But in spite of a thirty-year fast, my mind was not on food; they had sent a newspaper in with breakfast: the Great Los Angeles Times, for Wednesday, 13 December, 2000.
Newspapers had not changed much, not in format. This one was tabloid size, the paper was glazed instead of rough pulp and the illustrations were either full color, or black-and-white stereo-I couldn’t puzzle out the gimmick on that last. There had been stereo pictures you could look at without a viewer since I was a small child; as a kid I had been fascinated by ones used to advertise frozen foods in the `50s. But those had required fairly thick transparent plastic for a grid of tiny prisms; these were simply on thin paper. Yet they had depth.
I gave it up and looked at the rest of the paper. Eager Beaver had arranged it on a reading rack and for a while it seemed as if the front page was all I was going to read, for I could not find out how to open the damned thing. The sheets seemed to have frozen solid.
Finally I accidentally touched the lower right-hand corner of the first sheet; it curled up and out of the way . . . some surface charge phenomenon, triggered at that point. The other pages got neatly out of the way in succession whenever I touched that spot.
At least half of the paper was so familiar as to make me homesick-“Your Horoscope Today, Mayor Dedicates New Reservoir, Security Restrictions Undermining Freedom of Press Says N. Y. Solon, Giants Take Double-Header, Unseasonable Warmth Perils Winter Sports, Pakistan Warns India”-et cetera, ad tedium. This is where I came in.
Some of the other items were new but explained themselves:
LUNA SHUTTLE STILL SUSPENDED FOR GEMINTDS- Twenty-Four-Hour Station Suffers Two Punctures, No Casualties; FOUR WHITES LYNCHED IN CAPETOWN-UN Action Demanded; HOST-MOTHERS ORGANIZE FOR HIGHER FEES-Demand “Amateurs” Be Outlawed; MISSISSIPPI PLANTER INDICTED UNDER ANTI-ZOMBIE LAW-His Defense: “Them Boys Hain’t Drugged, They’re Just Stupid!”
I was fairly sure that I knew what that last one meant . . . from experience.
But some of the news items missed me completely. The “wogglies” were still spreading and three more French towns had been evacuated; the King was considering ordering the area dusted. King? Oh well, French politics might turn up anything, but what was this “Poudre Sarntaire” they were considering using on the “wogglies”?-whatever they were. Radioactive, maybe? I hoped they picked a dead calm day . . . preferably the thirtieth of February. I had had a radiation overdose myself once, through a mistake by a damn-fool WAC technician at Sandia. I had not reached the point-of-no-return vomiting stage, but I don’t recommend a diet of curies.
The Laguna Beach division of the Los Angeles police had been equipped with Leycoils and the division chief warned all Teddies to get out of town. “My men have orders to nark first and subspeck afterward. This has got to stop!”
I made a mental note to keep clear of Laguna Beach until I found out what the score was. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be subspecked, or subspected, even afterward.
Those are just samples. There were any number of news stories that started out trippingly, then foundered in what was, to me, double talk.
I started to breeze on past the vital statistics when my eye caught some new subheads. There were the old familiar ones of births, deaths, marriages, and divorces, but now there were “commitments” and “withdrawals” as well, listed by sanctuaries. I looked up “Sawtelle Cons. Sanc.” and found my own name. It gave me a warm feeling of “belonging.”
But the most intensely interesting things in the paper were the ads. One of the personals stuck in my mind: “Attractive still young widow with yen to travel wishes to meet mature man similarly inclined. Object: two-year marriage contract.” But it was the display advertising that got me.
Hired Girl and her sisters and her cousins and her aunts were all over the place-and they were still using the trade-mark, a husky girl with a broom, that I had designed originally for our letterhead. I felt a twinge of regret that I had been in such a jumping hurry to get rid of my stock in Hired Girl, Inc.; it looked as if it was worth more than all the rest of my portfolio. No, that was wrong; if I had kept it with me at the time, that pair of thieves would have lifted it and faked an assignment to themselves. As it was, Ricky had gotten it-and if it had made Ricky rich, well, it couldn’t happen to a nicer person.