Undo

The store had four machines on a bench along the window and three of them were IBMs with amber screens and the fourth one had a crowd.

They waited forty minutes. When the man in front of them finally got up he did it slowly, like somebody leaving a table.

Roz sat down.

The screen was small and it was white — not gray, not green, white, with black on it, and it did not flicker or roll or shrink at the edges when a refrigerator came on somewhere. It sat there being white.

There was a beige block on a cord beside the keyboard with one button on top of it.

“You push it around,” Gene said.

“I know what it is.”

She put her hand on it and moved it two inches and the arrow on the screen went four inches and off the side, and she stopped and moved it back and overshot the other way, and the salesman, who had come down the bench without either of them noticing, said, “Pick it up and put it down in the middle. It doesn’t mind.”

She picked it up. She put it down. The arrow stayed where it was.

“Huh,” she said.

He reached past her and pulled down a menu and let it go and the screen was a white rectangle with a strip of tools down the left side, and then he went away and served somebody about a printer.

Roz drew a line.

It took her about four minutes to get a line she’d have accepted from her left hand. She did it with the whole forearm off the bench, the way you would with a brush, because the wrist wasn’t in it — the wrist was in the mouse and the mouse was on the counter and the line was up on the glass a foot away.

Then she drew a second line that was wrong.

She sat back from it.

“There’s no eraser,” Gene said, looking at the strip.

“There is. It’s the one that’s a —” She pointed at it. “But it takes the first one too.”

She looked at the wrong line for a moment.

Then she reached up and pulled the menu down, the second one along, and went to the top of it, and let go.

The second line was not there.

The first line was.

Roz sat very still.

“What’d it do,” Gene said.

She did it again. She drew a bad line, pulled the menu, let go, and the bad line was gone and everything under it was exactly where she had left it, untouched, unsmudged, not lifted, not scraped, not gone slightly gray the way paper goes.

“Do that again,” Gene said.

She did it eleven more times.

He got bored at about the ninety-minute mark.

He walked the bench. He looked at the amber IBMs. He came back and stood behind her and watched her go into the small window that made the picture enormous and blocky, where she was moving single squares one at a time with the arrow, and he watched that for a while because it was at least like something.

Then he went and found the salesman.

“Where’s the language.”

“Say again?”

“The language. For the —” He nodded down the bench. “How do you write something for it.”

The salesman looked at him with an expression that suggested this was the fourth time that day.

“It doesn’t come with one.”

“With any?”

“It’s not that kind of a machine,” the salesman said, not unkindly. “You buy your programs. There’s a development system if you’re serious, but it’s not —” He made a small motion with his hand that took in the whole bench and the crowd and the white screen with the girl at it. “You don’t type at this one.”

Gene went back down the bench and looked at the front of the machine, and then at the top of it, and then at the sides, which he had not done yet, and there was no lid and no slot and no hatch and nowhere at all for a cartridge to go.

At six o’clock the salesman came down the bench and said they were closing in ten.

Roz had a whole thing on the screen by then. It had taken her four hours. Gene could not have described it and neither, later, could she.

“Can I keep it?”

“You’d need a disk.”

“Have you got one?”

“Not to give away,” the man said. “They’re seventy-nine for a box of ten.”

Roz sat with her hand on the mouse.

Then she took her hand off it and got the pad out of her bag and looked at the screen and looked at the pad, and did not open the pad.

The horse she had been able to copy. She had counted the spaces with her finger and laid them in as dots and got it down in nine minutes, and it was on her wall.

This was six hundred lines wide and half of it was in the small squares.

She put the pad back in the bag.

At ten past six the man reached around the back and the white went to a dot and the dot went out, and the three amber ones were still on down the bench, saying READY.