The Very Best of F & SF v1 (34 page)

The viewer is
your babysitter, your television, your telephone (the telephone lines are still
up, but they are used only as signaling devices; when you know that somebody
wants to talk to you, you focus your viewer on him), your library, your school.
Before puberty you watch other people having sex, but even then your curiosity
is easily satisfied; after an older cousin initiates you at fourteen, you are
much more interested in doing it yourself. The co-op teacher monitors your
studies, sometimes makes suggestions, but more and more, as you grow older,
leaves you to your own devices. You are intensely interested in African
prehistory, in the European theater, and in the ant-civilization of Epsilon
Eridani IV. Soon you will have to choose.

New York Harbor,
November 4, 1872—a cold, blustery day. A two-masted ship rides at anchor; on
her stern is lettered:
Mary Celeste.
Smith advances the time control. A flicker of darkness, light
again, and the ship is gone. He turns back again until he finds it standing out
under light canvas past Sandy Hook. Manipulating time and space controls at
once, he follows it eastward through a flickering of storm and sun—loses it,
finds it again, counting clays as he goes. The farther eastward, the more he
has to tilt the device downward, while the image of the ship tilts
correspondingly away from him. Because of the angle, he can no longer keep the
ship in view from a distance but must track it closely. November 21 and 22,
violent storms: the ship is dashed upward by waves, falls again, visible only
intermittently; it takes him five hours to pass through two days of real time.
The 23rd is calmer, but on the 24th another storm blows up. Smith rubs his
eyes, loses the ship, finds it again after a ten-minute search.

The gale blows
itself out on the morning of the 26th. The sun is bright, the sea almost dead
calm. Smith is able to catch glimpses of figures on deck, tilted above dark
cross-sections of the hull. A sailor is splicing a rope in the stern, two
others lowering a triangular sail between the foremast and the bowsprit, and a
fourth is at the helm. A little group stands leaning on the starboard rail; one
of them is a woman. The next glimpse is that of a running figure who advances
into the screen and disappears. Now the men are lowering a boat over the side;
the rail has been removed and lies on the deck. The men drop into the boat and
row away. He hears them shouting to each other but cannot make out the words.

Smith turns to
the ship again: the deck is empty. He dips below to look at the hold, filled
with casks, then the cabin, then the forecastle. There is no sign of anything
wrong—no explosion, no fire, no trace of violence. “When he looks up again, he
sees the sails flapping, then bellying out full. The sea is rising. He looks
for the boat, but now too much time has passed and he cannot find it. He
returns to the ship and now reverses the time control, tracks it backward until
the men are again in their places on deck. He looks again at the group standing
at the rail; now he sees that the woman has a child
in
her arms. The child struggles, drops over the rail. Smith hears the woman
shriek. In a moment she too is over the rail and falling into the sea.

He watches the
men running, sees them launch the boat. As they pull away, he is able to keep
the focus near enough to see and hear them. One calls, “My God, who’s at the
helm?” Another, a bearded man with a face gone tallow-pale, replies, “Never
mind—row!” They are staring down into the sea. After a moment one looks up,
then another. The
Mary Celeste
, with three of the four sails on her foremast set, is gliding away,
slowly, now faster; now she is gone.

Smith does not
run through the scene again to watch the child and her mother drown, but others
do.

The production
model was ready for shipping in September. It was a simplified version of the
prototype, with only two controls, one for space, one for time. The range of
the device was limited to one thousand miles. Nowhere on the casing of the
device or in the instruction booklet was a patent number or a pending patent
mentioned. Smith had called the device Ozo, perhaps because he thought it
sounded vaguely Japanese. The booklet described the device as a distant viewer
and gave clear, simple instructions for its use. One sentence read cryptically:
“Keep Time Control set at zero.” It was like “Wet Paint—Do Not Touch.”

During the week
of September 23, seven thousand Ozos were shipped to domestic and Canadian
addresses supplied by Smith: five hundred to electronics manufacturers and
suppliers, six thousand, thirty to a carton, marked “On Consignment,” to TV outlets
in major cities, and the rest to private citizens chosen at random. The
instruction booklets were in sealed envelopes packed with each device. Three
thousand more went to Europe, South and Central America, and the Middle East.

A few of the
outlets which received the cartons opened them the same day, tried the devices
out, and put them on sale at prices ranging from $49. 95 to $125. By the
following day the word was beginning to spread, and by the close of business on
the third day every store was sold out. Most people who got them, either
through the mail or by purchase, used them to spy on their neighbors and on
people in hotels.

In a house in
Cleveland, a man watches his brother-in-law in the next room, who is watching
his wife getting out of a taxi. She goes into the lobby of an apartment
building. The husband watches as she gets into the elevator, rides to the
fourth floor. She rings the bell beside the door marked 410. The door opens; a
dark-haired man takes her in his arms; they kiss.

The
brother-in-law meets him in the hall. “Don’t do it, Charlie.”

“Get out of my
way.”

“I’m not going
to get out of your way, and I tell you, don’t do it. Not now and not later.”

“Why the hell
shouldn’t I?”

“Because if you
do I’ll kill you. If you want a divorce, OK, get a divorce. But don’t lay a
hand on her or I’ll find you the farthest place you can go.”

Smith got his
consignment of Ozos early in the week, took one home and left it to his store
manager to put a price on the rest. He did not bother to use the production
model but began at once to build another prototype. It had controls calibrated
to one-hundredth of a second and one millimeter, and a timer that would allow
him to stop a scene, or advance or regress it at any desired rate. He ordered
some clockwork from an astronomical supply house.

