Say the ability to teleport was present in men in just as wide a range as the ability to remember. And say that that ability is so buried in the mind that it is almost unreachable. And the people who have the ability to the greatest degree — comparable to the people with total recall — even those people can’t tap the ability until they get into a one hundred per cent frantic stress situation.
All right. Call these people with the greatest degree of teleporting ability latents. Say Uncle Fred was a latent teleport. He’s sitting in the airplane, probably in a seat toward the rear of the plane, and suddenly the plane bucks and dips and dives straight for the mountain — he can look out the window and see that the right-hand wing has sheared off — and for the first time in his life he’s in a situation desperate enough to reach all the way down to the teleporting ability, and he wishes frantically he were home in his own kitchen, raiding the refrigerator, and all of a sudden he’s home. Which for shock value is about equivalent to kissing a girl who suddenly and instantaneously turns into a crocodile. So he teleports right back, while he still has his sanity. And the plane plunges into the mountain.
What killed Uncle Fred? The plane crash? No. The basic ingrained inability of the human mind to immediately reflect a postulate which has been proved false is what killed Uncle Fred.
And maybe that’s why nobody had ever come along before to tell the world he’d teleported. Because it required the imminent danger of death to bring the latent ability to the surface, and because the human being, at the instinctive level, would rather die than have his world turned topsyturvy.
Which was all well and good, except for one thing. He had teleported, and he hadn’t been facing imminent death. He had probably felt almost as much blind panic as Uncle Fred, but almosts don’t win ball games.
Unless age had something to do with it. Uncle Fred, at sixty-four, might have lived long enough, lived through enough variety of experience, and come to the age where the inevitability of death was real to him long enough ago, so that his panic at seeing the airplane wing fall off was just about as deep as Jeremy’s at twenty, having lived the normal fairly sheltered life of a middle-class American boy, finding himself suddenly blind and helpless in sharply cramped quarters with tear gas drifting toward him from two directions. And the man on the battlefield, who also appeared to a loved one at the moment of his death, would undoubtedly have already been toughened more than Jeremy by wartime Army basic training, which is a lot rougher than peacetime Air Force basic training any day in the week.
Or maybe… maybe he wasn’t the first one to survive after all.
He studied that idea, turning it over and over in his mind. There might have been others like himself. Say the potentiality is strong enough in only a relatively few human beings. Say the potentiality is forced into actuality only in some of the latents. Say that the catalyst is a sudden-death situation in most cases, and only rarely does there come along someone as lucky as Jeremy, who found out he had the ability before it was too late.
That would still leave a number of teleports in the world. And, so far as Jeremy knew, there weren’t any other teleports anywhere in the world at all.
So far as he knew.
But there might be some that he didn’t know about. If there were, obviously, they wouldn’t know about him. It might work both ways. Other individuals had discovered the ability. Some, totally disbelieving the truth, would push it out of their minds as hallucination, as Jeremy had tried to do. Some, reluctantly accepting the truth, would keep it a close secret, afraid that they would be considered crazy if they described their experience to anyone, would try to do it again — as Jeremy had tried — and would fail, and would simply go through life occasionally remembering the odd thing that had happened that summer at the lake.
And some would announce themselves, as Jeremy had done, and would be moved slowly and inevitably into lunatic asylums, and there they would stay, because they would be spending their entire lives in a situation of controlled slight stress, with never sufficient panic created to trigger the teleporting ability again.
Was that all of them?
Jeremy hoped not. If those were the three choices — to lie to yourself, to lie to others, or to be classed insane — then the people like Uncle Fred were the lucky ones after all.
There had to be another choice. Why couldn’t a man hide the ability from others, but keep working on it himself, training himself to use it consciously? And then find others, there had to be a way that people with this ability could find one another. None of them would be able to tell the normal people, of course. If they tried, they’d be considered members of just another nut cult. And physical demonstrations, assuming it were even possible to train this ability and bring it under control, could be easily explained away. People who hadn’t been present would say the magic words, “Mass hysteria,” which make any piece of difficult evidence disappear like smoke, and people who had been present would say, “It’s done with mirrors.”
“You can’t fool me. He’s twins!”
At that point, the ceiling light flickered. He had been told about that earlier in the day. It meant lights out in three minutes, and he was to be in bed when the lights went out. And no smoking.
He crawled into bed, and soon the lights went out, and bars and moonlight formed a diagonal pattern on the wall to his right, shining through his one window. He stared at the pattern, and tried to think.
“I don’t like it,” said the colonel. “It’s taking too long. Nothing’s happening.”
“Give it time, Jim,” said the major gently. “It hasn’t even been a week yet.”
The four of them were once again in the colonel’s suite at the BOQ. While Major Grildquist and the colonel talked, Ed Clark followed the conversation with his usual smiling eager attention, and Paul Swanson slouched moodily on the sofa, watching a pair of small steel balls orbit about one another in mid-air across the room.
“I don’t care how long it’s been,” snapped the colonel. “You haven’t done a thing yet. Paul, stop that.”
Swanson looked suddenly guilty, and the steel balls flashed across the room and burrowed into his shirt pocket.
“Well, now, Jim,” said the major, “I have done something. In less than a week, I have put that boy on tenterhooks. Give him a week or two more, and we’ll—”
“I don’t have a week or two more,” said the colonel.
“Push, push, push,” said the major gently. “You don’t really mean all that, Jim.”
“The devil I don’t.” The colonel glanced over at Clark. “What’s he doing now?”
“Still pacing the floor, I suppose,” said the major. “Pity we have to treat him this way.”
Clark cocked his head to one side and listened attentively. “Nope,” he said. “He isn’t doing anything. Just breathing.”
“Blast,” said the major. “Is he alseep?”
Clark listened a minute more, then shook his head. “Not from the sound of his breathing. He’s awake, all right. I think he’s sub-vocalizing. I wish I could pick that up.”
“There,” said the major. “You see? Sleepless nights. He was moved to a single room today, and he knows what that means.”
“All right,” said the colonel grudgingly. “You know your business, Ben.”
“Of course I do.”
“I just wish there were a way to speed it up.”
“What do you suggest? I suppose I could go rushing into his room with a pistol and shoot at him. That might scare him enough to send him popping off home again. On the other hand, it might not. And then he wouldn’t be around at all.”