Anywhere but Here

16

Their first jump took them close enough to spot planets. Donna let the computer get a good look, and Trent used more air to spin the pickup in a slow roll so the computer could see the whole sky, then they jumped again so it could triangulate on the planets.

It spotted seven of them, but the two closest to the star were gas giants, and there was nothing at all in the right orbit to support life. They picked another star and tried it again, finding a better spread of planets, but when they jumped close to the most likely candidate for landing, they could see that its atmosphere was thick and white from pole to pole, like Venus.

“Runaway greenhouse,” Donna said.

“Runaway planet, too,” Trent said. “Look at that bugger go.” It was receding visibly, like a home run going over the back fence.

“Wow.” Donna called up the landing program and had it calculate their velocity, and frowned when she read the number. “Five hundred and thirty-seven thousand kilometers an hour? That can’t be right.”

Trent watched the planet shrink from golf-ball size to the size of a grape. “I think it could be. That thing’s bookin’ it.”

“Well, we’re not going to land on it anyway, so I guess it doesn’t matter.” She made the landing program go away and popped the interstellar jump window back on the screen. “Let’s try another star.”

Trent eyed the power gauge. Down to a quarter now. But what else could they do? “Okay,” he said.

The next star had one gas giant close in, but there was a more Earth-like planet in the right spot for life. They jumped close to it and had a look. It was a brief look because that planet was moving just as fast as the other one, but they had long enough to see cloud patterns and blue oceans and brown continents that looked pretty much like home.

“That might do,” Trent said, “but damn, that speed. We’d be a week tryin’ to catch up.”

“Maybe not,” Donna said. “There’s that gas giant right there. If we used its gravity, we’d change velocity pretty quick.”

“How quick?”

She called up the landing program again and let it crunch on the information from their triangulation jumps. “Hard to say for sure until we make our first pass and figure out how massive it is, but if it’s Jupiter’s size, it would take us about three hours.”

Trent checked the pressure gauges on the air tanks. A nudge over two-thirds full on the left tank, and three quarters on the right. He hadn’t calibrated the gauges for time, but if each tank held about three hours’ worth, then… “We’ve only got about four and a half hours of air. That’d be cuttin’ it pretty close.”

“Yeah.” They watched the dwindling planet for a bit. Trent couldn’t help thinking that their hope for survival was dwindling just as fast. They had fifteen or twenty more jumps before they ran out of juice, and not enough air to take the time to use them right. “How many jumps does it figure we’d have to take to slow down usin’ the gas giant?” he asked. The only way to make this big a velocity change was to jump close to a planet and fall away from it, then when you got so far out that its gravity started to weaken, you jumped back closer and fell outward again, but the closer you jumped, the more energy it took.

She clicked the pointer on the “details” box and said, “Six jumps. We could cut it to five by drifting farther before we go back for another pass, but it would take longer.”

“Shit.” Landing would take three or four more, depending on how particular they were over their landing site. That wouldn’t leave them very many jumps to get home on.

He tried to think. “They can’t all be movin’ this fast, can they?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. All the planets in this solar system are.”

“We’d save a lot of power if we didn’t have to change so much velocity,” he said.

“You want to try another star?”

They would have to make two more jumps at the least—one to get there and one more so the computer could triangulate on the planets—and one more to get close enough to see if any of the the planets were any good…

“No,” he said. “Air’s top priority at this point. Power we can do without if we have to, but not air.”

“So you want to match velocity with this planet and land?”

“I don’t see much choice.”

“Me either.”

“Let’s do it, then.”

Donna called up the landing program and told it to catch up with the fleeing planet. She couldn’t pick an actual landing spot, since it was already so far away that it was just a blob on the computer’s screen, but they could do that later. The gas giant was already selected as the gravity source, so she just hit “go.”

The starfield on their left became a solid wall of yellow and orange haze. It looked like they were about six inches from it, but it began to recede the moment they arrived.

“Damn,” Trent said. “How can that program be so accurate jumpin’ from planet to planet, and so far off goin’ from Mirabelle to Earth?”

