A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  More time passed; it takes time for the central nervous system of a vast Megapolis to react to a widespread emergency. Had one called two and the two then called four, and the four called eight, the word would have spread fast. But plans and programs such as this fail unsafely at the first breach in the pattern for there is no way of bridging the missing link. So in the usual ponderous way, the commissioners called the captains and the captains notified their lieutenants, and soon the word was spread to the patrolmen. And where there was a missing link to bridge, the radio called the patrolmen, firemen off-duty, members of the civil defense, and anybody who could be sworn to duty.

  And not a few of these succumbed to habit by trying to take the teleport system to the teleport station they’d been assigned to prevent people from using.

  Ultimately, the stations were under control and the transits-per-minute meter was down to an unreadable, but still-not-zero figure. By this time, the hidden, unknown plane beyond the entrance of the teleports had its share of policemen and other keepers of the civic peace.

  Johnny Peters looked at the mass of gray hammertone finish, chromium, and glass, and he realized a helplessness, a complete futility, the utter impossibility of doing anything useful. For what had always worked properly had stopped abruptly at about four-thirty in the afternoon. It was as if the sun, having come up on time since the dawn of eyes to watch for it, failed to show.

  For Teleportransit was to Megapolis as hundreds of other teleport companies were to their respective cities. Take twelve years of handling commuter traffic five days each week and multiply that by the number of cities that had solved the commuting problem by licensing teleport companies, then quote the figure as a statistic with zero accidents in transit. The odds begin to approach the probabilities that the sun will not be late tomorrow morning.

  Still, to Johnny Peters, Walter Long, and Harry Warren, there was no realization of the enormity of the situation. It was too impersonal, too remote, too vast. That four or five million human souls had vanished into their machinery was a fact they could not comprehend.

  But as the word spread throughout the city, millions of individuals became intimately aware of a shocking, abrupt personal loss. And for the number who fold their hands and say “Kismet,” there are an equal number who want to strike back. And so part of the public became a mob.

  The night watchman on duty at the main door of the Teleportransit Building saw the mob approach but did not comprehend until the leaders crashed the big plate glass doors with a timber. As the mob came boiling into the lobby of the building, the night watchman fled in terror, taking the obvious way out along with two of the mob who pursued him into the teleport booth.

  Had there been no stairs, the elevator system might have cooled some of the anger, for a mob completely articulated into tiny groups out of communication with one another loses the ability to regenerate its mass anger. The leaders, without a shouting mass behind them, might have listened to reason. But the elevators, at night, would respond only to authorized employees with special keys. And so the mob, strung into a broad-fronted wave, trailed up the stairs after the leaders. The toil of climbing added to their anger.

  To prove the paranoiac quality of the mob, the air-conditioning in the Teleportranist Building did not give them any comfort; it made them resent even more the men they held responsible because they sat in comfort to perpetrate the outrage.

  Within the equipment room, the status remained quo. But not for long.

  The heavy doors muffled the sound of the mob; by the time the noise penetrated loud enough to attract the three men in the room, the same timber used to crash the main doors came hurtling through the doors to the equipment room.

  The foremost of the mob milled into the room and grabbed the three men. There were shouts of lynch-law: “Give it to ’em!” and “String ’em up!” and someone with a length of clothesline weaseled his way through the mob to the fore.

  A slipknot is not as efficient as the hangman’s noose with its thirteen turns, but it is effective. It is also terrifying. Being in the hands of a mob is panic-making in its own right. The sight of rope adds terror. Such shock makes some people faint, some are simply stunned into inaction, and some enter a strange mental stage through which they watch the proceedings without realizing that the mob is going to harm them.

  Some men take on a madman’s fury, break free, and try to run.

  As three of the mob held Johnny Peters, a fourth started to put the slipknot over his head, while the fifth tossed the other end of the clothesline over a ceiling strut. Johnny Peters lashed out, broke the grip of the three who held him, smashed the noose-holder in the face, and took off through the room, scattering the mob by sheer force. Behind him trailed the clothesline, for his wild, round-house swing had passed through the noose.

  Wildly, Johnny Peters headed for the only haven he knew, and as the door to the teleport booth closed behind him, the man who held the end of the rope shook it with a mad roaring laugh:

  “He ain’t going nowhere!”

  With deliberation, he started to collect the line, hand over hand. It slung in a tightening catenary from the ceiling strut over to the teleport booth door frame.

  Unmindful of his tether, Johnny Peters fished his key out, plugged it in, and twisted.

  With a roar, three of the mob grabbed the rope and hauled. The end, cut clean, pulled out of the door frame gasket and trailed across the floor; the three who had hauled went a-sprawl. For, as a moment of thought must reveal, the system could hardly teleport a material body instantaneously into an enclosed exit booth without creating an explosion of thermonuclear proportions. The teleport booths were carefully made to rigid dimensions; in the transit, everything contained in one went to the other; they swapped.

  Johnny Peters disappeared trailing his length of line.

