The Science Fiction Anthology. Fritz Leiber
happened to Earl one hot summer day when he was fourteen. Mrs. Jamieson was working in her kitchen; Earl supposedly was swimming with his friends in the river. Suddenly he appeared before her, completely nude. At sight of his mother his face paled and he began to shake violently, so that she was forced to slap him to prevent hysteria. She looked behind his ear.
It was there.
“Mom!” he cried. “Mom!”
He went to the window and looked out toward the river, where his friends were still swimming in the river, with great noise and delight. Apparently they did not miss him. Mrs. Jamieson handed him a pair of trousers. “Here, get yourself dressed. Then we’ll talk.”
He started for his room, but she stopped him. “No, do it right here. You may as well get used to it now.”
“Get used to what?”
“To people seeing you nude.”
“What?”
“Never mind. What happened just now?”
“I was swimming in the river, and a man came down to the river. His hair was all white, and his eyes looked like ... well, I never saw eyes like his before. He asked who was Earl Jamieson, and I said I was. Then he said, ‘Come with me.’ I went with him. I don’t know why. It seemed the right thing. He took me to a car and there was another man in it, that looked like the first one only he was bigger. We went to a house, not far away and went inside. And that’s all I can remember until I woke up. I was on a table, sort of. A high table. There was a light over it. It was all strange, and the two men stood there talking in some language I don’t know.”
Earl ran his hand through his hair, shaking his head. “I don’t remember clearly, I guess. I was looking around the room and I remember thinking how scared I was, and how nice it would be to be here with you. And then I was here.”
Earl faced the window, looking out, then turned quickly back. “What is it?” he asked, desperately. “What happened to me?”
“Better put your trousers on,” Mrs. Jamieson said. “It’s something very unusual and terrible to think of at first, but really wonderful.”
“But what happened? What is this patch behind my ear?”
Suddenly his face paled and he stopped in the act of getting into his trousers. “Guess I know now. They made me a Konv.”
“Well, don’t take on so. You’ll get used to it.”
“But they shouldn’t have! They didn’t even ask me!”
He started for the door, but she called him back. “No, don’t run away from it now. This is the time to face it. There are two sides to every story, you know. You hear only one side in school—their side. There is also our side.”
He turned back, a dawning comprehension showing in his eyes. “That’s right, you’re one, too. That is why you killed that Agent in the third cabin.”
It was her turn to be surprised. “You knew about that?”
“I saw you. I wasn’t sleeping. I was afraid to stay inside alone, so I followed you. I never told anyone.”
“But you were only nine!”
“They would have taken you away if I’d said anything.”
Mrs. Jamieson held out her hand. “Come here, son. It’s time I told you about us.”
So he sat across the kitchen table from her, and she told the whole history, beginning with Stinson sitting in the laboratory in New Jersey, holding in his hand a small cylinder moulded from silicon with controlled impurities. He had made it, looking for a better micro-circuit structure. He was holding this cylinder ... and it was a cold day outside ... and he was dreaming of a sunny Florida beach—
And suddenly he was there, on the beach. He could not believe it at first. He felt the sand and water, and felt of himself; there was no mistake.
On the plane back to New Jersey he came to certain conclusions regarding the strange power of his device. He tried it again, secretly. Then he made more cylinders. He was the only man in the world who knew how to construct it, and he kept the secret, giving cylinders to selected people. He worked out the basic principle, calling it a kinetic ordinate of negative vortices, which was very undefinitive.
It was a subject of wonder and much speculation, but no one took serious notice of them until one night a federal Agent arrested one man for indecency. It was a valid charge. One disadvantage of this method of travel was that, while a body could travel instantaneously to any chosen spot, it arrived without clothes.
The arrested man disappeared from his jail cell, and the next morning the Agent was found strangled to death in his bed. This set off a campaign against Konvs. One base act led to another, until the original reason for noticing them at all was lost. Normal men no longer thought of them as human.
Mrs. Jamieson told how Stinson, knowing he had made too many cylinders and given them unwisely, left Earth for Alpha Centaurus.
He went alone, not knowing if he could go so far, or what he would find when he arrived. But he did arrive, and it was what he had sought.
He returned for the others. They gathered one night in a dirty, broken-down farmhouse in Missouri—and disappeared in a body, leaving the Agents standing helplessly on Earth, shaking their fists at the sky.
“You have asked many times,” Mrs. Jamieson said, “how your father died. Now I will tell you the truth. Your father was one of the great ones, along with Stinson and Benjamin and Dr. Straus. He helped plan the escape; but the Agents found him in Bangkok fifteen minutes before the group left. They shot him in the back, and the others had to go on without him. Now do you know why I killed the Agent in the third cabin? I had to. Your father was a great man, and I loved him.”
“I don’t blame you, mother,” Earl said simply. “But we are freaks. Everybody says, ‘Konv’ as if it is something dirty. They write it on the walls in rest rooms.”
“Of course they do—because they don’t understand! They are afraid of us. Wouldn’t you be afraid of someone who could do the things we do, if you couldn’t do them?”
Just like that, it was over.
That is, the first shock was over. Mrs. Jamieson watched Earl leave the house, walking slowly along the river, a boy with a man’s problems. His friends called to him from the river, but he chose not to hear. He wanted to be alone. He needed to think, to feel the newness of the thing.
Perhaps he would cross the river and enter the deep forest there. When the initial shock wore off he might experiment with his new power. He would not travel far, in these first attempts. Probably he would stay within walking distance of his clothes, because he still lacked the tricks others had learned.
It was a hot, mucky afternoon with storm clouds pushing out of the west. Mrs. Jamieson put on her swimming suit and wandered down to the river to cool herself.
For the remainder of that summer they worked together. They practiced at night mostly, taking longer and longer jumps, until Earl’s confidence allowed him to reach any part of the Earth he chose. She knew the habits of Agents. She knew how to avoid them.
They would select a spot sufficiently remote to insure detection, she would devise some prank to irritate the Agents; then they would quickly return to Wisconsin. The Agents would rush to the calculated spot, but would find only the bare footprints of a woman and a boy. They would swear and drive back to their offices to dig through files, searching for some clue to their identity.
It was inevitable that they should identify Mrs. Jamieson as one of the offenders, since they had discovered, even before Stinson took his group to Centaurus, that individuals had thought patterns peculiar to themselves. These could be identified, if caught on their detectors, and even recorded for the files. But the files proved confusing, for they said that Mrs. Jamieson had gone to Centaurus with