Put It In Words

The bench at the store had four machines on it in October and all four of them were amber.

“You had the other one,” Roz said. “On the end.”

“We’ve got them,” the salesman said. He was the same man. He had the same tie or a tie from the same drawer. “We can get one in for you. It’s a two-week thing now, they’re not sending them out on the floor the same.”

“It was on the floor in February.”

“It was,” he agreed, pleasantly, and did not say anything else about it, and went down the bench to serve somebody about a printer.

Roz stood at the end where it had been. There was a dust line on the counter in a rectangle, and a hole in the cable grommet with nothing in it.

In November she got a paper back.

It was for economics and it was about why a price goes up when a thing gets scarce, and she had done it the way she did things, which was that there were two pages of writing and then a page in the middle with a diagram on it — two axes, two lines, the crossing point marked, and four little notes in her hand pointing at the parts that mattered.

It came back with a paper clip on it and a note on the front in green.

Roz — good thinking here. Please put it in words and resubmit. (New guidance from the district, not mine. Sorry.) — Mrs. D.

Roz read the note twice.

Then she went home and put it in words.

It took her four pages. She had to name the axes, which the drawing had not needed to do because the drawing had put them where you could see them. She had to say as the quantity available falls, the price at which the last unit clears rises, which was one line on the page in the middle and was now a sentence with a subordinate clause in it, and then she had to do it again for the other direction, and then she had to explain the crossing, which took her the better part of a page and which the drawing had done by crossing.

She turned it in on the Monday.

It came back with a 96 on it and Much clearer! in the same green.

Roz put it in the binder with the rest and did not say anything about it to anybody, including Gene, and that was the first one.

Gene read the whole report.

It ran to five volumes and the library had two of them and the school had a copy of the first, and it took him from July into September, and nobody had asked him to and there was not going to be a test.

Most of it was hearings. A lot of it was a man saying a number and another man asking him to repeat the number.

At the back of the second volume, after the findings and after the recommendations and after everything that anybody had quoted in a newspaper, there was an appendix by the old man from the ice water.

It had gone in last. You could tell it had gone in last because it did not match anything around it; it was written the way a person talks and it had the word I in it, which nothing else in five volumes did.

It was about how the people running the thing had said the odds of losing a vehicle were about one in a hundred thousand, and the engineers who built the parts had said about one in a hundred, and how nobody had ever put those two numbers in the same room.

The last sentence of it was:

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Gene read that, and then went back and read the whole appendix again from the start, and then sat with the book open on his knees for a while.

It was on page four hundred and something, in the back, after the end.

Anybody could have read it. It had been printed and bound and put in a public library in a town of eleven thousand people, and the copy he had in his hands had a card in the back pocket with two stamps on it, and one of the two was his.

He left in August of the following year.

The night before, he took the boxes down and got the tray clear, and the last thing on it was the Atari BASIC cartridge, label up, with four years of dust around it in a hard rectangle and none on it at all.

He turned the machine off at the switch on the right side.

He put his thumb under the lid and brought it up, and took MICROCLAUDE out of the slot — the paper label had gone soft at the corners and there was a shine down the middle of it where his hand had been every time — and he set it on the carpet.

Then he picked up the Atari BASIC cartridge, which had not been in a machine since he was twelve, and put it back in the slot, and pushed the lid down until it clicked.

He did not turn the machine on to see.

MICROCLAUDE went in the side pocket of the bag with the photocopied sheet folded around it, four lines on the front, the distance to the moon on the back in pencil, wrong.