Anywhere but Here

17

Somebody was honking at him. Trent jerked awake, certain he’d fallen asleep at the wheel, and the honking stopped. Sure enough, he was in the pickup, and he’d apparently run off the road, because there was grass all around.

His head hurt. And he was wearing a Ziptite pressure suit. He looked over to Donna’s side of the seat and saw her slumped half out of the truck, hanging by her shoulder strap. She was wearing a Ziptite, too. How the heck had they wound up here? Had they wrecked? Something wasn’t clicking. He felt like he’d been asleep for weeks, and needed another week to bring his mind up to speed.

He pulled Donna upright. She was limp as a sack and her head lolled to the side, but she was breathing. Her suit was sealed tight. Why? He couldn’t remember.

The sun was shining bright and warm through the windshield. Trent shaded his eyes and looked out at the volcano straight ahead. It looked impossibly high and steep-sided, like a cartoon drawing. Snow covered the top third or so.

Volcano. They’d been about to land on a planet full of volcanoes. No, they’d landed, and opened up their suits, but the air was bad. Sulfur dioxide, maybe, like you sometimes got in the mines. Did volcanoes put out sulfur dioxide? He seemed to remember that they did, but he wouldn’t bet on his memory of anything at the moment.

His suit was making little popping sounds: the pressure relief valve at the back of the bubble helmet letting out excess air. It was stiff, too, from being pressurized. Moving his arms took effort; they wanted to stick straight out from his sides. He forced them down to his waist and shut off the air tank’s valve, then thought to check Donna’s. She had never opened hers. He did that for her, letting her suit inflate and start popping for a minute or so and praying that the fresh air would bring her around. If it didn’t, he wasn’t sure what to do. He could seal up the cab and fill it from the tank under the seat, but that would take up just about all the air they had left, and there would still be sulfur dioxide or whatever the bad stuff was mixed in with it. If they were going to fill the cab, their best bet would be to jump into space first, let all the bad air out, and then refill it.

Which meant he needed to repack the parachute. He turned off Donna’s air tank so it wouldn’t bleed dry, then he climbed down to the grassy ground, pulled the good chute out to its full length, and folded it up. It hardly took any time; he couldn’t have asked for a better surface to work on.

The truck looked like it had been in a wreck. Both sides were dented and scraped up, and the driver’s-side mirror was smashed flat to the door. The fenders hadn’t been shoved into the tires, though, which was at least some comfort. They could still drive it if they had to.

His memory was starting to come back now. He almost wished it hadn’t when he realized how hopeless their situation was, but he supposed he would rather meet his end with his wits about him than confused and wondering what was going on.

He gave himself a fresh shot of air, did the same for Donna, who was still breathing evenly, then climbed up to the top of the cab and repacked the good parachute into its pod. The shredded one he just unbuckled and tossed its lines to the ground, then wadded it up and threw it in the camper.

Donna was coming around when he climbed back into the cab.

“How you feelin’?” he asked.

She tried to put her hand to her forehead, but bumped into the bubble helmet instead. “My head hurts.” Her voice was muffled by her suit.

“Mine too. It’s something in the air here. We can’t breathe it.”

“Where are we?” she asked.

“The ass end of nowhere with practically no air left,” he said. “We’ve got to move fast.”

“Where are we going?”

“Another planet.” He looked at the power gauge, turning his head to see past the condensation on the inside of his helmet. “We’ve got enough juice for half a dozen more jumps, and air enough to fill the cab one more time. Plus what’s in our suit tanks. If we go now, maybe it’ll be enough to get us somewhere that’s got air we can breathe.”

“With no refreshes?” She shook her head. “That’s not enough air.”

“I’d rather die trying something than just sit here and suffocate,” Trent said.

“Yeah.” She didn’t sound quite sure of that.

He noticed his hat lying on the floor between them, picked it up and automatically went to stick it on his head, but it wouldn’t fit over the bubble helmet so he laid it on the back of the seat instead. His brain still wasn’t up to full charge.

“Can you run the computer?” he asked.

She looked at the screen, then out the windshield. “I think so. It’s starting to come back.”

“Good. We’re going to need to find us another planet in just a couple of jumps.”

“I don’t know if I can do that,” she said.

“Let’s at least try.”

“Okay.” She took the computer off the dashboard and set it in her lap. “We’ll have to try another star. This was the only planet in this system that was even close to habitable.” She started tapping at the keyboard, bringing up previous screens from when they were jumping around looking for good stars. “There’s only one other Sun-like star in this whole region that we haven’t already been to.”

“We’ve only got one shot anyway,” Trent said, thinking that they didn’t actually have even that. They needed enough air to let them find a planet, match velocities, and land on it, which would take at least half an hour, and probably longer. It was ridiculous to even try, except that there was no alternative.

There was no room for any more mistakes, either. He went over the steps in his mind: jump into space, let out the bad air, refill with good air…

Let out the bad air. The valve was stuck. They could just crack the door seals again, like they had done before, but it was harder to keep the pickup from going into a spin when they did it that way, and if it did, they would have to waste more air through the maneuvering jets to bring it to a stop. It would be safer if he could fix the release valve in his door first.

