Time To Teleport

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "I'll see he doesn't get in the way," Eli assured him. "Where is he?"

  "Up on the solar deck," said Howell.

  "Thanks," said Eli. "I'll go up there right now."

  As Eli rode up on the elevator, he was conscious of a tiny sore spot on his left forearm, from which tissue had been removed, and another on the inside of his mouth on the left cheek from which a section of the mucous membrane had been clipped by a small, gleaming instrument in Tammy's capable fingers. He touched the sore spot in his mouth with the tip of his tongue; exploring like a child; and thought of the clean smell of Tammy's hands as she worked close to him. The same haunting familiarity which had touched him the night before at the sound of her voice, came to him again.

  The capsule rose above the solar floor; and he caught sight of a lean, fine-featured man who stood awaiting him, apparently having just risen from a deck chair near the transparent wall of the dome. The mark of Berber blood was strong upon this other, in his dark skin and shiny brown hair. A dark-colored, all-weather cape was clipped to his shoulders and he stood with his hands on the back of one of the chairs and smiled at Eli.

  Eli went toward him.

  "You're a damn fool, Seth," he said without preamble, as he got within speaking distance. "Sooner or later Sellars checks up on everyone who sees me. Do you want to be found out?"

  "You are my brother," said Seth. "And I think you're in trouble." He held out his hand, and Eli took it. They sat down together.

  "What gives you that idea?" asked Eli.

  "That's a foolish question," answered the Seth Maguin. "As well ask me how I found you here, or how I know you did not listen to the cube I sent you yesterday at Cable Island. As soon as you recognized my voice you destroyed it. I know these things; and you could know the equivalent of me, if you would only tear down the walls you've built up to block off that section of your mind."

  "We won't go into that, again," said Eli. "After all, we're only half-brothers."

  "What of it?" countered Seth. "We still had the same father; even if he did not know that one hot night spent in Ankhara had given him a son. Neither one of us knew either until the day when you and I looked at each other across a playground at the special school in Bermuda where we'd each been sent because of our high ratings on the aptitude tests. We looked at each other and knew. Not only I knew—you knew."

  "I don't remember that far back," said Eli.

  "Then why do you admit the relationship now?"

  "I don't in public," replied Eli. "And in private… what's the difference? There's nothing to blood relationship but an accident, lucky or not, depending on how you look at it."

  "It matters when there's psi ability in the blood. Our father had it."

  "Did he?"

  "I have it."

  "Have you?"

  "And you—"

  "No," said Eli, definitely. He shook his head with sudden weariness. "I won't talk about this, Seth. You're a Member and wedded to the notion. I'm not and I don't believe in it. Now let's drop it and get to the reason you risked being brought to Sellar's attention by coming to see me."

  Seth looked at him, a faint, upright line pain-drawn between the fine shadows of his dark brows.

  "It is the reason I came," he said quietly. "What are you here for?"

  "That's my business," answered Eli, levelly, meeting him eye to eye.

  "Forgive me," said Seth sadly. "But there is so much I know about you. You're free of ordinary politics now—I know that—and I'd hoped to bring you in with us."

  "No!" exploded Eli violently. "I sold my freedom for a mess of politics these last eight years and I'll never sell again—on any terms. For all my life I've tried to find the solutions of my problems in the ways other people find theirs. From now on I want to be left alone to do as I want."

  Seth shook his head.

  "That's impossible for you, Eli."

  "Suppose you tell me why."

  "Because," said Seth, "the world does not go that way. History will not allow it. I don't mean past history, but present history, this moment, in the way it determines the future. This moment, which is not just this moment in this one little area, but this moment the world over, with all its present, momentary happening and potentialities that those happenings imply. That is how history builds, not on a few but on an unimaginable multitude of casual incidents."

  "I don't see it interfering with me," said Eli grimly.

