Every single soul was sound asleep when Digital Dan's Traveling Computer Fair rolled into Panguitch at dawn one Sunday morning. Dan had a knack for finding the perfect spot when they arrived in a new town, and with Panguitch it wasn't hard: the town was small, surrounded by tilled farmland and framed by high mountain ranges running along both sides of the valley. Three long trailer-truck rigs sighed as their air brakes brought them to a halt next to the telephone switching station in the sandlot behind the baseball field of the Panguitch Junior/Senior High School.

Dan's crew had been driving all night. Shortly after midnight, they crossed Muddy Creek, slowed down briefly to look at the dilapidated motel in Mt. Carmel, before moving back into open land past some small farms along the Virgin River. Orderville and Glendale offered no resting spots either, so they kept going; the two-lane highway was completely empty and Dan managed to get their speed up to 70 mph as they traveled through several long north-south valleys with split-rail fences, cottonwood trees, small ponds, and run-down ranches with names like Little Bit of Heaven before finally reaching Panguitch.

"Okay folks, we got work to do," Zoë said, clapping her hands in the dawn stillness, as she walked back to supervise the unloading. Dan's name was on the trucks, but Zoë was in charge of the show; she was tall and slender, with jet-black hair pulled back in a ponytail. She hadn't gotten any sleep last night during the long drive down from Idaho Falls, and she looked like hell.

But there was no need for her to say anything more: the crew had been through this many times before. By 8:00, when the early risers were on their way to morning church services, all of the trucks had been hooked to the underground power lines next to the switching station, and the other cables had been connected; it would be a month before the utility company figured out how much juice had been sucked out of their transformers, and by then Digital Dan's trucks would be on the other side of the country. Meanwhile, the enormous tent had been set up, the wooden deck had been secured, and most of the electronic equipment had been unloaded. Digital Dan's Traveling Fair was ready for business.

Adam Edwilder was the first to see the tent, for the Edwilder property abutted the sandlot. Adam had gone out after breakfast to feed his rabbits; he stood for a moment, squinting into the morning sun as he watched the awnings of the enormous tent fluttering in the breeze, and then he scampered inside.

"Dad!" he yelled. His voice was just changing, a week after his 13th birthday; this time, because of his excitement, it squeaked. "There's a circus in town!"

Thurston Edwilder looked up from the desk in the living room, where he was pawing through piles of envelopes and receipts, looking for his list of appointments for the coming week. There was no room in the house for a proper office; to make matters worse, his wife frowned on the idea of doing business on Sunday. So he looked up furtively; he moved away from the desk, smiling and shaking his head in wonder as Adam bounded into the room.

Even though he had just turned 13, grown women in town invariably turned their head to watch Adam saunter absent-mindedly down the street. The bright blue eyes and the clear complexion must have come from Rachel's side of the family, Thurston thought to himself; perhaps the good-natured innocence did, too.

But he spent only a moment thinking about his son; he had a few last details to organize for his business trip before he could join Adam and Rachel at church. Thurston regularly spent each week driving his territory, which covered Utah and Colorado, peddling his company's wares; he left before dawn on Wednesday morning, and returned at dinner-time on Friday. His employer manufactured hardware supplies and electrical equipment, and depended on traveling salesmen like Thurston to carry the goods to every hardware store, Seven-Eleven, and gas station in the region.

Thurston had spent ten years traveling the territory before his promotion to regional manager. But the company had downsized during the recession; regional offices were closed, and the managers were told that they could open a virtual office at home, and go back to their sales routes -- or find a job somewhere else. Thurston had no special skills, and Panguitch had a dearth of jobs. After a month of interviewing around the state, Thurston grudgingly went back to his old job. It still bothered him, even on this quiet Sunday morning. He sighed and got ready for church.

On Monday morning, Zöe headed for the school while Dan headed toward the sheriff's office. It usually worked best this way: schools responded more favorably to a woman's presence, while small-town sheriffs felt more comfortable dealing with a man.

Zöe met first with the principal, a balding man named Matthews with muscles bulging out of his short-sleeved shirt. She launched into her standard speech: "We're in town for a week, Mr. Matthews, on a technology grant provided by the state."

"Yeah?" grunted Matthews. "Never heard of it. But I guess I wouldn't have anyway. That's Norman's department."

"Norman?" Zöe raised one eyebrow delicately.

"The science teacher," Matthews responded. "Henry Norman is the man you want to see about your computers."

Zöe rose and turned toward the door when Matthews stopped her with another familiar question: "How much is this going to cost?"

