Joseph had pursued a request for some books that he had asked the library to acquire as far as the library entrance, where a smilling young man had greeted him with this suitcase fulll of magic. We ordered some of these computers, he said with some excitement, and they just came. Want to play? The Music Department had been threatened with digitization, but their three-person claim on modernity was weak. So Professor Skizzen dutifullly sat at one end of a long library table and began pecking away: It is as if a spelll had been put upon mankind. How quickly the spelll enveloped the screen. We oinked and thought it singing, he wrote. The young man approached bearing his grin like a tidbit on a salver, so Skizzen hit DELETE and saw nothing more, neither his practice sentence nor the grin. Go on, the young man said, take it for a spin. Our new system will make it easy for us to keep records, he boasted. The bursar is out of his mind with delight. We rolled in the mud and believed we were bathing, Skizzen wrote, with his best hunt-and-peck. He knew Grin was grinning again, over his shoulder. Let the piker peek, Skizzen thought, I shall complete my edifying lines about the spelll that been put upon mankind. “We fought one another and afterward celebrated the carnage” soon materialized. With writing, he said aloud, the writing inscribes the letters, letters build the words, and, subsequently, the thought arrives — handmade like kneaded bread. With typewriting, you get letters by hammering them into existence. Or out, with x’s, if you don’t like them. With this sweet machine here, you issue a requisition. Well, now, I hadn’t thought about it that way, the Grinner said. With pen and ink, before we write, we think, because we hate the sight of corrections. With the computer we write first and think later, corrections are so easy to perform. I like the delete key best; it has a good appearance, Skizzen said, typing furiously. “We ate our farrow and supposed it was a splendidly healthy, indeed toothsome, way to dine.” Joseph determined to leave something behind as an animal might to signal its presence, so he keyed: “We eagerly awaited our own slaughter, as though we were receiving an award.” Now he spoke it as he played it. “Our haunch would hang in the smokehouse to season, and those of us who remained to feel would feel, like parvenus, that we had Arrived.” I’m glad you got these, he said to the Grin, though the young man didn’t seem to have any more grins to spend. I wonder how many unordered books these cost me. He slid his words the length of the long table where they disappeared over its edge into delete. Then Skizzen took his goatee away where it would be better appreciated.
Professor Joseph Skizzen had been apprehensive about the survival of the human race but now he was worried that it might, in fact, endure.
For the moment, there didn’t appear to be such a place. He knew these machines swallowed data, and that vaguely threatened him. No formal charges had been made, so Skizzen’s written defense was not yet needed, nor would it be very useful in his case to refer with such obsessive constancy to the evils that men do, when it was only his paltry transgressions that were at issue. Could Skizzen persuade his prosecutors to admit that his malfeasances were entirely precautionary — lies white as alabaster, or at least chalk — committed in order to prevent his own contamination and having, otherwise, no hope of profit. They were crimes only in his enemies’ criminalized eyes. Because he had lived apart from the system even when inside the system, it appeared that he had made the genuine less to be esteemed than the fraudulent; that his counterfeit bill would buy more than their good one. Well, that admission they would not make; it ate at their pride; it proved they were as fundamentally stupid as they superficially seemed to be; it made a mockery of their allegedly superior educational enterprise.
Any misgiving one might have had about the continuance of the human species has been replaced by serious concerns that it might muddle through after all.
So he was not one of them; he had not, as the common saying was, paid his dues; worse, he had surpassed them too easily. He, the least likely to succeed, the laziest boy in the class — the least eager, the least attentive — had solved the great conundrum, the most mysterious equation, the sphinx’s riddle; and they were angry, the way Cinderella’s sisters or Grimm’s evil brothers were, when the simpleton showed up with the solution. They were reluctant, but they had promoted him. It was grudging, yet applause was applause. They had accepted his advice; let themselves be led by an apparition.
Skizzen had to admit that his case would continue to worsen as the number and complexity of his fictions became known, and the machine would make record keeping simpler: he was not quite his alleged age; he did not know those he said he knew, only their secretaries, only by mail; he did not prefer the foods, the wines, the books, the music — even the music — he pretended to prefer; the habits he had were not his own; he frowned at what made him inwardly smile; he had taught his outer self to strut and curse while his private self cringed; his history was a forgery; his intentions could not be read; and when he said: I can play the organ, he meant: One day I will. In short, everything about Skizzen was askew.
His head was full of his own defense. In spite of himself, he rehearsed his forthcoming trial; he bore witness to his own worth; he thrust and parried, proudly protested, lamented and pleaded. Should he use this argument, try that twist, make this move, or exploit that? It was all, of course, done in the hopeless effort to blame his beliefs on the ghost of his father, to excuse his deceptions on account of lofty aims, and to explain his sure and calamitous demotion to his mom.
Analogies occurred to him that happily drew the mantle of malfeasance over others. For instance — if Mr. Mallory, the mountaineer (Joseph thought he might argue), had not belonged to the right clubs; if Mr. Mallory had not been schooled by pros; if Mr. Mallory had not made many preparatory climbs, defeating the most arduous Alpine peaks many times; if Mr. Mallory had instead used the wrong gear, unsportsmanlike aids, an ill-chosen route, and had made his ascent at the worst time of year; if Mr. Mallory had selected an inept partner in place of the redoubtable Andrew Irvine; if Mr. George Herbert Leigh Mallory had had fewer names; if Mr. Mallory had simply walked up one afternoon on his own despite the icefalls and blizzards that beset him: could the envious, quite in the face of these facts, deny that Mr. Mallory was at least a Climber deserving of a middle C, especially at the moment he stood in triumph on top of Everest where his heart would surely be heard when it howled at heaven, though, if truth be told, he was not one of the finer sort, a member of the best set. Would he still be unworthy of the honor due his feat if he were not one of the finer sort then, a member of the best set? should he not be warmed with admiration upon his descent despite not being one of the finer sort, a member of the best set? and his frosted face thawed by remedial ceremonies, although they’d have to be performed for someone not yet, not ever, one of the finer sort, a member of the best set? because he had achieved the peak; he had put his small flag in the obdurate ice; he had bested the best; and it would be only for him to say that his ascent had been a stroll in the park, that he had been grossly favored by fortune, and deserved none of his fame.