I went upstairs. My parents, who for years had been patiently awaiting the removal of the clutter from the crawl space, had second thoughts. What if I injured my back dragging the equipment to my car? Why couldn’t Eric and his father come for the tubes and chassis?

A passage from a novel—the name escaped me—came to mind. It was almost as if, by removing my old childhood toys, I were aging both myself and my parents.

I left the equipment at Eric’s after a meeting of the Kaypro writers group to which he and his father belonged. They lived in a white house in a greeny neighborhood high above most of Washington: a good location for an antenna, a great “QTH,” as Lynn Wilson would have put it in ham talk. The Meyers had filled the house with the paraphernalia of their obsessions. Downstairs Rima Meyer was at her spinning wheel; a huge loom dominated what normally would have been the dining room; and upstairs was the book-packed den where Gene, a Washington Post staffer, had been working on a long history of Maryland.[[85]] No one spoke of the odd juxtaposition—a Kaypro used to write of hogsheads and sailing ships.

Eric, a small, curly-haired boy, helped lug the radio gear into his bedroom nearby. Then we soldered up the Heathkit’s connectors and began hearing international Morse code and Spanish babble on the 15-meter band. He was amazed. I could make sense of the dots and dashes at twenty words per minute; he could copy at only a quarter of that speed. “Hey, don’t worry.[worry.] You’ll learn it much faster than I did,” I said. “You learned BASIC. I haven’t the mind for it. Anyone who can program will be a whiz at code.” And how much more useful computer skills would be. Take communications; 20 words per minute was one-thirtieth the speed of my dot-matrix printer. And yet I was dismayed to hear Eric speaking so enthusiastically of the day when he could transmit in voice. To Lynn Wilson and me, ham radio didn’t exist without code. We were like the old man at my newspaper back in Ohio who couldn’t stand a city room bereft of typewriters. Computers, in fact, had even violated the sanctity of code. A micro’s video display could flash out the letters summing up the holy dots and dashes—the ones I’d so painfully learned in my youth. I felt like a sailboater tipped over by the wake of a motorized yacht.

I snapped off the Heathkit. Eric and I went downstairs where Rima, a tiny woman named after the bird-girl in Green Mansions, was still at her spinning wheel. She dreamily looked up at us and proclaimed herself an anachronism. Children like Eric, she said, would be different from those before them—would think more abstractly in this video-game era. She wrote poetry; she heard voices; would the computer children do the same? I thought of Rob Barnaby, the WordStar writer, who had said he heard “a voice from the back of my head”; it wasn’t the same back-of-the-head voice as a poet’s, but it was there, anyhow. Someday Eric might be another Barnaby.

Later that evening I demonstrated WordStar for the Meyers. Father and son agreed: WordStar moved words around faster than did Select, the word processor with which our Kaypros had originally come. I turned to Rima. “Computers are supposed to be very good for poets,” I said. “You can consider the possibilities. You can learn what words look like before you commit yourself to paper.” Rima listened politely, but I thought I might as well be showing off an electric guitar to a mandolin player. Gene and I discussed the Arthur Clarke connection. It was iffy. The telephone lines might not work; Clarke might be away on a business trip. Gene wouldn’t ghostwrite Eric’s questions for Clarke, but he did have one he hoped would make the list. “At the writer’s group,” Gene said, “this businessman was telling me how he fired his secretary when he got his computer.” How did Clarke feel about such situations? It was a common but acceptable question, I felt—one just as reasonable as any that science-fiction writers and philosophers might raise about the origin of the universe.

Two weeks later I rang Clarke, around eleven in the morning, Virginia time. A little sleepily, he answered. He was tired after a trip promoting the 2010 novel in the United States, and right now he could not recall me. “Remember,” I said, “we talked several months ago, and you said we could get together on the modem.” Clarke had phoned late one evening after I’d written him questions about WordStar, and in a sense we were now even; for my mind had drawn an absolute blank when this stranger had begun in a British accent, “David, you’ll never guess who this is.” Well, I asked now, could we still get together on the modem? We’d run a test to be ready for the questions from Eric and others a few days later. “Call my computer store,” Clarke said. He was using BSTAM, alas, a communications program that didn’t work with my MODEM7 software. Imagine my disappointment. I’d been hoping for quick computer-to-computer contact, over 8,900 miles, with the inventor of the communications satellite; and now a mundane problem confronted us—a simple lack of software compatibility. BSTAM in some ways was a Rolls of a communications program, excellent for transmitting large blocks of data over long distances. In fact, Clarke had used it to send his New York publisher some changes in 2010. And yet, for communicating with me, his BSTAM disk was nothing but a worthless piece of plastic, because it snubbed MODEM7-style programs—perhaps the most common among micro users. It was as if Clarke were a lonely billionaire in a chauffeured Rolls. His ride might be velvety, but he would never meet the commoners in the Chevy in the next lane.

After calling around the country, I finally located a review copy of BSTAM. Eric helped me test it out over the phone. “May I come over and watch you talk to Clarke?” he asked. I hesitated. Hadn’t Eric already modemed his questions to me? His being in my apartment seemed redundant. Then, however, I remembered my youth, when Lynn Wilson would invite me to his attic for DX sessions. It was like angling. Lynn might not snag those stations in New Zealand or Morocco, but it was still the electronic equivalent of treating a boy to a morning of trout fishing in a mountain stream. Now Arthur Clarke would be the new DX. Of course, the Rothman-Wilson analogy didn’t absolutely hold, for Eric knew more about computers than I did. “Sure, Eric,” I said at last, “sure you can come.”

With Eric and his mother watching a few days later, I punched the “0” and confidently said I wanted such-and-such number in Colombo, Sri Lanka. A tape-recorded voice soon came on with a New Yawkish accent, announcing that all circuits to Sri Lanka were busy. Well, what did I expect? Sri Lanka wasn’t one of the great centers of global communications. And yet it still seemed vaguely bizarre. Why shouldn’t Sri Lanka enjoy instant contact all the time with the whole world? Why not? Arthur Clarke lived there. Perhaps on my tenth try I finally heard the musical tone of Clarke’s number ringing. “Eureka!” I yelled. Once more Clarke himself answered. He warned me that he was rushing through a movie project and some books and was months behind in his correspondence; the most I could hope for in reply to the questions would be a series of “Yeses,” “Nos,” and “Maybes.” That irked me. For my enterprise I deserved a response ahead of the other letter writers; in fact, you might say I wasn’t even a letter writer—I was a modemer. I glanced at Eric. He could tell the general direction of the conversation, and he looked just as downcast as I must have. Eric was even hoping—quite unrealistically, I believed—that Clarke might call him at home. “I am starting my own computer software company (R & D),” Eric had said in a preface to his questions, “and I hope to profit in this venture. I am enjoying your book 2001 and want to get 2010. I am also a novice-class ‘Ham.’ If you ever need any software or just want to chat, my home and work number is.... I also have interests in ROBOTICS and COMPUTER HARDWARE, and ELECTRONICS (etc.).” I’d reminded Eric that the technology might fail in my quest for answers to his questions; I hadn’t been so emphatic in warning that Clarke himself might fail us.

“I’m going to need to test the modem, anyway,” Clarke said after a pause, however. He wanted to exchange ideas with an MGM/UA director for the movie sequel to 2001.