  "It can't help but interfere," replied Seth. "Conflict is inevitable; and you are one of the factors in the conflict, along with us, the Members, with our belief in a great future for the race; and Anthony Sellars, with his armbanded group people who are theoretically merely qualified first-aiders who can be called upon in any public emergency, but which we know are the core of the army he is raising against us."

  Eli moved his head restlessly against the back of the deck chair.

  "Words," he said. "Suppositions. Rumors."

  "Are they?" demanded Seth. "We happen to know at the moment that Sellars is planning to uncover living proof of the popular rumor that credits us with having used hard radiation and gene experimentation on humans."

  "I would have thought he had more brains than that. Anyone with sense knows that couldn't be true."

  "But Eli," said Seth. "It is true."

  Eli turned and looked at him as if he had never seen him before.

  "It was a possible solution," said Seth, his dark eyes unhappy. "It had to be tried. Somewhere along the line, someone had to try it. It was before my time, back twenty or thirty years ago, and the experiments that survived are all grown up now. I could not have made such a decision myself, I think; but that is perhaps because I, today, know that such tactics are not the answer. But I cannot blame them. Like we who are the present Members, they believed that the future of the race was at stake—at stake as definitely as if a plague was sweeping the world and threatening to exterminate everyone."

  "Where, in God's name do you get such a notion?" burst out Eli.

  "What is characteristic of a species which has reached a point where further upward evolution is necessary?" countered Seth. "The species has reached its limits of adaptation within its present stage. It must evolve, or else."

  "What is there we can't adapt to?"

  "Atomic energy," said Seth. He looked at Eli. "Do you really want me to explain this?"

  "Yes," said Eli.

  "All right," replied Seth. He sat for a minute as if sorting out his thoughts. "All right," he went on. "It goes like this:

  "I say atomic energy and you laugh; because we've had atomic energy for two hundred years now and it's done nothing but make the world a very pleasant place to live in and an easy life available to all. But this is a very superficial view." He leaned forward earnestly.

  "I would like to remind you, Eli, of something that had its beginning at the same time as Atomic Theory, and that was the physics of which it was a part. There were men to be found, even in the mid-twentieth century who said that their present physics had opened up a very large room, but that its further walls could be seen; and that, barring some startling new discovery and the plugging of gaps here and there, that particular aspect of science was complete.

  "For two hundred years there has been completely explored—as far as human beings can explore it. What kind of situation does this leave us with?

  "Among other things it leaves us without a shield against atomic energy. Down the long history of Man's development the progression has been—first a new weapon, then a defense against it, then a weapon to crack that defense, and a stronger shield, and so on. Now, for two hundred years we have been possessed of an ultimate weapon, which is the end of the line. No defense is possible—there is no more science from which to build a defense. And for two hundred years we have lived in uneasy truce, one with another. Our solution has been to be careful not to play with the fires that might burn us; but this is contrary to man's very nature. What has made him what he is, has been his insi
stence on playing with the fires that might burn him. For two hundred years we have exercised a miracle of restraint. But it is no more than that. As long as the weapon remains, the problem of using it remains also.

  "It must be handled and it cannot be handled. What's the answer? One—the classic response of physical evolution would be to adapt physically so that a human being could walk through the heart of an atomic explosion without damage. Physics denies us this, as it denies us a defense as well. Two—Man's solution would be to think up something new in physics that would enable him to find a defense. But it seems there is nothing new. Well?"

  Seth finished and sat looking at Eli. Eli rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

  "You say," said Eli, finally, "that we're at the end of the line but that we can't stop traveling. So the only thing we can do is crash?"

  "Yes."

  "A little late in the day to be thinking of evolution, if that's true, don't you think?"

  "I'll tell you," said Seth slowly. "I think that evolution actually began farther back than we will ever know—before the first bomb fell. And I think that it has already taken place."

  "Oh?" replied Eli. "That must be a comforting conclusion for these cripples of your experimentation."

