“Gone?”
“Yes. I don't know where. They're happy. They ***ed. It was glorious. We could only touch a part of it.”
I felt my heart hammering to the sound of the last train pulling away from the station. My feet were pounding along the ties as it faded into the fog. Where are the Brigadoons of yesterday? I've never yet heard of a fairy tale where you can go back to the land of enchantment. You wake up, you find that your chance is gone. You threw it away.
Fool!
You only get one chance; that's the moral, isn't it?
Pink's hands laughed along my face.
“Hold this part-of-me-who-speaks-mouth-to-nipple,” she said, and handed me her infant daughter. “I will give you a gift.”
She reached up and lightly touched my ears with her cold fingers. The sound of the wind was shut out, and when her hands came away it never came back. She touched my eyes, shut out all the light, and I saw no more.
We live in the lovely quiet and dark.
INTRODUCTION TO
“PRESS ENTER
â
”
I've always thought of myself as a high-tech sort of guy, though lately I've fallen a bit behind. I don't have an MP3 player or a DVD burner or a picture cell phone or a plasma television. They bring out the stuff now faster than I can find a use for it. But I bought a CD player when they were pretty new and rare, and I had a JVC VCR back when it was the fanciest one you could buy, there were only thirty titles for rent, blank tapes cost $35, and the remote had a wire on it. I paid $1,300. The last VCR I bought, probably my sixth, cost me $60.
When I started writing I wanted the best tools. I skipped right over chisels on rocks, stylus on wet clay plates, quills and fountain pens, even mechanical pencils, and went straight to one of the first popular spin-offs of the aerospace program: the ballpoint pen. They were developed for bomber navigators in the war because fountain pens would squirt all over your leather bomber jacket at altitude. (I have a cherished example of the next generation ballpoint, a pressurized Space Pen cleverly designed to work in weightlessness, given to me by Spider Robinson. At least, I cherish it when I can find it. It is also cleverly designed to seek out the lowest point of your desk, roll off, then find the lowest point on the floor, under a heavy piece of furniture. That's because it is cylindrical and lacks a pocket clip to keep it from rolling. In space, I presume it would float out of your pocket and find a forgotten corner of your spacecraft to hide in. NASA spent $3 million developing it. Good job, guys. I'm sure it's around here somewhere.)
When I decided I'd better learn to type I bought an electric machine. Never learned to type on a manual, I'm hopeless at it. I used carbon paper because Xeroxing was fairly expensive, and Wite-Out, becuase I made a lot off misteaks.
When I wore out the Smith-Corona, I invested a lot of money in the Rolls-Royce of typewriters: an IBM Correcting Selectric. I could fool around for hours watching the little type ball twitch, faster than the eye could follow. No more jammed-up keys! You want a new typeface? Pop in another golf ball! No more blobs of white-out glop, no more eraser scraps gumming up the works. Just press a key and the tape jumps up
and sucks the ink right out of the paper! No more smudgy cloth ribbons I used over and over because my innate frugality wouldn't let me throw them away as long as the words were even slightly readable. The IBM used film ribbons, and the print was sharper than a newspaper or book.
I loved that machine. I loved it so much that for years I resisted the enthusiastic endorsements of friends who had these infernal machines called “word processors.” Heck, I didn't want to process words, I wanted to
write
. After a few years, when everybody I knew owned a computer, I even wrote a silly little story called “The Unprocessed Word,” pointing out the perils of entrusting your golden prose to the uncertain innards of a cantankerous machine instead of committing them to nice, pretty white paper.
And they
were
uncertain, too. One thing I noticed when people were talking about computers (and by then
everybody
was talking about computers, you couldn't shut them up once they got started!) was that
every single one of them
had lost massive chunks of data in something called a “crash,” usually more than once. They spoke about this with an odd pride, but it made me break out in a cold sweat. In my twenty-odd years of writing, I had never lost so much as one precious piece of paper, never had to go back and think the whole thing out again. The IBM Correcting Selectric was infallible. Errorless.