“I wish I knew,” said Donna.

They watched the gas giant recede, going from a flat wall to a three-quarter disk with a big nightside shadow on its lower-left side, then dwindling further until it was just a big parade-float balloon and finally about the size of a basketball, all within the space of a few minutes. Then the landing program jumped them back and they did it again, only slower.

The long minutes of waiting were tough on the nerves. Donna couldn’t do anything with the computer while it was in the middle of the landing sequence, so they couldn’t even keep trying to figure out what had gone wrong with it, and Trent kept wondering when it would suddenly decide to do it again. One more bad jump and they’d be out of luck.

His throat felt dry. There was plenty of beer left in the camper, but he and Donna would have to seal up their suits and open the cab to go get it. That would waste at least fifteen minutes of air even if they waited until it was at its worst before they vented it.

“I should have put a hatch between the cab and the camper,” he said.

Donna looked over at him. “I thought you decided it would be too likely to break the seal when we landed.”

“Yeah, but I could sure use a beer about now.”

“Me too.” She shivered. “And a blanket. I’m cold.”

“We can at least do something about that.” He twisted around and pulled their coats from behind the seat.

Instead of putting hers on, Donna unbuckled her seat-belt and scooted closer to him, pushing herself down to the seat until he put his arm around her and pulled her tight against his side, then she tucked her coat around their legs like a lap blanket. He draped his over their upper bodies and tucked the arms in behind them to hold it in place.

“Just like old times,” he said. She had always used to ride in the middle when they went four-wheeling outside of Rock Springs. You couldn’t do that very well in space, because you needed the shoulder harness to hold you against the seat when you landed, but they wouldn’t be doing that for a while yet. She rested her head on his shoulder and he rested his head on hers. Her hair smelled nice. Strawberry shampoo, and her own Donna scent that he always figured he could pick out blindfolded.

The gas giant was pretty. The clouds weren’t as thickly banded as Jupiter’s; they were more like Saturn’s, just wide, even bands encircling the entire globe. He wondered what made one planet do one thing and another planet do another. Rotation rate? Chemistry in the clouds? He didn’t have a clue. There was so much stuff he didn’t know about space. It made him feel like a total idiot. Donna was always reading books about it, or had been since the whole business had landed in their laps five months ago, but he couldn’t make himself sit down and read about orbital mechanics and planetary formation and stuff like that. It was too much like school, and he’d never liked that, either. He’d always been an outdoor guy. Give him a fishing pole and a mountain stream over a book any day.

He wondered if he’d ever see a stream again.

“What you thinking about?” Donna asked softly.

“Nothin’.”

“What sort of nothin’?”

He smiled. “Okay, I was thinking about going fishing.”

“Where would you go? If we were home, I mean.”

“I don’t know. Little Sandy, maybe. I’ve always liked it up there.”

“Me too.” She laughed. “Remember when I fell in the beaver pond?”

“Face first in the mud. Man, you were a sight. You looked like some horror-show monster. Gave me nightmares for weeks.”

“Me too.” They were silent for a few minutes, then she said, “We’re going to be okay.”

He nodded. “We don’t have much other choice.”

The gas giant wasn’t quite as big as Jupiter, so it took almost four hours to kill their velocity. Every time they refreshed their air, Trent winced at the sound of the old air rushing out and the new rushing in, but they had to do it or asphyxiate on their own carbon dioxide. They traded back and forth between Donna’s door and his so they wouldn’t have to use the maneuvering jets to kill their spin every time, so that saved a few extra breaths. He just hoped it would be enough.

When the main tank ran out, they started using air out of the maneuvering tank. It was tempting to consider all of that to be breathing air, but Trent knew they needed to keep some for adjusting their position when they fell into the atmosphere. It would do no good to make it to safety only to go in upside-down and wrap the parachute around the pickup.

