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Popping In 

Christopher Kempke 

copyright (c) 1991



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Twilight 

The windshield wipers came on the moment Billy Goldwin's mother started the car, testimony to some past rainstorm. She shut them off immediately, for they served no purpose on this particular day; the sun, though barely above the horizon, had no clouds to block it. 

Billy's mood was not so bright. Summer vacation had just come to an end, and the interminable, probably endless days of school were about to begin again. Already his reluctance to submit to this fate had resulted in missing the school bus, and a near-successful attempt to hide his continued presence from his mother made him even later. 

His mother's own outlook was, therefore, less than perfect. She didn't say a word to him as they slipped down the avenue away from their home, selected a few choice phrases for the next couple of blocks, then relapsed into the impenetrable silence as they covered the remaining three miles to the school's street. 

Billy could see the three-story school building ahead, and sank deeper into his gloom. The doors were closed, he would be late. To have a pink slip on the very first day of second grade, in addition to the suffering of mere attendance, seemed more than he should be expected to survive. 

With a passion he'd never felt before, he wished the school would disappear. In his head he could picture the street as it would appear without the school, the building gone entirely. It was a lovely dream, a Nirvana in which this particular hell no longer existed. He sharpened the mental image of the absent building, seeing only the shading trees and empty avenue. Billy lost himself in his sudden dream. 

And a moment later that dream came true. 

Billy and his mother had just enough time to realize that there was something wrong before the howling began; followed by a thunderous crash and a jerk that tore away all consciousness. 

Martin Kendall's feet sat on an oak desk in a cave in the Colorado rockies. A coin fell through the air in front of him, vanished inches above the desk, and reappeared near the ceiling. A moment later, as it again neared the desk, the stunt repeated itself. Kendall had been doing this for nearly half an hour, just barely able to control the coin at terminal velocity. 

An intercom buzzed, and he dropped his feet to the floor with sudden alertness. The coin, suddenly ignored, buried itself in his desktop. 

"Martin?" The voice of his secretary was badly distorted by the cheap intercom. "Sorry to bother you, but Henry brought me this a few minutes ago, and I thought you should see it." A manila folder materialized on the desk. Kendall opened it at once. 

It was a handwritten note, labeled "Transcription from Police Channel, St. Williams, Iowa". 

"Jefferson Park School appears to have vanished. No trace of the building remains above ground level, and there is not enough debris present to hypothesize an ordinary explosion of any kind. Several nearby objects appeared to be picked up and tossed TOWARD the scene of the disappearance, including several cars, whose occupants are currently being taken to Central Hospital for treatment. I will require backup and several ambulances." 

Beneath it was scrawled hastily, "This looks like one of ours." 

Kendall had his hand back on the intercom before he finished reading. "Get me four or five Teletrix and have them meet me at the school as fast as you can get them there. Is Henry still out there?" 

His question was answered a second later when the specified party appeared in front of his desk. About fifty, Henry was still in perfect shape, with slightly silvered hair which seemed to argue with his blue jeans and tennis shoes. His face almost always wore a slight smile, but today it showed no trace of humor. His eyebrows rose in a silent question, his body almost quivering with repressed motion. 

Kendall nodded, and the world changed. Without sound or transition, the rock walls of the Colorado cave were replaced by blue sky and defoliated trees. The chair on which he had been sitting a moment before vanished. Only the fact that he had begun to stand saved him from collapsing to the ground. 

Henry was standing next to him, glancing around to be sure no one had observed the teleportation. Satisfied, he gestured toward a large, regularly shaped pit in front of them. Policemen were scattered around it, with the disoriented, suspicious wandering of people facing the completely unknown. 

"That's the basement of the school building. The leaves and branches all around it are from the trees here. They were apparently sucked into the vacuum left when the school disappeared." 

Kendall nodded silently. "You're right --- it does look like a Shifter, or a Teletrix who wants us to think so. Let's see if we can get in there without the police harassing us." 

"No problem." Henry held out a small wallet. Kendall opened it, saw a badge and a card which read, in part, 'George MacWills, Federal Bureau of Investigation.' He smiled. 

The policeman who stopped them let them pass after seeing the badge. Henry dropped carefully into the pit and helped Kendall down. 

The place was a disaster. Folding chairs, old desks, and pieces of brick wall had been picked up, smashed, and indiscriminately tossed about by the winds. 

