Anywhere but Here

23

They didn’t make it all the way out of the mountains. Down toward the bottom they had to use too much battery power to drive around brush and downed logs. They wound up in a gently sloping valley with a stream running through it, with a flat meadow up on a bench above the water channel and trees and bushes all around. About half the trees were arrow trees, but the others were more like cotton-woods, with big branches holding up wide canopies that provided lots of shade—and cover from aerial attack. It was as good a camping site as they were likely to find, so Trent coasted the pickup to a stop beneath one of the broad-canopy trees and set the brake.

“Well, Eve,” he said to Donna, “it looks like this is what Eden’s going to look like for you and me. What do you think?”

“I think we could have done a lot worse,” she said.

Trent took the rifle off the gun rack and stepped down to the ground, looking all around for anything that might be dangerous, but except for a few mobile rocks out in the open meadow it looked like they had the place to themselves.

The tree they had parked beneath looked like a regular Earth tree, with lots of wide branches and regular spade-shaped leaves at the ends. Nothing lived in it that Trent could see. The ground under it was covered with tiny little round-leafed plants, like those waxy little weeds that Donna kept pulling out of the garden. It looked like that was what this place used for grass. They hadn’t seen any flowers on the way down here, and there weren’t any in the meadow, either. Maybe plants on this planet hadn’t evolved flowers.

The stream was wide enough that a person couldn’t quite jump across it, but there were plenty of stepping stones. It made a happy gurgling sound as it cascaded from pool to pool. It would be a good fishing stream, if there were fish in it. Several arrows standing in the pools made Trent guess that something lived in there, something that the birds could eat. He hoped he and Donna could eat it, too. And there were the slo-mos. If those guys proved edible, the two of them wouldn’t have to worry about food for a long, long time.

They needed helmets, though. They hadn’t managed to drive out of cupid range, and they couldn’t spend their whole lives under the canopies of these big leafy trees. They could probably dodge anything that they saw coming, but there was bound to come a time when they didn’t look up quick enough, and as much as he would hate giving up his Stetson, generations of cavalry had proved that felt hats weren’t much good at stopping arrows.

He understood how people on Mirabelle must have felt all the time, wondering when death would rain down out of the sky on them. Except no amount of armor could protect them. Nothing could stop an asteroid moving thousands of miles an hour. The only way to stop that kind of attack was to stop the attacker.

He wondered if that would be possible here. Or even desirable. Arrows dropping out of the sky weren’t exactly a good thing, but the only way he could think of to stop it was to kill the cupids, and wiping out an entire species would probably cause a lot of damage up and down the food chain. Not to mention killing a lot of cupids, who might not be such bad guys once you got to know them. People thought wolves and bears had to be killed until they learned how to live with them instead.

With any luck, the question would remain academic. He and Donna needed protection now, not years from now; he wouldn’t even begin to consider eradicating the cupids unless they wound up stuck here for life.

That was a real possibility. They didn’t have enough battery power to drive out of the valley, much less jump from star to star, and even if they could charge the batteries somehow, they had no idea where they were. Way the hell and gone away from Earth, that much was sure, but that didn’t help them figure out how to get home.

Donna came around the back of the pickup and put her arm around his waist. “What you thinking about?”

“Nothin’,” he said automatically.

“What kind of nothin’?”

He smiled and gave her a squeeze. “The way too serious kind. We’ve survived a meteor strike and almost runnin’ out of air and a mountainside landing and hostile natives; that’s probably enough serious shit for one day.”

“My thoughts exactly. How about we have us a picnic lunch? We never did get that meal Andre fixing for us, and that was hours ago. My stomach’s trying to digest itself.”

Trent had been too scared and too busy to even think about food, but the moment Donna mentioned it, his mouth began to water and his stomach growled like a lion. “Oh, yeah, I could eat a horse,” he said.

“How about a ham sandwich?” she asked.

“Make it two.”

“Coming right up.” She went into the camper and started making domestic noises.

