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my eyes out for what I needed.
One thing I wanted to find was the local power substation. In Columbia
City they re generally
disguised as houses, and most passersby don t give them a second thought.
You can tell by the power
lines, though. On a dead-end half-street off Tracy Place, I found the
substation that probably served
vanBecton s house before I located the house itself.
At first glance, the substation didn t look much different from a
normal, boxy, white-brick attempt at
Dutch colonial, but there was a sloppiness in the off-white trim paint, a
hopelessness in the way the lace
curtains in the false windows were so precisely placed, and an
un-lived-in air that permeated everything
from the evenly placed azaleas to the cobwebs linking the porch pillars
to the white bricks.
To me, those were more apparent than the faint humming or the power lines
that spread from the
brick-walled backyard.
I paused, resting my left leg on the low stone wall that contained the
raised lawn, and balanced my
battered case on my leg while I opened it and pretended to check the papers
inside. I was actually
studying the substation, making a few written notes and a lot more mental
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ones.
There were definite advantages to working in more affluent areas, and I
intended to make use of
every one of them. With my notes taken, I walked along the hilly,
tree-lined streets.
Some houses had perfectly raked lawns and white-painted trim that gleamed,
betraying the more
northern origin of their owners. On others, especially those with pillars,
the white paint almost seemed
designed to peel, giving an aura of the lost South, the time that had
begun to fade with Speaker
Calhoun s machinations. Senator Lincoln only applied the last nails to
the coffin, nails that had led to his
murder by Booth, the Anglophilic actor. And yet, despite the fall of
slavery and its lifestyle, vampirelike,
the essence of the-English south still seemed to drift through the Federal
District, especially in fog,
twilight, and rain.
On a cold hard fall day, more like winter, those houses seemed as out of
place as a painted old
courtesan at dawn.
I kept walking until I found Thorton Place, and vanBecton s house. It was
about as I had imagined
it an elegant, impeccably manicured, false Georgian town house with
real marble pillars and slate walks
and steps.
I didn t appear to look at his house, instead sketching his neighbor s
side garden on a plain piece of
paper while I continued studying the false Georgian. There were sensors
mounted inconspicuously in
various places. I really wasn t interested in the sensors but in the
positions of the wireset and power lines.
The large maple with the overhanging limbs offered some intriguing
possibilities.
After I finished the sketch and some brief notes, I made my way back down
Newfoundland, the
other cross artery leading back to Dupont Circle, and a memorial of sorts.
The debate over that state s
admission had nearly led to war with both England and France, and only
the advance of the Austrians on
Rome had held off what could have been a catastrophe. Quebec still made
threatening sounds about
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Newfoundland, sounds guaranteed mostly to extract trade concessions from
Columbia.
Many of the houses on Newfoundland Avenue date from the fifties, with glass
bricks and angular
constructions that seem to lean toward the sidewalks. Nothing is so dated
as past modernism. The
demolition crew working on an old  modern mansion confirmed that, as did
my sneezes at the dust.
Two empty steam haulers waited to be loaded with debris, and I had to cross
the street to the eastern
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side to get back down to Dupont Circle.
When I finished sneezing, I stopped by Von Kappel and Sons, Stationers,
where I browsed through
the rag and parchment specialty items, finally selecting a heavy
off-cream paper with a marbled
bluish-green border. I also bought two dozen large envelopes, the
ten-by-thirteen-inch kind with
accordion pleats that can hold nearly a hundred pages of documents. The
bill for the fifty sheets of classy
marbled paper, two dozen matching envelopes, and the bigger document
envelopes totaled $49.37.
The clerk didn t quite sniff at my half-open trench coat and cheap wool
suit, but he said as little as
possible.  Your change, sir.
 Thank you. I put the bag under my arm and made my way across the
circle.
Babbage-Copy was at the corner of Nineteenth and N, and they had machines
and printers you
could rent by the hour.
The balding young clerk put his thumb in his economics textbook and
flipped a switch on his console.
 Ten dollars. That s for two hours. Copies are five cents a page on the
impact printer. He handed me a
metal disk.  Put that in the control panel and bring it back here when
you re done. Take machine number
six.
He was back taking notes on a yellow lined pad even before I sat down. Why,
with all the Babbage
machines around, didn t he use one for his notes? There was no telling.
Some authors still write longhand,
although I can t see why. Maybe they re masochists.
Still, I had to set up the week, and that meant starting with a
simple one-page
introduction something to tease the reporters. I had some ideas, but it took
me several drafts before I
had a usable piece.
WHAT IS THE REAL PSYCHIC RESEARCH STORY?
A worldwide wave of fires and bombings has struck Babbage research
centers dealing with [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]