"Quite a mess," Kendall commented. "Not likely there's going to be anything here to give us clues. What time was it here when this happened?" 

"About eight thirty." 

Kendall froze, turned around slowly. "So school was in session?" 

Henry nodded slowly. 

"Oh shit." 

"The parents will start arriving once the word gets out, and there will be enough media attention to keep people talking for ages. There were almost fifteen hundred students there, plus the teachers and..." his voice trailed off suddenly. 

Kendall followed his gaze, saw nothing at first, then a few droplets of crimson showed a macabre path to something Kendall didn't want to look at at all. 

But he did. It was the lower half of a body, eviscerated and scattered about the floor, discreetly covered with leaves, almost invisible. 

"He must have been walking down the stairs when the school was teleported. Half of him left here, the other half went... wherever the rest of the school went." Henry's voice quivered audibly, though he kept it just above a whisper. 

Kendall shivered a bit himself. "This can't be seen from above. Let's get rid of it before the cops find it. They've had enough inexplicable things for one day." He teleported the body to a remote desert and brought back an equal volume of air to take its place. Only a slight shifting of the leaves showed that anything had happened. 

"We're wasting time," Kendall continued. "Get in contact with as many of the Teletrix as you can find all over the world; use my files to look them up. We need to find out where that school was sent. It would have made quite a flash when it appeared; I'll see if any military satellites picked it up. While I'm at it I'll get the army to control this. That should effectively silence the media." 

"We have people that high in the military?" Henry sounded surprised. 

"We have people everywhere," Kendall said without emotion. "Wait here for the help I asked for to arrive, and get them to help you look. There's a couple thousand very confused people somewhere right now, most of them schoolchildren. We need to find out where they went." 

Henry nodded. "I'll meet you at the Academy in an hour, whether I have news or not." 

Kendall finished climbing out of the basement, headed for a small outbuilding, stepped behind it and vanished. 

Two hours later three people gathered in Kendall's office. The third was a young woman of about twenty-five, an accomplished Teletrix and major instructor at the Academy. 

"The army is currently guarding the school," Kendall commented. "And there's not going to be any mention in the media. But this is going to be hard to gloss over. 

"Worse, the school still hasn't been located. None of the weather or military satellites registered a flash that hasn't been otherwise explained. And the students and teachers haven't phoned." 

"Sounds bad," Emily Westlane said. "We have to assume they're dead. The odds appear that they weren't teleported anywhere on Earth, and even if they were the school building would probably have collapsed in it's new setting." 

Henry nodded. "An extra-terrestrial destination seems likely. But who would want to send a school into outer space?" 

Emily shrugged. "A student who didn't want to attend classes. We know that this was an amateur teleportation, possibly even a first manifestation of power. A child seems likely." She paused. "If it was their first time, it's unlikely that they would have known enough to take themselves along." 

"So someone outside the school building, probably a student who didn't want to go to school, or a staff member that didn't want to go to work." Henry considered. "It was after school normally started, so there would be a relatively small number of people not in attendance. But I don't know how we could check every child and teacher in St. Williams." 

The group became silent for a few moments. Then Kendall snapped his fingers. 

"We don't have to. Just check the hospitals and morgue." 

"Huh?" Henry looked confused. 

Kendall smiled briefly. "This teleportation was amateur; the vacuum almost assures that. Only a tiny portion of them learn to use a grid for energy before we find them." 

Henry's befuddled expression vanished. "So our Shifter must have been using his own energy." 

"That school had a huge volume; quite an effort for an amateur. The strain must have been enormous." Emily sighed. "The morgue seems more likely." 

"Check it," Kendall said. "Henry, you check the hospitals." 

"There's only one," Henry said. "I'll be back in ten minutes. " He vanished. 

"Me, too," Emily said, and Kendall was suddenly alone. 

Three people who were not doctors exited a broom closet of the St. Martin city hospital wearing doctors' gowns. Henry had checked this hall only moments before, determined it to be relatively unused; no one was around to wonder what important medical conference had been held in the closet. 

Henry set off at a brisk pace, Kendall and Emily at his heels. 

"His name is William Goldwin, or 'Billy.' He's eight years old, starting second grade. He was late to school; his mother was driving him in. She says she saw the school simply vanish, felt a strong wind and heard thunder, then the car was lifted and thrown and she woke up in the hospital." Henry paused for breath. "She was treated for minor bruises and released, but Billy is in a coma. They're in there." He pointed to a door. 

