She stood up, did not notice that high heels gave her no trouble, and glided gracefully over to the little piano, sat down and opened it—let the first bars of Dvorak’s Slavonic Dance # 10 run through her mind, then started to play—
—and achieved a clash of noise.
“What the hell!” She looked at the keyboard, then hit middle C with her right forefinger. It sounded okay-and so did the C an octave below it. Several one- and two-finger experiments convinced her that the piano was not at fault. Yet to strike a single chord required studying the keyboard, then carefully positioning each finger by sight.
Presently she managed a slow, uneven, faulty version of “Chopsticks” by watching the keyboard and controlling her hands so hard they trembled. She quit before reaching its undistinguished coda and crashed the keys with both hands. (There go ten years of piano lessons!) (What did you expect, Boss? I was never much good even with a guitar.) (Well, I’m glad Mama didn’t hear that—she always wanted me to be a concert pianist. Eunice, why the devil didn’t you study piano as a kid?) (Because I was too busy studying boys! A much more rewarding subject. Joan, if you want to play the piano again, we can learn. But we’ll have to start almost from scratch. It’s in your head, I know; I could hear it. But to get from there down into our bands—my hands, dear—will probably take more patient work than slimming our hips.)
(Doesn’t matter, not really.) She got up from the piano bench. (Boss. Just a sec. While we’re here, let’s warm up Betsy and give her a check run.) (Huh? I know nothing about a stenodesk. It’ll be worse than the piano.) (We’ll see.)
She moved over and sat down at the stenodesk. (Well, Eunice? Which way to the Egress?) (Relax, Boss. The body remembers. Just say ‘Dictation, Eunice,’ then recite something you know. Think about what you’re dictating.)
(Okay.) “Dictation, Eunice. ‘Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition…
Deftly her hands touched the switches, swiveled the microphone in time to catch the first word, required the machine to listen & hold while she inserted punctuation, used erase & correct when the machine spelled “fourth” rather than “forth”—all without hurrying. —She stopped and looked at the result. (Be durned! How,
Eunice?) (Don’t ask, dear—or we might get fouled up in the dilemma of the centipede. But Betsy is purring like a kitten; she’s glad I’m back.) (Well, so am I. Uh, Eunice, this machine—Betsy, I mean—has access to the Congressional Library St. Louis Annex, does it not? —she not?) (Certainly. Hooked into the Interlibrary Net, rather, though you can restrict a query to one library.)
(Better query just one. I want to find out what is known about memory and how it works.) (All right. I’m interested, too; I think my memory is spotty. Can’t be sure. But on a search-of-literature it’s best to let Betsy handle it through preprograms—ask for references, followed by abstracts, followed by items selected from abstracts…else, on a generalized question like that, thousands of books would be transmitted and poor Betsy would gulp them down until she was constipated, and stop and not do anything until her temporary memory was erased.)
(You know how, I don’t. Uh, stick in a restriction not to bother with behaviorist theories. I know all about Pavlov and his robots I care to know, namely, that every time a dog salivates a behaviorist psychologist has to ring a bell.)
(All Eight. Boss? Can we spend a little more money?) (Go ahead, buy the Pyramids. What do you want, dearest?) (Let’s have a Triple-A-One snoop search run on me. Eunice Branca, I mean—the ‘me’ that used to be.) (Why, beloved? If you’ve been selling government secrets, they can’t touch you now.) (Because. It might fill some of those holes I think I have in my memory. . . and it might turn up something you’ve heard from me since I came back but which was not in the security report you got on me originally. Then you would know, dear. . . and could stop worrying that I may be only a figment of your imagination.)