  Johnny Peters was in a nearly indescribable state of—awareness. There was no sense of feeling; the tactile sense no longer existed. The sensitive tip of the tongue did not send continuous messages to the brain about the state of teeth or the amount of saliva. The telemetry that provides feedback of limb position was missing. Pressure against the feet was gone, as if there were no gravity.

  Where he was, there was no sound. Or, if sound existed there, he had not the ears with which to hear—nor taste, nor sight, nor olfactory sense.

  Yet he felt an awareness of self, of being, of existing.

  A remnant of long-forgotten Latin occurred, “Cogit, ergo sum.” And he wondered whether his Latin was correct. But right or wrong in the classics, Johnny Peters thought, and therefore he existed.

  And once this became evident to Johnny Peters, there came the usual return of hope, for so long as life existed, there was hope of getting back from whatever strange plane he had entered. Then, with panic subsiding, Johnny Peters became faintly aware of others.

  This, too, was a strange awareness. In life, for example, on a streetcar or subway, a person is aware of the presence of others because every sensory channel is bombarded, assaulted, overloaded. One can say, “They were so thick I could taste it!” and not be far from wrong because the chemicals that carry the spoor of close-packed humanity to the sense of smell are soluble in water; in saliva the smell becomes a taste.

  This was, or was it, like telepathy?

  What is telepathy like? Does the telepath dial a mental address and then carry on a two-way remark-and-rejoinder, or does he broadcast on an open band? Can he extract the mental peregrinations of someone who is unaware of this invasion of privacy, or does the human desire for privacy act as a barrier? Is that why telepathy is not a going process?

  In any event, Johnny Peters was aware of the presence of others; perhaps it is better to say that he was aware of the awareness of others. Then as this awareness became stronger and less puzzling, he became vaguely and faintly cognizant of identity. Not identity in the sense that an individual is identified, but rather in the sense that his awareness included a number of separate enti
ties. He recognized none of them, which may not be surprising since he had, by now, about five million individuals for company.

  Johnny Peters knew how the teleport worked, but still had difficulty in freeing his mind of the feeling that others who had used the teleport booth in the equipment room of the Teleportransit Building should be somewhere just beyond the entrance portal. Where they were he could not imagine, but he knew that the medium was not like a plugged tunnel, even though the tunnel albeit virtual, was the foundation for the teleport.

  For when the junction of a diode is very thin, and the energy of the electrons is very low, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty says that they have a definite probability of crossing the forbidden gap in the junction and appearing on the other side. In the tunnel diode, simple probability is loaded with a voltage bias so that a current flows across the forbidden gap; electrons pass through invisibly as if they flowed through a tunnel. The teleport performed the same operation with humans and things—or had until five million people occupied the forbidden gap between terminals.

  And so the people, instead of compact, locatable entities, were diffused essences of their beings, their awarenesses, occupying a volume of probability that encompassed and more likely exceeded the most distant of Teleportransit’s wide-flung network of terminals.

  Aware that he was mingled with other entities, Johnny Peters felt the need of finding and identifying someone, anyone he knew as an individual; an awareness that was not simply another being, but a definite being. Simple want called her name to mind, and somehow he formed the silent concept:

  “Trudy!”

  It gave directivity to his being, and cleared things; now he became aware of others, trying to make contact in the same way. Some of them had. Two were commenting on the situation in exceedingly uncomplimentary terms; in fact, they made his mind blush. Another was radiating the concept that he didn’t know where he was but at least he wasn’t suffering from the heat.

  Johnny Peters tried again. “Trudy!”

  If a completely diffused being had feelings, he might have felt something. Instead, he merely became aware of being surrounded by more essences of awareness, a mental crowding. This corresponded to his concept of the volume of probability; given absolutely zero energy, the probability was equally good to be anywhere in the Universe. But as the energy became significant, the volume of probability shrunk. Furthermore, there was a higher probability of occupying the center or near-center of the volume than occupying the outer edges. The distribution, of course, was Gaussian.

  Then he became aware of a reply. The concept, “Johnny?”

  “Yes, Trudy.”

  “What happened? Where are we?”

  “Where we are I don’t know,” he formed. “It’s supposed to be a forbidden gap between terminals that nothing can occupy. That’s why nothing ever got lost before. It’s either here or there, but never between.”

  “I don’t see,” came the faltering reply. “But what happened?”

  “I don’t know, but I think it’s some sort of traffic jam on the teleport.”

  “But why?”

  “Lord knows. Let’s figure it out after we find out how to get out of this in-between mess.”

  “Do you think you can?”

  “I’m not too sure, but Joe Fellowes must be in this mess somewhere.”

  “Let’s both call him.”

  Together, they formed the concept, “Joe Fellowes!” Again there was the awareness of something shifting, of a mental crowding; a reshuffling of the entities.

  Trudy radiated, “Johnny?”

  “Yes?”

  “Johnny—I get the distinct impression of a baby crying.”

  “Uh—yeah.”

  The awareness of reshuffling became intense. At one point, Johnny Peters caught a thought that might have been a reply from Joe Fellowes.

  “Trudy?”

  “Yes, Johnny?”

  “Let’s try Joe Fellowes again.”

