I am fond of this one because it embodies a wish fulfillment
fantasy. I would give anything to have the experiences the people
in the story have; the next best thing is to have them vividly
stimulated by my own prose.
I don't reread this story very often, but I remember it
a lot.
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, all right.”
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, so 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 1968. 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 voltage and amperage beyond certain limits, 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 flex, 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 device 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 feet 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 silent 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. After
a moment the little screen lighted up. McCranie, wearing a
different necktie and with his jacket on, said, “Yes,
Tom?”
“Jack, is Peg in there?”
“Why, no—she's in Cleveland, Tom.”
“Oh, yes”
McCranie looked puzzled. “Is anything the matter?” In the
other 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
15th—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
a while 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 device
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 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
his own 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
instructions 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 corn-crib!”
“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 life will begin.
* * *
By trial and error, Smith has found the settings for Dallas,
November 22, 1963: Dealey Plaza, 12:25 PM. 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 the roof of one of them, 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.
* * *
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 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 days 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
any 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 he has is 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 traces
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 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 their
faces and hear what they say. One calls, “My God, who's at the
helm?” Another, a bearded man with a face gone tallow-color,
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 devices 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 people 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 $126. 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 is watching his brother-in-law in
the next room, who is watching his wife getting out of a taxi. She
pays the driver, 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 a 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.”
* * *
A surgeon is using the Ozo with a camera attachment to photograph
a series of perfect sections of his patient's abdominal cavity:
better than computerized X rays, they have depth and full detail,
he can look into the living body. There is the tumor, it is
operable And tears are running down his cheeks.
* * *
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 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 13 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 and Carol and Ted
and Alice. The humor seems infantile and unimaginative
to you; you are not interested in the actresses' occasional
seminudity. 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 repeaters in stationary orbits, and a computerized
tracer device which would keep the Ozo focused on any object.
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, unaware that they are dead. Someday you too will be only a
series of images in a screen.
* * *
Smith is watching the planet Mars. It is his ninth visit, and 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 space. 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 away. 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 area 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 newspapers.
He wrote down the coordinates for the plane crash in which his
daughter and her husband had died, but he 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, which are on file in a few
libraries, but there are few calls for their retrieval codes. Not
many people read poetry or fiction anymore: reality is so much
more interesting
We know his name. Patient researchers, using advanced scanning
techniques, followed his letters back through the postal system
and found him, but by that time he was safely dead.
* * *
The whole world has been at peace for more than a generation
Crime is almost unheard of. Free energy has made the world rich,
but the population is stable, even though early detection has
wiped out most diseases. Everyone can do whatever he likes,
providing his neighbors would not disapprove, and after all, their
views are the same as his own.
You are forty, a respected scholar, taking a few days out to
review your life, as many people do at your age. You have watched
your mother and father coupling on the night they conceived you,
watched yourself growing in her womb, first a red tadpole, then a
thing like an embryo chicken, then a big-headed baby kicking and
squirming. You have seen yourself delivered, seen the first moment
when your bloody head broke into the light. You have seen yourself
staggering about the nursery in rompers, clutching a yellow
plastic duck. Now you are watching yourself hiding behind the
fallen tree on the hill, and you realize that there are no secret
places. And beyond you in the ghostly future you know that someone
is watching you as you watch; and beyond that watcher another, and
beyond that another.
Forever.