Larry Connaught, for instance. I ran into him on the street one day, and we chatted for a moment, and he asked if it was possible to get him in to see the upcoming foreign relations debate. It was; I called him the next day and told him I had arranged for a pass. And he was there, watching eagerly with his moist little eyes, when the Secretary got up to speak and there was that sudden unexpected yell, and the handful of Central American fanatics dragged out their weapons and began trying to change American policy with gunpowder.
You remember the story, I suppose. There were only three of them, two with guns, one with a hand grenade. The pistol men managed to wound two Senators and a guard. I was right there, talking to Connaught. I spotted the little fellow with the hand grenade and tackled him. I knocked him down, but the grenade went flying, pin pulled, seconds ticking away. I lunged for it. Larry Connaught was ahead of me.
The newspaper stories made heroes out of both of us. They said it was miraculous that Larry, who had fallen right on top of the grenade, had managed to get it away from himself and so placed that when it exploded no one was hurt.
For it did go off—and the flying steel touched nobody. The papers mentioned that Larry had been knocked unconscious by the blast. He was unconscious, all right.
He didn’t come to for six hours and when he woke up, he spent the next whole day in a stupor.
I called on him the next night. He was glad to see me.
“That was a close one, Dick,” he said. “Take me back to Tarawa.”
I said, “I guess you saved my life, Larry.”
“Nonsense, Dick! I just jumped. Lucky, that’s all.”
“The papers said you were terrific. They said you moved so fast, nobody could see exactly what happened.”
He made a deprecating gesture, but his wet little eyes were wary. “Nobody was really watching, I suppose.”
“I was watching,” I told him flatly.
He looked at me silently for a moment.
“I was between you and the grenade,” I said. “You didn’t go past me, over me, or through me. But you were on top of the grenade.”
He started to shake his head.
I said, “Also, Larry, you fell on the grenade. It exploded underneath you. I know, because I was almost on top of you, and it blew you clear off the floor of the gallery. Did you have a bulletproof vest on?”
He cleared his throat. “Well, as a matter of—”
“Cut it out, Larry! What’s the answer?”
He took off his glasses and rubbed his watery eyes. He grumbled, “Don’t you read the papers? It went off a yard away.”
“Larry,” I said gently, “I was there.”
He slumped back in his chair, staring at me. Larry Connaught was a small man, but he never looked smaller than he did in that big chair, looking at me as though I were Mr. Nemesis himself.
Then he laughed. He surprised me; he sounded almost happy. He said, “Well, hell, Dick—I had to tell somebody about it sooner or later. Why not you?”
I can’t tell you all of what he said. I’ll tell most of it—but not the part that matters.
I’ll never tell that part to anybody.
Larry said, “I should have known you’d remember.” He smiled at me ruefully, affectionately. “Those bull sessions in the cafeterias, eh? Talking all night about everything. But you remembered.”
“You claimed that the human mind possessed powers of psychokinesis,” I said. “You argued that just by the mind, without moving a finger or using a machine, a man could move his body anywhere, instantly. You said that nothing was impossible to the mind.”
I felt like an absolute fool saying those things; they were ridiculous notions. Imagine a man thinking himself from one place to another! But—I had been on that gallery.
I licked my lips and looked to Larry Connaught for confirmation.
“I was all wet,” Larry laughed. “Imagine!”
I suppose I showed surprise, because he patted my shoulder.
He said, becoming sober, “Sure, Dick, you’re wrong, but you’re right all the same. The mind alone can’t do anything of the sort—that was just a silly kid notion. But,” he went on, “but there are—well, techniques—linking the mind to physical forces—simple physical forces that we all use every day—that can do it all. Everything! Everything I ever thought of and things I haven’t found out yet.
“Fly across the ocean? In a second, Dick! Wall off an exploding bomb? Easily! You saw me do it. Oh, it’s work. It takes energy—you can’t escape natural law. That was what knocked me out for a whole day. But that was a hard one; it’s a lot easier, for instance, to make a bullet miss its target. It’s even easier to lift the cartridge out of the chamber and put it in my pocket, so that the bullet can’t even be fired. Want the Crown Jewels of England? I could get them, Dick!”
I asked, “Can you see the future?”
He frowned. “That’s silly. This isn’t supersti—”
“How about reading minds?”
Larry’s expression cleared. “Oh, you’re remembering some of the things I said years ago. No, I can’t do that either, Dick. Maybe, some day, if I keep working at this thing—Well, I can’t right now. There are things I can do, though, that are just as good.”
“Show me something you can do,” I asked.
He smiled. Larry was enjoying himself; I didn’t begrudge it to him. He had hugged this to himself for years, from the day he found his first clue, through the decade of proving and experimenting, almost always being wrong, but always getting closer. … He needed to talk about it. I think he was really glad that, at last, someone had found him out.
He said, “Show you something? Why, let’s see, Dick.” He looked around the room, then winked. “See that window?”
I looked. It opened with a slither of wood and a rumble of sash
