an atom smasher out of two soup cans and about five dollars’ worth of electrical equipment. Jon told me about that. And he said there was a kid out in some hick town in New Mexico who discovered tachyons—negative particles that are supposed to travel backwards through time—in 1954. A kid in Waterbury, Connecticut—eleven years old—who made a pipe-bomb out of the celluloid he scraped off the backs of a deck of playing cards. He blew up an empty doghouse with it. Kids’re funny sometimes. The supersmart ones in particular. You might be surprised.”
“Maybe. Maybe I will be. ”
“He was a fine boy, regardless.”
“You loved him a little, didn’t you?”
“Mr. Hagstrom,” Nordhoff said, “I loved him a lot. He was a genuinely all-right kid.”
And Richard thought how strange it was—his brother, who had been an utter shit since the age of six, had gotten a fine woman and a fine bright son. He himself, who had always tried to be gentle and good (whatever “good” meant in this crazy world), had married Lina, who had developed into a silent, piggy woman, and had gotten Seth by her. Looking at Nordhoff’s honest, tired face, he found himself wondering exactly how that had happened and how much of it had been his own fault, a natural result of his own quiet weakness.
“Yes,” Richard said. “He was, wasn’t he?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me if it worked,” Nordhoff said. “Wouldn’t surprise me at all.”
After Nordhoff had gone, Richard Hagstrom plugged the word processor in and turned it on. There was a hum, and he waited to see if the letters IBM would come up on the face of the screen. They did not. Instead, eerily, like a voice from the grave, these words swam up, green ghosts, from the darkness:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, UNCLE RICHARD! JON.
“Christ,” Richard whispered, sitting down hard. The accident that had killed his brother, his wife, and their son had happened two weeks before—they had been coming back from some sort of day trip and Roger had been drunk. Being drunk was a perfectly ordinary occurrence in the life of Roger Hagstrom. But this time his luck had simply run out and he had driven his dusty old van off the edge of a ninety-foot drop. It had crashed and burned. Jon was fourteen—no, fifteen. Just turned fijteen a couple of days before the accident, the old man said. Another three years and he would have gotten free of that hulking, stupid bear. His birthday ... and mine coming up soon.
A week from today. The word processor had been Jon’s birthday present for him.
That made it worse, somehow. Richard could not have said precisely how, or why, but it did. He reached out to turn off the screen and then withdrew his hand.
Some kid made an atom smasher out of two soup cans and five dollars’ worth of auto electrical parts.
Yeah, and the New York City sewer system is full of alligators and the U.S. Air Force has the body of an alien on ice somewhere in Nebraska. Tell me a few more. It’s bullshit. But maybe that’s something I don’t want to know for sure.
He got up, went around to the back of the VDT, and looked through the slots. Yes, it was as Nordhoff had said. Wires stamped RADIO SHACK MADE IN TAIWAN. Wires stamped WESTERN ELECTRIC and WESTREX and ERECTOR SET, with the little circled trademark r. And he saw something else, something Nordhoff had either missed or hadn’t wanted to mention. There was a Lionel Train transformer in there, wired up like the Bride of Frankenstein.
“Christ,” he said, laughing but suddenly near tears. “Christ, Jonny, what did you think you were doing?”
But he knew that, too. He had dreamed and talked about owning a word processor for years, and when Lina’s laughter became too sarcastic to bear, he had talked about it to Jon. “I could write faster, rewrite faster, and submit more,” he remembered telling Jon last summer—the boy had looked at him seriously, his light blue eyes, intelligent but always so carefully wary, magnified behind his glasses. “It would be great ... really great.”
“Then why don’t you get one, Uncle Rich?”
“They don’t exactly give them away,” Richard had said, smiling. “The Radio Shack model starts at around three grand. From there you can work yourself up into the eighteen-thousand-dollar range.”
“Well, maybe I’ll build you one sometime,” Jon had said.
“Maybe you just will,” Richard had said, clapping him on the back. And until Nordhoff had called, he had thought