The Jaunt
Steven King

Chapter 1"This is the last call for Jaunt-701," the pleasant female voice echoed through the Blue Concourse of
New York's Port Authority Terminal. The PAT had not changed much in the last three hundred years or
so - it was still gungy and a little frightening. The automated female voice was probably the mostplesant thing about it. "This is Jaunt Service to Whitehead City, Mars," the voice continued. "Allticketed passengers should now be in the Blue Concourse sleep lounge. Make sure your validation
papers are in order. Thank you."The upstairs lounge was not at all grungy. It was wall-to-wallcarpeted in oyster gray. The walls were an eggshell white and hung with plesant nonrepresentational
prints. A steady, soothing progression of colors met and swirled on the ceiling. There were one
hundred couches in the large room, neatly spaced in rows of ten. Five Jaunt attendants circulate,speakingin low, cherry voices and offering glasses of milk. At one side of the room was theentranceway, flanked by armed guards and another Jaunt attendant who was checking the validation
papers of a latecomer, a harried-looking businessman with the New York World Times folded under
one arm. Directly opposite, the floor dropped away in a trough about five feet wide and perhaps ten
feet long; it passed through a doorless opening and looked a bit like a child's slide. The Oates family
lay side by side on four Jaunt couches near the far end ofthe room. Mark Oates and his wife, Marilys,
flanked the two children. "Daddy, will you tell me about the Jaunt now?" Ricky asked. "You promised.""Yeah, Dad, you promised," Patricia added, and giggled shilly for no good reason. A Businessman witha build like a bull glanced over at them and went back to the fodder of papers he was examining as helay on his back, his spit-shined shoes neatly together.
From everywhere came the low murmur of conversation and the rustle of passengers settling down on
the Jaunt couches. Mark glanced over at Marilys Oates and winked. She winked back, but she wasalmost as nervous as Patty sounded. Why not? Mark thought. First Jaunt for all three of them. He andMarilys had discussed the advantages and drawbacks of moving the whole family for the last six
months - since he'd gotten notification from Texaco Water that he was being transferred to WhiteheadCity. Finally they had decided that all of them would go for the two years Mark would be stationed on
Mars. He wondered now, looking at Marilys's pale face, if she was regretting the decision. He glanced
at his watch and saw it was still almost half an hour to Jaunt-time. That was enough time to tell thestory ... and he supposed it would take the kids' minds off their nervousness. Who knew, maybe it
would even cool Marilys out a little. "All right," he said. Ricky and Pat were watching him seriously, his
son twelve, his daughter nine. He told himself again that Ricky would be deep in the swamp of puberty
and his daughter would likely be developing breast by the time they got back to earth, and again
found it difficult to believe. The kids would be going to the tiny Whitehead Combined School with thehundred-odd engineering and oil-company brats that were there; his son might well be going on ageology field trip to Phobos not so many months distant. It was difficult to believe ... but true. Who
knows ? he thought wryly. maybe it'll do something about my Jaunt-jumps, too. "So far as we know,"
he began, "the Jaunt was invented about three hundred and twenty years ago, around the year 1987,
by a fellow named Victor Carune. He did it as part of a private research project that was funded bysome government money ... and eventually the government took it over, of course. In the end it came
down to either the government or the oil companies. The reason we don't know the exact date is
because Carune was something of an eccentric - " "You mean he was crazy, Dad?" Ricky asked.
"Eccentric means a little bit crazy, dear," Marilys said, and smiled across the children at Mark. She
looked a little less nervous now, he thought."Oh." "Anyway, he'd been experimenting with the process
for quite some time before he informed the government of what he had," Mark went on, "and he only

told them because he was running out of money and they weren't going to re-fund him." "Your money
cheerfully refunded," Pat said, and giggled shrilly again.
"That's right, honey," Mark said, and ruffled her hair gently. At the far end of the room he saw a door
slide noiselessly open and two more attendants came out, dressed in the bright red jumpers of the
Jaunt Service, pushing a rolling table. On it was a stainless-steel nozzle attached to a rubber hose;beneath the table's skirts, tastefully hidden, Mark knew there were two bottles of gas; in the net bag
hooked to the side were one hundred disposable masks. Mark went on talking, not wanting his people
to see the representative of Lethe until they had to. And, if he was given enough time to tell the wholestory, they would welcome the gas-passers with open arms.
Considering the alternative.
"Of course, you know that the Jaunt is teleportation, no more or less," he said. "Sometimes in college
chemistry and physics they call it the Carune Process, but it's really teleportation, and it was Carune
himself - if you can believe the stories - who named it ?the Jaunt.' He was a science-fiction reader,
and there's a story by a man named Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination it's called, and this fellow
Bester made up the word ?jaunte' for teleportation in it. Except in his book, you could Jaunt just by
thinking about it, and we can't really do that." The attendants were fixing a mask to the steel nozzle
and handing it to an elderly woman at the far end of the room. She took it, inhaled once, and fell quiet
and limp on her couch. Her shirt had pulled up a little, revealing one slack thigh road-mapped withvaricose veins. An attendant considerately readjusted for her while the other pulled off the used mask
and affixed a fresh one. It was a process that made Mark think of the plastic glasses in motel rooms.
He wished to God that Patty would cool out a little bit; he had seen children who had to be held down,
and sometimes they screamed as the rubber mask covered their faces. It was not an abnormal
reaction in a child, he supposed, but it was nasty to watch and he didn't want to see it happen to
Patty. About Rick he felt more confident.
"I guess you could say the Jaunt came along at the last possible moment," he resumed. He spoke
toward Ricky, but reached across and took his daughter's hand. Her palm was cool and sweating
lightly. "The world was running out of oil, and most of what was left belonged to the middle-eastern
desert peoples, who were committed to using it as a political weapon. They had formed an oil cartel
they called OPEC - " "What's a cartel, Daddy?" Patty asked.
"Well, a monopoly," Mark said.
