The Big Jump

by Leigh Brackett

  Vickrey’s face was a mask of anguished longing, lifting up in the moonlight. He said, “They are taking Strang to his burial.” He tried desperately to break away, but he was between Peter and Simon, and they held him.

  “Where?” said Peter. “To the place of the Transuranae?” Deep in the shadowed throat of the gorge the pale white fire showed brighter now, bright enough to be seen and recognized as something separate from the moonlight. The voices were moving slowly toward it.

  Vickrey said, “You’ve killed once, you’ll kill again. You’ll take the others prisoner as you took me. Let me go!”

  He fought and strained like a mad thing, but they held him and others came to help. And Vickrey’s voice rose in a shrill wild cry. Comyn moved away to one side.

  Simon said disgustedly, “He’s no good to us. Lock him up until he comes to his senses. Anyway, we don’t dare go now while the whole lot of them are there. They’ll want to make us pay for Strang, and there’s too many of them.”

  The sentinels had been called in from the grove. Fisher stood looking uneasily from the mountains to the turmoil around Vickrey. Comyn walked up behind him, making no sound on the grass. He hit Fisher on the side of the jaw and took the rifle out of his hand as he went down. The stud was pushed up to full power. Comyn eased it back and then he turned to the group of men who were struggling with Vickrey.

  “All right,” he said. “Let him go.”

  They didn’t let him go, not at once. It was a minute before they understood why they had to. Vickrey was on his knees, and Simon had hold of him. Peter Cochrane straightened up.

  “Are you crazy, Comyn?”

  “Maybe.” Someone went for the rifle he had dropped in the scuffle, and Comyn pressed the firing stud. There was a sharp flash and the man went down. After that nobody made trouble. Getting knocked cold might not be fatal, but it was no fun. Simon still held onto Vickrey. He was so close to him that Comyn couldn’t knock him out without hitting Vickrey too. Simon Cochrane’s jaw was stubborn and his eyes were mean.

  Comyn said, “Let him go.”

  Peter came forward a step or two. He started to speak, and Comyn cut him short. “Listen,” he said, “I don’t give a curse about the ores or whether you get them or not. I came out here to find Paul Rogers, and that’s all I care about. Do you understand that, Vickrey? I’m Paul’s friend. I want to talk to him, and that’s all. If he doesn’t want to go back, I won’t try to make him. Will you take me to him?”

  Vickrey nodded. He tried to pull away from Simon, and Simon struck him. “Stay put,” Simon said, and then he shouted to the men who were standing around, “What’s the matter with you? Somebody take care of that—”

  Peter’s hand caught his collar, choked off his words and his wind with them. “Get up,” Peter snarled. He dragged Simon away from Vickrey and thrust him aside, viciously. “You never know when to quit, do you? You’re the kind of Cochrane that’s given the whole family a bad name. This is no place for rough stuff, not with him.”

  Simon swore. “You told me not to let him get away.”

  “I didn’t tell you to beat him up.” He swung around. “You can put the gun down, Comyn. Vickrey’s free to do what he wants. I guess he was telling the truth, and it is too late to help him. There’s no use killing a man trying to save his life.”

  Comyn smiled and shook his head. He did not put the gun down. “I can’t make you out,” he said to Peter. “Sometimes I think you’re a decent guy, and sometimes I think you’re a heel with a genius for covering up.” He moved the barrel of the rifle up and down gently, just to remind Peter that it was still there. “I need armor.”

  “You must be crazy! Comyn, you can’t—”

  “You know me well enough to know I’m going, whether I have the armor or not. And I know you well enough to know you’ll get it for me. So let’s not waste any more time.”

  Peter shrugged and turned away to the ship. Simon started to follow him, and Comyn said, “No. You stay here, where I can watch you.”

  He waited. Vickrey had risen to his feet. There was a new look about him now. He was free and he wasn’t afraid any longer. His body quivered, but it was with eagerness, and his gaze was on the mountains, on the shadowed gorge where the voices called. His eyes shone, and again Comyn wondered when he saw them why they were so unhuman, so changed from the eyes of man.

