Those were the three arguments, and when he lined them up against his own shaky conviction, the reality of a memory lasting just about one second, and an ambiguous sentence in a letter from his mother, the arguments against seemed pretty strong and the arguments for seemed pretty weak.
He lit a new cigarette from the butt of the old, and paced the floor some more. Never mind trying to bolster the arguments for, that wouldn’t get anywhere. He had to forget for a few minutes that he was worried and afraid and that he hadn’t the vaguest idea what the future held in store for him, and he had to concentrate on this problem just as calmly and logically as he could. The time had come to look for holes in the arguments against.
Number one, why hadn’t he done it before? The only possibility was that it had required a certain narrow set of conditions before the ability could express itself. What, then, were the conditions?
Well, it had been dark, pitch-black, it hadn’t been possible for him to see the rims of his glasses while he was wearing them. And he had been in a confined space. And he had been in a stress situation, feeling frantic, feeling that all was hopeless, and desiring more strongly than ever before in his life to be somewhere else. Some specific where else.
The first psychiatrist had asked him if he could teleport again. In his narcosynthesized condition he had answered no, and had given two reasons: He wasn’t alone, and there was no pressing need to go anywhere else.
All right, then. It required at least some but probably all of the conditions he’d just outlined. And could he honestly say that he had ever before in his life been in a situation with all of those conditions simultaneously present?
No, he couldn’t.
Then that was why he’d never done it before.
And had there been, since then, any other time when all of those conditions had been simultaneously present?
No, there had not been.
Then that was why he hadn’t done it again.
On to number two. If he had really gone home, why had he come right back? He tried to remember back to that second at home, tried to remember what his feelings and thoughts had been in the flash before returning to the point of departure.
He had been frightened. He had been really frightened that time, and he’d had every right to be. Sure, if he’d planned to teleport himself home, and he had then done it, he might simply have strolled on downstairs and said, “Hi, folks, I’m home.”
But he hadn’t planned it. And having the world suddenly shift seven hundred miles beneath you, without expecting it, is pretty shocking. The mind rejects the whole idea. The mind says, “This isn’t happening!” The mind says, “Go back! This isn’t possible! This is madness and chaos and death!” And you jump right back again.
And that was why he hadn’t stayed home. He’d been too shocked and terrified at being there. He had probably snapped back just in time to avoid either a heart attack or the loss of his mind.
And that left argument number three. If he could do it, why couldn’t other people do it?
Well, let’s narrow it down. Maybe some people can do it, just as some people can carry a tune and some people have 20–20 vision and some people can multiply four digit figures by three digit figures in their heads.
He could narrow it down, but that didn’t help much. He could say that it was also, aside from being an occasional characteristic rather than an inevitable characteristic, one which developed with maturity. That was another possible reason for his never having done it before, but no matter how much he narrowed and hedged, it wasn’t going to do much good unless he narrowed it all the way down to one, unless he drew a line with himself on one side and the whole human race on the other.
And then he remembered his Aunt Sara and his Uncle Fred, on his mother’s side. Eight years ago, Uncle Fred was killed in an airplane accident out in California, on the western slope of one of the Rockies. The day after that, when the news came, Aunt Sara, a kindly church-going old lady in her early sixties, insisted that she had had a premonition. Last night, she told anyone who would listen, at almost precisely the same time that poor Uncle Fred was dying against that mountainside, she swore she saw him standing in the kitchen, right next to the refrigerator. She had been in the living room, watching the television, in that mohair chair by the radiator, where she could look straight down the hall to the kitchen, and she swore she saw him standing there. And — the way she later told it — she’d said, “Why, Fred, what are you doing home so early?” And he was gone.
Of course, nobody had believed Aunt Sara. She kept on telling the story right up to the day of her death, a little over a year ago, and everybody just classed it as Aunt Sara’s one lapse into mysticism, brought on by the death of Uncle Fred, and let it go at that.
Jeremy had told the story himself once, just once, and not with any belief in it. It was two years ago, when he’d been a freshman in college. He and a bunch of the other guys in the dorm were together having a bull session, and the conversation had gotten around to ghosts and voodoo and séances and mysticism in general. All of them, being college freshmen, had the world completely figured out, and to a man they put down all that mystical nonsense as a lot of mystical nonsense. They took turns telling stories they’d heard, about phony mediums and voodoo dolls and whatnot, and Jeremy added as his contribution the story of his Aunt Sara and his Uncle Fred. Aunt Sara was still alive then, and his telling of the story was rather sarcastic and not at all kind to the old lady.
Once he’d told the story, another freshman assured him pompously that what he had just described was “a very common phenomenon, especially in wartime.” It seemed that the appearance of a loved one at just around the same moment when, it was later learned, that loved one was being killed in an enemy attack or a mine cave-in or an automobile accident, was one of the old standby situations of the believers in mysticism. It was even more common in mystical lore than the appearance of a long-dead relative. And it was, of course, all nonsense, easily explained by psychology.
Everything was easily explained by psychology, Jeremy realized now. Once you accepted the basic postulate that the mind could play tricks on a person, suddenly and without apparent reason, you could explain away just about anything that ever happened to anybody. You could prove to a man that the Earth was made of green cheese, if you first got him to accept the basic postulates of psychology.
Jeremy had believed the easy explanation of freshman psychology at the time. But now he’d been on the other end of that sort of visitation, and the easy explanations of psychology had a lot less appeal for him.
Because there was another explanation, one that didn’t require labeling nice down-to-earth old ladies as sudden crackpots.
Say that the ability to teleport was present to a greater or lesser degree in all men, just as memory is present to a greater or lesser degree in all men. There are some men with photographic memories, who can remember every word of a seven hundred page chemistry text six months after reading it once. And there are some men who can never remember a telephone number or an appointment or a birthday or what they did with the other cuff link.