Kendall glanced at his watch. "My wife should be getting home right about now. Go get her, and tell her to bring her kit." 

Henry nodded once, briefly, and then was not there. Kendall pushed open the door and stepped into the room. Emily followed. 

Billy lay on a bed, various pieces of machinery attached to his face and chest. On the other side of the room a crying woman sat in a plush chair. A doctor stood over the bed, fiddling with one of the dials and consulting a clipboard. He looked up as Kendall and Emily entered. 

The doctor looked up as they entered. "You're not doctors," he said simply. 

Emily smiled broadly, but not without a hint of malice. "We need to talk, outside." 

The doctor looked uncertain, glancing between her and the door. Kendall casually placed himself in the line of retreat. 

"I don't know who you are, but this patient needs my attention now, and I don't have time for you. You'll have to wait outside." 

Kendall gave Emily a sideways glance and shrugged. She pulled a wallet from a coat pocket, flipped it open toward the doctor. "You don't understand. I'm agent Smith of the FBI, and we need to talk outside right now." 

The doctor's agitation increased considerably, but he held his ground. "No, you don't understand. I can't leave him right now." 

Emily snapped the wallet closed and put it back in her pocket. "I think we're failing to communicate." She turned toward Billy's mother, who had looked up during the exchange. "Mrs. Goldwin, if you'll excuse us?" 

An instant later Emily and the doctor were gone. 

Mrs. Goldwin flew to her feet like she'd been stung. Kendall held up his hand in a restraining gesture, and smiled. 

"Don't worry, ma'am. We're not really with the FBI, but we can help your son, I hope." 

"How did they just disappear?" She was still standing, every muscle tensed as though she were about to run. 

"I'll explain everything once we've gotten your son revived. Has he been thrashing around, like he's been having nightmares? Sweating?" 

"No." She looked as though it took considerable effort to get the word out. 

Kendall frowned. The energy drain usually caused terrible nightmares, except in the most extreme cases when the body was too deeply drained. He had never seen an extreme case survive. 

"Mrs. Goldwin," he said slowly, "I need to ask you a couple questions, and the answers are extremely important. Your son has a very special ability, one that only a few people possess. He can make things move using only his mind. That's what happened to the school; he apparently sent it somewhere else." 

"Billy would never do that!" 

"He almost certainly did it by accident. Most people do, their first time. He was probably wishing the school would go away, and 'poof', it did. But it's very important to know where he sent it. Did he say anything just before the accident that might give us a clue?" 

She considered. "No. He wasn't speaking at all. We'd had an argument about his going to school." 

Kendall grimaced inwardly. 

There was a slight movement behind him, and Mrs. Goldwin started. 

"You rang?" June Kendall had a smile on her face. She lost it almost as soon as she realized her surroundings. She joined her husband at the bed, looked down into the boy's face. Carefully, she set her briefcase on the edge of the bed and opened it. Henry, who had teleported the two of them here, silently took a chair. 

"Wake him up," Kendall said. 

June frowned. "The only thing that might wake him is..." She trailed off, looked across the bed at Mrs. Goldwin. "You the boy's mother?" 

"Yes, I am." She looked very pale. 

Behind the cover of her open briefcase, June pressed a vial into Kendall's hand. "About half," she said aloud. 

Kendall teleported about half the vial's contents into Mrs. Goldwin's lungs and chest, then teleported himself across the bed to catch her as she slumped. Carefully, he dragged her to the chair. 

"That will keep her out for about twenty minutes. We'll tell her she fainted. She certainly looked bad enough." 

Kendall nodded. "Can you wake him up?" 

"Not safely. There's some stuff here that might work, but it's damn potent. It might wake him, on the other hand it might cause massive heart failure, too." 

Kendall considered. "He's dead for sure if we don't wake him. But we'll need the doctor just in case. I hope Emily's done intimidating him. Henry, will you go get them? I suspect they're on the roof." 

June shuddered. "Don't you folks have any less drastic intimidation techniques? Have you ever tried just talking to resolve your differences? Or maybe something just a trifle more subtle?" 

Henry grinned slightly. "Subtlety isn't exactly the point we're trying to make. I'll go get them." 

He vanished. 

