Part 1

Passage to Anywhere

by Sam Merwin Jr.

_Have you ever wondered what would happen if man’s inventive genius should abandon space rocket construction for a more daring approach to the conquest of space? Suppose--just suppose--you could step into a matter-transmitting machine and be instantly teleported to Venus or Mars? Concede the possibility and bear in mind that a battle of political titans would have to be waged first, and we predict you won’t be able to lay this story down. For Sam Merwin Jr., with his customary brilliance, has actually dared to fire the opening gun._

=The scientists were riding high in the saddle with U N backing. But it took a touch of genius to win the teleportation battle.=

The moment Park Hamilton sat down behind his desk and saw the shocking pink envelope lying atop the neat little rectangular tower that represented his morning’s mail, he felt a distinct sense of foreboding. For, while Hamilton was not psychic, in the course of his six-year tenure of the difficult office of executive operations director for Science Projects Research, he had become highly sensitive to the tumbler fallings of small events as indicative of larger patterns.

Reaching slowly for the shocking pink envelope, he tried to tell himself that it was his job that was making him jumpy. Keeping SPR together and afloat on the swirling tides of politics and opinion in a far from united world was a job that would have caused Atlas to throw down his burden in despair and face willingly the wrath of the gods. Or so Hamilton had more than once told his familiars in moments of despondency.

SPR had been born in the disturbed 1950’s as a modest revolt among scientists--first in England, then in the United States--against the nationalistic restrictions imposed upon them by governments inextricably involved in the Gilbertian paradoxes of the so-called Cold War. And, as a divided world somehow worked its way toward peace, it had grown, little by little, to include most of the truly able scientific brains on Earth.

Dedicated to the pure research few governments or industries could afford, it supported itself on a sort of ASCAP arrangement, by which its members turned over to SPR all of their royalties and were paid in return a guaranteed income according to the earnings of the more practical results of their work. Oddly enough, the plan was liked.

Ultimately, SPR had grown so unwieldy, and so rich, that Hamilton’s predecessor had managed to put it loosely under the aegis of the United Nations, thus protecting the fiercely independent organization, at least in part, from nationalist pressure. The great SPR Proving and Testing Laboratories in Antarctica had been set up when the UN took mandate over that much-claimed and almost uninhabited continent.

But winning agreement to his great plan from the individualistic and anarchic SPR members had proved almost more difficult than putting through the UN and Antarctic projects. Jacques Swanson, the man responsible, had died shortly after the first ground--or rather ice--was broken south of Ross Sea. And Park Hamilton was his successor.

He had never allowed himself to believe that the job was a sinecure. But he was firmly convinced that if he had been aware of the endless problems to which it would give rise he would have shot himself before considering it. Which, as his personal assistant, Miss Alderman, invariably reminded him, was so much blather.

“You thrive on it,” she told him when this mood was upon him. “You look five years younger.”

“That,” was his usual reply, “is because, in a Freudian sense, I’m trying to work my way back to the womb. But one of these days you’ll come in here and find me quite literally curled up in a foetal position. Then what will you do?”

“Buy you a lollipop,” had been her most recent retort.

All in all, a thankless business--and, opening the shocking pink envelope, Hamilton had a definite hunch that the day ahead was going to be even more thankless than usual.

His foreboding was based on a number of things. Each of them was small in itself, but in toto, they shaped up to a pattern he disliked. First, for several days, everything connected with SPR had been running far too smoothly. No member scientist had come up with a demand for a half billion dollars to build a machine that would take him under the Earth’s crust.

Moreover, no greedy power had been plotting in the UN Assembly to subvert to its own use the discovery of one of its nationals, solely to avoid paying SPR patent royalties. And no major industrial cartel had been stirring up trouble, charging scientist-slavery, from the same motives.

What was even more suspicious and disturbing, the reliable Miss Alderman had not yet arrived at her office--and had not phoned in an explanation. Shirley, the Eurasian receptionist, had given him this information quite casually on the way in.

And on top of that, Hamilton had walked under a ladder coming off the high-level ramp, where some rim repairmen had been fixing a warped edge on the helicoptor roof. This last occurrence was the most annoying, because Hamilton _knew_ it was foolishness and superstition. Yet he could not help feeling as he did.

