in the CPU still remained to be seen, but Jon’s mating of a Wang board to an IBM screen had actually worked. Just coincidentally it called up some pretty crappy memories, but he didn’t suppose that was Jon’s fault.
He looked around his office, and his eyes happened to fix on the one picture in here that he hadn’t picked and didn’t like. It was a studio portrait of Lina, her Christmas present to him two years ago. I want you to hang it in your study, she’d said, and so of course he had done just that. It was, he supposed, her way of keeping an eye on him even when she wasn’t here. Don’t forget me, Richard. I’m here. Maybe I backed the wrong horse, but I’m still here. And you better remember it.
The studio portrait with its unnatural tints went oddly with the amiable mixture of prints by Whistler, Homer, and N. C. Wyeth. Lina’s eyes were half-lidded, the heavy Cupid’s bow of her mouth composed in something that was not quite a smile. Still here, Richard, her mouth said to him. And don’t you forget it.
He typed:
MY WIFE’S PHOTOGRAPH HANGS ON THE WEST WALL OF MY STUDY.
He looked at the words and liked them no more than he liked the picture itself. He punched the DELETE button. The words vanished. Now there was nothing at all on the screen but the steadily pulsing cursor.
He looked up at the wall and saw that his wife’s picture had also vanished.
He sat there for a very long time—it felt that way, at least—looking at the wall where the picture had been. What finally brought him out of his daze of utter unbelieving shock was the smell from the CPU—a smell he remembered from his childhood as clearly as he remembered the Magic Eight-Ball Roger had broken because it wasn’t his. The smell was essence of electric train transformer. When you smelled that you were supposed to turn the thing off so it could cool down.
And so he would.
In a minute.
He got up and walked over to the wall on legs which felt numb. He ran his fingers over the Armstrong paneling. The picture had been here, yes, right here. But it was gone now, and the hook it had hung on was gone, and there was no hole where he had screwed the hook into the paneling.
Gone.
The world abruptly went gray and he staggered backwards, thinking dimly that he was going to faint. He held on grimly until the world swam back into focus.
He looked from the blank place on the wall where Lina’s picture had been to the word processor his dead nephew had cobbled together.
You might be surprised, he heard Nordhoff saying in his mind. You might be surprised, you might be surprised, oh yes, if some kid in the fifties could discover particles that travel backwards through time, you might be surprised what your genius of a nephew could do with a bunch of discarded word processor elements and some wires and electrical components. You might be so surprised that you’ll feel as if you’re going insane.
The transformer smell was richer, stronger now, and he could see wisps of smoke rising from the vents in the screen housing. The noise from the CPU was louder, too. It was time to turn it off—smart as Jon had been, he apparently hadn’t had time to work out all the bugs in the crazy thing.
But had he known it would do this?
Feeling like a figment of his own imagination, Richard sat down in front of the screen again and typed:
MY WIFE’S PICTURE IS ON THE WALL.
He looked at this for a moment, looked back at the keyboard, and then hit the EXECUTE key.
He looked at the wall.
Lina’s picture was back, right where it had always been.
“Jesus,” he whispered. “Jesus Christ.”
He rubbed a hand up his cheek, looked at the keyboard (blank again now except for the cursor), and then typed:
MY FLOOR IS BARE.
He then touched the INSERT button and typed:
EXCEPT FOR TWELVE TWENTY-DOLLAR GOLD PIECES IN A SMALL COTTON SACK.
He pressed EXECUTE.
He looked at the floor, where there was now a small white cotton sack with a drawstring top. WELLS FARGO was stenciled on the bag in faded black ink.
“Dear Jesus,” he heard himself saying in a voice that wasn’t his. “Dear Jesus, dear good Jesus—”
He might have gone on invoking the Savior’s name for minutes or hours if the word processor had not started beeping at him steadily. Flashing