"Like a club, honey," Marilys said. "And you could only be in that club if you had lots of oil.""Oh.""I don't have time to sketch the whole mess in for you," Mark said. "You'll study some of it in school,
but it was a mess - let's let it go at that. If you owned a car, you could only drive it two days a week,
and gasoline cost fifteen oldbucks a gallon - " "Gosh," Ricky said, "it only costs four cents or so agallon now, doesn't it, Dad?"
Mark smiled. "That's why we are going where we're going, Rick. There's enough oil on Mars to lastalmost eight thousand years, and enough on Venus to last another twenty thousand ... but oil isn't
even important, anymore. Now what we need most of all is - " "Water!" Patty cried, and theBusinessman looked up from his papers and smiled at her for a moment.

"That's right," Mark said. "Because in the years between 1960 and 2030, we poisoned most of ours.
The first water lift from the Martian ice-caps was called - " "Operation Straw." That was Ricky.
"Yes, 2045 or thereabouts. But long before that, the Jaunt was being used to find sources of cleanwater here on earth. And now water is our major Martian export ... the oil's strictly a sideline. But it
was important then."
The kids nodded.
"The point is, those things were always there, but we were only able to get it because of the Jaunt.
When Carune invented his process, the world was slipping into a dark age. The winter before, over ten
thousand people had frozen to death in the United States alone because there wasn't enough energy
to heat them.""Oh, yuck," Patty said matter-of-factly.
Mark glanced to his right and saw the attendants talking to a timid-looking man, persuading him.
At last he took the mask seemed to fall dead on his couch seconds later. First-timer, Mark thought.
You can always tell.
"For Carune, it started with a pencil ... some keys ... a wrist watch ... the some mice. The mice
showed him there was a problem ..."
Victor Carune came back to his laboratory in a stumbling fever of excitement. He thought he knew
how Morse had felt, and Alexander Graham Bell, and Edison . . . but this was bigger than all of them,and twice he had almost wrecked the truck on the way back from the pet shop in New Paltz, where hehad spend his last twenty dollars on nine white mice. What he had left in the world was ninety-three
cents in his right front pocket and the eighteen dollars in his savings account . . . but this did notoccur to him. And if it had, it certainly would not have bothered him. The lab was in a renovated barnat the end of a mile-long dirt road off Route 26. It was making the turn onto this road where he hadjust missed cracking up his Brat pickup truck for the second time. The gas tank was almost empty andthere would be no more for ten days to two weeks, but this did not concern him, either. His mind wasin a delirious whirl. What had happened was not totally unexpected, no.
One of the reasons the government had funded him even to the paltry tune of twenty thousand a year
was because the unrealized possibility had always been there in the field of particle transmission. But
to have it happen like this . . . suddenly . . . with no warning . . . and powered by less electricity than
was needed to run a color TV . . . God! Christ!
He brought the Brat to a screech-halt in the dirt of the door yard, grabbed the box on the dirty seatbeside him by its grab-handles (on the box were dogs and cats and hamsters and goldfish and thelegend I CAME FROM STACKPOLE'S HOUSE OF PETS) and ran for the big double doors. From inside
the box came the scurry and whisk of his test subjects. He tried to push one of the big doors open
along its track, and when it wouldn't budge, he remembered that he had locked it. Carune uttered aloud "Shit!" and fumbled for his keys. The government commanded that the lab be locked at all times- it was one of the strings they put on their money - but Carune kept forgetting. He brought his keys
out and for a moment simply stared at them, mesmerized, running the ball of his thumb over thenotches in the Brat's ignition key. He thought again: God! Christ! Then he scrabbled through the keys
on the ring for the Yale key that unlocked the barn door.
As the first telephone had been used inadvertently - Bell crying into it, "Watson, come here!" when hespilled some acid on his papers and himself - so the first act of teleportation had occurred by accident.
Victor Carune had teleported the first two fingers of his left hand across the fifty-yard width of thebarn.
Carune had set up two portals at opposite sides of the barn. On his end was a simple ion gun,available from any electronics supply warehouse for under five hundred dollars. On the other end,
standing just beyond the far portal - both of them rectangular and the size of a paperback book - wasa cloud chamber. Between them was what appeared to be an opaque shower curtain, except thatshower curtains are not made of lead. The idea was to shoot the ions through Portal One and thenwalk around and watch them streaming across the cloud chamber standing just beyond Portal Two,with the lead shield between to prove they really were being transmitted. Except that, for the last two
years, the process had only worked twice, and Carune didn't have the slightest idea why. As he wassetting the ion gun in place, his fingers had slipped through the portal - ordinarily no problem, but thismorning his hip had also brushed the toggle switch on the control panel at the left of the portal. He
was not aware of what had happened - the machinery gave off only the lowest audible hum - until hefelt a tingling sensation in his fingers.
Chapter 2"It was not like an electric shock," Carune wrote in his one and only article on the subject before
the government shut him up. The article was published, of all places, in Popular Mechanics. He
had sold it to them for seven hundred and fifty dollars in a last-ditch effort to keep the Jaunt amatter of private enterprise. "There was none of that unpleasant tingle that one gets if one
grasps a frayed lamp cord, for instance. It was more like the sensation one gets if one puts one's
hand on the casing of some small machine that is working very hard. The vibration is so fast andlight that it is, literally, a tingling sensation. "Then I looked down at the portal and saw that myindex finger was gone on a diagonal slant through the middle knuckle, and my second finger wasgone slightly above that.
In addition, the nail portion of my third finger had disappeared." Carune had jerked his hand backinstinctively, crying out. He so much expected to see blood, he wrote later, that he actually
hallucinated blood for a moment or two. His elbow struck the ion gun and knocked it off the table.
He stood there with his fingers in his mouth, verifying that they were still there, and whole. The
thought that he had been working too hard crossed his mind. And then the other thought crossed
his mind: the thought that the last set of modifications might have . . . might have done
something.
He did not push his fingers back in; in fact, Carune only Jaunted once more in his entire life.
