The Best of Wilson Tucker by Wilson Tucker

Author:Wilson Tucker [Tucker, Wilson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, American, https://archive.org/details/bestofwilsontuck0000tuck
ISBN: 9780671832438
Google: uFPcAAAACAAJ
Amazon: 0671832433
Goodreads: 890451
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 1982-01-31T22:00:00+00:00

“Shut up you bastards!”

For the first time in weeks the huge ape spoke. His hamlike hands dropped from propping up his head and he turned his strange, unwavering eyes on the neighboring cell. He seemed to discover the mild little man there for the first time. His gaze was brimming with curiosity, aroused interest. He said, “I like you, Doc.”

“Thank you.”

“Yeah, I like you.” Calculating eyes set in the massive head roamed over the scholar’s small body. “You’re okay. You ain’t bats like these other birds—you gotta good head.” His eyes glanced once at the book. “Sure, I like you.”

“Thank you. And may I add that I harbor no ill feelings toward you?”

“Yeah, I suppose so. We understand each other, huh?” He hunched forward and pointed an oversize finger. “Is that the truth, Doc? About what you said to brass buttons? Can a guy just get up and change his atoms and walk through that wall?”

His intended whisper resembled a muted roar. The clerk looked around at him, his attention caught. In the far cell the dark-skinned man uttered a single, contemptuous, “Hell!” and turned his back. The three guards looked on, half interested, half amused.

“Why, yes, it is theoretically true, I suppose, but not in the literal sense you imply. Actually, it is very much open to question. There is a school of belief which holds that it has happened; history has recorded such incidents. Well-known personages have vanished from jail cells and asylums, from rooms supposed to be escape-proof. When the door was opened, poof—they were gone. And sometimes they bobbed up elsewhere in the world.

“But understand this, it is—well, practically impossible. I say it is theoretically possible only because past incidents suggest it has happened. Not everyone can expect to do it, not in the longest lifetime imaginable. It could only happen once in so many hundreds of millions of times. Perhaps a bare half dozen occurrences from the day of Creation unto the end of time itself.”

Unexpectedly the clerk spoke. “I haven’t read anything about it happening.”

“Of course not, sir. You will very seldom find such things recorded elsewhere than in prisons or asylums, and then you may be sure the news wouldn’t be published. And who would bother to set down an abstraction at a time of hue and cry for an escaped prisoner? Perhaps in the long run the fellow was termed a magician, a partner of the devil, and eventually forgotten. But I believe it has happened.”

“Doc—do you mean that if a hundred million other guys was in this cell with me, one of them could walk right out through that wall?” The gross face was deeply interested despite the skepticism he chose to display. Beyond him, the clerk clung to a horizontal bar of the cell, watching and listening.

“Oh, no, hardly that.” The question seemed to amuse the scholar. “What I meant to imply was, given an unlimited number of years in which to live, and given the energy to go on forever without pause, a man could, eventually, walk through a solid wall or some similar object.

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