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 a gallon 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 last almost 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 the businessman 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 clean water 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 he had 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 not occur to him. And if it had, it certainly would not have bothered him.
The lab was in a renovated barn at the end of a mile-long dirt road off Route 26. It was making the turn onto this road where he had just missed cracking up his Brat pickup truck for the second time. The gas tank was almost empty and there would be no more for ten days to two weeks, but this did not concern him, either. His mind was in 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 seat beside him by its grab-handles (on the box were dogs and cats and hamsters and goldfish and the legend 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 a loud “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 he spilled 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 the barn.
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—was a cloud chamber. Between them was what appeared to be an opaque shower curtain, except that shower curtains are not made of lead. The idea was to shoot the ions through Portal One and then walk 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 was setting the ion gun in place, his fingers had slipped through the portal—ordinarily no problem, but this morning 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 he felt a tingling sensation in his fingers.
“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 a matter 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 and light that it is, literally, a tingling sensation.
“Then I looked down at the portal and saw that my index finger was gone on a diagonal slant through the middle knuckle, and my second finger was gone slightly above that. In addition, the nail portion of my third finger had disappeared.” Carune had jerked his hand back instinctively, 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 through his 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.