am I. Come, and we’ll talk. We’ll talk about Stinson and Benjamin, who helped them all get away. And Doctor Straus. And my husband, E. Mason Jamieson, who never got away because those filthy, unspeakable Agents shot him in the back, there in that coffee shop in Bangkok, Siam.”
Once, in the second year after her husband’s death, an Agent came and stayed in one of her cabins.
She learned that he was an Agent completely by accident. While cleaning the cabin one morning his badge fell out of a shirt pocket. She stood still, staring at the horror of it there on the floor, the shirt in her hands, all the loneliness returning in a black wave of hate and frustration.
That night she soundlessly lifted the screen from the window over his bed and shot him with a .22 rifle.
She threw the weapon into the river. It helped very little. He was one Agent, only one out of all the thousands of Agents all over Earth; while her husband had been one of twenty-eight persons. She decided then that her efforts would be too ineffective. The odds were wrong. She would wait until her son, Earl, was grown.
Together they would seek revenge. He did not have the cylinder—not yet. But he would. The Konvs took care of their own.
Her husband had been one of the first, and they would not forget. One day the boy would disappear for a few hours. When he returned the small patch of gauze would be behind his ear. She would shield him until the opening healed. Then no one would ever know, because now they could do it without leaving the tell-tale scar. Then they would seek revenge.
Later they would go to Alpha Centaurus, where a life free from Agents could be lived.
It happened to Earl one hot summer day when he was fourteen. Mrs. Jamieson was working in her kitchen; Earl supposedly was swimming with his friends in the river. Suddenly he appeared before her, completely nude. At sight of his mother his face paled and he began to shake violently, so that she was forced to slap him to prevent hysteria. She looked behind his ear.
It was there.
“Mom!” he cried. “Mom!”
He went to the window and looked out toward the river, where his friends were still swimming in the river, with great noise and delight. Apparently they did not miss him. Mrs. Jamieson handed him a pair of trousers. “Here, get yourself dressed. Then we’ll talk.”
He started for his room, but she stopped him. “No, do it right here. You may as well get used to it now.”
“Get used to what?”
“To people seeing you nude.”
“What?”
“Never mind. What happened just now?”
“I was swimming in the river, and a man came down to the river. His hair was all white, and his eyes looked like ... well, I never saw eyes like his before. He asked who was Earl Jamieson, and I said I was. Then he said, ‘Come with me.’ I went with him. I don’t know why. It seemed the right thing. He took me to a car and there was another man in it, that looked like the first one only he was bigger. We went to a house, not far away and went inside. And that’s all I can remember until I woke up. I was on a table, sort of. A high table. There was a light over it. It was all strange, and the two men stood there talking in some language I don’t know.”
Earl ran his hand through his hair, shaking his head. “I don’t remember clearly, I guess. I was looking around the room and I remember thinking how scared I was, and how nice it would be to be here with you. And then I was here.”
Earl faced the window, looking out, then turned quickly back. “What is it?” he asked, desperately. “What happened to me?”
“Better put your trousers on,” Mrs. Jamieson said. “It’s something very unusual and terrible to think of at first, but really wonderful.”
“But what happened? What is this patch behind my ear?”
Suddenly his face paled and he stopped in the act of getting into his trousers. “Guess I know now. They made me a Konv.”
“Well, don’t take on so. You’ll get used to it.”
“But they shouldn’t have! They didn’t even ask me!”
He started for the door, but she called him back. “No, don’t run away from it now. This is the time to face it. There are two sides to every story, you know. You hear only one side in school—their side. There is also our side.”
He turned back, a dawning comprehension showing in his eyes. “That’s right, you’re one, too. That is why you killed that Agent in the third cabin.”
It was her turn to be surprised. “You knew about that?”
“I saw you. I wasn’t sleeping. I was afraid to stay inside alone, so I followed you. I never told anyone.”
“But you were only nine!”
“They would have taken you away if I’d said anything.”
Mrs. Jamieson held out her hand. “Come here, son. It’s time I told you about us.”
So he sat across the kitchen table from her, and she told the whole history, beginning with Stinson sitting in the laboratory in New Jersey, holding in his hand a small cylinder moulded from silicon with controlled impurities. He had made it, looking for a better micro-circuit structure. He was holding this cylinder ... and it was a cold day outside ... and he was dreaming of a sunny Florida beach—
And suddenly he was there, on the beach. He could not believe it at first. He felt the sand and water, and felt of himself; there was no mistake.
On the plane back to New Jersey he came to certain conclusions regarding the strange power of his device. He tried it again, secretly. Then he made more cylinders. He was the only man in the world who knew how to construct it, and he kept the secret, giving cylinders to selected people. He worked out the basic principle, calling it a kinetic ordinate of negative vortices, which was very undefinitive.
It was a subject of wonder and much speculation, but no one took serious notice of them until one night a federal Agent arrested one man for indecency. It was a valid charge. One disadvantage of this method of travel was that, while a body could travel instantaneously to any chosen spot, it arrived without clothes.
The arrested man disappeared from his jail cell, and the next morning the Agent was found strangled to death in his bed. This set off a campaign against Konvs. One base act led to another, until the original reason for noticing them at all was lost. Normal men no longer thought of them as human.
Mrs. Jamieson told how Stinson, knowing he had made too many cylinders and given them unwisely, left Earth for Alpha Centaurus.
He went alone, not knowing if he could go so far, or what he would find when he arrived. But he did arrive, and it was what he had sought.
He returned for the others. They gathered one night in a dirty, broken-down farmhouse in Missouri—and disappeared in a body, leaving the Agents standing helplessly on Earth, shaking their fists at the sky.
“You have asked many times,” Mrs. Jamieson said, “how your father died. Now I will tell you the truth. Your father was