Now--the shocking pink envelope. Its color alone indicated two things. One, that it was an emergency message from Antarctica too vital to be entrusted to the usual coding channels. And two, that it must have come in during the past half hour--since he had left his apartment uptown. Otherwise it would have been relayed to him there. He was sure it could only mean trouble.

It read: SRYAN OFF HELIJET CIRCA 2200 EDST. VACATION TIME. HAMESSAGE RESTRAINING TOO LATE. WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN--CANTSPR. Translated, it meant that S. Ryan had taken off in a helijet about 10 p.m., New York time, on an overdue vacation. A message from Hamilton asking that he delay his departure had arrived too late. Ryan’s present whereabouts was not known. Chief, Antarctic Science Projects Research.

Hamilton said, “Damn!” in very forcible accents. Then, deciding the oath was still too mild and too trite for the occasion, he added a few more lurid expletives in several languages, including the Portuguese. These last he had picked up while doing a job as consulting biologist on the Amazon Delta Reclamation Plan--where his work had won him admission to SPR, class AAAA, and had led directly to his present job.

He flipped the visicommunicator switch to Miss Alderman’s office, and received in return nothing but a blank screen. He next switched over to Shirley, the receptionist, and was instantly rewarded with a view of her flowerlike Eurasian face. She said, “Miss Alderman’s apartment does not answer. And she has not called in.”

He flipped off with a scowl and lit a cigarette. His foreboding had been justified. He wondered just how his message to Ryan had been bungled in Antarctica. Or had Ryan simply defied restraint and taken off, and were Cantspr, Witherspoon and the rest down there covering for him? Exhaling wearily, he decided he could hardly blame either Witherspoon and his able staff, or Ryan himself.

Sven Ryan was an inventor and a man of genius. As an inventor he had just successfully tested what might well prove the most important single development in human gadgetry since the long-haired discovery of the wheel. And, as a genius, he had to be given _some_ leeway. But Ryan, free-roaming and talking just now--Hamilton tried but failed to suppress a shudder at the thought.

The visicommunicator hummed and he flipped it on again, hoping it would be the sorely needed Miss Alderman. Instead, it was Shirley. Impassively she announced in her sweet, thin voice, “Mr. Harris of the UN is here to see you, sir.”

“Dammit, I _know_ Mr. Harris is from the UN!” Hamilton exploded. Then, noting her hurt look, “I’m sorry, Shirley. You’re not the target of my wrath. Send him in.”

Ian Harris, as SPR high-level liaison man for the United Nations, had been working closely with Hamilton for almost five years. They had traveled together, wined and dined together both in public and private, golfed together, and explored each other’s minds and opinions in the closest harmony for hundreds of hours. And yet, at moments such as this, Harris had the knack of putting Hamilton on the defensive.

Hamilton knew he was the better looking. He had viewed himself too many times on too many color projection screens to have any doubts on that score. But his gray-tipped brown hair looked faintly theatrical when contrasted with Harris’ cropped black head, and his upper lip looked naked beside the other man’s neat black mustache. What was even more disconcerting, his features looked looser and more florid, his clothes not nearly so well fitting.

As usual, when Harris entered with a brisk nod Hamilton was annoyed to find the refrain of _There’ll Always Be an England_ running through his head. He said, “Hello, Ian,” waved him to a chair and offered him a cigarette with a defensive geniality.

The Englishman shook his head, settled back with a sigh and regarded his host with an I-say-old-man-is-this-exactly-cricket? expression. It occurred to Hamilton that Harris looked at the moment as sad as a Georgia hound dog whose master had eaten up all the steak.

The silence lasted until Hamilton said, with a trace of irritation he hated himself for revealing, “Ian, if you came over here to put the evil eye on me, I earnestly suggest that you go back to your own office? Let _me_ be _your_ guest.”

The UN representative regarded Hamilton as if he were some animal of a rarely photographed and inexplicable new species. Then he said, mildly, “Park. I find it difficult at times to convince certain regrettably backward branches of our organization that SPR is not a malignant wild growth upon the human social organism--a growth primarily dedicated to the development of disruptive discoveries without regard to their probable effect upon the structure of our society as a whole.”

