therefore, perhaps his weakness and profound weariness were largely the
result of his mysterious journeys.
Bobby Dakota had pried only a couple of the brass teeth from the heel of
the shoe. After studying them for a moment he put down the penknife,
leaned back against the sofa, and looked thoughtfully at the gloomy but
rainless sky beyond the office’s big windows. They were all silent,
waiting to hear what had been deduced from the condition of those
clothes and shoes Even exhausted, preoccupied with his own fears, and
only a one-day association with the Dakotas, Frank realized that Bobby
was the more imaginative and mentally nimble the two. Julie was
probably smarter than her husband; but was also a more methodical
thinker than he was, far less likely than he was to make sudden leaps of
logic to arrive at insight deductions and imaginative solutions. Julie
would more likely be right than Bobby was, but on those occasions when
they resolved a client’s problems quickly, the resolution would be
attributable to Bobby. They made a good pair, and Frank was relying on
their complementary natures to help him.
Turning to Frank again, Bobby said, “What if, somehow you can teleport
yourself, send yourself from here to there in a wink?”
“But that’s… magic,” Frank said.
“I don’t believe magic.”
“Oh, I do,” Bobby said.
“Not witches and spells and genies in bottles, but I believe in the
possibility of fantastic thing The very fact that the world exists, that
we’re alive, that we can laugh and sing and feel the sun on our skin…
that seems like a kind of magic to me.”
“Teleport myself.? If I can. I don’t know I can. Even if I have to
fall asleep first. Which means teleportation must be a function of my
subconscious mind, essentially involuntary.”
“You weren’t asleep when you reappeared in the hospital room or any of
the other times you vanished,” Hal stared.
“Maybe the first time, but not later. Your eyes were open.
spoke to me.”
“But I don’t remember it,” Frank said frustratedly-
“I remember going to sleep, then suddenly I was lying awake in bed, in a
lot of distress, confused, and you were all there.”
Julie sighed. “Teleportation. How can that be possible?”
“You saw it.” Bobby shrugged. He picked up his coffee and took a sip,
more relaxed than anyone in the room, as though having a client with an
astonishing psychic power was, if not an ordinary occurrence, at least a
situation that all of them should have realized was simply inevitable,
given enough years in the private security business.
“I saw him disappear,” Julie agreed,
“but I’m not sure that proves he… teleported.”
“When he disappeared,” Bobby said, “he went somewhere. Right?”
“Well… yes.
“And going from one place to another, instantaneously, as an act of
sheer willpower… as far as I’m concerned, that’s teleportation.”
“But how?” Julie asked.
Bobby shrugged again. “Right now, it doesn’t matter how.
Just accept the assumption of teleportation as a place to start.”
“As a theory,” Hal said.
“Okay,” Julie agreed.
“Theoretically, let’s assume Frank can teleport himself.”
To Frank, who was sealed off from his own experience by amnesia, that
was like assuming iron was lighter than air in order to allow an
argument for the possibility of steel-plated blimps. But he was willing
to go along with it.
Bobby said, “Good, all right, then that assumption explains the
condition of these clothes.”
“How?” Frank asked.
“It’ll take a while to get to the clothes. Stay with me. First,
consider that maybe teleporting yourself requires that the atoms of your
body temporarily disassociate themselves from one another, then come
together again an instant later at another place. Same thing goes for
the clothes you’re wearing and for anything on which you’ve got a firm
grip, like the bed railing.”
“Like the teleportation pod in that movie,” Hal said.
“The Fly.
“Yeah,” Bobby said, clearly getting excited now. He put down his coffee
and slid forward on the edge of the sofa, gesticulating as he spoke.
“Sort of like that. Except the power to this is maybe all in Frank’s
mind, not in a futuristic machine He just sort of thinks himself