Swearing, she ruthlessly simplified her assumptions and tried the regression analysis again. And the oh-so-clever scientific calculator choked on it again. Swearing louder, Kelly did some more simplifying. Not just regression for idiots this time. Regression for imbeciles. She hit the red button with the = sign on it. The calculator still choked.
“Fuck you!” she snarled, and drew in a deep, furious breath so she could really tell the stinking gadget where to go, how to get there, and what to do once it arrived.
Across the dining-room table from her, Colin was reading by the light of the same candles that shone on the uncooperative calculator’s little screen. Before she could fire off all the ammo she’d stacked up, he shook his head. “Don’t,” he told her.
She glared at him. “What do you mean, don’t?” He might be the man she loved. When he told her not to do something she damn well intended to do, though, he could take his chances like anybody else. And if he got in her way, she’d fire some of that ammo at him.
Or she thought so, till he answered, “I mean don’t, that’s what. If you cuss that thing the way you were fixing to cuss it, you’ll wake the baby. Do you want to do that?”
Kelly opened her mouth. Then she closed it. After a few seconds, she said “Oh” in a small, sheepish voice. She sighed. “Well, you’re right. How about if I throw the stupid thing against the wall, or maybe whack it a good one with a hammer?”
“Those’d make noise, too. Here. Wait.” Colin got up. He picked up one of the candlesticks and lit his way over to the kitchen with it. Setting the light on the countertop, he rummaged deep in the bowels of the miscellaneous drawer. The drawer was extremely miscellaneous. Except for maybe the Lost Chord or the Holy Grail, Kelly wouldn’t have been surprised at anything he hauled out of there. He’d recently produced a pair of polished-brass opera glasses whose existence she hadn’t even suspected.
He let out a sudden, pleased grunt and pulled out something in a leather sheath. “What have you got there? A vorpal blade?” Kelly said. “If I can go snicker-snack on the calculator with it, bring it on.”
Bring it on he did, or at least back to the table. He laid it next to the offending piece of electronica. “Not quite a vorpal blade. It was out of date by the time I went to high school, but hey, the high school I went to was out of date, too, so I ended up using it a lot.”
Kelly opened the flap and drew out the enameled-aluminum body. “A vorpal slide rule!” she exclaimed. “Wow! This is retro like Marshall’s typewriter.”
“Uh-huh.” Colin nodded. “The other way it’s like Marshall’s typewriter is, it still works and it doesn’t need a plug, or even batteries.”
“It still works if you know what to do with it.” Kelly aimlessly moved the slide back and forth. “Hate to tell you, but this is the first time I ever tried.” She was fifteen years younger than her husband. When she went to high school, slide rules might as well have been buggy whips. Well, buggy whips were probably staging a comeback these days, too.
“I can show you,” Colin said. “Some, anyhow.”
Multiplying and dividing seemed pretty simple… till Kelly said, “Wait a minute. How do I keep track of the decimal point?”
“Um, in your head,” he answered.
“Tell me another one,” Kelly said. “That’s great for three times two equals six, but you start going batshit when it’s 3.191X104 times 4.867X107.”
He got a faraway look in his eyes. “That’d be about, uh, 1.5X1012.”
She punched the scientific calculator. She felt like punching it a different way altogether, but refrained. Sure as hell, it told her the answer was 1.5530597X1012. “How’d you know that?” she yipped.
“Trick my uncle taught me. He’s the guy who gave me the slide rule. This baby cost like thirty-five bucks, and that was a lot of jack back in the day. Me, I woulda bought an el-cheapo plastic job, but he wanted me to be an engineer like him, so I got this fancy one.”
“The trick,” Kelly said with the air of someone holding on to her patience, which she was.
“Oh, yeah. Your first number was about 3X104. Your second one was about 5X107. Multiply those two together and you get 15X1011. That’s the same as 1.5X1012. You do the same thing whenever you work something on the slide rule. It’s the best way I know to keep the decimal point straight.”
“I guess it would be,” she said slowly, and looked at him as if she’d never seen him before. “If you knew stuff like that and you remember it all these years later, how come you weren’t an engineer?”
“’Cause I couldn’t stand high school. I did okay, but I hated every minute of it. It was like being in jail, only I hadn’t done anything to deserve to be there. Soon as I graduated, I joined the Navy—but you know that.”
“Uh-huh.” Kelly eyed him again, not the same way this time. “And the Navy wasn’t like being in jail?”
Colin let out a small, very dry chuckle. “As a matter of fact, it was. More like jail than high school was, a whole lot more. I didn’t know that going in, though. I was eighteen. I was dumb. But I repeat myself.”
“Oh, boy, do you ever.” Kelly thought back to some of the things she’d done when she was that age. And she didn’t even have the excuse of testosterone poisoning.
“Yup.” Her husband nodded. “I got used to it, though. After a while, I got to where I kinda liked it. Well, except for the living and sleeping arrangements. So when I took off one uniform, I put on another one. I’m what they call an institutional man, same as any other lifer.”
“No, you put the bad guys in the institutions,” Kelly said.
“Less difference than you’d think sometimes.” Colin made a point of changing the subject: “Want to take a shot at square roots and cube roots and waddayacallems—trig functions?”
“Sure,” Kelly said. If he didn’t want to talk about it, he’d clam up bigtime if she pushed. He’d already come out with some things about his past she’d never heard before.
Square roots and cube roots seemed pretty straightforward. So did trig functions. You slid the center piece. You moved the transparent piece with the hairline. You read the answer. It wouldn’t be anything like 1.5530597X1012, or even 4.867X107. You were kind of guesstimating the third significant figure, let alone any past that. In a way, that was cool. No one could accuse you of trying to be more precise than the data allowed.
But Kelly did wonder why no one had ever taught her the neat truck Colin used. Then she quit wondering. By the time she came along, nobody needed to keep track of decimal points in her head. The machines automatically took care of it. And if the machines screwed up, or—more likely—if some dumb human entered the wrong number somewhere, nobody would notice that the answer was also screwed up till something went horribly wrong. Every so often, something did. Maybe it wouldn’t if people checked a little more.
If the scientific calculator was retarded next to the computers Kelly couldn’t access, the slide rule was dumber yet. Trying to set up her problems so she could use it to work, Kelly feared she was simplifying so much that whatever answers she got wouldn’t mean anything.
When she said so, Colin observed, “They built the first A-bomb off calculations from bunches of those babies.” She grunted. She might have been playing with more variables than the Manhattan Project had. Then again, she might not have. She didn’t know one way or the other.