Chapter 5

March, 1949

I had been searching for way that I could use my powers to make money. So far I hadn't found anything. I refused to steal money from legitimate businesses, such as banks, but how about illegal businesses? Maybe I could find a way to lift some of the money that organized crime had stashed away. There was no way that this money could be returned to the original owners, so my conscience said that I could keep any that I could find. But, how could I find it if the government agents couldn't?

I did have one advantage that no one else had: my ESP! If I could learn to "read" minds through all that jumble of random thought that everybody had floating around, then I should be able to find out anything I wanted to know. Besides, that ability would be very valuable when it came time for The Vigilante to begin serious operations.

OK, who to start with? I couldn't bring myself to pick my parents as guinea pigs, and the kids I knew were too disorganized to give me a stable platform to practice on. The most convenient adults would be our neighbors. I would start with them and see what happened.

Mrs. Jones was always home, so she would be a good target when school vacation came up this summer. They had no children, so neither she nor I would be distracted by stray activity. On top of that, Mrs. Jones was in her early 20s and good looking, so I could have some fun spying on her! I would start tonight.

I went to bed early and moved my POV over to the Jones' house. I found her sitting with Mr. Jones in their living room. She was listening to Red Skelton on the radio and Mr. Jones was reading the newspaper. The first thing I found out was her first name when Mr. Jones said, "Mary, please turn the volume down. I can't hear myself think!" That was useful information, but not acquired the way I had hoped.

I started probing Mary's mind to find an anchor that I could latch on to. It was easy to follow Red Skelton's jokes and Mary's reaction to them, but I wanted to delve deeper into her thoughts. Wait, there was something! Oh, she needed to piss, but she was trying to wait for a commercial. That wasn't very profound, but it was more than I had ever been able to do, before.

While she was gone, I started watching her husband, Joe. I figured that I had nothing to lose, so I took a look at his mind. Jackpot! He was reading the sports section of the paper and thinking about some bets he had placed with his bookie. He had lost on every bet, but I now had the name of a bookie, Everett Johnson. I filed that name for future reference.

Mary came back; she had not missed any important part of the program. She listened to the last 10 minutes of the show and turned off the radio. She announced that she was going to bed and left the room. She went into their bedroom and removed her clothes. This was the best part for a 14-year-old boy! She was really stacked, like the proverbial brick outhouse! Now I knew what Joe saw in her! She put on a robe and went into the bathroom. She took a bath which I thoroughly enjoyed watching! She was so beautiful, I even enjoyed watching her wash her ears! OK, I admit it, I was so distracted that I forgot my mind-reading experiment.

She returned to the bedroom and donned a nightgown. She turned out the light and got into bed. She was soon asleep and I returned to trying to read her mind. In many ways this was easier. Without the many sensory distractions, it was easier to follow her thought paths. I should have realized this to begin with. Her mind jumped from topic to topic as she slept, but she dwelled on a thought far longer than she would have while awake. This gave me time enough to follow and understand how her thoughts were organized. Enough for tonight; I was getting sleepy and tomorrow was a school day.

At school the next day, I tried looking into the minds of some of the adults I encountered. No luck! It was all too confusing. Either I just didn't know enough, yet, or everybody's mind was different and it would be a unique challenge to enter a mind for the first time. I hoped that the former was the answer, but I could learn to live with the latter.

I spent the next week studying Mary's mind and finally was able to "read" her any time I tried. I could get both surface thoughts and deeply submerged ideas and feelings. I believed that I had learned as much as I could from her mind and it was time to move on to other experimental subjects. She had been so helpful, even if she didn't know it, that I wanted to reward her. I would have to find a way. The least I could do was to cure her and Joe of any illnesses they might have. During the next week, I contrived to shake hands with both of them in order to do that.

I experimented on other adults as I met them during the next few weeks and found that their minds were, indeed, unique, but close enough at the fundamental level that I could work through and get what ever I wanted if I just had enough time to look. I hoped that, with practice, I could learn to work faster with my probe. I did find myself getting faster and faster with my probing as time wore on, but it took me years to become really facile with the skill.

June, 1949

My thoughts kept returning to that bookie, Everett Johnson. He was a plum, ripe for the picking! I couldn't just go in and take his cash without creating a stir; I had to be much more subtle. The best way would be to "win" it from him. But to do that, I needed to know the results of athletic events before they occurred. Could I do that? I could try!

By now, school was out and I could retire to my hideout in the garage. There I could be alone and unfettered while I experimented with my ESP. I found out that what I wanted to do was called precognition, or precog for short. I had no one to ask for help, but I hoped to work it out myself. It seemed to me that it was just a variation on clairvoyance, my POV ability, so I should work from that standpoint.

I figured that moving backward or forward in time would be pretty much the same action, so I should start with moving backward where I knew what I was looking for. Last night, the local Class D pro baseball team had played a home game and I had listened to it on the radio. I hoped that this would give me enough information to find them in the past. I decided to try adding a fourth dimension to my spacial map, keyed on my present as being time zero. That way, I could move 10 hours back in time and stay 15 minutes; if I returned to time zero, 15 minutes would have also passed in my current time. However, if I returned with an added 9 hours and 45 minutes, I would return to the same time that I had left. At this stage, only my conscious, not my body, was moving in time. I was ready to try it.

I went through my usual routine for initiating POV and then concentrated on moving back to 7:30 PM at the ball park. There I was! I am a baseball fan, so I had a lot of fun watching the players doing what I knew that they would do. Of course, the game ended the same as before with a 5 to 4 home victory; I was elated. I returned to a time just after I had left. The nearly 3 hours of the game had consumed no time in the present and I had lost nothing since I was functionally immortal, based on what T'ching T'ching had said.

I next jumped back to the Florida-Auburn football game of 1948, played in Montgomery, and watched that. That was Auburn's only win that year, and, during halftime, I teleported to the hot dog stand and bought one. I ate it and returned to watch the rest of the game. I had returned home before I fully realized what I had done. I had actually traveled in time!

I was so excited that I forgot the rest of my experiments scheduled for that day. Besides, I was still hungry, so I went in when Mother called me for lunch.

By now, I had stopped using my bicycle for transportation, except when it was necessary to be seen riding it. Whenever I could, I teleported wherever I wanted to go. I simply looked with POV for a deserted place near my destination and teleported there. Therefore, I teleported to the swimming pool for my daily scenery "fix" and teleported back home. I had become so comfortable with teleporting that the act no longer took conscious thought; I just thought about where I wanted to be and there I was.

The next day I returned to my time travel experiments. Because I wasn't sure what would happen, I wanted to be very careful with my first trip to the future. I decided to make a very short jump of about one hour into my future, but remain in the garage. As a joke, I made up a sign, "Hello, me. Congratulations on a successful jump." I put the sign where I could see it from the sofa and lay back down. I then willed myself one hour into the future. I made it and there was the sign! I jumped back right away, and left the garage. I had read enough time travel stories to be very cautious about meeting myself, so I vacated the garage for 2 hours.