“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.
2
The landscape was definitely alien. Our viewpoint was perhaps fifty feet above the ground, just over the treetops. In the distance, hidden somewhat by the haze in the air, mountains loomed. Closer were green carpeted hills with great flapping pink and white birds flying lazily over them. The hills and the jungle that covered them marched right down to the pebble and shell strewn beach in front of us. The trees weren’t like trees at all, they were more like giant ferns. Huge green fronds swayed and tossed about in the wind like green-haired dancers at a neo-punk concert.
“I did it!” shouted Jason. “I twisted the right dial and there are the trees!”
He whooped and stood suddenly, still aiming an index finger at the screen like a bird dog in pheasant farm. His fingernail had a black crescent of grime around it. I gave him a dark look, remembering the well-deserved slugging. But then I softened.
“Yes, you did it, all right,” I admitted.
“So…” He said distantly. He turned to me and looked troubled.
“What should we do now, Steve?”
The elation of what had just happened overwhelmed me again. I had trouble focusing my thoughts for a few moments.
“Hell if I know.”
“Well, should we tell someone?”
“No. Absolutely not. Haven’t you seen enough movies man? We want to keep this to ourselves. I’ve always wanted something like this to happen to me.”
“Me too,” said Jason, his voice falling away to a near whisper. “But now I don’t know what to do with it.” Then he spotted something. He went into a point again.
“Holy crap, Batman! Would you look at those little dudes! ”
For the next full minute we gaped at the screen like a couple of specials. Everything was fairly normal, Earth-like that is, except for the green people in the fern-trees. I could see seed pods, up under the fronds, like coconuts on a palm. I could also see a lot of skinny little green guys in the fronds with the coconuts. Jason broke our stunned silence. Nothing could stun him into silence for long.
“Jeez. They seem to be looking at us.”
“You’re right,” I said. For the first time, I felt a cold hand grip my bowels and give a gentle squeeze of fearful excitement. I shifted in my chair and rubbed my fingers against one another nervously.
“Those little green bastards…” Jason muttered wonderingly. “They’re goblins!” he stated with sudden decision. “That’s what they are.”
“Goblins, huh?” I chuckled. Then I spotted a glint of metal and straightened up. “They have weapons too,” I said. “See there? That one has a knife of some kind, and the three in the tree next to him have bows!”
“Maybe they’ll shoot at us!”
“Maybe you should shut up.” But I was worried. Just what, I wondered, did we look like to them? It was clear that they could see us. Just thinking about what we were seeing was enough to scare the spit out of my mouth and to start the sweat running out of my relatively cool armpits.
Then one of the skinny little farts fired an arrow at us.
“Duck!” Jason all but screamed. And though I didn’t see any real danger, and the arrow looked like it would probably fall short anyway, I ducked. When we looked back, we saw that the arrow had indeed fallen short and that we were apparently out of their range. They shot several more arrows which dropped into the sea below us before they finally gave up.
“Come on Jason, they can’t hit anything. It’s just a picture.” I was a bit pissed that Jason had gotten me to duck.
“I don’t know…”
“Here, let’s just give them something to shoot at.” I reached forward to the fine tuning knob and brushed it.
The image zoomed in and we found ourselves in the middle of one of the big fern-trees. We stared into the startled faces of three goblins. Up close they looked kind of nasty. They were about three feet tall. They might have been a little taller but they seemed to move about in a crouch all of the time, as if their knees were permanently bent. Their hands were long with thin fingers and large bony joints. Their facial features were sharp and pinched into a perpetual snarl. Surprised by our sudden move, they produced thin screeching sounds and displayed mouthfuls of protruding yellow teeth that glistened wetly. We were right there in the middle of their fern-tree and it was like shoving a torch into a snake pit. They squirmed away and hissed excitedly.