Waterfalls and Glass #5
Track 2, Sector 3:
”Early for dessert, eh?“ said Panos when he turned up a minute later with two coffee cups and a steaming glass carafe. ”What kind of pie?”
”Hash browns” said Monica ”... and the beef hash ...” ”... and anything else I can make a hash of.“ Panos took this down on the little notepad as if all three were standard diner fare with customary shorthands. Susan added ”hash browns, two eggs over light.”
”Go on about the thing last night. About the machine. I came home to an empty apartment at half past eleven and thought you had decided to hack the night away. One of the Mercy techs who's part-time over here said she got stood up by Chuck for dinner last night. I didn’t have the heart to tell her what for.”
”Oh, well, Chuck had to set up the ... the spectacle.”
”He's nice to everybody at Mercy, I hear. Maybe he needs a pocket diary though to keep his dates with machines from fouling up the others.”
”They don't have a machine at Mercy, Susan, I mean they have that IBM 604 but they don't have a Machine. So I don't see what Mercy has to do with Chuck.“
”Well, it's probably none of my business. Anyway, you got it all working and the folks were there from Census and Lansing?“
”Well, we only actually have one cabinet running, just enough to meet the requirement for this quarter and enough of the machine to run the environmental controls, you know, for the pumps and everything. It worked and enough flashbulbs went off that everybody who could want a picture certainly got one. Oliver did a weird thing.“
”Oliver did an intentional thing that you don't understand. He's like that Russian.“
”Khrushchev?”
”Checkov. The playwright. He doesn't put something out there unless he intends to use it later.“
”Oh. No. I mean, he isn't that creative. He just does everything backwards. There is no plan to use it later. He already did use it just the way we would brush our teeth. Yuck. I didn't brush my teeth last night. Anyway, he did use it somewhere off in the middle distance where he's looking and we're just living through it as it propagates backwards towards us. It's like watching a big oreboat pass on the lake. Boring, boring, boring, then terrifying as the wake hits your little boat. You know, he mostly looks right through people in the present. Like an X-ray. But not the helpful kind when you break a bone or need new shoes. The kind that barrels through, is deep inside you for less than an instant, and has maybe killed you but you don't know it yet.“
"Monnie, that's horrible. What I really wanted to know is am I still going to have a job three months from now. I think you don't know that and I think you don't know that because that big brain of yours was focused on something other than making Packard and Hatch and Allen and all those other fellows satisfied patrons of your computing arts. But today, my dear, is Saturday and you have an appointment with The Machine at the automat. I have a bunch of nickels for the laundry. I'll get the kitchen squared away while you're out and get some groceries in but then I'm going to Mercy to donate blood."
"OK"
"Are you going to be in for dinner? Nancy and Dennis are coming from Detroit and they're going to stay over. I'm cooking."
Panos had also been cooking and arrived with two eggs and an arm of hashed foods which he set down before them. He also set down a small bowl of what looked to Monica like oily martini olives.
"Everything on separate plates, like you like, Monica."
"I don't understand these olives."
"Hashemite. Eat them." And she did.
Susan ate some of her perfect egg and wished she had ordered toast.
"Monnie? Please don't put your feet in that shoe store machine. I work so hard to make sure we can have a safe place to work. I can't have you coming home and watching your feet in X-ray vision like a TV channel. Those things are dangerous."
They retreated to their own thoughts and to their own plates and finished their breakfast in the scrapy, slurpy, but otherwise silent diner. Monica left exact change on the edge of the table for the meal and added a half-dollar piece for the olives. It was extravagant but Panos was silly and thoughtful.
As they walked home they played "Name That Tune", a mutual favorite, and Monica went on at length about the difficulties of getting her version working on the glass semitone bars of the lacquer hydroterms.
"Monnie, I know what a duplex is. We live in a fourplex. What you're describing isn‘t a duplex or any kind of plex but more like a .. like that covered bridge over the Flat river."
"That's half duplex. The road inside the bridge doesn't have a particular direction to it but only one car at a time can go through if they are going in different directions. The other car can't even enter until the first one is all the way out. But on the other hand, you could probably fit four or five cars in there if they were all going in the same direction. You have to have a way to take turns. But if you have a line of cars in each direction and take a turn between each car, the whole thing slows to a crawl."
"So it's like a stop sign instead of a traffic light."
"Right! So it's how often do you switch, which is inefficient, against how long you you let people sit. And so in the music program, I'm having trouble arranging it so that the player at the term can interrupt the sequence of commands playing the tune when they recognize it."
"Are you telling me that your machine is going to be ready for the census but it can‘t walk and chew gum at the same time?"
"Oh, no. The term can handle it. You can multiplex sixteen terms on the same line. The problem is that the new machine is set up for those electric teletypes and the connection to the terms runs through a current loop to hydro adapter. That's the part that can't handle it. The hydro terms have a system called 'flow control' that‘s not in the teletypes yet. New ones that can handle it are supposed to be shipped this year and census decided to go electric based on that. Anyway, none of those new electrics have flowed this way yet and they say that none are coming until next year. Even then, I could make it work as long as the song is 'Jingle Bells' and you guess within 7 notes. The electrics we have now are ASR 28s with French type boxes and IBM Bs. The problem is that nobody makes an electric that can play an octave, let alone three."
Monica took a breath and reflected on what she had just said. There are a lot of problems in the world but most of them have never been said out loud. The act of doing so is a little bit like magic, not because the utterance itself is magic but because it forces the speaker to organize the statement of the problem in a such a way that it can be transmitted to another human and the burden thus shared. It usually surprised Monica was when she heard her own problems come from her lips in this way and unlocked a completely new line of thinking.
"You're ahead of your time, Monnie."
"Is that a multiplexing joke?"
"No, honey."
"I just mean that you can turn the problem around. I love my hydro. The electrics are noisy, their type is bad, their keys are terrible, and they smell bad. Even their paper is bad! The problem isn't the electricity. The machine itself is electric, of course, and it's fantastic. Susan, would you please please call Nancy and ask her to bring her Solovox?"
"Oh, I see. You're bringing the mountain. That thing is a mountain, Monnie, there must be a dozen tubes in there at least and I think the little keyboard is screwed onto their piano now anyway."
"Ok. Ok. I'll go to the mountain myself. No problem."
"Sure, Honey. Go to the mountain, but take the clothes, and the soap, and the nickels, and stop at the automat on the way."
With that they arrived back at their own particular molehill and prepared to set out on a second round. Monica gathered up the washing in Susan's old Army bag. She picked up a semi-lurid paperback with with "Less Than Fair / a Tarrytown Tariff Tale / No. 221" splashed across it and set off for the new automatic coin-operated laundry. Monica snorted to herself as she imagined that it was high tarrifs, and not arbitrage-fuled amory that drove the amount of dress that Tarrytown covers inevitably modeled. She wished that her own laundry load was a little lighter but the machinery room was very cold and she did spill quite a lot of coffee on herself. With the book in her teeth like a fresh-cut carnation (just like Andrea in Blossom Blockade / Tarrytown No. 8 ) she set out.