by Danny and TheTimeTrust
Danny Hearn:
I look out the window, at the wing. I look a little further, to the ground below. I'm not comfortable with this. Not at all. I'm flying in an antique.
"Jesus, calm down," Tobias says.
"What?" I say to him.
"You've been fidgeting the whole trip. Surely you've flown before," he replies.
"Never on anything this... old." Both of us are silent for a moment. I look ahead, to a small box suspended from the ceiling a few meters in front of us. "What the hell is that?" I ask Tobias. The box is about a foot-and-a-half wide, and is entirely black. There seems to be a glass cover over the front, and there's some sort of control panel at the bottom.
"That? That's a television," Tobias says to me, looking a little puzzled. "What, you don't have TV in your time?"
"Sure, we have TV... but not like that," I reply. Suddenly, pictures appear from behind the glass cover. "Well, I'll be damned..." I say quietly.
"That thing'll rot your brain, you know."
"Shut up, Hal."
How the hell did it turn itself on? Oh. I see. Just to my left is a stewardess holding... something black. Some sort of hand-held control. "It's two dimensional," I say.
"Yes. Yes it is," Lance replies.
I can't help but thinking, once again, how primitive this time is. My lungs suddenly feel... congested. And a little itchy. I cough loudly. I do it again. Damn. This sucks. I feel a little... dizzy. I keep coughing.
"Danny, are you okay?" someone says. I think it was M'xy. Or Mick. One of the two.
"Yeah... I just need a glass of water," I say, getting up.
"This week on Mandelovia Today..."
"Agent Digigrrl, will you turn that television off?" shouted Dr. Henry Quantos from his laboratory, where he'd been going through and approving Chief Bobowsky's plans for their upcoming mission. "DIGIGRRL?!"
Quantos reluctantly rose from his desk and impatiently stormed over to the empty recreation room, muttering something about common decency, and was about to turn the television off, when something stayed his hand. He listened and watched.
"--world's luckiest man! And he lives right here in Mandelovia!"
"'World's luckiest... man'...?" Quantos muttered, frowning and rubbing his cropped white beard in thought.
"We caught up with the world's luckiest man earlier today, after in less than one week he had won the Mandelovian Lottery, won a privately sponsored trip to Space Station Mir, and became the chief executive officer of a multinational company -- BountyLand Foods, Ltd. -- when he won the controlling stocks of the company in a card game mere hours before they skyrocketed up in value!
"But what do we know of the world's luckiest man? Very little, it would seem, beyond his name: Pete 'the Chimp' Glover. Up until this week this Charlie Chaplin-like 'little tramp' was a drifter, originally from Newfoundland, who had worked in an acrobatic act with his father in the circus as a child."
"Mr. Glover, to what do you account your recent skyrocket to success?"
"I be'n jinxed afore. N'arn jinxed a'more."
"That story and more, coming up next, on Mandelovia Today!"
"Hmmm..." Dr. Quantos murmured in thought. "I think I'll have to send Chief Bobowsky on one more mission before the next one..."