Or maybe she merely thought it and I caught the thought. I'm doing that
quite a bit of late.
Then she would run outside again. A moment later, Robert would run in
and stand in front of the same shelf. Then he also would run outside
again. There would be silence for several minutes. The silence would
rupture with a burst of laughing and shouting. Soon, Star would come in
again.
"How does he find me?" I heard her think once. "I can't reason it, and
I can't ESP it out of him."
It was during one of their silences when Ruth called over to me.
"Hey, Pete! Do you know where the kids are? Time for their milk and
cookies."
The Howells are awfully good to Star, bless 'em. I got up and went over
to the window.
"I don't know, Ruth," I called back. "They were in and out only a few
minutes ago."
"Well, I'm not worried," she said. She came through the kitchen door
and stood on the back steps. "They know better than to cross the street
by themselves. They're too little for that. So I guess they're over at
Marily's. When they come back, tell 'em to come and get it."
"Okay, Ruth," I answered.
She opened the screen door again and went back into her kitchen. I left
the window and returned to my work.
A little later, both the kids came running into the house. I managed to
capture them long enough to tell them about the cookies and milk.
"Beat you there!" Robert shouted to Star.
There was a scuffle and they ran out the front door. I noticed then
that Star had dropped the coin and I picked it up and sent it to Jim
Pietre.
* * * * *
"Hello, Jim," I said into the phone. "Are you still there?"
"Yep, still waiting for an answer," he said.
"Jim, I think you'd better come over to the house right away. I'll
leave my office now and meet you there. Can you get away?"
"Can I get away?" he exclaimed. "Boss says to trace this coin down and
do nothing else. See you in fifteen minutes."
He hung up. Thoughtfully, I replaced the receiver and went out to my
car. I was pulling into my block from one arterial when I saw Jim's car
pulling in from a block away. I stopped at the curb and waited for him.
I didn't see the kids anywhere out front.
Jim climbed out of his car, and I never saw such an eager look of
anticipation on a man's face before. I didn't realize I was showing my
dread, but when he saw my face, he became serious.
"What is it, Pete? What on Earth is it?" he almost whispered.
"I don't know. At least I'm not sure. Come on inside the house."
We let ourselves in the front, and I took Jim into the study. It has a
large window opening on the back garden, and the scene was very clear.
At first it was an innocent scene--so innocent and peaceful. Just three
little children in the back yard playing hide and seek. Marily, a
neighbor's child, was stepping up to the base tree.
"Now look, you kids," she was saying. "You hide where I can find you or
I won't play."
"But where can we go, Marily?" Robert was arguing loudly. Like all
little boys, he seems to carry on his conversations at the top of his
lungs. "There's the garage, and there's those trees and bushes. You
have to look everywhere, Marily."
"And there's going to be other buildings and trees and bushes there
afterward," Star called out with glee. "You gotta look behind them,
too."
"Yeah!" Robert took up the teasing refrain. "And there's been lots and
lots of buildings and trees there before--especially trees. You gotta
look behind them, too."
Marily tossed her head petulantly. "I don't know what you're talking
about, and I don't care. Just hide where I can find you, that's all."
She hid her face at the tree and started counting. If I had been alone,
I would have been sure my eyesight had failed me, or that I was the
victim of hallucinations. But Jim was standing there and saw it, too.
Marily started counting, yet the other two didn't run away. Star
reached out and took Robert's hand and they merely stood there. For an
instant, they seemed to shimmer and--_they disappeared without moving a
step!_
Marily finished her counting and ran around to the few possible hiding
places in the yard. When she couldn't find them, she started to blubber
and pushed through the hedge to Ruth's back door.
"They runned away from me again," she whined through the screen at Ruth.
Jim and I stood staring out the window. I glanced at him. His face was
set and pale, but probably no worse than my own.
We saw the instant shimmer again. Star, and then immediately Robert,
materialized from the air and ran up to the tree, shouting, "Safe!
Safe!"
Marily let out a bawl and ran home to her mother.
* * * * *
I called Star and Robert into the house. They came, still holding
hands, a little shamefaced, a little defiant.
How to begin? What in hell could I say?
"It's not exactly fair," I told them. "Marily can't follow you there."
I was shooting in the dark, but I had at least a glimmering to go by.
Star turned pale enough for the freckles on her little nose to stand
out under her tan. Robert blushed and turned to her fiercely.
"I told you so, Star. I _told_ you so! I said it wasn't sporting," he
accused. He turned to me. "Marily can't play good hide-and-seek anyway.
She's only a Stupid."
"Let's forget that for a minute, Robert." I turned to her. "Star, just
where do you go?"
"Oh, it's nothing, Daddy." She spoke defensively, belittling the whole
thing. "We just go a little ways when we play with her. She ought to be
able to find us a little ways."
"That's evading the issue. _Where_ do you go--and _how_ do you go?"
Jim stepped forward and showed her the bronze coin I'd sent him.
"You see, Star," he said quietly. "We've found this."
