A Blink of the Screen

can do it, too. Ask kids today even to repair a TV, they’ll laugh at you, they’ll say you’re out of the Arc.
    I said, ‘Sometimes. If they’re fixable. What’s the problem?’
    ‘That’s what we’d like you to find out,’ he says, more or less suggesting, if we can’t pin something on him we’ll pin it on you, chum. ‘Can you get a shock off these things?’
    ‘No way. You see, the interfaces—’
    ‘All right, all right. But you know what’s being said about ’em. Maybe he was using it for weird kicks.’ Coppers think everyone uses them for weird kicks.
    ‘I object most strongly to that,’ said this other voice. ‘I object most strongly, and I shall make a note of it. There’s absolutely no evidence.’
    There was this other man. In a suit. Neat. He was sitting by one of these little portable office terminals. I hadn’t noticed him before because he was one of these people you wouldn’t notice if he was with you in a wardrobe.
    He smiled the sort of smile you have to learn and stuck out his hand. Can’t remember his face. He had a warm, friendly handshake, the kind where you want to have a wash afterwards.
    ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Thompson,’ he said. ‘I’m Carney. Paul Carney. Seagem public affairs department. Here to see that you are allowed to carry out your work. Without interference.’ He looked at the copper, who was definitely not happy. ‘And any pressure,’ he added.
    Of course, they’ve always wanted to nail Seagem, I know that. So I suppose they have to watch business. But I’ve done thirty, forty visits where afers have died, and men in suits don’t turn up, so this was special. All the money in the equipment should’ve told me that.
    Life can get very complicated for men in overalls who have problems with men in suits.
    ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I know my way around these things okay, but if you want some really detailed testing then I would have thought your people’ll—’
    ‘Seagem’s technical people are staying right out of this,’ snapped the copper. ‘This is a straight in-situ report, you understand. For the coroner. Mr Carney is not allowed to give you any instructions at all.’
    Uniforms, too. They can give you grief.
    So I took the covers off, opened the toolbox, and stuck in. That’s my world. They might think they’re big men, but when I’ve got the back off something and its innards all over the floor, it’s me that’s the boss …
    Of course, they’re all called Seagems, even the ones made by Hitachi or Sony or Amstrad. It’s like Hoovers and hoovers. In a way, they aren’t difficult. Nine times out of ten, if you’re in trouble, you’re talking loose boards, unseated panels, maybe a burnout somewhere. The other one time it’s probably something you can only cure by taking the sealed units into the hypercleanroom and tapping them with a lump hammer, style of thing.
    People say, hey, bet you got an armful of degrees and that. Not me. Basically, if you can repair a washing machine you can do everything to a Seagem that you can do outside a lab. So long as you can remember where you put the screws down, it’s not taxing. That’s if it’s a hardware problem, of course. Software can be a pain. You got to be a special type of person to handle the software. Like me. No imagination, and proud of it.
    ‘Kids use these things, you know,’ said the copper, when I was kneeling on the floor with the interface boards stacked around me.
    (I always call them coppers, because of tradition. Did you know that ‘copper’ as slang for policeman comes from the verb ‘to cop’, first reliably noted in 1859? No, you don’t, because, after all that big thing ten years ago about the trees and that, the university put loads of stuff into those big old read/write optical units, and some kid managed to get a McLint virus into the one in the wossname department. You know? Words? History of words. This was before I specialized in Seagems, only in those days they were still called Computer Generated Environments. And they called me in and all I could haul out of 5kT of garbage was half a screenful which I read before it wiped. This guy was crying. ‘The whole history of English philology is up the swanee,’ he said, and I said, would it help if I told him the word ‘copper’ was first reliably noted in 1859, and he didn’t even make a note of it. He should of. They could, you know, start again. I mean, it wouldn’t be much, but it would be a