  "Eli!" said Seth. "Be shocked if you want to by what I told you, but don't let it affect the fairness of your judgement!' "

  "The floor," Eli told him, "is all yours, Seth."

  "You didn't give me a chance to finish. We—the Members—have reached the conclusion on the basis of forty years of work and what evidence we can and have observed, that the psi faculties bear the same relation to the human race that human intelligence does—though not necessarily in direct ratio to intelligence. In short, everybody has them, with some people having them more than others. We know they exist—"

  "I don't," interrupted Eli. Seth stared at him.

  "Now, Eli…"

  "That's what I said." -

  "Eli," said Seth sternly, "unless you've been willfully blinding yourself, you couldn't have lived thirty-eight years in this day and age without seeing examples of the ordinary psi qualities in action."

  "I've seen parlor tricks," Eli said. "I've heard rumors. I've never been convinced."

  "You out of all the world!" said Seth, with a rare note of bitterness in his voice. "The man on the street doesn't share your disbelief. Even Anthony Sellars makes no bones about believing."

  "I say merely I've never been convinced."

  "The message cube I sent you, for example."

  "I can think," said Eli, "of more than one way that could have been gotten into Poby's pouch without any non-physical means being involved. They range all the way from illegal hypnotic conditioning of Poby to accept a second cube while denying its existence, to some simple sleight of hand with the diplomatic pouch somewhere along the line."

  "I assure you," said Seth, "that that cube was teleported directly from the instrument on which I recorded it to the pouch on your courier's wrist.' "

  Eli turned and smiled at him.

  "If that's true," he said, "why bother with me? Go on and take the world."

  "Because in two hundred years we have never succeeded in making any single such faculty reliable. We have men who can telepath, who can teleport, who can transmute—but not one of them can be relied on to do it to order."

  "It worked with me," said Eli, with a casual wave of his hand.

  "Things usually work with you," replied Seth, a shade grimly. "That's what I've tried to tell you for thirty years. We think, and I believe, that you may have the very thing we need."

  "And what's that?"

  Seth threw his arms out hopelessly.

  "Who knows?" he said. Then he calmed somewhat, slipping back into his normal quietness and self-possession. His slim face stared earnestly into Eli's. "The psi faculties don't seem to show up as a single extra talent, but as a field of extra talents, among them many we can't conceive of. For example—myself."

  "For example, you," agreed Eli, good-humoredly.

  "My talent, if you want to call it that," said Seth, "seems to lie mainly along the line of something like intuition or insight into people and things." He rose from the desk chair suddenly and began to pace back and forth in the sunlight pouring through the transparency of the solar roof. "Every so often, something will present itself to me in a flash. And from then on my certainty is so fixed that I can't even doubt that thing to myself."

  "And I suppose," replied Eli, watching him move, "that you've some such intuition about me."

  "Yes," said Seth, halting and looking at him. "I know—I don't think, Eli—I know that at this present moment in history you are the kingpin on which we all must turn, Members, Sellars, Underseas, and all the people of all the groups anywhere."

  "It's too late now, Seth," said Eli. "I've given up the spokesmanship."

  "I know."

  "Damn it, don't give me that!" shouted Eli, suddenly starting up from his chair. "You can't know."

  "I tell you I know!" Seth faced him; and for a moment his eyes lit up and his brown face was transfigured with a wild, prophetic glint. "I know because it is my function to know—everything about you that is necessary at this time. I am bound to you by blood and affection. I am tied to you by chance and time. In the hour approaching there is nothing that can separate us, neither space, nor time nor death!"

  For a few seconds after these last words rang out, the two of them stood silent, staring at each other. Then Eli spoke, and his voice was hard.

  "Another of your intuitions?" he asked, the sarcasm heavy in his voice. Seth's face gentled and smoothed. He smiled softly at Eli.

  "Yes," he said.

  Eli sighed and turned away. He crossed back to his deck chair and dropped down into it again.

  "You see why I can't accept anything you say, Seth," he said wearily. "It's too wild."

