Robert Silverberg - What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper

It’s a bad case of entropic creep Mike said.

I wonder if the newspapers were ever identical to each other I said. We should have compared them on the first day. Now we’ll never know whether we all had the same starting point.

Let’s check out the other pages Bill.

We compared things. The front page headlines were all the same but there were little differences in the writing. The classified ads had a lot of rearrangements. Some of the death notices were different. All in all the papers were similar but not anything like identical.

How can this be happening I asked? How can words on a printed page be different one day from another?

How can a newspaper from the future get delivered in the first place Mike asked?

We phoned some of the others and asked about stock prices. Just trying to check something out we explained. Charlie Harris said Natomas was quoted at 56 and Jerry Wesley said it was 57¼ and Bob Thomason found that the whole stock market page was too blurry to read although he thought the Natomas quote was 57½. And so on. Everybody’s paper slightly different.

Entropic creep. It’s hitting hard.

What can we trust? What’s real?

Saturday afternoon Bob Thomason came over very agitated. He had his newspaper under his arm. He showed it to me and said look at this Bill how can it be? The pages were practically falling apart and they were completely blank. You could make out little dirty traces where there once had been words but that was all. The paper looked about a million years old.

I got mine out of the closet. It was in bad shape but not that bad. The print was faint and murky yet I could still make some things out clearly. Natomas 56¼. Levitz Furniture 103½ . Disney 117¼. New numbers all the time.

Meanwhile out in the real world the market has been rallying for a couple of days right on schedule and all my stocks are going up. I may go crazy but it looks at least like I’m not going to take a financial beating.

Monday night November 29. One week since this whole thing started. Everybody’s newspaper is falling apart. I can read patches of print on two or three pages of mine and the rest is pretty well shot. Dave Bruce says his paper is completely blank the way Bob’s was on Saturday. Mike’s is in better condition but it won’t last long. They’re all getting eaten up by entropy. The market rallied strongly again this afternoon. Yesterday the Giants got beaten by St. Louis and at lunch today I collected my winnings from Butch Hunter. Yesterday also Sid and Edith Fischer left suddenly for a vacation in Florida. That’s where Edith’s sister lives, the one who’s supposed to die tomorrow.

I can’t help wondering whether Edith did something about her sister after all despite the things Mike said to her Thanksgiving.

So now it’s Tuesday night November 30 and I’m home with the Post and the closing stock prices. Unfortunately I can’t compare them with the figures in my copy of tomorrow’s Times because I don’t have the paper any more it turned completely to dust and so did everybody else’s but I still have the notes I took the first night when I was planning my market action. And I’m happy to say everything worked out perfectly despite the effects of entropic creep. The Dow Industrials closed at 831.34 today which is just what my record says. And look at this list of highs for the day where my broker sold me out on the nose:

Levitz Furniture —103¾

Bausch & Lomb — 149

Natomas — 57

Disney —116¾

EG&G —23¾

So whatever this week has cost me in nervous aggravation it’s more than made up in profits.

Tomorrow is December 1 finally and it’s going to be funny to see that newspaper again. With the headlines about Nixon going off to China and the people wounded in the bank robbery and the currency negotiations in Rome. Like an old friend coming home.

I suppose everything has to balance out. This morning before breakfast I went outside as usual to get the paper and it was sitting there in the bushes but it wasn’t the paper for Wednesday December 1 although this is in fact Wednesday December 1. What the newsboy gave me this morning was the paper for Monday November 22 which I never actually received the day of the first mixup.

That in itself wouldn’t be so bad. But this paper is full of stuff I don’t remember from last Monday. As though somebody had reached into last week and switched everything around, making up a bunch of weird events. Even though I didn’t get to see the Times that day I’m sure I would have heard about the assassination of the Governor of Missouri. And the earthquake in Peru that killed ten thousand people. And Mayor Lindsay resigning to become Nixon’s new Secretary of State. Especially about Mayor Lindsay resigning to become Nixon’s new Secretary of State. This paper has to be a joke.

But what about the one we got last week? How about those stock prices and the sports results?

When I get into the city this morning I’m going to stop off first thing at the New York Public Library and check the file copy of the November 22 Times. I want to see if the library’s copy is anything like the one I just got.

What kind of newspaper am I going to get tomorrow?

Don’t think I’m going to get to work at all today. Went out after breakfast to get the car and drive to the station and the car wasn’t there nothing was there just grey everything grey no lawn no shrubs no trees none of the other houses in sight just grey like a thick fog swallowing everything up at ground level. Stood there on the front step afraid to go into that grey. Went back into the house woke up my wife told her. What does it mean Bill she asked what does it mean why is it all grey? I don’t know I said. Let’s turn on the radio. But there was no sound out of the radio nothing on the TV not even a test pattern the phone line dead too everything dead and I don’t know what’s happening or where we are I don’t understand any of this except that this must be a very bad case of entropic creep. All of time must have looped back on itself in some crazy way and I don’t know anything I don’t understand a thing.

Edith what have you done to us?

I don’t want to live here any more I want to cancel my newspaper subscription I want to see my house I want to get away from here back into the real world but how how I don’t know it’s all grey grey grey everything grey nothing out there just a lot of grey.