  Peter came back, carrying a suit of the flexible radiation armor done up in a bulky pack, with the helmet on top. There was a hard set to his mouth, and his glance probed angrily around the men’s faces.

  “One of these is missing,” he said. “Somebody’s beat you to it, Comyn.”

  “Put it down,” said Comyn. “Right there.” Peter laid the pack on the ground and stepped back, and Comyn picked it up. Simon was still sulking. He did not speak, but Peter asked:

  “Has anybody seen Bill Stanley?”

  No one had.

  Peter said some hot and angry words. “Amateurs! That goes for you too, Comyn. Things aren’t hard enough, you all have to foul things up for everybody grinding your own little axes. All right, get the hell on with it, and I hope you both fall into a chasm and break your necks!”

  “Then don’t follow too close behind me,” Comyn said. “Come on, Vickrey.”

  Vickrey spoke, suddenly, clearly. He was speaking to Peter Cochrane, and there was in him all the dignity of a free man, a man of science. There was something else, too, that made them feel small and a little unclean before him, an inexplicable and irritating sensation to come from a naked creature who had gone native in some weird way.

  “I know that you will follow,” he said. “The light is there in the gorge, and there will be many on the trails. What will happen to you afterward is partly in your hands. I only warn you not to make the mistake that Ballantyne did—and not to use your rifle on my people. Strang is dead, and they will mourn him for a short while. But there is no vengeance in them. They have forgotten vengeance, along with many other things that they once knew. Do not harm them. They are harmless.”

  Without looking at any of them again, Vickrey set off across the plain. Comyn went after him, and presently the shadows of the grove wrapped around them. Vickrey sped on, and the voices called in the distance, and Comyn threw the gun away. Vickrey smiled.

  “You’re wiser than the Cochranes.”

  Comyn grunted. “There are times when a gun doesn’t help. I just got a feeling this was one of them.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “Yes,” said Comyn. “There used to be a dirty saying for just how scared I am.” They were through the grove now and in among the forest trees, great trees with blackness around their feet. The tangled boughs above Comyn’s head were not like any he had seen before except in dreams, and the leaves on them hung in strange curling shapes, copper and gold and pallid silver under the moons. The moist sod gave off strange scents where he crushed it under his boots, and there were vines with huge dark flowers. Vickrey moved swiftly and without sound, a slim white blur in the gloom, and it was like running with a ghost.

  As they went, Comyn asked, “What about your people? You said they used to be men, like—”

  He caught himself, but Vickrey smiled and finished it for him. “Like me. Yes. Barnard’s Star has eight worlds. They came from the fifth one, originally, moving closer in toward their sun as it waned. In the course of ages they reached this planet and found the Transuranae. They will not travel anymore.”

  Thinking of the shapes that had run faun-like through the grove, naked and lacking even speech except for those simple calls, Comyn asked incredulously, “You mean those—you mean they had spaceships?”

  “Oh, yes. Spaceships and great cities and war and medicine and politics—civilization. There are ruins beyond the mountains of the cities they built when they first came to Barnard II. Fine ones too. I’ve seen them. Their culture was on approximately the same level as our own.” He shook his head. “It’s becoming difficult for me to think of su
ch things. The mind adjusts so easily to altered ideas of importance.”

  After a moment he added, “I wish your ship hadn’t come. It’s unhappy to try being Vickrey again.”

  Comyn noted the odd choice of words, but he didn’t mention it. Instead he said, breathing hard, “Don’t you ever get tired?”

  Vickrey made a gesture of impatience, but he slowed down to a walk. Comyn plodded gratefully for a while until his heart quit hammering and the sweat rolled less violently down his back, where the armor-pack weighed heavily. They were closer to the gorge now, and the voices sounded clearer, like the voices of great birds. They seemed to hold no menace, and yet the very feyness of them was terrifying—perhaps because it should have been insane and wasn’t.