At first, he did nothing. He took a long, aimless walk around the barn, running his hands throughhis hair, wondering if he should call Carson in New Jersey or perhaps Buffington in Charlotte.
Carson wouldn't accept a collect phone call, the cheap ass-kissing bastard, but Buffington
probably would. Then an idea struck and he ran across to Portal Two, thinking that if his fingers
had actually crossed the barn, there might be some sign of it.

There was not, of course. Portal Two stood atop three stacked Pomona orange crates, looking likenothing so much as one of those toy guillotines missing the blade. On one side of its
stainless-steel frame was a plug-in jack, from which a cord ran back to the transmission terminal,
which was little more than a particle transformer hooked into a computer feed-line.
Which reminded him Carune glanced at his watch and saw it was quarter past eleven. His deal with the government
consisted of short money, plus computer time, which was infinitely valuable. His computer tie-inlasted until three o'clock this afternoon, and then it was good-bye until Monday. He had to getmoving, had to do something - "I glanced at the pile of crates again," Carune writes in his
Popular Mechanics article, "and then I looked at the pads of my fingers. And sure enough, theproof was there. It would not, I thought then convince anyone but myself; but in the beginning,of course, it is only one's self that one has to convince.""What was it, Dad?" Ricky asked.
"Yeah!" Patty added. "What?"
Mark grinned a little. They were all hooked now, even Marilys. They had nearly forgotten where
they were. From the corner of his eye he could see the Jaunt attendants whisper-wheeling theircart slowly among the Jaunters, putting them to sleep. It was never as rapid a process in thecivilian sector as it was in the military, he had discovered; civilians got nervous and wanted totalk it over. The nozzle and the rubber mask were too reminiscent of hospital operating rooms,
where the surgeon with his knives lurked somewhere behind the anaesthetist with her selectionof gases in stainless-steel canisters. Sometimes there was panic, hysteria; and always there werea few who simply lost their nerve. Mark had observed two of these as he spoke to the children:
two men who had simply arisen from their couches, walked across to the entryway with nofanfare at all, unpinned the validation papers that had been affixed to their lapels, turned themin, and exited without looking back. Jaunt attendants were under strict instructions not to argue
with those who left; there were always standbys, sometimes as many as forty or fifty of them,hoping against hope. As those who simply couldn't take it left, standbys were let in with their own
validations pinned to their shirts. "Carune found two splinters in his index finger," he told thechildren. "He took them out and put them aside. One was lost, but you can see the other one in
the Smithsonian Annex in Washington. It's in a hermetically sealed glass case near the moonrocks the first space travellers brought back from the moon - " "Our moon, Dad, or one ofMars's?" Ricky asked.
"Ours," Mark said, smiling a little. "Only one manned rocket flight has ever landed on Mars, Ricky,
and that was a French expedition somewhere about 2030. Anyway, that's why there happens to
be a plain old splinter from an orange crate in the Smithsonian Institution. Because it's the firstobject that we have that was actually teleported - Jaunted - across space.""What happened then?" Patty asked. "Well, according to the story, Carune ran . . ."Carune ran back to Portal One and stood there for a moment, heart thudding, out of breath. Got
to calm down, he told himself. Got to think about this. You can't maximize your time if you go off
half-cocked. Deliberately disregarding the forefront of his mind, which was screaming at him tohurry up and do something, he dug his nail-clippers out of his pocket and used the point of thefile to dig the splinters out of his index finger.
He dropped them onto the white inner sleeve of a Hershey bar he had eaten while tinkering withthe transformer and trying to widen its afferent capability (he had apparently succeeded in thatbeyond his wildest dreams). One rolled off the wrapper and was lost; the other ended up in theSmithsonian Institution, locked in a glass case that was cordoned off with thick velvet ropes andwatched vigilantly and eternally by a computer-monitored closed-circuit TV camera.
The splinter extraction finished, Carune felt a little calmer. A pencil. That was as good asanything. He took one from beside the clipboard on the shelf above him and ran it gently into
Portal One. It disappeared smoothly, inch by inch, like something in an optical illusion or in a very
good magician's trick. The pencil had said EBERHARD FABER NO. 2 on one of its sides, black
letters stamped on yellow-painted wood. When he had pushed the pencil in until all but EBERH
had disappeared, Carune walked around to the other side of Portal One.
He looked in. He saw the pencil in cut-off view, as if a knife had chopped smoothly through it.
Carune felt with his fingers where the rest of the pencil should have been, and of course there
was nothing. He ran across the barn to Portal Two, and there was the missing part of the pencil,
lying on the top crate. Heart thumping so hard that it seemed to shake his entire chest, Carune
grasped the sharpened point of his pencil and pulled it the rest of the way through.
He held it up; he looked at it. Suddenly he took it and wrote IT WORKS! on a piece of barn-board.
He wrote it so hard that the lead snapped on the last letter. Carune began to laugh shrilly in theempty barn; to laugh so hard that he startled the sleeping swallows into flight among the highrafters.
"Works!" he shouted, and ran back to Portal One. He was waving his arms, the broken pencil
knotted up in one fist. "Works! Works! Do you hear me, Carson, you prick? It works AND I DIDIT!""Mark, watch what you say to the children," Marilys reproached him.
Mark shrugged. "It's what he's supposed to have said.""Well, can't you do a little selective editing?""Dad?" Patty asked. "Is that pencil in the museum, too?" "Does a bear shit in the woods?" Marksaid, and then clapped one hand over his mouth. Both children giggled wildly - but that shrill note
was gone from Patty's voice, Mark was glad to hear - and after a moment of trying to lookserious, Marilys began to giggle too.
The keys went through next; Carune simply tossed them through the portal. He was beginningto think on track again now, and it seemed to him that the first thing that needed finding out wasif the process produced things on the other end exactly as they had been, or if they were in any
way changed by the trip.
