Dustin jerked back. Who could be calling at 3:00 in the morning? They’d wake his parents! He picked up the phone. A recorded announcement said, “This is a Peek-a-boo priority communication. Information from your Peek-a-boo unit indicates a unique contact. Please do not attempt to send your Peek-a-boo device out again or switch programs on your computer. Representatives from Peek-a-boo will communicate with you immediately… . This is a Peek-a-boo priority communication… .”
Dad’s voice interrupted. “What have you done, Dustin? Do you know what time it is?”
Mom said sleepily over the phone, “What is going on? What is going on?”
The image finished forming on the monitor behind the popup message. Dustin hesitated, the phone still to his ear. “Please do not attempt to send your Peek-a-boo device out again or switch programs on your computer,” repeated the voice. Dustin closed the popup window; the screen glowed yellow, orange and red in crisp lines and shapes.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“I’m coming up,” said Dad.
The stairs creaked beneath his mom’s slippered feet.
Mom arrived first, then Dad. They gathered behind his chair.
Dad said, “Why are they calling you in the middle of the night?”
“I don’t know, Dad. Something about this.” He gestured toward the monitor.
Mom said, “Is that a screensaver?”
In the distance, a police car siren sounded, coming closer.
Dustin’s face flushed, the phone still in his hand, repeating the message over and over. “No, my Peek-a-boo took it.”
“What is it?” Dad leaned over Dustin’s shoulder. The upper half of the monitor showed colored shapes in sharp geometry. A mottled gray and yellow texture filled the bottom half, but all the angles were skewed so the image seemed to be sliding off the screen’s left side.
The siren turned onto Dustin’s street, its flashing blue and red lights reflecting off the neighborhood trees until the car parked in his driveway. The siren wailed to silence, and a few seconds later, a heavy knocking came from the front door.
His parents looked at Dustin first, and then toward the pounding downstairs. “Don’t touch your computer, son,” said Dad.
Another car without a siren or flashing lights pulled into the driveway. Doors opened. Voices jumbled together outside.
Minutes later, his room full of strangers, Dustin sat on his bed’s edge and said, “I just kept sending it out.” An earnest older man whose shirt was tucked in on only one side wrote Dustin’s comment in a notebook.
“Had you seen a planet on that coordinate earlier?” he asked. Dustin shook his head. At Dustin’s desk, two women, one in a bathrobe, and the other in a nice pantsuit, whispered vehemently back and forth about the image. “We’ll need his hard drive. It could be a fake,” Pantsuit said. “I don’t see how,” replied Bathrobe.
A man in uniform, but definitely not a policeman, carefully rolled Dustin’s Peek-a-boo into a plastic bag that zipped closed when the unit plopped to the bottom.
From the hallway, Mom’s voice said, “He’s always been a determined boy.”
Dad said, “So, you think he really found something, do you?” His tone was skeptical.
Someone in the hallway said, “He’ll be famous.”
“Look at this,” said Bathrobe. She moved the cursor to the menu bar at the top of the screen. A few clicks later, the image reoriented itself. Now the gray and yellow texture moved to the top and became sky. Dustin blinked, then blinked again. What had seemed abstract before suddenly made sense. “Is that…” he said, and swallowed. “Is that a building?”
Pantsuit pointed to what had been a red blob before, “Yes, and that looks like a tree to me…” she bent close to the screen, “… with a park bench under it. A yellow one with brown arm rests.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Bathrobe, in a voice that was clear she did.
The older man sitting on the bed with Dustin said to himself, “It’s such a big universe. What are the odds a Peek-a-boo would appear close enough to a planet’s surface, oriented just the right way, to take a picture of a park bench?”
Bathrobe said, “A park bench 380 million light years from Earth.”
Dustin lay in his bed. The clouds had cleared, and early dawn lightened the sky enough through his window to dissolve the stars and show the blank area on his desk where his computer had sat earlier that night. Now, though, only a clean square outlined by a fine dust film showed that anything had been there at all.
“We’ll replace this computer,” Bathrobe had said as she left with the CPU. Pantsuit added, “And a new Peek-a-boo, even better than your old one. Later today, there will be a news conference.”
The older man patted Dustin on the head as he left. “There will be a lot of news conferences, I’d say, now that you showed us where to look.”
After all the bustle, after the doors slammed below and the cars departed, Dustin finally climbed into bed, but he couldn’t sleep. For the longest time he stared out the window, his sheets pulled to his chin, hands locked behind his head. A few days ago, the moon had preceded Mars to the horizon, but now the red planet set first, while the moon followed, dragging Pleiades like star babies close behind. He thought about the stars passing by his window as if they were friends: Hamal, of course, and Menkar, and the sprinkling of tau stars, omi Tau, xi Tau and f Tau, then Aldebaran and Algol, and Betelgeuse, who faded last in the lightening sky. They all seemed so comforting that he didn’t notice at first that the house had changed. For the longest time he tried to place the difference. Not just the missing computer. Not just the strangeness of the night’s events. Something else.
He gasped in surprise, then silenced his breathing so he could hear. Below him, in his parent’s room, he heard voices: his mom and dad, talking. The conversation rose and fell. It had been going on since they’d left his room. Once, he could swear, he heard laughter. Long after the morning sky had brightened to blue and the maple tree cast its shadow on the fence and their neighbor’s house, Dustin listened, and not once, that morning, did his parents quit talking. Not even when they moved into the kitchen. Not even when they began fixing breakfast. Their voices broke the long silence, and Dustin knew he wasn’t alone in the house.
He wasn’t alone, and it was time to eat.
TINY VOICES
More than the thirty feet and a wall separated the two women.
Stella sipped breaths, her sheet pulled under her chin, eyes closed tight, but she saw the room from a dozen vantage points: from the television’s self-focusing eye, the coffee pot’s proximity control, the light switch’s finger pad, the medical sensor’s finely tuned perception field that reached not just to her, tracing each labored heart beat and marking the sluggish progress of her blood through her body, but also picking up a fly’s tiny buzz near the ceiling fixture and a beetle crawling along the baseboard under the bed. She saw herself lying beneath the covers, old, old, old, as old as crumbling epitaphs, as old as weathered wood, her face a shrunken fruit barely making a dent in the pillow. I.V. lines dangled from her arm. She pitied herself as if from afar, and it was all she could do to keep from weeping. In fact, when she looked closely, she could tell she was weeping shiny glinting tear tracks from the corners of her eyes to her ears. It didn’t seem fair, so close to death that she could sense so much. With an electron’s nimbleness, she switched her attention from device to device. I can’t be dying, she thought; I don’t want to.