"Nothing, Mr. Matthews," Zöe smiled sweetly. "It's all funded out of the state technology grant."

"A week?" Henry Norman asked a few minutes later, when Zoë repeated her speech to him. "You're going to be here all week?"

"Yes, we are," Zöe confirmed, bobbing her head up and down. "We hope that will be enough time for every grade to visit at least once. And we'll be open evenings, too, for the parents to come see the latest computer technology."

"Not much good it will do them," Norman responded sourly. "You should have brought one of those traveling book-mobiles. Some good books, that's what they need in this town."

"Well, maybe so," Zöe conceded, "but that's not our department. We've been commissioned by the state to introduce both kids and adults in the rural area to computer technology."

"No video games?" Norman inquired suspiciously.

"No sir," she replied emphatically. "Maybe a little demonstration of the latest virtual reality technology, but no games. Strictly educational."

"Well ..." Norman shrugged. "We're getting near the end of the school year anyway -- I suppose it won't hurt to bring the kids over for an hour at a time."

"Great," Zöe beamed. "We'll be ready for you. Just bring them over, one grade at a time, whenever you're ready."

Meanwhile, Dan was being quizzed by Luke Daniels, the town sheriff. This was always the tricky part: there was always at least one skeptic in every town they visited, and it was often the sheriff. Last week, it was the busybody wife of the mayor, who had noticed that the Traveling Fair had purchased no food, no gas, no supplies of any kind; that had taken some fancy talking, and it was a mistake they wouldn't make in Panguitch.

Luke Daniels seemed more puzzled than skeptical; he had never heard of a traveling computer fair, and wasn't sure what kind of forms and permissions would give it the legitimacy that would be required from the insurance company in the event of an emergency.

"Oh, don't worry," Dan reassured him. "We're completely covered. Those state honchos have insured us every which way."

What a rube, he thought, as he continued explaining the virtues of the state-sponsored science project to bring computers to the people. Daniels frowned through the entire speech, leaning so far back in his ancient desk chair that it groaned and threatened to break. But after 15 minutes, he agreed that no forms needed to be filled out, no permissions were needed. Dan reached across the desk littered with paper coffee cups to shake Daniels' hand, and gave him a last toothy grin as he turned to go.

It was the grin that made Daniels suspicious: it wasn't cheerful or even devilish, it was downright carnivorous. As if the fox had just been given the keys to the chicken coop, Daniels thought, as he shuffled into the back room of the office building, where the fax machine and the xerox machine and a dusty old Wang office automation terminal hummed quietly.

Daniels turned on the modem, and dialed the National Crime Information Center to see if the Feds had ever heard of this too-cheerful fellow named Dan. He had carefully noted Dan's physical features -- sandy hair, green eyes, small goatee -- and had remembered every detail that Dan had described. He spent several minutes punching in his inquiry with one finger, and then sat back and waited as the red lights on the modem flashed and flickered while the modem transmitted his request to a computer that Daniels assumed was somewhere within the labyrinth FBI headquarters building in Washington, DC.

But the information request never made it past the edge of town. This was not the first time someone had tried contacting NCIC, and Dan had taken precautionary steps as a matter of course. When Dan's technicians tapped into the telephone switching station in Panguitch, the first thing they looked for was the line to the police station. All outgoing calls -- voice, fax, and data -- were intercepted by Dan's computers and rerouted appropriately. By the time Dan got back to the command center in the first truck, it was all over; a bored-looking young man described the NCIC inquiry from the sheriff and how he had deflected it.

"Just goes to show," Dan mused, "that you can never tell about these local yokels. But it'll be a cold day in hell before one of these amateurs catches Digital Dan..."

A moment later, Zöe banged open the trailer door and slouched into a chair with a cold beer. "How did you make out?" Dan asked.

"No problem," she answered with a sigh. "The school classes will visit in the mornings and afternoons, starting tomorrow. We'll get the word out around town during the day; they should be back with their parents during the evening."

"We've only got a week," Dan reminded her. "I may have out-smarted the sheriff, but I have a feeling that the other locals will start snooping around sooner or later."

"Don't worry," Zöe reassured him. "It's enough time. We'll get them so worked up they'll pee in their pants. By Saturday, we'll know which one we can grab."

On Tuesday morning, the first-grade school group appeared. Listless for most of the tour, the six- and seven year olds watched with glazed eyes as Dan's assistants ran through their demonstrations of interactive educational programs. "Where's the Nintendo games?" one child whined. "This stuff sucks!"