He saw the keys go through and disappear; at exactly the same moment he heard them jingle on
the crate across the barn. He ran across - really only trotting now - and on the way he paused toshove the lead shower curtain back on its track. He didn't need either it or the ion gun now. Just

as well, since the ion gun was smashed beyond repair. He grabbed the keys, went to the lock thegovernment had forced him to put on the door, and tried the Yale key. It worked perfectly. He
tried the house key. It also worked. So did the keys which opened his file cabinets and the one
which started the Brat pickup.

Chapter 3

Carune pocketed the keys and took off his watch. It was a Seiko quartz LC with a built-in
calculator below the digital face twenty-four tiny buttons that would allow him to do everythingfrom addition to subtraction to square roots. A delicate piece of machinery - and just as
important, a chronometer. Carune put it down in front of Portal One and pushed it through with apencil.
He ran across and grabbed it up. When he put it through, the watch had said 11:31:07. It now
said 11:31:49. Very good. Right on the money, only he should have had an assistant over there
to peg the fact that there had been no time gain once and forever. Well, no matter. Soon enoughthe government would have him wading hip deep in assistants. He tried the calculator.
Two and two still made four, eight divided by four was still two; the square root of eleven was
still 3.3166247 . . . and so on. That was when he decided it was mouse-time. "What happened
with the mice, Dad?" Ricky asked.
Mark hesitated briefly. There would have to be some caution here, if he didn't want to scare hischildren (not to mention his wife) into hysteria minutes away from their first Jaunt. The major
thing was to leave them with the knowledge that everything was all right now, that the problem
had been licked.
"As I said, there was a slight problem . . ."Yes. Horror, lunacy, and death. How's that for a slight problem, kids? Carune set the box which
read I CAME FROM STACKPOLE'S HOUSE OF PETS down on the shelf and glanced at his watch.
Damned if he hadn't put the thing on upside down. He turned it around and saw that it was aquarter of two. He had only an hour and a quarter of computer time left. How the time flies when
you're having fun, he thought, and giggled wildly. He opened the box, reached in, and pulled out
a squeaking white mouse by the tail. He put it down in front of Portal One and said, "Go on,mouse." The mouse promptly ran down the side of the orange crate on which the portal stoodand scattered across the floor. Cursing, Carune chased it, and managed to actually get one handon it before it squirmed through a crack between two boards and was gone.
"SHIT!" Carune screamed, and ran back to the box of mice. He was just in time to knock two
potential escapees back into the box. He got a second mouse, holding this one around the body(he was by trade a physicist, and the ways of white mice were foreign to him), and slammed thelid of the box back down.
This one he gave the old heave-ho. It clutched at Carune's palm, but to no avail; it went headover ratty little paws through Portal One. Carune heard it immediately land on the crates acrossthe barn. This time he sprinted, remembering how easily the first mouse had eluded him. He
need not have worried. The white mouse merely crouched on the crate, its eyes dull, its sides

aspirating weakly. Carune slowed down and approached it carefully; he was not a man used tofooling with mice, but you didn't have to be a forty-year veteran to see something was terribly
wrong here. ("The mouse didn't feel so good after it went through," Mark Oates told his children
with a wide smile that was only noticeably false to his wife.) Carune touched the mouse. It was
like touching something inert - packed straw or sawdust, perhaps - except for the aspiratingsides. The mouse did not look around at Carune; it stared straight ahead. He had thrown in asquirming, very frisky and alive little animal; here was something that seemed to be a living
waxwork likeness of a mouse. Then Carune snapped his fingers in front of the mouse's small
pink eyes.
It blinked . . . and fell dead on its side.
"So Carune decided to try another mouse," Mark said.
"What happened to the first mouse?" Ricky asked.
Mark produced that wide smile again. "It was retired with full honors," he said.
Carune found a paper bag and put the mouse into it. He would take it to Mosconi, the vet, thatevening.
Mosconi could dissect it and tell him if its inner works had been rearranged. The government
would disapprove his bringing a private citizen into a project which would be classified triple top
secret as soon as they knew about it. Tough titty, as the kitty was reputed to have said to thebabes who complained about the warmth of the milk. Carune was determined that the GreatWhite Father in Washington would know about this as late in the game as possible. For all thescant help the Great White Father had given him, he could wait. Tough titty. Then heremembered that Mosconi lived way the hell and gone on the other side of New Paltz, and that
there wasn't enough gas in the Brat to get even halfway across town . . . let alone back.
But it was 2:03 - he had less than an hour of computer time left. He would worry about the
goddamn dissection later.
Carune constructed a makeshift chute leading to the entrance of Portal One (really the first
Jaunt-Slide, Mark told the children, and Patty found the idea of a Jaunt-Slide for mice deliciously
funny) and dropped a fresh white mouse into it. He blocked the end with a large book, and after a
few moments of aimless pattering and sniffling, the mouse went through the portal anddisappeared.
Carune ran back across the barn. The mouse was DOA. There was no blood, no bodily swellings
to indicate that a radical change in pressure had ruptured something inside. Carune supposedthat oxygen starvation might - He shook his head impatiently. It took the white mouse only
nanoseconds to go through; his own watch had confirmed that time remained a constant in theprocess, or damn close to it.
The second white mouse joined the first in the paper sack. Carune got a third out (a fourth, if you
counted the fortunate mouse that had escaped through the crack), wondering for the first time
which would end first - his computer time or his supply of mice.

He held this one firmly around the body and forced its haunches through the portal. Across theroom he saw the haunches reappear . . . just the haunches. The disembodied little feet weredigging frantically at the rough wood of the crate.
Carune pulled the mouse back. No catatonia here; it bit the webbing between his thumb andforefinger hard enough to bring blood. Carune dropped the mouse hurriedly back into the I CAMEFROM STACKPOLE'S HOUSE OF PETS box and used the small bottle of hydrogen peroxide in his
lab first-aid kit to disinfect the bite.