They napped fitfully between recharges, partly trying to conserve air and mostly because they hadn’t slept in a day and a half, but Trent kept waking out of daydreams of good times on Earth only to find himself about to die in the ass end of nowhere, and he decided he’d rather just stay awake. He was glad he wasn’t alone out here, but he would have given anything, even the last of his air, to have Donna home safe instead. It was her idea to come on this particular trip, but he’d been the one who turned their pickup into a spaceship in the first place. Who had he been kidding? He wasn’t an astronaut. If he’d just accepted who he was and left it at that, he wouldn’t have gotten either of them into this mess.

He was glad when the computer dinged at them to warn them that the velocity change was about complete. It gave him something else to think about. Something to keep his hands busy, too. At least when they were landing, he could do something. If he didn’t screw that up, they could be on the ground in another half hour, which was a good thing because that’s about all the air they had left. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if the atmosphere wasn’t breathable.

Donna slid over to her side of the cab and buckled in while the computer took them back to where it thought the Earth-like planet ought to be. It was off by about half the planets width, which wasn’t that bad considering all the jumps they’d made and the velocity change they’d gone through, but it took another jump to put them into position just outside the atmosphere, and once they picked their landing site it would take another two at the minimum to fine-tune their position and velocity so they would come in slow enough to deploy the parachute. That was cutting it awfully close. If they ever got home, it would be on the last couple of electrons in the plasma cells.

There weren’t many continents here. What land there was was mostly islands; circular bull’s-eyes with tall peaks in the middle. “Volcanoes,” Trent said when he realized what he was seeing. And now that he had the right image, he realized that a lot of the clouds down there were actually active eruptions.

“Let’s pick one that’s dormant,” Donna said.

“Good idea.”

They didn’t have a whole lot of time to decide. Every minute they spent looking meant another minute cancelling the downward velocity they picked up from the planet’s gravity. So Trent just pointed at the first island he saw that looked big enough to provide a good target and didn’t have a big thunder cloud over its peak. “There.”

“Done,” said Donna. She clicked the pointer on the widest stretch of flat land on the computer’s image of the island, then hit the “go” button. The computer zapped them over to the night side of the planet for a minute or so to kill their velocity, then popped them back into place and dropped them into the atmosphere. They made one big jump, then two more small ones, feeling out the point where the hyperdrive couldn’t go any farther, then began to drop from there. Trent used a couple more bursts of air from their dwindling supply to orient the truck so they were coming in with the parachutes on top.

“Airspeed is fifty, seventy-five, a hundred,” Donna called out. At a hundred, Trent flipped the parachute release switch, using the one they hadn’t used last time. Might as well put equal wear on them both. He’d considered using them together, since there would be no second chance if this landing didn’t go well, but then he remembered that it would just take them longer to land if he popped both chutes. They could do it down lower, just before they landed, if they wanted to, but there was really no need. One chute was enough for a normal landing.

There was the usual two seconds of free fall after the release as the parachute billowed upward, then the hard lurch as it filled out.

Then they were falling again.

“What the hell?” Trent craned his neck and stuck his head against the window so he could look up. The parachute was a shredded mop of flapping rags, and there was a big cloud of white confetti above that. It looked like the thing had exploded.

Could somebody have shot at them with a laser satellite? They hadn’t tried to call anyone on the radio, because they had been too far away when they were at the gas giant, and they hadn’t had time before they lined up for landing. There hadn’t seemed much point anyway; out here, the odds of finding humans, or even aliens who used the same radio frequencies as humans, were ridiculously small.

Something had happened to their chute, though. Should they jump back into space and try the radio? Maybe they could negotiate a rescue, or at least permission to land. But they only had one or two more refreshes of air; hardly time enough for any of that. And the more he looked at the shredded parachute overhead, the less it looked like laser damage. Nothing was melted; it just looked shredded.

They were picking up speed fast. The remains of the parachute were ripping free like party streamers. “Hang on,” Trent said. He jammed his fingers going for the other chute switch, and he and Donna braced themselves for the jolt. When it came, it shoved them deep into the seat, hard enough that Trent felt the air tank under his butt. He prayed that this chute would hold, please hold, just get us to the ground goddammit hold, and he held his breath for the moment of free fall that would tell him he and Donna were dead, but it never came. He looked up and saw the canopy filled out firm and round above them, and he remembered to breathe.