But on Tuesday afternoon, Henry Norman brought the seventh grade science class and Zöe perked up as Adam Edwilder drifted away from the other children to peer at the display on one of the large color screens. Gorgeous, she thought. Good enough to eat.

"Adam," Zöe murmured, as she looked at the name badge stuck on his chest. "Would you like to see what tempted your namesake in the garden of Eden?"

Adam's blue eyes watched her curiously as she quickly typed a sequence of commands on the computer keyboard. He frowned as a bright red apple suddenly appeared on the screen, but then smiled as it began to rotate slowly, mimicking a three-dimensional display by casting a simulated shadow as it spun.

"That's just the beginning," Zöe whispered to him, as she reached behind the computer display monitor to pull out a series of contraptions connected to the computer by long, black cables.

"What's that?" Adam asked innocently.

"Virtual reality," Zöe responded in a syrupy voice. She touched him gently, sliding a long delicate finger across his cheek. "Here, put this helmet on. And the gloves, too. Then reach out and see if you can grab the apple."

It took a few seconds for Adam to adjust the helmet so that he could see through the darkened visor; the gloves fit easily, and he slid them onto his hands. He moved one hand, then the other -- tentatively at first, then with more and more confidence. A smile grew on his lips.

Suddenly, his muscles tensed and he jerked back. "Who's that talking to me?" he asked loudly, with the exaggerated voice children use when wearing a Walkman tape unit.

"It's just the computer," Zöe answered. "But we've programmed it to sound like Eve, in the Bible. Don't worry -- she won't hurt you. She likes you. You can trust her."

"Trust who?" a voice behind Zöe asked skeptically.

Zöe whirled around. It was Henry Norman, scowling at the apparatus that Adam was wearing.

"It's a virtual reality demonstration," Zöe reassured him. "Nothing to worry about. We're just showing the students that computers have become so powerful they can simulate almost any human experience or emotion."

"Hell's gonna freeze over before a computer can simulate real emotions," Norman grumbled. "Anyway, you're going to have to unhook him: I've got the get the class back to school."

"It will take just another minute or two," Zöe murmured, watching Adam as he moved a step closer to the computer display, reaching both hands out to grab the apple.

"I don't have another minute," Norman exclaimed peevishly. He strode past Zöe and lifted the helmet off Adam's head.

Adam sagged back against Norman's body. He blinked and shook his head; then he turned and smiled at Zöe. "That was amazing," he said. "I could almost taste the apple. Can I come back sometime and try again?"

"Absolutely," Zöe said, while looking carefully at Norman. "Come back anytime; we're open until ten o'clock."

After-school band practice and chores filled Adam's time until dinner; there was no time for an afternoon visit. But at dinner, he asked the obvious question: would Thurston and Rachel take him for a tour of the computer fair in the evening?

"It's really neat, Dad," Adam exclaimed. "They have lots of stuff that you would like, too."

Rachel demurred; she spent Tuesday evenings with her choir group at the local church. Consequently, Thurston was left in charge of supervising Adam and his homework; and since he regularly left town before Adam awoke on Wednesday mornings, Tuesday evening was a time of considerable guilt and frustration. He vacillated between spending time with his son and organizing his paperwork for the three-day road trip.

On this particular Tuesday evening, Thurston was feeling especially frustrated; he and Rachel had argued once again about the encroachment of his office within Rachel's neatly organized living room. No matter how hard he tried, Thurston was unable to convey how frustrated he felt by the invasion of privacy that accompanied his working at home.

When the bigwigs at headquarters had told him he would be losing his office, Thurston's first concern had been the lack of a secretary. No secretary meant no buffer to protect him from angry customers, nagging managers, and all the other idiots who wanted to talk to him on the phone. But it was worse than that: working at home meant that Rachel and the neighbors wandered in all during the day to pester him, for they assumed that Thurston wasn't really working. The mail-man, the UPS man, and the gas meter-reader all felt that Thurston was one of their buddies; whenever they came by, they invariably spent half an hour chatting.

In a moment of exasperation this afternoon, Thurston had told Rachel that such interruptions were as invasive as if someone wandered into the bathroom while he was sitting on the toilet. But Rachel was offended; she didn't tolerate anything even remotely obscene, and as a result the analogy was lost on her.

Thurston was so angered by the argument that he knew it would be impossible to get any further work done -- even if Rachel was gone for the rest of the evening. So he relented and told Adam that as soon as the dishes were washed and his evening chores were done, they would spend an hour visiting the computer fair.

