The Big Jump Read online

  This was the hard part. This was the worst of it. At first reason had told him: keep your jaw shut. As long as they aren’t sure, you’ll have a chance: they won’t kill you. Now it was only deaf, blind instinct. Comyn weaved his head from side to side, trying to get up, to get away. But he couldn’t, he was tied.

  “What did Ballantyne tell you, Comyn?”

  “Nothing.”

  The flat palm gently jarred his brain.

  “You were locked up with him for nearly twenty minutes. We heard his voice. What did he say, Comyn?”

  “He screamed. That’s all.”

  The cupped palm, bursting his eardrum, cracked his skull down the middle.

  “What did he tell you, Comyn?”

  “Nothing!”

  The gentle approach. “Listen, Comyn, we’re all tired. Let’s quit fooling around. Just tell us what Ballantyne said and we can all go home and sleep. You’d like that, Comyn—a nice soft bed and nobody to bother you. Just tell us.”

  “Didn’t talk. Just…screamed.”

  The other approach. “Okay, Comyn. You’re a big guy. You got scars on your knuckles. You think you’re tough, and you are—oh, yes, a very big muscular iron-headed character. But they don’t come so tough they can’t be softened.”

  Fists this time, or whatever they were using. The slow dribble of blood down the side of his face, into his mouth, into his eyes. Pain in his belly.

  “What did Ballantyne say?”

  “Nothing…” A faint whisper, trailing off.

  Voices, jumbled, distant. Let him rest, he’s nearly out.… Rest, hell, give me the ammonia. The biting fumes, the gasp, the partial return of light. And it began again. Who told you we had Ballantyne? Who are you working for? What did Ballantyne say?

  There came a time when Comyn thought he heard the opening of a door and then a new voice, angry, authoritative. He sensed a sudden change going on, things or people moving quickly in the reddish half-blind obscurity. Somebody was doing something with his hands. Instinct told him when they were free. He rose and struck out, hit something that yelled, caught it and held on with a single-hearted desire to tear it in pieces. Then it slipped away, everything slipped away, and there was only darkness and a great peace.…

  He woke up gradually, as out of a long sleep. He was in a very comfortable bedroom, and a stranger was standing over him with a certain air of impatience. He was a youngish, well-fed, sandy-haired man who looked as though he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders and considered Comyn an unwelcome addition to the burden, one he wanted to be done with as soon as possible.

  Comyn let him stand, until he had dredged up what memories he possessed and got them in order. Then he sat up, very slowly and carefully, and the stranger spoke.

  “No internal injuries and no broken bones, Mr. Comyn. We’ve done all we could for the bruises. You’ve been here two days.”

  Comyn grunted. He felt his face, touching lightly.

  “Our doctors did their best there, too. They assure me there won’t be a scar.”

  “That’s fine. Thanks very much,” Comyn said sourly, and looked up. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Stanley, William Stanley. I’m business manager for the Cochrane enterprises here on Mars. Look here, Mr. Comyn.” Stanley bent over him, frowning. “I want you to understand that this was done to you absolutely without the knowledge or sanction of the management. I was away on business, or it would never have happened.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Comyn. “Since when have the Cochranes objected to a little blood?”

  Stanley sighed. “The old reputation is hard to live down, even though it was made two generations ago. We employ a lot of men, Mr. Comyn. Sometimes some of them make mistakes. This was one of them. The Cochranes apologize.” He paused, and then added, making sure that Comyn got every word quite clearly, “We felt that the best apology lay in not pressing charges against you for some rather serious offenses.”

  “I guess that makes us even,” Comyn said.

  “Good. Your papers, passport, and wallet are on the table there beside you. In those boxes on the chair you’ll find clothing to replace your own, which was beyond repair. Passage home to Earth has been arranged for you on the next Cochrane liner. And I think that’s all.”

  “Not quite,” said Comyn, and got stiffly out of bed. The room went round him twice, and then steadied. He looked at Stanley from under sullen brows and laughed.

  “Next step in the game, huh? You couldn’t beat anything out of me, so now you’ll try sweetness and light. Who are you trying to kid?”

