The Big Jump

by Leigh Brackett

  He ducked, and Johnny’s arm swung violently past his head. Then the kid was all over him. Comyn smacked him open-handed a couple of times, impatiently, but the kid was full of himself. He was strong enough, and some of his blows hurt. Comyn began to get mad.

  “Lay off,” he said, “or I’ll give it to you, kid or no kid.”

  He pushed him away. Johnny muttered something about Comyn being scared to fight. Suddenly he rushed him. Comyn sidestepped.

  From out of the dense shadows of a stand of tall white-flowering bushes came a narrow bolt of lightning. It struck, with a crack and a flare, on the spot which Comyn had just left and which Johnny was just now passing. The kid went down without a whimper.

  Comyn stood for one dazed instant looking from the dead boy to the dark mass of bushes. Then he moved, faster than he had ever moved before. A second bolt from a shocker turned up to lethal voltage hit the ground behind him. It knocked him over, half stunned, but that was all, and he never stopped going, rolling in among a clump of trees. He got his own weapon into his hand. He pushed the stud all the way up and fired into the bushes, but a little high. He wanted to flush the killer out, alive.

  Sounds began to come from the direction of the house. They had seen the man-made lightning playing. Some woman screamed, and men were shouting. Comyn fired twice more into the bushes, changing his position fast each time. The killer didn’t answer, and then beyond the bushes he heard somebody running. Comyn went after him.

  People were pouring out into the gardens from the house now. The killer couldn’t turn that way. He could try to double back toward the passenger lock, but Comyn would be in his way and Comyn was armed. Maybe the killer hadn’t counted on this. He went the only way there was left open, toward the freight locks. Comyn ran, turning down the power on his shocker. It didn’t carry far that way, but if he could get close enough he might bring down the guy alive and still able to talk.

  He saw him, running fast across an open glade. He shouted to him to stop, but he was outranged. The only answer he got was a snap bolt that hit a tree too close for comfort. There were shouts and thrashings in the gardens all around now, and the emergency lights were coming on. The guards were moving in from the freight locks. The killer ran, but there was no place to run to. And then there were men on all sides of him in the bright glare of the lights, and the blue bolts flashed and struck…and that was it.

  Comyn came up. There was a milling around of people. Guards were shoving the workmen back into the lock and there was a lot of talking. Peter Cochrane and Stanley were both there, both with shockers in their hands, looking at the body. Comyn looked too.

  “Do you know him?” he asked.

  Peter nodded, and Stanley said, “Name’s Washburn. He used to be a Cochrane employee—oh, two, three years ago. He was fired. Undesirable, a trouble-maker.” Stanley shook his head. “How did he get here? What was he doing?”

  Comyn said, “Trying to kill me. He tried it once before, on Earth.”

  Peter looked at him sharply. “You’re sure of that?”

  Comyn nodded.

  People were coming from the party now. Sydna, Simon, guests looking excited, frightened, upset, or curious, according to their natures.

  “Keep them back,” said Peter savagely. “Keep them away from here.”

  Comyn said, “It doesn’t matter now. You might as well let them see the ship. It doesn’t matter.”

  Peter stared at him. Simon moved between them, looking down. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, he came aboard the yacht. I saw him.”

  Peter’s eyes blazed. “And you didn’t stop him? You let a character like that come in here and didn’t even tell me?”

  Simon said angrily, “Are you kidding? He had a pass from you.”

  Without a word, Comyn turned and took Peter Cochrane by the neck and bore him down.

  Hands pulled at him. There was a confusion of voices. Finally somebody hit him across the back of the head with the flat of a shocker. He let go and they dragged him away off of Peter.

  Peter got up unsteadily. Stanley was down on his knees beside the dead man, going through his pockets. He held up a piece of paper.

  “Here it is, Peter. It has your signature.”

  Peter shook his head. He took the paper and studied it. “Forgery,” he said. “He worked for us. He could have got hold of a signature very easily. Probably on his termination-of-contract papers. I’ve signed a lot of ’em. I never gave him a pass.”

