The Big Jump

by Leigh Brackett

  THE BIG JUMP

  LEIGH BRACKETT

  Phoenix Pick

  An Imprint of Arc Manor

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  The Big Jump copyright © 1955 by Leigh Brackett. © 1983 by the Huntington National Bank for the Estate of Leigh Brackett Hamilton. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual persons, events or localities is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.

  Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick, Phoenix Rider, Phoenix Science Fiction Classics, The Stellar Guild, Manor Thrift and logos associated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor Publishers, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.

  This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.

  Digital Edition

  ISBN (Digital Edition): 978-1-61242-054-7

  ISBN (Paper Edition): 978-1-61242-053-0

  Published by Phoenix Pick

  an imprint of Arc Manor

  P. O. Box 10339

  Rockville, MD 20849-0339

  www.ArcManor.com

  ****

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  Rogue Queen by L. Sprague de Camp

  The World Beyond the Hill (Non-Fiction, Hugo Award)by Alexei and Cory Panshin

  ****

  THE BIG JUMP

  ONE

  Across the gulfs between the WORLDS, from end to end of a Solar System poised taut and trembling on the verge of history, the rumors flew. Somebody’s made it, the Big Jump. Somebody came back.

  Spacemen talking, in the bars around a thousand ports. People talking, in the streets of countless cities. Somebody’s done it—the Big Jump—done it and come back. That last bunch, they—Ballantyne’s outfit. They say…

  They said a lot of things, conflicting, fantastic, impossible, grim. But behind the words there was only rumor, and behind the rumors—silence. A silence that was sphinx-like as the soundless wastes of night that roll forever around the island Sun. Too much silence. That was what Arch Comyn listened to, after he had heard the words. The rumors themselves seemed to have come most strongly along a line that ran from Pluto’s orbit in to Mars, and it was around Mars that the silence was deepest.

  Comyn went to Mars.

  The guard at the main gate said, “Sorry. You got to have a pass.”

  “Since when?” asked Comyn.

  “Since a couple of weeks.”

  “Yeah? What’s so different about the Cochrane Company all of a sudden, now?”

  “It ain’t only us, it’s every spaceship line on Mars. Too many creeps wanting answers to silly questions. You got business here, you get a pass through the regular channels. Otherwise blow.”

  Comyn glanced briefly at the height and size of the locked main gate, and then at the steel-and-glassite box that housed the guard and the controls.

  “Okay,” he said. “You don’t need to get tough about it.”

  He turned and walked away to where his rented car was waiting, and got in. He drove slowly back along the strip of concrete road that led to the new, prosaic, and completely earthly city four miles away. Out here on the open desert the cold Martian wind blew thin and dry and edged with dust, and there was no comfort in the far red line of the horizon, naked under a dark blue sky.

  Presently there was another road veering off from the one he was on, and he turned into it. It went round to the truck gate of the spaceport, which showed now as a low sprawling monster on his left, with clusters of buildings and a couple of miles of sheds grouped around the docking area. The nine-globed insignia of the Cochranes showed even at this distance on the tall control tower.

  Halfway between the main road and the truck gate, and out of sight of both, Comyn slewed his car into the ditch. He climbed out, leaving the door open, and sat down in the dust. Nothing used this road but company equipment. All he had to do was wait.

  The wind blew, laggard, wandering, sad, like an old man searching in the wilderness for the cities of his youth, the bright cities that had been and now were not. The red dust formed tiny riffles around Comyn’s feet. He sat, not stirring, waiting with a timeless patience, thinking…

  Two days and nights I spent in the lousy bars here, with my ears spread to the breeze. And it was all for the birds, except for that one drunken kid. If he wasn’t telling the truth…

  There was a sound on the road. A truck coming out from the city, bearing the Cochrane name. Comyn lay down quietly in the dust.

  The truck roared up, raced past, screeched to a stop, and then backed up. The driver got out. He was a young man, big and burly, burned dark by the Martian wind. He leaned over the body beside the road.

  Comyn came up off the ground and hit him.

  The trucker didn’t want to stay down. He was mad, and Comyn didn’t blame him for it. It took another hard blow to put him out. Comyn dragged him around behind the car and searched his pockets. He had a pass, all right. Comyn took his coverall and the cap with the broad peak and green visor that cut down desert glare. Then he fixed the trucker up inside the car so he’d keep safe until he got loose or somebody found him. On an impulse, Comyn dug out a couple of crumpled bills, hesitated, then shoved one of them into the trucker’s pocket.

  “Buy yourself a drink,” he said to the unhearing ears. “On me.”

  Dressed in the company overall, wearing the company cap with the face-shielding visor, and driving the company truck, Comyn rolled up to the gate and showed his pass. The guard opened up and waved him in.

