Characters in The Jaunt

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.

He would not tell them, for instance, about C. K. Summers’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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

But before doing it, Michaelson had pushed the Nil button on his Jaunt board, erasing each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of possible portals through which Mrs. Michaelson might have emerged—anywhere from neighboring Reno to the experimental Jaunt-Station on Io, one of the Jovian moons.

“You promised.” “Yeah, Dad, you promised,” Patricia added, and giggled shrilly for no good reason. A businessman with a build like a bull glanced over at them and then went back to the folder of papers he was examining as he lay on his back; his spit-shined shoes neatly together.

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.

… 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; …

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 breasts by the time they got back to earth, and again found it difficult to believe.

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.

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.