The Big Jump

by Leigh Brackett

  Comyn’s flesh began to quiver as he remembered Ballantyne’s voice, his face and the look that had been on it.

  “Something or someone was calling to Paul, and Ballantyne was begging him not to listen.”

  Jonas asked harshly, “Who? What?”

  “Something he called the Transuranae. He was afraid of them. I think the others had gone to them, and now Paul was going too. He was afraid of them. He screamed.”

  “And that was all,” said Jonas. His eyes were curiously filmed now, like windows curtained lest too much show through. “He was screaming when he died.”

  Comyn’s voice was quite natural when he said, “Oh, no. That wasn’t all.”

  Silence. He waited. Jonas waited. Too much silence. Comyn thought his own heart was pounding as loud as a kettledrum. He was sure all those straining Cochrane ears heard it and knew he was lying. Suddenly he hated them with a personal hatred. They were too big, too strong, too sure of themselves. They wanted too much. Even if knowledge had come to him at that moment that Paul Rogers and all the others were dead and beyond help, he would have gone on fighting the Cochranes, just to mess up their plans. They were too good at using other men for pushballs.

  And one of them, he was very sure, had tried to kill him.

  Still Jonas waited.

  Comyn smiled. “I’ll tell the rest of it,” he said, “when I’m out by Barnard’s Star.”

  Stanley exploded. “Bluff. Just brazen, stupid bluff. Tell him to go to hell.”

  Uncle George was talking angrily, and Peter tried to get a word in, but the old man in the chair quieted them with three words.

  “Wait a minute.” His eyes hadn’t left Comyn’s. “Wait a minute. There’s this to think of. If he isn’t bluffing, he could be valuable out there. If he is—even so, it might be best to take him along.”

  They thought that over. They seemed to like it, all but Stanley. Comyn hadn’t had to think; he’d got the meaning of it first.

  He looked at Jonas and he said softly, “You are a tough old so-and-so, aren’t you?”

  Jonas chuckled. “Do you want to go to Barnard’s Star or don’t you?”

  Comyn said, between his teeth, “All right, I’ll buy it.”

  “You won’t,” said Jonas, “be going back to Earth.” He looked around at the faces. “That goes for all of you but George. Everything’s got to be done right here at Luna, and I’ll have no babbling it out till we have a second ship on the way.”

  Stanley protested, “But what about the courts? United and Trans-World are already entering anti-monopoly suits to get rights to the drive. If they get us tied up—”

  “They won’t,” said Jonas. “George and our legal staff can hold them off. Peter, you get things started here. You’re in charge.” The old man closed his eyes wearily. “Now get out of here, all of you. I’m tired.”

  Comyn found himself with the others out in the big hall. They were dismissed, he thought savagely, like a lot of school children.

  But the others paid him no attention. They were talking in high voices, Stanley still protesting, Aunt Sally complaining shrilly, until Peter Cochrane’s authoritative voice cut across the gabble.

  “We’d better get started. Since the work has to be done here, we’ll need complete machine-shop facilities and technical staffs. Nielsen and Felder can handle that. You get them here, Bill.”

  “But to put Ballantyne’s drive into a new ship just can’t be done here—” Stanley started.

  Peter cut him off. “It has to be. One of our new Pallas class, I’d say. The locks here will take it. Come on, we’ll get things rolling.”

  Comyn turned and walked away from the noisy, argumentative group. He didn’t turn when he heard Sydna calling after him. Right now he’d had enough of the Cochranes. Mixing with the Cochranes had got him into something dandy, something so big that it scared him right down to his boots. And he was in it now, all the way.

  The corridor was high and empty, and his footsteps mocked him as he walked. He could walk as far as he pleased—through the rooms and halls, across the terraces, around the gardens blooming in the windless air—but he’d still be under this glass bubble on the Moon. And death was under it with him. Whoever had tried before would try again now, with effort doubled and redoubled, to make sure that one Arch Comyn with his big mouth never lived to peer at Barnard’s Star.

  And if he did live to get there, and they asked him, Where did Ballantyne land?—what was he going to answer?

