The Big Jump

by Leigh Brackett

  Comyn snored, twitched and dreamed. His dreams were not good. He started up, gagging on a lungful of stale air—it seemed to him that he hadn’t breathed real air since he went to Luna—and became aware of the bell that announced mealtime.

  Comyn came out of his cabin warily, as he always did. He was not afraid of guns. The ship’s arsenal was locked, and no one was allowed anything more lethal than a pocketknife. Peter Cochrane was taking no chances with hysteria, space fever or simple mutiny. But a man bent on murder can be very ingenious in devising weapons. Comyn was cautious.

  There was no one in the corridor. Comyn yawned and started along it toward the main cabin. His head was still heavy, and there was a strong taste of whiskey in his mouth.

  On the starboard side of the corridor was a compartment used for the keeping of certain stores for the cabin section. The door was not quite shut, but that was not unusual since people went in and out of it fairly often. Comyn passed it.

  There was a swift, sharp suction of air behind him, a door behind pulled open silently but very fast, and then a hurried step and one harsh indrawn breath. Comyn threw himself forward and as much to the left as he could manage on split-second notice. The steel bar that had been meant for the back of his skull came whistling down onto his right shoulder instead. It made a very ugly noise.

  Pain became a huge inescapable fact. He was falling and he couldn’t help that, but his left hand went instinctively to the focal point of that agony as though to hold it back, and found instead the collared end of the steel bar and gripped it and pulled it along.

  He hit the deck. Bands of light were flickering in front of his eyes, and there was darkness close behind. But the fear of death was on him and he thrashed around, still holding the steel bar. There was a man there, a cautious man, a man expecting failure, because he had hidden his face and head so that his victim could not recognize him—all this care despite the fact that there should have been no possibility of recognition.

  Rage came up in Comyn so strongly that it almost cleared away that gathering dark. He made an animal sound, with no words in it, and tried to get up. The man with the hidden face turned suddenly and ran away. His legs and his polished shoes ran and ran down the length of the passage, and Comyn watched them, and he knew whose shoes they were, and he recognized those dark-trousered legs. A man’s face is only part of what you know him by. He started to say the name that went with them, but he didn’t have time. He passed out.

  He was still lying in the corridor. His right arm was numb to the finger ends, and he felt pain when he moved. It took him a long time to get up, and a longer time to make the several miles down the passage and into the main cabin. He had not been out too long. They were still at dinner, around the collapsible tables. The men looked at him when he came in. They were all there, Peter and Simon and Bill Stanley, the scientists, all of them. They stopped eating and Doctor French got up suddenly.

  Comyn sat down heavily. He looked at Peter Cochrane. “I’m ready now,” he said, “to tell you where Ballantyne landed.”

  NINE

  Many voices spoke at once. French was bending over him, asking where he was hurt. Peter Cochrane stood up, demanding silence. Simon was leaning forward, his eyes intent. Bill Stanley put down his knife and fork. His hands were seized with an uncontrollable trembling. There was a pallor on him and a sweating. Comyn laughed.

  “You should have made it good,” he said to William Stanley. “Peter would have. Simon would have. But not you. You haven’t that kind of guts.”

  Stanley said, “I don’t—”

  “Oh, yes, you do. Hiding your face didn’t hide the rest of you. I know your shoes, your clothes, the way you move. I know you, now.”

  Stanley pushed his chair back a little, as though he would like to get away from Comyn, from all of them. He spoke again, but his words were not clear.

  “It’s different when you have to do it yourself, isn’t it?” Comyn said. “Not nice and tidy like just writing a check. You have to figure on maybe missing the first time. You have to be able to go on hitting a man until he stays down. You have to have a strong stomach and no nerves, like Washburn. Maybe with a gun you could have done it, but not with your hands—not ever with your hands.”

  French was trying to peel his shirt back, and Comyn pushed him away. Simon had risen. His eyes met Peter’s. Peter’s face got white around the lips. Suddenly he took hold of Stanley’s jacket.

