"Nine o'clock," he repeated. "I'll be there." He hung up. Everything is okay, he told himself fiercely; I'm only going to have a look at marvels I won't have the chance to see again. But the interior dialog would not stop: In that case, why are your palms so sweaty? came the next question. His response was to ignore it.

As things worked out, he was late; never having gone directly to Michelle Gordian's house, he lost his way a couple of times, and streetlights were few and far between. When he finally did arrive, he thought she had changed her mind and was going to meet him in the house: behind drawn drapes, the lights were on. But no one came to the door when he rang the bell. He went back around the house to the garage.

Michelle was at the word processor when he entered her sanctum. She waved without turning around, saying, "With you in a couple of minutes. I'm working through a tough part, and it's taking longer than I thought it would. Sorry."

He didn't answer. He was not sure she could hear him: a record was spinning on the turntable, and she was listening to it through a pair of earphones. Instead, he walked over to the green-glowing screen in front of which she was sitting. As he came up, she muttered an obscenity under her breath, punched a couple of keys. Pete stared?on the screen, a paragraph had disappeared. A letter at a time, a new version began taking shape.

"I want this gadget!" he cried in honest envy, thinking of scissors and paste and snowdrifts of crumpled paper in his wastebasket.

She could hear?he saw her smile at him. "I think that'll do it," she said. She hit different buttons. A light on the small rectangular box next to the screen came on; the box started chuckling to itself. "Storing what I've written on the floppy disc," she explained, taking off the earphones. "I'll print it out tomorrow."

He must have looked like a small boy who had just lost his candy. "Oh, you really were interested in the machines, then?" she said.

He nodded, but felt his face grow hot at her ironic tone.

She waited until the disc drive had fallen silent, typed out a new command. Pete jumped as the printer started purring like a large mechanical cat. Paper rose at an astonishing rate. "How fast does it type?" he asked.

"About three hundred words a minute, I think," she said indifferently.

He peered into its works, exclaimed, "It's printing left-to-right and right-to-left!"

"Why not? It's quicker that way. It's not as if it knows what it's doing, or anything like that. It's just a tool, like an automobile."

"Yes, but I'm used to automobiles, and I'm not used to this." He changed the subject. "Was the record you had on from your time or mine?"

"Mine, or at least you would say so. Actually, it's pretty old. It's from, uh"?she looked at the back of the cardboard sleeve?"1978."

"That's new enough for me," he laughed. He took the record cover, turned it over. The design on the front was the same as that on the other side: a stylized street lined with geometric shapes running like a purple-pink bend sinister across a black background. "'Robin Trower. Caravan to Midnight,'" he read. "May I hear it?"

He was surprised when she hesitated. "I don't know if I ought to do this to you," she said. "It's only rock-and-roll, but I like it."

"Only what?"

"Never mind. Popular music."

"It's okay," he reassured her. "I like Bach and Vivaldi, sure, but I can listen to Perry Como too."

For some reason, that seemed to fluster her more. "It's not?like Perry Como."

"Is Robin Trower a girl singer, then, like Rosemary Clooney? That's all right."

"He's an Englishman who plays electric guitar," Michelle said flatly.

"Oh." If she thought she was going to put him off, she was wrong. The idea of futuristic technology married to music only intrigued him more. "Sounds fascinating."

His determination made her throw her hands in the air. "All right. Don't say you weren't warned." She set the earphones on his head. They were padded with red sponge rubber, lighter and more comfortable than the ones radiomen had used during the war. "You might as well listen to the first side first," she said, flipping the record in her hands. He saw it flex, and guessed it was unbreakable. He wished some of the hard shellac platters he'd once owned had been.

Then the needle?housed in a more elaborate cartridge than current phonographs employed?was dropping. Pete heard it hiss on the opening grooves of the record, listened to the syncopated thump of drums. He just had time to realize that the sound was marvelously clear before the snarling whine of the guitar made him jump straight up. Then everything was happening at once?guitar, drums, and a singer who attacked his song like a man going after a snake with an axe.

Michelle had the volume up very high. Pete felt as if he were listening to a jet engine warming up in stereophonic sound (something he knew only from a few big movie theaters). "It's not like Perry Como at all," he said. He could hardly hear himself talk. He saw Michelle's lips move, but made nothing of her reply.

He had almost snatched the earphones off at the first stunning jolt, but he soon realized that this Robin Trower knew exactly what he was doing and had his unruly instrument under control. The music was so strange he could not tell whether he liked it or not, but he recognized talent when he heard it.

The song?it was called "My Love (Burning Love)," he saw on the sleeve?came to an appropriately fiery end. In the brief moment of silence between tracks, Michelle said, "The next one's quieter."

"Jesus, I hope so." He lifted off the earphones. "Too strong for my blood, I think," he said, adding reflectively, "That's what I'd call real zorch."

He was obscurely pleased that he had managed to puzzle her. "Real what?"

"It's what the young hepcats say when they mean something like 'strange and marvelous,'" he explained. "There's a bop-talking San Francisco disk jockey named Red Blanchard who's their hero up where I live. Bunch of crazy kids, the kind who dye their hair green or wear purple lipstick or red eyebrow pencil?what's so funny?"

"Nothing, really," she got out after a while. "Plus ?a change, plus c'est la m?me chose, that's all." She studied him. "What would you like now?"

He hesitated but played safe. "If this is your record player, what can your TV do?"

She shrugged, turned it on. The picture filled the screen much more quickly than on the sets with which he was familiar, and it was very sharp, but the difference seemed of degree rather than of kind. He was disappointed. He must have shown it, for she said, "Remember, it can only give back the signal it's getting. However?" She went over to her desk, took out a plastic case a little larger than a fat paperback. "A videocassette," she said, loading it into the box attached to the television.

"Magnetic tape?" Pete asked, and at her startled nod he said smugly, "They were talking about it in Time last month."

"That'll teach me to show off. I ought to tell you this is old too. I've seen it a million times, but I never mind watching it again."

He did not answer. He was staring at the words flowing across the starry background: "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…" The story background being laid out mattered much less to him than the fact that the lettering was glowing gold. There had been talk of color TV for years, but unexpectedly seeing one was something else again.

Michelle brought her desk chair over next to his. He felt about seventeen, at the movies with a date. The headlong action of the space opera he was watching only added to the feeling; it reminded him of a film made by splicing several months' worth of serials together.

Halfway through, he burst out, "My Lord, that's Alec Guinness!" The actor's snow-white beard brought home the inexorable passage of time even more starkly than the calculator card Michelle carried; Pete wondered what the years would do to him.