“Yes?” Jones encouraged.
“Computer names. Not any that I ever heard of, but they’re making new ones all the time. Digital Linear Computer. Digital Computer—ah—Recompensacing, Military. Something like that. Not those, of course. Computer names.”
Jones was heading for the door when Fowler called after him.
“Uh?” he asked, turning.
“Any periods?” Fowler repeated.
“Any? Oh. No periods. Just DLC, DCRM.”
“Computer names,” said Fowler dogmatically.
AT home, mechanically transcribing from the open book on his left, Jones slowly realized that it didn’t have to be computer names, for Pete’s sake, at all. How about government departments? Department of Labor Controls? If you were going to imagine things, why not Department of Control and Regulation of Management?
Funny that hadn’t occurred to him at the time. Or to Fowler. Jones felt a bit irritated; the man ought to know his own business better than that. And yet the idea of the computers had taken instant hold of his imagination. DLC and DCRM, two giant blocks of masonry, dull-lit, full of the smells of ozone and oiled metal, and the sound of purring …
He came to the end of a page and ripped it out of the machine. It was getting so that he hated to touch the typewriter; the keys were like little metal teeth that snapped back at him. Not enough sleep last night or the night before. He was on edge.
He forced himself to think about the government departments again while he tabulated errors. There was something so solid and safe about a government department. Department of Control and Regulation—
His fingers had gone numb. He stared down at his writing.
JONS ABC KLK ABCDEF KLK ABC KLK DLC
It was as clear to his mind as if he had heard it in the rhythmic rotary murmur of one of the teletype machines at the office … JONES ABC (Click) ABCDEF (Click) ABC (Click) Dulcie. Idling up there in the big masonry block—idling (click) like a metal Red King (click) dreaming of a man named Jones …
“Dulcie!” cried Jones, strangling. “Dulce—uh! Dulcie!”
Little steel typewriter keys were stuck in his shoulder. He writhed.
“Wake up! Fred!”
He stared at his wife’s face foggily. She was all blurry in the funny light from the bed stand.
“Dulcie,” he said with a thick tongue.
She let go his shoulder and brushed a cable of hair back from her forehead. “Fred, what’s the matter with you? You scared me.”
He moved his lips and tongue experimentally. “All right,” he mumbled.
“You’re not awake yet,” she said, studying him. “Who’s Dulcie?”
“Just a nightmare.” He shuddered. “Just another damned nightmare.”
He threw the bedcovers back and started to get out of bed.
MYRA watched him in silence until he began putting on his clothes. “Where are you going? Do you know what time it is?”
“Half past three,” said Jones, glancing at the clock. “Doesn’t matter. Wide awake.”
“Fred, sit down a minute. I want to talk to you.”
Jones kept going out of the bedroom.
“Fred, I’ve taken about as much of this—”
“Not now!” he shouted.
He went on down to his study, clicked on the friendly lights and sat down by the window. He lit a cigarette. The fluorescent light on his desk began to hum.
“Stop that, damn you!” Jones yelled, and sprang at it. It toppled over, tinkled, sputtered maliciously, and went out.
Jones got the oilcloth cover from behind the filing cabinet, where he had tossed it years ago, and carefully draped it over the typewriter, not touching the metal with his fingers.
“Click,” he said between his teeth, pulling the edges of the cover tight. “Go ahead and click.”
After a moment, hesitantly, he picked up the telephone. He used a yellow pencil to dial 211.
“Long distance,” said the whiskery voice in his ear.
“I want to make a call to Deadwood, Arizona. Station to station. The Imperial Hotel.”
Jones introduced himself to the thin voice at the other end of the line. “I’m faying to locate Mr. Walter Wallace. Did he leave a forwarding address or mention where he was going when he checked out?”
“Just one moment, sir … No, sir, Mr. Wallace hasn’t checked out. He’s still in the hotel.”
“Ring him,” said Jones. “No, wait a minute. Take a message. Tell him I’m grabbing the first plane out.”
Wallace was waiting for him in his room. He was paler than ever. He seemed to listen to himself with a faint, incurious surprise.
“I was due to go on to Reno day before yesterday, but I didn’t. No point to it until I get this thing settled. Awfully good of you to come out and compare notes.”
The roar of the plane’s engines was still faintly in Jones’s ears, like a far-off, thunderous, metal surf. He heard himself ask, “Do you have nightmares?”
“Nightmares!” said Wallace faintly, with a wry twist of his lips. “Oh, yes. Any amount. I haven’t touched a typewriter.”
“Me, either.”
“Now you’d think that would help, but it doesn’t.” Wallace laced his long, translucent fingers together, hunching himself like a large, pale spider in the maple chair, in the chintz-filtered sunlight. “Has it struck you,” he asked slowly, “that none of the messages actually said anything? Told us anything? Contact. Receive message. Obey. Would you take the trouble to reach back two hundred years in time to say that to anybody?”
JONES heard his own breath whistling in his nose. “Why did you say two hundred years?”
“Oh, well,” said Wallace, and looked away with a little smirk. “I have been sitting here thinking,” he went on, “and do you know what else I’ve thought of? … I’m not boring you? Can’t understand why not … I’m thinking of thrillers I read in my carefree youth, where the murderer would send you a note with some insidious Oriental poison on it. You see, it didn’t matter what the note said. It could be anything. For example, “What price umbrellas now?’ You opened it up, and got the poison on your fingers, and then you were as good as dead. That was the real message.”
“Listen,” Jones asked after a moment, “what does it want? Can you feel that? Do you—”
“Want?” said Wallace. “Want? I don’t know. We’re finding out, though, aren’t we? We opened the bloody envelope. Now they don’t need to muck about with typographical errors, you see. We’re on the hook.” He smiled. “What do you suppose the worm says to the fish?”
Jones sat dully in his rumpled topcoat with his hat on his knee. He was unshaven and his shirt was buttoned up wrong. He got a cigarette out of his pocket, looked at it and put it away.
“I do run on,” said Wallace politely.
Looking at him, Jones discovered that Wallace was astonishingly flat. He was a nicely colored picture pasted up in the air in front of a flat chintzy wall, with light coming through from somewhere Outside … like the peephole boxes they had made in Sunday school when he was a kid, pasting up cut-out people and furniture from magazines, to stand there in a stifling shoe-box and be stared at.
It was a curious feeling. He knew that he could get up and step across the carpet and touch Wallace, and find him round and solid and breathing. But he knew it wouldn’t mean anything; he could do it, yet it wouldn’t be any sort of proof.
And looking at the flat illusion that was Wallace, he could see that Wallace felt the same about him.
He stood up. “We’ll have to work together,” he said. “Lick this thing. Must leave now.”
“Oh, yes,” Wallace agreed.
“Awfully nice of you to call.”