Written in Time by Jerry Ahern

we’ll have to have some—would be too heavy. Diamonds are portable. Can you use the Internet at the library to research diamond prices, find a source for buying in quantity at the best prices, and determine what type of stone would have had the greatest value a century ago? Stuff like that, David?”  
    “I suppose, but it’s a waste of time.”  
    “Humor your father,” Ellen advised.  
    David nodded his assent.  
    They had never gotten a computer that was capable of going online, merely older machines from mixed parts that were used for nothing more than typing. Jack Naile supposed that now they never would.  
    ***
    Jack’s mother had always made lists, and Jack made lists. For that reason, aside from shopping lists for the grocery store, which Ellen grudgingly composed for Thanksgiving and Christmas, she never did lists at all.  
    But there was an exception to every rule. While Jack typed furiously—she reflected that wrote was a kinder word—on their latest novel, Ellen sat at the other computer and worked up a list in outline form.  
    Everything from electrical and plumbing skills to animal husbandry to pattern making for clothes to passive solar hot water heating to composting toilets had to be considered. Although microfiche would comprise the bulk of their traveling library, there were certain books they would try their best not to be forced to leave behind.  
    Jack believed very strongly in God. Ellen, whom Jack insisted was an agnostic and not the other a word, was the only one of the two of them who had read the Bible. Neither of them went to church, but a Bible should be brought. And, for philosophical comfort, they would want to bring Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Scrap books with family photos were a must for sanity’s sake, lest they forget who they really were and where they had come from.  
    Ellen returned to the portion of the list dealing with household-related problems. Before the children were born, when she’d worked outside the home, she’d made quite a bit of her own clothes. She had always intended to show Elizabeth how, but never had the time. Soon, despite the fact that any sewing machine they would eventually acquire would be hopelessly primitive by comparison to its modern counterparts, she would have the time.  
    Ellen liked to garden, rarely for flowers, mostly for vegetables. In recent years, there had been little time for that. A century away in the past, raising vegetables might not be a necessity, but would be quite practical.  
    There was a second list Ellen was making, one playing off the other. It was a listing of books she must read, despite the fact that they would be archived on microfiche. If circumstances forbade the use of the microfiche as reference material, she would still have her mind.  
    Certain entries on this second list were for Jack to read, books on reloading cartridges—he seemed to be the only firearms writer there was who didn’t reload—books about caring for livestock (which she would read as well), works on electrical wiring and plumbing skills, woodworking without power tools (he’d always said he wanted to build furniture, if he ever retired), books on horseman-ship—the list seemed unending for both of them. Yet it was imperative that Jack’s list be appreciably shorter for two reasons. Most of this end of their current novel was in his hands at the present, so he would have less time. Secondly, she was the speed reader of the family.  
    In her high school days, Ellen had been clocked at twenty-eight hundred and fifty words per minute, with excellent retention. Nowhere near that fast anymore, she could read five books or more in the time it took Jack— whose IQ had measured one hundred fifty six at age twelve but who was a painfully slow, maddeningly thorough reader—to get through just one.  
    As David Naile had begun using the Internet to research the quality, characteristics and values of diamonds at the turn of the century, a