Slob - Ellen Potter [42]
That’s what happened when the TV made a little pift sound and suddenly Charlie’s Angels was on. The picture was pretty fuzzy, just like the ghost images at The Black Baron Pub. I stared at the TV for a second or two and actually said out loud, “What? What’s hap—what?”
My eyes grew wider as I watched a blond Charlie’s Angel jumping around, dressed as a cheerleader.
“Okay, Okay, this is it, Owen,” I said, still talking out loud. I needed to hear my own voice to convince myself this was real.
My heart was thumping harder than any thump that Andre had ever given me. This was it. I had done it! Me, twelve-year-old Owen Birnbaum, had done it with junkyard scraps and brainpower. And Nima’s amplifier, of course. The feeling of success was so overwhelming that for a while I nearly forgot what all this hard work had been for.
Okay, I said to myself. Calm down. You may have managed to get an old signal but now you have to figure out when that signal was first sent out. I’d have to check the old Retro TV Magazines for the dates on which that episode was shown. Chances were they’d shown that episode more than once in the past two years. After that, I’d still have to capture some more old signals and recheck the magazines to pinpoint the dates of these old signals. If they were from before October 25, 2006, the day my parents were killed, I still had time to possibly capture the surveillance recording from that night. I could hook up the deli’s surveillance camera receiver to Nemesis and start looking. But if the signals were from after that date, it was all for nothing. Well, Nemesis would be a success, but any hope of identifying the person who had shot my parents would be lost forever. I ran to Jeremy’s room and pounded on the door.
“What?” she yelled on the other side of the door.
“Come in my room and look,” I called, and rushed back to my bedroom.
In a minute she came in my room and stared at the TV.
“Charlie’s Angels. Stupid show,” she said.
“But I was watching The Love Boat.”
She stared at me for a second, then her eyes went wide. “You mean it worked?”
I nodded.
“You did it?” Her voice was getting shrill.
I nodded again.
“I can’t believe it. Owen! You are a total genius!”
Almost.
Still, I loved the way she said that.
We watched the show for ten more minutes, though Jeremy kept making gagging noises whenever the cheerleaders appeared. Suddenly the TV went pift and The Love Boat came back on.
Crap.
I ran up to Nemesis and checked the equipment. Everything looked fine. I had simply lost the signal.
“Do you think it will come back again tonight?” Jeremy asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, there’s no school tomorrow . . . Teachers’ Conference Day. You can watch the Freakout Channel all day long to see if you can catch the signal again.”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t work like that. I won’t be able to catch the signal until around the same time tomorrow night. Come here, I’ll show you.”
Jeremy came to the window, and I pointed out into the black, star-freckled sky.
“See that star up there?” I said. “Between the water tower and the Fuji Towers?”
She nodded.
“Pretend that’s the Nemesis star. It’s not, but just imagine. That star will only be in that particular spot for a certain amount of time this evening. Soon it will pass out of sight behind that water tower. Tomorrow night, at around this time, it will be there again for a while, although over weeks it will drift a little. When Charlie’s Angels came on, the Nemesis star was at just the right spot for me to catch signals off of it. I’ll have to wait until around the same time tomorrow night to get the signals again. If I can get them again. Understand?”
“Got it.” She nodded once, although she looked so confused that I doubted she really did.
“But,” she said after a moment of thought, “how will you know when that old Charlie’s Angels episode aired two years ago?”
“I’ll have to go through all the Retro TV Magazines and write down the day and time the episode was on. If I’m lucky, it will only have been on once in the