3xT

by Harry Turtledove

  There was an inch-long strip of silvery stuff at the top of the card, with an angular dark gray zero at the right edge. Pete pressed the 7, and almost dropped the card when, silently and without any fuss, the matching number took the zero's place. McGregor leaned over and punched the radical sign. The 7 disappeared in turn, to be instantly replaced by 2.6457513.

  "That," the editor said softly, "is the most astounding thing I have ever seen in my life."

  Pete hardly heard him. He had used desktop electric calculators before, bulky machines half as big as a typewriter, was used to the whirr of their motors, the ratcheting thunk of turning gears and cams, the wait for everything to finish in a multidigit multiplication. But here for the asking, at the press not even of a button, was 2.6457513. He had met the future, and he was in love.

  When Michelle held out her hand for the incredible little device, he did not want to give it back. All he could think of to say was, "If you're used to machines like this, how can you stand living in 1953?"

  McGregor, as was his way, carried that thought a step further: "How many centuries in the future are you from?"

  One of her carroty eyebrows rose. "I'm sorry to disappoint you, but only about thirty-five years." When the two men exclaimed in disbelief, she said, "Think of this, then: What would the best aeronautical engineer in the world have made of an F-86 jet fighter in 1918? The more technology grows, the more it can grow. You both know that."

  "Yes, but I never had my nose rubbed in it like this before," McGregor muttered.

  Pete did not look at it that way. The idea of the future had drawn him long before he began writing about it. Now he had held a piece of it in his hand, had touched the warm palm and fingers of it with his own.

  He had to know more. "What else can you show us?" he breathed. "What were those things you named, a 'VCR' and and a, uh, 'disc driver'? You must have them here, or you wouldn't have mentioned them."

  "Disc drive," she corrected absently. "Yes, I have them. Whether you should see them or not—well, having come this far, I suppose you deserve to know the rest. Come on out to the garage with me."

  She led them through the kitchen and service porch. As they walked down the steps into the backyard, she locked the door behind them. "Why bother?" Pete said. "We aren't going to be gone all that long, are we?"

  She looked surprised, then sheepish. "Force of habit. Something else I brought with me from the 1980s, I'm afraid."

  McGregor cleared his throat. "Which brings up another point. Pete asked how you live here; I'm more interested in why. And why so secretly? With what you know, why not give the United States the help we need against the Reds?"

  Something changed in her face. She was younger than Pete, years younger than the editor, but living through her life in the future (My God—she wouldn't even be born yet! Pete thought) had left her more streetwise, more cynical than both of them together. His misgivings stirred again.

  She said bleakly, "Why do you think the government deserves that kind of edge?"

  "Why don't you?" McGregor demanded after a short, stunned pause. The hostile edge was back in his voice, and Pete did not blame him.

  Michelle was unabashed. "For one thing, Watergate wasn't exactly fiction. All I did was change some names. Do you want to know who President Cavanaugh really is?" She paused for dramatic effect, then told them.

  McGregor winced. "I will be damned," Pete said.

  She continued inexorably, "Does the name Klaus Barbie mean anything to either of you?"

  "The Butcher of Lyon," Pete exclaimed. "I went through there not long after the Nazis left. What about him?"

  "He's living in South America now, because he was a resource to our intelligence agencies and we helped spirit him away from the French. Just about thirty years from now, he'll finally get captured and we'll get around to apologizing to France."

  Pete started to say, "I don't believe it," but the words stuck in his throat.

  "Shall I go on?" Michelle asked McGregor. "Or will you believe I have some reason for doing things like I am?"

  "You have an unpleasant way of making your points," he said, but took the argument no further.

  She unlocked the garage door, swung it up, turned on the light, and closed it behind the three of them. The front third of the garage held the same sort of stuff Pete's did: a couple of trashcans, a lawnmower, some gardening and hand tools, a pile of boxes filled with miscellaneous junk. The rest was walled off. A door had been cut in the wall; a stout deadbolt gleamed above the knob.