Midnight 

A sharp slap brought Billy back to awareness. He could only barely get his eyes open, but he spread his lids carefully and tried to focus on his surroundings through the resulting haze. 

Kendall sat on the edge of the bed with an intent look on his face. Behind him, beyond the range on which Billy could focus stood the doctor, Henry, Emily, and June. Billy's mother still dozed in her chair on the other side of the bed. 

"Billy, can you hear me?" Kendall's voice was very low, almost a whisper. June prodded him in the back and he repeated the question a bit more loudly. 

"Yes." It took several attempts to get the word out. Billy remembered a time he had almost drowned, the foggy feeling that would not go away. He felt like that now. 

"Do you know what a grid is?" 

Billy's brain refused to yield a definition. He shook his head slowly. 

Kendall unfolded a large piece of paper, held it close to him. It was glossy black, with yellow lines at about three inch intervals forming squares. 

"Can you close your eyes and imagine this?" 

Billy tried, and sleep overcame him almost at once. Another slap brought him back. 

"Billy, it's very important that you stay awake. Try to imagine this picture in your mind. Keep your eyes open." 

Billy studied the grid intently for a few moments, formed an image of it in his mind. "Ok" 

"Good. Now pretend that those yellow lines are all over the room, connecting everything with each other. Try to imagine a whole bunch of yellow lines." 

Billy nodded. Kendall smiled slightly, pulled a coin from his pocket. 

"Now here's the hard part. Look at this coin, and pretend that there's a yellow line connecting it with the blanket right here." Kendall patted the bed slightly. "Okay?" 

"Okay." 

"Now, imagine the coin moving along the yellow line to the bed." 

There was a soft pop, and simultaneously a flash of brilliant light from the bed. The coin now sat on the blanket. 

Billy's fatigue vanished, energy flowing through his body as though some internal dam had burst. 

Kendall stood up, the coin vanishing as he did so. "Good, he'll be okay now. He's tapped the grid enough to get his energy back. Doctor, I don't think we'll be needing your services any more. June, see if you can wake his mother." 

The doctor fled the room. Emily watched him go with a slight grin. June gently shook Billy's mother, awakening her easily. 

"We all need to have a talk," Kendall said. "And this isn't the place to have it. I'm going to take us all to my office. Mrs. Goldwin, Billy, this may make you slightly uncomfortable. Everything around you is going to change suddenly, but you won't be hurt in any way. Are you ready?" 

Mrs. Goldwin's eyes clearly said no, but she softly said, "Yeah." 

Kendall smiled, nodded curtly, and the whole world changed. 

Safely seated a half mile below the surface of a Colorado mountain, Kendall turned at once to business. 

"Billy, when you were in the car with your mother, you sent the school away somewhere. It's very important that you tell us where you sent it so we can rescue the people who were in it." 

Billy looked at his mother, back at Kendall. "I didn't do anything, it just went away." 

Kendall's smile widened imperceptibly. "I know you didn't try to make it go anywhere, it was an accident. What were you thinking at the time?" 

The glance at his mother was longer this time. "I just wanted the school to disappear," he admitted finally. His mother gasped softly. 

"Disappear to where? It's very important." 

Billy thought about it for a while. "Just disappear. I didn't want it to go somewhere else, I just wanted it not to be there." He burst into tears. 

June came and caught his hand. "That's okay, now. Let's go get you something to eat, okay?" She winked at Billy's mother, led the child slowly from the room. Mrs. Goldwin rose to follow, but a gesture from Kendall made her sit back down. Emily and Henry silently left the room, uncharacteristically using the door rather than teleporting away. 

"I've got to tell you a little bit more about your son, Mrs. Goldwin." 

Mrs. Goldwin nodded slowly. 

"Every now and then someone's born with the ability your son has. We call it teleportation; the ability to move things from one place to another without touching it or moving it through any of the space in between. About one person in a thousand is able to do it. Of those, about one person in one hundred ever discovers this ability on their own. 

"But now and then something happens such as with Billy. For some reason or another, they think about an object in a different way than they have before, and `poof', it moves. It's very draining on your energy, in a way more than just simple fatigue. It causes bad dreams and frequently even death. Many `crib death' children are just latent teleporters who teleported something too large to handle in a dream, and died as a result. 