  “Did you do this, Bill?”

  Stanley sat perfectly still, looking up at Peter. His eyes began to get a slow hot gleam in them that grew brighter and uglier, and then all at once he struck Peter’s hand away and sprang up. It seemed as though that rough touch on him had acted as a key to turn loose everything that had been bottled up in him under pressure for a long time.

  It came out quietly, very quietly, as though his throat was pulled too tight to make much noise in it.

  “Yes, I did. And keep your hands off me.”

  He moved back a step or two, away from them. Nobody spoke around the tables. They were all watching, with their forks halfway to their mouths. Simon started forward, but Peter caught him.

  “That won’t do any good right now,” he said. And then to Stanley: “You have the log books.”

  “I had them. I burned them.” He looked from Peter to Simon and back again. “Getting them was easy. You were all so excited, thinking what you might be going to get. There were only two of them—thin little books. I saw them first and stuck them inside my shirt, as easy as that.”

  “You burned them,” Peter said, and Stanley jerked his head.

  “I memorized them. I have a good memory.” He turned on Comyn. “All right, go ahead. Tell them. You’ve made trouble for me from the beginning. I’d have had you killed on Mars, only Peter stopped it.”

  Comyn said, “Doesn’t Johnny weigh a little heavy on your soul?”

  “No. That was Washburn’s doing. I didn’t even know he was there until I saw him dead. I fired him after he failed the first time. You cost him a lot of money, Comyn, and he was mad. I guess he thought he could still collect. Probably blackmail me too. No, Johnny wasn’t my fault.”

  “I don’t understand, Bill,” said Peter. He was staring at Stanley in a puzzled way, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “Why? We always treated you right. You were one of the family, you had an important job, plenty of money—we trusted you. I don’t understand.”

  Stanley laughed. It was not a nice sound. “One of the family,” he repeated. “An appendage. A wailing wall for Claudia, and a football for her mother. A convenience. Good old dependable Bill. But not a Cochrane, never for a minute. No real voice in anything, no real interest in the corporation. That was all Claudia’s.” His mouth twisted. “Claudia!”

  Simon said angrily, “What did you marry her for, then? You were anxious enough at the time.”

  “What would anybody marry Claudia for?” asked Stanley. “Her money. I thought I could stick it out, but between her and her old bat of a mother—” He broke off. “All right. I saw a chance to get hold of something worth having and I took it. What’s wrong with that? Ask old Jonas how many times he did it, to get his palace on the Moon.”

  Comyn repeated his original statement about himself. “You should have made it good.”

  “I should have. Unfortunately, I don’t have the capacity for violence. Few civilized men do.” His control was beginning to crack a little. He had started to shake again, and his eyes blazed. Comyn thought how unfamiliar a man looked with all his emotions showing. It was like seeing him with his clothes off.

  Stanley turned again to Peter and the smouldering Simon. His voice had risen just a little, a notch higher, a notch louder. “Comyn says he can tell you where Ballantyne landed. All right. But I read the log, remember. I know the coordinates, not just the world but the exact location on it. I know where the transuranic ores are, the exact location. I know—”

  Peter said, “I think we could find th
em if we had to.”

  “Perhaps you could. But there’s more than just finding them. There’s the—the Transuranae. I know about them too.” He strode toward Comyn, four or five jerky steps. “Do you know all that, Comyn? Can you tell them?”

  Comyn didn’t answer for a long moment. Then he said slowly, “Stanley, you’re a scared little man, a greedy little man, and you’re hoping against hope. But you’re safe. You win.” He glanced at Peter. “I thought maybe I could jar it out of him, but it didn’t work. I can’t tell you where Ballantyne landed. I never knew.”

  Peter let out a long breath. “I hoped,” he said, “but I never counted on it. So that settles that.” He looked at Stanley. “Well?”

  Stanley was trying hard to hang onto himself. The sudden uncontested victory had almost unmanned him. He tried three times before he could get the words out.

