Children -- Fiction; Diary fiction; Fathers and daughters -- Fiction; Psychic ability -- Fiction; Science fiction
I don't see how I managed to make so much work of teleporting myself.
It's the simplest thing in the world, no effort at all. Why, a child
could do it! That sounds like a gag, considering that it was two
children who showed me how, but I mean the whole thing is easy enough
for even almost any kid to learn. The problem is understanding the
steps ... no, not understanding, because I can't say I do, but working
out the steps in the process.
There's no danger, either. No wonder it felt like a still picture at
first, for the speeding up is incredible. That bullet I got in the way
of, for instance--I was able to go and meet it and walk along beside it
while it traveled through the air. To the men who were dueling, I must
have been no more than an instantaneous streak of movement.
That's why the youngsters laughed at the suggestion of danger. Even if
they materialized right in the middle of an atomic blast, it is so slow
by comparison that they could TP right out again before they got hurt.
The blast can't travel any faster than the speed of light, you see,
while there is no limit to the speed of thought.
But I still haven't given them permission to teleport themselves out
of this time yet. I want to go over the ages pretty carefully before I
do; I'm not taking any chances, even though I don't see how they could
wind up in any trouble. Still, Robert claimed the Brights went from the
future back into the beginning, which means they could be going through
time and overtake any of the three of us, and one of them might be
hostile--
I feel like a louse, not taking Jim's cameras, specimen boxes and
recorders along. But there's time for that. Plenty of time, once I get
the feel of history without being encumbered by all that stuff to carry.
Speaking of time and history--what a rotten job historians have done!
For instance:
George III of England was neither crazy nor a moron. He wasn't a
particularly nice guy, I'll admit--I don't see how anybody could be
with the amount of flattery I saw--but he was the victim of empire
expansion and the ferment of the Industrial Revolution. So were all the
other European rulers at the time, though. He certainly did better than
Louis of France. At least George kept his job and his head.
On the other hand, John Wilkes Booth was definitely psychotic. He could
have been cured if they'd had our methods of psychotherapy then, and
Lincoln, of course, wouldn't have been assassinated. It was almost a
compulsion to prevent the killing, but I didn't dare.... God knows what
effect it would have had on history. Strange thing, Lincoln looked
less surprised than anybody else when he was shot, sad, yes, and hurt
emotionally at least as much as physically, yet you'd swear he was
expecting it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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