By Mind Alone
Larry Niven, first published in If: Worlds of Science Fiction, June, 1966.
part 4
I said, “Doctor Larsen, could that be dangerous?”
He shook his head. “She’s right. From the campus to San Diego was much further.”
“But we did that under supervised conditions.”
“How do you supervise teleportation?” Larsen smiled like a child with a joke. “You all know as much about teleportation as I do.”
Good Lord, I thought, and wished myself to the bar to fill my glass. If I’d known that at the beginning of the course I’d have backed out right then. I’d only joined out of curiosity; curiosity, and the fact that Carol was in it. Why not? It was only a six-week course, and no credit meant nothing to lose.
And Larsen could make any course fun.
We’d set in the classroom chairs with the plywood platforms for notebooks, listening to Larsen deliver his introductory lecture. Half of us already knew him from his philosophy of chemistry courses. The rest didn’t know whether to giggle or not. Larsen is a frustrated actor. When he lectures he waves his arms and marches back and forth and shifts dialects to act out his ideas. His dialects are lousy, but he doesn’t know that. His story was incredible as his lecture style.
On a Sunday afternoon about three months ago, Dr. Raymond C. F. Larsen had leaned back in his swivel chair, gotten his pipe going, and began daydreaming of the many things he’d like to do before he was old. Become a spelunker. Learn to ride a surfboard. Eat steak tartare, just once. When he got up to take a shower, he was really into the swing of it. He stood with his back to the shower head, with the hot water falling heavily on the back of his neck, and there he made his great decision. He would join a nudist camp that very summer!
Would he have backed out? Of course he’d have backed out. But he didn’t get the changes, because the next he knew, no more water was falling, and there was a very cold breeze all around him.
He stood in the center of Sun-and-Fun Nature Camp, just thirty miles north of Los Angeles. He was dripping wet and stark naked. From all directions, thoroughly tanned men and women as naked as he started at him in obvious horror.
Sure they were stating. They’d seen him appear out of nowhere! But Larsen didn’t think of that. He crouched like a man with acute intestinal cramps, trying to cover himself (he demonstrated for us, there in the classroom), and frantically wished himself back into his shower.
He knew he could do it, now any time he wanted. (He demonstrated this, too, and twenty laughing students, laughing at his antics whether they believed his story or not, went utterly silent.) But could he teach others the art? He wanted to know all about teleportation: its limits, its uses, its dangers.
Give him credit for courage. He went before the Board. The Board of Trustees watched him flicker around the Board Room like a cadaverous hallucination, and after a four-hour conference they had agreed to let him try…
…The first few class days, Larsen had been the only teleport. The rest of us would grit our teeth and clench our eyelids, while Larsen cried, “No, no, no! You’ve go t to be relaxed, confident. Look at me!” And with an expression so confident it couldn’t look anything but silly, Larsen would teleport all over the room. He inspired nothing but envy.
He tried beer, which he’d been drinking that historic day: two-thirds of a can of Coors per student. He tried beer and a pipe, his own carefully broken-in Dunhill with the mouthpiece dipped in antiseptic each time one of us used it. HE tried having us teleport out of our own showers, while he called encouragement from outside the curtain. One day he tried beer plus a tranquilizer.
And suddenly Linda Baird wasn’t among us.
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.
