Chapter I

"The WPA stinks," Sara said. Now, I've known Sara four year. We've been engaged three times and married once--only marriage, not matrimony--so I pretty much know what to expect from her. I didn't speak.

She rummaged in her belt pouch and waved something from it under my nose. It was a plastic tube, pointed and dark at one end. "Do you know what this is?" She said it loud enough to make people at other tables look away from the program on the Rutlan Community Room cubeo.

As it happened, I did know what it was. "Sure," I said. "It's a pencil."

"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."