Crash
less.
Point two: They were
expensive
. I gulped hard when I paid $860 for the IBM. With these “word processors,” $860 was about what you paid for the word processing
software.
Okay, slight exaggeration, but the first word processor I ever actually used belonged to Richard Rush. We were rewriting the script to
Millennium
. It was made by one of those defunct pioneers, maybe Osborne. It had a daisy-wheel printer console the size of a Victrola that made a racket like the starting lap at Daytona Beach. If you couldn't afford one of these beasts, there was an alternative: dot-matrix printing. Oh, puh
leese!
The y and the p and the g and the q didn't drop below the line. Each letter was formed of about nine little dots. I'd rather read Braille with my toes. With my shoes on. The Osborne had enough memory for forty, maybe fifty pages of text. The whole ensemble, which pretty much filled an office, cost more than $15,000. (Richard didn't care, the studio was paying for it.) Six times a day it did something inexplicable or failed to do anything at all. For these times you consulted an instruction manual the size of the Manhattan phone book, written in Sanskrit.
I didn't want to learn a new language. I wanted to
write.
Point three: They were
ugly.
Ugly, ugly, ugly. You could get any color you wanted in a screen, so long as it was green. (Later, also orange. Big deal.) They were gray or beige, and looked like a TV set you bought at K-Mart. My IBM was black, the only color for serious machinery, and looked like a stealth fighter jet.
Lee and her ex-husband had a TRS-80 (Trash-80, everybody called them affectionately) that used floppy disks the size of dinner plates. It had a capacity much inferior to your average cell phone these days. These computers were made of
Masonite or fiberglass or linoleum and made a wimpy little tickety-tickety sound when you typed on them. With my IBM, when I got frustrated and was crumpling sheet after sheet and tossing it in the garbage can, I could pound on the sucker, bang my head on it,
bite
it, and do no harm except to my teeth. With a computer, you didn't dare look at it sideways or a connection would come loose and you could spend days finding it. Hit it, and you could be out five or six grand. My dear friend Spider Robinson came to visit and proudly brought his Mac, a pathetic little beige tower with a screen quite a bit bigger than a watch face. It was “user-friendly,” he said. You could play pinball on it. I tried, and concluded it would never replace my arcade-sized Gorgar machine. (I was wrong, eventually. Two days ago I saw a three-by-5-foot flat-screen plasma pinball machine that belongs to Michael Jackson. Wow!)
Point four: You always needed something else. New modem. Bigger external drive (maybe as much as 100 kilobytes,
huge
capacity!). Printer cable. Expansion port. More programs, or updates to old ones. It took an hour to assemble it all and you ended up with a nest of wires that would strangle a rat.
It seemed obvious to me this was not a mature technology. A toaster is a mature technology. You buy one for $12, take it out of the box, you throw away the instruction manual because all it's going to tell you is not to use it in the bathtub, or blow-dry your cat with it. You plug it in. You drop in a piece of bread. A minute later you butter your toast.
An IBM Correcting Selectric was a mature technology. You roll in a piece of paper. You turn it on. You sit there for three hours . . . and you've probably only got one sentence, and that's a bad sentence, but that sentence will not
go away
if somebody plugs in a toaster in the kitchen and blows a fuse.
I vowed that I would not buy a computer until it was as simple as a toaster.
Â
STEP ONE: Remove from box.
STEP TWO: Plug in.
STEP THREE: Turn on.
STEP FOUR: Write beautiful prose.
Â
Step four is always a little iffy, but I knew the first three steps were doable, I knew the day would come.
I didn't wait that long. I broke down and bought one when I saw Windows demonstrated, and figured that even an ex-physics major like me could operate it. (I decided to go with 90 percent of the world and get a PC, and Spider has never forgiven me.) I am now on my third computer. This one is the toaster. It's an HP Pavillion ze1110 and I paid $900 for it two years ago. It weighs a couple of pounds. It came with three things in the box: the laptop, the power cord, and a telephone cord which
I didn't need because I already had six of them, just like you. I didn't use the four-page instruction manual, which had almost no text but lots of helpful pictures for illiterates. Didn't need to. I wasn't going to use it in the bathtub. It is about one million times more powerful than the computer that was on
Apollo 11.