  That, he didn’t know.

  SEVEN

  Comyn had about reached the LIMIT of his endurance by the time the lid finally blew off everything.

  He was in the gardens with Sydna, under a flowering tree that shadowed them from the green Earthlight, when the discreet cough of a servant interrupted.

  “Mr. Peter would like to see you at once, miss.”

  “Is he angry?” asked Sydna.

  “I’m afraid so, miss. A message came from the yacht…”

  “I thought so,” she said. And when the servant was gone she added, “Well, let him be mad. It was getting too dull here, all these weeks.”

  “A nice compliment for me,” Comyn remarked.

  “Oh, Comyn, I didn’t mean us. That’s been wonderful.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “And especially wonderful, the way you’ve let Stanley see us. I appreciate your using me to needle him.”

  He thought she would hit him, but instead, after a moment, she laughed.

  “He is crazy about you, isn’t he?” he demanded.

  “He’s a louse.”

  “Because he’s crazy about you?”

  “Because he says so. At least, he did once—just once. Cousin Claudia is a mess, but she is my cousin and she thinks he’s wonderful.” She straightened down her white dress. “Look at that, you big ape, you’ve torn the zipper! And anyway, he’s one of those earnest asses that bore me stiff. So I have let him catch us necking a few times.” She spoke suddenly with a bitter undertone. “And anyway, Comyn, between us it’s just today. There may not be any tomorrow. When that ship takes off with you inside it—that’s it. Shall we go face Peter?”

  “What have you done now?”

  “You’ll find out. I told you, it was getting too dull here.”

  That, Comyn thought grimly as he followed her, was a misstatement. It hadn’t been dull here under the dome all these weeks, at least not for him. But it had been wearing—very wearing indeed.

  The devil of it was that he had had no part whatever in all the feverish, sweating activity that had been going on here. All that work had taken place in the segment of the dome that was completely hidden from the big house by the lines of trees that delimited the gardens.

  There were the huge locks where freighters came with loads of fuel for the greedy pumps and furnaces, with chemicals for the air-purifiers and refrigerants for the daytime cooling system, with water for the vast rock cisterns and tanks of oxygen, with food and liquor and supplies. There were the machine shops that had suddenly and swiftly enlarged so that now a small army of expert mechanics labored in them.

  There was where the Ballantyne drive was, and the new ship in which it had been installed. It was a larger, stronger and better ship than Ballantyne’s—not a pioneer ship but the follow-up to a pioneer, the consolidator. The guts had been stripped out of it and had been put back in a different pattern. The shops rang with a deafening clangor. Men worked in them right up to the limit of efficiency and then were replaced by another shift. Nobody complained. Wages were astronomical. The men were prisoners here until after take-off, but they didn’t complain of that, either.

  But they, and Peter Cochrane and Simon and Stanley, were part of something, doing something. Even Uncle George, back on Earth using high-priced legal talent to stave off the anti-monopoly suits, was doing something. Only he, Comyn, was barred out.

  The armed guards who were stationed beyond the gardens had their orders. A lot of people were posted out, and Comyn
was one of them. He could stand and watch the distant silver sides of the ship, and the cranes and the atomic welders flaring, could listen to the booming and screeching and hissing—but that was all.

  “Listen,” he told Peter Cochrane, “I’m a workboss and a damned good one. And after all, I’m going in that ship.”

  “Yes,” said Peter, “and you get in it when we go. Not before then. We’ve had proof of your capacities for making trouble, Comyn.”

  “But I could do something outside the ship. I could—”

  “No, Comyn. You stay out, and that’s final. Grandfather’s orders.”

  Comyn had stayed out, savagely cursing the old man who remained huddled and unseen in his ridiculous room, plotting to steal a star before he died.

  He had watched from outside when the ship went out on its first test, slipping silently up into the stark lunar sky. He felt a cold qualm in the belly when he realized that presently he would be inside that same ship, inside a tiny, tiny capsule that held all the light and air and life there was out in the black immensities between the suns.

