Word Processor of the Gods

Olivetti electric had been put aside for the time being on top of one of the filing cabinets.

'It serves the purpose,' Richard said. He nodded at the word processor. 'You don't suppose that thing really works, do you? Jon was only fourteen.'

'Looks funny, doesn't it?'

'It sure does,' Richard agreed.

Nordhoff laughed. 'You don't know the half of it,' he said. 'I peeked down into the back of the video unit. Some of the wires are stamped IBM, and some are stamped Radio Shack. There's most of a Western Electric telephone in there. And believe it or not, there's a small motor from an Erector Set.' He sipped his beer and said in a kind of afterthought: 'Fifteen. He just turned fifteen. A couple of days before the accident.' He paused and said it again, looking down at his bottle of beer. 'Fifteen.' He didn't say it loudly.

'Erector Set?' Richard blinked at the old man.

'That's right. Erector Set puts out an electric model kit. Jon had one of them, since he was... oh, maybe six. I gave it to him for Christmas one year. He was crazy for gadgets even then. Any kind of gadget would do him, and did that little box of Erector Set motors tickle him? I guess it did. He kept it for almost ten years. Not many kids do that, Mr. Hagstrom.'

'No,' Richard said, thinking of the boxes of Seth's toys he had lugged out over the years -- discarded, forgotten, or wantonly broken. He glanced at the word processor. 'It doesn't work, then.'

'I wouldn't bet on that until you try it,' Nordhoff said. 'The kid was damn near an electrical genius.'

'That's sort of pushing it, I think. I know he was good with gadgets, and he won the State Science Fair when he was in the sixth grade -- '

'Competing against kids who were much older -- high school seniors some of them,' Nordhoff said. 'Or that's what his mother said.'

'It's true. We were all very proud of him.' Which wasn't exactly true. Richard had been proud, and Jon's mother had been proud; the boy's father didn't give a shit at all. 'But Science Fair projects and building your very own hybrid word-cruncher -- ' He shrugged.

Nordhoff set his beer down. 'There was a kid back in the fifties,' he said, 'who made an atom smasher out of two soup cans and about five dollars' worth of electrical equipment. Jon told me about that. And he said there was a kid out in some hick town in New Mexico who discovered tachyons -- negative particles that are supposed to travel backwards through time -- in 1954. A kid in Waterbury, Connecticut -- eleven years old -- who made a pipe- bomb out of the celluloid he scraped off the backs of a deck of playing cards. He blew up an empty doghouse with it. Kids're funny sometimes. The super smart ones in particular. You might be surprised.''

'Maybe. Maybe I will be.'

'He was a fine boy, regardless.'

'You loved him a little, didn't you?'

'Mr. Hagstrom,' Nordhoff said, 'I loved him a lot. He was a genuinely all-right kid.'

And Richard thought how strange it was -- his brother, who had been an utter shit since the age of six, had gotten a fine woman and a fine bright son. He himself, who had always tried to be gentle and good (whatever 'good' meant in this crazy world), had married Lina, who had developed into a silent, piggy woman, and had gotten Seth by her. Looking at Nordhoff's honest, tired face, he found himself wondering exactly how that had happened and how much of it had been his own fault, a natural result of his own quiet weakness.

'Yes,' Richard said. 'He was, wasn't he?'

'Wouldn't surprise me if it worked,' Nordhoff said. 'Wouldn't surprise me at all.'

After Nordhoff had gone, Richard Hagstrom plugged the word processor in and turned it on. There was a hum, and he waited to see if the letters IBM would come up on the face of the screen. They did not. Instead, eerily, like a voice from the grave, these words swam up, green ghosts, from the darkness:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, UNCLE RICHARD! JON.

'Christ,' Richard whispered, sitting down hard. The accident that had killed his brother, his wife, and their son had happened two weeks before -- they had been coming back from some sort of day trip and Roger had been drunk. Being drunk was a perfectly ordinary occurrence in the life of Roger Hagstrom. But this time his luck had simply run out and he had driven his dusty old van off the edge of a ninety-foot drop. It had crashed and burned. Jon was fourteen -- no, fifteen. Just turned fifteen a couple of days before the accident, the old man said. Another three years and he would have gotten free of that hulking, stupid bear. His birthday... and mine coming up soon.