At the fair, Thurston was fascinated by the technology display that had been set up for the adults: notebook computers, battery-powered laser printers, wireless modems, and a host of electronic gadgets that Thurston had seen only in magazines. Some of the big-shots at his company headquarters had this technology, but the field staff had nothing but telephone credit cards.

Thurston couldn't help lusting for the magic of e-mail, voice-mail, and computer-generated faxes. It looked better than sex; he felt sinful. He sighed -- he couldn't afford any of this technology on his own, and there would be the devil to pay if he tried to charge it on his expense account. And besides, Rachel had given strict instructions that Adam be home by 9 PM.

But Adam was in no mood to go. "Puh-leeeze, Dad!" he begged, as Zoë hovered over him, waiting for another chance to show him the virtual reality demonstration.

As Thurston hesitated, Dan suddenly swooped in. Zöe had already told him about Adam, and he had watched knowingly as Thurston ran his fingers over a 3-pound color subnotebook machine.

Why don't you borrow it for a couple of days?" he asked.

Thurston was startled. "That's awfully Christian of you," he responded, "but I wouldn't have time to play with it. I'm leaving on a trip tomorrow, and I won't be back until Friday night."

"Take it along with you," Dan offered magnanimously, while Zöe smiled sweetly at him. "Try out all of this stuff, so you can tell the other parents and kids in town that it really works!"

Thurston objected feebly, and before he knew what was happening, he was loaded down with two carrying bags full of equipment. Dan spent the next thirty minutes showing Thurston how to operate the rudimentary features of word-processing, fax communications, electronic mail, and voice-mail.

"Actually, this has nothing to do with computers," Dan shrugged as he explained the voice-mail features to Thurston. "But you might as well have it all -- and we have the ability to set up your voice-mail account on your home phone line." Indeed he did; Dan's infiltration of the phone company's computer system was more extensive than Thurston would ever have imagined.

"We're going to have a devil of a time explaining this on our expense account," Dan grumbled when the Edwilders finally left.

"Don't worry," Zöe replied. "Consider it an investment. Now we won't have to worry about the parents holding the boy back. All I have to do is get him back here one more time."

Wednesday morning, Thurston put the two carrying bags of computer equipment into the car, together with all of the samples of new merchandise from corporate headquarters; he left quietly, and pulled out of town on State Highway 89 just as the sun came over the horizon. Rachel and Adam rose half an hour later and went about their morning routine just as they always had. The routine at the Panguitch school was normal, too, and several more classes visited Dan's computer fair. To Zöe's dismay, though, the seventh grade science class was scheduled for no further visits.

It was not until Wednesday evening that Thurston began to realize how his life had changed. Rachel didn't know where he was staying -- it was the Road Runner Motel in Vernal, not that it mattered -- and he normally called home each night to give her the phone number in case of an emergency. But this time, there was no need: she could leave him voice-mail, and the beeper on his belt was set to beep at one-minute intervals until he responded.

Nobody knows where I am, Thurston thought, as he sat on the motel bed. It him like a thunderbolt. Not a single damn soul. For the first time since he was a child, when he hiked after school in the foothills behind Panguitch, he was entirely alone. He could call them -- his wife, the office, his customers, or anyone else he wanted to contact -- but they couldn't call him.

When he woke up Thursday morning, Thurston bounded out of bed with a sense of joy. There would be no intrusions today; he had a long drive in front of him, from Vernal to Leadville, and nobody would be able to find him. He dialed a complicated fax-forwarding service that Dan had arranged for him, and downloaded two faxes from his customers; they could wait until he got into Leadville this evening. Then he called the "back-door" number of his voice-mail system, and left a message for Rachel that said, "Everything's okay ... but I don't know where I'll be, or when I'll get in. I'll check with you later."

By Friday morning, the sense of freedom had become an obsession. His motel rooms had become his office; from dinnertime until bedtime each evening, he spread his paperwork across the bed and set up his computer on the desk beside the bed. Every motel was slightly different, but he invariably found a way to connect the computer to the motel phone system to send and receive his faxes. He checked in on voice-mail at breakfast, lunch, and dinnertime -- and downloaded his fax messages once each evening.

At three o'clock Friday afternoon, Thurston finished his last visit, selling a dozen battery chargers to a feisty old grandmother who ran the WalMart hardware section in Grand Junction. He climbed slowly into his car and drove up Main Street to the intersection with Interstate 70 at the edge of town. Panguitch was due west, some 200 miles away; Denver lay to the east. Thurston hesitated for a long time, and then made the turn.

