He looked at the hair again, and accidentally got his finger in the image and saw the loops and ridges as if they were the hills and valleys of another world, like those strange, periodically folded mountain ranges on Pluto.
He could sell the microscope for a tenth of what it would cost to recover his father’s performance of Don Giovanni.
He gave the woman the ten bucks, his hands slippery with fear that she would change her mind and ask more. He only had eleven in his wallet.
“You can fix junk?” she asked as he handed it to her. “Take the toaster too. For you, one buck.”
He shrugged. Spending habits: eleven bucks a day was three hundred thirty a month. Three years of that would recover the record. He smiled, gave her the buck, and took the toaster. He might indeed be able to fix it cheaply—but there were already many things that needed to be fixed in that garage.
Betty was waiting for him when he got home.
“Bad news. I can tell; you went shopping.” She smiled.
“Bad news,” he admitted. “Ten grand. They want ten grand.”
‘Tour dad’s important to you. We gotta know where we come from.” She put her arm around him and squeezed. “Hon, we’ve got plenty of money in the house.”
“We promised ourselves we wouldn’t do that.” The royalties and the dividends of what was left after they paid off the house were enough to eat on if they lost their jobs in another cutback cycle, if they ate ra-men. Society had almost taken the house from him once for taxes—and the idea of giving the title to someone else, of giving the crooks, graspers, and cheats out there a chance at him, even though it made good financial sense, made him shiver. The house was what he had left of Mom’s life, all her long hours at low pay, all her scrimping and discipline. He would not risk it. Mom, Carlo, Theresa, he vowed, someday I’m going to do something to make you all proud of me, something that makes it all meaningful. Something to make dad sing.
“Hon,” Betty interrupted his thoughts, “we can’t take it with us. You’re obsessed with this; every night, every day we’re not at work, you’re in that workshop and we’re not getting any younger.” She pressed her body against him, and murmured, throatily. “Let’s make some hay while the Sun shines. Go for it.”
It lifted him out of his gloom a bit. “Hey, we gotta lot of years left, darling. We’ll start saving more. Besides, maybe I can make some money off this junk I bought.”
“OK, hon. Whatever you think best. I love you.”
He answered with the distracted kiss of a man running after a dream and running out of breath as it got further and further away. Perhaps some things were not meant to be.
The day before the school’s annual swap meet, Scott took the microscope and the now-working laser toaster out of their boxes for a last-minute polishing. The microscope tempted him again, reminding him of the days when he thought he might have a professional career ahead of him. A job in industry, or maybe even a professorship at some idyllic liberal arts college in a small midwestern town, far from want and tension; complete with fresh air, trees, and seasons.
The drawers of the plastic organizer that held his nuts and bolts had thin plastic dividers that he thought might make good sample slides. He pulled one out, frowning and shrugging his shoulders as some number eights mixed with some number sixes.
The now-working light could illuminate samples from above and below. The instrument worked perfectly, and he went on a microscopic odyssey, exploring nails, paint brush bristles, sawdust, bare wire ends and numerous other small objects.
Thinking back to the Pluto video, he took another look at the planet of his fingertip, and journeyed over its ridges. Then he remembered the phonograph needle over that same fingertip. He reached for half of his father’s record, stored on one of the neatly labeled “open projects” shelves over the workbench, blew the dust off of it, and placed it in the focal plane.
The grooves wavered from side to side; he thought of flying along those grooves; he’d be jerked from side to side and get airsick. That vibration, of course, was how these old records made sound. Now if he were flying along that groove, his radar altimeter would experience a doppler shift as the surface came in and out at him.
Could he build a little something to fly along those grooves? If it weren’t in actual contact with the record, it wouldn’t break when it hit the broken edge. And it wouldn’t wear out the record—those old disks would last just as long as the CD’s. “Scott?”
“Oh, hi, darling.”
“I brought you some soup. What are you thinking about?”
“I was thinking about building a sort of laser needle for these old records, that wouldn’t touch the records so it wouldn’t matter if they were cracked or warped.”
“Sounds expensive. I mean, it would have to be very precise, wouldn’t it? And precise things cost a lot.”
She had a point. He started thinking about the servos, tracking, doppler transducers… damn!
“You’re right, I think. The way the Audion guys were going to do it would cost a lot less, I guess.”
The realistic professional in him could conceive of ten thousand dollars as being less. The boy reached out to the father he’d never known, and his hand closed on air. He couldn’t give up, not now, not so close.
“Betty, I’m going to keep the microscope. If it’s worth a grand now, it will be worth a grand next year. And by next year, maybe I’ll think of something else.”
“Sure, hon. Drink your soup.”
But the next year was little different. He tried to make a tracking system, but it wouldn’t stay on the groove. The stuff he needed to fix that was too expensive.
His latest idea was to guide the laser with a stiff Teflon fiber to track the groove, using a resistive diaphragm and servo loop instead of physical force to guide it. But there was an interaction mode between the fiber and the servo control that caused it to hunt its way out of the groove.
He’d been trying a software damper when Betty came to the shop.
“Hon, they’re releasing the Persephone encounter tapes tonight. Want to quit and watch?”
NASA had found a four-hundred-kilometer iceball far out of the ecliptic for the Pluto probe to pass by. Some newspeople were calling it the tenth planet, causing a lot of astronomers to smile through clenched teeth. But it was probably the biggest event left in the saga of robot space exploration.
“Sure, why not? I give up. This isn’t going to work either.”
There. He’d admitted it. A broken idea depressed him even more than his broken record, and, uncharacteristically, he just left everything where it was. He turned as he left the shop, slapped the light switch off, said “Sorry, Dad,” into the gloom, then followed Betty back to the house.
But instead of using the wall screen in the livingroom, she led him back to the bedroom.
“I know this sounds a little kinky, hon. But last time, well, it was kind of good.”
Scott laughed. “Anything to please. We’ll can it and play it back.”
They did. They were making their fourth pass over Tombaugh ridge in deep afterglow when Betty suddenly gasped and her eyes snapped wide open. Then she laughed gently.
“Oh, Scott,” she murmured, “did the probe actually fly down that valley, like this?” She took one of his fingers and used it to simulate the hypothesized probe trajectory in the folds of the bedding.
“No,” he laughed, “they made a three-dimensional model of Persephone in their computer and just transformed the coordinates of the pixels so that it looks that way, as if we were in a spaceship traveling right down that groove…”
She giggled as he was rendered speechless. Of course! He had lasers. He had a microscope. He had a turntable. A drill press to hold the microscope. He could track by hand, to prove the concept. He had his home computer and its optical floppy. As long as he had the picture of the groove, he didn’t have to fly anything physical through it. His “needle” could be a purely software construct.