  Comyn said, “I hope you can prove that.” Men were still holding his arms, and his head hurt. Peter Cochrane came up to him.

  “Why? And what did you mean by, ‘Let them see the ship. It doesn’t matter now’?”

  Comyn said slowly, “Your friend was in too much of a hurry. He thought he had a clear shot at me, but he didn’t. Johnny got in the way.”

  A silence fell. It spread outward from Comyn, stunned and heavy, and in it Sydna’s voice was harsh and very loud.

  “You mean Johnny’s dead.”

  “Dead. You can bury Washburn and you could have buried me, but you can’t bury Johnny. And I’m glad. He was a fool kid, but this wasn’t any of his fight. There was no reason he should die for it.”

  He looked around at them, at Peter and Simon and Bill Stanley and at Sydna with her shocked white face—particularly at Sydna.

  “Well, you had your party,” he said bitterly. “And it’s blown the lid right off your private country on the Moon. You’ll have Earth policemen tramping all over it, and you can’t keep them out. They’ll want to know all about how Johnny got killed, and why, and what you’re doing here that’s worth a murder, and there won’t be any secret about it anywhere. That’s why I say you might as well let them know about the ship.”

  Again there was a long, cold silence. The dead man lay on his side where Stanley had rolled him. One arm flung carelessly across his face. His mouth seemed to be smiling, as if he were dreaming. Stanley looked gray and sick, and Simon’s eyes roved uneasily, not looking at anything. Behind the people the freight locks towered upward, and out from them came the muffled clang and roar that had not stopped even for death.

  Peter Cochrane spoke.

  “I will notify the Earth authorities myself. Meanwhile, no one is to leave the dome or communicate with anyone until the investigation is complete and the police allow you to go.”

  There was a loud cry of protest. Peter silenced it.

  “I’m sorry, it’s necessary. You are welcome as our guests, and I’m sure Sydna will make your visit as pleasant as possible.”

  They began to straggle away slowly, back toward the house. Some men went to hunt for Johnny. Peter turned again to Comyn.

  “I haven’t tried to kill you. As Jonas told you, murder is for fools. And if I had wanted to kill you I’d have done it myself and it wouldn’t have been bungled. All right, boys, let him go.”

  Then Peter Cochrane went off, walking fast, toward the freight locks. Simon watched him go uneasily.

  “You know what he’ll do,” he said to Stanley.

  Stanley was still staring at the body. It seemed to have a strange fascination for him. He ran his tongue constantly over his lips as though they were dry, and his hands shook.

  “I don’t know,” he answered absently. “I haven’t had time to think.”

  “He’ll hold off notifying Earth as long as he can. He’ll get the bloody ship ready for take-off and go, without any further tests. By the time the cops get here, we’ll be clear out of the System—if the drive works.”

  His voice lingered over the brief word, if. Comyn heard him and shivered, wondering where they would be if it didn’t.

  EIGHT

  His name was Arch Comyn, and once he had had a home on Earth, and once he had had a girl with strong brown shoulders. And what was he doing out here in the abyss between the stars?

  From across the main cabin, from the table where some of the others were playing cards, a voice said:

  “Give me three.”r />
  Comyn thought it was funny. It was very funny, indeed, that men making the second Big Jump in history, that men going faster and farther than any men but five had ever gone before, separated only by metal walls from the awfulness of infinity, should sit and play games with little plastic cards and pretend that they were not where they were.

  He knew now what Ballantyne had felt. This was not the going between worlds that men had grown used to. This was an adventure into madness. The ports were shielded tight because there was nothing beyond them but an awful blankness, tinged with eerie flickerings of energy that was their own mass discharging itself through the neutronic convertors into a tight propulsion field, hurling them through a space that was not normal and might not even exist in their own universe. Theoretically, the astrogators knew where they were. Actually, no one knew.

  The nastiest thing about it was that there was no sense of motion. The interior of the ship was gripped in a stasis that was the reactionless core of the mass-propulsion field itself, the dead quiet eye of the hurricane. They might as well have been in a tightly shuttered room on Earth, going nowhere. And yet the stars—the stars that Ballantyne had learned to hate—showed on the screens as crawling tracks, distorted and spectral and infinitely strange, as the unthinkably speeding ship overtook and passed their light rays.

