Camera

Speaking of Erid, Rocky’s calibrating some kind of device in his control-room bubble. It looks almost like a gun. I don’t think we’ve started a space war, so I assume it’s something else.

He holds the device with one hand, taps it with another, and uses two more to hold a rectangular panel that is connected to the device by a short cable. He uses his remaining hand to anchor himself at a handhold.

He makes some more adjustments to the device with what looks like a screwdriver, and suddenly the panel springs to life. It was completely flat, but now has a texture to it. He waves the gun part left and right and the patterns on the screen move left and right.

“Success! It functions!”

I lean over the edge of the pilot’s seat for a better look. “What’s that?”

“Wait.” He points the gun part at my external camera readout screen. He adjusts a couple of controls and the pattern on the rectangle settles into a circle. Looking closer, I see some parts of the circle are a little more raised than others. It looks like a relief map.

“This device hear light. Like human eye.”

“Oh. It’s a camera.”

“♫♪♫,” he says quickly. Now we have “camera” in our vocabulary.

“It analyze light and show as texture.”

“Oh, and you can sense that texture?” I say. “Cool.”

“Thank.” He attaches the camera to the bulb wall and fixes its angle to point at my central screen. “What are wavelengths of light humans can see, question?”

“All wavelengths between 380 nanometers and 740 nanometers.” Most people don’t just know that off the top of their head. But most people aren’t junior high schoolteachers who have giant charts of the visible spectrum on their classroom walls.

“Understand,” he says. He turns a few knobs on his device. “Now I ‘see’ what you see.”

“You’re an amazing engineer.”

He waves a claw dismissively. “No. Camera is old technology. Display is old technology. Both were on my ship for science. I only modify to use inside.”

***

Chapter 17