“Yes, sir,” said Jeremy woodenly. The major sighed. “All right, Jeremy,” he said. “We’ll get the discharge papers moving now. You should be out of the Air Force in a week. And then you’ll go to a VA hospital, where they’ll be able to help you a lot more than I have.”
“An asylum?”
“A special hospital, Jeremy. Don’t worry, it won’t be a ‘Snake Pit’ kind of place.”
“Yes, sir,” said Jeremy dully.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” said Major Grildquist to the colonel, “by the time I was finished talking, I’d halfconvinced myself. I hope I didn’t lay it on too thick.”
“We’ll soon find out,” said the colonel. “I hope.”
“What do we do now?” the major asked him.
“Now? Now, we start waiting. We’ve pushed him as far as we can. From here on, it’s up to him. If he’s ever going to get control of that ability of his, it’ll be between now and the time he expects his discharge to come through. Ed, what’s he doing?”
“He’s pacing the floor.”
“Good. That means he’s thinking.”
Jeremy was thinking. He was thinking harder than he ever had before, and all his thoughts circled and spiraled and whirlpooled around and finally bumped up against the same dead end.
The only proof he had was in his head. And if he were crazy, that wasn’t very good proof at all.
That was the dead end. Either he was sane or he was crazy, and he no longer knew which he was.
If only he knew how he’d done it. If only he could just decide to go home and poof go home. If only he didn’t have to be scared out of his wits before he could do it every time.
He paced back and forth in the small room until lights out, and then he lay atop the blankets on the bed, fully dressed, and started at the light-and-shadow pattern on the wall, and tried to figure out how he’d done it.
It was like reaching into a vat full of cosmolene and rocks. Somewhere down in there was a diamond, and all the rest were just pebbles. And he had to reach down in and find the diamond by touch alone.
And he couldn’t even be sure the diamond was there.
He dug down in, reached down in, searched for the key. What had his mind done those two times? What had it done?
It wasn’t just desire, that wasn’t enough. There was a switch of some kind, a lever inside his brain, and he had to push that lever before he could do it.
Home. Think about home, about his own bed at home. That’s where he wanted to go. Think about it, and push down deeper and deeper into his brain, and try to figure out what his brain had done those two times.
That?
The bed felt different.
His eyes were closed, and he kept them closed. His hands moved out from his sides, exploring the surface of the bed. And his hands didn’t touch the roughness of Air Force blankets, they touched the smooth coolness of bedspread.
He held his breath, listening. Laughter, from downstairs, Laughter and applause and a voice. The television set.
A car drove by, he heard it.
His mother said something, down in the living room, her voice muffled by distance.
He was home.
Still not really sure, he opened his eyes, and the familiar shapes of his bedroom were around him, and it was real, it was real, and he was home.
And this time he knew how.
It was so easy. All you had to do was find it, and then it was so easy.
It was like multiplying numbers in your head. It was the spot where you stored each digit of the answer until the multiplication was complete. A little cubbyhole down in the left-hand corner of the mind, and he’d never used it for anything but the temporary storage of numbers. But if he thought of a place — the hospital room — and did that—
And the pattern of light-and-shadow stripes was on the wall. He was back in the hospital.
He grinned.
“Sir,” said Ed Clark, getting to his feet. “He just went away.”
The other three turned to look at him. The major said, “What do you—” but the colonel shushed him with an impatient wave of his hand.
They waited, the colonel and Major Grildquist and Paul Swanson all watching Clark, and Clark listening, and after an interminable wait of almost three minutes, Clark grinned and relaxed and said, “He’s back.”
The colonel sighed, smiling. “He cracked it. See how long he was gone? This time, he cracked it. Paul, more beer.”
“On its way,” said Paul.
“The son of a gun,” said the colonel, beaming from ear to ear and rubbing his hands together. “He cracked it.”
Jeremy lay on the bed in the hospital room, getting used to the idea. He knew where it was now, he knew just how to make it work. So he wasn’t crazy after all.
Tomorrow, by golly, he was going to show that major. “Watch this,” he’d say, and flick. And maybe the major could spend some time convincing himself that they were both crazy.
Tomorrow? Why wait for tomorrow?
There was that colonel, too.
He could go right now. The colonel would help him, somehow, whoever he was. Maybe he was one of the other teleports who’d managed to avoid winding up in a looney bin.
Then why hadn’t he come here?
Never mind. He could go ask him.
Except that he didn’t know where the colonel was.
Then how had he found him the last time?
He poked around some more, with greater confidence now, but there was nothing else, only that little switch down in the number-cubbyhole, that was all.
Maybe that was all it needed.
“Colonel Whoever-you-are,” he whispered. “Here I come.”
And flick.
And he was lying on the floor in the middle of the living room. And there was the colonel looking down at him, grinning as though his face would break. And two other people in civvies, off to the left.
And Major Grildquist!
Jeremy scrambled to his feet. “Major—!”
“O.K., Jeremy,” said the colonel. “O.K., take it easy.”
Jeremy looked from face to face, and they were all smiling, all four of them, smiling as though they were proud of him.
And all at once he saw why. “You knew all along,” he said wonderingly. “You knew all along.”
“We did, Jeremy,” said the colonel. “But none of us knew how to drag that ability of yours up where you could use it. You had to do that for yourself.”
“You’re teleports, too,” said Jeremy. “I knew there had to be others, I knew it.”
The colonel shook his head. “You’re the first teleport I’ve run across,” he said. “You’re a very valuable property, boy.”
Jeremy was bewildered. “But—”
“Colonel Brice,” said the major gently, “is what you might call a talent scout. He looks for odd talents — like yours, for instance. And then he puts them to work.”
“Work?”
“We’ll have orders cut tomorrow,” said the colonel, “transferring you to my outfit. You can say goodbye to the hospital and crazy psychiatrists like Ben there.”
“Your outfit, sir? Jeremy was struggling with his bewilderment. “What outfit is that, sir?”
“What do you think? Intelligence.” Jeremy grinned. “Sure,” he said. “Sure.”
“You’ll like the outfit,” the colonel told him. “They’re all madmen like you and those two.”