  Only one screen, fitted with a complicated electronic damper-field, showed space ahead in relatively true perspective. Centered in the crosshairs and kept centered by automatic compensators was the dull red eye of Barnard’s Star. At first, the men had stared often at the screen and the brooding eye in it. Then they had looked at it less and less, and finally avoided it altogether.

  Comyn couldn’t avoid it. He’d gone back to stare at it again and again. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. He asked Peter Cochrane now, “Why Barnard’s Star, anyway? What made Ballantyne pick it instead of Centauri?”

  “We knew Barnard’s Star has planets,” said Peter. He looked worn, drawn to the breaking point, full of a feverish triumph that would not let him rest. “It has a low luminosity, and the astronomers were able to separate its planets visually some years ago, with the Keble telescope. Alpha and Proxima Centauri they’re still not sure of, so Barnard was chosen. Of course, it’s only a start. The Weiszacker theory is pretty well proved by now, and it postulates that most stars have planets, so you can see this is only a start—”

  He broke off suddenly, as though he realized he was talking too rapidly, too intensely. The young doctor who had cared for Ballantyne and who was going to take care of them now because he was the only expert there was on transuranic medicine, said:

  “Better take a sedative and knock off for a while, Mr. Cochrane.”

  Peter said, “No, I want to go over those log books again.”

  “There’s plenty of time for log books.”

  “There’s nothing in them we haven’t already found out, anyway,” Simon said. His gaze, cold and glowering, was fixed on Comyn. “Our friend here is the only one who knows where we’re going. Or does he?”

  “You’ll find out,” said Comyn, “when we get there.”

  French, the doctor, and Roth, the physicist who had examined Ballantyne, and the other men from the Cochrane labs who were playing cards, bent studiously over their game to keep out of Cochrane quarrels.

  Comyn said harshly to Peter, Simon and Bill Stanley, “And before you find out, I’m going to know which of you hired Washburn to do me in.”

  “Which one of us?”

  “Yes. It was one of you three. One of you has the missing books of Ballantyne’s log. You all had the opportunity.”

  Comyn’s eyes were very bright, very hard. He was, like the rest of them, suffering from long tension. Things had been bad before they left Luna: Johnny’s sheeted corpse lying in one of the great rooms; Sydna’s guests hysterically demanding to know why the police didn’t come, why they were being kept prisoners—and Sydna herself, with a face like a stone image, not speaking to anyone. Old Jonas had talked to her. What he had said, Comyn didn’t know, but Sydna had no spirit left in her.

  It hadn’t really gone on long. No more than two days, Earth time. Peter had done exactly as Simon predicted. The activity around the freight locks had reached an insane pitch, with workmen dropping in their tracks and being revived or replaced. And then, incredibly, the ship was ready, Peter called the authorities, and there was not even time to say good-bye.

  “One of you,” Comyn said, “hired that killer who got the wrong man. I’m not sure yet which one of you it was. But I will be.”

  Peter said furiously, “You still think I gave Washburn that pass?”

  “He had it.”

  Simon came and stood in front of Comyn. “I didn’t like you the first time I saw you,” he said. “I like you less and less as time goes by. You talk too much. It might be a good idea if someone did kill you.”

  “Yeah,” said Comyn. “And you saw Washburn get off the yacht! You could have stopped him and checked that forged pass, but you didn’t.”

  Bill Stanley caught Simon’s arm and said, “Wait a minute. We can’t afford any brawls now. We…”

  Doctor French cleared his throat nervously. “Listen, we’re under a psychological strain that can crack us wide open if we’re not careful. Knock it off. Take a sedative, calm down. Especially you, Mr. Cochrane.”

  “You sound,” said Peter dryly, “as though you could use a sedative yourself.” He glanced at Simon. “However, I think you’re right. Let it go, Simon.”

  “You’d better let it go, too. But I won’t argue it now. I’m going to try to sleep.”