  One of the great sleek Cochrane ships was on the field, loading passengers for somewhere. Around the docks and the sheds and the machine shops there was a clangorous turmoil where the work of servicing and refueling went on, with the huge mobile cargo cranes stalking mightily through the confusion. Comyn glanced at it without interest, got his bearings, and turned the truck toward the administration area.

  Warehouses. Office blocks. Enough buildings for a small city. Comyn drove slowly, squinting at signs, not seeing the one he wanted. The palms of his hands sweated on the wheel and he wiped them one after the other on his coverall. His belly was tied up in knots inside.

  That kid had better be right, he thought. I better be right, I’m in trouble all the way now, and it better be for something.

  He leaned out of the cab and hailed a passing clerk. “Which way to the hospital? I’m new around here.”

  The clerk gave him directions and he drove on, around two or three corners and down a narrow street. He found the hospital, a shiny white building designed for the care of Cochrane employees, not very big and tucked away in a quiet place. There was an alley behind it and a door that said Delivery Entrance.

  Comyn pulled the truck in, cut the motor, and got out. The door was only a step or two away, but before he could reach it the door had opene
d and closed again, and there was a man standing in front of it.

  Comyn smiled. The knots in his middle went away. “Hello,” he said cheerfully, and added in his mind, I love you, little man with the hard look and the gun under your jacket. Seeing you means I’m right.

  “What you got there, buddy?” asked the man in the doorway.

  What Comyn had was a load of baggage destined for some ship. But he said, “Stuff for the hospital commissary. Perishable.” He let the words drift him a little closer. “I’ve got the bills.” He put his hand in his pocket, still smiling, a man without a care in the world.

  With the beginning of suspicion, the man in the doorway said, “How come you’re so early? The usual time for delivery—”

  “What I’ve got,” said Comyn softly, “can be delivered anytime. No, keep your hands right where they are. I’ve got something here in my pocket, and if it goes off you’ll know what it is. But you won’t like it.”

  The man stood taut against the door, frozen in mid-motion, his eyes focused on Comyn’s right hand that was hidden in his pocket. He was thinking hard, thinking of all the small, nasty, illegal weapons that ingenious people on nine different worlds had created and successfully used. He was not pleased with his thoughts.

  Comyn said, “Let’s go inside.”

  The man hesitated. His eyes met Comyn’s, searched them, probed them. Then he made a small snarling sound and turned to open the door.

  “Quietly,” said Comyn. “And if there’s anyone around, you vouch for me.”

  There was no one in this back corridor lined with storerooms. Comyn shoved the guard into the nearest one and kicked the door shut. “I’ll take that gun,” he said, and took it. A nice neat shocker, the latest model. Comyn shifted it to his right hand and stepped back.

  “That’s better,” he said. “For a minute I thought you were going to call me out there.”

  The man’s face became vicious. “You mean you didn’t have—”

  “I have now.” Comyn’s thumb flicked the stud up to lethal voltage. “Save your mad till later. Where’s Ballantyne?”

  “Ballantyne?”

  “Who is it, then? Strang? Kessel? Vickrey?” He paused. “Paul Rogers?” His voice hardened. “Who have the Cochranes got in here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? You’re guarding somebody. You have to know who it is.”

  Beads of sweat had begun to glisten on the man’s face. He was watching Comyn, and he had forgotten to be angry.

  “Look. They brought somebody in here, sure. They’re keeping him under guard, sure. It’s supposed to be one of their own guys, with something contagious. Maybe I believe that, maybe I don’t. But all I know is that I sit on that back door eight hours a day. The Cochranes don’t tell me their business. They don’t tell anybody.”

  “Yeah,” said Comyn. “You know where the room is.”

  “It’s guarded too.”

  “That’s where you come in.” He spoke briefly and the man listened, staring unhappily at his own weapon in Comyn’s hard sunburned fist.

  “I guess,” he said, “I’ve got to do it.”

  He did it. He took Comyn without a hitch through the main corridors and upstairs into a small wing of private rooms that were all vacant except for one at the end. In front of that one sat a large man, half asleep.

  That’s what the kid in the bar had been mad about. They had thrown him out of one of these rooms and put him into a ward. He had been the only patient in the wing—and why had they thrown him out, suddenly, in the middle of the night?

  The large man came out of his doze and sprang up.

  “It’s all right, Joe,” said the man who walked so close to Comyn. “This guy’s a friend of mine.”

  His voice carried no note of conviction. The large man started forward. “Are you crazy, bringing a stranger—Hey…hey, what goes on?”

  His reflexes were good, very good. But Comyn was already set and in range. The shocker made a gentle buzzing sound and the large man hit the floor. The smaller one followed him, a short second behind. Both men were out, but nothing worse. Comyn had had the shocker back on low power long before he used it.

  When the young doctor looked out of the end room a moment later, disturbed by the faint sounds that had reached him, there was nothing to see but the empty hall with the empty rooms along it.