  "This is where I do my real work," she said as she unbolted and unlocked it.

  She reached for a light switch just to the side of the door. Pete was not sure what to expect—probably something like the inside of a flying saucer. It wasn't like that. The general impressions reminded him of his own working area: office furniture, lots of books and records. There was an amenity he wished he had thought of for himself—a small refrigerator—in one corner.

  The more he looked, though, the stranger things got. The television set was no model he had seen before, and he did not know what the small box, full of knobs and buttons, attached to it was. The radio, record player, and speakers were similarly recognizable but not familiar, and seemed somehow naked out by themselves without a cabinet.

  And the gadget on the desk had a keyboard, but if its mother was a typewriter, she had been unfaithful with a TV set. Wires led to a couple of other unfamiliar machines—no, wait, there was paper in one of them. "No wonder your paper looks like that!" Pete said. "You've got little side-strips for the holes to mesh with the sprockets of the electric printer, and then you just peel them off. How clever!"

  "That was the hardest thing to install," she remarked. "I don't want to say much about how I travel, but I can't bring anything back with me that I can't carry. These days I mostly stay here, anyway, unless I need something I can only get uptime. Happens I like it here."

  Pete walked over to the desk. There was a magazine on it, next to the keyboard-cum-screen. He did not recognize the title, or the emblem prominently displayed on the cover: a stylized rabbit's head in a bow tie. "Gala 33rd Anniversary Issue!" the magazine proclaimed. The date (seeing that gave him chills) let him make a quick subtraction.

  "It's almost ready to begin." The connection with his own times was cheering, in a way. Then he noticed something else. "This cost five dollars?" he said in horror.

  "It's not as awful as it sounds," Michelle reassured him. "In terms of 1953 money, it's somewhere between a dollar and a dollar and a half."

  He frowned. Not even the postwar inflation had been as bad as that. Some things in the future looked to be mixed blessings after all.

  He picked up the magazine. "May I?"

  "Go ahead," she said. There was something in her voice he could not quite read. She kept her face carefully blank as she went on, "In some ways it will probably interest you more than it does me."

  The first few pages were mostly ads. The quality of the color reproduction surpassed anything 1953 could offer. Pete gaped at the lines of the cars. They were the most blatantly different element, though fashions had also changed, women's hairstyles were new, and mustaches and beards were common on men.

  The magazine fell open naturally at the center. A very pretty girl smiled out at Pete. "Ah, I see what you meant; it's like Esquire," he said, and opened the foldout.

  He closed it in a hurry, scarlet to the roots of his hair. "Where did you get this, this pornography?" he stammered.

  He turned even redder when he saw how hard she was trying not to laugh at him. "By my standards, it isn't pornography; in fact, it's very mild, compared to some others," she said gently. "And I bought it at the same place I got my little calculator—the Rexall's at the corner of Vermont and Gardena Boulevard."

  "You bought it yourself? You didn't have a man get it for you? I don't believe it. How could you show your face anywhere afterward?"

  "Women do a lot of things in my time that they can't do her
e-and-now." She eyed him with disconcerting directness, smiled so that her lips parted very slightly. Did that mean what he thought it did? He was not sure he wanted to know. He had never seriously looked at another woman since he married Katherine, but there was no denying he felt drawn to Michelle Gordian now. He could not tell where his interest in her for her origin stopped and his interest in her as a person—and as a woman—began.

  He was grateful when she changed the subject, and suspected her to be aware of it. She said, "Anyhow, the pictures weren't the reason I bought the magazine. It has a Clarke story in it that I want to use."

  For a moment, all that did was to convince Pete that the publication wasn't obscene, at least in its own context: he could not imagine Arthur Clarke publishing in anything that was. Then the full meaning of her words hit him. "You're saying you've plagiarized all your work, then?" he asked coldly. "So that's why you came back here—to make an easy living off what other people have done." His liking for her flickered and blew out.

