Passage to Anywhere: A Discovery the World Isn’t Ready For

Passage to Anywhere by Sam Merwin Jr. - The scientists were riding high in the saddle with UN backing. But it took a touch of genius to win the teleportation battle.

The MomentT 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.