Changing the Past Read Free Page B

good-natured irony. “Certainly not if your name is Jack Kellog.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œWhat’s what?”
    â€œThe name you called me.”
    Dorothy’s nose became sharper. “Yes, your own.”
    At least Hunsicker now had a place to sit while dealing with the weird events that bedeviled him. He sank into the chair behind his desk.
    Suddenly Dorothy became concerned. “Are you okay, Jack? You’re awfully pale.”
    He tried to pull himself together. Dorothy was inclined to believe him excessively frail and older than he was. “I’m not ill,” he said. “I’m preoccupied.”
    â€œWhat’s that supposed to mean?”
    Carrie Janes looked up. She had been distracted from her manuscript and was irritated. The expression caused her face to become a pinched bag. Her eyes were slightly glassy from contact lenses.
    Hunsicker told Dorothy, “Don’t worry about it.”
    She was miffed and turned away.
    He briskly pulled the chair up to his desk, got his eyeglasses from the case in his left inside breast pocket, and having taken the wallet from the corresponding pocket on the right, examined the documents of identification he found there: several credit cards; a little plastic rectangle supplied by the head office of his health plan, with blood type, the address of next of kin, and a negative response to the question of possible allergies to medication; finally, a driver’s license and a car-registration certificate.
    Each of these documents identified a John A. Kellog, and the license bore a photograph of himself.
    Myron Beckersmith closed, with a snap, the reference book he had taken from the shelves. “Say, Jack,” said he, “aren’t there such things as French slang dictionaries? If so, can’t we get one? This is the third manuscript I’ve done in the past year that’s had words and phrases that I can’t find in here.” He slapped the fat volume he was holding; Hunsicker recognized it as their French-English dictionary, published at least thirty years before. “I always have to query the authors. Couldn’t we get something?”
    Beckersmith often requested improvements in equipment and materials. The copy-editors asked questions of the authors on little gummed tags attached to the edge of a page. Hunsicker’s department used the old-fashioned kind the glue of which must be moistened. Myron, perhaps not unreasonably, wanted the self-stick type, but it was not he who had to present this expensive plea to the managing editor, a tightfisted woman whose only apparent interest in books was to produce them as cheaply as possible. But no doubt she had her problems too and was probably oppressed by higher-placed executives. Hunsicker had a certain at least potential sympathy for most human beings.
    But that had been Hunsicker. Kellog was another man. “Sure,” he told Myrón now. “I’ll check the main public library and see what they have.”
    Carrie, more irritated than ever by the new intrusion into her consciousness, looked up and asked, “What word are you looking for?”
    Myron obviously disliked her, as did Dorothy. He frowned and said, “It’s a phrase: faire minette . ‘Do a kitty’? ‘Play with the pussycat’? That doesn’t make sense in the context.”
    Carrie said coldly, “Oral sex.” Myron took too long to understand. “Eating pussy,” she added in impatience. He flushed.
    Dorothy rolled her eyes and snickered.
    Jack Kellog put away the documents that identified him. “With Carrie on hand, we don’t need reference books,” he said with superficial lightheartedness, rising from the chair. “But I’ll go over to the library right now and see what I can find.”
    Dorothy curled her lip in disapproval. “You just got back. You could just look in Books in Print and save a