The Big Jump

by Leigh Brackett

  Darkness. The black silence of the tomb. He strained his ears, but even the supersonic torture of the drive was slipping away, receding beyond reach. Blue witch-lights flared from every metal surface in the ship, and then it began: the subtle slide and wrench and twist that took each separate atom in a man’s body and moved it in a new direction with the most horrible effect of vertigo that had ever been devised. Comyn tried to scream, but whether he made it or not he never knew. For one timeless ghastly interval he thought he saw the fabric of the ship itself dissolving with him into a mist of discrete particles, and he knew that he wasn’t human anymore and that nothing was real. And then he plunged headlong into nothingness.

  TEN

  The first thing that came to him was the familiar thud and throb of the auxiliaries. It dragged him back to the point where he could remember what his name was, and then he opened his eyes and sat up. There were solid bulkheads around him, and a solid bunk under him. He felt himself all over, and he was still there. The feel of the ship was different. It was the normal feel of a spaceship, under way and braking.

  He got up and went out into the passageway. The lights were on again. Men were coming out of their cabins. He wondered if he looked like them, like something dug up and resurrected. His legs didn’t work right and he staggered, trying to run. But they were all staggering and nobody noticed. There was a rising babble of voices. The ship sounded like an aviary at dawn.

  He came into the main cabin. He saw faces with tears running down them, but he didn’t know whose they were and he didn’t care. The ports were open. For the first time in a million years the blank walls were opened up, and Comyn flung himself toward the nearest port. Men crowded on his heels and there was much noise, but he neither felt nor heard. He clung to the thick quartzite and stared at the beautiful deep darkness of space outside. He saw the stars that were no longer eerie crawling worms of light but bright suns, blazing blue and red and gold and green. They hung in clusters, in ropes and chains and burning clouds against the primal night.

  Somebody said, in one long tumbling breath: “We made it oh God we made it we shifted back!”

  Comyn made himself stop shaking. He looked around the cabin, but the people he wanted were not there and he went forward to the bridge. The brake bursts shook the deck plates under his feet, and it was a good feeling. They were back. They were moving. Everything was all right.

  Peter and Simon and Stanley were in the bridge. The ports were open here, too; and dead ahead in space was a far-off sun the color of rusty iron—a somber fire burning in the dark. Comyn’s feeling of elation drained away. They had made the second Big Jump, and now it was waiting for them under the light of that mad and wildly fleeing star—the world and the fate that had waited for Ballantyne at the end of that first long trail.

  Stanley had a sheet of paper, a large one, covered with many figures. He held it out to the navigator.

  “Here’s your destination,” he said.

  The navigator spread out the paper on his workboard and scowled at it. Presently he said, “You’ve given me too much, mister. The planetary coordinates look okay, and the orbital velocity and grav-constant equations and the landing speeds. But all this mess here—these calculations of the relative motions of Ballantyne’s ship and Barnard II…!”

  Comyn reached over and snatched the paper out of the startled man’s hands. He backed away, looking at it, ignoring the sudden angry words that were being said.

  He said to Stanley, “You memorized all this?”

  “Of course,” said Stanley. He made a grab for the paper. “Damn you, Comyn.”

  “Yes, you did,” said Comyn, and tore the sheet apart.

  An enraged and startled cry burst from several different throats, and Comyn thrust the torn scraps into his pockets. He smiled at Stanley.

  “You can write it out again.”

  Peter swore, a bitter vitriolic stream. “What are you trying to do, Comyn? Aren’t things tough enough without—”

  “He memorized it all,” said Comyn. “He’s good. He can remember stuff in three dimensions, orbital velocities, landing speeds, the works. Give him a pencil and paper. He can write it out again.”

  A glint of understanding came all at once into Peter’s eyes. “Sure,” he said. “Get him some paper, Simon. I’m sorry this happened, Bill, but there’s nothing lost except a little work.”

  “A little work,” said Stanley. He looked at Comyn the way a cobra looks at something it can’t get at to strike. He said things, very ugly things, but Comyn didn’t pay attention to them. He was noticing some sudden changes in Stanley.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. “A minute ago you were lordly as a hog on ice, and now you don’t look so good. Has your memory gone back on you?”