  Stanley’s mouth tightened. “I don’t understand you.”

  Comyn’s gesture was sweepingly contemptuous. “You’re not going to let me run loose with what I know.”

  “Exactly what do you know, Mr. Comyn?” asked Stanley with a curious politeness.

  “Ballantyne. You had him here, hidden, in secret, when the whole System was waiting to welcome him back. You, the Cochranes, trying to grab away from him whatever he’d found! Dirty pool and dirty hands playing it. Where’s his ship? Where are the men who went with him? Where have you got them hidden?”

  Anger was in Comyn’s voice, a dark flush of anger in his cheeks. His hands moved in short, hungry circles.

  “Ballantyne made the Big Jump, he and the men with him. They did the biggest thing men have ever done. They reached out and touched the stars. And you tried to hide it, to cover up, to rob them even of the glory they had coming! So now you’re going to turn me loose to tell the System what you’ve done? The hell you are.”

  Stanley looked at him for a long moment: a big furious man standing naked and incongruous in the handsome bedroom, the half-healed marks and bruises on him, still looking for something to hit. When he spoke it was almost with pity.

  “I’m sorry to take the wind out of your sails so cruelly, but I broke the news two days ago, as soon as Ballantyne was dead. Far from trying to rob him, we were making every effort to save his life—without benefit of sensation-hungry mobs, invading newsmen, and people like you. Everybody seems to feel quite grateful toward us.”

  Comyn sat down slowly on the bed. He said something, but the words were not audible.

  “As to the other men…” Stanley shook his head. “Ballantyne was alone in the ship. The controls were almost completely automatic, and it was possible for one man to operate them. He was…as you saw him. He never knew he had made it back.”

  “A hell of a thing,” said Comyn quietly. “A real hell of a thing. What about the ship itself—and the log? Ballantyne’s log. What did it say about Paul Rogers?”

  “That’s all public knowledge. You can read it in any paper.”

  “I want to know. What happened to Paul Rogers?”

  Stanley studied him curiously. “He must have meant a lot to you to make you go to such lengths.”

  “He saved my neck once,” said Comyn briefly. “We were friends.”

  Stanley shrugged. “I can’t help you. The log and the various scientific data gathered on the outward trip were all clear up to the time they approached the worlds of Barnard’s Star. After that—nothing.”

  “Nothing at all?” Comyn’s blood began to stir with a deep and almost unpleasant excitement. If that was true, the score or so of words he had heard from Ballantyne’s lips were worth—what? Kingships, empires—a damn sight more, for sure, than the life of one Arch Comyn.

  Stanley answered. “No. There’s no hint of what happened afterward. The log simply broke off.”

  Comyn’s eyes, very cold and catlike, examined Stanley’s face minutely. “I think you’re lying.”

  Stanley began to get an ugly look around the mouth. “Look here, Comyn, all things considered I think you’ve been treated pretty decently. And if I were you I’d go away quietly without trying everybody’s patience too far.”

  “Yes,” said Comyn reflectively. “I guess so.” He went over to the boxes on the chair and began to open them. “It would strai
n your patience pretty hard, wouldn’t it, if I asked about the Ballantyne drive? The star-drive he developed, the first and only one that worked. Did you happen to take a look at it?”

  “We did. And we did more.” Suddenly Stanley was facing him across the chair, his words coming sharp, and rapid, every line of him altered by a startling intensity. “You annoy me, Comyn. You make me sick, battering your way in where you haven’t any business and making trouble for everybody. So I’ll explain to you, speaking as a Cochrane, because I married into the family and consider myself part of it, and I’m tired of all the two-bit ciphers in the System taking cracks at it.

  “We saved Ballantyne’s ship from smashing head-on into Pluto. We’d had patrols out looking for it for weeks, of course, and we beat some others to it. We took the ship to our emergency field on Cochrane Beta in the asteroid belt, and we dismantled the Ballantyne drive. Then we flew it to the Cochrane estate on Luna, where nobody else can get at it. And I’ll tell you why.