"We call these people Shifters. They can teleport, but only with some danger and a lot of fatigue. The larger the volume of matter they wish to move, the more energy it takes to move it. Your son was very lucky; most children would have died teleporting a structure as large as that school building. 

"Now, even ten percent of one in a thousand human beings makes for a fairly large number of people with this ability. When someone manifests this ability, they are usually noticed by one of our people, and brought here. 

"This place you're in is called the Teletrix Academy, and its graduates are referred to as Teletrix. Billy will be one of those graduates eventually." 

"Billy has to come here?" 

"Yes, for a year or so, to learn how to use his gift well. There are techniques that allow a Teletrix to teleport things without using his or her own energy to do it. Also, the terrible side effects, light and thunder, can be avoided by some other tricks. But most importantly, we teach him to use his gift in an ethical fashion. A Teletrix out for personal gain would be a devastating force in the world. There have been a few who we might only call `evil.' They are very dangerous people, and extremely difficult to stop. We'd just as soon make ourselves responsible for his moral training as well." 

"But he has school to attend, and ..." 

"Many of our students do; and classes are provided here. You will be allowed to visit at any time. In fact, you may live here if you wish. You might want to take our tests --- you may be a latent Teletrix yourself, although it's not particularly likely." 

"But..." 

"And, Mrs. Goldwin, I'm afraid I must insist. You see, he doesn't have a grasp on his abilities, and he's dangerous to others as well as himself. It's quite likely that he killed everyone in that school by teleporting them into outer space, or into the sun, or some other such `accident' merely by ignorance. We can't allow that to happen again. In one year, perhaps less, he may return to the outside world and lead a productive life there. It is never easy to let your son go, but I assure you that it it necessary. I have had this conversation with hundreds of parents over the years, and always reach the same conclusion. 

"I'm sorry that this had to happen like this. Usually Shifters manifest their powers in some small manner that allows us some time to break the news gently. It wasn't so this time, and training should begin at once before he decides to try again on his own. I am certain that another such attempt would result in his death." 

Mrs. Goldwin was silent for a long moment. "It appears I have no choice. I'll have to discuss it with my husband, of course." 

Kendall nodded. "I'll help you if you like. June will make sure that Billy is settled in here. My wife's a very pleasant lady, I'm sure he'll get along with her just fine for a while." 

"Your wife... is she a..." 

"Teletrix? No, she just had the misfortune of marrying one. I expect her to come to her senses any day." Kendall grinned. "Shall we go?" 

Five hours later Emily dropped into one of Kendall's office chairs with something halfway between a sigh and a snore. The others in the office had fared little better; Henry was pacing to keep himself alert, Kendall himself was sipping on his fourth cup of coffee in as many hours. June alone looked fresh; somehow she always did. 

"Nothing," Emily said flatly. "But I suspect you already knew that. There are fifteen thousand Teletrix all over the world looking for that school building." 

"I've still got them looking," Kendall acknowledged, "But I can't see that there's much chance we'll find anything any more. The flash was our best hope, but I've been over all the satellite photos a hundred times. I've been teleporting all over this planet so much I'm developing permanent jet lag." 

"The army's fairly nervous about this, but the press is still in the dark. By the time it leaks, I think it will be old enough news that no one will believe it." Henry paused for a few moments. "Of course, somebody's eventually going to put all of these little stories together and draw some fairly dangerous conclusions, for us." 

"They already have," Kendall commented. "But nobody believes them, either. I doubt the Academy is in any real danger for the time being." He looked toward his wife. 

June shrugged. "I've been talking to Billy for hours. He continues to insist that he sent the school `nowhere.' I even tried hypnosis. Any memory he has of where he sent it is locked up so tight that he can't get at it either consciously or subconsciously." 

Henry tossed his wallet in the air. It vanished, appeared on Kendall's desk. With a slight frown, he teleported it across the room again. The rest of the room's occupants ignored him. 

"So we're back at a dead end again," Kendall said. "I suppose we're going to have to get some sleep sometime, and I'm beginning to suspect that the school is permanently beyond our reach." 

There was a soft sound of thunder, and Henry's wallet appeared on Kendall's desk in a brilliant flash of light. 

"I'd almost forgotten how hard it was to teleport on your own power," Henry said. He stared at the wallet again, wrinkled his head in concentration. The wallet vanished with the customary pop. There was no corresponding flash of light. 

