Knock Twice Scrapbook

By Mind Alone
Larry Niven, first published in If: Worlds of Science Fiction, June, 1966.

part 7

So we edged the car out from among the other cars and took off down the twisting concrete road that leads a mile down to the base of the mountains. We all had our cars, because none of us but Pat would have known where to teleport to. It was a silent drive until we got the cigarettes. They seemed to loosen us up, to get us talking.

“Yeah, a strange party,’ I agreed. “Carol, do you think Pat’s teleporting made her sick?”

“Of course. But I don’t know why it should.”

“Maybe it didn’t. Maybe it’s just our native egotism, our—hubris—that makes us think the whole world revolves around our new power.”

“Ubris?”

“Hubris. The pride that challenges the gods.”

“Oh.” She couldn’t have cared less. “Why would Pat have to go all the way to the beach for cigarettes?”

I knew what she meant. “Pat’s just honest.”

“Suppose she’d teleported inside a shop, made a list of what she took, then paid off the bill Monday. What’s wrong with that?”

“It could give her a reputation.”

“A reputation for honesty.”

“Couldn’t it make a storekeeper nervous, knowing there were people around who could get into his shop any time they wanted?”

“Mmmm.”

We drove with the windows open. It was hot down here on the flatlands. The sun was setting in red glory behind endless groves of citrus trees. Above the low music from the radio, Carol said thoughtfully, “Art, why not steal?”

“I thought one of us would get there eventually.”

“I mean it. The penalty for theft is imprisonment, right? How do you imprison a teleport?”

“You don’t. You can’t.”

“Well?”

“How about a public opinion? And where would you like to have dinner?”

“The Four-In-Hand, I guess.”

“Would you proclaim it far and wide that you’re an untouchable thief and don’t give a damn who knows it? How many friends would you have left?”

“Oh.”

“But that wouldn’t work on everybody. Fact is, the law doesn’t take teleportation into account. When it does, they’ll change the penalty to ‘shoot on sight’.”

Carol giggled. “I guess so. You’ve nipped a brilliant crime career in the bud.”

“You mean I’ve made an honest woman of you.”

“Have it your way.”

“I’ve been trying.”

“What happened to her, Art?”

The fear in her voice made me look over. Carol was scared, deep down scared, and all the bantering and philosophical discussions wouldn’t hide it. I said, “there must be laws we don’t know about yet. Pat ran into one.”

“How? What did she do we didn’t?”

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.

By Mind Alone
Larry Niven, first published in If: Worlds of Science Fiction, June, 1966.

part 6

We got the story out of him. Pat’s parents had been watching television when they’d heard a scream from the next room. They’d rushed in to find Pat on the floor, already unconscious, with a blazing fever. The doctor was there now.

“I’m going after her,” said Lou Dugan.

“Take the car!” Larsen ordered. “Don’t try and more teleporting.”

Lou went outside and we heard his car starting. The rest of us stayed, but not in any party mood. Had Pat strained her powers, or weakened some unknown and unguessed region in her brain? There was no real evidence for it, but most of us were convinced that Pat was sick because she had teleported. Larsen obviously thought so. His air of clownish good humor was gone. He sat on the couch and silently worried.

Hal an hour later we called again.

When the doctor arrived Pat had a temperature of one hundred and four. Her cheeks were flaming red, and the touch of her skin burned. The doctor refused to make a diagnosis, saying that all of her symptoms seemed to proceed directly from the fever. Now the fever had dropped to an even hundred.

Another half hour before our next call. The fever was falling with unlikely speed. It was down to ninety-nine point one. Pat had been conscious for a few minutes, and the doctor had immediately given her a sedative. He knew about our experiments with teleportation, and he didn’t want Pat going anywhere in her present condition. It was typical of Pat that she had left orders for the party to go on without her. But that didn’t seem right. People began leaving by twos and fours. Larsen was still on the couch, looking like the Thinker now, or like a math student beating his head against an exam problem that won’t come right.

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.

By Mind Alone
Larry Niven, first published in If: Worlds of Science Fiction, June, 1966.

part 5

I got my drink replenished and reached for a cigarette to occupy my other hand. I was out, and Pat wasn’t back yet. Nuts. I joined Larsen again. Shouldering my way into the group that surrounded him.

His eyes lit. “Art, have you thought of an experiment for us?”

I hadn’t, but I said, “Yah.  Get someone to teleport to two different places at the same time. If it works, there’ll be town of him, and that’ll violate the Laws of Conversation of Matter.”

That got a laugh. Larsen said, “All rights, you’re elected to go first.”

“Let’s let Carol go first. Two of Carol would be a fun thing.”

She was standing right  me, of course, and she cocked her head at me and asked, “What are you buttering me up for?”

“Got a cigarette?”

She had t wo, and she grimaced when she had to give me one. It was mentholated, and it was dried from the altitude, but I’ll smoke anything in an emergency. Carol said, “Pat should have been back by now.”

I nodded. It had been a good fifteen minutes.

“We’d better call her home.” Larsen sounded a bit uneasy.

Lon Dugan was the guy she’d come with, and he had her beach house number. We crowded around while Larsen made the call. When he hing up he looked very sober. “She’s been taken sick,” he said.

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.

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.