“Baw!-baby, bawl-baby, look at the baby bawl,” Roger had taunted him. “It wasn’t nothing but a cheap, shitty toy anyway, Richie. Lookit there, nothing in it but a bunch of little signs and a lot of water.”
“I’M TELLING!” Richard had shrieked at the top of his lungs. His head felt hot. His sinuses were stuffed shut with tears of outrage. “I’M TELLING ON YOU, ROGER! I’M TELLING MOM!”
“You tell and I’ll break your arm,” Roger said, and in his chilling grin Richard had seen he meant it. He had not told.
MY BROTHER WAS A WORTHLESS DRUNK.
Well, weirdly put together or not, it screen-printed. Whether it would store information in the CPU still remained to be seen, but Jon’s mating of a Wang board to an IBM screen had actually worked. Just coincidentally it called up some pretty crappy memories, but he didn’t suppose that was Jon’s fault.
He looked around his office, and his eyes happened to fix on the one picture in here that he hadn’t picked and didn’t like. It was a studio portrait of Lina, her Christmas present to him two years ago. I want you to hang it in your study, she’d said, and so of course he had done just that. It was, he supposed, her way of keeping an eye on him even when she wasn’t here. Don’t forget me, Richard. I’m here. Maybe I backed the wrong horse, but I’m still here. And you better remember it.
The studio portrait with its unnatural tints went oddly with the amiable mixture of prints by Whistler, Homer, and N. C. Wyeth. Lina’s eyes were half-lidded, the heavy Cupid’s bow of her mouth composed in something that was not quite a smile. Still here, Richard, her mouth said to him. And don’t you forget it.
He typed: MY WIFE’S PHOTOGRAPH HANGS ON THE WEST WALL OF MY STUDY He looked at the words and liked them no more than he liked the picture itself. He punched the DELETE button. The words vanished. Now there was nothing at all on the screen but the steadily pulsing cursor.
He looked up at the wall and saw that his wife’s picture had also vanished.
He sat there for a very long time—it felt that way, at least—looking at the wall where the picture had been. What finally brought him out of his daze of utter unbelieving shock was the smell from the CPU—a smell he remembered from his childhood as clearly as he remembered the Magic Eight-Ball Roger had broken because it wasn’t his. The smell was essence of electric train transformer. When you smelled that you were supposed to turn the thing off so it could cool down.
And so he would.
In a minute.
He got up and walked over to the wall on legs which felt numb. He ran his fingers over the Armstrong paneling. The picture had been here, yes, right here. But it was gone now, and the hook it had hung on was gone, and there was no hole where he had screwed the hook into the paneling.
Gone.
The world abruptly went gray and he staggered backwards, thinking dimly that he was going to faint. He held on grimly until the world swam back into focus.
He looked from the blank place on the wall where Lina’s picture had been to the word processor his dead nephew had cobbled together.
You might be surprised, he heard Nordhoff saying in his mind. You might be surprised, you might be surprised, oh yes, if some kid in the fifties could discover particles that travel backwards through time, you might be surprised what your genius of a nephew could do with a bunch of discarded word processor elements and some wires and electrical components. You might be so surprised that you’ II feel as if you’re going insane.
The transformer smell was richer, stronger now, and he could see wisps of smoke rising from the vents in the screen housing. The noise from the CPU was louder, too. It was time to turn it off—smart as Jon had been, he apparently hadn’t had time to work out all the bugs in the crazy thing.
But had he known it would do this?
Feeling like a figment of his own imagination, Richard sat down in front of the screen again and typed: MY WIFE’S PICTURE IS ON THE WALL He looked at this for a moment, looked back at the keyboard, and then hit the EXECUTE key.
He looked at the wall.
Lina’s picture was back, right where it had always been.
“Jesus,” he whispered. “Jesus Christ.” He rubbed a hand up his cheek, looked at the keyboard (blank again now except for the cursor), and then typed: MY FLOOR IS BARE He then touched the INSERT button and typed: EXCEFf FOR TWELVE TWENTY-DOLLAR GOLD PIECES IN A SMALL COTTON SACK He pressed EXECUTE.
He looked at the floor, where there was now a small white cotton sack with a drawstring top. WELLS FARGO was stenciled on the bag in faded black ink.
“Dear Jesus,” he heard himself saying in a voice that wasn’t his. “Dear Jesus, dear good Jesus—” He might have gone on invoking the Savior’s name for minutes or hours if the word processor had not started beeping at him steadily. Flashing across the top of the screen was the word OVERLOAD Richard turned off everything in a hurry and left his study as if all the devils of hell were after him.
But before he went he scooped up the small drawstring sack and put it in his pants pocket.
When he called Nordhoff that evening, a cold November wind was playing tuneless bagpipes in the trees outside. Seth’s group was downstairs, murdering a Bob Seger tune. Lina was out at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows, playing bingo.
“Does the machine work?” Nordhoff asked.
“It works, all right,” Richard said. He reached into his pocket and brought out a coin. It was heavy—heavier than a Rolex watch. An eagle’s stern profile was embossed on one side, along with the date 1871. “It works in ways you wouldn’t believe.”
“I might,” Nordhoff said evenly. “He was a very bright boy, and he loved you very much, Hagstrom.
But be careful. A boy is only a boy, bright or otherwise, and love can be misdirected. Do you take my meaning?” Richard didn’t take his meaning at all. He felt hot and feverish. That day’s paper had listed the current market price of gold at $514 an ounce. The coins had weighed out at an average of 4.5 ounces each on his postal scale. At the current market rate that added up to $27,756. And he guessed that was perhaps only a quarter of what he could realize for those coins if he sold them as coins.
“Mr. Nordhoff, could you come over here? Now? Tonight?”
“No,” Nordhoff said. “No, I don’t think I want to do that, Mr. Hagstrom. I think this ought to stay between you and Jon.”
“But—”
“Just remember what I said. For Christ’s sake, be careful.” There was a small click and Nordhoff was gone.
He found himself out in his study again half an hour later, looking at the word processor. He touched the ON/OFF key but didn’t turn it on just yet. The second time Nordhoff said it, Richard had heard it. For Christ’s sake, be careful. Yes. He would have to be careful. A machine that could do such a thing—How could a machine do such a thing?
He had no idea… but in a way, that made the whole crazy thing easier to accept. He was an English teacher and sometime writer, not a technician, and he had a long history of not understanding how things worked: phonographs, gasoline engines, telephones, televisions, the flushing mechanism in his toilet. His life had been a history of understanding operations rather than principles. Was there any difference here, except in degree?
He turned the machine on. As before it said: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, UNCLE RICHARD’ JON He pushed EXECUTE and the message from his nephew disappeared.
This machine is not going to work for long, he thought suddenly. He felt sure that Jon must have still been working on it when he died, confident that there was time, Uncle Richard’s birthday wasn’t for three weeks, after all—But time had run out for Jon, and so this totally amazing word processor, which could apparently insert new things or delete old things from the real world, smelled like a frying train transformer and started to smoke after a few minutes. Jon hadn’t had a chance to perfect it. He had been—Confident that there was time?
But that was wrong. That was all wrong. Richard knew it Jon’s still, watchful face, the sober eyes behind the thick spectacles… there was no confidence there, no belief in the comforts of time. What was the word that had occurred to him earlier that day? Doomed. It wasn’t just a good word for Jon; it was the right word. That sense of doom had hung about the boy so palpably that there had been times when Richard had wanted to hug him, to tell him to lighten up a little bit, that sometimes there were happy endings and the good didn’t always die young.