Farnham’s Freehold By Robert A. Heinlein

But- Damn it, a man had to be a man! “There are scrolls in here and a reader. Do you want to learn?”

“Uncle protect us!”

“Don’t swear. If you want to-and can keep your pretty little mouth shut-I’ll teach you. Don’t look so damned scared! You don’t have to decide now. Tell me later. Just don’t talk about it. To anyone.”

Kitten did not. It scared her not to report it, but she had a reflex for self-preservation and felt without knowing why that to report this would endanger her happy setup.

Kitten became substitute family life for Hugh. She sent him to work cheerful, greeted him with a smile when he came back, talked if he wanted to talk and never spoke unless spoken to. Most evenings she curled up ‘in front of the television-Hugh thought of it as “the television” and it was in fact closed-circuit television under principles not known to him, in color, in three dimensions, and without lines.

It played every evening in the servants’ main hall, from evening prayer until lights-out, to a packed house, and there were outlets in the apartments of executive servants. Hugh had watched it several evenings, expecting to gain insight into this strange society he must learn to live in.

He decided that one might as well try to study the United States by watching Gunsmoke. It was blatant melodrama, with acting as stylized as Chinese theater, and the favorite plot seemed to be that of the faithful servant who dies gloriously that his lord may live.

But it was only second in importance to Happiness in the morale of life belowstairs. Kitten loved it.

She would watch it, snapping her gum, and suppressing squeals of excitement, while Hugh read-then sigh happily when the program ended, accept her little drink of Happiness with profuse thanks and a touch of her forehead, and go quietly to sleep. Hugh sometimes went on reading.

He read a great deal-every evening (unless Memtok stopped in to visit) and half of every day. He begrudged the time he spent translating for Their Charity but never neglected it; it was the hopeful key to better things. He had found it necessary to study modern culture if he was to translate matters of ancient history intelligibly. The Summer Palace had a fair library; he was given access when he claimed necessity for his work-Memtok arranged it.

But his true purpose was not translation but to try to understand what had happened to his world to produce this world.

So he usually had a scroll in the reader, in his office, or in his living room. The scroll system of printing he found admirable; it mechanized the oldest form of book into a system far more efficient than bound leaves-drop the double cylinder into the reader, flip it on, and hold still. The letters raced across in front of his eyes several hundred feet at a whack, to the end of the scroll. Then the scroll flipped over and chased back the following line, which was printed upside down to the one just scanned.

The eye wasted no time flipping back and forth at stacked lines. But a slight pressure speeded the gadget up to whatever the brain could accept. As Hugh got used to the phonetics, he acquired speed faster than he had ever managed in English. But he did not find what he was looking for.

Somewhere in ‘the past the distinctions between fact, fiction, history, and religious writings seemed to have been rubbed out. Even when he got it clear that the East-West War that had bounced him out of his own century was now dated 703 B.C. (Before the Great Change), he still had trouble matching the world he had known with the “history” set forth in these scrolls.

The war itself he didn’t find hard to believe. He had experienced only a worm’s-eye view of the first hours but what the scrolls related matched the possibilities: a missile-and-bomb holocaust that had escalated in its first minutes into “brilliant first strike” and “massive retaliation” and smeared cities from Peiping to Chicago, Toronto to Smolensk; fire storms that had done ten times the damage the bombs did; nerve gas and other poisons that had picked up where fire left off; plagues that were incubating when the shocked survivors were picking themselves up and beginning to hope-plagues that were going strong when fallout was no longer deadly.