The Big Jump

by Leigh Brackett

  “You again,” he said. “How did you—”

  “Never mind that,” said Cochrane swiftly. He kept his gaze on the doctor, on the floor, anywhere but on the white bed with the siderails up on it. “Is there any change?”

  Things were fading out for Comyn. He had taken a few steps forward, drawn by that white barred oblong beyond the two men, beyond the apparatus and the laboratory benches. The light was very brilliant, very clear. It was focused now upon the bed, and around it things seemed to be fading out: the men, the voices, the emotions.

  Far off on another world the doctor was saying, “No change. Roth and I have completed…”

  No. It was bad enough on Mars. I heard him scream and I saw him die, and that was bad enough. Nobody ought to have to look at this.

  A voice, another one. “I told you before what my findings were. I’ve verified them, as far as anybody can. I can’t go beyond the limits of my equipment. This has got to wait for a whole new science.” Excitement in the voice, stronger than dread, stronger than anything.

  “I know that, Roth. I know it.”

  Voices, men, tension, fear—going round, going faster, dissolving in a darkening mist around that single intense point of light. Comyn put out his hands, not knowing that he did it, and took hold of the cold top bar of the bed. He hung on while the warmth and the strength drained out of him and left him empty of everything but a sickening horror.

  The thing that lay in the bed between the barred sides was Ballantyne. It was Ballantyne, and it was dead, quite dead. There was no covering on it to hide its deadness; no breathing lifted the flattened ribs; no pulse beat anywhere beneath the pale transparent skin, and the tracery of veins was dark, and the face was…

  Dead. And yet—it moved.

  The faint unceasing twitchings and drawings of the flesh that Comyn remembered when Ballantyne was still alive had increased and taken over now that he was dead. It was as though some new and dreadful form of life had claimed the wasted shell when Ballantyne had left it: a brainless, blind, insensate life that only knew to move, to stir and pluck the string of muscles that lifted the skeletal limbs and put them down again, that made the fingers grasp and close and the head turn slowly from side to side.

  It was motion without reason, without sound except for the rustling of the sheet. Motion that laid a blasphemous hand even on the face that had no longer any thought or being behind it, and made it…

  Comyn heard a hoarse and distant sound. It was himself trying to speak and not making it. He let go of the bed. After that he didn’t hear or see anything until he fetched up against some solid object with a crash that knocked some sense back into him. He stood where he was, shaking all over, the breath coming raw and rasping into his throat. Gradually the room stopped swinging and he was able to think again.

  Peter Cochrane said, “You wanted to come.”

  Comyn didn’t answer. He moved away from the bed, as fast as he could get, and kept his back to it. He could still hear the dry vague rustling that never stopped.

  Cochrane returned to the doctor. “What I want to know for sure,” he said, “is this: could Ballantyne ever—ever live again? As Ballantyne, I mean. As a human being.”

  The doctor made a decisive gesture. “No. Ballantyne died, from heart failure due to exhaustion. He is dead, by every normal physiologic standard. His brain is already deteriorating. But his body has in it a residue of some weird new physiological activity—I can hardly call it life.”

  “What kind of activity? We’re not scientists, doctor.”

  The other hesitated. “The ordinary processes of metabolism ceased in Ballantyne’s body cells when he died. But there’s a residual process that keeps going on. And it’s something brand new. It’s a low-level flow of energy in the cells, not generated by the usual biochemical metabolic process, but by the slow degeneration of certain transuranic elements.”

  Comyn looked up sharply.

  “You mean,” Cochrane was saying slowly, “he has suffered a kind of radioactive poisoning?”

  The doctor shook his head, and Roth said firmly, “No, this is definitely not toxic radioactivity. The elements that Ballantyne’s body cells absorbed are beyond the range of our chemistry, even of the transuranic chemistry our labs have been dabbling with. They don’t emit injurious radiation, but do release energy.”

  They glanced briefly and against their will at the bed, and Cochrane said somberly, “Then his…movements…are merely a mechanical reflex?”

  The doctor nodded. “Yes. The cytoplasm of the contractile-tissue cells, such as the muscle fibres, is constantly activated by the flow of energy.”

