A Hole In Space

Jerryberry Jansen of CBA smiled into the cameras. The warmth he felt for his unseen audience was genuine: he regarded himself as a combination of entertainer and teacher, and his approximately twelve million students were the measure of his success. "The Centaurus expedition was by no means a disaster," he told them. "For one thing, the colony fleet which cost you, the taxpayer, about six hundred and sixty million new dollars nine years ago-can be re-used as is, once the UN Space Authority finds a habitable world. Probably the colonists themselves will not want to wait that long. A new group may have to be retrained.

"As for the interstellar drop ship concept, it works. This has been the first real test, and it went without a hitch. Probably the next use of drop ships will not be a colony expedition at all, but an attempt to rescue the crew of Lazarus. The ship was sending its distress signal. There is good reason to think that the crew is still alive.

"Doctor Karin Sagan has pointed out that any rescue attempt will take decades. This is reasonable, in that the distances to be covered are to be measured in light-years. But today's ships are considerably better than Lazarus could ever have been."

"You idiot," said Robin Whyte, PhD. He twisted a knob with angry force, and the teevee screen went blank. A few minutes later he made two phone calls.

Karin was sightseeing on Earth.

The UN Space Authority had had a new credit card waiting for her, a courtesy she appreciated. Otherwise she would have had to carry a sackful of chocolate dollars for the slots. Her hands quickly fell into the old routine: insert the card, dial, pull it out, and the displacement booth would send her somewhere else.

It was characteristic of Karin that she had not been calling old friends. The impulse was there, and the worn black phone book with its string of nine-year-old names and numbers. But the people she had known must have changed. She was reluctant to face them.

There had been a vindictive impulse to drop in on her ex-husband. Here I am at thirty-six, and you-Stupid. Ron knew where she had been for nine years, so why bug the man?

She had cocktails at Mr. A's in San Diego, lunch at Scandia in Los Angeles, and dessert and coffee at Ondine in Sausalito. The sight of the Golden Gate Bridge sparked her to flick in at various booths for various views of all the bridges in the Bay area. For Karin, as for most of humanity, Earth was represented by a small section of the planet.

There had been changes. She got too close to the Bay Bridge and was horrified at the rust. It had never occurred to her that the San Francisco citizenry might let the bridges decay. Something could be done with them: line them with shops a la London Bridge, or landscape them over for a park, or run drag races... They would make horribly obtrusive corpses. They would ruin the scenery. Still, that had happened before...

Some things had not changed. She walked for an hour in King's Free Park, the landscaped section of what had been the San Diego Freeway. The trees had grown a little taller, but the crowds were the same, always different yet always the same. The shops and crowds in the Santa Monica Mall hadn't changed ... except that the city had filled in the space between the curbs, where people had had to step down into the empty streets.

She did some shopping in the Mall. To a saleslady in Magnin's West she said, "Dress me." That turned out to be a considerable project, and it cost. When she left, her new clothes felt odd on her, but they seemed to blend better with the crowds around her.

She did a lot of flicking around without ever leaving the booth-the ubiquitous booth that seemed to be one instead of millions, that seemed to move with her as she explored. It took her longer to find the right numbers than it did to dial.

But she flicked clown the length of Wilshire Boulevard in jumps of four blocks, from the coast to central Los Angeles, by simply dialing four digits higher each time.

She stopped off at the Country Art Museum in Fresno and was intrigued by giant sculptures in plastic foam. She was wandering through these shapes, just feeling them, not yet trying to decide whether she liked them, when her wrist phone rang.

She could have taken the call then and there, but she went to a wall phone in the lobby. Karin preferred to see who she was talking to.

She recognized him at once.

Robin Whyte was a round old man, his face pink and soft and cherubic, his scalp bare but for a fringe of white hair over his ears and a single tuft at the top of his head. Karin was surprised to see him now. He was the last living member of the team that had first demonstrated teleportation in 1992. He had been president of JumpShift, Inc., for several decades, but he had retired just after the launching of Lazarus II.

"Karin Sagan?" His frown gave him an almost petulant look. "My congratulations on your safe return."

"Thank you." Karin's smile was su

He did not respond in kind. "I need to see you. Urgently.

Can you come immediately?"

"Concerning what?"

"Concerning the interview you gave this morning."

But the interview had gone so well. What could be bothering the man? She said, "All tight."

The number he gave her had a New York prefix.

It was evening in New York City. Whyte's apartment was the penthouse floor of a half-empty building. The city itself had lost half its population during the past forty years, and it showed in the walls of dark windows visible through Whyte's picture windows.

"The thing I want to emphasize," said Whyte, "is that I didn't call you here as a representative of JumpShift. I'm retired. But I've got a problem, and pretty quick I'm going to have to take it up with someone in JumpShift. I still own enough JumpShift stock to want to protect it."

His guests made no comment on his disclaimer. They watched as he finished making their drinks and served them. Karin Sagan was curious and a bit truculent at being summoned so abruptly. Jerryberry Jansen had known Whyte too long for that. He was only curious.

"You've put JumpShift in a sticky situation," said Whyte. "Both of you, and the rest of the news media too. Karin, Jerryberry, how do you feel about the space program?"

"I'm for it. You know that," said Jerryberry.

"I'm in it," said Karin. "I feel no strong urge to quit and get an honest job. Is this a preliminary to firing me?"

"No. I do want to know why you went into so much detail on Lazarus."

"They asked me. If someone had asked me to keep my mouth shut on the subject I might have. Might not."

"We can't rescue Lazarus," said Whyte.

There was an uncomfortable silence. Perhaps it was in both their minds, but it was Jerryberry who said it. "Can't or won't?"

"How long have you known me?"

Jerryberry stopped to count. "Fourteen years, on and off. Look, I'm not saying you'd leave a six-man crew in the lurch if it were feasible to rescue them. But is it economically infeasible? Is that it?"

"No. It's impossible." Whyte glared at Karin, who glared back. "You should have figured it out, even if he didn't." He transferred the glare to Jansen. "About that rescue mission you proposed on nationwide teevee. Did you have any details worked out?"

Jerryberry sipped at his Screwdriver. "I'd think it would be obvious. Send a rescue ship. Our ships are infinitely better than anything they had in 2004." "They're moving at a seventh of lightspeed. What kind of ship could get up the velocity to catch Lazarus and still get back?"

"A drop ship, of course! A drop ship burns all its fuel getting up to speed. Lazarus II is doing a third of lightspeed, and it cost about a quarter of what Lazarus cost-it's so much simpler. You send a drop ship. When it passes Lazarus you drop a rescue ship through."