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, in fact, with more brains than your average flatworm. They must have felt a bit like those German scientists who tried to impregnate Jewish women with the sperm of German shepherds.
'What happened?' one of the scientists shouted (is reputed to have shouted). It was the only question Foggia had a chance to answer. 'It's eternity in there,' he said, and dropped dead of what was diagnosed as a massive heart attack. The scientists foregathered there were left with his corpse (which was neatly taken care of by the CIA and the Effa Bee Eye) and that strange and awful dying declaration: It's eternity in there.
'Daddy, I want to know what happened to the mice,' Patty repeated. The only reason she had a chance to ask again was because the man in the expensive suit and the Eterna-Shine shoes had developed into something of a problem for the Jaunt attendants. He didn't really want to take the gas, and was disguising it with a lot of bluff, bully-boy talk. The attendants were doing their job as well as they couldsmiling, cajoling, persuadingbut it had slowed them down.
Mark sighed. He had opened the subjectonly as a way of distracting his children from the pre-Jaunt festivities, it was true, but he had opened itand now he supposed he would have to close it as truthfully as he could without alarming them or upsetting them. He would not tell them, for instance, about C. K. Summer'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. The story of Rudy Foggia, he of the bridgeclub murders and the uneaten chicken dinner, was in there. There were also case histories of some other thirty (or more . . . or less . . . or who knows) volunteers, scapegoats, or madmen who had Jaunted wide awake over the last three hundred years. Most of them arrived at the other end dead. The rest were hopelessly insane. In some cases, the act of reemerging had actually seemed to shock them to death. Summer's section of Jaunt rumors and apocrypha contained other unsettling intelligence as well: the Jaunt had apparently been used several times as a murder weapon. 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. 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. So there was Mrs. Michaelson, Jaunting forever somewhere out there in the ozone. Michaelson's lawyer, after Michaelson had been held sane and able to stand trial for what he had done (within the narrow limits of the law, perhaps he was sane, but in any practical sense, Lester Michaelson was just as mad as a hatter), had ciphered a novel defense: his client could not be tried for murder because no one could prove conclusively that Mrs. Michaelson was dead. This had raised the terrible specter of the woman, discorporeal but somehow still sentient, screaming in limbo . . . forever. Michaelson was convicted and executed. In addition, Summers suggested, the Jaunt had been used by various tinpot dictators to get rid of political dissidents and political adversaries; some thought that the Mafia had their own illegal Jaunt-Stations, tied into the central Jaunt computer through their CIA connections. It was suggested that the Mafia used the Jaunt's Nil capability to get rid of bodies which, unlike that of the unfortunate Mrs. Michaelson, were already dead. Seen in that light, the Jaunt became the ultimate Jimmy Hoffa machine, ever so much better than the local gravel pit or quarry. All of this had led to Summer's conclusions and theories about the Jaunt; and that, of course, led back to Patty's persistent question about the mice. 'Well,' Mark said slowly, as his wife signaled with her eyes for him to be careful, 'even now no one really knows, Patty. But all the experiments with animalsincluding the miceseemed to lead to the conclusion that while the Jaunt is almost instantaneous physically, it takes a long, long time mentally.' 'I don't get it,' Patty said glumly. 'I knew I wouldn't.'But Ricky was looking at his father thoughtfully. 'They went on thinking,' he said. 'The test animals. And so would we, if we didn't get knocked out.' 'Yes,' Mark said. 'That's what we believe now.'Something was dawning in Ricky's eyes. Fright? Excitement? 'It isn't just teleportation, is it, Dad? It's some kind of time-warp.'It's eternity in there, Mark thought.'In a way,' he said. 'But that's a comic-book phraseit sounds good but doesn't really mean anything, Rick. It seems to revolve around the idea of consciousness, and the fact that consciousness doesn't particulateit remains whole and constant. It also retains some screwy sense of time. But we don't know how pure consciousness would measure time, or even if that concept has any meaning to pure mind. We can't even conceive what pure mind might be.' Mark fell silent, troubled by his son's eyes, which were suddenly so sharp and curious. He understands but he doesn't understand, Mark thought. Your mind can be your best friend; it can keep you amused even when there's nothing to read, nothing to do. But it can turn on you when it's left with no input for too long. It can turn on you, which means that it turns on itself, savages itself, perhaps consumes itself in an unthinkable act of
