The Very Best of F & SF v1 (33 page)

As the
margaritas take hold, the whole mad scenario melts down to the image of those
two small shapes sitting side by side in the receding alien glare.

Two of our
opossums are missing.

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After a year or so of reading story
submissions for the magazine, I discovered that I could have saved myself a lot
of time had I just printed up form letters that said, “Damon Knight used this
same idea better and more succinctly years ago.” Damon Knight (1922-2002)
wrote, edited, criticized, and occasionally illustrated science fiction stories
for more than six decades, during which time he penned dozens of great stories
and novels. This one, which appeared in the special Damon Knight issue, struck
me as being prescient.

You
are five
, hiding in a place only you know. You
are covered with bark dust, scratched by twigs, sweaty and hot. A wind sighs in
the aspen leaves. A faint steady hiss comes from the viewer you hold in your
hands; then a voice: “Lorie, I see you—under the barn, eating an apple!” A
silence. “Lorie, come on out, I see you.” Another voice. “That’s right, she’s
in there.” After a moment, sulkily: “Oh, okay.”

You squirm
around, raising the viewer to aim it down the hill. As you turn the knob with
your thumb, the bright image races toward you, trees hurling themselves into
red darkness and vanishing, then the houses in the compound, and now you see
Bruce standing beside the corral, looking into his viewer, slowly turning. His
back is to you; you know you are safe, and you sit up. A jay passes with a whir
of wings, settles on a branch. With your own eyes now you can see Bruce, only a
dot of blue beyond the gray shake walls of the houses. In the viewer, he is
turning toward you, and you duck again. Another voice: “Children, come in and
get washed for dinner now.”

“Aw, Aunt Ellie!”

“Mom, we’re
playing hide and seek. Can’t we just stay fifteen minutes more?”

“Please, Aunt
Ellie!”

“No, come on in
now— you’ll have plenty of time after dinner.” And Bruce: “Aw, okay. All out’s
in free.”

And once more
they have not found you; your secret place is yours alone.

Call him Smith.
He was the president of a company that bore his name and which held more than a
hundred patents in the scientific instrument field. He was sixty, a widower.
His only daughter and her husband had been killed in a plane crash in 1978. He
had a partner who handled the business operations now; Smith spent most of his
time in his own lab. In the spring of 1990 he was working on an image-intensification
device that was puzzling because it was too good. He had it on his bench now,
aimed at a deep shadow box across the room; at the back of the box was a card
ruled with black, green, red and blue lines. The only source of illumination was
a single ten-watt bulb hung behind the shadow box; the light reflected from the
card did not even register on his meter, and yet the image in the screen of his
device was sharp and bright. When he varied the inputs to the components in a
certain way, the bright image vanished and was replaced by shadows, like the
ghost of another image. He had monitored every television channel, had shielded
the device against radio frequencies, and the ghosts remained. Increasing the
illumination did not make them clearer. They were vaguely rectilinear shapes
without any coherent pattern. Occasionally a moving blur traveled slowly across
them.

Smith made a
disgusted sound. He opened the clamps that held the device and picked it up,
reaching for the power switch with his other hand. He never touched it. As he
moved the device, the ghost images had shifted; they were dancing now with the
faint movements of his hand. Smith stared at them without breathing for a
moment. Holding the cord, he turned slowly. The ghost images whirled, vanished,
reappeared. He turned the other way; they whirled back.

Smith set the
device down on the bench with care. His hands were shaking. He had had the
thing clamped down on the bench all the time until now. “Christ almighty, how
dumb can one man get?” he asked the empty room.

You are six,
almost seven, and you are being allowed to use the big viewer for the first
time. You are perched on a cushion in the leather chair at the console; your
brother, who has been showing you the controls with a bored and superior air,
has just left the room, saying, “All right, if you know so much, do it yourself.”

