The Big Jump, by Leigh Brackett
I suspect most readers of this blog won’t know Leigh Brackett’s name. You’ll know her work though, because she was a scriptwriter on The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, The Empire Strikes Back. Quite a CV.
Until recently I knew her as a writer of mid-20th Century sword and planet/planetary romance novels, a genre that doesn’t exist any more. She wrote stories of a Mars that never was, full of princesses, ancient ruins, swords, spaceships and of course mighty heroes. Edgar Rice Burroughs is the only person still remembered for those kind of books, but for a while they were pretty popular and he was never the only one writing them.
What changed for me was a review by Trevor of Themookseandthegripes. He read her rather sombre sounding post-apocalypse novel The Long Tomorrow, and really liked it. Given Trevor isn’t an SF reader as a rule, that caught my attention (besides, it’s always worth paying attention to Trevor’s recommendations). I wasn’t in the mood for sombre though, so when I saw she’d written a novel that was a mix of hardboiled detective fiction and pulpy space opera I knew that was the one for me.
Arch Comyn is a construction boss. The solar system’s been settled, but nobody yet has managed to make the big jump beyond it, nobody has reached the stars. Humanity may have settled Mars, the Moon, as far out as Pluto’s orbit, but no further and in this future world there’s still buildings that need to be built and hard men needed to build them.
Comyn’s a tough guy, handy with his fists. He’s a character you’ll recognize from a hundred hardboiled novels. He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty, but he has a code and part of that code is he won’t forget a favour or a friend.
Now one of those friends needs him, because the word is that somebody’s finally made the big jump. Somebody’s punched through space to another solar system, and returned, alive. Ballantyne’s his name, the sole person to come back from this first successful interstellar voyage. The reason that matters to Comyn is that one of his friends, Paul Rogers, was also on that crew and Paul didn’t make it back. He’s out there somewhere, maybe dead, maybe not, somewhere further out than any human has gone before.
The expedition was funded by the fabulously wealthy Cochrane family, and whatever happened they’re keeping tight lipped about it. Ballantyne is locked away on a private clinic on Mars, nobody has access and nobody’s talking. Comyn though, he wants to know what happened to Paul Rogers, so he goes to Mars, breaks into that hospital, gets past the Cochrane guards and sees Ballantyne. We’re on page 10. These old pulp writers really knew how to push a story along.
Ballantyne isn’t as Comyn remembers him:
It was a face that was only a ghostly echo, pitiful, terrible, marked by something frightening, worse than death or the fear of dying. It was something, Comyn thought, that had never before oppressed the children of Sol. A queer terror came over him as he looked at it. Suddenly he wanted to run, to get away out of the room, far away from whatever evil shadow it was that this man had brought back with him from another star.
Comyn knows he doesn’t have long. He’s barred the door but the Cochrane people are drilling through it. He has only moments to find out what happened to Paul Rogers:
Comyn bent over, so that his ear was almost touching the blue transparent lips. A voice came out of them, no louder than the beating of a moth’s wing…
“…listened too long. Too long, too far…”
“Where is Paul?”
“…too far, too lonely. We weren’t meant for this. Desolation…darkness…stars…”
Again, almost fiercely, “Where is Paul?”
“Paul…”
The drill hit metal. The whining changed to a thin-edged screech.
The breathing skeleton that was Ballantyne went rigid. Its lips moved under Comyn’s ear, laboring with a dreadful urgency.
“Don’t listen, Paul! I can’t go back alone, I can’t! Don’t listen to them calling…Oh, God, why did it have to be transuranic, why did it?”
The drill screeched thinner, higher. And the painful whisper rose.
“The Transuranae! Paul, no! Paul, Paul, Paul…”
Suddenly Ballantyne screamed.
That’s all Ballantyne says. Moments later he’s dead. The Cochranes of course burst in, but here’s the thing – Ballantyne never spoke to them, only to Comyn. He didn’t say much of use, but the Cochranes don’t know that and that gives Comyn leverage. It’s page 12, I said those pulp writers knew how to move a story along.
… here he was in the middle of something so big he couldn’t even guess the end of it. It was a game for stars, and he, Arch Comyn, held just one little hole card… But, whatever the Cochranes did to him, he was going to find out about Paul Rogers.
I’m not going to say too much more plotwise. Obviously there’s a second expedition out to the stars, and of course Comyn bluffs his way onto it by playing his one card – that nobody knows what Ballantyne said to him – for all its worth. The Cochranes are right out of the Big Sleep, with an aging patriarch and murder at the heart of the family (and soon on the ship with Comyn). There’s a romantic interest too, naturally, in the form of the untameable Sydna Cochrane. Sydna’s rich and beautiful and she knows it, but she’s surrounded by socialites and dilettantes, she’s never met a man like Comyn before…
I’ll be honest with you, I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff and I gulped The Big Jump down. Of course it doesn’t really make sense. We’re in space, but everything is pretty much like 1955, which oddly enough is when it was written. Take out the spaceships, electric pistols and moon habitats and it’s 1950s technology, 1950s social attitudes. The Cochranes have the most important man in the solar system locked up in a desert hospital where nobody can get to him (it doesn’t really change anything that the desert’s on Mars rather than say Nevada), but of course they don’t have a simple thing like a microphone or camera in his hospital room.
This is not a serious read. It’s certainly not a recognised classic in the way The Long Tomorrow is. The plot is straightforward and the characters are from central casting, but nobody reads a book like this looking for subtlety or psychological insight.
The characters are who they need to be to serve the story - a rough but honourable hero, a princess (sorry, heiress, not the same thing at all), a milquetoast hanger-on/courtier who resents how easily Comyn has found himself at the heart of things, there’s others but they’re equally archetypal. Even so Brackett’s skill as a writer does show. Hokey as the novel is it’s at times strangely powerful. The sense that the first expedition encountered something beyond human understanding, something other, is well captured and Brackett is as good as building atmosphere as she is at keeping things moving.
In the end, The Big Jump clocks in at a punchy 135 pages and it’s as fast a read as any you’ll find. It’s pure entertainment, but well written within the scope of what it’s trying to do. It’s solid, expertly crafted pulp. It’s a great choice as a palate-cleanser, particularly if new worlds and old-fashioned murder are the sorts of things you find refreshing. It turns out SF and crime are like bacon and maple syrup, it doesn’t sound like you should be able to combine them successfully, but actually the result is pretty good.
Joachin Boaz reviewed The Big Jump, here. Trevor’s review of The Long Tomorrow, which I mentioned above, is here. If the idea of SF crime remotely appeals to you by the way and you haven’t already read it you should check out Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel. I can’t promise how it stands up today given I read it as a teenager, but it’s pretty much the recognised classic in the field. There’s also of course Neuromancer, which might as well be The Big Sleep in orbit.
Filed under: Brackett, Leigh, Science Fiction
