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The computer used no paper till the writing was finished and ready to print; no trees had to die to become paper thrown away for typing errors.
"Wookie," she said, after midnight, "I apologize to you. I am sorry."
"That's all right," I said. "What are you sorry for?"
"I thought you were being a silly gosling, I thought here's just what we need, a big electric toy in the trailer to put us right out in the rain, but I didn't say anything because it was your sweet gift. I was wrong! It's so ..." She looked up at me, searched the word and came down on it center-square: ". . . organized! It's going to change our lives!"
So enchanted was she with the powers of the computer that more than once in the days that followed I had to ask very courteously if it might be possible for me to have a few minutes at the keyboard. I wanted to learn, too.
"Poor dear," she said absently, as she typed. "Of course you want to learn. Just a few minutes more. . . ."
Minutes turned to hours, to days; interrupt her I refused to do. Soon I was back once again from the Apple store, a second computer in tow. For this one we had to set a drafting-table in the least-crowded corner of the trailer, making it the most-crowded corner.
Curiosities, the computers were, but they were compasses, too, through a forest of ideas and schedules and strategies demanding attention. In addition, they could whip out financial statements faster than the IRS could blink; pressing one key, we could bury them in financial statements.
By the time the little house was finished, we were both comfortably expert in driving our smart little machines. We
smoothed them to our personal design, switches set just so, extra memory-boards installed, electronics to link them by telephone to giant computers long-distance.
A week after we moved to the hilltop, the computers were running six hours a day, side by side on their desk in the bedroom-cornerrturned office.
Our vocabulary changed.
"I booted straight into a hang, wookie!" She showed me a screen full of frozen-ant lines. "Has that ever happened to you?"
I nodded in sympathy. "Yep. It's your disk or your drive," I said. "No. It's your 80-character board. Control-reset if you can, or re-boot on my disk. If it works on mine, it's not the board, it's your disk. Maybe your drive speed's off and it ate your disk I hope to God not but we can fix it."
"It wouldn't be the disk, or I would have gotten an I/O error," she said, full of frowns. "I have to be so careful about things that cause the whole program to blow up, or my computer to self-destruct. Like touching it, for instance ..."
Then we heard an impossible sound, the crunch of tires on gravel outside. Up our long steep forbidding drive, through five No Trespassing Keep Away At All Costs This Means You signs, had driven an automobile.
Out stepped a woman carrying a sheaf of papers, daring to invade our precious privacy.
I stormed from my computer out the door and met her before she had taken five steps.
"Good morning," she said politely, in a fine British accent. "I hope I'm not interrupting ..."
"You are," I barked. "Did you happen to notice the signst The NO TRESPASSING signs?"
She froze like a doe looking point-blank into the barrel of a hunting-rifle.
"I just wanted to tell you-they're going to cut all the trees and they'll never grow back!" She bolted for the safety of her car.
Leslie ran from the house to keep her from going.
"They're . . . who's they?" she said. "Who's going to cut all the trees?"
"The government," the lady said, looking nervously over Leslie's shoulder at me, "the Bureau of Land Management. It's illegal, but they're going to do it because nobody's going to stop them!"
"Come in," Leslie said to her, nodding a wordless Down, King, to me, as though I were the family attack-dog. "Please come in, and let's talk about it."
That was the way, hackles raised, I met Community Action-a meeting I had resisted since approximately the hour I had learned to walk.
forty
DENISE FINDLAYSON left u
s with a stack of documents, a dwindling drift of dust over the driveway and a dark sense of oppression. Did I not have enough troubles with the government that now it had to destroy the very land around us?