"I shouldn't have to tell you my game." She was almost in tears.
"You're both just Tweens. You couldn't understand." Then, struck with
contrition, she turned to me. "Daddy, I've tried and tried to ESP you.
Truly I did. But you don't ESP worth anything." She slipped her hand
through Robert's arm. "Robert does it very nicely," she said primly, as
though she were complimenting him on using his fork the right way. "He
must be better than I am, because I don't know how he finds me."
"I'll tell you how I do it, Star," Robert exclaimed eagerly. It was
as if he were trying to make amends now that grownups had caught on.
"You don't use any imagination. I never saw anybody with so little
imagination!"
"I do, too, have imagination," she countered loudly. "I thought up the
game, didn't I? I told you how to do it, didn't I?"
"Yeah, yeah!" he shouted back. "But you always have to look at a book
to ESP what's in it, so you leave an ESP smudge. I just go to the
encyclopedia and ESP where you did--and I go to that place--and there
you are. It's simple."
Star's mouth dropped open in consternation.
"I never thought of that," she said.
Jim and I stood there, letting the meaning of what they were saying
penetrate slowly into our incredulous minds.
"Anyway," Robert was saying, "you haven't any imagination." He sank
down cross-legged on the floor. "You can't teleport yourself to any
place that's never been."
She went over to squat down beside him. "I can, too! What about the
Moon People? They haven't been yet."
He looked at her with childish disgust.
"Oh, Star, they have so been. You know that." He spread his hands out
as though he were a baseball referee. "That time hasn't been yet for
your daddy here, for instance, but it's already been for somebody
like--well, say, like those things from Arcturus."
"Well, neither have you teleported yourself to some place that never
was," Star was arguing back. "So there."
* * * * *
Waving Jim to one chair, I sank down shakily into another. At least the
arms of the chair felt solid beneath my hands.
"Now, look, kids," I interrupted their evasive tactics. "Let's start at
the beginning. I gather you've figured a way to travel to places in the
past or future."
"Well, of course. Daddy." Star shrugged the statement aside
nonchalantly. "We just TP ourselves by ESP anywhere we want to go. It
doesn't do any harm."
And these were the children who were too little to cross the street!
I have been through times of shock before. This was the same--somehow,
the mind becomes too stunned to react beyond a point. One simply plows
through the rest, the best he can, almost normally.
"Okay, okay," I said, and was surprised to hear the same tone I would
have used over an argument about the biggest piece of cake. "I don't
know whether it's harmful or not. I'll have to think it over. Right
now, just tell me how you do it."
"It would be so much easier if I could ESP it to you," Star said
doubtfully.
"Well, pretend I'm a Stupid and tell me in words."
"You remember the Moebius Strip?" she asked very slowly and carefully,
starting with the first and most basic point in almost the way one
explains to an ordinary child.
Yes, I remembered it. And I remembered how long ago it was that she
had discovered it. Over a year, and her busy, brilliant mind had been
exploring its possibilities ever since. And I thought she had forgotten
it!
"That's where you join the ends of a strip of paper together with a
half twist to make one surface," she went on, as though jogging my
undependable, slow memory.
"Yes," I answered. "We all know the Moebius Strip."
Jim looked startled. I had never told him about the incident.
"Next you take a sheet and you give it a half twist and join the edge
to itself all over to make a funny kind of holder."
"Klein's Bottle," Jim supplied.
She looked at him in relief.
"Oh, you know about that," she said. "That makes it easier. Well, then,
the next step. You take a cube"--Her face clouded with doubt again, and
she explained, "You can't do this with your hands. You've gotta ESP it
done, because it's an imaginary cube anyway."
She looked at us questioningly. I nodded for her to continue.
"And you ESP the twisted cube all together the same way you did Klein's
Bottle. Now if you do that big enough, all around you, so you're sort
of half twisted in the middle, then you can TP yourself anywhere you
want to go. And that's all there is to it," she finished hurriedly.
"Where have you gone?" I asked her quietly.
The technique of doing it would take some thinking. I knew enough
physics to know that was the way the dimensions were built up. The
line, the plane, the cube--Euclidian physics. The Moebius Strip, the
Klein Bottle, the unnamed twisted cube--Einsteinian physics. Yes, it
was possible.
"Oh, we've gone all over," Star answered vaguely. "The Romans and the
Egyptians--places like that."
"You picked up a coin in one of those places?" Jim asked.
He was doing a good job of keeping his voice casual. I knew the
excitement he must be feeling, the vision of the wealth of knowledge
which must be opening before his eyes.
"I found it, Daddy," Star answered Jim's question. She was about to
cry. "I found it in the dirt, and Robert was about to catch me. I
forgot I had it when I went away from there so fast." She looked at me
pleadingly. "I didn't mean to steal it, Daddy. I never stole anything,
anywhere. And I was going to take it back and put it right where I
found it. Truly I was. But I dropped it again, and then I ESP'd that
you had it. I guess I was awful naughty."