Oh, fine, he thought bitterly. Everything’s got a string on it. What good will this rapport gadget do me if Tharn’s going to show up every day? Maybe I’m only crazy. I hope so.
Something would have to be done unless Kelvin was prepared to go through life with his face buried in his hands. The worst of it was that Tharn had a haunting look of familiarity. Kelvin discarded a dozen possibilities, from reincarnation to the déjà vu phenomenon, but—
He peeped through his hands, in time to see Tharn raising a cylindrical gadget of some sort and leveling it like a gun. That gesture formed Kelvin’s decision. He’d have to do something, and fast. So, concentrating on the problem—I want out!—he pressed the button in the surface of the flat case.
And instantly the teleportation method he had forgotten was perfectly clear to him. Other matters, however, were obscure. The smells—someone was thinking—were adding up to a—there was no word for that, only a shocking visio-auditory ideation that was simply dizzying. Someone named Three Million and Ninety Pink had written a new flatch. And there was the physical sensation of licking a twenty-four-dollar stamp and sticking it on a postcard.
But, most important, the man in the future had had—or would have—a compulsion to think about the teleportation method, and as Kelvin snapped back into his own mind and time, he instantly used that method. …
He was falling.
Icy water smacked him hard. Miraculously he kept his grip on the flat case. He had a whirling vision of stars in a night sky, and the phosphorescent sheen of silvery light on a dark sea. Then brine stung his nostrils.
Kelvin had never learned how to swim.
As he went down for the last time, bubbling a scream, he literally clutched at the proverbial straw he was holding. His finger pushed the button down again. There was no need to concentrate on the problem; he couldn’t think of anything else.
Mental chaos, fantastic images—and the answer.
It took concentration, and there wasn’t much time left. Bubbles streamed up past his face. He felt them, but he couldn’t see them. All around, pressing in avidly, was the horrible coldness of the salt water. …
But he did know the method now, and he knew how it worked. He thought along the lines the future mind had indicated. Something happened. Radiation—that was the nearest familiar term—poured out of his brain and did peculiar things to his lung-tissue. His blood cells adapted themselves. …
He was breathing water, and it was no longer strangling him.
But Kelvin had also learned that this emergency adaptation could not be maintained for very long. Teleportation was the answer to that. And surely he could remember the method now. He had actually used it to escape from Tharn only a few minutes ago.
Yet he could not remember. The memory was expunged cleanly from his mind. So there was nothing else to do but press the button again, and Kelvin did that, most reluctantly.
Dripping wet, he was standing on an unfamiliar street. It was no street he knew, but apparently it was in his own time and on his own planet. Luckily, teleportation seemed to have limitations. The wind was cold. Kelvin stood in a puddle that grew rapidly around his feet. He stared around.
He picked out a sign up the street that offered Turkish Baths, and headed moistly in that direction. His thoughts were mostly profane. …
He was in New Orleans, of all places. Presently he was drunk in New Orleans. His thoughts kept going around in circles, and Scotch was a fine palliative, an excellent brake. He needed to get control again. He had an almost miraculous power, and he wanted to be able to use it effectively before the unexpected happened again. Tharn. …
He sat in a hotel room and swigged Scotch. Gotta be logical!
He sneezed.
The trouble was, of course, that there were so few points of contact between his own mind and that of the future-man. Moreover, he’d got the rapport only in times of crisis. Like having access to the Alexandrian Library, five seconds a day. In five seconds you couldn’t even start translating. …
Health, fame and fortune. He sneezed again. The robot had been a liar. His health seemed to be going fast. What about that robot? How had he got involved, anyway? He said he’d fallen into this era from the future, but robots are notorious liars. Gotta be logical. …
Apparently the future was peopled by creatures not unlike the cast of a Frankenstein picture. Androids, robots, so-called men whose minds were shockingly different. … Sneeze. Another drink.
The robot had said that the case would lose its power after Kelvin had achieved health, fame and fortune. Which was a distressing thought. Suppose he attained those enviable goals, found the little push-button useless, and then Tharn showed up? Oh, no. That called for another shot.
Sobriety was the wrong condition in which to approach a matter that in itself was as wild as delirium tremens, even though, Kelvin knew, the science he had stumbled on was all theoretically quite possible. But not in this day and age. Sneeze.
The trick would be to pose the right problem and use the case at some time when you weren’t drowning or being menaced by that bewhiskered android with his seven-fingered hands and his ominous rod-like weapon. Find the problem.
But that future-mind was hideous.
And suddenly, with drunken clarity, Kelvin realized that he was profoundly drawn to that dim, shadowy world of the future.
He could not see its complete pattern, but he sensed it somehow. He knew that it was right, a far better world and time than this. If he could be that unknown man who dwelt there, all would go well.
Man must needs love the highest, he thought wryly. Oh, well. He shook the bottle. How much had he absorbed? He felt fine.
Gotta be logical.
Outside the window streetlights blinked off and on. Neons traced goblin
