Page 182 - Where the Dream Ends ebook

Marc Erdrich

salvos at his bases, damaging his ships. Loud noises, piercing
whistles and thunderous crashes accompanied every strike. In
less than a minute the game was over. Eddie was dazed. His

score was 600. A list of high scorers scrolled onto the screen
accompanied by the names of the star players. The initials JLE
occupied the first five positions. The top score was 149,500.
Whew! I’ve a ways to go, Eddie thought, dropping another half
dollar into the slot. Probably just some twelve-year-old kid any-
way. He tapped the buttons furiously. The second time he did
a little better, scoring 1200. He played several more rounds,
each time improving on his previous score.

“Hey fella, you having lunch or what,” the bartender called.
Eddie was glad to be pulled away from the box. He had imag-
ined himself being swallowed up by the machine like the play-
ers in the movie Tron.

Eddie recalled another time when he got hooked on a tiny
hand-held video game that belonged to a friend. When you
pressed the start button a bird, looking remarkably like a stork,
dropped a baby into a stretcher held by two stick figures. The
idea of the game was to use the controls to maneuver the

stretcher into position to catch the baby and bounce it into
an ambulance in the corner of the screen. This done, more
babies dropped from the sky faster and more furiously until
there were three and more babies falling from the sky simulta-
neously. If you missed a baby as it fell from the sky it splattered
onto the ground and an angel of death appeared on the screen.
After the third miss three angels appeared and the game was
over. All this took place on a screen that was two inches square.

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