  He said, “Joe?” on a tentative note, but there was no answer. Frowning, he went down to the intersecting corridor to have a look. While his back was turned Comyn slipped into the end room and shut the door. There was a lock on it, brand new and shiny, non-regulation equipment for a hospital room. He snapped it and then he turned toward the bed, toward the man who lay there. His heart was hammering now because after all it might be somebody else…

  And, the rumors were all true. Ballantyne had done it. He had made the Big Jump and come back, back from the outer darkness beyond the sun. The first of all men, come back from the stars.

  Comyn bent over the bed. His hands were gentle now, uncertain, touching the skeletal shoulder with a kind of awe.

  “Ballantyne,” he whispered. “Ballantyne, wake up. Where is Paul?”

  He felt bones under his fingers, skin and bones and a tracery of fragile veins. There was movement, a faint pulsation of it, a twitching and quivering of the flesh that never stopped, as though some dreadful memory still drove the ravaged body toward escape. A face…

  It was a face that was only a ghostly echo, pitiful, terrible, marked by something frightening, worse than death or the fear of dying. It was something, Comyn thought, that had never before oppressed the children of Sol. A queer terror came over him as he looked at it. Suddenly he wanted to run, to get away out of the room, far away from whatever evil shadow it was that this man had brought back with him from another star.

  But he stayed. The doctor came and tried the door, battered on it, yelled, and finally ran away. And still Comyn bent over the bed and whispered, growing colder, growing sicker, flinching from the touch of damp skin twitching under his fingers. And still the terrible face rebuked him and would not speak.

  More men came and shouted outside the door. This time they brought an electric drill to cut away the lock.

  “Ballantyne! What happened to Paul? Paul…do you hear? Where is he?”

  The drill began to bite on the plastic door.

  “Paul,” said Comyn patiently. “Where is Paul Rogers?”

  The harsh whining of the drill crept around the little room, filling the corners, filling the silence. Ballantyne moved his head.

  Comyn bent over, so that his ear was almost touching the blue transparent lips. A voice came out of them, no louder than the beating of a moth’s wing…

  “…listened too long. Too long, too far…”

  “Where is Paul?”

  “…too far, too lonely. We weren’t meant for this. Desolation…darkness…stars…”

  Again, almost fiercely, “Where is Paul?”

  “Paul…”

  The drill hit metal. The whining changed to a thin-edged screech.

  The breathing skeleton that was Ballantyne went rigid. Its lips moved under Comyn’s ear, laboring with a dreadful urgency.

  “Don’t listen, Paul! I can’t go back alone, I can’t! Don’t listen to them calling…Oh, God, why did it have to be transuranic, why did it?”

  The drill screeched thinner, higher. And the painful whisper rose.

  “The Transuranae! Paul, no! Paul, Paul, Paul…”

  Suddenly Ballantyne screamed.

  Comyn sprang back from the bed, blundering into the wall and staying there, pressed against it, bathed in an icy sweat. Ballantyne screamed, not saying anything, not opening his eyes, just screaming, out of an abysmal agony of soul.

  Comyn stretched out his hand to the door and tore it open. The drill-shaft snapped. Men poured into the room and he told them, “For God’s sake, make him stop!”

  And then, between t
wo heartbeats, Ballantyne was dead.

  TWO

  Time had lost itself somewhere in the haze. He was not even sure where he was anymore. There was a taste in his mouth, a red and salty taste he remembered from getting hit in fights. Only there didn’t seem to be any fight going on. And when he tried to see, all he could get was a blurred confusion of light and shadow in which things vaguely moved.

  The questions still came. They were part of the universe, part of existence. He could not remember a time when there had not been questions. He hated them. He was tired and his jaws hurt, and it was hard to answer. But he had to, because when he didn’t somebody hit him again, somebody he couldn’t quite manage to get at and kill, and he didn’t like that.

  “Who paid you to do this, Comyn? Who sent you after Ballantyne?”

  “Nobody.”

  “What’s your job?”

  “Construction boss.” The words came out thick and slow and painful. They had worn grooves in his tongue from being said so often.

  “Who are you working for?”

  Double question. Tricky. But the answer was the same. “Nobody.”

  “Who did you work for?”

  “Inter-World Engineering…bridges…dams…spaceports. I quit.”

  “Why?”

  “To find Ballantyne.”

  “Who told you it was Ballantyne?”

  “Nobody. Rumor. Could have been any of ’em. Could have been…Paul.”

  “Who’s Paul?”

  “Paul Rogers. Friend.”

  “He was the flight engineer on Ballantyne’s ship, wasn’t he?”

  “No. Astrophys—” He couldn’t handle that one. “Something to do with the stars.”

  “How much did United Tradelines pay you to get to Ballantyne?”

  “Nothing. On my own.”

  “And you found out Paul Rogers is dead.”

  “No.”

  “Ballantyne told you he was alive?”

  “No.”