“Don’t have none yet,” he said.
“All right,” I said. “Is it Vermont, Homer?”
“Well,” he said, “it’ll do for people who want to know.” I almost didn’t say it and then I did. “What does she look like now?”
“Like Diana,” he said. “But she is kinder.”
“I envy you, Homer,” I said, and I did.
I stood at the door. It was twilight in that deep part of summer when the fields fill with perfume and Queen Anne’s Lace. A full moon was beating a silver track across the lake. He went across my porch and down the steps. A car was standing on the soft shoulder of the road, its engine idling heavy, the way the old ones do that still run full bore straight ahead and damn the torpedoes. Now that I think of it, that car looked like a torpedo. It looked beat up some, but as if it could go the ton without breathin hard. He stopped at the foot of my steps and picked something up—it was his gas can, the big one that holds ten gallons. He went down my walk to the passenger side of the car. She leaned over and opened the door. The inside light came on and just for a moment I saw her, long red hair around her face, her forehead shining like a lamp. Shining like the moon. He got in and she drove away. I stood out on my porch and watched the taillights of her little godevil twinkling red in the dark . . . getting smaller and smaller. They were like embers, then they were like flickerflies, and then they were gone.
Vermont, I tell the folks from town, and Vermont they believe, because it’s as far as most of them can see inside their heads. Sometimes I almost believe it myself, mostly when I’m tired and done up. Other times I think about them, though—all this October I have done so, it seems, because October is the time when men think mostly about far places and the roads, which might get them there. I sit on the bench in front of Bell’s Market and think about Homer Buckland and about the beautiful girl who leaned over to open his door when he come down that path with the full red gasoline can in his right hand—she looked like a girl of no more than sixteen, a girl on her learner’s permit, and her beauy was terrible, but I believe it would no longer kill the man it turned itself on; for a moment her eyes lit on me, I was not killed, although part of me died at her feet.
Olympus must be a glory to the eyes and the heart, and there are those who crave it and those who find a clear way to it, mayhap, but I know Castle Rock like the back of my hand and I could never leave it for no shortcuts where the roads may go; in October the sky over the lake is no glory but it is passing fair, with those big white clouds that move so slow; I sit here on the bench, and think about ‘Phelia Todd and Homer Buckland, and I don’t necessarily wish I was where they are … but I still wish I was a smoking man.
The Jaunt
“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 most pleasant thing about it. “This is Jaunt Service to Whitehead City, Mars,” the voice continued. “All ticketed 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-wall carpeted in oyster gray. The walls were an eggshell white and hung with pleasant 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, speaking in low, cherry voices and offering glasses of milk. At one side of the room was the entranceway, 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 of the 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 silly for no good reason.
A businessman with a build like a bull glanced over at them and went back to the fodder of papers he was examining as he lay 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 was almost as nervous as Patty sounded. Why not? Mark thought. First Jaunt for all three of them. He and Marilys 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 Whitehead City.
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 the story… 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 the hundred-odd engineering and oil-company brats that were there; his son might well be going on a geology 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 by some 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 whole story, 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 Œthe Jaunt.’ He was a sciencefiction 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 with varicose 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.