He put a Band-Aid over it, then rummaged around until he found a pair of heavy work-gloves. He
could feel the time running out, running out, running out. It was 2:11 now.
He got another mouse out and pushed it through backward - all the way. He hurried across to
Portal Two. This mouse lived for almost two minutes; it even walked a little, after a fashion. It
staggered across the Pomona orange crate, fell on its side, struggled weakly to its feet, and then
only squatted there. Carune snapped his fingers near its head and it lurched perhaps four steps
further before falling on its side again. The aspiration of its sides slowed ... slowed ... stopped. It
was dead. Carune felt a chill.
He went back, got another mouse, and pushed it halfway through headfirst. He saw it reappear
at the other end, just the head . . . then the neck and chest. Cautiously, Carune relaxed his gripon the mouse's body, ready to grab if it got frisky. It didn't. The mouse only stood there, half of iton one side of the barn, half on the other.
Carune jogged back to Portal Two.
The mouse was alive, but its pink eyes were glazed and dull. Its whiskers didn't move. Goingaround to the back of the portal, Carune saw an amazing sight; as he had seen the pencil incutaway, so now he saw the mouse. He saw the vertebrae of its tiny spine ending abruptly inround white circles; he saw its blood moving through the vessels; he saw the tissue moving
gently with the tide of life around its minuscule gullet. If nothing else, he thought (and wrote
later in his Popular Mechanics article), it would make a wonderful diagnostic tool. Then henoticed that the tidal movement of the tissues had ceased. The mouse had died.

Chapter 4
Carune pulled the mouse out by the snout, not liking the feel of it, and dropped it into the paper sackwith its companions. Enough with the white mice, he decided. The mice die. They die if you put themthrough all the way, and they die if you put them through halfway headfirst. Put them through halfway
butt-first, they stay frisky.
What the hell is in there?
Sensory input, he thought almost randomly.
When they go through they see something - hear something - touch something - God, maybe evensmell something - that literally kills them. What? He had no idea - but he meant to find out.Carune
still had almost forty minutes before COMLINK pulled the data base out from under him. He unscrewed
the thermometer from the wall beside his kitchen door, trotted back to the barn with it, and put itthrough the portals. The thermometer went in at 83 degrees F; it came out at 83 degrees F. He
rummaged through the spare room where he kept a few toys to amuse his grandchildren with; among
them he found a packet of balloons. He blew one of them up, tied it off, and batted it through theportal. It came out intact and unharmed - a start down the road toward answering his question about
a sudden change in pressure somehow caused by what he was already thinking of as the Jaunting
process.
With five minutes to go before the witching hour, he ran into his house, snatched up his goldfish bowl
(inside, Percy and Patrick swished their tails and darted about in agitation) and ran back with it. He
shoved the goldfish bowl through Portal One.
He hurried across to Portal Two, where his goldfish bowl sat on the crate. Patrick was floating
belly-up; Percy swam slowly around near the bottom of the bowl, as if dazed. A moment later he also
floated belly-up. Carune was reaching for the goldfish bowl when Percy gave a weak flick of his tailand resumed his lackadaisical swimming. Slowly, he seemed to throw off whatever the effect had
been, and by the time Carune got back from Mosconi's Veterinary Clinic that night at nine o'clock,
Percy seemed as perky as ever.
Patrick was dead.
Carune fed Percy a double ration of fish food and gave Patrick a hero's burial in the garden.
After the computer had cut him out for the day, Carune decided to hitch a ride over to Mosconi's.
Accordingly, he was standing on the shoulder of Route 26 at a quarter of four that afternoon, dressedin jeans and a loud plaid sport coat, his thumb out, a paper bag in his other hand. Finally, a kid
driving a Chevette not much bigger than a sardine can pulled over, and Carune got in. "What you got
in the bag, my man?" "Bunch of dead mice," Carune said. Eventually another car stopped. When the
farmer behind the wheel asked about the bag, Carune told him it was a couple of sandwiches.
Mosconi dissected one of the mice on the spot, and agreed to dissect the others later and call Carune
on the telephone with the results. The initial result was not very encouraging; so far as Mosconi could
tell, the mouse he had opened up was perfectly healthy except for the fact that it was dead.
Depressing.
"Victor Carune was eccentric, but he was no fool, "Mark said. The Jaunt attendants were getting close
now, and he supposed he would have to hurry up . . . or he would be finishing this in the Wake-Up
Room in Whitehead City. "Hitching a ride back Home that night - and he had to walk most of the way,so the story goes - he realized that he had maybe solved a third of the energy crisis at one single
stroke. All the goods that had to go by train and truck and boat and plane before that day could be
Jaunted. You could write a letter to your friend in London or Rome or Senegal, and he could have it
the very next day - without an ounce of oil needing to be burned. We take it for granted, but it was a
big thing to Carune, believe me. And to everyone else, as well.""But what happened to the mice, Daddy?" Rick asked. "That's what Carune kept asking himself," Marksaid, "because he also realized that if people could use the Jaunt, that would solve almost all of theenergy crisis. And that we might be able to conquer space. In his Popular Mechanics article he said
that even the stars could finally be ours. And the metaphor he used was crossing a shallow stream
without getting your shoes wet. You'd just get a big rock, and throw it in the stream, then get anotherrock, stand on the first rock, and throw that into the stream, go back and get a third rock, go back tothe second rock, throw the third rock into the stream, and keep up like that until you'd made a path of
stepping-stones all the way across the stream . . . or in this case, the solar system, or maybe eventhe galaxy." "I don't get that at all," Patty said.
"That's because you got turkey-turds for brains," Ricky said smugly.
"I do not! Daddy, Ricky said - ""Children, don't," Marilys said gently.
