HELLOOO MS. ANDERSON-LEE... 
by Anthony R. Elmore 
Live, from your neighborhood: 
"For chrissakes, get that bicycle out of the way," called Ben Guzzle from the foyer, his voice muffled by the new 27-inch TV he carried. His three children scurried from the den, pelting Ben with questions. "Move, I can't see." He snarled and bumped into a hat rack and nearly tripped over an RC 4x4 racer before he steadied himself. He cautiously wedged the TV through the narrow doorway and scraped his hands on the jambs. Immediately, his legs tangled in the controller wires of his kid's Nintendo 64. It banded his legs from moving; so, cursing scarlet, he set the TV down on the worn, juice-stained carpet. The kids funneled behind him, arguing who has the right to help daddy. "All of you, sit down or I'm taking it back." But that was an idle threat, and he could barely cap his excitement about what a week's check could bring. He ripped off the tape, opened the flaps, and pulled the TV out of the box, taking in the scent of plastic. "Nothing smells like new, smells like ..." Two plastic foam braces and the bubble wrap detached from the set and fell to the floor; beads of plastic foam dust flittered in the air. He put the new TV where the old, busted set used to be, the one bought two Christmases past. He impressed himself as he matched the male and female cable cords to the right slots and had the cable box, the VCR and the video game patched in like a telephone worker figures out the vermicelli of wires in a junction box. 
He had to wrestle the ziplocked remote and instructions away from his toddler, but once he got them he cracked a beer, sat on his lazy boy, and studied the newfangled remote control. To him it had more buttons than a 747 cockpit. "Fucksakes, you need an engineering degree just to watch Monday Night Football. How do you turn this goddamn thing on?" Arrows, triangles, ovoids, letters denoting functions he never would use were as confusing a Babylonian calligraphy. At the top a red, circular button obviously had to be the power. He pressed it, and a blue screen appeared and the word "Programming" flashed on the screen. "Programming?" He read the instructions printed in five European languages, Japanese, and Mandarin, Cantonese, and a language script he'd never seen before. He located the English instructions, which read with the clarity of the criss-cross golf tee language. He read for about ten minutes, murmuring. "All I want to do is watch 'Baywatch'." 
* * * 
Seventy Years before Doug was born, Philo T. Farnsworth, the raconteur inventor and boy-genius, demonstrated his new invention, the cathode ray television, to a wealthy cadre of Connecticut venture capitalists. " 
Imagine," he said, gesturing toward the inactive gray bulb, no bigger than a headlight set among a field of vacuum tubes. "Millions upon millions of people experiencing a single moment together, all transfixed by the same image, all one nation. Not even Wilson and his League can bring nations together like this. A world with carte blanche to all nations." He stepped beside one of the younger investors and leaned into his ear. "And all kinds of currencies." 
"Sounds to me," said the portly, taciturn investor, dipping his stovepipe hat to him, "like the framework that will make laudanum look like chamomile tea. I think this is a marvelous idea, but not for this time, especially with a world to rebuild." 
"Yes," a shorter Stovepipe said, "I wouldn't be party to this new opiate." Philo was not swayed by the Stovepipes' objections. He counted on it. In that instant of silence, he slowly swept his arm and flipped a silver toggle switch. A loud click burst through the room and the bulb slowly lit. The image was mottled as a reflection in a gray pond as black and white filled the bulb's diameter. The torso and head of a beautiful singer appeared, still hazy, the image attuning to her slight figure. She began to sing a familiar aria. The Stovepipes leaned in around the tube, transfixed by the darkly sensuous beauty of the woman hued in excited electrons. Philo stood aside, smile beaming. He had set up the demonstration before the Stovepipes arrived; the girl was in a studio next door. The field of Stovepipes bayed words like "remarkable", "ingenious", "I could touch her." They turned to Philo, Stovepipes erect. 
"This could make us millions, nay, billions" the shorter Stovepipe postulated. 
"This visual radio, this ... is indescribable." Exhorted a Stovepipe behind the others. 
"Come with me to the studio, and I'll show how the pictures get from there to here." He said, "as well as the lovely chanteuse." Together they exited to the studio, leaving the lab empty except for the flicker of the TV. 
Moments later, a middle-aged, salt-and- pepper-bearded man broke into the laboratory. He wore the period's clothes, but his waistcoat and cuffs were more appropriate for winter. He looked around at the lab to see if he were alone, a fetid gust of francium and sodium assailing his nose. His view turned to the TV prototype and he walked cautiously toward it. He beheld a living museum piece, his emotions idling between spite and marvel. Marvel for the present; spite that began fifty years after Ben Guzzle sent his new TV back to Circuit City. His name was Dr. Hughes, the "Doctor" title ornamental since colleges of his time did not offer doctorates in literature anymore, the few colleges that were left. Dr. Hughes approached the TV, seeing the Stovepipes vie to kiss the hand of the nightingale or idiotically waving into of the camera. "This is how it started," he thought, "The learned and dumb, reduced to gesturing into the dead crow's eye of the camera." Inside him, he wanted to take a bat to the infernal machine that had enslaved generations to the spectacles it transmitted, that had put him in the street. But that was not his plan. He too saw the Berlin Wall come down, the Second Moon Mission, the bloodied rags of humanity pulled from the smolders of the Murrah building. The TV shrank expansive oceans into puddles, and made the world smaller and accessible. But in the same frame, dulled the intelligence of many, reducing their fickle attentions to mere blips, disconnected them from their local culture, from each other. So he thought. He was obsolete. This would be his Oklahoma bombing. 
From his satchel he took out and unrolled a blueprint, and compared it to the vacuum tube menagerie of the TV. He found what we call the channel changer, the device that made it possible for moderns to switch channels. For Farnsworth, this was the most difficult part to design. "It is a fantastic machine designed for the dullard." He found it, pulled it from the circuitry board it and put it in his pocket. He glanced a minute at the Stovepipes scrabbling across the screen, and Philo standing with his hand in his pocket halfway out of frame. The half expression on his face smiled greedily. It really was a wonder, in this time. 
His mission accomplished and his one-way trip through time complete, he hurried out the lab toward the grove where the timepod lay. He wished he could send a letter of apology to Dr. Bhopa for time-jacking his prototype and for hitting him too hard. But it was necessary, and he did a service to the future. He returned to the timepod and carefully gutted the machine of its circuits, then burnt the capsule beyond recognition. Anyone who found the charred heaps would think it was another failed, queer-looking automobile or airplane prototype. Dr. Hughes survived for two more years in the smog-drenched dives of San Francisco. He made a frugal living as a science fiction writer, but editors rarely bought his stories about a populous of attentions arrested by a Nordic, breasty jogging woman. He succumbed to tuberculosis and subsequently died anonymous among the other unknown throngs in a hospital. He was buried in a mass pauper's grave along with the odd-looking jewelry and the funny devices that weren't worth stripping for the copper. 
* * * 
It's Ben Guzzle's time now, but not the same Ben. He brings in the TV, puts it on the console where the older set stood. As before, he unpacked the control, which looks like something between a scientific calculator and a telemetry panel for finding satellites. But since classes in geometry, astronomy, and calculus were compulsory for finding the eight channels of the machine, he didn't feel embarrassed. He was only a copier repairman with only a freshman understanding of engineering. "OK, let's fire this thing up. The cosine of the telemetry of the satellite squared by the root. Put in Maxwell's equation, say a little prayer, and ... Hellooo Ms. Anderson-Feynman." 

Story copyright 2000 by Anthony R. Elmore