"Eureka!" Henry shouted, and leapt to his feet. Everyone else in the room had been staring at him for several seconds, and flinched at the sudden flurry of motion. 

"The wallet!" Henry said. "Where is it?" 

"How should I know?" Kendall said slowly. "You teleported it, didn't you?" 

"Yes." 

"Then where did you send it?" 

"Nowhere." 

There was a slight pause as the words settled. 

"Nowhere?" 

"I blanked my mind just as I sent it, failed to specify a destination. It's doesn't drain as much energy as a full teleport, either. That's how Billy managed to survive!" 

Kendall looked him straight in the eye. "Can you bring it back?" 

Henry closed his eyes, nodded slowly. "Yes, I think I can." 

Light was suddenly everywhere. When the flash faded, Henry's wallet was in his hand. 

"Yes, it can be done. But it's as fatiguing to bring it back as to send it. And I think that it's going to have to be Billy who recalls the school." 

Kendall turned his attention to June. "What are the chances he'd survive that?" 

She shook her head. "Almost zero. He'll need a couple of weeks at least to recuperate first, and even then it's dangerous. And probably not worth it. Wherever this `nowhere' is, there's not likely to be any air there, is there?" 

Henry shook his head. "No probably not." 

Emily looked at him for a long moment, then teleported the wallet from his hands. It appeared in her lap in a soft flash of light. Scowling, she tried again. This time, the wallet remained missing. 

"Bring it back, Henry." Her voice was soft. 

Henry closed his eyes for almost a full minute. "I can't," he said simply. 

There was a flash. "But I can, easily. So only the person who sends it can get it back." Emily shook her head. "It just seems a shame to leave all those people hanging in limbo, even if they are dead." 

"Any chance that it will just pop back of it's own accord?" Kendall asked. 

Both Henry and Emily shrugged. 

"I think that it's definitely time to get some sleep then. We will all think about this better when we're awake." 

Emily nodded, looked at her watch. Suddenly, she pulled the watch from her wrist, glanced at it briefly, and sent it nowhere. Everyone looked up at the pop. 

Emily grinned theatrically, waited almost a full minute, then recalled the watch. She stared at it as though seeing it for the first time. 

"They're still alive," she said quietly. "Teleportation allows you move from place to place skipping the intervening space. It appears you also skip the intervening time. My watch didn't gain so much as a second while it was gone. So no time is passing for the people in the school." 

The mood of the room brightened noticeably for the first time in several hours. 

"Good thinking, Emily," Kendall said. "We have a chance of rescuing them. We just wait for Billy to recover, get him to bring the school back. With luck we'll even find a way to do it on a grid and he won't have to use his own energy." 

June looked skeptical, Emily contemplative. Henry gave a sudden, strangled gasp. "That half a man we found going down the stairs..." 

Kendall sobered instantly. "Yes. He doesn't even know he's dead." 

Dawn 

Kendall shifted the unfamiliar army uniform on his shoulders, seeking without success to make it more comfortable. Henry stood nearby with a practiced ease; it was not the first time he has worn such a uniform. Both men were carefully scrutinizing the school foundations. 

"There's a lot of damage to the structure," Henry said. "I rather doubt that the school would continue to stand for more than a couple seconds after being brought back." 

"Which would injure or kill most of the occupants," Kendall finished for him. "Clearly unacceptable. So what do we do?" 

Henry shook his head. "If we knew exactly where the people were, we could probably teleport them out before the building collapsed. But there's no way to know that I can see." 

"Could we rebuild the foundation so that the school would stand?" 

"I thought of that," Henry replied. "But we don't know how. The blueprints were destroyed in a fire some years ago, and in any case we don't know exactly how much of the school was taken and how much left. I'm not sure that it would work in any case; the sudden weight on the foundations would be likely to break them." 

"Any chance that there are any blueprints left somewhere? Interior drawings or photographs? If we knew the complete structure of the building we could drop a teleport shield on it, immobilize it in one place long enough for the people to get out." 

Henry considered for several seconds. "That sounds awfully dangerous. There aren't any blueprints, but we could probably find photographs of the interior. But even if we could completely reconstruct the inside it would probably take several Teletrix working together to keep the geometry straight, and if we weren't perfectly synchronized we'd probably just accelerate the destruction." 

Kendall's spun suddenly toward Henry. "Of course! You're a genius, Henry!" 