"Carune pretty much foresaw what has happened," Mark said. "Drone rocket ships programmed toland, first on the moon, then on Mars, then on Venus and the outer moons of Jupiter . . . drones really
only programmed to do one thing after they landed - " "Set up a Jaunt station for astronauts," Ricky
said. Mark nodded. "And now there are scientific outposts all over the solar system, and maybe
someday, long after we're gone, there will even be another planet for us. There are Jaunt-ships on
their way to four different star systems with solar systems of their own . . . but it'll be a long, longtime before they get there.""I want to know what happened to the mice," Patty said impatiently. "Well, eventually thegovernment got into it," Mark said. "Carune kept them out as long as he could, but finally they got
wind of it and landed on him with both feet. Carune was nominal head of the Jaunt project until hedied ten years later, but he was never really in charge of it again." "Jeez, the poor guy!" Rick said.
"But he got to be a hero," Patricia said. "He's in all the history books, just like President Lincoln andPresident Hart."
I'm sure that's a great comfort to him . . . wherever he is, Mark thought, and then went on, carefully
glossing over the rough parts. The government, which had been pushed to the wall by the escalatingenergy crisis, did indeed come in with both feet. They wanted the Jaunt on a paying basis as soon as
possible - like yesterday. Faced with economic chaos and the increasingly probable picture of anarchy
and mass starvation in the 1990's, only last-ditch pleading made them put off announcement of the
Jaunt before an exhaustive spectrographic analysis of Jaunted articles could be completed. When theanalyses were complete - and showed no changes in the makeup of Jaunted artifacts - the existenceof the Jaunt was announced with international hoopla. Showing intelligence for once (necessity is,after all, the mother of invention), the U.S. government put Young and Rubicam in charge of the pr.
That was where the myth-making around Victor Carune, an elderly, rather peculiar man who
showered perhaps twice a week and changed his clothes only when he thought of it, began. Youngand Rubicam and the agencies which followed them turned Carune into a combination of Thomas
Edison, Eli Whitney, Pecos Bill, and Flash Gordon. The blackly funny part of all this (and Mark Oates
did not pass this on to his family) was that Victor Carune might even then have been dead or insane;
art imitates life, they say, and Carune would have been familiar with the Robert Heinlein novel about
the doubles who stand in for figures in the public eye. Victor Carune was a problem; a nagging
problem that wouldn't go away. He was a loudmouthed foot-dragger, a holdover from the Ecological
Sixties - a time when there was still enough energy floating around to allow foot-dragging as a luxury.
These, on the other hand, were the Nasty Eighties, with coal clouds befouling the sky and a longsection of the California coastline expected to be uninhabitable for perhaps sixty years due to anuclear "excursion."

Victor Carune remained a problem until about 1991 and then he became a rubber stamp, smiling,
quiet, grandfatherly; a figure seen waving from podiums in newsfilms. In 1993, three years before heofficially died, he rode in the pace-car at the Tournament of Roses Parade.
Puzzling. And a little ominous
The results of the announcement of the Jaunt - of working teleportation - on October 19th, 1988, wasa hammerstroke of worldwide excitement and economic upheaval. On the world money markets, thebattered old American dollar suddenly skyrocketed through the roof. People who had bought gold ateight hundred and six dollars an ounce suddenly found that a pound of gold would bring something
less than twelve hundred dollars. In the year between the announcement of the Jaunt and the firstworking Jaunt-Stations in New York and L.A., the stock market climbed a little over a thousand points.
The price of oil dropped only seventy cents a barrel, but by 1994, with Jaunt-Stations crisscrossing the
U.S. at the pressure-points of seventy major cities, OPEC had ceased to exist, and the price of oil
began to tumble. By 1998, with Stations in most free-world cities and goods routinely Jaunted
between Tokyo and Paris, Paris and London, London and New York, New York and Berlin, oil had
dropped to fourteen dollars a barrel. By 2006, when people at last began to use the Jaunt on a regularbasis, the stock market had levelled off five thousand points above its 1987 levels, oil was selling forsix dollars a barrel, and the oil companies had begun to change their names. Texaco became Texaco
Oil/Water, and Mobil had become Mobil Hydro-2-Ox.
By 2045, water-prospecting became the big game and oil had become what it had been in 1906: atoy.
Chapter 5"What about the mice, Daddy?" Patty asked impatiently. "What happened to the mice?"
Mark decided it might be okay now, and he drew the attention of his children to the Jaunt attendants,
who were passing gas out only three aisles from them. Rick only nodded, but Patty looked troubled asa lady with a fashionably shaved-and-painted head took a whiff from the rubber mask and fell
unconscious.
"Can't Jaunt when you're awake, can you, Dad?" Ricky said. Mark nodded and smiled reassuringly at
Patricia. "Carune understood even before the government got into it," he said.
"How did the government get into it, Mark?" Marilys asked. Mark smiled. "Computer time," he said.
"The data base. That was the only thing that Carune couldn't beg, borrow, or steal. The computer
handled the actual particulate transmission - billions of pieces of information. It's still the computer,you know, that makes sure you don't come through with your head somewhere in the middle of yourstomach." Marilys shuddered. "Don't be frightened," he said. "There's never been a screw-up like
that, Mare. Never.""There's always a first time," she muttered.
Mark looked at Ricky. "How did he know?" he asked his son. "How did Carune know you had to beasleep, Rick?""When he put the mice in backwards," Rick said slowly, "they were all right. At least as long as hedidn't put them all in. They were only - well, messed up - when he put them in headfirst. Right?"

"Right," Mark said. The Jaunt attendants were moving in now, wheeling their silent cart of oblivion. He
wasn't going to have time to finish after all; perhaps it was just as well. "It didn't take many
experiments to clarify what was happening, of course. The Jaunt killed the entire trucking Business,
kids, but at least it took the pressure off the experimenters - " Yes. Foot-dragging had become aluxury again, and the tests had gone on for better than twenty years, although Carune's first tests
with drugged mice had convinced him that unconscious animals were not subject to what was known
forever after as the Organic Effect or, more simply, the Jaunt Effect.
