Velocity

Starplay
1

“Twiddle it to the left,” suggested Jason.

I did as he suggested. The wavering image shimmered, brightened, then flew apart into a liquid rainbow splash of a million colors. The picture went dead, fading to black as if the commercials were finally over with and the show was coming back. But it didn’t.

“No, no, dumb-ass!” moaned Jason. “I said left, LEFT. You know what I’m talking about, moron?”

“I did turn it left,” I protested remotely, too interested in the Space-television to get annoyed by Jason. I pressed the reset button-at least, that’s what it seemed to do-and started twiddling again. The dusty workshop around us was quiet except for the humming of the machine’s transformers.

Jason made a move to shove me out of the way and get his butt into the folding chair we had set up in front of the console. But I weigh more and have two inches on him, so I managed to elbow him back.

“Knock it off, Jason.”

“Well, I found it!”

“No, you didn’t. We both did. And besides, it was my crazy dead uncle Chet that invented the thing.” My uncle had been totally bananas according to my dad. Mom said he was disturbed, but a gifted inventor, which should tip you off to which side of the family he was on. All I remember was that he lived in a plaid bath-robe, never brushed his teeth and screamed a lot at night. Eight years ago they had put him in a nuthouse and he died shortly after. It was when they committed him that they closed up his workshop. My folks were always kind of funny about the subject and never wanted to discuss it.

Curiosity has always been one of my weak points, so when they left the ranch this year for a vacation in Wisconsin, the time seemed ripe for an investigation. It had been no mean feat to cut that padlock, let me tell you.

“So?” Jason retorted, refuting my entire argument with one syllable. He flopped back into his folding chair, which was to my left. His chair squeaked because one of the legs didn’t sit right on the floor anymore. I turned back to the Space-television. We had decided to call it that when we first found it because it worked kind of like a television, and it showed mostly pictures of space, nebulas and stars and stuff. When it showed anything at all, that is.

“Lookit, I want to try for a while,” Jason said with a touch of wheedling in his voice that I detected and enjoyed. He put one elbow on the console beside me and leaned into my view. One finger went to his forehead, which was covered up by overly-long brown-blonde hair. He started poking at the zits he kept under there.

“Tough.”

“Come on, Steve.”

I ignored him and concentrated on the dials in front of me. The damn thing was so hard to focus, it seemed to be made for someone with finer hand control than I was able to manage. I had a certain goal in mind, I wasn’t just jacking around. I wanted to get the settings back to just the place where they had started, when we had first touched the console and brought it into life.

“Come on, Steve. Why don’t you give it a rest, huh?”

“Shut up. I’m trying to get the trees back.”

“Oh… Uh, I don’t know, Steve,” Jason’s tune changed from that of a dog watching dinner through a sliding glass door to one of concern. “I don’t think we should mess around with those things.”

The screen blurred a reddish haze, then an image of orange-red fuzzy stars like hairy tangerines solidified. My tongue slipped out to wet the corner of my mouth. I moved my fingers in the tiniest increments of pressure that I could manage. The picture focused. I sat back and smiled.

“It’s the wrong picture,” Jason pointed out unnecessarily.

“Yeah, but it’s clear, my man. It’s clear!” I slapped his back with slightly intimidating force. He winced and scowled at the picture. Then the bastard reached out and, just as random as you please, twisted the third dial from the right.

“Jesus! What the hell do you…”

I drew back my arm. I was going to slug him, and he knew it too, but he wasn’t ducking. He was pointing at the screen. A calm part of my mind wondered what made Jason do crap like that all the time and why I let him hang around with me. He was kind of like Beetle Bailey, always farting around with the Sarge, knowing full well he was going to get his teeth pushed in.

“Look!” that was all he said.

I paused, but didn’t look in case he was planning to duck and spoil my aim. He didn’t do anything of the kind.

“Damn, that’s weird! Look, Steve!”

I finally looked. And my mouth fell open twice as far as his did. Jason doesn’t have all that much in the way of imagination, but he knew weird when he saw it. The screen was a wash of blue. A blue painted sky above and a shimmering blue sea below. It wasn’t space, it was a planet.

My stomach just fell away, like when you first start down in an express elevator from the seventieth floor. My insides turned to jelly. It was the first time since we had started fooling with my uncle’s invention that we had seen a planet.

It wasn’t just an empty sea, either, there were somethings moving in the water, dark sinister shapes. My mind immediately conjured images of mermen, killer whales and platysaurus herds. Unknown things from an unknown world. And I was watching them in my own home.

Hungrily, I leaned forward, forgetting completely to slug Jason. I could have kissed him. Almost. I rubbed my hand on the ball that moved the view in place, doing a complete 360 degree rotation. I spotted land and my heart leapt again. My hand moved to the knob farthest to the right, the one that never seemed to do anything but make the image shimmer a bit. I had long suspected that it was for fine tuning movements.

“Go for it, Steve!” whispered Jason, sensing my intent. “Go for it!”

The last knob was spring loaded, or something, because when you twisted it, it resisted you and always moved back into place when you let go. I felt the cold metal knob under my fingertips. I centered the land with the aiming ball and gave the unknown knob the slightest hint of a twist. The image of the land leapt away and dimmed to a smudge on the horizon.

“Zoom lens!” shouted Jason. He kept pointing at the screen, as if to keep it there.

“But in reverse,” I said as I nudged the dial the opposite direction.

The land loomed, filling the screen. And there they were. The trees that we had first seen when we had powered up our space-television.