Gordon Dickson Time to Teleport (v1.0) (lit)

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the perspiration from his face and waited.
Finally he heaved a great sigh.
"That's all right," he said. "I'm all right now."
"I'm sorry, Eli," said Tammy. "Oh, I'm so sorry."
"Not your fault," he said. "How were you to know anything about me?Took me by
surprise, too."
"But what was it?" she asked, sinking down on a hassock beside his chair and
taking his cold hand in hers. He did not look at her.
"Nothing," he said."Nothing. Sometimes things bother me." He was silent for a
moment; then he spoke again. "Seth went, you say?"
"As soon as the news reports began to get bad," she answered. "He he told me
you two were related, Eli."
Eli looked at her with such sudden horror that she shrunk back.
"Eli!" her voice shook. "What kind of a secret is it?"
On the arm of his chair Eli's hand curled into a fist and he fought himself
back into self-possession.
"No one," he said, "ever knew but the two of us, before."
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"But I don't understand."
Eli drew a deep breath.
"I'll tell you," he said. He looked away from her. "My father, himself, never
knew Seth was his son. I never suspected that I had a brother. I thought I was
an only child.
"I was an odd child," he went on painfully. "Things bothered me, and I
couldn't seem to make anybody understand why.Ordinary things that didn't
bother other people. Once, for example, when I was very young, I remember I'd
picked up the notion that if I tried hard enough, I could talk to animals. And
I tried hard for a long time without getting any place, so finally I asked my
father about it. If I remember correctly, I asked him to send me to a man
who'd teach me how to speak to animals, like the man who was teaching me to
play the violin. And he told me" Eli smiled a little bleakly "in a very kindly
way, of course, that no one knew how to talk to animals. And when he told me I
never could or never would be able to talk to a single creature except another
human, I thought I couldn't stand it.All the living things that moved and
felt; would never be able to tell me how it was."
Tammy laid her cheek against the back of his hand where it rested on the arm
of the chair. Eli went on talking.
"And as I grew older," he said, "it got worse.Because I couldn't explain to
other people. Everything that lived had some power to touch me. When the
growing things budded in the spring, I woke with them, and during the long
summer as they grew, I grew with them, and in the fall the pride of their
maturity was my pride, so that the onset of winter was like one last flaming
great and glorious battle with honorable death. My longing went down with the
salmon to the ocean; and never got free again, for whale and diatom held it
tight to them. In the end, there was nothing with life in it that I wasn't
compelled to feel my kinship with."
Eli stopped and sighed.
"And then, as I grew up," he went on. "I began to be aware of people."
He stopped. Tammy lifted her face and looked at him.
"This," he said, "is the part I cannot explain, never explain, to anyone. I
can say I started to feel for them, too, and that's all I can say. From this
point on, there are no words."
He stopped again, and was silent for so long, that Tammy spoke up, gently.
"But what about Seth?"
"Oh yes, Seth," he took up his story again. "You see I didn't have any person
I could get this across to all this that bothered me. So, when I was very
young, I first started to make up an imaginary friend, who would understand,
without my telling him. I got to know my imaginary friend very well, and he
grew in my mind until he had a personality of his own, until he was a real
person, with his own problems, that onlyIunderstood."
He paused and looked at Tammy.
"And then when I was fourteen, my high aptitude rating on the General Tests
allowed me to be sent to the School for Special Intelligences onBermuda . And
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there my imaginary friend and I came face to face; and he was Seth."
"And had he " said Tammy.
Eli nodded.
"I had been his, too. When we put our minds together at last, we discovered a
great many things, among them that we were half-brothers."
"But how did you find that out?"
"It became obvious to us," answered Eli. "I can't explain."
"And then " prompted Tammy.
"And then?" said Eli.
"What happened to the two of you after that?" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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