So what else could have happened? Maybe—this was a thrilling thought! — maybe they’d let him go! Maybe it had all been a mistake; he hadn’t committed all those crimes after all, and finally the truth had come out, and her father was a free man today, exonerated.

But wouldn’t that have gotten into the papers? And wouldn’t he, if a wrongly convicted innocent man, have returned to his family? Did he even know he had a family? Had Edna ever told him that Myrtle existed? (Edna herself refused to talk at all about the subject anymore and would fly into a rage if Myrtle dared start to question her.)

Myrtle spent nearly every waking moment of her life now going over and over these questions, considering the possibilities, thinking about her father! This morning, driving to the library, she concentrated so exclusively on the enigma of Tom Jimson that she never noticed the ancient, battered, rusty yellow Volkswagen Beetle that had been parked across the street from her house and that then followed her all the way downtown, even parking just a few slots away in the parking lot behind the library building. Nor did she feel the Beetle driver’s eyes on her as she entered the building.

It was half an hour into her workday when the little fat man with the wet eyes approached her at the front desk and asked what books the library had on computers. “Oh, we have a large number,” she assured him, and pointed across the room at the card catalogue, saying, “Just look in the subject heading drawers under computer, and you’ll—”

“But,” he interrupted, being timid and yet at the same time forceful, doing some pointing of his own toward the computer terminal on the counter to her right, “won’t you have it all in there?”

Myrtle looked with a kind of remote distaste at the computer terminal, one of four in the building, put in a few years earlier as part of a statewide program. Money that could have been spent on books, as the librarians often told one another. “Oh, that,” she said. “I’m sorry, the person who runs that isn’t in today.”

There was in fact no one who ran the computer, and hadn’t been since a few months after the four were installed. At that time, a half-day orientation course had been offered up in Albany, and the only member of the staff willing to spend the time had been the most recent employee, a flighty young woman named Duane Anne, who’d just wanted the day off from regular work, and who in any case had shortly afterward enlisted in the navy.

Usually, telling someone that “the person who runs the computer” was unavailable was enough to deal with the problem, but not this time. The little round man turned his wet eyes on the machine, blinked at it, and said, “Oh, that’s a very simple one, just an IBM-compatible VDT.”

“VDT?” She didn’t even like the sound of these things.

“Video display terminal.” His large wet eyes—they did look unappetizingly like blue-yolked eggs—swiveled toward her and he said, “The main frame’s up in Albany, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“The entire state wide catalogue’s available there,” he said, as though that were something wonderful. “Everything in every branch!”

“Oh, really?” Myrtle could not have been less interested, but she did her best to sound polite.

But then the little man suddenly moved, saying, “May I?” as he ducked around the end of the desk to stand in front of the computer, rubbing his little fat hands together and absolutely beaming at the machine. His broad stubby nose actually twitched, as though he were a rabbit suddenly faced with an entire head of lettuce.

At a loss, knowing she’d somehow lost control of the situation but unsure what to be alarmed at, Myrtle said, “Excuse me, but I don’t think—”

“Now, we turn it on here,” he said, smiling, and his little hand darted out. There was a faint flat tik, and the TV screen of the computer went from its normal dead flat gray to a living virulent bottomless black. The little man’s hands touched the typewriter keys, and green letters bounced horribly into existence on that black abyss.

“Oh, please!” Myrtle cried, half reaching out toward him. “I don’t think you should—”

He turned toward her, smiling with pleasure, and she saw his face was really very sweet and harmless; beatific, almost. “It’s all right,” he told her. “Really it is. You don’t have to be afraid of computers.”

Which changed her attitude in an instant. “Well, I’m certainly not afraid of them,” she said, insulted at the implication of primitive ignorance. If she chose to have nothing to do with computers, it wasn’t out of aboriginal fear. She simply saw no reason for the things, that’s all.

But the little man clearly didn’t view the situation that way. Shaking his head, smiling sadly at her with his ridiculously wide mouth, he said, “It’s just a wonderful help, that’s all. It’s a tool, like that pencil.”

Myrtle looked at the pencil in her hand, seeing absolutely no link between it and the machine the little man was now so fondly fondling. “I really don’t think you should do that,” she told him. “Authorized personnel… insurance… my responsibility…”

He smiled at her, obviously not listening to a word. “Now, let’s see,” he said, studying her, but not in an offensive way. “You aren’t going to care about computers, so what shall we access for you?”

“Access?” The word drew a blank in Myrtle’s brain.

“You have such lovely flowers around your house,” the little man went on, and before Myrtle could react to that, could ask him how he knew she had such lovely flowers around her house, he was saying, “So let’s see what all the libraries around the state have for you on flowers.”

“But—” she started, trying to catch up. “My house?”

“Look!” he cried, indicating the TV screen, gesturing to it like an affable host welcoming a favored guest to the best party of the year. “I bet you didn’t know all this was here.”

So she looked at the screen. She really had no choice but to look, even though it was difficult at first to make her eyes focus on those sharp-edged green letters. But then it did all come clear, as though some kind of mist or scrim had been swept away from in front of her eyes, and she stared in absolute astonishment. Gardening, flower arranging, picture books of flowers, histories of flowers: title after title went by, in as much profusion as any spring meadow. “But—” she stammered, “we don’t have all those books here!”

“But you can get them!” the little man told her. “See? These symbols show you which libraries in the system have which books, and this code shows you how to request through the central computer in Albany, and they’ll loan you the books to your library from theirs.”

“Well, that’s wonderful!” Myrtle was delighted at this cornucopia out of the blue, this sudden magic box. “Wait!” she cried. “They’re going too fast! I want to see— How do I order?”

“I’ll show you,” he said. “It’s really easy.”

And the next forty minutes disappeared in a haze of floral technology. With the help of the little round man—he was like the elves in the fairy stories who make the shoes—Myrtle learned to master the computer, the VDT, to ask it questions and give it commands and use it like, like, like a pencil! How astonishing! How liberating! How unexpected!

At the end of the forty minutes, when he asked her if she thought she could run it by herself now, she said, “Oh, yes, I can! Oh, thank you! I never realized!”

“People think computers are bad,” the little man said, “because whenever they want to do something somebody always says, ‘You can’t now, the computer’s down.’ But if you know what you’re doing, it’s easy. Gee whiz, you know, pencils break their points, too, but people don’t panic and say pencils aren’t any good.”