"Of course. But my brilliance is such that escapes even me at the moment. What did I say?" 

"Never mind, I need to think about it some more. But we've probably got a solution to that problem. The next question is, how do we cover this all up?" 

Henry smiled slowly. "Emily and I had a discussion about that last night. She had an idea that's so outrageous it can't fail." 

Kendall snorted. "I can't wait. Let's get back to the office." 

Henry spread his map out on Kendall's desk. Emily stood at his side; Kendall sat in his usual chair. Each grabbed a corner to prevent the paper from rerolling itself. 

"Here's the major camp, and the latrines," Henry said, pointing. "Everyone not on duty will be there. They've erected a tent over the school foundations to keep the gawkers away; the on-duty patrols will be right around the tent to keep away suspicious people. Nevertheless, there will probably be a crowd of worried parents over here, in the compound." 

"Any chance there will be stragglers?" 

"It's always possible, but not likely. I've been watching them for a week now, and they've been relatively invariant in their routine. But if there are, the others know what to do with them, so it won't be a big deal." 

"Good," Kendall said, glancing at his watch. "We have about ten minutes. I'll take the parents, Henry, you get the tent and the patrols, Emily, the main camp is yours. Then start looking for anyone we missed. Meet me here when you're done." He tapped the map. "Any questions?" 

"I question your sanity," Emily said. "Other than that, no." 

"That's what you're there for," Kendall said. "If something goes wrong with this plan, get that school back into the nether as fast as you can." 

"Understood." 

Kendall checked his watch again. "Nine and a half minutes exactly. Let's go!" 

The office was replaced with starry darkness. Kendall slid across the night toward the small rope-enclosed compound. Perhaps sixty people were in it, despite the hour; tents and sleeping bags were omnipresent. 

Kendall closed his eyes, brought forth an image of the yellow grid that was so much a part of his talent. Normally he would have required neither concentration nor the closed eyes, but the task he performed now was still relatively new, and there was little room for error. 

He mentally cut away half of the grid, imagining the lines fading to nothing in one direction, opened his eyes. Superimposing the grid upon the enclosure and the public latrines beyond, he concentrated on the nothing beyond his grid and gave a short mental push. 

Usually he would have pulled air from the other end of the grid to fill the space, but tonight he just performed a second teleport a few moments later, sucking air from over an ocean hundreds of miles away. 

There was just the slightest rumble, a gentle breeze, then silence. The compound and its occupants were gone. 

A crash of thunder from beyond the trees told him that Henry had been less successful, but it no longer mattered. Kendall smiled to himself, and flickered to the meeting place. 

The army and the tent were gone, sent into an empty nowhere, out of space and time. The school foundation was barely visible in the near-complete darkness. 

Henry and Emily were already there. A few moments later they were joined by June and Billy, who had been hiding nearby for several minutes. 

"So far, so good," Kendall said. He kept his voice at a whisper despite the fact that there was no one to hear except the five people gathered in the clearing. "Now the fun begins. Emily, you should probably sit in that tree over there to give you a better view. If you think something's wrong, you know what to do." 

Emily nodded, and vanished. 

June carried two large briefcases. She handed one to Henry, the other to Kendall. "It took myself and about fifty academy folks all day to get this stuff into two thousand containers. Don't drop those cases or the whole county will go to sleep. And not wake up." 

"No problem," Henry said. "We'll try not to break them." 

He hefted his case and vanished. 

Darkness prevailed for a few seconds longer. 

There was a sudden flurry of activity. Four helicopters appeared silently in the air, dropped slightly as they adjusted to the pressure change from their source. Moments later the whirring of their blades filled the night. Everywhere men and women were materializing, filling the schoolyard with humanity. These people turned and ran for the edge of the concrete playground, only to be replaced fifteen seconds later with a new batch. And so it continued, again and again, until fully two thousand people stood waiting. 

Equipment began appearing, transferred fully constructed from a storeroom beneath the Colorado Rockies. Wooden towers, bleachers, ladders, and other paraphernalia were quickly set up. Seventeen huge searchlights illuminated the air over the school foundations. 

Kendall strode to the playground as the activity slowly settled into an expectant silence. His wife and Billy followed slowly. Two thousand Teletrix had arranged themselves about the school, where they could view it from every angle. They stood silently, waiting. 

Kendall summoned a megaphone, spoke into it. 