“What happened to the first one?” Donna asked.

“I have no idea,” Trent said. “It doesn’t look like it was shot. It’s more like our clothes and that shop towel, but the alien slime didn’t even get close to that parachute.”

She frowned. “No, but the tree sap did.”

“The tree sap?” He slapped his forehead. “The tree sap! Of course. This is the chute that got hung up in the tree. And we got sap all over our clothes, too. And I wiped it off the parachute with the shop towel.”

She looked up at the good chute. “I’m glad they didn’t both come down in that tree.”

“Me too.” He looked up again and saw the old chute hanging in the shroud lines of the good one. What was left of it flapped a little in the breeze, but it wasn’t fouling the lines or anything.

He looked down as much as he could. As near as he could tell, they were right over the island. He didn’t have the mirrors aimed downward this time, either, but he could see big puffy clouds floating serenely over the central volcano, casting shadows on its flanks. They didn’t seem to be moving very fast, which was a good thing. It wouldn’t take much wind to blow the pickup out over the ocean.

Donna reached across the seat and took his hand. Her fingers were like ice, even through the Ziptite suit. He rubbed them in his palms, not sure if that would warm them up or not, but he did it anyway.

He had to refresh their air one more time on the way down. That left just a few pounds in the tank, enough for maybe one more cabful, but if things went right, they wouldn’t need it for a while.

And it looked like things were finally going right. There were trees on the island, and several streams running down off the volcano. As they grew closer, they could see wide, flat beaches and grassy meadows. Some kind of herd animals were grazing in the meadows.

“I think we could have done lots worse,” Trent said. “ ’Specially if those are palm trees.”

Donna said, “More people are killed by falling coconuts than airplane crashes.”

“That’s a risk I’m willing to take,” Trent replied. He smiled and added, “I’ll make us coconut helmets. And a coconut bikini for you.”

“How come I have to wear clothes?”

He thought about that for a second. “’Cause otherwise we won’t get anything done?”

“Depends on your definition of ‘anything.’ ” She was giving him that look again.

He just shook his head and looked at the ground. They were only a few hundred feet up now, aimed for a big patch of green grass or something. As long as the same stuff was directly beneath them, too, they couldn’t ask for better. “Hang on,” he said, and he leaned back in the seat.

It was a perfect touchdown. The pickup bounced once and came to rest on level ground, and the parachute slid to the side and collapsed right beside them. It would be a piece of cake to fold it up and stow it again.

Trent looked over at Donna. She was grinning like a goof, and he realized he was, too. They’d made it. The sun was shining bright, and a little breeze was rippling the grass in front of them.

Normally if they were exploring new planets they would have a mouse in a cage who would get the dubious honor of taking the first breath while they waited in their Ziptite suits, but this trip they hadn’t expected to go anywhere that didn’t already have people on it. Trent considered having Donna seal up while he tried it, but there seemed little point. Either they could breathe it or they were dead. So he just unlatched the top and bottom of his door and popped it open, and Donna did the same on her side. They looked at one another, then each took a breath.

It smelled fresh and grassy. And a little spicy. “Smells like cinnamon,” he said. “Not bad. Kind of sweet.”

Donna had a funny look on her face. “What are all those stars doing down here?” she asked.

He was about to ask what she meant when he saw them himself: bright swirls of light looping around a central dark spot, a dark spot that grew wider and wider as he watched. He heard a ringing in his ears, and he felt like he was back in space again, floating weightless.

“Shit!” he yelled. “Seal up! There’s something wrong with the air.” He knocked off his cowboy hat and flipped his hood over his head in one motion, squeezed the seam closed, then reached down to his side and cranked the suit’s tiny air tank’s valve open. He heard the hiss of air filling the suit just before the darkness expanded all the way, and he fell forward into the steering wheel.