barn with it, and put it through the portals. The thermometer went in at 83 degrees F; it came out at 83 degrees F. He rummaged through the spare room where he kept a few toys to amuse his grandchildren with; among them he found a packet of balloons. He blew one of them up, tied it off, and batted it through the portal. It came out intact and unharmed—a start down the road toward answering his question about a sudden change in pressure somehow caused by what he was already thinking of as the Jaunting process.
With five minutes to go before the witching hour, he ran into his house, snatched up his goldfish bowl (inside, Percy and Patrick swished their tails and darted about in agitation) and ran back with it. He shoved the goldfish bowl through Portal One.
He hurried across to Portal Two, where his goldfish bowl sat on the crate. Patrick was floating belly-up; Percy swam slowly around near the bottom of the bowl, as if dazed. A moment later he also floated belly-up. Carune was reaching for the goldfish bowl when Percy gave a weak flick of his tail and resumed his lackadaisical swimming. Slowly, he seemed to throw off whatever the effect had been, and by the time Carune got back from Mosconi’s Veterinary Clinic that night at nine o’clock, Percy seemed as perky as ever.
Patrick was dead.
Carune fed Percy a double ration of fish food and gave Patrick a hero’s burial in the garden.
After the computer had cut him out for the day, Carune decided to hitch a ride over to Mosconi’s. Accordingly, he was standing on the shoulder of Route 26 at a quarter of four that afternoon, dressed in jeans and a loud plaid sport coat, his thumb out, a paper bag in his other hand.
Finally, a kid driving a Chevette not much bigger than a sardine can pulled over, and Carune got in. “What you got in the bag, my man?”
“Bunch of dead mice,” Carune said. Eventually another car stopped. When the farmer behind the wheel asked about the bag, Carune told him it was a couple of sandwiches.
Mosconi dissected one of the mice on the spot, and agreed to dissect the others later and call Carune on the telephone with the results. The initial result was not very encouraging; so far as Mosconi could tell, the mouse he had opened up was perfectly healthy except for the fact that it was dead.
Depressing.
“Victor Carune was eccentric, but he was no fool,” Mark said. The Jaunt attendants were getting close now, and he supposed he would have to hurry up ... or he would be finishing this in the Wake-Up Room in Whitehead City. “Hitching a ride back home that night—and he had to walk most of the way, so the story goes-he realized that he had maybe solved a third of the energy crisis at one single stroke. All the goods that had to go by train and truck and boat and plane before that day could be Jaunted. You could write a letter to your friend in London or Rome or Senegal, and he could have it the very next day-without an ounce of oil needing to be burned. We take it for granted, but it was a big thing to Carune, believe me. And to everyone else, as well.”
“But what happened to the mice, Daddy?” Rick asked.
“That’s what Carune kept asking himself,” Mark said, “because he also realized that if people could use the Jaunt, that would solve almost all of the energy crisis. And that we might be able to conquer space. In his Popular Mechanics article he said that even the stars could finally be ours. And the metaphor he used was crossing a shallow stream without getting your shoes wet. You’d just get a big rock, and throw it in the stream, then get another rock, stand on the first rock, and throw that into the stream, go back and get a third rock, go back to the second rock, throw the third rock into the stream, and keep up like that until you’d made a path of stepping-stones all the way across the stream ... or in this case, the solar system, or maybe even the galaxy.”
“I don’t get that at all,” Patty said.
“That’s because you got turkey-turds for brains,” Ricky said smugly.
“I do not! Daddy, Ricky said—”
“Children, don’t,” Marilys said gently.
“Carune pretty much foresaw what has happened,” Mark said. “Drone rocket ships programmed to