Professor Mozart burst into my office, waving the January 1992 issue of Physics Today. “What are you doing here, W. A.?” I greeted him in surprise. “I thought you were abroad fund-raising for the SSC!”

“Just got back,” he gasped, having apparently run up all five flights of stairs. “Castro says he'll provide all the cigars if we can persuade Bush to lift the sugar quota. Just sent Bromley a memo. Don't see how Congress can drag its feet any longer—especially when we remind them that accelerator physics gave us ride-on lawn mowers, sliced bread, and the compact disc. But what about this response to your call last May for the abolition of journals in favor of electronic bulletin boards? Ten letters to the editor—all but two hostile? As a pundit, you've got it made!”

“Thank you,” I replied sourly, “but the fact is I received even more letters that were wildly enthusiastic—by far the biggest response I've ever had.”

“Don't tell me,” he said, lighting up an enormous Havana. “All the favorable correspondence came by email. No copies to Physics Today. Shun the print media. Matter of principle.”

“You've got it,” I confirmed, suppressing a gasp myself. “My supporters are all children of the network. I doubt they even use the telephone anymore, except as ancillary to a modem. They want me to lead the way into the shining electronic future, writing software, designing hardware, lobbying professional societies, organizing boycotts, raising funds …”

“Leave the fund-raising to me,” he ordered through the smoke. “Your immediate problem is to answer your critics. How could you have expected to attack the refereeing process and come out unscathed? Don't you realize most people can't write an acceptable laundry list without peer review? Without referees we'd soon be promulgating inchoate blather. Can you imagine what Hamlet must have looked like the first time Shakespeare submitted it? Why, somebody once told me that Othello is what Titus Andronicus turned into after half a dozen exchanges. And you want to abolish refereeing!”

“Never mind how peer review operates under the current system,” I interrupted. “What none of the critics have noticed is how much better it will work in Computopia.”

“No doubt you're thinking,” he murmured through the fog, eyes half closed, “of a parallel bulletin board of criticisms and errata.”