  Simon came back with pencil and paper and shoved them impatiently at Stanley. “Here. Get busy. We haven’t all the time in creation.”

  “Time,” said Stanley. “If Comyn hadn’t interfered—”

  “A very odd thing has happened,” said Peter slowly. “I’m beginning to like Comyn. We have much in common.”

  Stanley threw the pencil on the floor. “I can’t do it here,” he said. “Nobody could. I’m going to my cabin and it may take me a little while. Don’t disturb me. If there’s any more trouble made for me, you’ll all pay for it.”

  He stamped out. Nobody spoke until he was gone, and then Comyn said:

  “Don’t blow a fuse. If anything goes wrong, this paper can be pieced together again. I was careful how I tore it.”

  Simon said, “He couldn’t have got the log books aboard. I examined every piece of baggage myself.”

  “Not the books themselves,” said Comyn. “But a couple of micro-photostats could slide by in a pack of cigarettes or a roll of socks.”

  “Well,” said Simon, “let’s go.”

  “Give him a while,” said Peter. “Let him get set. I’ll need the master key. Those metal doors don’t break open very easy.”

  They waited a little, and then the three of them went very quietly through the main cabin, where there were still clusters of men by the ports, and down the passageway to Stanley’s cabin. Peter nodded and put the key into the lock.

  The door swung in. It had taken only a few seconds to open it, but Stanley must have been sitting inside with his reflexes on hair-triggers, listening, fearing, hoping, not knowing whether to delay or to hurry, and not daring to do either. There was a large ash tray on his table with a tiny fire burning in it, and Comyn saw the finish of an action that must have started with the first touch of the key to the lock. A roll of microfilm dropped into the fire, flared, and was gone, and Stanley was already scrabbling for the other one, the one he had been copying from. But he couldn’t pick it up so easily because it was pinned under a small but very powerful lens.

  Comyn sprang forward. Peter and Simon were right with him. They hit Stanley almost together, bore him over and fell in a sprawling undignified tangle, six hands clawing for the tiny thing that Stanley had tight in his clenched fist. Comyn got his hands around Stanley’s wrist and squeezed. Peter was saying, “Look out, don’t tear it!” and Stanley was trying to fend them all off with one hand and his feet. He was sobbing like a woman and cursing them. Finally Simon hit him in the face. He went limp for a moment and his fingers relaxed and Peter got the film.

  They rolled off each other and got up, leaving Stanley sitting on the floor with one hand to the side of his face where Simon had struck him. There was a smear of blood at the corner of his mouth. Peter looked down at him. He was breathing hard and his eyes were ugly. He said to Simon:

  “Get that paper off him.”

  Simon began to search him, roughly. Stanley said, “No!” on a high rising note, and floundered up. He swung at Simon’s head and missed, and Simon hit him again, open-handed this time, contemptuously, but hard. “Stop it,” he said, “or I’ll break your jaw.” Peter stepped up and held Stanley’s arms from behind. Simon found the paper.

/>   “Give it here,” said Peter. He let go of Stanley and took the paper. The fire was still smoldering in the big ash tray. He put Stanley’s guarantee of empire into it and watched it burn.

  Stanley said, “You can’t do that. It isn’t that easy.” His voice was high. He wiped with the back of his hand at the blood on his mouth. “The other roll is gone—the last book, the one about the Transuranae. I still know what’s in it. You can’t get along without me.”

  The ashes crumbled and turned gray. Peter Cochrane said slowly, “We’ll get along, Bill. You’re not a big enough man to bull us out, and you know it. It’s time you stopped being a fool.”

  “What do you expect me to do?” asked Stanley savagely. “Agree with you?”

  “I’m going to make you a proposition,” Peter said. “I will give you, in your own name, a fair share of Cochrane Transuranic—and no more than a fair share, no more than any of the others who volunteered for this trip will get. Furthermore, Simon and I will agree to forget your recent behavior.”

