hundred disposable masks. Mark went on talking, not wanting his people to see the representatives of Lethe until they had to. And, if he was given enough time to tell the whole story, they would welcome the gaspassers with open arms.
Considering the alternative.
“Of course, you know that the Jaunt is teleportation, no more or less,” he said. “Sometimes in college chemistry and physics they call it the Carune Process, but it’s really teleportation, and it was Carune himself-if you can believe the stories-who named it ‘the Jaunt.’ He was a science-fiction reader, and there’s a story by a man named Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination it’s called, and this fellow Bester made up the word ‘jaunte’ for teleportation in it. Except in his book, you could Jaunt just by thinking about it, and we can’t really do that.”
The attendants were fixing a mask to the steel nozzle and handing it to an elderly woman at the far end of the room. She took it, inhaled once, and fell quiet and limp on her couch. Her skirt had pulled up a little, revealing one slack thigh road-mapped with varicose veins. An attendant considerately readjusted it for her while the other pulled off the used mask and affixed a fresh one. It was a process that made Mark think of the plastic glasses in motel rooms. He wished to God that Patty would cool out a little bit; he had seen children who had to be held down, and sometimes they screamed as the rubber mask covered their faces. It was not an abnormal reaction in a child, he supposed, but it was nasty to watch and he didn’t want to see it happen to Patty. About Rick he felt more confident.
“I guess you could say the Jaunt came along at the last possible moment,” he resumed. He spoke toward Ricky, but reached across and took his daughter’s hand. Her fingers closed over his with an immediate panicky tightness. Her palm was cool and sweating lightly. “The world was running out of oil, and most of what was left belonged to the middle-eastern desert peoples, who were committed to using it as a political weapon. They had formed an oil cartel they called OPEC—”
“What’s a cartel, Daddy?” Patty asked.
“Well, a monopoly,” Mark said.
“Like a club, honey,” Marilys said. “And you could only be in that club if you had lots of oil.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t have time to sketch the whole mess in for you,” Mark said. “You’ll study some of it in school, but it was a mess—let’s let it go at that. If you owned a car, you could only drive it two days a week, and gasoline cost fifteen oldbucks a gallon—”
“Gosh,” Ricky said, “it only costs four cents or so a gallon now, doesn’t it, Dad?”
Mark smiled. “That’s why we’re going where we’re going, Rick. There’s enough oil on Mars to last almost eight thousand years, and enough on Venus to last another twenty thousand ... but oil isn’t even that important, anymore. Now what we need most of all is—”
“Water!” Patty cried, and the businessman looked up from his papers and smiled at her for a moment.
“That’s right,” Mark said. “Because in the years between 1960 and 2030, we poisoned most of ours. The first waterlift from the Martian ice-caps was called—”
“Operation Straw.” That was Ricky.
“Yes. 2045 or thereabouts. But long before that, the Jaunt was being used to find sources of clean water here on earth. And now water is our major Martian export ... the oil’s strictly a sideline. But it was important then.”
The kids nodded.
“The point is, those things were always there, but we were only able to get it because of the Jaunt. When Carune invented his process, the world was slipping into a new dark age. The winter before, over ten thousand people had frozen to death in the United States alone because there wasn’t enough energy to heat them.”
“Oh, yuck,” Patty said matter-of-factly.
Mark glanced to his right and saw the attendants talking to a timid-looking man, persuading him. At last he took the mask and seemed to fall dead on his couch seconds later. First-timer, Mark thought. You can always tell.
“For Carune, it started with a pencil ... some keys ... a wristwatch ... then some mice. The mice showed him there was a problem ...”
Victor Carune came back to his laboratory in a stumbling fever of excitement. He thought he knew now how Morse had felt, and Alexander Graham Bell, and