  "It certainly looks that way," McGregor put in. Where exotic technology had lured Pete, with editor's instinct McGregor had been drawn to the bookshelves. Most of the volumes there were pocket books. Some of the writers' names were familiar, others not. The books were shelved alphabetically by author's last name; Pete's glance flicked to the L's. He was startled to see how much he had done—would have done?—will have done? He gave up on the right verb form.

  In any case, McGregor was holding several books in his hand. He showed one to Pete. "You'll notice it's called Neutron Star," he said. "It also has 'At the Core' and 'The Handicapped' in it. Here's another one: The Hugo Winners, Volume V, with 'Not So You'd Notice.' I can go on for a while, if you like."

  He looked at Michelle Gordian as at some particularly unpleasant insect, an expression Pete understood completely. He had always reckoned thieves of other people's work beneath contempt; that the authors of the stories stolen here could have no chance to prove these words their own only made it worse.

  Pete could not even bring himself to respect the way Michelle stood up to the scorn he and McGregor directed at her. "Don't you want to hear my reason for doing what I'm doing?" she asked.

  "Does it matter?" Pete ground out. He felt ashamed of his thoughts of a few minutes before.

  "It's obvious anyway," McGregor said. "It's one of the oldest clichés in science fiction—the time-traveler using special knowledge to get rich. I never thought I'd see anyone actually do it, that's all."

  " 'Get rich?' " Michelle echoed. It was her turn to flush now, but from anger rather than embarrassment. "Not likely, at three cents a word and down. If money were what I wanted, there are easier ways than spending so much time in front of my word processor." Seeing their uncomprehending looks, she jabbed a thumb at the mutant typewriter.

  Pete thought of his own troubles making ends meet, but her expostulation did nothing to move McGregor. "What then?" the editor snapped. "Look at the name you've built for yourself here and now. Who are you up in your own time?"

  He plainly thought the question rhetorical, but she answered it. "An up-and-coming SF author, if you must know. You've been picking books off the shelves; why don't you get mine out?" There were four of them, three novels and a collection of stories, published, Pete noticed, under her own name. She said, "You can see I don't have to steal everything I do. That's come in handy, because some of what I've sold wouldn't be publishable in a science fiction magazine in the 1980s."

  Pete pointed to the magazine with the rabbit on the cover. "After seeing that, I'd think you could get anything into print."

  She smiled. "In that sense, you can, pretty much. But not everything I've written myself is science fiction, if you see what I mean."

  "Oh." Pete and McGregor looked at each other. The writer asked in a low voice, "Which ones are real?"

  "To hell with that." McGregor made an impatient gesture. He peered at Michelle over the top of his glasses. "You're saying you have some reason besides the strictly personal for doing what you're doing."

  Relief showed on her face. "Yes, I do."

  "It had better be a good one."

  "I think it is."

  The Astonishing editor waited, but she said nothing more. Finally he barked, "Well?"

  "Think it through for yourself," she said. Nothing could have been better calculated to engage his interest. "You, too, Pete," she urged. "You must have read a fair number of the stories I've had published—I won't call them mine if that offends you. What do they have in common?"

  Not much, was Pete's first thought. They were too diverse—and no wonder, if they actually came from many different pens.

  But McGregor saw what she was driving at. He was more used to considering a number of stories together than Pete. He said slowly, "If I had to pick any one thing, it would be the way your characters attack problems. They all have a knack for applying knowledge logically."

  "Thanks," she said. "That's one of the main ideas I've been trying to get across." She turned to Pete, asked with seeming irrelevance, "You have school-age kids, don't you?"

  "A couple of boys," he nodded. "Why?"

  "How are they learning to read?"

  He made a sour face. "About how you'd guess—this current idiocy of pictures and 'looking at the shape of the whole word,' whatever that means. It doesn't matter. When Carl turned four, I bought an old phonics reader at a secondhand bookstore and taught him myself, the right way; I did the same for his brother a year later. They're both near the top of their classes now."