"Thank you all for coming this evening. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you, but we could think of no other way of resolving this problem without your aid. 

"You have all been instructed in what to do. Please remember that time will be very short; you may have as long as ten seconds, but four is a more likely guess. At this time you should arrange yourself so that each of you can see where the school will appear." 

There was a slight shifting of the crowd. 

Kendall opened the briefcase he held. On the other side of the empty foundation, Henry did the same. Within, hundreds of vials of a white powder glimmered. 

"Each of you should take one of these. Be very careful with it; do not breath it or break it." 

The briefcase emptied rapidly. 

Kendall looked at June expectantly. She nodded once, placed her hand on Billy's shoulder. 

"Do you remember our lessons? It's time to bring the school back. But you must be very careful to do it the way Henry showed you. Don't make any light." 

Billy smiled. "I can do it." He closed his eyes, opened them, then closed them again. Finally, he opened them and turned toward June. 

"It didn't work." 

Kendall swore silently. 

June was more gentle. "Just try again, Billy." 

Billy nodded skeptically, turned toward the hole in the ground, and closed his eyes. 

Without a whisper, the school flickered back into existence. 

Almost immediately, the ceiling of the top floor vanished, the walls following a fraction of a second later as a thousand Teletrix teleported bits and pieces of the building away. People within became visible, frozen by a shock that had not yet had time to fully register. The remaining Teletrix teleported them into the playground as quickly as they became visible. Inside of a second, none remained on the top floor. 

The school began to tilt crazily to one side. The low rumbling only drove the Teletrix to faster speeds. The middle floor was eaten away, it's people pulled out and added to the collection in the playground as they became appeared. When none remained, the bottom floor, too, began to disappear like sand in a strong wind. 

The walls now began to collapse, but it was far to late to make any difference. Even as they fell, the walls vanished, the students and teachers flickered to safety The bottom floor collapsed inward, but there was no one left on it. 

Kendall watched the school vanish piecemeal until he was sure everyone who could be rescued was out. But there was still an occupant of the building. 

Kendall met Henry in the ruins of the basement, seeking half a man. They found him without too much trouble, his body just beginning to realize it was in pain. Henry and Kendall had discussed this for hours in the preceeding days, but their decision pleased neither of them. 

With a flash of his mind, Kendall sent the man almost a hundred million miles away. His body was consumed instantly and painlessly by the fusion furnace of the sun. 

"I'm sorry," Kendall said quietly. "But this is the only thing we could do for you." 

Henry and Kendall stared at the empty place where he had been for several long minutes, silently, then teleported back to the playground. 

In the time they had been gone, the equipment had vanished. Each of the Teletrix had chosen a single resident of the school and taken him or her home. The drug June had distributed created a sleep laced with enough dreams to blur the line between reality and nightmare. The events of the night would be pieced together vaguely, if at all. For the people in the school, day would have become night, their minds disoriented. The school would still be gone when they awoke, but with luck they would not remember being in it. 

At the end of it all, only Henry, Emily, and Kendall remained. One of the Teletrix had taken June and Billy back to the Colorado office. 

"It's not a perfect success," Emily said. "We had a couple of bumps and bruises from falling bricks, but nothing that a little time won't cure. Plus, of course, it will be impossible to hide the signs of all those people here, but that will be only a minor mystery. The tabloids will probably pass us off as space aliens." 

Kendall nodded. "That and the fact that every soldier and parent here tonight is going to find their watch a few minutes slow." 

"Speaking of which," Henry said, "it's been almost ten minutes since we took out the natives. We'd best get them back before they get too much out of kilter. Keeps the mystery count low." 

"Agreed." 

The three of them separated to their former positions. 

Returning the parents' compound was easier. Kendall merely superimposed a whole grid over the empty scene, and bled the energy of transport into it. Silently and lightlessly the compound reappeared, the air it replaced ending up somewhere over the Pacific. 

Five minutes later, wine glasses clinked over Martin Kendall's desk. 

"Well, we did it. Only one casualty, and little disruption. When the missing people reappear tomorrow morning, this whole thing should pass. Eventually, the army will get tired of guarding that now-useless hole in the ground and go home." Kendall raised his glass. "I'd like to thank all of you for your help, especially Billy here." 

Billy took a sip from his glass. "It's good!" he said. 

"Indeed," Kendall said. "Best lemonade I've ever tasted." 


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