At dinnertime on Friday, Rachel was perplexed: Thurston was usually punctual, but he hadn't arrived. She shrugged, mentally blaming his tardiness on the new-fangled computer toys he had been playing with. In any case, dinner would get cold if she waited any longer; she called Adam to the table, and sat down to eat. All through dinner, Adam pestered her for permission to visit the Computer Fair, but Rachel just shook her head.

By Saturday morning, Rachel was worried; she didn't know where Thurston was when he last called, or precisely where he had been all week. Thurston was too quiet to have gone off on a drunken binge, and she knew that his business duties would not have kept him away on the weekend. Though she hesitated to report him as a "missing person," she phoned Luke Daniels at the sheriff's office just in case -- but Daniels had no reports of fatal accidents anywhere in the state, no news at all about Thurston Edwilder. He promised to call if he heard anything.

By Saturday evening, Rachel was so distracted she could hardly make dinner. Adam was worried, too; he didn't feel close to his father, but he loved his parents in an abstract way, an emotion based on the security of a stable, predictable routine.

"Where could he be?" he kept asking Rachel, as he pushed the peas and mashed potatoes around his dinner plate.

It was Rachel's idea to visit the Computer Fair after dinner; she couldn't face sitting in an empty house, listening to Adam's endless questions. They cut across the sandlot separating the Edwilder's back yard from the Computer Fair, and walked in the front entrance, where Zöe was waiting.

"Your father's not here?" Zöe asked, smiling as she saw Adam.

"He's away somewhere," Adam answered vaguely, gesturing toward Rachel. "I brought my mother."

"Are you here to learn about computers?" Zöe asked politely.

"Heaven forbid!" Rachel answered. She was overwhelmed by the swarms of children and parents hovering around the blinking, clattering, whirring machines.

"Adam was learning about virtual reality," Zöe cooed, putting her arm around him so that her breast brushed against his shoulder. "But we didn't finish the demonstration."

Rachel frowned as Zöe led him away; her frown deepened as she saw the goggles, helmet, and gloves attached to her son. She watched the apple spinning up on the screen, three feet in front of Adam, and tried to imagine what her son was experiencing.

Zöe sighed contentedly; it would be only a matter of moments before it was over. She couldn't push the mother away, but she used her body to block any intrusions from the rest of the crowd that was pushing, squirming, touching, and poking every piece of computer equipment they could get their hands on.

Adam's lips began to move; then his hands moved slowly up and down. His left foot shuffled forward a step, then his right foot. Entranced by the appearance of sleep-walking, Rachel turned to Zöe and asked, "What is he doing?"

"He thinks he's about to go on a journey," Zöe murmured. "But he has no idea where he's going ... "

She turned and smiled at Rachel; the capture was virtually complete now. " ... and God knows he'll never get back."

The words jolted Rachel. She lunged forward and lifted the helmet off Adam's head; he sagged wordlessly against her as she stripped the gloves off his hands. She turned to rebuke the woman who had tried to lure her son away, but Zöe was gone. The crowd was swirling, swarming, pressing closer; another child grabbed the gloves from Rachel's hands and the boy's father laughed as he placed the goggles on his son's head.

When they got home, Adam went to the phone in the kitchen and dialed the back-door number to see if there were any voice-mail messages; there were none. Then he dialed the Edwilder home phone number to leave a message of his own for his father. When the voice-mail system connected, it first played the outgoing message a digital nomad had left for the world to hear: "This is Thurston Edwilder. I'm gone. I'm not quite sure where I'll be or if I'll ever get back -- so leave a message at the tone."

Adam listened quietly, then hung up the phone. He went to bed and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Just before dawn the next morning, Digital Dan's Traveling Computer Fair silently pulled out of town. Every single soul in Panguitch was still sound asleep, but there was one less than the week before.

"We didn't get the one we wanted," Zöe groused.

"You can't always get what you wa-ant," Dan hummed, in an unearthly rendition of Mick Jagger. "It's better than nothing."

Copyright (c) 1995 by Edward Yourdon. All rights reserved. Please respect the copyright associated with this material. It's intended for review and commentary only; this short story may not be reproduced, eaten, sold, or distributed without my express written permission. I would appreciate your feedback: comments, suggestions, criticisms, kudos, war stories, dark secrets, good jokes, wild ideas, etc. Please send them to me by e-mail at ed@yourdon.com.