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jammed into the wood. My palm slipped off the knob in front and tried to skate across the fresh-planed surface, driving long splinters into my skin. The plane clattered off the board and went for my toe with the hellish accuracy of a pain-guided missile.
    I shouted a few words rarely heard in 1845, and some uncommon even in the 23rd century. I hopped around on one foot. Another lost art, hopping.
    “It could have been worse,” a voice said in my ear. It was either incipient schizophrenia, or the Central Computer. I bet on the CC.
    “How? By hitting both feet?”
    “Gravity. Consider the momentum such a massive object could have attained, had this really been West Texas, which lies at the bottom of a spacetime depression twenty-five thousand miles per hour deep.”
    Definitely the CC.
    I examined my hand. Blood was oozing from it, running down my forearm and dripping from the elbow. But there was no arterial pumping. The foot, though it still hurt like fire, was not damaged.
    “You see now why laborers in 1845 wore work boots.”
    “Is that why you called, CC? To give me a lecture about safety in the work place?”
    “No. I was going to announce a visitor. The colorful language lesson was an unexpected bonus of my tuning in on—”
    “Shut up, will you?”
    The Central Computer did so.
    The end of a splinter protruded from my palm, so I pulled on it. I got some, but a lot was still buried in there. Others had broken off below skin level. All in all, a wonderful day’s work.
    A visitor? I looked around and saw no one, though a whole tribe of Apaches could have been hiding in the clumps of mesquite. I had not expected to see any sign of the CC. It uses the circuitry in my own head to produce its voice.
    And it wasn’t supposed to manifest itself in Texas. As is often the case, there was more to the CC than it was telling.
    “CC, on-line, please.”
    “I hear and obey.”
    “Who’s the visitor?”
    “Tall, young, ignorant of tampons, with a certain puppy-like charm—”
    “Oh, Jesus.”
    “I know I’m not supposed to intrude on these antique environments, but she was quite insistent on learning your location, and I thought it better for you to have some forewarning than to—”
    “Okay. Now shut up.”
    I sat in the rickety chair which had been my first carpentry project. Being careful of the injured hand, I pulled on the work boots I should have been wearing all along. The reason I hadn’t was simple: I hated them.
    There was another story for Walter. Shoes. If Lunarians wear them, they tend to be the soft kind, like moccasins, or socks. Reason: in a crowded urban environment of perfectly smooth floors and carpets and a majority of bare-foot people, hard shoes are anti-social. You could break someone else’s toes.
    Once I had my feet jammed into the smelly things I had to search for the buttonhook. Buttons, on shoes! It was outrageous. How had people ever tolerated such things? To add insult to inutility, the damn things had cost me a fortune.
    I stood and was about to head into town when the CC spoke again.
    “If you leave those tools out and it rains, they will combine with the oxygen in the air in a slow combustion reaction.”
    “Rust is too poor a word for you, right? It rains out here…  what? Once every hundred days?”
    But my heart wasn’t in it. The CC was right. If button-up torture devices were expensive, period tools were worth a king’s ransom. My plane, saw, hammer and chisel had cost a year’s salary. The good news was I could re-sell them for more than I paid…  if they weren’t rusted.
    I wrapped them in an oiled cloth and stowed them carefully in my toolbox, then headed down the trail toward town.
     
    I was in sight of New Austin before I spied Brenda, looking like an albino flamingo. She was standing on one leg while the other was turned around so the foot was at waist level, sole upward. To do it she had twisted at hip and knee in ways I hadn’t thought humanly possible.