“So you feel bad. You feel bad because you’re Arch Comyn, a very tough guy, and you fell apart like a kid when you really came up against it.”
Comyn looked at him and didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to, it seemed. There must have been something in his eyes. For Peter’s face changed.
“Look, Comyn, I can make you feel better about that. French says that the ones of us who fell apart were the ones who didn’t have enough fear—not enough caution, enough inhibitions, to keep us scared of it.”
Comyn asked, “Stanley?”
Peter said, “Yes. We left him there.” And then his voice got raw-edged. “What else could we do? He’d had it, full force, and if we took him he’d be Ballantyne all over again. Better to let him stay, as he wanted. As it was, we barely got you away in time.”
Comyn said, “And you came in here now to get thanked for saving me?” Peter’s face grew angry, but Comyn went on, all his blind passion gathering. “You reached inside the gates and snatched a man out of a kind of life no man ever dreamed of having, and you want him to thank you?”
He was sitting up now, and he rushed on before Peter could interrupt. “You know what? You were scared, too scared to quit being a mucky little person named Peter Cochrane, too scared to walk out of the grubby little life you knew. And because you were, you dream it up now that it was poison, it was evil, it mustn’t be touched, no one must touch it.”
Peter did not answer. He stood looking down at Comyn, and then his face grew haunted, haggard, and his shoulders sagged a little.
“I think,” he whispered after a moment, “I think you may be right. But, Comyn…”
Peter had been fighting his own battle. Comyn saw that now. His dark face was gaunt from strain and something more than strain.
“…but Comyn, should a man be more—or less—than a man? Even if the Transuranae were the shining good they seemed, even if they could make men like angels, it seems wrong, wrong, for men to step so suddenly out of what the cosmos has made them. Maybe, ages from now, we could be like that. But now, it seems wrong.”
“In Adam’s fall, we sinned all,” quoted Comyn harshly. “Sure. Stick to it. It’s the only life we know, so it’s the best one. The people of Barnard II won’t build any starships or any castles on the moon. So that makes us better. Or does it?”
Peter nodded heavily. “It’s a question. But when I had to answer it, there was only one way I could decide. I think in time you’ll agree.” He paused and added, “Ballantyne did. Either his armor failed, or he took it off, because he’d had the first full dose. But he couldn’t stay inside the gates of paradise. Maybe it wasn’t so good when he took another look at it.”
“Maybe,” said Comyn, without conviction. He remembered Stanley’s face at the last minute: a wretched little man with a lot of hounding passions he couldn’t satisfy, inadequate and eaten up with envy, and yet there at the end he had found something better than a share in Cochrane Transuranic or anything else he had wanted. He had simply stopped being Stanley. And now he was there and Comyn was here, and Comyn hated Stanley in a curious new way.
Peter turned. “French says you’re all right to move around. Don’t stay in here and sulk. It only makes it worse.”
Comyn cursed him with all his heart, and Peter smiled faintly. “I don’t think you’d have made a really satisfactory angel,” he said, and left.
Comyn sat on the bunk and put his face between his hands, and in the darkness behind his eyes he saw again the swift white fires leaping and the fierce and splendid burning of the stars. Something shook him like a great hand and left him empty.
He didn’t want to move around. He didn’t want to go back to doing the things he’d done before, and he didn’t want to see anybody. But he did want a drink. He wanted a drink very badly, and there wasn’t any where he was, so he got up and went outside.
Whatever French and Roth had done to him had left him weak as a baby. Everything seemed dim around him, touched with unreality. In the main cabin, he found a bunch of the others sitting around, looking like men who had been sick. They looked at him and then looked away again, as though he reminded them of something they didn’t want to remember.
There was a bottle on the table. It had already been punished hard. Comyn put down most of what was left in it. It didn’t make him feel any better, but it numbed him so he didn’t care how he felt. He glanced around, but nobody looked at him or said anything to him.
