"A pencil!" she hissed back. "A pencil such as they've been making
for, I don't know, maybe three hundred years. Plastic and a black
core, that's all. An atavistic, human writing instrument. But there is
more real, solid news in this one pencil than in all the gadgets and
wires and whirling wheels of the whole stinking WPA, your World Press
Association! And in one edition of my poor little _Argus_, that funny
little country monthly...."
Fortunately, at this point, the familiar Thomas Edison Pageant
broadcast ended and the announcer on the cubeo rang his Town Crier
bell. Copies of the Northeast Region edition of the _Sun_ began pouring
out of the Fotofax slot. As a matter of habit I rose and got a _Sun_
for each of us, Sara taking hers with a snort, and sat down again as
the announcer gave the World Press Association opening format:
"An informed people is a free people," he droned. "Read your _Sun_ and
know the truth. Stand by now for an official synopsis of the day's
happenings prepared by the World Press Association."
We both got up to go, leaving our _Suns_ behind as most in the room
later would too. "Oh, I almost forgot," Sara said, the way she does
when she's been thinking about something all day. "That reminds me. I'm
pregnant."
"Ah?" I said. "Okay. Good." Not just marriage this time: matrimony it
was. We walked out, and she held my hand, a thing she doesn't normally
do.
* * * * *
On the belt-way to Milbry and Sara's house, some 48 kiloms north of
Rutlan, we talked about getting wed. I lay back in the seat of my car
and through the roof watched the December snow fall--making plans with
only half a mind for moving from my Nork apartment, deciding whether
to keep both cars, arguing whether the commute to Nork took 40 or 45
minutes, choosing a sex for the baby. Mostly I was thinking about what
Sara had said about the _Sun_. I'm a Reporter, after all.
When the car locked onto the exit tramway and started deceleration, I
suggested that we go to the _Argus_ office first. Her apartment was
just upstairs anyway. "We had better," I said, "have a little talk."
The demand sensor of the radiant heater in front of the _Argus_
building was, as usual, out of order, so we didn't linger. Sara pressed
her ID bracelet against the night lock and the door swung open with a
squawk that lifted my hair.
Once when I asked her why she didn't get it fixed, she said it saved
the price of a cowbell on a spring. I told her then that Vermont had
no business in the 21st century, and she said the 21st century had no
business in Vermont, the 19th had been more fun. Fun! She said if I
didn't like Vermont I could go back to Nork, and she gave it the old
fashioned pronunciation, Newark, I suppose just to irritate me. As I
recall, I did go back to Nork, that time, but that was a long time ago.
This time, anyway, I pushed her gently down into her chair, the worn
old oak swivel chair in front of the disreputable old rolltop desk,
with that battered old electric typewriter of her father's and her
grandfather's. For all I know, her five-great-grandfather Elias
Witherill started the _Argus_ with it in 1847, two centuries ago.
"You say the WPA is bad," I said. I tapped the typewriter. "There's
your real villain. And there--" pointing at the ancient offset press
she printed the _Argus_ on and waving at the framed, yellowed copy of
Vol. 1, No. 1 of the _Argus_, hanging on the wall--and "there!"
* * * * *
It began with the typewriter, I informed her. The printing press came
first, but typewriters really did the job.
Maybe the actual beginning was the manuscript of the ancient monks:
impersonal and uniform. But handwriting was hardly wide-spread in the
Dark Ages, so let's take it from the typewriter.
Handwriting was an individual thing. Transcribed speech; and speech is
an individual's articulated thought. Printing is based on handwriting,
but it's stylized and made uniform for mass production.
That leaves a big gap between script and print--the difference between
personal mental process and a merely mechanical process of duplication.
Look at it this way. In the days when handwriting was general, a
man believed a personal message if it came from someone he trusted.
And he'd know it came from that person because he recognized the
handwriting, just as he'd recognize the person's voice, or his face.
The writing was, in effect, an extension of the reader's own senses or
experience, into a distant situation.
Then with better communications came more handwritings, and more
distant situations. Then the typewriter, and then the dictatyper.
Everybody's writing was just like everybody else's, and there was a
lot of it.
Everything was in type, even the identifying name at the end of
a personal letter, the autograph ("Signature," Sara snigged) ...
signature, then. For a long time businessmen's letters had been
signed by their stenographers anyway. ("Secretaries, blockhead," Sara
muttered, and she sighed.)
The point is, I continued, that except for a few cases of
eccentricity--I glanced at her belt pouch, with the pencil in
it--handwriting had disappeared. The written word--the reader's distant
experience--was in type: dictatype, teletype, phototype, printer's
type ... newspapers, books, advertising, business letters, memoranda,
personal letters, everything.
Before, people had tended to believe most of what was handwritten, and
almost nothing that was in type. With everything in type, they got
tired of deciding which to believe and began to believe either every
word, or none. It wasn't good.
It led to the Edict, and of course to the World Press Association and
its relentless search for truth.
"Gah," said Sara. "Truth is an overrated commodity. Let's go upstairs
and get ourselves something to eat."