A Handful of Darkness by Philip K. Dick

the way downtown?”
    “Well, almost all the way.”
    “A hundred and sixty miles! It’s beyond belief. Why, it takes my husband two and a half hours to get his monojet through the commercial lanes and down at the parking lot then walk all the way up to his office.”
    “I know,” Ellis muttered, grabbing his hat and coat. “Used to take me about that long. But no more.” He kissed his wife goodbye.
    “So long. See you tonight. Nice to have seen you again, Mrs. Lawrence.”
    “Can I—watch?” Mrs. Lawrence asked hopefully.
    “Watch? Of course, of course.” Ellis hurried through the house, out the back door and down the steps into the yard. “Come along!” he shouted impatiently. “I don’t want to be late. It’s nine fifty-nine and I have to be at my desk by ten.”
    Mrs. Lawrence hurried eagerly after Ellis. In the back yard stood a big circular hoop that gleamed brightly in the mid-morning sun. Ellis turned some controls at the base. The hoop changed colour, from silver to a shimmering red.
    “Here I go!” Ellis shouted. He stepped briskly into the hoop. The hoop fluttered about him. There was a faint pop . The glow died.
    “Good Heavens!” Mrs. Lawrence gasped. “He’s gone!”
    “He’s in downtown N’York,” Mary Ellis corrected.
    “I wish my husband had a Jiffi-scuttler. When they show up on the market commercially maybe I can afford to get him one.”
    “Oh, they’re very handy,” Mary Ellis agreed. “He’s probably saying hello to the boys right this minute.”
    Henry Ellis was in a sort of tunnel. All around him a grey, formless tube stretched out in both directions, a sort of hazy sewer-pipe.
    Framed in the opening behind him, he could see the faint outline of his own house. His back porch and yard, Mary standing on the steps in her red bra and slacks. Mrs. Lawrence beside her in green-checkered shorts. The cedar tree and rows of petunias. A hill. The neat little houses of Cedar Groves, Pennsylvania. And in front of him—
    New York City. A wavering glimpse of the busy street-corner in front of his office. The great building itself, a section of concrete and glass and steel. People moving. Skyscrapers. Monojets landing in swarms. Aerial signs. Endless white-collar workers hurrying everywhere, rushing to their offices.
    Ellis moved leisurely towards the New York end. He had taken the Jiffi-scuttler often enough to know just exactly how many steps it was. Five steps. Five steps along the wavery grey tunnel and he had gone a hundred and sixty miles. He halted, glancing back. So far he had gone three steps. Ninety-six miles. More than half-way.
    The fourth dimension was a wonderful thing.
    Ellis lit his pipe, leaning his brief-case against his trouser-leg and groping in his coat pocket for his tobacco. He still had thirty seconds to get to work. Plenty of time. The pipe-lighter flared and he sucked in expertly. He snapped the lighter shut and restored it to his pocket.
    A wonderful thing, all right. The Jiffi-scuttler had already revolutionized society. It was now possible to go anywhere in the world instantly , with no time lapse. And without wading through endless lanes of other mono jets, also going places. The transportation problem had been a major headache since the middle of “the twentieth century. Every year more families moved from the cities out into the country, adding numbers to the already swollen swarms that choked the roads and jetlanes.
    But it was all solved now. An infinite number of Jiffi-scuttlers could be set up; there was no interference between them. The Jiffi-scuttler bridged distances non-spacially, through another dimension of some kind (they hadn’t explained that part too clearly to him). For a flat thousand credits any Terran family could have Jiffi-scuttler hoops set up, one in the backyard—the other in Berlin, or Bermuda, or San Francisco, or Port Said. Anywhere in the world. Of course, there was one drawback. The hoop had to be anchored in one specific