  “Let’s not be polite about this. For once, I’ve got the upper hand and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t even kill me, because all the knowledge is in my head and because you’re going to need me every step of the way, before we land and after. Especially after.”

  “Suppose,” said Peter softly, “that we decide we don’t need you at all. Suppose we just lock you up and let you stay there.”

  “You could. It would be dangerous and tremendously expensive to search eight unknown planets—there are satellites too, you know. Our fuel and supplies aren’t unlimited. The voyage alone was Ballantyne’s whole objective, and the landing was only by the way. But we’re here to consolidate, and we can’t waste too much potential running around. You could try, and you might even succeed. But without the information I can give you, you’d never get the ores. You probably would not even survive the attempt. There are…obstacles.”

  The shadow of dread that passed over Stanley’s face was more impressive than any threat, because it was personal and unpremeditated. And Comyn was remembering Ballantyne’s final scream.

  “What’s your price?” asked Peter Cochrane.

  “High,” said Stanley, “but not too high. I want a controlling interest in Cochrane Transuranic and all that goes with it. Fifty-one percent. You Cochranes have enough, Peter. There’s no reason why you should have this too.”

  For a while nobody spoke. There were deep lines between Peter’s eyes and around his mouth. Simon watched Stanley with the cold eagerness of a leopard. Finally Peter said:

  “What do you think, Simon?”

  “Tell him where to go. The Cochranes have never needed help from little swine like him.”

  Again no one spoke. Peter scowled and thought. Sweat gathered in drops on Stanley’s forehead and ran slowly down his temples, over pulses that were beating visibly.

  Peter said thoughtfully, “We might beat it out of him.” His gaze slid to Comyn. “What do you think?”

  “I’d enjoy it,” Comyn said. “But it’s risky business. None of us are experts, and you can kill a man without meaning to. Besides, in this case it wouldn’t work. All Stanley has to do is break down and tell us a bunch of lies, and we wouldn’t know the difference. We couldn’t check it.” He paused, and added, “I think he’s got you.”

  Simon started a bitter protest, and Peter silenced him.

  “It comes down to this,” he said. “A hundred percent or forty-nine. It won’t make any difference if we come back the way Ballantyne did. Very well, Bill, you win.”

  “I want it on paper,” Stanley said. “And signed.”

  “You’ll get it. And now I’m going to tell you what I think of you.” He told him, and Stanley listened. When he was all through, Stanley said:

  “You were entitled to that, but I don’t want any more of it, from either of you. Do you understand?”

  He seemed to have grown several inches taller, and his face had acquired a superficial calm that was almost dignified. He started to leave the cabin, a proud man, a successful man, and then Comyn said quietly:

  “Do you think this is going to make Sydna fall at your feet?”

  Stanley turned around. He said, “I don’t know why I didn’t beat your head in when I had the chance. You keep your dirty mouth shut.”

  “What is this,” demanded Peter, “about Sydna?”

  Comyn said, “He’d rather have her than Claudia.”

  Simon laughed. He seemed to find that idea so genuinely funny that he couldn’t help laughing. Stanley rounded on him in a white fury.

  “Sydna’s standards aren’t so high. Ask Comyn. And you’re going to learn something, all of you. You’re going to learn to respect me. Sydna too. She has nothing to be haughty about except her money. None of you have. You can all think what you like about me, but by God you’ll respect me!”

  He gave Simon a crack across the mouth that stopped his laughter, and then he went away so swiftly and furiously that he was gone before Simon could get at him. Peter hauled his brother away toward his own cabin.

  “Keep your temper,” he said. “We’ve got enough on our necks. Come on, we have work to do.”

  They left. The men around the table began slowly to eat again, not as though they cared about it. They didn’t talk. They were too embarrassed by what had happened and now waited till they could get off by themselves in small groups to let loose the excited chatter that was in them. French said to Comyn:

  “Better let me take care of that shoulder.”

  He took care of it, and it was not as bad as it might have been because Comyn’s muscles were thick and had saved the bone. But he was pretty well laid up with it for a while. By the time he could use his arm again he was ready to lose his mind from inaction, from the subliminal screech of the drive, from the not-moving and not-seeing—the uncanny drawing out of time.