  "I'm sure they are. But what about the children whose parents didn't bother? How well are they going to do when they come across an unfamiliar word? You're a good SF writer—extrapolate. What happens when those kids grow up? What happens when some of them become teachers and try to teach their sons and daughters to read?"

  Pete thought about that, and did not like the answer he came up with. "You're telling us that's how it's going to be?"

  "I'm afraid I am. You can watch out for something called 'new math,' too, which is just as delightful as reading through pictures."

  "Thirty-odd years isn't that long a time," McGregor protested. "When the Roman Empire fell in the west, it took generations for the decline in literacy to become as widespread as you're implying. And we're starting at a much higher level than the Romans ever reached."

  "True enough," Michelle said, "but then, the Romans were carrying on as best they could, trying to preserve what they had with the barbarians at the gates."

  She stopped there, letting the two men follow her train of thought for themselves. "You mean we don't?" Pete said. His fist clenched; the notion that the United States, having surmounted the Depression and World War II, put western Europe back on its feet, and contained the Reds in Korea, could suffer a loss of will, was enough to infuriate him.

  As was so often true, James McGregor asked the question that needed asking. "What went—er, goes—wrong?"

  "My hindsight isn't long enough to be sure," Michelle said, "but I can put my finger on a couple of things. One is education, as I said. Another is the hangover from the war in Vietnam."

  "In where?" the editor said, but Pete's memory jogged back to his thoughts when he was about to read "Reactions." He exclaimed, "Oh, my God! Tet Offensive!"

  McGregor stared from one of them to the other. "You're not telling me that one's based on fact?" he demanded of Michelle. At her nod, he gave a rueful laugh. He said, "You know, when you sent it to me, I almost bounced it because it seemed too unlikely for the readers to believe. The only things that saved it were the gadgetry on the one hand and the fact that it was internally self-consistent on the other. No wonder, I guess." He was still shaking his head.

  "No wonder at all," Michelle said. "The war is one of the reasons a magazine can cost five dollars. There wasn't—won't be—enough money to pay for guns and butter both, so the printing presses tried to make up the difference."

  "That always happens," Pete said.

 
; "Yes, but I think it was the least of the damage," Michelle replied. "What is it Heinlein says?—it doesn't matter if a hamburger costs ten dollars as long as there's plenty of hamburger. The harm done the country's institutions was worse."

  "The riots and marches and such?" Pete asked; they had only been sketched in as background to the story, but they formed a constant counterpoint to the fighting that occupied center stage.

  "Those are just the outward signs of what I mean," Michelle said. "To this day I'm not sure whether the war was right or wrong in itself, but it was certainly botched. People got very cynical about everything the government did (Watergate helped there too), and a lot of them automatically opposed it or thought it was stupid when it tried to do anything at all.

  "And with contempt for the government went contempt for organization and standards of every sort. That aided and abetted the failure of education, I fear. And naturally, with the emphasis on the importance of the individual, anything that didn't produce immediate, obvious benefits had hard sledding. Even the space program had rough going—once weather satellites and communications satellites were in place, people took them for granted and didn't think about all the R&D it took to get them up in the first place. What can I tell you? The interest of the country just swung away from science and technology. There's no prettier way to put it than that."

  "That can't be strictly true," Pete protested. "What about all these things?" He waved at the television, the contraption wired to it, the—what had she called it?—word processor.

  She pointed at them one at a time in turn, saying, "Made in Taiwan, made in Japan (nobody in the United States manufactures videocassette recorders—we can't compete), made in Japan . . . the microcomputer is American-built, but the Japanese models are just as good and getting better—and cheaper."

  Seeing their stricken expressions, she went on gently, "It's not all bad, up when I come from. Blacks—no, I'm sorry, Negroes is the polite word now—and women have many more opportunities than here-and-now, and a lot take advantage of them. Many people who would die or be crippled today can be saved."