"Won't you come in, Captain?" the woman replied.
She led him into a front room which, Ann had once told him, had been called a living room. A peculiar name, surely, for the room appeared to have been designed solely as a place to sit while watching Tri-D—or flat-screen television, as it had been called in its early developmental stage when the house was new—or to hear someone play the bulky instrument known as a piano.
The room was an example of the appalling waste of space so common to the twentieth century. It was extremely spacious, but neither food tubes nor bed drawers were concealed in the walls.
Hunter had always been curious about the piano. It amazed him that it had been operated entirely by hand. There was no electric scanner to read the mood of the player and interpret it in melody. Driven to contrive his own harmonics, how could the twentieth century man have derived any satisfaction at all from music? His sensibilities had been immature, of course. But even so, an instrument which demanded so much individual creativeness must have been an enormous frustration.
Since so many surviving twentieth century machines made the same demand on the individual—their automobiles, for example, had been individually directed, without any sort of electronic safety control—it had puzzled both Hunter and Ann that the incidence of maladjustment in the past had been so low.
The captain dropped into a comfortable, chintz-covered rocking chair—one relic in this island of time that he really enjoyed. "Will you tell Mrs. Ames I'm here?" he asked the stranger.
"I'm Mrs. Ames."
"I mean Mrs. Janice Ames—the owner of the house."
The woman smiled woodenly. "You're speaking to her, Captain, though I must say I don't remember ever having met you before."
"You don't remember—"