“For heaven’s sake, get to the point, Ian,” said Hamilton. “We’ve been over this a thousand times before. It’s the job of SPR’s scientists to invent what comes bubbling up to the surface of their perhaps oddly constructed minds. It’s my job--and yours--to fit them into the socio-economic pattern.”

Harris regarded him with a mute disapproval that made Hamilton feel like a small boy caught cheating in a grade-school test. The UN man said, “Do you really think you’re doing your job, old man?”

“I’m doing my best,” said Hamilton, knowing that the toreador capework was about over and the moment of truth about to arrive.

“I’m sure you are.” Having made his point, Harris was disposed to be conciliatory. “But what about this Ryan business?”

Hamilton sighed, and pushed the shocking pink envelope across the desk. “There it is,” he said simply. “Somebody goofed. I sent out a restraining order under special code the moment I heard that Ryan’s tests were successful.”

Harris glanced at the message, frowned, and tossed it back on the desk. “Rough luck, Park,” he said. Then, “Has it occurred to you what it could mean if word gets out generally that this mad genius of yours has developed an instantaneous matter-transmitter?”

“How did _you_ hear of it?” Hamilton asked, instantly suspicious, and remembering that it was absolutely against the UN-SPR pact for the UN to have an informant in Antarctica.

To Hamilton’s amazement, the usually imperturbable Harris countenance turned a bright pink. Нe thought, _If I’m not skinned alive over this it will have been worth it--just to see Ian blush. But what is he hiding?_

The UN man said, with seeming clairvoyance, “It’s not what you think. I--er--picked it up quite inadvertently. I happened to stumble across your man Ryan late last night.”

“If you did,” said Hamilton seriously, “why in the name of heaven didn’t you clamp on to him?”

“I tried to,” was the reply. “But the circumstances were not exactly propitious.”

“Ryan at complete liberty in New York!” Hamilton groaned. “Was he talking?”

“If he was keeping silent,” said Harris, his face resuming its normal pale tan, “would I be here now? I tell you, Park, this may be more serious than you think. I’m qualified to understand his ravings--an ability not shared by many, thank God. But there’s no way of telling how much harm has been done.”

“Have you taken steps?” Hamilton asked, wishing he had looked up before walking under that ladder.

Harris nodded. “I’ve put our UN force on the job. But what can they do? There are only a few score of them. Even if they locate him, they have no real jurisdiction outside of UN territory. All your man has to do is tell them to push off.” He paused, then added, “I came over here to discover your attitude and what steps _you_ are taking.”

“Thanks, Ian,” said Hamilton. Harris didn’t have to detail what it could mean if word got out that a successful instantaneous matter-transmitter had been discovered. It could mean world-wide financial and economic catastrophe. It could mean disaster for every other form of freight and cargo transportation on Earth, from the great rocket airliners with their chains of freight-gliders to the humblest obsolescent tramp steamer plying the ocean waves.

Hearing of it prematurely, people wouldn’t wait to learn its limitations, or the bugs that would have to be worked out before it could be put into operation. They’d dump their stocks and property investments and gilt-edged bonds and the result might well be world-wide chaos.

“We’ll do our very best, never fear,” said Hamilton, accompanying Harris to the office door.

But, returning to his desk, he wondered just what they could do. To put either the New York City police or the Federal Authorities on the job would be an iron-clad way of opening up a leak. It was one hell of a mess. He sat down behind his desk, put his face in his hands, and tried desperately to think of something. Nothing came.

The visicommunicator hummed its little tune, and wearily he turned it on again. Miss Alderman’s trim, competent face appeared on the screen. He said, “Just where have _you_ been?”

She said, “I only this minute got home--and I’ve got the mad Minnesotan with me. _Chief_, are you okay?”

II

Hamilton’s first reaction was one of utter disbelief. He said, “You’ve _what_, Nancy? If by any chance this is a joke--”

“It’s not,” Miss Alderman assured him crisply. “How do you think I got these rings under my eyes? Sven Ryan is sleeping it off right here in my apartment. I didn’t dare turn on my communicator until he passed out.”

“But where, and how did you ever get hold of him?” asked Hamilton, still half-incredulous.