  “No, let’s try Irma Fellowes. I think women are more sensitive.”

  “Only a woman would make that statement,” was his response, “but I’ll try anything.”

  Now the reshuffling was almost a physical motion; the awareness of movement through a densely packed medium, of motion blocked from time to time, of packing tight, of flowing ever-so-slowly through extreme difficulty toward some focal point.

  “Irma Fellowes?”

  Faintly, dimly came the reply, unformed and wordless, but nonetheless it was the awareness of Irma Fellowes. Motion became a struggle, but they fought to move, urged on by some unknown drive.

  Now the awareness of Irma Fellowes was stronger, mental flashes of Joe Fellowes began to come in, and as the latter increased in clarity, others began. There was the doctor; his awareness was concern for his patient. The interne was merely anxious to get back to his post. The nurse was impatient because she had a date that evening and didn’t want to miss it. The baby was complaining, as babies do, about the rough treatment that was meted upon one’s first appearance on Earth.

  “Is it a boy or girl?” wondered Irma Fellowes.

  “How can we possibly find out in this . . . this . . . nothingness?”

  The interne advised, “Find out whether baby’s thinking blue or pink thoughts.”

  Nurse wanted to know, “Is it born?”

  Joe Fellowes’ thought was a snort. “How can anything be born of a diffused essence that’s spread out over a spherical volume of probability about a hundred and fifty miles in diameter? The term’s meaningless.”

  “But what are we breathing? And how will we eat?”

  The question, unanswerable by any form of reasoning or logic, was interrupted by a stronger cry from the baby, a feeling of strain having been eased. The packed-in awareness flowed away and throughout the entire volume of probability, motion became fluid, fast, and free.

  The exit terminals of Teleportransit began to spew forth humanity. They landed running, some of them; others were pushed violently because they did not move forward out of the way fast enough. The big rush hour of Megapolis, started two hours ago, was finishing. With the finish on one hundred and twenty minutes of overtime, the mysterious medium between the terminals was doing its best to live up to the definition, “forbidden gap.”

  Being people once more instead of merely aware essences, they raised their voices.

  “It’s a boy,” said the doctor.

  “But what happened?” asked Trudy.

  “It was like a log jam,” explained Joe Fellowes. “And baby was the key log.”

  “But how could the teleport system form such a jam?” demanded Johnny Peters.

  “We were too efficient,” said Fellowes. “Our coincidence-counting circuits are set up to make a double check on the transits. Some shiny-bottomed accountant wanted to be more than certain that every transit was paid for, so all trips are checked at the entrance and again at the exit. Baby made ’em mismatch.”

  “All right, so how did we break the jam?”

  “You did,” chuckled Fellowes. “You went in to the teleport booth and plugged in your key without entering a destination. That made the number of in-counts match the number of out-counts. And once your awareness approached the troubled area, the uncertainty of which was which, or in this case, whose was whose, became high enough in probability to effect a transfer. Boom! The log jam breaks and everything comes tumbling home.”

  “But—?”

  “Baby? Well, you’ve heard it said that when they start, nothing will stop ’em,” chuckled Fellowes. “And so baby has the dubious honor of being the first kid born en route to the hospital by teleport.”

  “And,” said the doctor dryly, “delivered by a diffused medical team of essences.”

  SEA WRACK

  Edward Jesby

  GRETA HIJUKAWA-ROSEN SAT on the beach watching her escort maneuver a compression hover board above the waters of the Mediterranean. He stood on the small round platform, balancing it a few inches above the sp
illing tops of the wind-driven waves with small movements of his legs. The board operated on the power sent to it from the antennae above the chateau, but he operated on his own.

  “Viterrible,” Greta thought, stretching to lift the underside of her small breasts to the full heat of the sun. She giggled, wondering what her sisters would think of her use of a commercial word, and then shrugged and looked at her own golden tan comparing it to her escort’s dark color. Abuwolowo was humus brown. “Deep as leaf mold,” she said speaking aloud, and stood up to watch him lift the thin platform to its maximum altitude of six or seven meters. His figure rapidly diminished in size as he sent it wobbling in gull-like swoops out over the Mediterranean. Ultimately it was boring, she decided, there was no real danger. He had a caller fitted into his swim belt, and if he fell into the water the board he rode on would save him, diving into the water and lifting him to safety. Now he was very far out, and all that was visible above the wave tops was the black bobbing ball of his head.

  “I suppose I should have a feeling of loss.” There was contempt in her voice, and it came from her knowledge that all she knew of loss was what she had read about in a recent television seminar on great books, but she gasped, losing reality, when she saw the head in close to the beach.

  Looking desperately for her binocular lorgnette she asked, “Abuwolowo?” in a shout, but the head was white, and not merely the color of untanned skin, but a flat artificial white, like the marble statues in the garden of the summer home. Now, to her further horror, the rest of the apparition appeared out of the shallows. Above the blue sea, silhouetted against the paler sky, was a black figure with a dead white head. It staggered through the chopping waves with efforts to lift its legs free. When the creature succeeded in lifting its feet clear she was reassured. It was wearing swim fins, and she ran forward to help.