Robert Siverberg: Hot Sky at Midnight

PROJECT LONG JUMP

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

This must be the place, Carpenter thought.

A long jump indeed. All the way to some other star.

Well, he was ready for it. He felt calm, determined, fully committed: he reached that point beyond all caring, now, and was entering this place the way, in some earlier century, he might have entered a monastery.

Of his own free choice he was leaving the world behind him, and good riddance to it.

That world had become an excessively difficult place. Breathing itself was a problem; so was dealing with ordinary sunshine, which was no longer ordinary, and so was the question of doing the right thing, Carpenter thought. He had tried to do the right thing most of his life, and had only fitfully succeeded at it. Not his fault: he had tried. Then he had involved himself in a wrong thing, with catastrophic results. And Enron? Jolanda? They too had tried to do the right thing, according to their own lights. And in the course of doing it they had sought to make their individual accommodations to life in this difficult era, and eventually they had made one accommodation too many, and they had died for it.

A tough proposition, life in this difficult era. Carpenter wanted a fresh start.

And he knew he would get it here. They would take him and change him and send him to the far reaches of the universe. Fine. Fine. He, too, could be persistent and resilient. You fail on one world, you pick yourself up and go on to another one. Rebirth, always rebirth: that was the way. As one of the Kyocera men put his hand to the door plate Carpenter allowed himself another vision. This one was brief, redemptive: a golden-green sun, a shimmering lemon sky, a forest of glistening fronds, a lake of pure pearly water. The new Eden, an untarnished paradise, waiting to be found and settled by the chastened, humbled race of man. Of whose vanguard into interstellar space he would be a member.

No, he told himself.

Allow yourself no dreams, and then there will be no disillusionments. Make the voyage; see what happens; hope for the best, but count on nothing. And perhaps this time we will do a better job of it.

Or perhaps not.

The door opened and a face peered out. For one astonished moment Carpenter thought that the ghost of Victor Farkas was standing there, waiting in the doorway to receive him.

But no—no, this wasn’t Farkas. The same eerie, eyeless domed head, yes. But this was a youngish, wiry man, much shorter than Farkas had been, olive skin, narrow shoulders, wide ironic mouth, a general expression of cool youthful insolence. Not Farkas.

Carpenter said, “I’m the new starship crewman. Paul Carpenter.”

The eyeless man nodded. “Come on in, and welcome to Project Long Jump,” he said. He put out his hand. “My name is Juanito.”