief post-concert toast. And the rest, as they say, is history....

It is, I concede, a bizarre scenario but an altogether plausible one. It is consistent with all known facts. Best of all, its correctness may be easily proven or disproven. Stewart Manor has been maintained virtually unchanged for the last century and a half. If the poll results were hidden there, then I should be able to find them using only standard and easily concealed anthropological tools such as a flashlight, an x-ray camera, and a temporal sight restorer.

There was little more I could do. Carpe Diem. Tempus Fugit. Pax Vobiscum. Westward Ho!

Touching down at the Broadway Hotel, I quickly punched in with the Automated Desk Clerk and had my bags teleported to my room. I hopped the Stewartland Monorail ("Please stand clear of the doors") and soon found myself standing in a queue at the gates of Stewart Manor. The long lines at Stewartland are infamous, but I must say the staff does a tremendous job of entertaining visitors while they wait. Teenagers wearing costumes of favorite Stewartian characters -- Josephine Baker, Warren Harding, Charlotte Corday, etc. -- worked the crowd and signed autographs for freckle-faced kids wearing those ubiquitous toy cat ears.

After just three hours (it was off-season), I reached the front of the line. I was quickly placed in a group with nine fellow travelers. Six were there corporally, two were taking a VR tour, and one was a ghost avatar presumably sent by a future scholar studying 22nd-century Stewartian culture. I hate avatars -- their hollow eyes and translucent bodies always give me the creeps. Still, there are laws prohibiting discrimination against the temporally challenged. I nodded a quick hello and kept my distance.

"Good morning, everyone!" chirped a handsome young man who materialized in front of the group.. "My name is Slingsby A. Stewart VII, and I'm the Head Curator here at Stewart Manor. It will be my pleasure to guide you on a tour of the Great Master's humble abode from the year 1981 until his tragic death in an antique car accident on June 30, 2034. I'm sure you're all anxious to get started. Are there any questions before we do?"

The woman next to me raised her hand. "Are you by any chance a...."

"...direct descendant of the Great Master?" finished Slingsby with a laugh. "That's the first thing everyone asks! Yes, I am. My great-great-great-great-grandfather was Dr. Slingsby A. Stewart Sr., 2004-2083, youngest son of the Great Master and founder of Stewart University of History and Musicology. I've been the curator here since 2193.

"Anything else? No? Good, let's get started. I can tell you that Stewart Manor is essentially untouched and perfectly preserved from the Great Master's era. Several years after his death, the house and all its contents were sold to a wealthy, retired, computer security specialist as a tax shelter. It stood unoccupied for approximately four decades.

"By then, the Alistairian Worldwide Renaissance was in full bloom. Several groups attempted to purchase Stewart Manor, but its owner elected to sell to a consortium headed by the Great Master's grandchildren. It underwent minor renovations before being reopened as a public museum in 2076, one century to the day after the release of, uh, the Scottish Album. Stewartland, the theme park and resort, sprang up by the turn of the century."

Several members of the party were enthralled by all this, but I just stifled a yawn. This was the stuff they teach you in 4th-grade music class. I surreptitiously checked the cold fusion batteries in my equipment. Everything was in perfect working order. I was sure that old house held some big secrets, and I was determined to find them in the next few hours.

"Well, let's get moving," said Slingsby as he led us along a garden path to a stone staircase. "Everyone watch your step please on the way down."

"Down?" I repeated in surprise.

"Down. The tour starts in the Great Master's cellar. We'll work our way up from there."

I switched on my flashlight. The journey was about to begin.....