  He had had to wait and watch and sweat, until the ship slipped back and Peter Cochrane came out of it. His face was beaded with sweat and drawn with impatience and something else. Stanley walked jerkily behind him.

  “…whole robot-shift for the drive had bugs in it. The relays won’t take the load. Rip it out and rebuild it…”

  That was all Comyn could find out, just what he overheard. And he was supposed to sit and wait and play games with Sydna and be patient, and he was about ready to blow his fuses one way or another.

  Only it seemed that Sydna had blown hers first. He followed her up to the house, and he was sure from the stubborn set of her chin that she was heading into a storm.

  Peter was waiting for her on the terrace. He wore the blackest look Comyn had ever seen on a man’s face. Stanley and Claudia were there too, as well as a brace of young cousins who looked brightly expectant.

  Peter said flatly, “The yacht’s due to land in twenty minutes. Captain Moore radioed for clearance, because he’s worried. It seems, Sydna, that there are some twenty-odd of your friends aboard.”

  She said brightly, “Oh, I forgot to tell you about that. I thought a party would liven things up around this detention home.”

  Peter let go. “You know what we’re trying to do here! You know how much a lot of people would give to know what we’re doing! Yet you—”

  “Don’t be so stuffy, Pete! None of my friends are spies—they don’t have brains enough. And anyway they don’t care.”

  “Sure, laugh it off,” he said furiously. “Listen, what do you think would happen if word got out that we have a second star-ship almost ready to go? They’d slap an injunction on us in an hour! The only thing that’s saved us so far is the fact they don’t suspect how fast we’re moving. Damn it, Sydna—”

  “Stop swearing at me and cool down. Your guards will keep them out of the work-locks. Nobody’ll go there anyway if the liquor’s here at the house.”

  “A party would be nice,” said Claudia timidly. Then she looked at Stanley and shut up.

  Stanley said, “Tell the yacht to go back to Earth.” He had aged a good bit since Comyn had first seen him. He had lost that pink, well-fed look, and there was a taut intensity about him that almost matched Peter’s. He, too, was going on the second Big Jump. He had insisted on it, and Sally Cochrane had backed him, averring that somebody had to look after her and Claudia’s interests. But he didn’t seem to enjoy the prospect.

  “It can’t go back,” Sydna said. “People would know something was up here if you sent them all back now.”

  She had them licked, and they knew it. Peter snarled, “All right, Sydna. But if anything goes wrong, I swear I’ll break your neck.”

  Nothing went wrong—not at first. The yacht landed, and from a distance Comyn saw a crowd of gay, squealing young fools pour out of it and make for the house and Sydna and the liquor. And it seemed that almost at once the Earthlit gardens and terraces were full of laughter and dance music and white-jacketed men carrying trays of drinks.

  Comyn sat on a terrace and had a few, and a few more, and listened to people having fun. He wasn’t having any, not at all. He wasn’t sober, but he couldn’t let go anymore. He knew why too. It was because he wasn’t quite one of normal humankind anymore, because the shadow of the coming Big Jump was on him, because presently he was going away from it all, out where only five men had ever been before, toward something that could rob you even of a decent death…

  He wondered, for the thousandth time, what Ballantyne had meant by the Transuranae. How could you guess what a thing was when there wasn’t any frame of reference at all to go on? They had talked about the Transuranae, but nobody had really had anything to say that could help. The Transuranae—whoever, whatever they were—was it they who had done the thing to Ballantyne that…?

  Comyn shivered and poured down a little more of the Cochranes’ good whisky to drown out the sight and sound of Ballantyne, dead and stirring in his high-barred bed. All of a sudden a pretty girl with dark fluffy hair was standing in front of him, asking: “Who are you?”

  She was cute as a button. She made him feel old, and suddenly there was an uncrossable gulf between them because of the thing he was going to do and that she was not going to do and didn’t even know about. But she was cute.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m a stranger here, myself. Who are you?”

  “You’ll never guess.”

  “Then I won’t try.”