“Maybe you’d better come right over here, Chief,” she said. “I’ll explain when you get here. Do you know where I live?”

“I do--and I’m on my way.” When Miss Alderman switched off, he flipped Shirley’s switch, and informed her he was leaving the office. “Call Mr. Harris and tell him everything is under control,” he directed.

He left by the private door, thus avoiding the reception room and any potential holdups in the outer office. Emerging on the high-level ramp, he looked about warily for the rim repairmen and their ladder, and was relieved to discover that they had finished their work, and gone elsewhere.

Since Miss Alderman, like everyone on SPR except its few top echelon members, lived within a mile of the Zeckendorf Plaza offices, Hamilton hopped a ramp-conveyor that carried him with gratifying celerity and an equally gratifying smoothness across the bottomless canyons of the incredible city.

In less than fifteen minutes he had arrived at a high-level port in her own building, close to the lean green rectangle of Central Park. About him, unnoticed, passed the ever-changing kaleidoscopic vista of Manhattan with its familiar but fantastic metal and glass complexes of polychromatic spires, pyramids, ziggurats and domes.

Although the trip had been incredibly brief, Miss Alderman looked as crisply and as trimly brunette as she had on the day when she had first stepped into his office to take up her difficult assignment as his personal secretary. Evidently she had found time to do a quite miraculous repair job on the circles under her eyes.

He put an arm around her shoulders, and gave her a quick squeeze. He said, “If I forgot to say thanks over the communicator--thanks now, Nancy.” He stood back, looking at her with open admiration. “_How?_” he asked her.

“Have some coffee,” she suggested, flushing with pleasure.

She poured him a steaming black cupful from a glasspresso livingroom machine which was one of SPR’s most profitable patents. As they sat down, Hamilton could hear the faint sound of snoring from behind the closed bedroom door. He lifted an eyebrow, and nodded toward the sound. Miss Alderman nodded in return.

“I’m waiting,” said Hamilton.

“Well,” she began, marshalling her thoughts and words with care, “I was sound asleep in my beautypad when I got a call on the communicator. It must have been just about three a.m. It was one of the girls in compo-filing. She was watching a night club mike-jockey and she told me that Sven Ryan had just appeared on the screen, and wasn’t he supposed to be in Antarctica? It seems she filed your restraining message yesterday afternoon.”

“Good girls, both of you,” said Hamilton warmly.

To his surprise, Miss Alderman choked on her coffee. For some reason, her reaction reminded him of Ian Harris’ inexplicable embarrassment in his office earlier.

When she had recovered herself, Miss Alderman said, “I’m sorry, Chief. But I think you’ll understand when I tell you that by the time I got myself together and over to the club our crazy genius was sitting at a table swathed in three of Molly Sadler’s choicest items--one blonde, one redhead, and one brunette. You never saw such--er--figures.”

Hamilton could not help smiling. His use of the phrase _good girls_ in even remote connotation with any of Molly Sadler’s justly renowned Cyprians was more than amusing. He said, “You underrate me, Nancy. How did Ryan react when he saw you?”

“It was odd.” She told him. “Mind you, he was very drunk, and by the time I managed to get him halfway reassembled he couldn’t remember any of it. But I’d be willing to swear he said, ‘Lord! Another vulture! And I fled Antarctica to get away from all of you. But where’s your black mustache?’”

She stroked her perfectly smooth upper lip, looking faintly troubled. Then she said, “I don’t have a mustache, do I, Chief?”

He replied, “No, of course not, but Ia--” He caught it barely in time. And, in spite of himself, he grimaced, envisioning what must have happened. Evidently Ryan, loaded and ready for “tiger hunting,” had headed for Molly Sadler’s famous non-home and discovered the impeccable, imperturbable, and immovable Ian Harris already there.

“What’s the matter, Chief?” Miss Alderman stared at him with curiosity snapping in her wide-set black eyes.

“Nothing,” said Alderman. “Tell you later. How did you manage to get him away from the bevy? From what I’ve heard about Molly’s girls--” He let it hang.

“Chief, all I can tell you after last night is that everything you hear isn’t half the truth,” she said solemnly. “If I had a quarter of the--well, I’ll just say that if I had a certain kind of glamor I’d never have wasted a fourth of my life becoming college-trained to spend the best years of my youth behind a desk--even a very nice desk.”

