“Ketting consty,” Maddy muttered as she burst through the door into the back room.
Keltin tapped his reader’s power node and shuffled the stock tablet back on top of the stack. “What’s the matter this time, Sis?” he asked.
“Just some troublemaker coming in and wanting things his own way,” she responded. “Even made his dumb kid ask for it, too. Didn’t have the courage to say so himself.”
“How do you know he’s a throwback, Maddy? There’s no stars and stripes, or anything like that I can see on the viewer,” Keltin tossed back.
“I just do, ‘K?” she looked at him over her shoulder from the stack of bound paper readers she was looking through. “Besides, who names their kid ‘George’ these days? It’s not like we don’t know who he’s named after. Ol’ mister cherry tree himself. I mean, c’mon. Get some originality.” She raised her hand with a book in it. “And who comes in asking for anything by Twain? He’s so 20th century.”
Keltin could see Maddy was holding a tattered copy of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
“I’ll grant you it’s an odd request. But George could be a family name, and maybe the kid’s just interested in science in fiction. You know Pops doesn’t keep anything truly seditious around,” Keltin said as he brushed a lock of muddy brown hair back from in front of his eyes.
“Oh please!” Maddy snorted. She dropped the other magazines and books back on the shelf and turned on her heel back toward the door. “You’re too soft on them, you know,” she said as she strode by Keltin’s station. “You really ought to get out more. See what’s actually going on out there. Not just believe what you read off those official news reports you get back here.” She pulled open the door and wafted back out to the front of the shop.
Keltin dragged the reader back out from under the stock tablet, and hit the power node with the third finger on his left hand. He continued to read where he had left off: “… it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, …”
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