  “How did they lose it all?” he asked. “The spaceships and the cities. Civilization.”

  “I told you. They found the Transuranae.”

  “War?” said Comyn.

  Vickrey looked at him as though he had said a childish thing. “Not war. No. It was only a question of need.”

  “Of need?”

  “Yes. Everything man has ever done has been done out of need—for food, for shelter, for mutual protection. Civilization developed to supply those necessities easily. But if they’re no longer necessary to you, you have developed beyond civilization and can slough it off.”

  “You mean that those things are no longer necessary to you, Vickrey? Because of their weird transuranic poisoning?”

  “It’s not poisoning, it’s transmutation. A complete physiological change, where ordinary metabolism ceases to be and is replaced by energy, a constant flow of it through the living cells from the transuranic elements those cells have ingested. The body has a new self-sufficient life. It has no hunger and no fear. So the brain that is in it has no longer any use for cities, for finance and intricate social structures, for work and gain, for war and greed—not even for complicated speech. They sound ridiculous here, don’t they, all those pompous words?”

  There was a curious sickness in Comyn, a shivering recoil from an unimaginable kind of living thus unfolded.

  “But radioactive matter kills,” he said.

  “The elements we knew on Earth, yes. But they’re the end-products, the embers, still burning and with a long way yet to the ultimate lead, but with their vital energy gone. Neptunium and plutonium are hybrids, man-made and unnatural. The true transuranics, far and far beyond our periodic table, are the forces that were in the beginning, the life seeds, the fountainhead. Perhaps we’re all children of the Transuranae in a way, many times removed and with all our vital powers gone too.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will,” said Vickrey. “Can you run now? There is still a way to go.”

  Even while he spoke he was forgetting Comyn and the things that he had talked about, straining toward the gorge. Comyn ran.

  And as he ran, the fear in him deepened—the fear of a tough-minded man who felt all his hard, matter-of-fact certitudes suddenly threatened, his familiar world quaking around him.

  “But if the Transuranae worked that change in you, who are they?” he cried.

  Vickrey did not answer. The ground was sloping upward and they had come into a broad path between the trees, trodden by many feet over countless years, so that it was worn deep below the level of the sod and packed as hard as iron. Vickrey was speeding faster along it, and Comyn labored after him. He could see the gorge now through the thinning forest, dark, dark under the slanting moons. The voices rang.

  There were others on the path.

  Vickrey called, a gentle, joyous note, and they answered him—the slender people, the child-eyed people who looked at Comyn and were puzzled, but only a little afraid. He went up with them toward the mouth of the gorge. He kept close to Vickrey because he knew if he lost him he would bolt and run. He could not have stood to be alone among these creatures who looked like men and women and were not.

  The last trees dropped behind them. They streamed up between the stony pinnacles that were the pillars of the gate, and the gorge lay open before them. It was full of voices and dim moving shapes, and forward in its deep cleft the white fire burned, as snow burns under a brilliant sun. Vickrey paused and said one dreaming word. Human speech was slipping from him now.

  Comyn put on the clumsy armor and set the helmet over his head. And he was afraid.

  It was worse now, with the ray-proof metal fabric hampering his limbs and the face-plate of leaded glass cutting down his field of vision. Sweat soaked his clothing, and the canned, flat air from the shielded tank between his shoulders was difficult to breathe.

  He stumbled after Vickrey along a path worn smooth and broad across the rock. Many of them were women with white thighs and pointed breasts, but they roused in him no lust, and the men gave him no sense of shame. It seemed as natural that they should go unclothed as it was for the winds to blow.

  They were hurrying and their faces were bright. The sound of voices was dying away as fewer and fewer were left on the open path. The wild tortured shapes of rock sprang up on either side, with heads and shoulders bathed in ruddy moonlight. But that was high above. Where Comyn was the darkness clustered thick, and there was no light except the strange white fire that drew and beckoned. Some infection began to enter into him from Vickrey and the others, so that he too was eager to reach it. But with every step he took toward the fire, the fear in him grew greater.