  Seth smiled and answered nothing. Abruptly Eli turned to the small table beside his deck chair. There was a small figurine there in snowy plastic, a Grecian maiden with a water jar on her shoulder. He picked it up and threw it suddenly on the floor, so that it bounced and rolled a dozen feet from them.

  "All right!" he said tightly. "Let's see you put that back without touching it."

  Seth turned his eyes on the fallen figurine. For a moment his face tightened. Then it relaxed.

  "I'm sorry," he said, turning back to Eli. "I can't."

  Eli let a long breath sigh from him.

  "You see?" his voice was almost helpless. He looked up at Seth. "Not that it makes any difference. Even if you were right—even if what you say was true and real, I'd still say no. What you can't understand…" he hesitated. "What nobody can seem to understand is that I'm through with all the big questions. Seth, do you know what I want to do?"

  "What haven't you done?" smiled Seth. "During your twenties I remember you tried your hand at just about everything. Certainly, all of the arts; and where sciences were concerned—"

  "The point was, I was looking for what I wanted to do," interrupted Eli.

  "I thought you found it in politics."

  "No!" said Eli sharply. "And I haven't found it yet. But I've found a way to find it."

  Seth said nothing, but watched him.

  "I'm going to tell you why I'm here," said Eli. He rubbed the back of his hand in momentary weariness across his forehead. "I've always been running after something—you know that. This same something. And I haven't found it, but now I've started to run out of time."

  He looked at Seth and then away again.

  "Well, I've found a way to gain time. If I tell you about it, I want you to keep it a secret."

  "If you wish," said Seth.

  "About two years ago," Eli went on, taking a deep breath, "I began worrying about time. I didn't care about my chronological age. What I cared about was that I still hadn't started whatever it was I was going to do. And my body was getting steadily closer to its end—its time getting shorter every day. I got a notion and
I dug up Howell, the man in charge here."

  "I've heard of him somewhere before," said Seth.

  "He's a good medical research man, one of the best," said Eli. "A little violent, but not bad. I talked my idea over with him, and using my authority as spokesman got our captive University of Miami to award him a research grant, this station and facilities. The grant was for the development of new techniques in underwater surgery."

  "The Undersea Domes would be interested in that, of course," nodded Seth.

  "But that isn't what he's been doing," said Eli grimly. "What he has been doing is working out a technique to rebuild and replace the worn-down parts of my body. In two years he's worked out something. If it works, my body should regenerate on a twenty-year-old level."

  He looked at Seth.

  "I could mean, practically, immortality," he said.

  Seth frowned in astonishment.

  "So you see," said Eli. "I—" he hesitated. "I have my own life to lead. A man has a right—"

  The large three-dimensional screen that rose like a bubble in the center of the solar floor, chimed suddenly, four dulcet notes, and the head of Tammy appeared in it, several times life-size.

  "Oh, there you are," she said, swiveling to face them. "We're knocking off for the cocktail break downstairs. Why don't you two come down and join us."

  She smiled and disappeared. Eli got up from his chair.

  "Coming, Seth?" he asked.

  Seth smiled.

  "I'll come for the company," he said.

  They moved across the floor to the elevator capsule, the subject between them, by mutual silent agreement, laid aside for the moment. They stepped inside; and Eli thumbed the stud for fourth level.

  "A pleasant station," said Seth, as the capsule began to slip downward.

  "Yes," said Eli. "I—"

  He broke off suddenly. Seth looked at him. "Nothing!" said Eli. And when he saw Seth still staring, he repeated, fiercely. "Nothing, I tell you!"

  Seth let it go; and the walls of the elevator tube slipped swiftly upward, opaquely about them as they dropped. But Eli was looking through and beyond them, seeing still the momentary picture of the solar deck, seen over Seth's shoulder in the minute before the capsule dropped below its floor level. For a moment the solar had stood out before him, with deck chairs, screen and tables.