Free Virtual Unrealities, The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester by Alfred Bester

pakejes and has to hang around Gorg’s room hiding untill it wil look like she walked both ways. Gorge and I make fun of her becaze she is fat and lazy but she gets into the movees for free and saw Hoppalong Casidy sixteen times .
     
    The End
     
    Herod stared at Warbeck.
    “Great little girl, Ethel,” Warbeck said. “She’s too lazy to walk, so she teleports. Then she has a devil of a time covering up. She has to hide with her pakejes while George and Stuart make fun of her.”
    “Teleports?”
    “That’s right. She moves from place to place by thinking her way there.”
    “There ain’t no such thing!” Joe said indignantly.
    “There wasn’t until lazy Ethel came along.”
    “I don’t believe this,” Herod said. “I don’t believe any of it.”
    “You think it’s just Stuart’s imagination?”
    “What else?”
    “What about Planck’s equation? E=nhv?”
    “The kid invented that, too. Coincidence.”
    “Does that sound likely?”
    “Then he read it somewhere.”
    “A ten-year-old boy? Nonsense.”
    “I tell you, I don’t believe it,” Herod shouted. “Let me talk to the kid for five minutes and I’ll prove it.”
    “That’s exactly what I want to do … only the boy’s disappeared.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “Lock, stock, and barrel. That’s why I’ve been checking every Buchanan family in the city. The day I read this composition and sent down to the fifth grade for Stuart Buchanan to have a talk, he disappeared. He hasn’t been seen since.”
    “What about his family?”
    “The family disappeared too.” Warbeck leaned forward intensely. “Get this. Every record of the boy and the family disappeared. Everything. A few people remember them vaguely, but that’s all. They’re gone.”
    “Jesus!” Joe said. “They scrammed, huh?”
    “The very word. Scrammed. Thank you, Joe.” Warbeck cocked an eye at Herod. “What a situation. Here’s a child who makes friends with child geniuses. And the emphasis is on the child. They’re making fantastic discoveries for childish purposes. Ethel teleports because she’s too lazy to run errands. George makes robots to build model planes. Anne-Marie transmutes elements because she hates spinach. God knows what Stuart’s other friends are doing. Maybe there’s a Matthew who’s invented a time machine so he can catch up on his homework.”
    Herod waved his hands feebly. “Why geniuses all of a sudden? What’s happened?”
    “I don’t know. Atomic fallout? Fluorides in drinking water? Antibiotics? Vitamins? We’re doing so much juggling with body chemistry these days that who knows what’s happening? I want to find out but I can’t. Stuart Buchanan blabbed like a child. When I started investigating, he got scared and disappeared.”
    “Is he a genius, too?”
    “Very likely. Kids generally hang out with kids who share the same interests and talents.”
    “What kind of a genius? What’s his talent?”
    “I don’t know. All I know is he disappeared. He covered up his tracks, destroyed every paper that could possibly help me locate him and vanished into thin air.”
    “How did he get into your files?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Maybe he’s a crook type,” Joe said. “Expert at breaking and entering and such.”
    Herod smiled wanly. “A racketeer genius? A mastermind? The kid Moriarty?”
    “He could be a thief-genius,” the doomed man said, “but don’t let running away convince you. All children do that when they get caught in a crisis. Either they wish it had never happened or they wish they were a million miles away. Stuart Buchanan may be a million miles away, but we’ve got to find him.”
    “Just to find out is he smart?” Joe asked.
    “No, to find his parents. Do I have to diagram it? What would the army pay for a disintegration beam? What would an element-transmuter be worth? If we could manufacture living robots how rich would we get? If we could teleport how powerful would we be?”
    There was a burning