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their way to bestsellerdom—but rather her presentation of it, and she was having trouble with its presentation precisely because this damn machine had no reliable capability for error correction. A word processor would supply that lack.
    Impatiently Stevie jabbed the on/off control and let her fingers speak her disillusionment:

    TYPEWRITERS ARE PASSE.

    The Exceleriter had no key for accent marks, and the word passé looked funny to her without the necessary diacritical symbol. (Did the keyboards of word processors have this symbol? She did not know.) Stevie advanced the paper and tried to think of a synonym that would not require an accent mark. It took her only a moment.

    TYPEWRITERS ARE OBSOLESCENT.

    There. That was very good. Happy with this choice, Stevie typed the sentence twice more, releasing much of the anxiety occasioned by her block. What a gas, belittling the heretofore unhelpful Exceleriter through its own stupid instrumentality.

    TYPEWRITERS ARE OBSOLESCENT.
    TYPEWRITERS ARE OBSOLESCENT.

    Of course it was a foolish rationalization, but it was also a form of therapy, and, by indulging herself, maybe she could coax herself back into a productive frame of mind. Scapegoating an innocent typewriter made more sense than going after the president of Pantronics Data Equipment with a .22-caliber Röhm RG-14. And no one need ever know, either.

    TYPEWRITERS ARE OB

    Blaaaaaht! protested the PDE Exceleriter 79. The noise horrified Stevie. Reflexively she lifted her hands from the keyboard and gripped her shoulders. Before she could untangle herself to turn the machine off, however, the type disc reeled off eight more letters and a period without her even touching the Exceleriter. She stared at the result.

    TYPEWRITERS ARE OBNIPOTENT.

    Omnipotent , it undoubtedly meant. The mechanical hangup—the brief Bronx cheer—had not taken place quickly enough for the machine to substitute the requisite m for the b left over from obsolescent . In fact, the Exceleriter had failed to demonstrate its assertion. What it had done, though, afflicted Stevie with an incredulous fear and curiosity. It had typed several letters by itself, and it had somehow typed them in a meaningful sequence. The letters refuted her own self-serving claim and held the implicit promise of an even wider power. No typewriter could perform such a feat without prior programming, of course, but she had just seen it happen.
    “No, you didn’t,” Stevie said aloud. “You saw no such thing.”
    The pleasant low-level purr of the Exceleriter seemed to confirm this assessment. It was eerie, though, and Stevie shut the machine off. The declaration on her paper—TYPEWRITERS ARE OBNIPOTENT—did not disappear with the hum. It stuck around, a ridiculous joke and a threat. An accident, surely, with a subconscious impetus.
    What had happened, Stevie realized, was that she had quickly and inadvertently typed NIPOTENT just before the type disc’s noisy revolt and the machine had printed out these letters after the element righted itself. The Exceleriter had only seemed to be operating independently of her control. As for that particular sequence of letters, it embodied a sardonic Freudian gloss on her failure to get going this morning. She was tweaking herself for her pride, her indecisiveness, her readiness to elude responsibility.
    Or maybe the space heater had used up so much of the oxygen in her little room that she had hallucinated the entire episode. Don Willingham at Barclay Builders Supply had advised her to vent the heater, but Stevie had resisted because of the inconvenience and expense. Maybe, though, the propane fumes and the depletion of oxygen in her upstairs study had combined to play tricks on her mind. Had she really heard that raspberry? Had she really seen the type disc spin out those last eight strident letters by itself?
    Whether she had or hadn’t, the fact of what she, or it, had written would brook no disbelief. It was there to touch and