He and Mosconi had drugged several mice, put them through Portal One, retrieved them at the otherside, and had waited anxiously for their test subjects to reawaken . . . or to die. They had
reawakened, and after a brief recovery period they had taken up their mouse-lives - eating, fucking,playing, and shitting - with no ill effects whatsoever. Those mice became the first of several
generations which were studied with great interest. They showed no long-term ill effects; they did not
die sooner, their pups were not born with two heads or green fur and neither did these pups show anyother longterm effects.
"When did they start with people, Dad?" Rick asked, although he had certainly read this in school.
"Tell that part!""I wanna know what happened to the mice!'' Patty said again. Although the Jaunt attendants had now
reached the head of their aisle (they themselves were near the foot), Mark Oates paused a moment toreflect. His daughter, who knew less, had nevertheless listened to her heart and asked the rightquestion. Therefore, it was his son's question he chose to answer.
The first human Jaunters had not been astronauts or test pilots; they were convict volunteers who had
not even been screened with any particular interest in their psychological stability. In fact, it was theview of the scientists now in charge (Carune was not one of them; he had become what is commonly
called a titular head) that the freakier they were, the better; if a mental spaz could go through andcome out all right-or at least, no worse than he or she had been going in-then the process wasprobably safe for the executives, politicians, and fashion models of the world.
Half a dozen of these volunteers were brought to Province, Vermont (a site which had since become
every bit as famous as Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, had once been), gassed, and fed through theportals exactly two hand-miles apart, one by one.
Mark told his children this, because of course all six of the volunteers came back just fine and feelingperky, thank you. He did not tell them about the purported seventh volunteer. This figure, who might
have been real, or myth, or (most probably) a combination of the two, even had a name: Rudy
Foggia. Foggia was supposed to have been a convicted murderer, sentenced to death in the state of
Florida for the murders of four old people at a Sarasota bridge party. According to the apocrypha, thecombined forces of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Effa Bee Eye had come to Foggia with aunique, one-time, take-it-or-leave-it, absolutely-not-to-be-repeated offer. Take the Jaunt wide awake.
Come through okay and we put your pardon, signed by Governor Thurgood, in your hand. Out you
walk, free to follow the One True Cross or to off a few more old folks playing bridge in their yellow
pants and white shoes. Come through dead or insane, tough titty. As the kitty was purported to havesaid. What do you say?
Foggia, who understood that Florida was one state that really meant Business about the death penalty
and whose lawyer had told him that he was in all probability the next to ride Old Sparky, said okay.
Enough scientists to fill a jury box (with four or five left over as alternates) were present on the Great

Day in the summer of 2007, but if the Foggia story was true-and Mark Oates believed it probably
was-he doubted if it had been any of the scientists who talked. More likely it had been one of theguards who had flown with Foggia from Raiford to Montpelier and then escorted him from Montpelier
to Province in an armored truck.
"If I come through this alive," Foggia is reported to have said, "I want a chicken dinner before I blow
this joint." He then stepped through Portal One and reappeared at Portal Two immediately.
He came through alive, but Rudy Foggia was in no condition to eat his chicken dinner. In the space it
took to Jaunt across the two miles (pegged at 0.000000000067 of a second by computer), Foggia's
hair had turned snow white. His face had not changed in any physical way-it was not lined or jowly or
wasted-but it gave the impression of great, almost incredible age. Foggia shuffled out of the portal,
his eyes bulging blankly, his mouth twitching, his hands splayed out in front of him. Presently hebegan to drool. The scientists who had gathered around drew away from him and no, Mark really
doubted if any of them had talked; they knew about the rats, after all, and the guinea pigs, and thehamsters; any animal, in fact, with more brains than your average flatworm. They must have felt a bit
like those German scientists who tried to impregnate Jewish women with the sperm of German
shepherds.
"What happened?" one of the scientists shouted (is reputed to have shouted). It was the only question
Foggia had a chance to answer. "It's eternity in there," he said, and dropped dead of what wasdiagnosed as a massive heart attack. The scientists foregathered there were left with his corpse(which was neatly taken care of by the CIA and the Effa Bee Eye) and that strange and awful dying
declaration: It's eternity in there.
"Daddy, I want to know what happened to the mice," Patty repeated. The only reason she had achance to ask again was because the man in the expensive suit and the Eterna-Shine shoes had
developed into something of a problem for the Jaunt attendants. He didn't really want to take the gas,
and was disguising it with a lot of bluff, bully-boy talk. The attendants were doing their job as well as
they could-smiling, cajoling, persuading-but it had slowed them down.
Mark sighed. He had opened the subject-only as a way of distracting his children from the pre-Jaunt
festivities, it was true, but he had opened it-and now he supposed he would have to close it astruthfully as he could without alarming them or upsetting them. He would not tell them, for instance,
about C. K. Summer's book, The politics of the Jaunt, which contained one section called "The Jaunt
Under the Rose," a compendium of the more believable rumors about the Jaunt. The story of Rudy
Foggia, he of the bridgeclub murders and the uneaten chicken dinner, was in there. There were also
case histories of some other thirty (or more . . . or less . . . or who knows) volunteers, scapegoats, ormadmen who had Jaunted wide awake over the last three hundred years. Most of them arrived at theother end dead. The rest were hopelessly insane. In some cases, the act of reemerging had actuallyseemed to shock them to death. Summer's section of Jaunt rumors and apocrypha contained other
unsettling intelligence as well: the Jaunt had apparently been used several times as a murder weapon.
In the most famous (and only documented) case, which had occurred a mere thirty years ago, a Jaunt
researcher named Lester Michaelson had tied up his wife with their daughter's plexiplast Dreamropes
and pushed her, screaming, through the Jaunt portal at Silver City, Nevada. But before doing it,
Michaelson had pushed the Nil button on his Jaunt board, erasing each and every one of the hundredsof thousands of possible portals through which Mrs. Michaelson might have emerged - anywhere fromneighboring Reno to the experimental Jaunt-Station on Io, one of the Jovian moons. So there wasMrs. Michaelson, Jaunting forever somewhere out there in the ozone. Michaelson's lawyer, after
Michaelson had been held sane and able to stand trial for what he had done (within the narrow limits

of the law, perhaps he was sane, but in any practical sense, Lester Michaelson was just as mad as ahatter), had ciphered a novel defense: his client could not be tried for murder because no one could
prove conclusively that Mrs. Michaelson was dead. This had raised the terrible specter of the woman,discorporeal but somehow still sentient, screaming in limbo . . . forever.
