He plainly thought the question rhetorical, but she answered it. "An up-and-coming SF author, if you must know. You've been picking books off the shelves; why don't you get mine out?" There were four of them, three novels and a collection of stories, published, Pete noticed, under her own name. She said, "You can see I don't have to steal everything I do. That's come in handy, because some of what I've sold wouldn't be publishable in a science fiction magazine in the 1980s."

Pete pointed to the magazine with the rabbit on the cover. "After seeing that, I'd think you could get anything into print."

She smiled. "In that sense, you can, pretty much. But not everything I've written myself is science fiction, if you see what I mean."

"Oh." Pete and McGregor looked at each other. The writer asked in a low voice, "Which ones are real?"

"To hell with that." McGregor made an impatient gesture. He peered at Michelle over the top of his glasses. "You're saying you have some reason besides the strictly personal for doing what you're doing."

Relief showed on her face. "Yes, I do."

"It had better be a good one."

"I think it is."

The Astonishing editor waited, but she said nothing more. Finally he barked, "Well?"

"Think it through for yourself," she said. Nothing could have been better calculated to engage his interest. "You, too, Pete," she urged. "You must have read a fair number of the stories I've had published?I won't call them mine if that offends you. What do they have in common?"

Not much, was Pete's first thought. They were too diverse?and no wonder, if they actually came from many different pens.

But McGregor saw what she was driving at. He was more used to considering a number of stories together than Pete. He said slowly, "If I had to pick any one thing, it would be the way your characters attack problems. They all have a knack for applying knowledge logically."

"Thanks," she said. "That's one of the main ideas I've been trying to get across." She turned to Pete, asked with seeming irrelevance, "You have school-age kids, don't you?"

"A couple of boys," he nodded. "Why?"

"How are they learning to read?"

He made a sour face. "About how you'd guess?this current idiocy of pictures and 'looking at the shape of the whole word,' whatever that means. It doesn't matter. When Carl turned four, I bought an old phonics reader at a secondhand bookstore and taught him myself, the right way; I did the same for his brother a year later. They're both near the top of their classes now."

"I'm sure they are. But what about the children whose parents didn't bother? How well are they going to do when they come across an unfamiliar word? You're a good SF writer?extrapolate. What happens when those kids grow up? What happens when some of them become teachers and try to teach their sons and daughters to read?"

Pete thought about that, and did not like the answer he came up with. "You're telling us that's how it's going to be?"

"I'm afraid I am. You can watch out for something called 'new math,' too, which is just as delightful as reading through pictures."

"Thirty-odd years isn't that long a time," McGregor protested. "When the Roman Empire fell in the west, it took generations for the decline in literacy to become as widespread as you're implying. And we're starting at a much higher level than the Romans ever reached."

"True enough," Michelle said, "but then, the Romans were carrying on as best they could, trying to preserve what they had with the barbarians at the gates."

She stopped there, letting the two men follow her train of thought for themselves. "You mean we don't?" Pete said. His fist clenched; the notion that the United States, having surmounted the Depression and World War II, put western Europe back on its feet, and contained the Reds in Korea, could suffer a loss of will, was enough to infuriate him.

As was so often true, James McGregor asked the question that needed asking. "What went?er, goes?wrong?"

"My hindsight isn't long enough to be sure," Michelle said, "but I can put my finger on a couple of things. One is education, as I said. Another is the hangover from the war in Vietnam."

"In where?" the editor said, but Pete's memory jogged back to his thoughts when he was about to read "Reactions." He exclaimed, "Oh, my God! Tet Offensive!"

McGregor stared from one of them to the other. "You're not telling me that one's based on fact?" he demanded of Michelle. At her nod, he gave a rueful laugh. He said, "You know, when you sent it to me, I almost bounced it because it seemed too unlikely for the readers to believe. The only things that saved it were the gadgetry on the one hand and the fact that it was internally self-consistent on the other. No wonder, I guess." He was still shaking his head.

"No wonder at all," Michelle said. "The war is one of the reasons a magazine can cost five dollars. There wasn't?won't be?enough money to pay for guns and butter both, so the printing presses tried to make up the difference."

"That always happens," Pete said.

"Yes, but I think it was the least of the damage," Michelle replied. "What is it Heinlein says??it doesn't matter if a hamburger costs ten dollars as long as there's plenty of hamburger. The harm done the country's institutions was worse."

"The riots and marches and such?" Pete asked; they had only been sketched in as background to the story, but they formed a constant counterpoint to the fighting that occupied center stage.

"Those are just the outward signs of what I mean," Michelle said. "To this day I'm not sure whether the war was right or wrong in itself, but it was certainly botched. People got very cynical about everything the government did (Watergate helped there too), and a lot of them automatically opposed it or thought it was stupid when it tried to do anything at all.

"And with contempt for the government went contempt for organization and standards of every sort. That aided and abetted the failure of education, I fear. And naturally, with the emphasis on the importance of the individual, anything that didn't produce immediate, obvious benefits had hard sledding. Even the space program had rough going?once weather satellites and communications satellites were in place, people took them for granted and didn't think about all the R amp;D it took to get them up in the first place. What can I tell you? The interest of the country just swung away from science and technology. There's no prettier way to put it than that."

"That can't be strictly true," Pete protested. "What about all these things?" He waved at the television, the contraption wired to it, the?what had she called it??word processor.

She pointed at them one at a time in turn, saying, "Made in Taiwan, made in Japan (nobody in the United States manufactures videocassette recorders?we can't compete), made in Japan… the microcomputer is American-built, but the Japanese models are just as good and getting better?and cheaper."

Seeing their stricken expressions, she went on gently, "It's not all bad, up when I come from. Blacks?no, I'm sorry, Negroes is the polite word now?and women have many more opportunities than here-and-now, and a lot take advantage of them. Many people who would die or be crippled today can be saved."

"'Heart Transplant' will come true, then?" McGregor asked.

"Oh, yes, but it's just the most dramatic one of a whole range of new techniques… What else? Well, we're still holding the line against the Russians. I expect we will, a while longer. That's not a bad thing; they're smoother then than they are now, but no nicer."

"All very interesting, I'm sure," the editor said, "but it still doesn't answer the question we've had all along: Why are you here?"

"I thought I was explaining that," she said. "I'm trying to change the future, of course." Her voice took on a fresh urgency, as if she were a lawyer trying to convince two magistrates of the justice of her case. "We missed coming so much further than we did by so little. The moon program petered out?"