furnished in such luxury as he had never seen in real life, but only in historical plays. Yet that, of course, was completely appropriate; he was living in the middle of history. This mansion had been built before the first man had ventured beyond the atmosphere, and he guessed that most of its fittings were
contemporary. The cabinets full of delicate glassware, the oil paintings, the quaint old photographs of stiffly posed and long-forgotten eminences (perhaps the original Washington — no, cameras hadn't been
invented then), the heavy drapes — none of these could have been matched on Titan, and Duncan doubted
if their holographic patterns were even stored in the Central Library.
The very communications console looked as if it dated back to the last century. Although all the
elements were familiar — the blank gray screen, the alphanumeric keyboard, the cameral lens and speaker grille — something about the design gave it an old-fashioned appearance. When he felt that he could
again walk a few yards without danger of collapse, Duncan made his way cautiously to the console and
parked himself heavily on the chair in front of it.
The type and serial numbers were in the usual place, tucked away at the side of the screen. Yes, there was a date — 2183. It was almost a hundred years old.
Yet apart from a slight fuzziness of the "e" and "a" on the contact pads, there was practically no sign of wear. And why should there be, in a piece of equipment that did not contain a single moving part?
This was another sharp reminder that Earth was an old world, and had learned to conserve the past.
Novelty for its own sake was an unlamented relic of centuries of waste. If a piece of equipment
functioned satisfactorily, it was not replaced merely because of changes in style, but only if it broke down, or there was some fundamental improvement in performance. The home communications console — or
Comsole — had reached its technological plateau in the early twenty-first century, and Duncan was
prepared to bet that there were units on Earth that had given continuous service for over two hundred
years.
And that was not even one tenth of the history of this world. For the first time in his life, Duncan felt an almost overwhelming sense of inferiority. He had not really believed that the Terrans would regard
him as a barbarian from the outer darkness, but now he was not so sure.
18
Embassy
Duncan's Minisec had been a parting gift from Colin, and he was not completely familiar with its
controls. There had been nothing really wrong with his old unit, and he had left it behind with some
regret; but the casing had become stained and battle-scarred, and he had to agree that it was not elegant enough for Earth.
The ‘Sec was the standard size of all such units, determined by what could fit comfortably in the
normal human hand. At a quick glance, it did not differ greatly from one of the small electronic
calculators that had started coming into general use in the late twentieth century. It was, however,
infinitely more versatile, and Duncan could not imagine how life would be possible without it.
Because of the finite size of clumsy human fingers, it had not more controls than its ancestors of three centuries earlier. There were fifty neat little studs; each, however, had a virtually unlimited number of functions, according to the mode of operation — for the character visible on each stud changed according to the mode. Thus on ALPHANUMERIC, twenty-six of the studs bore the letters of the alphabet, while ten showed the digits zero to nine. On MATH, the letters disappeared from the alphabetical studs and were
replaced by x, +, ÷, -, =, and all the standard mathematical functions.
Another mode was DICTIONARY. The ‘Sec stored over a hundred thousand words, whose three-line
definitions could be displayed on the bright little screen, steadily rolling over page by page if desired.
CLOCK and CALENDAR also used the screen for display, but for dealing with vast amounts of information
it was desirable to link the ‘Sec to the much larger screen of a standard Comsole. This could be done
through the unit's optical interface — a tiny Transit-Receive bull's-eye operating in the near ultra-violet.
As long as this lens was in visual range of the corresponding sensor on a Comsole, the two units could happily exchange information at the rate of megabits per second. Thus when the ’Sec's own internal
memory was saturated, its contents could be dumped into a larger store for permanent keeping; or,
conversely, it could be loaded up through the optical link with any special data required for a particular job.
Duncan was now employing it for its simplest possible use — merely as a speech recorder, which was
almost an insult to a machine of such power. But first there was an important matter to settle — the
question of security.
An easily remembered word, preferably one that would never be employed in this context, would be