JUMPER

By

ZVI ZAKS

Copyright 2005 by Zvi Zaks

I was fixing a weeder in the cornfield and trying not to think about Ariela when the jumper alert sounded.

I hated that field. Its hot mugginess and swarms of gnats made me sick. Normally, I worked in an  air-conditioned computer room, but since I was the brownhorn up from Earth just two years ago, I was the chump who had to go ten levels inward to the half-gravity level where the farm robot broadcast distress signals.

The vista around the crops should have calmed me. I stood at the bottom of a perfectly straight valley. Above, a flock of geese flew under cumulus clouds.  To the south, majestic snow-covered mountains approached a wide, peaceful river whose bank, overhung with lazy willows, marked the end of the cornfield.

It was all fake. The mountains and geese were pan-holograms. The valley itself stretched too straight, and its sides rose too smoothly for an earth scene. Above me was no sky, but rather a ceiling that curved upward parallel to the valley and formed the floor of the next layer of our space station. Instead of the river, a 10-foot-thick rock radiation shield delimited both the cornfield and the space station itself. The disguise showed skill and ingenuity, but I and the 50 thousand other spacers in this station, this monstrous, spinning tin can named Epsathree, knew we did not live on Earth. And we could never think otherwise.

Only one place could be worse than this cornfield. That’s when my phone shrieked out the jumper alert.

The cry, a harsh klaxon noise, turned my sweat cold. That sound came for one purpose only – to announce another spacer had gone insane, had lost his reason and was now trying to jump away from the space station back to Earth.

Yes, I wanted to leave the cornfield, but not for this. Trembling, I looked at the phone. A red five flashing on the screen told me I was the last person enlisted into the rescue team. How could my luck be worse?   If the computer had found just one more brownhorn on a level inwards from mine, I would have been drafted as backup only.

I tapped the screen to acknowledge the alarm and ran to a nearby ersatz redwood.  Pressure from my palm on a smooth area of bark opened a large panel and revealed an outside elevator door. All too quickly, the elevator arrived with one passenger, a tall fair-skinned woman who looked a little like my Ariela, though without her long, flowing hair. I entered. The cool air on my sweaty face brought relief from the farm’s heat. I felt myself heavy as the cubicle shot inward/upward.

I turned to the woman. “I’m Dahm Origin.”

“Ivana Peterson." Her voice sounded bored.

“You’re answering the alert?”

“Of course."

“How far down did the notice go?”

“I got it on level nine, just below you." She emitted a grunt of disgust. “This is such a bother. Don’t jumpers care how much they inconvenience others?”

How could she be so callous?  “Jumpers are insane. It’s

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Texte: Zvi Zaks
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 03.04.2013
ISBN: 978-3-7309-1910-1

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