The Space Sieve Read online

QUICKLY REVIVING HIM, they cleaned David up and put him to bed, confident that he had no fever or illness that they could detect.

  But unfortunately, David did not honestly tell them what had been going on. In fact, he lied to them, telling his parents he had passed out from exercising – not a very credible story really. Moreover, on this evening, having lied to them, he now continued a pattern of lying to his parents. This began innocently at first – he didn’t feel he could tell them what happened. But lying, it seems, once begun, becomes easier for most of your kind. He began to deliberately mislead his parents, and indeed, began to actively plot their deception.

  Had he not done so, a great deal of sorrow would have been avoided. For his parents, while completely inadequate to assess the capacity and function of the Space Sieve, were capable of recognizing dangers to their children, and were certainly more capable of doing so than was David for himself. At a minimum, his parents had the prudence that comes with age, and would not have allowed David to venture nearly as far with the Device as he ultimately would venture with it.

  David, for his part, after that first evening recognized he was obsessed with the Machine. He also knew that to give himself over to that fixation as he had been doing, would ultimately lead to destruction of his health and more importantly to him, to the Device being removed from him. He could not allow that to happen, and he knew that this is exactly what would happen if he was too preoccupied with it. He realized this shortly after he found himself lying on the floor next to the Device with his hysterical parents leaning over him. Later, he realized it even more as he heard them talking about the days of school he had been missing, about how odd he had been acting at his grandfather’s house, and about how distant and strange he had been lately. And he could see they were making connections about where the problem really was.

  But he felt the pain of his obsession most of all the next morning, when he awoke and found the Device had been taken out of his room.

  This presented a difficult situation for him. He had to have it back. But if he was too eager, too persistent, he knew his parents, fearing for his health, would recognize his obsession, and would never give it back to him.

  He got up and went downstairs. It was Thursday, and breakfast went normally. But he could see his parents eyeing him, waiting for him to ask about the Device, and so he didn’t.

  But finally his brother broached the subject.

  I will point out here, as I have done in the past that I do not give irrelevant details in this account. I have not mentioned the names of David’s siblings, nor have I even related their number. These details are no more relevant to this account than what David had for breakfast, what he was wearing, what his parents were wearing, where in the house they ate their breakfast, the color of the chairs, etc. I have no intention of prolonging my ordeal in using your manner of communication any longer than necessary.

  If you want to read details such as those in a story, I would suggest you go get a work of fiction and read it. In the area of giving tedious, irrelevant detail, most of them will not disappoint in that regard.

  “Mommy,” David’s younger brother said, “Why did you put that thing that David got from Grandpa in the garbage?” At first, David felt a rush of adrenaline-enhanced concern, and he could sense he parents were studying his face carefully. But his powers of reason quickly took charge.

  “Ah,” he thought, “now I know where it is – the garbage.” He resolved he would simply retrieve it later. He began to formulate the rationale he would use when he did.

  But then he felt a cold chill. He heard the throbbing diesel engine of a heavy truck in front of the next-door neighbor’s house, and then he heard its brakes squeak as it stopped in front of his house. It was garbage day.

  As he now ran to the window, David could see that among the rest of the family’s garbage, was the Device. It looked unique – its dark form sticking out of the garbage container, contrasted against the brightness and color of the sunny morning.

  David froze for a moment – he had resolved after all, to appear indifferent about the Device. But he instantly realized this artifice would be irrelevant if he lost it, and in seconds it would be loaded into the garbage truck. Running through the kitchen he crashed through the door and ran outside. By the time he reached the street the truck had already lifted the garbage container and it was beginning to tip into the truck.

  David ran to the driver’s door, and screamed, “STOP!!”

  Unfortunately for David, the operator of the truck heard him, and did indeed stop the hydraulic arm. The operator had always imagined this happening – lifting a garbage container that held a child’s valued possession, and having the child come running out of the house like this. Many men would have relished the opportunity to crush a child’s hopes by dumping the garbage and continuing on. But this man had a kinder heart, and he saw the parents run out of the house behind David, besides. When he stopped the arm it was very near its highest point.

  As he did so, the jarring caused the Device to come loose, and it fell. It crashed against the side of the truck, and David watched in horror as it struck the sidewalk. It hit hard on one of its corners, and raised a small puff of dust as it chipped the concrete.

  He saw it all happen in slow motion, and being acquainted with the sorts of devices that your kind makes he believed the Space Sieve would be wrecked by the jarring impact.

  Breathing heavily, he immediately up-righted it, and found the impact point where it hit the sidewalk. The curb had been chipped, and on one corner of the Device was the white concrete dust.

  But as David ran his fingers along the Device and he wiped the dust away, he felt no chip, no dent, no scratch.

  It remained unchanged, undamaged, perfect.

  When Leland saw how robust it was, in hindsight he regretted having thrown it away. It was old, after all, and it had been Grandfather’s.

  He looked at his wife sheepishly. “You know Honey they really don’t make stuff like that anymore. Look at the thing – not even a scratch.”

  (I might mention here, that there is nothing in, nor associated with, your universe that can damage this Device – there is no hard object, no energy in your reality that can mar it. Even the heat inside the core of your sun, cannot harm the Space Sieve.)

  “Maybe,” he continued, “we shouldn’t have thrown it away after all.”

  Sharon looked back at him. “Lee, we talked about this,” she said softly. “He’s been missing school . . .”

  But they agreed to let David keep it, so long as he would play with it for only an hour a day, and only after he had done all of his homework and the other tasks he was supposed to do were completed. In return, David secured from his parents the agreement that when he would play with it, he would be allowed to do so alone. (But he used the word “study” to refer to what he did with it. After all, who would believe a boy would play with what appeared to be an inert object? But his parents were able to accept, at least to a point, that David might want to “study” it. After all, he had pointed out, don’t people study inert objects all the time?)

  And so David kept his end of the bargain in exchange for his hour each day, and this went on for seven months, by which time David had become dangerously practiced in the use of the Machine, along the lines of which I will now begin to relate. As an introduction, and since you have probably already forgotten, it would be worth reiterating that when David first saw the stellar phenomena on the screen of the Device – the planets, the other worlds, the galaxies and the like – he wasn’t seeing transmitted images. Although still physically sitting there in his bedroom, what he saw – looking at them directly – were the actual places themselves. It was as though, as I said, he was looking out an open window, directly at a tree, at the sky, or at any actual thing. That the objects he observed were billions of miles away or in alternate dimension of reality altogether, is irrelevant. He was in fa
ct looking directly at them, and doing so from any angle he chose.

  By the time summer came, David had already determined what he wanted to do, using the Device. He had chosen some first worlds he would visit and which, from his bedroom, he had explored in a general sense, many times. He resolved to start tomorrow, and to so begin the new life that the Space Sieve would provide him.