  Stanley laughed. “That’s big of you. Listen, in a little while you’ll be landing on Barnard II. Unless I tell you what was in that book, the same thing will happen to you that happened to Rogers and Vickrey and Strang and Kessel—and Ballantyne. You don’t dare take that chance.”

  Comyn had started forward at the mention of Rogers’ name, but Peter stopped him.

  “Let me do this…All right, Bill, so it happens to us, and it doesn’t happen to you. Where will you be? Can you pick up the pieces of the expedition and take the survivors home—or if there aren’t any, go back by yourself? There’s more to a bluff than words. There’s got to be a man to back it up.”

  Stanley said between his teeth, “You’re not doing so well with your bluff. The fact you’re willing to make concessions at all shows that—”

  Peter’s hand shot out and gripped the front of Stanley’s shirt.

  “Get one thing through your head,” said Peter in a very soft voice. “I’m making no concessions to you. I’m thinking of Claudia. Be thankful you’re married to a Cochrane, for if you weren’t I’d throw you to the hogs.”

  He flung him off with such fierce contempt that Stanley stumbled and half fell onto the edge of his bunk.

  “Now, you cheap little chiseler,” said Peter, “do you want your job back or don’t you?”

  Stanley was still sitting on the edge of his bunk. He looked at Peter fixedly, and then answered him in four vicious words.

  He added, “I’ve still got you in a cleft stick. You’ve got to know about the Transuranae and what else is on that world. You’ll pay for that knowledge, or you’ll get what Ballantyne got.”

  Peter said harshly, “I’ve known you a long time, Bill. You’re a tough man behind a desk, but not anywhere else. You’ll take the share I offered you and be glad of it.”

  He turned away. Comyn’s fists itched, but he followed. Stanley shouted furiously after them:

  “A share in Cochrane Transuranic you’ll give me! That’s funny, that’s very funny. You don’t know what the hell you’re giving out shares in but you will, you will—”

  Comyn slammed the door. Peter scowled down at the roll of microfilm in his hand. “That’s what old Jonas meant by amateurs who bungle unpredictably. But one thing sure, he’s scared. He’s plenty scared, and not of us.”

  Three days later they were in an orbit around Barnard II, and going down.

  ELEVEN

  Comyn slept, a light, uneasy, restless sleep. His dreams were full of voices, full of words and pictures; the landing; the grassy plain, with the strange slim golden trees; the mountains to the south, the tall cliffs and rocky spires, tortured by wind and water into shapes that leaned and crouched and made to spring; the gorge that cleft them.

  There had been the land and the day of waiting, penned inside the ship, while the endless tests were made. Finally it was determined: “No contamination of the air.” Stanley’s face set like marble, Stanley’s mouth unspeaking. “You’ll have to pay me, Peter. You’ll have to pay.”

  Men going out, wearing armor, carrying Geigers. No radiation, no contamination, not here on the plain. Men could come out and breathe again. It was safe.

  Peter staring off toward the mountains. “Is it there?”

  Stanley saying, “I’ll tell you, but you’ll have to pay.”

  “Tomorrow…”

  “If you pay.”

  Dreams, oppressive, somber, filled with beauty, tinged with fear. Beauty of wild tree and sweeping plain, beauty of sound and color—all alien, new and strange. Comyn tossed in the narrow bunk and saw again the mountains and the gorge as he had seen them at the going down of Barnard’s Star, a rust-red giant heavy in the west. Red light poured down on the world, the screaming spires dripping blood from off their flanks. They were beautiful even then, beautiful as battle, as armed knights clashing above the shadowed gorge.

  And then in the dream was sunset, and the coming on of night. Dusk and darkness, and underneath them horror. Horror that sped through the golden trees, faster and faster on noiseless feet, calling, crying, toward the ship, “I am Paul. I am dead, but I cannot die!”

  Comyn woke with a leap and a yell. He was shaking, drenched with sweat. The cabin was filled with moonlight that came in through the port, but the room was small and close and he had seen too much of its walls. It felt like a coffin, and nightmares clung in its corners. He went out of it and down the passage.