  “I’m Bridget,” she said, and made a face. “Awful name, isn’t it?” All at once she brightened, looking over Comyn’s head. “Oh, there’s Simon!” She called his name and waved, and Simon came over and put his arm around her and she sort of melted in against him, smiling, but still interested in Comyn.

  “Simon, he’s unhappy. Why is he unhappy?”

  “He thinks people are trying to kill him. Has anybody tried it lately, Comyn?”

  “I haven’t turned my back on anybody,” Comyn said.

  “You’re joking,” said Bridget. “Nobody would want to kill him—he’s cute.”

  “Well,” said Simon, “that’s a word I wouldn’t have thought of to describe him, but maybe you’re right. Come on, Bridgie. So long, Comyn, and don’t take any poisoned Martinis.”

  Comyn watched them go. His lack of affection for Simon Cochrane was reaching gigantic proportions. He was thinking how nice it was going to be for all of them, cooped up together in a ship all the way out to Barnard’s Star.

  He saw Peter come out on the terrace and stand scowling at the festivities. He was stone-cold sober. Stanley joined him, and he wasn’t having any fun either. They talked a minute or two, and then Peter went down into the garden and vanished into the darkness. Going to check on his cordon of guards, Comyn thought. Sydna ought to get a good licking for this. But then, it was just such a trick of Sydna’s that had got him here, so he ought to be grateful—or ought he?

  Where was Sydna, anyway?

  Stanley went down the steps and into the garden, after Peter. Comyn got up. He was tired of sitting and brooding. He searched around for a sight of Sydna’s blonde head, spotted it and went toward it. The terrace felt a bit unsteady under his feet, and there seemed to be two or three hundred people on it instead of only some twenty-odd. Sydna was with the long drink of water she called Johnny, the one Comyn had met before. There were several others around them. Somebody had just said something very funny, and they were all laughing.

  Comyn came up beside Sydna and said, “Hello.”

  She looked up at him. Her eyes were very bright, very gay. “Hello, Comyn.” On the other side of her, Johnny stood up.

  Comyn said, “How about entertaining a visiting fireman?”

  She shook her head. “You look glum. I don’t feel like being glum.” She turned away.

  Comyn put his hand on her shoulder. “Sydna…”

  “Oh, go away, Co
myn. I’m enjoying myself. Let me alone.”

  Johnny stepped between them. He was feeling good. He was feeling strong and twice his normal size. He thrust his face into Comyn’s and said, “You heard her. Go away.”

  Comyn’s temper, none too long at the best, ran out with a snap. He picked Johnny up and set him aside. “Listen, Sydna, I want to talk to you…”

  Johnny’s fist hit him on the cheekbone, hard enough to make his head ring.

  “Now will you go?” asked Johnny. His breath was coming hard and excited, and he was all ready to let her go again. Sydna sprang to her feet, slamming her glass down on the low table in front of her.

  “Oh, the devil with both of you!” she snapped, and strode away, taking the others with her. Comyn glowered after her, thinking that some day he would beat that arrogance out of her if he kept his health.

  Johnny said, “I think we better go out in the garden.”

  Comyn looked at him. “Oh, no!”

  Johnny’s face was pale, except for two red bars along his cheekbones. He had worked himself up to a fine pitch, and he wasn’t going to let it go. “You’ve been trying to take Sydna away from me,” he said.

  Comyn laughed.

  The red bars widened on Johnny’s face until they reached from his collar to the roots of his hair.

  “You come into the garden,” he said, “or I’ll do it right here.”

  He would too. Comyn sighed. “Okay, Junior, come on. Maybe I can talk some sense into you out there.”

  They went down the steps, close together. There was a rustling and cooing as of pigeons in the dark fringe of shrubbery, and Comyn led on. Johnny tramped beside him, his breath whistling in his nose. Comyn grinned. Johnny sounded like a very young and angry bull at courting time.

  The light of the terrace dimmed and passed away behind them, and the stars grew very bright, burning against the dome. The voices were only a distant murmur.

  Johnny said, “This is far enough.”

  “Okay.” Comyn stopped. “Hold on a minute, kid, and listen—”