Swanson shrugged. “He’s liable to know what he’s doing,” he said, “whether he knows it or not. Let him try.”
“Ben?”
The major looked helpless. “I just don’t know,” he said. “I’ve grown to like the boy. I hate the thought of pushing him that close to the brink.”
“You’d like to just send him home and forget about it?”
“Of course I would. Wouldn’t you?
“No,” said the colonel savagely. “I need him too badly. I need him, and you need him, and the whole country needs him. We can’t forget him, because we’ve got to have him.”
“Then I suppose,” said the major reluctantly, “we’d better let him try this experiment of his.”
Four glasses of beer sailed in from the kitchenette. “I thought we could use some,” said Swanson.
Major Grildquist waited two days before telling Jeremy they would try the experiment. And when he did tell him, Jeremy was so grateful he could have cried. “Thank you, sir,” he said, his voice breaking. “Thank you. And I won’t try to fool you, I swear I won’t. And whatever happens, I’ll abide by it. If it doesn’t work, then I’ll know for sure.”
“That’s, uh, fine,” said the major. He bustled at his desk, not looking Jeremy in the eye. “We’d better make the arrangements,” he said.
Two medics were brought in, and they all discussed the physical equipment needed for the experiment. Cramped quarters, for one thing. One of the medics suggested they attach a strait jacket to him and stuff him into a broom closet. Pitch blackness, too, and that could be arranged by using the broom closet in the unused basement of the west wing, where the hall lights could be switched off and absolutely no light whatsoever could work its way into the broom closet, not even at high noon.
That left the third, and probably most important, ingredient, a stress situation. “I will think,” Jeremy told them, “about insane asylums.”
The arrangements completed, Jeremy was returned to his room. The experiment would be tried the next day.
He didn’t get much sleep that night. He tossed and turned, and he went over and over the details of his plan, and he became fully convinced that it would never work in a million years.
A stress situation? Frantic panic? People don’t consciously think themselves into panic, the environment forces panic on them.
It would never work. It was his only chance, his one and only chance, and it would never never never work.
By morning, he was a nervous wreck, already feeling the first faint touches of unreasoning fear. He wanted to call the whole thing off, because it couldn’t possibly work and it wouldn’t prove a thing, and he would still believe that he had teleported, and they would ship him off to an insane asylum faster than ever. He wanted to tell them to forget it, he’d have to think of something else, but he couldn’t. He didn’t dare open his mouth. And it was hopeless. He was doomed.
He ate three mouthfuls of breakfast, felt as though he had swallowed three round lead balls, and gave up all thought of food. He paced his room most of the morning, chainsmoking, his fingers shaking when he tried to light his cigarettes, his feet stumbling on nothing at all as he prowled back and forth in the room.
They came for him at eleven, and the sound of the key in the lock was so sudden and at this moment so loud, that he almost screamed and he almost fainted. When they put the strait jacket on him, they had to move his arms for him, he couldn’t seem to make them work right. Major Grildquist looked at him oddly, and touched the back of his fingers to Jeremy’s cheek, as though he couldn’t believe there was any warmth in a cheek that gray. “Are you all right?” the major asked him.
It isn’t going to work. He wanted to say that, he wanted to yell it at the top of his lungs, but he couldn’t. It was as though he were paralyzed, as though he were a clockwork doll set into motion, and he was walking toward the table edge, and there was no way to stop his motion and keep from falling off that table edge. He trembled all over when he felt the jacket tighten on him from behind, and then he held himself rigid, to keep from trembling again.
“Are you all right?”
He managed to get it out that time. “Yes.” The one word was all he could muster.
Then they left the room, and he concentrated on walking. Raise the right leg, bend it slightly at the knee, swing it forward like pushing it through waist-deep water, straighten the knee joint, set the heel down, rock forward, raise the left leg, and repeat. Conscious motion, like learning to walk all over again, and the knowledge that he was going to fail, and he would live the rest of his life in a room like the one he’d just left.
They went down to the basement and stood by the broom closet. “There you are,” said the major. “Cramped quarters. And we’ll cut the lights once you’re in there. We’ll give you five minutes.”
Jeremy shook his head violently. “No,” he said, his voice hoarse and sandy. Five minutes alone in that darkness would kill him. Fail and get it over with.
He pronounced the words carefully, with someone else’s bone-dry tongue and palate. “One minute.”
“Are you sure?” asked the major.
He nodded, spastically.
“All right, then.”
The two medics helped him into the broom closet. “Good luck,” said the major, his voice oddly inflected, and the door closed.
The broom closet was a tiny upright box so small that his shoulders practically touched both sides, and when the arms crossed in front of him inside the strait jacket touched the back wall, his shoulder blades were just barely brushing the door.
Light crept under the door, and then there was a click, and he was alone and in darkness. Black darkness, and silence, and the wild terror of failure.
He had had a plan. He would go home, as he had before, but this time he would go to the kitchen. His mother would be in the kitchen, getting lunch ready at this time of day, and she would see him. And then he would flash back here and he would tell them, “Call my mother, she just saw me, and that proves it, that proves I can do it and I’m not crazy.”
And it couldn’t possibly work.
He tried to concentrate on the kitchen — the familiar table and chairs and the curtains on the window over the sink — and he couldn’t even visualize it. He couldn’t even get a picture of the kitchen in his mind. He tried to think of his mother, he tried to wish himself home and with his mother, and he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t think, he couldn’t concentrate on a thing. The thoughts boiled through his mind, disjointed and screaming, and he couldn’t think, he couldn’t think, he couldn’t think!
He tried to scream out his panic, but his throat was frozen shut and he could only mouth the words. “Somebody help me!”
He was standing in a living room. There was a green broadloom rug on the floor, a rust-colored sofa and two armchairs, drum tables and a coffee table. A man sat on the sofa, leaning forward over an open file folder on the coffee table. He was dressed in an Air Force uniform, with colonel’s eagles on the shoulders. He was grayhaired and lean, with a craggy narrow-lipped face.
The man looked up and blinked in astonishment. “What the hell—?”
This wasn’t home!
And he was back in pitch blackness, and this time his throat was open, and he screamed, and screamed, and screamed.
Light, and the door open, and hands grabbing him as he leaped jerking out, wide-eyed and still screaming. The hands held him and he was rushed along, his useless feet bump-bump-bumping against the steps as they hurried him up from the basement.
They put him in a bathtub, leaving the strait jacket on, and they attached a canvas cover over the whole top of the bathtub except where his head stuck out, and they ran very hot water into the tub.