“Mickey,” said Bunter, and spelled it out.
“ ‘Mickey’ doesn’t start with I, silly,” said Billy.
“ ‘Famous mouse, six letters with an I,’ ” said the box in Billy’s voice.
“Boy. Touchy,” said Billy. “I meant starts with an I.”
“Ignatz,” was Burner’s immediate response and spelled this one out, too.
“There you go!” Billy typed it in and was rewarded with “Okey Dokey,” in the voice of, oddly enough, Mickey Mouse.
“Hey, Billy.”
“Hi, Dad.” Billy paused the game and turned in his chair. “Was that meeting with Miss Barstow all right, I mean... am I in any trouble or anything?”
Dad forced a smile and said, “Nothing to worry about.” Not for you to worry about, anyway, he added silently. He noticed the box in its sling around Billy’s neck and pointed to it. “Here’s something new. What’s the idea?”
“Nothing much, really. It was just sort of a pain to keep moving Bunter around so he could see stuff and sometimes I’d knock him over and, well, this is just easier. Now he can see what I see and I don’t have to worry about it.”
“Good idea.” His designer’s eye, unbidden, noted the several loops wrapped here and there around the box and replaced them with a fitted pocket. The single loop of string had to be pulled over the head, had a fixed length, and torqued to one side when Billy leaned forward; replace it with U of cloth and a Velcro closure. But his heart kept his mouth shut and he just said, “That’s really clever.”
Billy rewarded him with a proud smile, which faltered after a moment. “Uh, Dad?” he paused. “There’s something I didn’t tell you before you went to see Miss Barstow. I think maybe I should have.”
“Oh?”
“Well, remember with the baseball thing when Bunter couldn’t tell it was a picture? And then with the fly cause I left him active all day? Even though it didn’t hurt him, I figured he must be pretty bored and anyway he couldn’t really learn anything if he didn’t get out to really see stuff, you know what I mean?” The words came in a rush. His father just nodded and waited.
“Anyway. Well, I’ve been taking Bunter to school.” He stopped.
Dad grinned despite himself. “How did you manage that?”
Billy went over to the closet and took his knapsack down from the hook. “Like this,” he said. He flipped the box out of the string web around his neck and snapped on the remote unit. He opened the back pocket on the sack, pulled out a sock, pushed back a book that was already in the pocket, firmly pushed Bunter down into the remaining space and stuffed the sock on top. He zipped shut the stuffed pocket and held it out. “See?”
“Uh-huh. I see.” Dad looked closely at the pocket and saw the hole picked into the fabric. He carefully emptied the pocket again and looked at it more closely. He saw a piece of white bandage gauze glued to the back of the hole; on the outside, it had been colored with something to match the rest of the fabric and continue the interrupted pattern. “Bunter looks through here, is that the idea?”
“That’s right,” said Billy, forgetting the infraction and warming to his construction. “That way he can see out but with the cloth nobody else sees his eye. I wear the pins under the flaps on my jacket and the ear thing so I can talk to him and he can talk to me.”
“Nobody noticed the earpiece?” Dad was drawn into it now.
“Nobody said anything. I put a little piece of cotton behind it so it looks like I have an earache or something.”
“And how long have you been doing all this?”
“Oh,” said Billy, less animated, aware once more of the problem. “About a week.” He grew quiet once more. ‘’So, anyway, I thought maybe I should tell you in case that’s why Miss Barstow wanted to see you, but I kind of didn’t think of it before you went over to see her.”
“She didn’t say anything about it.”
“Oh. I thought maybe she knew because she got kind of upset about that Tik-Tok thing and all.” He was uncertain now; perhaps he shouldn’t have said anything.
“What’s Bunter have to do with Tik-Tok?”
“That was Burner’s idea.”
“Bunter’s idea? How do you mean it was Burner’s idea?”
Billy explained the events leading up to his proposal of the tube in class and finished with, “…so when Bunter told me that, I knew right away it was the right answer. At least, I thought so. I guess I was wrong. Again.” He paused, then added, “I think I would have thought of it anyway. It’s just that Bunter thought of it first.”
The engineer in Jack wanted to explore this development right away, and had a brief squabble with the father who saw his son in pain. The engineer lost.
“No, Billy. Don’t beat yourself up. Your answer was right. It wasn’t what Miss Barstow expected, and maybe she didn’t like the way you gave it, but that doesn’t make you wrong and it doesn’t make you bad.”
“Like Jim said, huh, Dad? ‘That’s just what she ordered, it’s not what she wants?’ ”
Jack smiled. “Yes. Exactly like that.” He thought of the meeting again and the displays on the wall. “Billy, did you bring your history book home from school? There are some things I want to ask you about.”
Billy was a little puzzled at the request, but also comforted by the reassurance. He was willing to go along. “Sure, Dad. It’s right over here.”
Later that evening, dinner over, the two of them were finishing up in the kitchen. Jack was still in something of a funk but a little more optimistic than he had been. That afternoon he had felt as if he had suddenly discovered that some great silent plague was sweeping through his community. Now he was pretty sure that the plague had passed by his own home, at least for now. It was something; not much, but something.
It was still raining. What with being stuck indoors, a couple of hours of homework, bookwork, and what must have seemed to him pointless quizzes on history and civics, Billy was bouncing off the walls. It was all making Jack feel a little short-tempered.
“Billy, how about some TV?”
“Sure, Dad. What’s on? Can we watch on the big screen down here? Can Bunter watch, too?” Once again, Billy had the box slung in the web around his neck.
“I don’t know, why not, and sure. Come on, let’s go see.”
Billy careened into the front room, pulled open the drawer on the side table, scooped up the remote control, hurled himself into one of the wing-backs and turned the system on all before Jack was even over the threshold of the kitchen. The big screen was swinging down into position from its recess in the ceiling as Jack settled himself into the other chair. He wordlessly held out a hand for the remote.
As the screen locked down in place it came alive on the info channel. It always did, since the distributor had Jack pegged as an unregenerate entertainment cheapskate. Tonight it came up with four separate windows, each with different spinning, dancing text begging for attention over a looping clip of some show, each with essentially the same message: “Jack Phillips, just look what you’re missing! If you’d subscribed to full serv, tonight you could be seeing…” or prem serv or fam serv or sports serv or whatever. He stabbed the mute button before the thing started braying the messages out loud as well. This was not helping his mood.
He ran his thumb over the glide pad in the center of the remote, scanning the screen for the cursor. This little game of find the icon was new this season and he found the innovation particularly annoying. Some genius at the info channel had figured out a way to squeeze a few more pennies out of the service by selling even the presentation of the cursor icon and its start-up position to advertisers. Jack hated having to run his thumb back and forth across the glide pad until he found some object, he never knew what, moving in synchrony through the gyrating mess already on the screen. Intellectually, he knew the intent was to slow him down and make him study the ads on the screen; the emotional effect, though, made him feel like he had to stroke and soothe some skittish beast to get its attention. If the distributor owned the set he could accept it, but this was his system in his home.