Comyn said, “Knock it off, will you. I won’t explode.”
There were a couple of feeble grins and a pretense of greeting, and then they went back to their thinking again. Comyn began to realize that they weren’t thinking about him as much as they were about themselves.
One of them spoke up. “I want to know—I want to know what we saw. Those things…”
French sighed. “We all want to know. And we never will, not completely. But…” He paused, then said, “They weren’t things. They were life, a form of life inconceivable except among the alien elements of a transuranic world. Life, I think, seated in linkages of energy between atoms infinitely more complex than uranium. Life, self-sufficient, perhaps coeval with our universe, and able to impregnate our cruder, simpler tissues with its own transuranic chemistry…”
Comyn thought again of what Vickrey had said: the fountainhead, the beginning.
Someone said grimly, “I know one thing: no one’s getting me back there, for anything.”
Peter Cochrane said, “Relax. Nobody’s going back to Barnard II.”
But when Comyn was again alone with Peter, he said, “You’re wrong. In the end, I’ll go back.”
Peter shook his head. “You think you will. You’re still under its touch. But that will fade.”
“No.”
But it did. It faded; as the timeless hours went by, it faded…as he ate and slept and went through all the motions of being human. Not the memory of it; that did not dim. But the fierce, aching pull of a life beyond life couldn’t hold a man every minute, not when he was shaving, not when he was taking off his shoes, not when he was drunk.
There came an end at last to the timelessness and the waiting. They suffered again through the eerie wrenchings and vertiginous shifts and came out of drive into normal space. And presently Luna shone like a silver shield beyond the forward ports, and the second Big Jump was finished.
After the long confinement of the ship the eruption of new voices and unfamiliar faces was confusing. The gardens hadn’t changed in the million years Comyn had been away, nor the bulk of the great house in the blaze of the lunar day. Comyn walked through it all like a stranger, and yet everything was the same except himself.
He was not the only one who felt that way. It was a joyless business. They had brought back with them from a foreign sun the same chill shadow that had covered Ballantyne, and Claudia was wailing loud over the death of Stanley. They had told her he was dead, and in a sense it was quite true. They had not conquered any stars. A star had conquered them.
Comyn searched among the faces for one he did not see, and somebody told him. “She wouldn’t stay here after the ship took off. She said the place was haunted, and that she couldn’t stand it. She went back to New York.”
Comyn said, “I know exactly what she meant.”
The halls of the great house were cool and dim, and Comyn would have waited in them alone, but Peter said:
“I may need you, Comyn. You were closer to it than any of us, and Jonas won’t be easy to convince.”
Reluctantly, Comyn stood once more in the crowded, old-fashioned room that looked out over the Mare Imbrium, and Jonas was as he had been before: an ancient dusty man huddled in a chair, more frail, more wrinkled, slipping farther over that ultimate dark edge. But still he raked with his claw-like hands at life, still he burned with ambition.
“You got it, eh?” he said to Peter, leaning his cage of bones forward in the chair. “Cochrane Transuranic! Has a good sound, doesn’t it? How much, Peter? T
ell me how much!”
Peter said slowly, “We didn’t get it, Grandfather. The world is…poisoned. Ballantyne’s crew and three of our own men—” He paused, and then muttered the fictional word. “There won’t be any Cochrane Transuranic, now or ever.”
For a long moment Jonas was utterly still, and the color surged up into his face until it threatened to burst the parchment skin. Comyn felt a distant pang of pity for him. He was such an old man, and he wanted so much to steal a star before he died.
“You let it go,” said Jonas, and he cursed Peter with all the breath he had. Coward was the kindest word. “All right, I’ll find a man who’s not afraid. I’ll send out another ship—”
“No,” said Peter. “I’m going down to talk to the Government men. There’ll be other voyages to other stars, but Barnard’s must be let alone. The radioactive contamination there is a kind nobody can fight.”
