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 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.
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 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 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 the 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. TheMary 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. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]