This morning I stopped by Fritz’ to drive him to Charlie’s. He was all dressed up for his visit with the Jack Vances. As soon as I got him to Locus, Charlie and Shelly took him away. They were going to look at some sort of software that Jack Vance, who is legally blind, uses to read and type.

The new hire arrived today, a pretty, roundfaced woman in a Mickey Mouse shirt, with curly brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Charlie got back from the Vance visit in a good mood, very chummy. Harlan Ellison called, and Charlie kept rolling his eyes at me during the phone conversation while Ellison told him some story about about Normal Spinrad saving Ellison’s life in some oblique manner. Charlie also talked about the Vance visit. Much of this was possibly for the new hire’s benefit. (She was in the front room writing out art book cards. Charlie had his voice pitched in name-dropping mode.) Shelly told me Charlie was miffed when Jack seemed to ignore Charlie’s outstretched hand, but she thought Vance’s poor eye-sight, rather than his usual brusquess, was responsible for that.

The software Vance used, according to Wikipedia, was something called BigEd software, created for him specifically by a software engineer named Kim Kokkonen. I never heard anything more from Fritz about it, and I doubt anything came of the visit. Fritz did not even use a keyboard, and wrote in longhand.