In fact, the
controls on this machine are unfamiliar; the little viewers you have used all
your life have only one knob, for nearer or farther—to move up/down, or
left/right, you just point the viewer where you want to see. This machine has
dials and little windows with numbers in them, and switches and pushbuttons,
most of which you don’t understand, but you know they are for special purposes
and don’t matter. The main control is a metal rod, right in front of you, with
a gray plastic knob on the top. The knob is dull from years of handling; it
feels warm and a little greasy in your hand. The console has a funny electric
smell, but the big screen, taller than you are, is silent and dark. You can
feel your heart beating against your breastbone. You grip the knob harder, push
it forward just a little. The screen lights, and you are drifting across the
next room as if on huge silent wheels, chairs and end tables turning into
reddish silhouettes that shrink, twist and disappear as you pass through them,
and for a moment you feel dizzy because when you notice the red numbers jumping
in the console to your left, it is as if the whole house were passing massively
and vertiginously through itself; then you are floating out the window with the
same slow and steady motion, on across the sunlit pasture where two saddle
horses stand with their heads up, sniffing the wind; then a stubbled field,
dropping away; and now, below you, the co-op road shines like a silver-gray
stream. You press the knob down to get closer, and drop with a giddy swoop; now
you are rushing along the road, overtaking and passing a yellow truck, turning
the knob to steer. At first you blunder into the dark trees on either side, and
once the earth surges up over you in a chaos of writhing red shapes, but now
you are learning, and you soar down past the crossroads, up the farther hill,
and now, now you are on the big road, flying eastward, passing all the cars,
rushing toward the great world where you long to be.

It took Smith
six weeks to increase the efficiency of the image intensifier enough to bring
up the ghost pictures clearly. When he succeeded, the image on the screen was
instantly recognizable. It was a view of Jack McCranie’s office; the picture
was still dim, but sharp enough that Smith could see the expression on Jack’s
face. He was leaning back in his chair, hands behind his head. Beside him stood
Peg Spatola in a purple dress, with her hand on an open folder. She was
talking, and McCranie was listening. That was wrong, because Peg was not
supposed to be back from Cleveland until next week.

Smith reached
for the phone and punched McCranie’s number.

“Yes, Tom?”

“Jack, is Peg in
there?”

“Why, no—she’s
in Cleveland, Tom.”

“Oh, yes.”

McCranie sounded
puzzled. “Is anything the matter?” In the screen, he had swiveled his chair and
was talking to Peg, gesturing with short, choppy motions of his arm.

“No, nothing,” said
Smith. “That’s all right, Jack, thank you.” He broke the connection. After a
moment he turned to the breadboard controls of the device and changed one
setting slightly. In the screen, Peg turned and walked backward out of the
office. When he turned the knob the other way, she repeated these actions in
reverse. Smith tinkered with the other controls until he got a view of the
calendar on Jack’s desk. It was Friday, June 15—last week.

Smith locked up
the device and all his notes, went home and spent the rest of the day thinking.

By the end of
July he had refined and miniaturized the device and had extended its
sensitivity range into the infrared. He spent most of August, when he should
have been on vacation, trying various methods of detecting sound through the
device. By focusing on the interior of a speaker’s larynx and using infrared,
he was able to convert the visible vibrations of the vocal cords into sound of
fair quality, but that did not satisfy him. He worked for awhile on vibrations
picked up from panes of glass in windows and on framed pictures, and he
experimented briefly with the diaphragms in speaker systems, intercoms and
telephones. He kept on into October without stopping and finally achieved a
system that would give tinny but recognizable sound from any vibrating
surface—a wall, a floor, even the speaker’s own cheek or forehead.

He redesigned
the whole device, built a prototype and tested it, tore it down, redesigned,
built another. It was Christmas before he was done. Once more he locked up the
device and all his plans, drawings and notes.