  “But he’s really dead?”

  “Yes. He’s dead.”

  Stanley broke into the brooding moment of silence that followed. “What are we going to do with him? We can’t let people see him. There’d be an uproar, an examination, and it would all be out!”

  “No, we can’t let people see him,” Cochrane agreed slowly. He said, after a moment, to Stanley, “You get the Earth news-services on the phone. Tell them that we’re going to give Ballantyne the hero’s funeral he deserves—and one that all Earth can see.”

  “All Earth? Peter, you’re crazy—”

  “Am I? Maybe. Anyway, Ballantyne had no close family so nobody can stop us. Tell them to watch the northwest corner of Mare Imbrium in an hour.”

  Comyn got it, then. He exhaled a long breath. Cochrane glanced at him briefly, and then once more at the barred unquiet bed.

  “I know how you feel,” he said. “Besides, he’s come a long way. He deserves to rest.”

  They went out then, back up into the light, into the cooled and freshened air, and the scent of flowers that came in from the rioting gardens. And in Comyn’s mind that faint remembered voice was whispering, Oh, God, why did it have to be transuranic…And he was sick, with a sickness that he thought would never leave him while he lived.

  Sydna was waiting. Cochrane and Stanley were busy now with this thing they were about to do. They hardly noticed when she took Comyn by the arm and led him off, out to a terrace above the gardens where the filtered sunlight poured down fiercely and took some of the coldness out of his bones. She put a drink in his hands and waited, looking at his face, until he noticed her and began to speak.

  “Don’t tell me about it,” she said sharply. “No.”

  After a moment she drew closer to him and murmured, “Don’t look startled or surprised. They can see us from the windows. Comyn, will you leave here now? I can still get you away.”

  He looked down at her. “What’s the matter?”

  “You were down there a long time. The family has started to arrive. Comyn—”

  “You’ve had a few.”

  “And I wish I’d had more! Listen, I got you into this. I blew my top about Ballantyne and brought you up here. I’m trying to get you out while I can still do it.”

  His eyes were bleak. “Afraid I am trying to cut in on the profits?”

  “You bloody fool! You don’t know us Cochranes. This thing is big, and that means people are going to get hurt. Will you go?”

  Comyn shook his head. “I can’t.”

  She looked at him, narrow-eyed, and then she said mercilessly, “Are you sure now you want to find your friend Paul Rogers?”

  Comyn was glad he did not have to answer that question, right now. For at the moment, from the terrace they saw the sleek, purring, airtight truck heading away from the mansion and going toward the lock.

  They watched it in silence as it went out of the dome and down the ledges, back and forth, onto the great lunar plain. It went so far out on the plain that it was but a dot. It stayed there a while and then came back.

  Then, for them and for all watching Earth to see, upon the Mare Imbrium flared a dazzling flower of atomic flame—blazing, soaring, and then dying away. A hero’s funeral pyre, with a world for witness. Comyn unclenched his hands. And Sydna slipped something into one of them.

  It w
as a shocker, still warm from her body. She said, “All right, come on and meet my family.”

  SIX

  It was the most ridiculous room he had ever seen. It was comparatively small, and it was furnished in the overstuffed fashion of three generations before. It had a long, shabby sofa, lumpish chairs and drifts of small tables. One wall was filter-glass, but the other walls were covered with incongruous flowered wallpaper. And there was a fireplace with a mantel above it—a fireplace here in this super-modern castle on the Moon!

  Six or seven people sat about the room, but when Comyn came in with Sydna they stopped talking and stared at him. He felt as if he were walking into an ambush of hostile eyes. Stanley was sitting in a corner beside one of those muffin-faced girls that, sooner or later, happened to every family. Beyond him, by the fireplace, was a shabby Morris chair. The figure seated in it was the focus of the whole room.

  “This is the man, Grandfather,” said Peter Cochrane. The burst of atomic fire out on the Mare Imbrium seemed to have burned something out of him. He had the look of one exhausted by grappling with the impossible.

  A voice spoke out of the old Morris chair. “You,” it said. “Come here.”

