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.