Total Breakdown
By Mind Alone
Larry Niven, first published in If: Worlds of Science Fiction, June, 1966.
part 3
He looked like the melancholy farmer with the pitchfork in American Gothic would look if you gave him a loud sports coat and a yellow tie and poured three martinis into him. “It means the total breakdown of physics,” he roared, jabbing a grinning sophomore in the chest with a forefinger. “We’ll have to rewrite every law we know!”
“Nuts,” said the sophomore, who was a physics major.
“Go on,” Larsen prompted. He loves an argument. Carol once said he’d rather fight than smoke.
“Be happy to,” said the sophomore. “Ever since the Renaissance, every change we’ve made in physics has bee something of a generalization. Every previous law was a special, local case of the law as we use now. What we’ve got will work just like it always has.”
“Except teleportation.”
I thought the sophomore had the short end of the argument. General relativity, which was evolved to explain a mere fourteen-minute precession in Mercury’s orbit, had smashed Newtonian physics. The Principle of Uncertainty had ended the philosophy of determination without changing any part of real life. So, perversely, I stepped in in the sophomore’s favor.
“Suppose teleportation was restricted to the laws of physics?”
“That’s impossible!” came the roar of opinion. But Larsen said, “How? Think of something we can test, Art.”
“All right.”
“Pat! We’re out of cigarettes.”
“Pat came out of nowhere near the big table in the middle of the room. “Right,’ she said, and disappeared. In a few moments she was back. “There aren’t any in the closets, either. Hmmmmmm.” In voice and mannerisms and the mobility of her not-pretty, not-homely face, Patricia Blackman was larger than life. She stood there with an index fingernail tapping her teeth, her eyes fixed up and side was, the very picture of the word scheme. “I’ll have to go for some.”
“Let me go,” I offered. “I know where the Village is.” The Village is a tiny cluster of shops across the Lake. Besides being the perfect gentleman, I wanted time to think of an answer to Larsen’s challenge.
But Pat’s wide mouth grinned at me under the Roman nose. “It’s Sunday,” she proclaimed triumphantly. Everything’s closed.” She leaned close and patted me on the arm. “Now don’t worry, hon. I’ll get some at the beach house. Mother’s got stacks of cartons in the downstairs closet.”
“Hold it, Pat. Hermosa beach is a long way from here.”
“We’ve all gone further than that,” she said, and was gone. Her cheerful smile seemed to disappear a split second after she did — like the Cheshire cat.
Too late to stop her. Pat was at the beach — now.
In this Sunday series of posts I will be “re-publishing” pulp science fiction short stories that have long since gone out of print. When possible I will seek out author’s and estates for permission.