  Comyn went and looked down at the old, old man who sat in the chair watching him with eyes like two dark glowing embers.

  He said, “You’re Jonas Cochrane.”

  The old face, seamed and shrivelled and shrunken tight over the characteristic jutting bones, was stamped with a long lifetime of acquired wisdom, none of it saintly. Only that face made it possible to identify this ancient man—wrapped in a shabby woolen robe and dusted with cigarette ash—with the crafty, ruthless schemer of the old days who had clawed top place for his family in the great game of ships and planets.

  Over his head on the mantel, amid a grotesque ruck of mementos—of baby shoes preserved in bronze, models of the first Cochrane flagships, faded photographs of prosaic Middle-Western houses and people—Jonas Cochrane’s face was startlingly repeated in a well-done miniature of a Sioux Indian chief.

  “That’s Old-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses,” said Jonas, with pride. “On the mother’s side, I’m a direct descendant.” He went on, without any change of tone, “I don’t like interference, especially from amateurs. They’re unpredictable. You’ve made us a lot of trouble, Comyn.”

  “Enough trouble,” asked Comyn softly, “that you decided to have me killed?”

  Jonas Cochrane’s eyes grew narrow and very bright. “Murder is for fools,” he said. “I’ve never indulged in it. What are you talking about?”

  Comyn told him.

  Jonas leaned forward, looking past Comyn. “Are any of you responsible for this? Peter?”

  Peter snapped. “Of course not. I’ll get hold of Hannay.”

  He went out. A couple more people had come in by now, and Comyn thought he could place them: Sydna’s other two brothers, one strongly resembling Peter but without the iron in him, the other fairer and more round-faced, with a merry, self-indulgent look. There was a gray-haired man with a mouth like a steel trap and a chronically ill-tempered expression, and Comyn knew he was the survivor of Jonas’ two sons. He could guess the reason for the sour disposition. Old Jonas had lived too long.

  There were some other third-generation Cochranes, male and female, including the girl who was sitting with Stanley, looking from him to the others with vague alarm, and sneaking glances at Comyn as though he might suddenly go off like a bomb. That would be Sydna’s cousin. Stanley did not seem much relieved by the disposal of Ballantyne. He sat staring at his feet, snarling occasionally in a genteel way when his wife whispered to him.

  Beside them was a middle-aged-to-elderly woman who looked more like Old-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses than Jonas did, except that the Sioux chief had a far kindlier face.

  She looked impatient, and said sharply, “Father, why are we wasting time on this person? I’ve come all the way up here to discuss business, and I don’t see any reason—”

  “Of course you don’t,” said Jonas tartly. “You’re a fool. You always were a fool, Sally. Just sit there and don’t bother me.”

  Somebody snickered. Jonas’ daughter sprang up. “Father or no father, I don’t have to take that kind of talk! And I won’t. I…”

  Jonas, ignoring her splutter, lighted a cigarette with large hands that were so weak they trembled with the effort. Everyone else seemed amused, except Muffin-face, who looked distressed.

  “Don’t you mind, Mother,” she whispered timidly.

  Jonas regarded them both with a great weariness. “Women,” he said.

  Peter Cochrane came back. “Well, Comyn, Hannay says you slugged him and parked him in the washroom, and that’s all he knows. He didn’t see anyone else following you, nor did he see any attack.”

  Comyn shrugged. “He wouldn’t. He was out cold. And the other guy was much better at tailing than Hannay.”

  Stanley said, “We’ve only Comyn’s word that he ever was attacked.”

  “And, Comyn,” said Peter, “you hadn’t tried to negotiate with anyone, so who would want to silence you? You could have some personal enemies—”

  “Sure,” said Comyn. “But this wasn’t one of them. And they don’t hate me that bad.”

  Stanley shrugged. “How do you know? Anyway, I can’t see that it’s very important, except to you.”