“You’ll do--anywhere,” he told her. Then, frowning, “Among the interesting things I’ve heard about Molly’s girls is that some of them have college degrees too. Was Ryan talking?”

“He certainly was,” said Miss Alderman promptly. “He was beguiling his harem with promises to ship each of them an Antarctic rock-diamond every week, by instant teleportation.”

“Oh, God!” said Hamilton. “Let’s hope these particular girls have extremely low IQ’s. They could be the exact opposite of the intellectual type.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it, Chief,” was Miss Alderman’s reply. “Though it doesn’t seem quite fair, when you come right down to it.”

“How did you get him away from them?” he asked.

She shook her close-cut darkhaired head. “If I hadn’t been full of outraged righteousness, if I’d stopped to think twice, I’d never have made it,” she admitted. “I just marched in and led poor Sven out by the ear. It was a high-handed, somewhat unworthy trick--at least he seemed to think so once I had him under wraps. I’m beginning to think so myself.”

“Get hold of yourself, Nancy,” said Hamilton, rising. “You’ve done SPR a very great service. How’d you keep him here?”

“Not the way you think,” she said promptly. “By the time I got him here he was running out of steam. He wanted to talk--and go on drinking. He’s a pretty nice guy, you know. It took me all the rest of the night to get him folded up.” She paused, then added, “Chief, is this new item of his as hot as he claims?”

“Ian Harris was in my office just now, having catfits over it,” said Hamilton. “Potentially, it’s the hottest potato SPR has ever come up with. And we’ve had to handle some pretty sizzling ones, remember?”

“I remember,” said Miss Alderman.

Hamilton rose. He said, “I think we’d better wake Ryan up. We can’t let him sleep here indefinitely.”

“Why, Chief!” asked Miss Alderman, standing to reveal a trim if not opulent figure.

“I’m not, at the moment, concerned about your reputation,” he told her, inwardly damning all women for their tendency to coyness at the wrong moments. “What I am concerned with is Ryan and his--”

The doorbell chimed sharply. After a swift, silent interchange, Miss Alderman answered it. Rather expecting Ian Harris to have run them to earth, Hamilton was not wholly surprised at the appearance of a huge, burly man with bushy black eyebrows and a ruggedly handsome face.

Face and body belonged to Charles Forsythe, Undersecretary of Science and Industry in the Cabinet of the President of the United States and one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals. It is perhaps needless to add that he was, incidentally, SPR’s deadliest foe in the name of private enterprise.

Miss Alderman turned to stare at Hamilton, her expression bewildered and uncertain.

Hamilton said, quietly, “Come in, Charlie. Come in. I’m glad to see you.”

“Glad to see you, too, Park,” said Forsythe. The two men eyed each other with the restrained wariness of polite jungle cats. Then Forsythe’s mouth twitched and Hamilton found himself laughing with the intruder. _Confound the man!_ he thought. It was a hell of a note when you couldn’t stay mad at your enemies.

Actually, Forsythe’s sudden emergence in the already complex problem of Sven Ryan and his matter-transmitter was an element Hamilton had been hoping they could avoid ever since Ian Harris had told him Ryan was at liberty in New York and talking his head off. But, since Forsythe was already here....

Hamilton said, “Let Miss Alderman pour you a cup of coffee. It’s excellent, I can assure you.”

“Thank you, I could use one,” said the industrialist, flinging himself in a rollachair that creaked ominously under his by no means inconsiderable weight. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“I don’t imagine you did,” said Hamilton, shaking his head faintly at Nancy, who was giving him a shall-I-put-something-in-it? look. “You must have been pretty busy.”

“All in the night’s work,” said Forsythe, yawning and extending his legs. His voice, like the rest of him, was big and deep. Charlie Forsythe looked like a gigantic, old-fashioned steel puddler who had come up in the world and was not quite adjusted to its social niceties--a bull in a china shop instead of the expensively-reared son of vast inherited wealth that he actually was. He was a throwback to the industrial-pirate era of the late nineteenth century--human, tough, limited, determined, likeable, and always dangerous.