A high-ranking
officer in Army Intelligence, watching the first demonstration of the Ozo in
the Pentagon, exclaimed, “My God, with this we could dismantle half the
establishment—all we’ve got to do is launch interceptors when we see them push
the button.”

“It’s a good
thing Senator Burkhart can’t hear you say that,” said another officer. But by
the next afternoon everybody had heard it.

A Baptist
minister in Louisville led the first mob against an Ozo assembly plant. A month
later, while civil and criminal suits against all the rioters were still
pending, tapes showing each one of them in compromising or ludicrous activities
were widely distributed in the area.

The commission
agents who had handled the orders for the first Ozos were found out and had to
leave town. Factories were fire-bombed, but others took their place.

The first Ozo
was smuggled into the Soviet Union from West Germany by Katerina Belov, a
member of a dissident group in Moscow, who used it to document illegal
government actions. The device was seized on December by the KGB;

Belov and two other
members of the group were arrested, imprisoned and tortured. By that time over
forty other Ozos were in the hands of dissidents.

You are watching
an old movie,
Bob & Carol
& Ted & Alice.
The humor seems infantile
and unimaginative to you; you are not interested in the actresses’ occasional
semi nudity. What strikes you as hilarious is the coyness, the sidelong
glances, smiles, grimaces hinting at things that will never be shown on the
screen. You realize that these people have never seen anyone but their most
intimate friends without clothing, have never seen any adult shit or piss, and
would be embarrassed or disgusted if they did. Why did children say “pee-pee”
and “poo-poo,” and then giggle? You have read scholarly books about taboos on “bodily
functions,” but why was shitting worse than sneezing?

Cora Zickwolfe,
who lived in a remote rural area of Arizona and whose husband commuted to
Tucson, arranged with her nearest neighbor, Phyllis Mell, for each of them to
keep an Ozo focused on the bulletin board in the other’s kitchen. On the
bulletin board was a note that said “OK.” If there was any trouble and she
couldn’t get to the phone, she would take down the note, or if she had time,
write another.

In April 1992,
about the time her husband usually got home, an intruder broke into the house
and seized Mrs. Zickwolfe before she had time to get to the bulletin board. He
dragged her into the bedroom and forced her to disrobe. The state troopers got
there in fifteen minutes, and Cora never spoke to her friend Phyllis again.

Between 1992 and
2002 more than six hundred improvements and supplements to the Ozo were
recorded. The most important of these was the power system created by focusing
the Ozo at a narrow aperture on the interior of the Sun. Others included the
system of satellite slave units in stationary orbits and a computerized tracer
device which would keep the Ozo focused on any subject.

Using the
tracer, an entomologist in Mexico City is following the ancestral line of a
honey bee. The images bloom and expire, ten every second: the tracer is
following each queen back to the egg, then the egg to the queen that laid it,
then that queen to the egg. Tens of thousands of generations have passed; in
two thousand hours, beginning with a Paleocene bee, he has traveled back into
the Cretaceous. He stops at intervals to follow the bee in real time, then
accelerates again. The hive is growing smaller, more primitive. Now it is only
a cluster of round cells, and the bee is different, more like a wasp. His year’s
labor is coming to fruition. He watches, forgetting to eat, almost to breathe.

In your mother’s
study after she dies, you find an elaborate chart of her ancestors and your
father’s. You retrieve the program for it, punch it in, and idly watch a random
sampling, back into time, first the female line, then the male... a teacher of
biology in Boston, a suffragette, a corn merchant, a singer, a Dutch farmer in
New York, a British sailor, a German musician. Their faces glow in the screen,
bright-eyed, cheeks flushed with life. Someday you too will be only a series of
images in a screen.

Smith is
watching the planet Mars. The clockwork which turns the Ozo to follow the
planet, even when it is below the horizon, makes it possible for him to focus instantly
on the surface, but he never does this. He takes up his position hundreds of
thousands of miles away, then slowly approaches, in order to see the red spark
grow to a disk, then to a yellow sunlit ball hanging in darkness. Now he can
make out the surface features: Syrtis Major and Thoth-Nepenthes leading in a
long gooseneck to Utopia and the frostcap.

The image as it
swells hypnotically toward him is clear and sharp, without tremor or
atmospheric distortion. It is summer in the northern hemisphere: Utopia is wide
and dark. The planet fills the screen, and now he turns northward, over the
cratered desert still hundreds of miles distant. A dust storm, like a yellow
veil, obscures the curved neck of Thoth-Nepenthes; then he is beyond it,
drifting down to the edge of the frostcap. The limb of the planet reappears; he
floats like a glider over the dark surface tinted with rose and violet-gray;
now he can see its nubbly texture; now he can make out individual plants. He is
drifting among their gnarled gray stems, their leaves of violet horn; he sees
the curious misshapen growths that may be air bladders or some grotesque
analogue of blossoms. Now, at the edge of the screen, something black and
spindling leaps. He follows it instantly, finds it, brings it hugely magnified
into the center of the screen: a thing like a hairy beetle, its body covered
with thick black hairs or spines; it stands on six jointed legs, waving its
antennae, its
mouth parts busy. And its four
bright eyes stare into his, across forty million miles.

Smith’s hair got
whiter and thinner. Before the 1992 Crash, he made heavy contributions to the
International Red Cross and to volunteer organizations in Europe, Asia and
Africa. He got drunk periodically, but always alone. From 1993 to 1996 he
stopped reading the newspapers.

He wrote down
the coordinates for the plane crash in which his daughter and her husband had
died, but never used them.

At intervals
while dressing or looking into the bathroom mirror, he stared as if into an
invisible camera and raised one finger. In his last years he wrote some poems.