Dulcie & Decorum
Damon Knight
If you make typographical errors in typing, leave them alone! The biggest mistake is in trying to learn whether they mean anything!
“What is so fascinating about the letter w?” Wallace asked, looking up from the typed pages. His cool British voice was as precise as ever.
“Hm?” said Jones, pulling a cork.
“The letter ‘w,’ ” Wallace repeated patiently. “I’ve been counting your typographical errors. I find the letter you most frequently strike, when you ought to be striking some other letter, is ‘w’. Now I have an excuse for doing it—my name. But what’s yours? Why ‘w’?”
Jones got the cork out and filled both glasses. “You’re supposed to be reading the article.”
“Couldn’t possibly,” Wallace said. “Awfully sorry. Full of Americanisms. I get fearfully loyal when I’m drunk. Language of Shakespeare and Milton and Robie. You know.”
“Robie?”
“My editor. Filthy little bug. Writes himself, you know. Under pseudonyms. Asks you casually how you liked so-and-so’s last piece. Actually his own, you see. Ugh.”
JONES was beginning to feel mildly, pleasantly dizzy. It was quiet and cool down in his basement study at this time of night, with the house silent above them and the night airs astir. He and Wallace had been drinking and talking ever since four that afternoon, when they’d met at a press conference that turned out to be a bust. Wallace was a feature writer for a chain of British papers; he was just beginning a two-months’ grand tour of America.
“Quite sinister,” Wallace said. “Bear looking into. I should like to have your opinion, Jonesy. How do you explain it?”
Jones swallowed, and the cool brightness went smoothly down to join the warmth at the bottom. He said, “Maybe he has expensive tastes.”
“Who?”
“Robie.” He added, as Wallace looked blank, “Your editor.”
“What’s that to do with ‘w’s?”
“I don’t know,” Jones said. After a while, he got up and sat down at the desk with his hands resting on the typewriter keyboard. He twiddled his fingers experimentally a few times. “I think my fingernail catches on the ‘w’ key.”
Wallace nodded several times. “Yes. But why?”
“Probably stands for something Freudian. Women. Woe. Waste.”
“Wallace, in my case,” said Wallace. “Scots wha hae.”
Jones was slowly warming up to the topic. “No, you were right. I just remembered—when I used to work for a publicity man, years ago. I knew the crumb was getting rich and I had an idea he wasn’t paying me enough. Thirty-five dollars a week. Well—” he typed rapidly— “I swear I never did it on purpose, but I kept typing his name like this.”
He handed the sheet over to Wallace. It read: $IDNEY $TEVEN$ON.
Wallace grinned. “I see. And yet the almighty dollar sign’s nowhere near the ‘s,’ is it? Not even the same finger.”
“No.”
“Well, this is interesting. What about the ‘w,’ then? I don’t much care for your theory, but evidently there’s a psychic message there. ‘W’—‘w’—‘w.’ Wa, wa, wa. Baby crying. Maybe you weren’t allowed to howl enough as a child.”
They drank, thinking it over.
“You’re going on the theory,” said Jones, “that all typos have some sinister significance.”
“Oh, absolutely.”
“Well, that doesn’t stand up. No. I hit every letter wrong sometimes. If they all mean something—well, hell, how do you know you know they mean anything? You’re sure to hit a wrong one every now and then. Am I getting through to you? What I mean—”
“Know exactly what you mean,” said Wallace. “Question of frequency. Frequency.”
“Oh,” Jones said weakly.
“Doesn’t follow, though.”
WALLACE got up to look over Jones’s shoulder. “The ‘w’ happens to be in the middle of a nest of high-frequency letters, doesn’t it? ‘E,’ ‘a,’ ‘s’ Hold on—I’ve got it! Suppose somebody were trying to communicate with you!”
“They could write me a letter,” said Jones.
“No. No post where he is. Cloud-cuckoo land, or Mars, or somewhere. You follow me?”
“Or the spirit world?” asked Jones, interested.
Wallace collapsed into a fit of silent laughter and spilled wine down the front of Jones’s shirt. “Be sensible,” he said happily. “Practical. Hard-headed. Some psychic little tout in Soho, asleep and dreaming of you. Or one of your remote descendants, centuries from now. A by-blow of your great-great-grandnephew’s brother-in-law’s mistress. Somebody reaching back in Time, you see, or forward, for that matter. Trying to communicate.”
“What for?”
“Are you going to be difficult? How the deuce do I know what for? You haven’t even opened the bloody envelope.”
He sat down again, looking miffed.
“I apologize,” said Jones.
“Accepted,” said Wallace. He sniffed dreamily, tenting his fingers in front of his long, pale face. “Now just suppose— How would a fellow like that go about getting in touch with you?” He held up a hand to forestall Jones’s reply. “He’s got a bad connection, you see. He can’t make you hear voices, or do automatic writing, or anything like that. All he can do is twitch your fingers the least bit, when they’re already moving and you’re not paying much attention. Only then. Result, typos.” He saluted Jones with his glass and drained it.
“Magnificent,” said Jones.
“See any flaws in it?”
“Not a one.”
“Very well, we shall see. Ready?” Staring intently at Jones’s manuscript, Wallace read off the typographical errors as he came to them, and Jones typed them out.
The resulting message read:
OYKEIOXILERWJWJ.
“Settles that,” said Wallace with relief. “All nonsense, naturally. Find something else to worry about tomorrow. Mean-while, landlord, more wine.”
THE next day was hot and sticky, and Jones had a hangover. He sweated on a story that had gone infuriatingly wrong somewhere and finally gave it up. He didn’t tell himself he had given it up; he told himself he was killing time while his brain freshened itself.
The way he killed time was to go back through his manuscript and make a long list of typos. It was just as good as solitaire and, anyhow, there was a kind of witless fascination in it. Jones knew perfectly well that he was not going to find any message hidden in his typing errors, any more than the lint from his trousers cuffs would turn out to be pure uranium, but that didn’t stop him. Millions of words have been written about Shakespeare and Bacon for less reason.
After a while, he had a long foolish row of letters, like this:
EMJBFTDHHTAAGDWWFF4CDFZMG
So he returned to his work, which continued to go badly. He soon found himself mooning over the string of letters again, trying to rearrange them and break them up so they would make sense. Mostly, it seemed to him, the trouble was not enough vowels. He tried inserting vowels to make words like “job, fit, dough, hot,” which was all right in a primitive kind of way, but not very satisfactory.
Well, suppose the meaning was in the letters he had meant to strike, instead of the ones he had actually hit? It was a possible hypothesis, no screwier than the rest of it, and it gave him an excuse to kill more time. So he went back painstakingly through the manuscript and tracked down every typo again, and under each he wrote what the letter should have been:
EMJBFTDHHTAAGDW
JOUGNSRGISQQIVE