Stephen King's 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 plesant 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 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 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 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 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 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 Œjaunte' 
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. 


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.
There was not, of course. Portal Two stood atop three stacked Pomona 
orange crates, looking like nothing 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-in lasted until three o'clock 
this afternoon, and then it was good-bye until Monday. He had to get 
moving, 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, the proof 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 their cart slowly among the 
Jaunters, putting them to sleep. It was never as rapid a process in the 
civilian sector as it was in the military, he had discovered; civilians 
got nervous and wanted to talk 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 selection of 
gases in stainless-steel canisters. Sometimes there was panic, hysteria; 
and always there were a 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 no fanfare at all, 
unpinned the validation papers that had been affixed to their lapels, 
turned them in, 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 the children. 
"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 moon rocks the first space travellers brought 
back from the moon - "
"Our moon, Dad, or one of Mars'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 
first object 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 the file 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 with the transformer and trying to widen its 
afferent capability (he had apparently succeeded in that beyond his 
wildest dreams). One rolled off the wrapper and was lost; the other ended 
up in the Smithsonian Institution, locked in a glass case that was 
cordoned off with thick velvet ropes and watched 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 as anything. 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 the empty barn; to laugh so 
hard that he startled the sleeping swallows into flight among the high 
rafters.
"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 DID IT!"

"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?" Mark said, 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 look 
serious, Marilys began to giggle too.

The keys went through next; Carune simply tossed them through the portal. 
He was beginning to think on track again now, and it seemed to him that 
the first thing that needed finding out was if 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 to shove 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 the government 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.
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 everything from 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 a pencil.
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 enough the 
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 his children (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 a quarter 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 stood and scattered across the floor. Cursing, Carune chased it, 
and managed to actually get one hand on 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 the lid 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 head over ratty little paws through Portal One. Carune 
heard it immediately land on the crates across the 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 to fooling 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 aspirating sides. The mouse did 
not look around at Carune; it stared straight ahead. He had thrown in a 
squirming, 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, that evening. 

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 the babes who complained about the warmth of the 
milk. Carune was determined that the Great White Father in Washington 
would know about this as late in the game as possible. For all the scant 
help the Great White Father had given him, he could wait. Tough titty.
Then he remembered 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 and disappeared.
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 supposed that 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 
the process, 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 the room he saw the haunches reappear . . . just the 
haunches. The disembodied little feet were digging frantically at the 
rough wood of the crate.
Carune pulled the mouse back. No catatonia here; it bit the webbing 
between his thumb and forefinger hard enough to bring blood. Carune 
dropped the mouse hurriedly back into the I CAME FROM 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 grip on the mouse's body, ready to 
grab if it got frisky. It didn't. The mouse only stood there, half of it 
on 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. Going around to the back of the portal, Carune saw an amazing 
sight; as he had seen the pencil in cutaway, so now he saw the mouse. He 
saw the vertebrae of its tiny spine ending abruptly in round 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 he noticed that the tidal movement of the tissues had ceased. The 
mouse had died.
Carune pulled the mouse out by the snout, not liking the feel of it, and 
dropped it into the paper sack with its companions. Enough with the white 
mice, he decided. The mice die. They die if you put them through 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 even smell 
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 the portal. 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 tail 
and 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, dressed in 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," Mark said, "because he also 
realized that if people could use the Jaunt, that would solve almost all 
of the energy 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 another rock, 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 even the 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 to land, 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, long time before they get there."
"I want to know what happened to the mice," Patty said impatiently.
"Well, eventually the government 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 he died 
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 and President 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 escalating energy 
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 the analyses were complete -  and showed no changes 
in the makeup of Jaunted artifacts - the existence of 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. Young and 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 long section of the 
California coastline expected to be uninhabitable for perhaps sixty years 
due to a nuclear "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 he officially 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, was a hammerstroke of worldwide excitement and 
economic upheaval. On the world money markets, the battered old American 
dollar suddenly skyrocketed through the roof. People who had bought gold 
at eight 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 first working 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 regular 
basis, the stock market had levelled off five thousand points above its 
1987 levels, oil was selling for six 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: a toy. 

"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 as a 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 your stomach." 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 be asleep, Rick?"
"When he put the mice in backwards," Rick said slowly, "they were all 
right. At least as long as he didn'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 a luxury 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 other side, 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 
any other 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 to 
reflect. His daughter, who knew less, had nevertheless listened to her 
heart and asked the right question. 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 the view 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 and come out all right­or at 
least, no worse than he or she had been going in­then the process was 
probably 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 the portals 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 feeling perky, 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, the 
combined forces of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Effa Bee Eye 
had come to Foggia with a unique, 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 have 
said. 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 true­and Mark Oates believed it probably was­he 
doubted if it had been any of the scientists who talked. More likely it 
had been one of the guards 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 way­it was not lined or 
jowly or wasted­but 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 he began 
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 the hamsters; any animal