At home he spent
the holidays experimenting with commercial adhesives in various strengths. He
applied these to coated paper, let them dry, and cut the paper into rectangles.
He numbered these rectangles, pasted them onto letter envelopes, some of which
he stacked loose; others he bundled together and secured with rubber bands. He
opened the stacks and bundles and examined them at regular intervals. Some of
the labels curled up and detached themselves after twenty-six hours without
leaving any conspicuous trace. He made up another batch of these, typed his
home address on six of them. On each of six envelopes he typed his office
address, then covered it with one of the labels. He stamped the envelopes and
dropped them into a mailbox. All six, minus their labels, were delivered to the
office three days later.

Just after New
Year’s, he told his partner that he wanted to sell out and retire. They
discussed it in general terms.

Using an assumed
name and a post office box number which was not his, Smith wrote to a
commission agent in Boston with whom he had never had any previous dealings. He
mailed the letter, with the agent’s address covered by one of his labels on
which he had typed a fictitious address. The label detached itself in transit;
the letter was delivered. When the agent replied, Smith was watching and read
the letter as a secretary typed it. The agent followed his instruction to mail
his reply in an envelope without return address. The owner of the post office
box turned it in marked “not here”; it went to the dead-letter office and was
returned in due time, but meanwhile Smith had acknowledged the letter and had
mailed, in the same way, a large amount of cash. In subsequent letters he
instructed the agent to take bids for components, plans for which he enclosed,
from electronics manufacturers, for plastic casings from another, and for
assembly and shipping from still another company. Through a second commission
agent in New York, to whom he wrote in the same way, he contracted for ten thousand
copies of an instruction booklet in four colors.

Late in February
he bought a house and an electronics dealership in a small town in the
Adirondacks. In March he signed over his interest in the company to his
partner, cleaned out his lab and left. He sold his co-op apartment in Manhattan
and his summer house in Connecticut, moved to his new home and became
anonymous.

You are
thirteen, chasing a fox with the big kids for the first time. They have put you
in the north field, the worst place, but you know better than to leave it.

“He’s in the
glen.”

“I see him; he’s
in the brook, going upstream.”

You turn the
viewer, racing forward through dappled shade, a brilliance of leaves: there is
the glen, and now you see the fox, trotting through the shallows, blossoms of
bright water at its feet.

“Ken and Nell,
you come down ahead of him by the springhouse. Wanda, you and Tim and Jean stay
where you are. Everybody else come upstream, but stay back till I tell you.”

That’s Leigh,
the oldest. You turn the viewer, catch a glimpse of Bobby running downhill
through the woods, his long hair flying. Then back to the glen: the fox is
gone.

“He’s heading up
past the corncrib!”

“Okay, keep
spread out on both sides, everybody. Jim, can you and Edie head him off before
he gets to the woods?”

“We’ll try.
There he is!”

And the chase is
going away from you, as you knew it would, but soon you will be older, as old
as Nell and Jim; then you will be in the middle of things, and your life will
begin.

By trial and
error, Smith has found the settings for Dallas, November 22, 1963: Dealey
Plaza, 12:25 P.M. He sees the Presidential motorcade making the turn onto Elm
Street. Kennedy slumps forward, raising his hands to his throat. Smith presses
a button to hold the moment in time. He scans behind the motorcade, finds the
sixth floor of the Book Depository Building, finds the window. There is no one
behind the barricade of cartons; the room is empty. He scans the nearby rooms,
finds nothing. He tries the floor below. At an open window a man kneels,
holding a high-powered rifle. Smith photographs him. He returns to the
motorcade, watches as the second shot strikes the President. He freezes time
again, scans the surrounding buildings, finds a second marksman on a roof,
photographs him. Back to the motorcade. A third and fourth shot, the last
blowing off the side of the President’s head. Smith freezes the action again,
finds two gunmen on the grassy knoll, one aiming across the top of a station
wagon, one kneeling in the shrubbery. He photographs them. He turns off the
power, sits for a moment, then goes to the washroom, kneels beside the toilet
and vomits.