"We cut it out."
"Can you do that? Is that allowed?"
"It's allowed," said Theda, "if nobody sees." She took the cork off the scalpel. "It's the end of the movie. We're going to lose a few seconds of the end of the movie. Is that all right?"
Nicky looked at the strip of ruined tape, lying across the cart under the flashlight. He looked at her hands. They were small and square and steady and had a burn scar across the back of the left one from a soldering iron and two calluses on the right from twelve years of files and gravers, and they were not shaking at all.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "Yeah. That's all right."
She cut, clean and square, once and twice. She laid the two good ends on the steel ruler and butted them together so that they met perfectly, without a gap and without an overlap, and pressed a tiny strip of Magic Tape over the join on the dull back side of the tape, and trimmed the edges with the scalpel so that not one hair of Scotch tape hung over. She burnished it flat with her thumbnail. Then she wound the slack back into the cassette with the tip of a pencil, and fitted the top back on, and held out her palm, and he put the five screws into it, one at a time.
The whole thing took eleven minutes. When she sat back on her heels, it was ten past one in the morning.
"Well," she said. "Press it."
"You press it."
"It's your card."
"It's your splice."
They pressed it together, both of their fingers on the one button. The picture came up: the auto camp at night, the owner and his wife in the doorway of their little office, and then there was a hiccup, a jump, a half-second shudder of snow where nine inches of 1934 used to be, and then the picture again. The owner's wife was saying something about a trumpet. A man had asked for a toy trumpet, she said. What on earth for? And then, from the darkened cabin across the lawn, came a single bright blare of sound, ridiculous and triumphant, and the window of the cabin went dark, and the music swelled, and that was all. THE END.
"That's it?" said Nicky.
"That's it?" said Theda.