  “Every one of these attempts to make the Big Jump has been backed by us or another corporation, or a government that could put up the capital. No private individual could do it. Ballantyne developed that drive with Cochrane money. He built his ship with it, made his flight with it. It’s bought and paid for. Now are there any more questions you want to ask?”

  “No,” said Comyn slowly. “No, I think that’s enough for one day.”

  He began pulling the clothes out of the box. Stanley swung around and started for the door. His eyes still glittered. Just before he reached it Comyn said:

  “You think I’m lying, too.”

  Stanley shrugged. “I expect you’d have talked if you’d had anything to say. And I doubt very much that you could have brought Ballantyne back to consciousness when all the doctors had failed.”

  He went out, smacking the door shut hard behind him. And there it is, thought Comyn bleakly. A door slammed right in my face. The Cochranes are all fine, law-abiding people; Ballantyne’s dead; the log book has nothing in it—and where do I go from here?

  Home, probably. Home to Earth, with Ballantyne’s ghostly voice whispering transuranic in his ears, with Ballantyne’s awful screaming ringing in his soul. What had they found out there, those five who had reached the stars? What can a man see under this sun or another to put the look on his face that Ballantyne had had?

  He thought about those few disjointed words and what they might mean. Ballantyne had landed, somewhere on the worlds of Barnard’s Star. And he had left Paul Rogers there, with Strang and Kessel and Vickrey and something called the Transuranae.

  Comyn shuddered. There was a tingling on his skin and a taste of something evil in his mouth. All of a sudden he was sorry he had ever come to seek out Ballantyne and got himself entangled in the trailing edges of a shadow cast by an alien sun. If only Ballantyne hadn’t screamed…

  And now the Cochranes were going to let him run a while. They didn’t really believe that Ballantyne had remained quiet. They couldn’t afford to risk believing it. There were too many others as hungry as they were for the stars, and Comyn—if he liked—could make himself rich by offering what he knew to the highest bidder. A corollary thought evolved itself, and Comyn turned it over in his mind. It seemed to make sense. The Cochranes, on the other hand, didn’t know what Comyn knew, and they would let him live as long as possible on the chance that they could get it out of him. That was the reason for the beating and the reason for this so-called freedom he now had.

  It dawned on Comyn that he was in trouble, way in, over his head. He had expected trouble with the Cochranes. He had, in fact, come looking for it. But things had got fouled up, and here he was in the middle of something so big he couldn’t even guess the end of it. It was a game for stars, and he, Arch Comyn, held just one little hole card…

  But, whatever the Cochranes did to him, he was going to find out about Paul Rogers.

  THREE

  Earth was one long howling shriek of excitement. Comyn had been back in New York for four days, and the frenzy had shown no signs of calming down. If anything, it was worse.

  Nobody slept. Nobody seemed to work. Nobody even went home anymore. They lived in the bars, in the streets, in the video houses. They swarmed around the public communications outlets and swirled in thick purposeless torrents up and down the canyon streets. It was like New Year’s Eve a thousand times enlarged.

  The Big Jump had been made. Man had finally reached the stars, and every clerk and shopgirl, every housewife, businessman and bum felt a personal hysteria of pride and achievement. They swayed in dense masses across Times Square feeling big with a sense of history, sensing the opening drumbeats of an epoch in what they saw and heard from the huge news-service screens.

  They talked. They drank and wept and laughed, and a surprising number of them, thinking of the vastness of galactic space and the many stars that there were in it, went into the churches and prayed. Suddenly it seemed as though some very doubtful doors had been opened upon them.

  Comyn had spent most of the four days since he landed prowling the streets. Like everybody else, he was too restless to stay in his room. But he had a different reason. He let the crowds drift him where they would, shouldering his way at intervals into one bar or another, drinking steadily but not too much—and thinking.

  He had a lot to think about: life and death, the few last words of a man, the Cochranes, and a game of chess that was being played with stars for pawns.

  Stars, thought Comyn, and me. There I am, right up in front and all ready to get knocked over, unless I can figure the right way to jump.