  He went off to his cabin. Simon had disappeared. Bill Stanley sat down by himself and stared blankly at a bulkhead. The card players talked in low monotones, not as though their minds were on the game.

  Comyn lit a cigarette and moved restlessly back and forth in the confined space. Air whirred in the ventilators. The dome lights burned, and they were bright enough, but there was something vaguely unnatural about the light itself, as though it had shifted somewhere along the spectrum. Comyn’s flesh quivered deep in its individual cells, torturing him like a persistent itch. It tortured everybody. Roth had said it was some obscure effect of the stasis and its surrounding field of energy. Static electricity, he thought, generated by their own bodies under the abnormal conditions. One of the hazards of star-flight. It could be a hazard. Little things could grow so big. Little things like an itch or a sound you couldn’t quite hear.

  Comyn thought: Ballantyne heard it at the last. All the way out to Barnard’s Star and back he listened to it, but he couldn’t hear it. And then they fetched the damned electric drill and that was it—the sound…

  Just over the threshold of hearing lay the nerve-aching screech and whine, the incessant, maddening, unbearable sound—the sound of the drive.

  Comyn swore abruptly, and said, “It wouldn’t be so bad if we were moving.”

  Roth grunted, scowling at the cards he held. “You’re moving,” he said. “You’re covering six light-years a lot of times faster than light itself.” He threw down his hand. “A lousy pair of tens. I’m out. Yes, Comyn, you’re moving.”

  “But how do we know we are? We can’t feel it, we can’t see it, we can’t even hear it.”

  “We take it on faith,” said Roth. “Our instruments assure us that we’re approaching Barnard’s Star at high velocity. Or it’s approaching us. Who knows? Motion is only relative. Anyway, relative to our known universe we’re going at a speed that’s so fast it’s impossible—theoretically. Relative to some other universe or state of matter, we could easily be standing still.”

  “When you scientists start dreaming it up, you give me a pain,” said Comyn. “It all sounds cockeyed.”

  “Not at all. Groom’s theory, on which Ballantyne built his drive, was that the so-called light-speed barrier was real, and that matter achieving faster-than-light velocities would shift into another plane of atomic vibration, or matter-sta
te, creating a closed vacuum in the continuum in which energy could be neither gained nor lost. Hence, the mass-propulsion field, the ship feeding on itself, as it were, using the kinetic energy stored up in the original acceleration. The drive works, but whether or not that proves the theory, we don’t know. There’s a very interesting distortion of time…”

  Comyn, listening and only half understanding, felt that nightmare sense of unreality closer upon him. He fought against it; he had to keep his mind on the very real and nasty problem that faced Arch Comyn.

  “…and Vickrey was much concerned with time in his notes on the outward voyage,” Roth was saying. “The chronometers functioned, but were they still accurate as to Earth chronology? There was no way to check. We say they took so-and-so many months for the first Big Jump. Vickrey’s word was ‘eternity’—a fairly vague term. How long has it been since we went into star-drive? My idea is that the time sense…”

  Comyn stamped out his cigarette irritably and left the main cabin. All this scientific double-talk was upsetting. He had a literal mind. A chair was a chair, a table was a table and an hour was sixty minutes long. As long as he could hang onto these realities, he could make out.

  He dug a bottle out of a locker—not the sedative Doctor French would have prescribed, but ninety-proof and good enough. He sat drinking it and thinking of Sydna, wondering if she really meant what she had said about there not being any tomorrow for them. Probably. He wished she was here, but he was glad she wasn’t. After a while he began to listen to the drive: the sound he could hear with the edges of his teeth and the raw ends of his nerves, but not quite with his ears. He swore, poured another drink and then went to sleep. It seemed a devil of a way to spend your time on this, man’s second traverse between the stars, but there wasn’t much else to do. Even the scientists had little to do but check their instruments. The flight engineers were useful only when shifting in or out of drive, and the pilots were purely ornamental except when the ship was operating on normal velocity. The functioning of the ship on star-drive was automatic. No crew of human beings could have controlled it manually. All they did was sit and watch a million gadgets and hope they worked.