“Okay, let’s give it a try,” Hal Walsh said. “David, would you like to do the honors?”

“As a matter of fact, no,” David Goldfarb said. “I want to get the bloody call. I don’t want to make it. I want to see the numbers light up on the gadget here. You don’t know how much I want that.”

His boss at the Saskatchewan River Widget Works eyed him. “Oh, maybe I do,” he said. He dug in his pocket and tossed a dime to Jack Devereaux. “Go find a phone booth and call David.”

“All right,” Devereaux said. He put on his overcoat before leaving the office. The calendar said spring had come to Edmonton, but the weather paid no attention. “I’ll even note the phone number, so we can see if it works the way it’s supposed to.”

“It had better.” Walsh spoke as if a failed widget were a personal affront. That was how he thought, too, which probably went a long way toward making him such a good engineer.

Devereaux slammed the door behind him. David Goldfarb knew a phone booth-a far flimsier phone booth than the solid, red-painted British sort-stood around the corner. With this ghastly weather, he didn’t understand why booths in Canada were so flimsy, but they were. It helped remind him he was in a foreign country. Waiting for Devereaux to call reminded him of the same thing. On the other side of the Atlantic, he’d be waiting for his colleague to ring.

The telephone rang. It did the same thing regardless of where it was. He picked it up. “Hullo-Goldfarb here.” Numbers appeared on the screen of the widget hooked up to the phone, a widget that sent electronic tendrils through the telephone lines to the instrument the person on the other end of the connection was using.

“Yes, I’d like to order some pirogis to go.” That was Devereaux’s voice, even if he was trying to get Ukrainian dumplings.

“Bravo-you just wasted Hal’s dime,” Goldfarb said. Devereaux laughed and hung up on him.

Walsh came over and looked at the numbers, which remained on the screen. “I think we’ve got something here. Police, fire departments-this beats the hell out of having an operator try to trace a call.”

“Businesses will use it, too,” Goldfarb said. “If you have customers ringing you, you’ll be able to ring back whenever you’ve got something on special.” Walsh understood ring, just as Goldfarb understood call; he didn’t bother using the North American term instead of the one he’d grown up with.

Jack Devereaux came back into the office. He was waving a scrap of paper. Goldfarb snatched it out of his hand. He compared it to the number he’d written down. They matched. Solemnly, Goldfarb, Walsh, and Devereaux shook hands. “We’re in business,” Hal Walsh said.

Devereaux said. “Not yet, we’re not,” he said. “We have a useful widget. Now we’ve got to convince people they really want to use it.”

Walsh beamed at him. “You’d be handy to have around if you didn’t know a slide rule from a skelkwank light,” he said. “You’ve always got your eye on the main chance.”

“I should hope so,” Devereaux replied with dignity. “As for slide rules, another five years and they’ll be nothing but antiques. Why get eyestrain trying to read a third significant figure when an electronic calculator will give you eight or ten just as fast?” He turned to Goldfarb. “Isn’t that right, David?” he asked, as if Hal Walsh had challenged him.

“I expect it is,” Goldfarb said in what he feared was a hollow voice. “I’ll miss ’em, though.” He felt very much an antique himself, remembering how proud he’d been when he learned to multiply and divide on a slide rule and how he’d been even prouder after he’d found a couple of tricks for keeping track of the decimal point-unlike a calculator, the slide rule wouldn’t do it for him. He also knew he had no great head for business. That didn’t make him a stereotypical Jew, but it did make him a man who’d spent his entire adult life in the RAF. He hadn’t had to worry about what things cost, or about the best ways to sell them to a public that didn’t know what it was missing by doing without them.

“So will I,” Walsh said. “And you never have to worry about the batteries going dead with a slide rule, either. But if the calculator gives better results, you’d have to be a fool to want to use anything else, eh?”

Devereaux grinned a sassy grin. “David doesn’t think like that. He’s an Englishman, remember. They hang on to things because they’re old, not because they’re any good. Isn’t that right?” he said again.

“Something to it, I shouldn’t wonder,” Goldfarb said. To the Canadians, he was an Englishman. To most of the Englishmen he’d known, he’d been nothing but a Jew. Perspective changed things, sure enough. Before he could say as much, the telephone rang. He picked it up. “Goldfarb here,” he answered, as he had before.

“Hello, Goldfarb.” That was his wife calling. “Can you pick up a loaf of bread on the way home tonight?”

“No, not a chance,” he said, just to hear Naomi snort. “See you when I see you, sweetheart.” He hung up. Even before he did that, he craned his neck to see the number displayed on the small screen of the Widget Works’ latest widget.

His boss and Jack Devereaux were doing the same thing. “Is that your home number?” Hal Walsh asked, which somewhat surprised David-his working assumption was that, if it had to do with numbers in any way, Walsh already knew it without needing to check.

“Yes, that’s it,” Goldfarb agreed. “And I’d say we’re really on to something here.”

“I’d say you’re right.” Walsh looked as if he wanted to blow canary feathers off his chin. The Saskatchewan River Widget Works was his company; even though the phone-number-reading gadget hadn’t been altogether his idea, the greater share of the profits from it would end up in his pocket. He might have picked that thought out of Goldfarb’s mind, for he said, “Nobody will be poor on account of this, I promise you all. I think it’ll be a big enough pie for everybody to have a big slice.”

“Hal, you’ve played straight with us right from the start,” Devereaux said. “I don’t think anybody’s worried you’re going to pull a fast one this time.”

“That’s right,” David Goldfarb said, though he hadn’t been with the Widget Works right from the start. Walsh was the sort of boss who inspired confidence.

He laughed at his employees now. “In the old days, the days before the Race came, I could have turned everything into cash and headed down to Rio. Well, I still could, if I felt like living under the Lizards for the rest of my days. Since I don’t, I suppose I’d have to go to Los Angeles instead.”

“They’d ship you back from the USA,” Devereaux pointed out.

“But at least you’d have decent weather while you were there,” Goldfarb said with undisguised longing. By what he was used to, Los Angeles was liable to be beastly hot, but he preferred that to too bloody cold, which was how Canadian weather struck him.

Jack Devereaux said, “I wonder where the jet stream is this year, and where it’ll take the fallout.”

“Not that much from the Japanese test,” Hal Walsh said. “Of course, they may set off some more.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that,” Devereaux said. “I was thinking of the big dose, when the Nazis and the Race start going after each other.”

“God forbid,” Goldfarb said. “I’ve got family in Poland.” The others wouldn’t think of him as an Englishman anymore, but too bad. He tried to look on the bright side of things: “Maybe the war won’t happen after all. The Germans have been thumping their chests for a while now, but that’s all they’ve been doing.”

“There’s a big part of me that would love to see Germany smashed to smithereens,” Devereaux said, and Goldfarb could no more help nodding than he could help breathing. His colleague went on, “All the same, though, I hope you’re right. There’d be too much damage to the rest of the world to make the war worthwhile.”