  The lock was open. A man sat inside of it, with a high-powered shock-rifle on his lap.

  “I’m going out,” said Comyn.

  The man looked at him doubtfully. “I have my orders,” he said. “But the old man’s out there. You ask him.”

  Comyn stepped through the round thick-walled opening and climbed down the ladder. Two copper moons burned in the sky, and a third was rising huge and tawny from the horizon. There was no darkness except where the groves of slender trees trailed it from their boughs. A little to the left, still plain under the returning grass, were the scar and the hollow where Ballantyne’s ship had lain.

  Peter Cochrane was walking back and forth by the foot of the ladder. He stopped and spoke:

  “I’m glad you came. It isn’t good to be alone on a strange world.” He took Comyn’s arm and pulled him away a little, out of the glow from the ship’s ports. “Look off there, straight down the gorge. Is that just moonlight?”

  “Hard to say…” The three moons wove a tapestry of light that glanced and gleamed in a bewildering way, shifting constantly and very bright. But Comyn thought he saw, down among the cliffs where Peter was pointing, a pale white fire not made by any moon. It was a fragile, glittering aurora that set his nerves to leaping with an awareness of the unknown…and then vanished from his dazzled eyes, lost in the overwhelming moonlight.

  “I don’t know,” said Comyn. “I can’t be sure.”

  “That’s the devil of it,” Peter said. “We’re not sure of anything.”

  He started to walk back toward the ship. Comyn followed him. From somewhere in the night behind them came a soft fluting call, very clear and sweet, with a sound in it like laughter. Peter jerked his head toward it.

  “Take that, for instance. What is it—bird, beast, something with no name at all? Who knows?”

  “Stanley might. What are you going to do about Stanley?”

  “Comyn, there are times when only a damn fool won’t give in. This may be one of them. I don’t know.” He shook his head somberly. “If it were just myself and Simon, I’d see him in blazes first. But I can’t take that chance with the others.”

  He glanced around the moon-washed plain. “I look at this place, and I think there can’t be any danger here. Regular Garden of Eden, isn’t it? And then I remember Ballantyne, and I’m willing to give Stanley the whole Cochrane Corporation if he can give us only a hint of how to save ourselves from what happened to him.”

  “But you don’t really think he can.”

  “I don’t know,
Comyn. But I do know nobody else can.”

  “So you’ll come to terms with him.”

  “Probably,” said Peter, as though the word tasted bitter in his mouth.

  Again the bird-like call came, very soft this time, but sounding much closer. There was a grove of trees perhaps sixty yards away. The two men turned toward it, curious to see if possible what sort of creature was there, singing in the night. The shadows underneath the boughs were dark, but the coppery moonlight shafted down in the open spaces. Comyn saw a flicker of movement.

  Peter’s hand closed hard upon his arm. “Men! Do you see them, Comyn? Human—”

  The words choked in his throat. Suddenly night and distance were not, and Comyn saw clearly the ivory bodies stealing between the trees. His dream was still strong in him. He tore away from Peter’s grasp and began to run out across the plain, shouting, “Paul! Paul Rogers!” And it was like the nightmare in reverse. The long grass plucked at his feet and the trees seemed far away, the faces of the men beneath them were obscured. Men, four men, Ballantyne’s crew—No, there were more than four. The grove was full of slim pale bodies, naked, light of foot, and some of them were not men at all. He could see even at the distance that they were women, with long hair blowing as they ran. And they were running now. They were frightened by his shouting, and the grove rang with fluting calls, a kind of speech, but very simple, like the speech of birds.

  He cried, “Paul, don’t run away. It’s me, Arch Comyn!”

  But the white bodies vanished between the shadows and the trees, back into the deeper woods beyond, and Paul was not there. And the clear full-throated calling died away and was gone.

  Peter caught him just on the edge of the grove. “Don’t go in there, Comyn!”

  Comyn shook his head. “Gone now. I scared them off. It wasn’t Paul. It wasn’t any of them.” A long sliding shiver racked him, and his breath came hard. “Peter, do you think those people are the…Transuranae?”