Jonas’ withered lips still moved, but no sound came out of them, and his body jerked in a perfect paroxysm of rage. Peter said wearily:
“I’m sorry, but it’s so.”
“Sorry,” whispered Jonas. “If I were young again, if I could only stand, I’d find a way…”
“You wouldn’t,” said Comyn sharply. Suddenly a passion came over him. He remembered many things and he bent over Jonas fiercely and said, “There are some things even the Cochranes aren’t big enough to handle. You wouldn’t understand if I explained to you, but that world is safe for all time, from everybody. And Peter’s right.”
He turned and left the room, and Peter came after him. Comyn made a gesture of distaste, and said, “Let’s go.”
When they landed in New York, when they finally got clear of the mob scene that went on for a time around the spaceport, Comyn told Peter:
“You go on to your Government men. I got better things to do.”
“But if they want you too—”
“I’ll be in the Rocket Room’s bar.”
Later, sitting in the bar, Comyn kept his back to the video, but he couldn’t shut out the breathless voice that tumbled out the news to all the gasping, excited listeners.
“…and this magnificent second voyage, while it explored only a radioactive-poisoned world that cannot be exploited or visited again, is still another great trail blazed to the stars. Other ships will soon be going out there, other men…”
Comyn thought that sure, they’d go, all full of neat little schemes. But they’d find out that it wasn’t the same as their little planets. They’d find they were out in the big league and that human games were not played out there.
He didn’t turn, not right away, when a throaty voice at his shoulder interrupted.
“Buy me a drink, Comyn?”
When he did turn he saw it was Sydna. She looked just the same. She wore a white dress that revealed her brown shoulders, and her improbable hair was the color of flax, and she had that cool, lazy smile.
“I’ll buy you a drink,” he said. “Sure. Sit down.”
She did and lit a cigarette, and then looked at him through the drifting smoke.
“You don’t look quite so good, Comyn.”
“Don’t I?”
“Peter said that you found something pretty bad out there.”
“Yeah. So bad that we didn’t dare to stay, so bad we had to run right back to Earth.”
“But you found Paul Rogers?”
“I found him.”
“But you didn’t bring him back?”
“No.”
She picked up her drink. “All right. Tactful Sydna, who knows when to keep her mouth shut. Here’s to you.”
After a moment, she said, “I found out something too, Comyn. You’re a rather ugly roughneck—”
“I thought you knew that.”
“I did. But what I found out was that in spite of it, I missed you.”
“So?”
“Oh, hell, I can’t keep being coy,” she said. “I’m leading up to the idea of getting married. I’ve thought about it. It’d be so much more convenient.”
“Have you got enough money that I wouldn’t have to work?” he asked.
“Plenty, Comyn.”
“Well, that’s something,” he said. “Though I’d probably get tired of spending it and go back to work anyway. There’s only one thing…”
“Yes?”
“You ought to know something, Sydna. I’m not the same guy you got acquainted with. I got rearranged a little inside.”
“It doesn’t show much.”
“It will. You didn’t like it up in your lunar castle because it was haunted. How will you like living with a haunted man?”
“I’ll unhaunt you, Comyn.”
“Can you?”
“It’ll be fun trying. Let’s have another.”
He turned and signaled the waiter and turned back to her, and the strange pain took him by the throat again: the pain of loss, of exile, of a fading longing.
I’m slipping back, back all the way to Arch Comyn, and I don’t want to! I’m forgetting what it was like, what it could have been like, and all my life I’ll think of it and want to go back, and be afraid to…
Let it go, he thought, let it go and slip back. It might be second-rate to be just human but it’s comfortable, it’s comfortable…
He looked across the table at Sydna. “Shall we drink on it?”
She nodded and reached out her free hand. And when he took it, it quivered inside his grasp. She said:
“All of a sudden, I don’t want another drink. I want to cry.”
She did.
===END===
Table of Contents
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
The Big Jump Page 13