Dustin watched his computer’s monitor. Three stars appeared in the upper left corner, but the screen was otherwise dark. He rested his fingertips on the keyboard. “Can I ask Mom to eat with us?”
“You can’t take a picture of what’s not there.” Dad stepped toward the door, loosening his tie. He paused, one finger caught in the silk, the knot half undone. “She hates Chinese.”
For the rest of the night, Dustin sent the Peek-a-boo out, over and over. He changed batteries at 2:00, when he realized twenty black screens in a row and no “Thank you for participating” messages meant the device hadn’t moved. The challenge was that not only did Dustin not know if the star had planets circling it, but he didn’t know what their orbital plane was. He could send the Peek-a-boo the right distance from the star and miss because the planet could be anywhere in the sphere of distance that far away. Plus, the Peek-a-boo could appear pointing in the wrong direction. All he could do was to keep trying.
He did get several more good shots of the star, though. He spent an hour running the best ones through the effects: corona analysis, blue-light shift, red-light shift, x-ray rendered, radio rendered, various luminosity lines emphasized, all the filters. In every way, it came out within a few percentage points of the sun. Twice more he received, “New object! You have contributed to man’s knowledge of the universe.”
Slade looked glum. “Have you ever lost a Peek-a-boo?” He hadn’t opened his portfolio or his lunch. It didn’t look like a trading day.
“No,” said Dustin. His eyes felt heavy, like they were filled with syrup. When he’d finally fallen asleep, the sun had risen. “Did you leave it somewhere?”
“Not misplaced. I mean lost the whole fricking thing? I sent it out, and it didn’t come back. One second it’s there, and the next it’s gone.”
Dustin sat up. “Gone? Like gone, gone?”
“Yeah, bang, loud noise-hurt-my-ears gone, and get this: a message from the Peek-a-boo Project pops up and says, ‘An unexpected anomaly occurred during transmission. You must replace your unit. Thank you for participating.’ It gave me a 10% off coupon for my next purchase. What a ripoff!”
“So, what did you do?”
“I called Peek-a-boo, of course! Twenty-four hour service, my ass. It’s a recorded message and a gazillion choices. So, I work my way down the menu, and you know what they said? ‘Although very rare, an unexpected anomaly could include your Peek-a-boo unit occupying simultaneous space with a solid object, such as a star.’ My aunt told me the whole thing is a con to get kids to buy more Peek-a-boos. That they really aren’t taking pictures at all.”
Dustin looked at Slade’s folder. He did have beautiful images. “Are you going to quit?”
Slade pushed away from his table. He touched his hand to the side of his Mohawk to make sure it was still straight. “Even if they’re fake, I like the pictures. I’ll talk my step mom out of the money when she’s in a good mood.” He smirked, “Besides, my grades in science have never been better.”
None of the other kids who traded at lunch were in the room. Dustin’s own folder, with the new star pictures, unshown inside, rested under his hand. A thought occurred to him. “Did you pick up the pieces?”
“What?” Slade pushed his portfolio under his arm so he could open his lunch bag.
“The pieces from your Peek-a-boo, when it exploded?”
Slade laughed. “There weren’t any pieces! There wasn’t even any smoke. It exploded into nothing. Total whack job.”
When Dustin was alone, and the only sounds were kids yelling to each other in the hallways, he smiled.
Mom sat on the edge of the bed, just as she had the night before, except this pantsuit matched her beige purse. “We may need to make some changes soon, Dustin.”
Warily, Dustin watched her. “Like what?”
She toyed with her purse’s clasp. “School, maybe. Probably a different house. A condo, perhaps. I know of some nice ones below market price nearer my office.” She glanced up, dry-eyed, just for an instant. “At least for part of the time.”
Dustin felt his lungs constricting. It took effort for him to say, “This is temporary, right? It’s just til things patch together?”
She slumped. “If it makes you feel better to believe that, sure.”
In the empty time after she left, Dustin pushed the send button repeatedly, not really looking at the monitor, even when he got a good shot of the new star. He saved the image mechanically. No planet. Send. Send. Send.
A half hour later, Dad delivered almost the same speech, except it was an apartment with a great view of the mountains.
Dustin had lined the AA batteries on his desk like bullets. Every couple hours he popped two used ones out of the Peek-a-boo. Spent casings, he thought. They dropped to the carpet.
His hands trembled on the keyboard. He swallowed dryly. Somewhere around this star, maybe, circled a planet the same distance as Earth. He’d found the system’s Jupiter about 11:00. So many systems had a Jupiter, an oversized lump of a planet, always about the same distance from the center. Star system evolution turned out to be remarkably similar, time after time. Many stars formed planets, and they formed them in about the same way, and it was because of their Jupiters that the inner planets were shielded. Jupiters inhaled planet-busting comets and shepherded the loose debris into tidy orbits that would otherwise careen about unchecked. But the inner planets were so much smaller. The giant planets protected, but they also overwhelmed with their size and strength. They distracted.
Where was the tiny glimmer of the inner planets? Dustin fine tuned the coordinates, kicking the Peek-a-boo from one side of the star to the other, always taking a half-dozen pictures from one coordinate before shifting again. Even at the same coordinates, though, the unit might appear millions of miles from the last spot. A three-dimensional graph of the appearances would eventually surround a location, but there was no fine control. He could only keep trying.
At 3:00 in the morning, the Peek-a-boo felt slick and cool under his fingers. A twitch on the keyboard sent it out again. Stars appeared on the monitor. “Thank you for participating.” He sent it out again. The Peek-a-boo never failed him. It always came back (but Slade’s hadn’t!). Graveyard silence filled the house. Out the window, clouds covered the night sky, so all he saw was his own shimmery image, like he was someone else: a small boy’s spirit, his elbows planted on his ghost desk in a ghost world looking at his ghost computer. Dustin almost waved, but something stirred behind him in the reflection. He was too tired to be startled. Standing at the door, illuminated by the monitor’s faint light, his Dad in pajamas looked in. His face had no color, no life, and two shadowed pits marked where his eyes should have been. Dad leaned against the doorjamb, watching Dustin, or he might have been looking beyond him, or his eyes could have been closed. The pose held for a marble moment.
Dustin blinked, and the apparition was gone. Had he really seen him? A few seconds later, the stairs creaked; Dad going down.
For a hundred heartbeats, Dustin stared at his reflection, and then through the ghost boy to the maple tree he couldn’t see, and beyond that to the clouds that covered the stars, and through them to the stars themselves, trying to understand. Dad had appeared and disappeared without a sound except the squeak on the stair. Everything done in silence. No noise that Dustin didn’t make himself in the perpetually quiet house. He pressed the send button again, and the key’s cricket click seemed big in the muffling stillness.
The image of himself in the glass and the wavery memory of his dad behind him defined Dustin’s universe. Nothing else existed. Then a new image began forming on his monitor from the top down. Not black. Yellow from side to side, like candle flame. Not a starscape. Not even a distant planet hovering in the velvet abyss. On the screen’s left side, a corner of something red appeared. A straight line built toward the screen’s bottom, and then an orange sphere formed on the screen’s right side. The computer pinged three times. A new popup message flashed across the image: “DO NOT TOUCH YOUR PEEK-A-BOO OR TURN OFF YOUR COMPUTER!” At the same time, his phone rang. A second later, his cell phone, recharging on the nightstand chimed for attention.