The Big Jump Leigh Brackett He was playing with fire—a strange transuranic fire that spoke of life beyond life, a luminous link with infinity ... I ACROSS the gulf between the worlds, from end to end of a Solar System poised taut and trembling on the verge of history, the rumors flew. Somebody’s made it, the Big Jump. Somebody came back. Spacemen talking, in the bars around a thousand ports. People talking, in the streets of countless cities. Somebody’s done it, the Big Jump, done it and come back. That last bunch, they say—Ballantyne’s outfit. They say . . .
They said a lot of things, conflicting, fantastic impossible, grim. But behind the words there was only rumor, and behind the rumors—silence. A silence sphinx-like as the soundless wastes of night that roll forever around the island Sun.
Too much silence. That was what Arch Comyn listened to, after he had heard the words. The rumors themselves seemed to have come most strongly along a line that ran from Pluto’s orbit into Mars, and it was around Mars that the silence was deepest.
Comyn went to Mars . . .
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