Michaelson was convicted and executed. In addition, Summers suggested, the Jaunt had been used byvarious tinpot dictators to get rid of political dissidents and political adversaries; some thought that
the Mafia had their own illegal Jaunt-Stations, tied into the central Jaunt computer through their CIA
connections. It was suggested that the Mafia used the Jaunt's Nil capability to get rid of bodies which,unlike that of the unfortunate Mrs. Michaelson, were already dead. Seen in that light, the Jaunt
became the ultimate Jimmy Hoffa machine, ever so much better than the local gravel pit or quarry. Allof this had led to Summer's conclusions and theories about the Jaunt; and that, of course, led back to
Patty's persistent question about the mice. "Well," Mark said slowly, as his wife signaled with her eyesfor him to be careful, "even now no one really knows, Patty. But all the experiments withanimals-including the mice-seemed to lead to the conclusion that while the Jaunt is almost
instantaneous physically, it takes a long, long time mentally." "I don't get it," Patty said glumly. "Iknew I wouldn't."But Ricky was looking at his father thoughtfully. "They went on thinking," he said.
"The test animals. And so would we, if we didn't get knocked out." "Yes," Mark said. "That's what we
believe now."Something was dawning in Ricky's eyes. Fright? Excitement? "It isn't just teleportation,is it, Dad? It's some kind of time-warp."It's eternity in there, Mark thought."In a way," he said. "But
that's a comic-book phrase-it sounds good but doesn't really mean anything, Rick. It seems to revolvearound the idea of consciousness, and the fact that consciousness doesn't particulate-it remains wholeand constant. It also retains some screwy sense of time. But we don't know how pure consciousness
would measure time, or even if that concept has any meaning to pure mind. We can't even conceive
what pure mind might be." Mark fell silent, troubled by his son's eyes, which were suddenly so sharp
and curious. He understands but he doesn't understand, Mark thought. Your mind can be your bestfriend; it can keep you amused even when there's nothing to read, nothing to do. But it can turn on
you when it's left with no input for too long. It can turn on you, which means that it turns on itself,
savages itself, perhaps consumes itself in an unthinkable act of auto-cannibalism. How long in there,
in terms of years? 0.000000000067 seconds for the body to Jaunt, but how long for the unparticulated
consciousness? A hundred years? A thousand? A million? A billion? How long alone with your thoughts
in an endless field of white? And then, when a billion eternities have passed, the crashing return oflight and form and body. Who wouldn't go insane? "Ricky-"he began, but the Jaunt attendants had
arrived with their cart. "Are you ready?" one asked. Mark nodded. "Daddy, I'm scared," Patty said ina thin voice. "Will it hurt?" "No, honey, of course it won't hurt," Mark said, and his voice was calm
enough, but his heart was beating a little fast-it always did, although this would be something like his
twenty-fifth Jaunt. "I'll go first and you'll see how easy it is."The Jaunt attendant looked at him
questioningly. Mark nodded and made a smile. The mask descended. Mark took it in his own hands
and breathed deep of the dark.
***
The first thing he became aware of was the hard black Martian sky as seen through the top of thedome which surrounded Whitehead City. It was night here, and the stars sprawled with a fiery
brilliance undreamed of on earth. The second thing he became aware of was some sort of disturbancein the recovery room-mutters, then shouts, then a shrill scream. Oh dear God, that's Marilys! hethought, and struggled up from his Jaunt couch, fighting the waves of dizziness. There was anotherscream, and he saw Jaunt attendants running toward their couches, their bright red jumpers flying
around their knees. Marilys staggered toward him, pointing. She screamed again and then collapsed
onthe floor, sending an unoccupied Jaunt couch rolling slowly down the aisle with one weakly clutchinghand. But Mark had already followed the direction of her pointing finger. He had seen. It hadn't beenfright in Ricky's eyes; it had been excitement. He should have known, because he knew Ricky-Ricky,
who had fallen out of the highest crotch of the tree in their backyard in Schenectady when he was only
seven, who had broken his arm (and was lucky that had been all he'd broken); Ricky who dared to go
faster and further on his Slideboard than any other kid in the neighborhood; Ricky who was first to
take any dare. Ricky and fear were not well acquainted. Until now. Beside Ricky, his sister still
mercifully slept. The thing that had been his son bounced and writhed on its Jaunt couch, a
twelve-yearold boy with a snow-white fall of hair and eyes which were incredibly ancient, the corneas
gone a sickly yellow. Here was a creature older than time masquerading as a boy; and yet it bounced
and writhed with a kind of horrid, obscene glee, and at its choked, lunatic cackles the Jaunt attendants
drew back in terror. Some of them fled, although they had been trained to cope with just such an
unthinkable eventuality. The old-young legs twitched and quivered. Claw hands beat and twisted anddanced on the air; abruptly they descended and the thing that had been his son began to claw at its
face. "Longer than you think, Dad!" it cackled. "Longer than you think! Held my breath when theygave me the gas! Wanted to see! I saw! I saw! Longer than you think!" Cackling and screeching, thething on the Jaunt couch suddenly clawed its own eyes out. Blood gouted. The recovery room was anaviary of screaming voices now. "Longer than you think, Dad! I saw! I saw! Long Jaunt! Longer than
you think-"It said other things before the Jaunt attendants were finally able to bear it away, rolling its
couch swiftly away as it screamed and clawed at the eyes that had seen the unseeable forever andever; it said other things, and then it began to scream, but Mark Oates didn't hear it because by thenhe was screaming himself.