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.