  “Oh, but it is,” said old Jonas softly. “You’re a fool too, Stanley, or you’d see it. If he’s telling the truth, it means that somebody didn’t want him to talk to the Cochranes. Somebody preferred to lose Comyn’s possible knowledge rather than risk letting us have it. And that means—” He broke off, looking shrewdly at Comyn. “You have courage, but that’s a cheap virtue. It’s no good without brains. Have you got brains, too? Can you finish my line of reasoning?”

  “Easy,” Comyn answered. “You have been, or are about to be, double-crossed by somebody in your own camp.”

  There was an uproar of voices. Jonas’ gray-haired son came to his feet and thrust his face close to Comyn’s and shouted, “That statement alone brands you as a liar! No Cochrane would ever sell out!”

  At that, Comyn laughed.

  Peter’s face had taken on a dark, savage look. “I’m afraid I agree with Uncle George. What Comyn implies would presuppose special knowledge on the traitor’s part—something he knows that we don’t know, that he was afraid Comyn might tell us. But there isn’t any special knowledge. I examined Ballantyne’s ship, the log, everything. And Stanley was with me, and Uncle George and Simon came almost at once.”

  “That’s right,” said the cheerful young man who was Peter’s brother, and who was now more cheerful than he had any business to be. “We were all there together. And nobody else got aboard until we were through. No special knowledge for anybody. Wasn’t any. Vouch for old Pete anytime. Besides, it’s silly. All Cochranes share and share alike.”

  He gave Comyn a slow, gliding look, and Comyn saw that underneath young Simon Cochrane was about as jovial as a cottonmouth.

  “Personally,” he said, “I don’t give a damn one way or the other. I’m only interested in finding out whether Paul Rogers is alive or not, and bringing him back safe if he is.” He faced old Jonas squarely. “There’s going to be a second Big Jump. I want to go along.”

  And that was it. It was funny, he thought, how you kept a crazy idea in your mind, how you told yourself it was crazy and not a thing you’d ever do, and then suddenly you said, “I want to go along,” and you knew that all the time you’d been planning to do it.

  Peter Cochrane said angrily, “You go? What are you, Comyn—the White Knight? If Rogers or any of the other three are alive, we’ll bring them back.”

  Comyn shook his head. “No dice. The Cochranes have always liked a clear field, and this one is too easy to sweep clean. To put it crudely, I don’t trust you.”

  An uproar of voices began, with Sally Cochrane’s shrill indignant trumpeting rising above the rest. Old Jonas held up his hand.
r />   “Quiet,” he said. “All of you!” He looked up into Comyn’s face with eyes very bright, very hard, as ruthless as an old eagle’s. “You’ll have to pay for what you want, Comyn. Pay high.”

  “Yeah.”

  The room had become quite still. The light clinking of bracelets was clearly audible as Sally Cochrane leaned forward. They all leaned forward, intent on Comyn and the old man, intent on every word.

  Jonas said, “Ballantyne talked before he…died.”

  “He talked.”

  “But how much, Comyn? How much? Transuranic isn’t enough.” Jonas hitched himself upward in the chair. He was a gaunt rack of bones with the hot pleasure of combat still burning in it. “And don’t try to blackmail me, Comyn. Don’t threaten me with United Tradelines or anyone else. You’re here under a glass bubble on the Moon and you can’t get out. Understand that? You’re here for as long as it suits me, and you can’t talk to anyone. This place has come in handy that way before. Now, go on.”

  There was silence in the room—a silence of held breath, and hostile faces flushed and watching. The palms of Comyn’s hands were wet. He was walking a thin wire, and one wrong step would be enough.

  “No,” said Comyn slowly, “transuranic isn’t enough now. You got that much from Ballantyne’s own body cells. But there was more.”

  Silence. A ring of eyes around him, hot and hungry, eager and cruel.

  “Paul Rogers was alive when Ballantyne parted with him. I think the others may have been, too. He pleaded with Paul not to leave him—said he couldn’t go back alone.”

  A pale tongue flickered over pale old lips. “He made a landing, then. We knew he must have when we found the transuranic elements in his body. Go on, go on!”

  “The sound of the drill they were using on the door was what roused Ballantyne, I think. It made him remember other sounds. He spoke about the voyage out—it must have been hell. And then…”