  It took some figuring. And the problem was made tougher by the fact that he was no longer alone, even when he brushed his teeth. Out of doors, wherever he went, a shadow went with him. Indoors, in his furnished room, the privacy was only a hollow sham. Listening and scanning devices had been installed almost as soon as he rented a place. He knew it, but hadn’t bothered to try to find them all and tear them out. The longer he kept the Cochranes guessing, the better.

  They’re waiting, he thought. Waiting for me to make my play.

  And what was his play going to be? The Cochranes, who had made nine planets their back yard, were in this for wealth and power as wide as the stars. He had horned in for only one thing: to find out what had become of Paul Rogers.

  It hadn’t been a very bright thing to do. But then Rogers hadn’t been very bright either, to stick his own irreproachable neck out for a not-so-irreproachable mug named Comyn who had got himself into very bad trouble. And Rogers had done that for no better reason than that they had lived on the same street and stolen apples together a long time ago.

  But bright or not, it was done, and he couldn’t get out of it. The only thing left was to buck the Cochranes.

  He had studied the published reports of the finding of Ballantyne’s ship and what was in it. Every account agreed that Ballantyne’s logbooks broke off short with the approach to the system of Barnard’s Star. That meant either that the Cochranes were lying and had secreted one or more of the most vital books for their own uses, or that the Cochranes were not lying and knew no more than anyone else whether Ballantyne had landed or what he had found.

  If that was true, he, Comyn, was the only man alive who did know. He might, just possibly, have a weapon big enough, with which to tackle the Cochranes. Or he might, just as possibly, have nothing but his own death warrant.

  In either case, it seemed a good idea to find out a little more about the meaning of a certain word. And that, at least, would be easy. Inter-World Engineering had research labs in the same building that housed their home offices. Nobody could get suspicious if he went to the main office under cover of trying to get his job back.

  He went there, and the now-familiar unobtrusive form in the nondescript clothes went with him, as far as it could. Comyn left it outside the building. But while he was waiting for the lift, a combination of polished marble, light, and reflection from the doors revealed to him a thing
that sent a quick cold chill streaking up his back.

  He had not one shadow, but two.

  He rode up to Inter-World’s floor filled with an unpleasant sense of wonder. The Cochranes on his tail he could understand. But who else? And—why?

  From the main office he went up a flight of private stairs to the labs and asked for Dubman, a physicist he had gotten to know briefly during a sloppy Venusian spaceport project.

  Dubman was a brilliant little man who had turned waspish on the world because his liver wouldn’t let him drink anymore. He stared when Comyn asked him,

  “Can you tell me something about transuranic elements?”

  “I’m not busy enough, I’ve got to teach high-school physics to workbosses,” Dubman said. “Look, there’s a library with textbooks of physics in it. Good-bye.”

  “I only want a fast breakdown,” Comyn protested. “And it’s important.”

  “Don’t tell me work-gang slavedrivers have to know nuclear physics now!”

  Comyn decided to tell the truth—at least, part of it. “It isn’t that. There’s somebody I’ve got to impress, and I’ve got to know enough about this to make a stall.”

  Dubman jeered. “Are you going in for intellectual girls now? That’s new. I remember hearing about your exploits and I never—”

  Patiently, Comyn steered him back to the subject.

  Dubman said, “Transuranic elements are elements that by our natural laws shouldn’t be—and aren’t.”

  He paused, proud of his epigram.

  Comyn said, “Yeah. Meaning?”

  “Meaning,” said Dubman, irritated by the lack of appreciation, “that there are ninety-two chemical elements that make up everything in our solar system. They run from hydrogen, number one, the lightest, to uranium, number ninety-two, the heaviest, and most complex.”

  “I got that far in school,” Comyn told him.

  “Did you? I wouldn’t have guessed it, Comyn. Well, back in 1945 they added something. They built up artificial elements heavier than uranium, neptunium, number ninety-three, and plutonium, number ninety-four. Transuranic elements, that didn’t exist naturally on Earth or our other planets at all, but could be made to exist artificially. That was only the start. They kept building more and more complex transuranic elements, and finally Petersen proved…”