That was easier said than done. The nozzle stuck out only half an inch, but that was far enough for the weight of the truck to bend it sideways when it had tipped over. He would need a pair of Vise-Grips to bend that back into shape, and if dirt had gotten inside before it was bent, it would probably stay blocked even if he straightened it.

It could take ten or fifteen minutes to fix, way more time than they could gain by not using the maneuvering jets. Okay, forget that. Just go. But if they ever got out of this, he vowed to put a rubber hose on there for a nozzle instead of a chrome pipe. Hell, a valve stem off a tire would work perfect.

“Ready to go?” Donna asked.

“Yeah… no! Wait a minute.” He was missing something. Something obvious.

“What’s the matter?”

Valve stems. The truck had four valve stems, five if you counted the spare. It would take way too long to yank one off a tire and replace the nozzle on his door with it, but he had just gotten a sudden image of what would happen if he tried it. Twenty-five pounds of air pressure would come roaring out of the tire. At least a cabful at one atmosphere, maybe more.

“We’ve got five extra air tanks!” he shouted.

“What? Where?”

“The tires!”

He leaped out of the cab, slipped on the grass, picked himself up off his butt, and rushed around to the camper, where he grabbed the lug wrench out of the tool box and began spinning the nuts off the wheels, leaving only one attached—but loosely—to each hub. That way he wouldn’t have to bust them loose in space with nothing to push against. The truck wobbled when he leaned into the wrench to loosen the last nut, but the single bolt on each wheel held well enough to keep it from going anywhere.

He had to refresh the air in his suit twice more while he worked, and he was panting again when he was done. He could see pretty well through the helmet now because the condensation had collected into droplets and was running down the plastic bubble, dripping onto his neck and running down his chest under his shirt.

Donna slid down to the ground and went into the camper, emerging with the rope, which she tied to the roll bar as high up as she could reach on her side. After she’d secured one end, she laid the coil alongside the roll bar and used the loose end to tie the coil down so it wouldn’t go anywhere, but she used a slip knot on that end so it would be easy to release, leaving one end tied tight to the roll bar and the rest of the coil free.

“What’s that for?” Trent asked. He had shifted over to the spare, and was removing it completely from its bracket on the side of the camper. He would start with that one, even though it was a smaller tire. With any luck, that would be all they needed.

Donna said, “You’re not going to have time to remount those in space, but we’re probably going to need ’em again. You can tie them to the rope, and we can remount them after we land.”

She was absolutely right. “That’s thinking ahead. Good.” He picked up the lug nuts and threw them into the camper, almost threw the lug wrench in after them, then thought better of it and took that with him into the cab. He might need that in space if he couldn’t get the last lug nuts off with just his fingers.

They had just about used up the air in their suits. Donna helped him roll the spare tire up onto the seat, then the two of them squeezed into the cab with it and slammed their doors. The spare fit lengthwise between the back of the seat and the dashboard, so there was actually still a fair amount of room.

“Okay!” Trent said. He latched his door tight and made sure his window was sealed. “Let’s do it.”

Donna latched her door and checked her window, then picked up the computer and set it on her lap again. Trent peered around the front of the tire to see what she was doing. She was just calling up the launch window when he noticed something moving out her window, and he looked past her to see an alien creature about seven or eight feet tall walking toward them, leaning on a long stick that it held in two of its four hands.

“Wait!” he said.

Donna paused with her finger over the button. “What now?”

“Behind you. We’ve got company.”

She turned to look, and they both watched the alien take a few more cautious steps toward them. It stood upright on two legs, but it looked more insectile than human with its narrow waist, four arms, and a long, oval head on a slender stalk of a neck. It was more than just a big bug, though: it was wearing a red-and-white striped blanket draped over one shoulder and wrapped between its two sets of arms, then tied around its waist. Its stick was sharpened on the top, pretty obviously a spear. It stopped maybe twenty feet away and bobbed its head up and down.

“Somebody lives here,” Donna said. “Do you think they’d be able to help us?”

“I don’t know,” Trent said. He wanted it to be so, because the odds of their finding another planet with air they could breathe in the short time they had left was pretty minuscule, but they would have to communicate the concept of oxygen to the natives, and actually get some from them, in the same amount of time. All from a guy carrying a spear that didn’t even have a metal point. “It doesn’t look good,” he said. “I don’t think this guy is techie enough to even understand what we need, much less provide us with it.”

“What if he’s a sheepherder or something, and there’s a regular city just over the hill?”

“We’d have to get there, and I’ve already unbolted the wheels.”

“We can’t just leave!” Donna protested. “Not without at least trying to talk to him.”

“I don’t think we have a choice,” Trent said. “We’ve got one chance to find another planet, but only if we go now.”

“But—”

“Look out!”

The native had cocked back its spear. It took three running steps toward them and threw it straight at Donna.

“Shit!” she yelled, and she jabbed at the keyboard.