Free Snow White and the Giants by J. T. McIntosh Page B

treated, would mar her skin."

Miranda was listening so intently that I was encouraged.

"Her clothes would be old, imperfectly washed with poor soap, or no soap

at all. They'd fit only approximately. If there was a bit of cleavage,

it would be unsubtle, almost as if she'd forgotten to put something

on. Am I making sense?"

"I'm listening," said Miranda.

"A girl of today," I said, "can make far more of herself without really

trying. There's plenty of clean water and good soap, and in this part of

the world we've beaten the insect problem. She wears new or nearly new

clothes, and they fit. Underneath she can wear lightweight machinery

that does a marvelous job on what Nature forgot to do. All kinds of

makeup are available, if she happens to know how to use it, and she

doesn't have to have bad teeth. However . . . "

I paused. But Miranda Said nothing.

"After another century or two," I said, "purely technical things like

better materials and seamless joins will be taken for granted. As well

as that, though, experience in design should count for something. Oh,

I know none of you would wear the clothes you've been wearing here back

where you came from, any more than a girl from my office would go around

in 1666 dressed as she is now. But if she went back -- "

"Don't labor it," said Miranda. "You've made your point."

"What puzzles me," I said, "is your curious compromise. I mean, everything

I saw in the camp looked right. You've all got your hair cut the right way.

Yet just this morning, when you wore a pink suit that would otherwise have

been perfectly all right for Shuteley High Street, it was made of luxon."

"Well . . . that was a mistake."

"I thought only Greg made mistakes."

Rather sharply she said: "It's not mistakes Greg makes. Some of the

things he does he means. Others he just doesn't care about. A mistake

is something you'd take back if you had the chance. Greg wouldn't take

anything back."

"But he just did. He looped Jota back."

She decided to surrender on that, yielding on one more thing that didn't

matter too much.

"Loop equipment is small and light and the effect is purely local,"

she said. "There isn't supposed to be a set at the camp, but apparently

someone's got one. I'll have to do something about that . . . "

"Just minor gadgetry," I said. "Like luxon. Nothing most."

She looked at me sharply, wondering, as she seemed to have done once or

twice, if I was possibly not as primitively moronic as I was supposed

to be.

She told me a little more about the loop technique, and I realized

that I'd been pretty near the mark. To her, it was minor, unremarkable,

which was why she told me about it. In much the same way I might have

tried to explain a zip-fastener to a girl of the seventeenth century.

When small, local disaster occurred, you snuffed it out of existence.

If an axe slipped and slashed your leg, you snapped back a few seconds

and avoided the accident. If a car, carelessly reversed at a harbor,

plunged into the dock, you took the careless moments back and braked

before the car went over the edge. If you dropped a precious vase and

it shattered in a thousand fragments, you turned the second hand back

and didn't drop the vase.

It was a useful but very ordinary technique, possibly more significant

than paper-clips, zip-fasteners, safety-pins and cigarette lighters,

but not to be classed with things like the transistor radio, television

or atomic energy . . . she thought.

And it occurred to me for the first time that Miranda was no genius,

merely an ordinary girl of her time, fairly intelligent but no deep

thinker.

"Another thing," I said. "Food is just food. The quality doesn't

matter. Now that's a real surprise. All the indications are that people

will become more choosy, not less. But the expected doesn't always come

about. I could make a guess . . . Expanding world population makes food

supply more and more difficult. And maybe synthetic food isn't