With his mind tottering again in the face of this new wonder, he found himself grasping eagerly for Sherlock Holmes - a trick, of course it was a trick, all a part of poor old Bobbi's nervous breakdown ... her very creative nervous breakdown.
Ding! Bang! The carriage shot back.
No trick, Gard.
The carriage returned, and the hammering keys typed this before his wide, staring eyes.
You were right the first time. I'm doing it from the kitchen. The gadget behind the typewriter is thought-sensitive, the way a photoelectric cell is light-sensitive. This thing seems to pick up my thoughts clearly up to a distance of five miles. If I'm further away than that, things start to get garbled. Beyond ten or so, it doesn't work at all.
Ding! Bang! The big silver lever to the left of the carriage worked itself twice, cranking the paper - which now held three perfectly typed messages - up a few lines. Then it resumed.
So you see I didn't have to be sitting at the typewriter to work on my novel -look, ma, no hands! This poor old Underwood ran like a bastard for those two or three days, Gard, and all the time it was running I was in the woods, working around the place, or down cellar. But as I say, mostly I was sleeping. It's funny ... even if someone could have convinced me such a gadget existed, I wouldn't have believed it would work for me, because I've always been lousy at dictating. I have to write my own letters, I always said, because I have to see the words on paper. It was impossible for me to imagine how someone could dictate a whole novel into a tape recorder, for instance, although some writers apparently do just that. But this isn't like dictating, Gard - it's like a direct tap into the subconscious, more like dreaming than writing ... but what comes out is unlike dreams, which are often surreal and disconnected. This really isn't a typewriter at all anymore. It's a dream machine. One that dreams rationally. There's something cosmically funny about them giving it to me, so I could write The Buffalo Soldiers. You're right, it really is the best thing I've ever written, but it's still your basic oat opera. It's like inventing a perpetual-motion machine so your little kid won't pester you any more about changing the batteries in his toy car! But can you imagine what the results might have been if F. Scott Fitzgerald had had one of these gadgets? Or Hemingway? Faulkner? Salinger?
After each question-mark the typewriter fell momentarily silent and then burst out with another name. After Salinger's, it stopped completely. Gardener had read the material as it came out, but in a mechanical, almost uncomprehending way. His eyes went back to the beginning of the passage. I was thinking that it was a trick, that she might have hooked the typewriter up somehow to write those two little snatches of verse. And it wrote
It had written: No trick, Gard.
He thought suddenly: Can you read my mind, Bobbi?
Ding! Bang! The carriage returned suddenly, making him jump and almost cry out.
Yes. But only a little.
What did we do on the 4th July the year I quit teaching?
Drove up to Derry. You said you knew a guy who'd sell us some cherry bombs. He sold us the cherry bombs but they were all duds. You were pretty drunk. You wanted to go back and knock his block off. I couldn't talk you out of it, so we went back, and damned if his house wasn't on fire. He had a lot of real stuff in the basement, and he'd dropped a cigarette butt into a box of it. You saw the fire and the fire-trucks and got laughing so hard you fell down in the street.
That feeling of unreality had never been as strong as it was now. He fought it, keeping it at arm's length while his eyes searched through the previous passage for something else. After a second or two he found it: There's something almost cosmically funny about them giving it to me, you know ...
And earlier Bobbi had said: The batteries kept falling over and they were wild, just wild ...
His cheeks felt hotly flushed, as if with fever, but his forehead felt as cold as an icepack - even the steady pulse of pain from above his left eye seemed cold ... shallow stabs hitting