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to use the kid on all this stuff?”
    “Hey! I’m right here,” Brenda protested.
    “The kid is vital to the whole thing. She’s your sounding board. If a fact from the old days sounds weird to her, you know you’re onto something. She’s contemporary as your last breath, she’s eager to learn and fairly bright, and she knows nothing . You’ll be the middle man. You’re about the right age for it, and history’s your hobby. You know more about old Earth than any man your age I’ve ever met.”
    “If I’m in the middle…  ”
    “You might want to interview my grandfather,” Walter suggested. “But there’ll be a third member of your team. Somebody Earth-born. I haven’t decided yet who that’ll be. Now get out of here, both of you.”
    I could see Brenda had a thousand questions she still wanted to ask. I warned her off with my eyes, and followed her to the door.
    “And Hildy,” Walter said. I looked back.
    “If you put words like abnegation and infibulation in these stories, I’ll personally caponize you.”
     

Chapter 03
AMAZING!
MIRACLE MOONBEAM CURES ALL!
    I pulled the tarp off my pile of precious lumber and watched the scorpions scuttle away in the sunlight. Say what you want about the sanctity of life; I like to crush ’em.
    Deeper in the pile I’d disturbed a rattlesnake. I didn’t see him, but could hear him warning me away. Handling them from the ends, I selected a plank and pulled it out. I shouldered it and carried it to my half-finished cabin. It was evening, the best time to work in West Texas. The temperature had dropped to ninety-five in the oldstyle scale they used there. During the day it had been well over a hundred.
    I positioned the plank on two sawhorses near what would be the front porch when I was finished. I squatted and looked down its length. This was a one-by-ten—inches, not centimeters—which meant it actually measured about nine by seven eighths, for reasons no one had ever explained to me. Thinking in inches was difficult enough, without dealing in those odd ratios called fractions. What was wrong with decimals, and what was wrong with a one-by-ten actually being one inch by ten inches? Why twelve inches in a foot? Maybe there was a story in it for the Bicentennial series.
    The plank had been advertised as ten feet long, and that measurement was accurate. It was also supposed to be straight, but if it was they had used a noodle for a straightedge.
    Texas was the second of what was to be three disneylands devoted to the eighteenth century. Out here west of the Pecos we reckoned it to be 1845, the last year of the Texas Republic, though you could use technology as recent as 1899 without running afoul of the anachronism regulations. Pennsylvania had been the first of the triad, and my plank, complete with two big bulges in the width and a depressing sag when held by one end, had been milled there by “Amish” sawyers using the old methods. A little oval stamp in a corner guaranteed this: “Approved, Lunar Antiquities Reproduction Board.” Either the methods of the 1800’s couldn’t reliably produce straight and true lumber, or those damn Dutchmen were still learning their craft.
    So I did what the carpenters of the Texas Republic had done. I got out my plane (also certified by the L.A.R.B.), removed the primitive blade, sharpened it against a home-made whetstone, re-attached the blade, and began shaving away the irregularities.
    I’m not complaining. I was lucky to get the lumber. Most of the cabin was made of rough-hewn logs notched together at the ends, chinked with adobe.
    The board had turned gray in the heat and sun, but after a few strokes I was down to the yellow pine interior. The wood curled up around the blade and the chips dropped around my bare feet. It smelled fresh and new and I found myself smiling as the sweat dripped off my nose. It would be good to be a carpenter, I thought. Maybe I’d quit the newspaper business.
    Then the blade broke and