  The floor of the gorge dipped downward steeply and the path went with it, and a great ragged grotto opened in the rock. The white fire came out of it, but Comyn saw now that the radiance he had been watching was only a fragment of what lay inside. The path split and curved away to left and right, in along the sides of the grotto, and the last of the people streamed along the two paths. Comyn stopped.

  “Vickrey!” he cried out. “Vickrey!”

  But Vickrey was gone. Comyn took hold of the rock wall beside him with his two hands and clung to it for a while. He stood just at the edge of the grotto, neither in nor out, until he decided whether he was going to run away or not. And he saw the reason why the path split.

  The floor of the grotto was cracked wide open in a rough-edged chasm. Through this crack the white light poured upward: an aurora of blinding purity, with a rippling in it. The lips of the chasm and the grotto roof above, where the light struck most strongly, burned with their own dimmer fires. And Comyn thought that ages of intense bombardment by transuranic radiation had transmuted the common rock into something else, so that the whole grotto was filled with radiance.

  He could not see in the chasm; he was too far from it and the angle was wrong. But he could see the ledges on either side, the lower ones wide, the upper ones climbing the grotto walls in rough steps. They were crowded now with the people whose eyes were so disturbing, and they had the happy faces of children at a festival. At one place a part of the lower ledge thrust out a little over the crack, and here there was a long litter made of rude poles and heaped high with flowers. The flowers moved and stirred with the motion of the thing they covered, and beside the litter stood two men. Between the distance and the dazzle, Comyn could not make out their faces. But he knew one of them.

  He took his hands away from the rock, set his teeth hard and went into the grotto.

  FOURTEEN

  The people were still in MOTION, and he moved with them, an incongruous lumbering shape among the lithe bare bodies. The wide lower ledges were filled. But on the others that rose like rough steps above them, winding and tilting along the sides of the grotto, the people were streaming up, a shifting fresco of white forms, silent-footed, eager. There was a stillness in the place and a sense of some unknown power crouched and waiting to leap forth. They were waiting for it; they had known it before, and Comyn ran heavily along the crowded ledge toward Paul Rogers. He did not wish to see the leaping forth, and time was pressing on him like a spur. The white fires rushed upward from the chasm, a glory and a fear.

  He shouted P
aul’s name, but his voice was muffled by the helmet. And the men on the jutting lip of rock were lost in some far distance of their own. They stooped and lifted up the bier that held Strang’s body, and a cascade of brilliant flowers fell from it to the ground.

  The streaming of the people onto the upper ledges quickened. Comyn’s armored boots struck heavy on the rock.

  Slowly, very solemnly, the men lowered the foot of Strang’s rude bier and let the body slip, still stirring, into the abyss.

  The motion of the people ceased. There was a sighing, sharp and swift, around the ledges, and then silence, in which nothing moved or breathed—only Comyn, running out upon the lip of rock, calling Rogers’ name.

  Even through the deadening helmet, his voice rang loud and harsh upon the stillness—and the men turned slowly toward it. They had gone very far into whatever strange life they were living now, and they were being called back against their will, and it was a hurt to them. The sheets of fire purled up and over the burning rim, curling above their heads like waves, crested with a bursting foam of light. Their faces were rapt and dreaming, touched now with pain from the hammering of Comyn’s voice.

  He reached out his gloved hands and set them on Paul’s bare shoulders and cried his name again. And the face that looked into his through the leaded glass was the face of Paul Rogers as Comyn had known it all his life, and yet it was not. Paul Rogers was gone from it and someone else was there in his stead, someone beyond his understanding. And Comyn took his hands away and was afraid.

  The swift white fires leaped toward the glowing roof, and the people waited on the ledges, and the eyes that had forgotten knowledge and all the ways of men looked into Comyn’s and were troubled. Then, as through the opening of a door long closed, recognition came and after it, alarm.

  “Not now!” The words were stiff and awkward on Rogers’ tongue, but he said them urgently, putting up his hands as though to thrust Comyn back. “No time, not now!”