  He looked at his watch, and it meant nothing. The chronometers were only a mockery. Earth was years, centuries behind them, and Barnard’s Star had grown no bigger on the screen, no brighter. The feeling had begun to grow on the ship’s company that they were lost somewhere out of space and time and would never find their way back. There were outbreaks of hysteria, and French was busy with his needle. One man cracked completely and was confined to his cabin, strapped down.

  “We’ll all be there,” muttered French, “if we don’t get out of this pretty soon.”

  “We’re almost ready to shift drive,” Peter said. His face was pared down to the bone now, and he looked more like Jonas and more like an Indian than ever. “We’ll be back in normal space—tomorrow.”

  He hesitated before he said that word that was only an arbitrary symbol for something that didn’t exist.

  “If we make it,” Comyn thought. The fear was in him too. It was the strangeness that got you, the not knowing. You had to sit and wait and wonder if the trap would let you go.

  Stanley kept saying, “Don’t worry. Ballantyne and the others felt the way we do, but they came out of it all right. They made it.”

  He had his paper, signed and sealed. He knew more about what was going to happen than any of them. But even he was afraid. It showed on him like a gray dust, and his cheering words were only words and nothing more. Nobody answered him. People rarely spoke to him anymore. Comyn thought that it wasn’t their concern over the Cochrane fortunes, but simply that the men hated to have their lives depending on Stanley.

  They didn’t trust him, not because of his business ethics but because they felt he was not a man, except by courtesy of sex. He was no longer pink and prosperous, but he was still the executive errand-boy, the carrier-out of other men’s orders. They had seen the way he had won his victory. It did not inspire confidence in them.

  “As soon as we’re out of drive,” Stanley told Peter, “I’ll give you the coordinates on our destination.”

  The flight engineers were glued to their instruments now. Time passed, or the arbitrary illusion of it, measured off by the chronometers. Men moved about, doing nothing in particular with great intensity, or simply sat and sweated. They had been through this once, and it had been bad enough. T
his time it was worse. The interior of the ship felt to Comyn like the inside of a bomb getting ready to explode. The red eye of Barnard’s Star watched them from the screen and did not change.

  The dome lights began to flash off and on. Alarm bells rang through the passageways and in the cabins. The first warning. French finished giving the last man his shot.

  “All right,” said Peter. “Everybody to your quarters.” His voice was rasping, like an old man’s. Up in the control room the pilots were strapping in, ready to take over. Indicators quivered and crawled, and a sonic-relay beam was squeaking higher and higher up the scale. Lights flickered on the board like little stars. The engineers were as robots, eyes fixed, faces glazed with sweat, calling off in voices that were not human. The astrogators were standing by.

  Somebody said; “What if they miscalculated? What if we ram right into Barnard’s Star?”

  Comyn went back to his cabin and lay down. He felt sick. He wanted a drink worse than he ever had in his life, but there wasn’t any more. He rolled the coppery taste of fear over his tongue and braced himself. The dome lights were still flashing: off, on; off, on.

  The bells rang—second warning.

  Comyn waited. The shot was supposed to dull the nerves, make the shock easier on them. He did not feel dulled. He was afraid of what was coming and more afraid of its not coming. Suppose the drive failed to shift? Suppose they couldn’t come out of it?

  The dome lights flashed, off, on. It was hard on the eyes, hard on the nerves. The squall and screech of the drive was almost audible now. He waited, and it was a long time, too long.

  Something had gone wrong; the drive had failed and they couldn’t come out of it. They were going to go on and on forever in this not-space until they went crazy and died, and even that wouldn’t stop them…

  The lights stopped flashing. They stayed a hard bright steady glare, and then the third warning sounded, not bells this time but a siren, so there would be no mistake about it. The wild banshee howling raised the hair on Comyn’s head and brought out the cold sweat on his skin, and then the lights went out and there was no more sound.