It has a twenty-gigabyte hard drive of which I've used 1. It has a CD-DVD drive. It would be
way
too much computer to run a starship on a thousand-year voyage to Alpha Centauri. It was obsolete twenty-three months ago, but I don't care.
And I
still
manage to lose a page or two of priceless prose every year. In fact, last month I had a brain freeze and hit the wrong key twice and lost 80 percent of my email for 2003.
Â
Â
The following story was written long before I got a computer, long before I knew anything but the ABCs of them. I take that back; I was still working on B. I knew some of the basic terms: modem, CRT, dot matrix, bit, byte, kilobyte. The computer slang I got from something called “The Hacker's Dictionary,” which Richard Rush found and downloaded (a new word at the time) while surfing the infant Internet. Much of it is obsolete now, LOL :-), as is all of the hardware.
After it was published, two things surprised me. One was that people assumed I knew not only ABC, but DEFGHIJKLMNOP and maybe Q about computers. They wanted to share their epic computer-crash stories with me, and discuss the virtues and drawbacks of ASCII and WordPerfect and URLs and WYSIWYG and GIGO, and were amazed to discover I didn't know what any of those things were, that I didn't even own one, not even a Trash-80. So I guess I faked it adequately. I was proud of that, because faking it is the very essence of science fiction. Possibly of life in general.
The second thing was that lots of people told me the story had scared the silicon chips out of them. This amazed me, because I hadn't thought it was particularly scary. Sad, and gruesome, and lonely, sure. But scary? I went back and read it again, something I seldom do after a story is published . . . and it creeped me out.
I hope it creeps you out, too. In a nice way.
PRESS ENTER â
THIS IS A recording. Please do not hang up untilâ” I slammed the phone down so hard it fell onto the floor. Then I stood there, dripping wet and shaking with anger. Eventually, the phone started to make that buzzing noise they make when a receiver is off the hook. It's twenty times as loud as any sound a phone can normally make, and I always wondered why. As though it was such a terrible disaster: “Emergency! Your telephone is off the hook!!!”
Phone answering machines are one of the small annoyances of life. Confess, do you really
like
talking to a machine? But what had just happened to me was more than a petty irritation. I had just been called by an automatic dialing machine.
They're fairly new. I'd been getting about two or three such calls a month. Most of them come from insurance companies. They give you a two-minute spiel and then a number to call if you are interested. (I called back, once, to give them a piece of my mind, and was put on hold, complete with Muzak.) They use lists. I don't know where they get them.
I went back to the bathroom, wiped water droplets from the plastic cover of the library book, and carefully lowered myself back into the water. It was too cool. I ran more hot water and was just getting my blood pressure back to normal when the phone rang again.
So I sat there through fifteen rings, trying to ignore it.
Did you ever try to read with the phone ringing?
On the sixteenth ring I got up, I dried off, put on a robe, walked slowly and deliberately into the living room. I stared at the phone for a while.
On the fiftieth ring I picked it up.
“This is a recording. Please do not hang up until the message has been completed. This call originates from the house of your next-door neighbor, Charles Kluge. It will repeat every ten minutes. Mr. Kluge knows he has not been the best of neighbors, and apologizes in advance for the inconvenience. He requests that you go immediately to his house. The key is under the mat. Go inside and do what needs to be done. There will be a reward for your services. Thank you.”
Click. Dial tone.
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I'm not a hasty man. Ten minutes later, when the phone rang again, I was still sitting there thinking it over. I picked up the receiver and listened carefully.
It was the same message. As before, it was not Kluge's voice. It was something synthesized, with all the human warmth of a Speak'n'Spell.
I heard it out again, and cradled the receiver when it was done.