Trent followed her long enough to get their picnic blanket from under the dining table’s bench seat, then took it outside and laid it out on the ground beside the truck. He looked up into the tree and stepped out to the edge of its canopy to check the sky, but he still didn’t see anything moving. All the same, he couldn’t make himself relax. He kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Donna came out of the camper a couple minutes later with three sandwiches and a bottle of water. Trent wasn’t a big water fan, but he supposed they ought to ration the beer a little. No telling when they’d get more. Probably when he brewed some. He hoped his own stuff would taste better than the beer he got in brew pubs.

The sandwiches were wonderful. Trent wolfed his first one in about six bites, then forced himself to make the second one last until Donna was done with hers. She wasn’t wasting any time, either, so it wasn’t a great hardship. Neither of them spoke more than “Mmmff, good!” until the sandwiches were gone.

There were no ants. Trent kept waiting for little creatures to crawl up onto the blanket and go for the bread crumbs, but he only saw a couple of brown stick-like things about an inch long, and those just crossed the blanket on their long, spindly legs and kept going. There were no flies or mosquitoes, either. The air was just the right temperature, and the ground was soft under the blanket; perfect conditions for a nap, except Trent couldn’t bring himself to let down his guard yet.

There was plenty of work to do anyway. They were definitely sleeping inside the camper until they were sure it was safe outside, which meant he had to repair the table that the tire had smashed, because that folded down level with the seats to make their bed. And there was the helmet question. What could he use to make helmets? He supposed he could cut up a tool box or something for the sheet metal and hammer it into some kind of hat, but he didn’t really want to ruin a perfectly good tool box unless he had to. He wished he’d thought to bring some extra diamond plate along, but when you’re coming down under a parachute, you don’t want a whole lot of unnecessary weight. He hadn’t brought welding equipment for the same reason.

He had a saw. Maybe he could cut down a tree and hollow out a chunk of log for a helmet. And he could split a log and hollow the halves for shoulder-guards. Maybe saw one into boards for chest and back protection, like those advertising sandwich boards that people wore on street corners.

He laughed out loud at the image. The thing would weigh a ton.

“What’s funny?” Donna asked.

He told her what he’d been thinking, and she laughed, too, but not at that. “There’s helmets lying around all over the place,” she said. “Most of ’em are full of slo-mos, but I’ll bet we could find a couple of empty shells without too much searching.”

He tilted his head back and gazed up into the branches of the tree. “Good grief, what else am I missin’?”

She leaned forward and kissed him. “Nothing you can’t solve the hard way, I’m sure.”

“I guess that’s a compliment.”

“That’s how I meant it.”

“Well, then, that’s okay.”

He stood up and looked out at the meadow. There were several slo-mos out there, but he couldn’t tell a dead one from a live one without going out and tipping them over. So he shouldered his rifle and walked out into the open, keeping a weather eye out for cupids while he walked up to each slo-mo in turn, tipped it over, and waited to see if it tried to right itself.

One of them flipped much more easily than the others, and when it did, a lizard-like creature about the size of a hamster scuttled out of it and made a beeline for Trent’s boot. He jumped back and kicked at it, and it changed course for a clump of bushes a few dozen yards away, zigzagging like a soldier storming a gun emplacement all the way.

The slo-mo shell was empty. The bottom was half chewed away, and the inside was just a hollow cavity. The walls were about a quarter of an inch thick, and hard as bone. Definitely hard enough to stop an arrow, and probably bullets, too. Trent tried to bust out the rest of the underside, but it just flexed in his hands. He would have to take a hammer to it, and probably a file to smooth off the rough edges. The domed part was too big to fit comfortably on a human head, but with a little padding he supposed it would work okay.

He tried to find a second one, but everything else in the meadow was still alive, except for several rocks that turned out to actually just be rocks. He went over to the bank and looked down into the creekbed, but that was so full of round rocks that he would have to go down and turn them all over just to see which ones were real and which weren’t.

He carried the empty one back to the camper. Might as well see if he could make one work before he hunted up another.

“It’s funny,” he said. “It’s just about the perfect shape for a helmet already. You’ve got to wonder how come.”

“Form follows function,” said Donna, holstering her pistol. She had been keeping watch on the sky while he was out in the open. “It’s basically the same shape as a turtle shell, too.”

“No it’s not. Turtle shells are a lot flatter.”

“Tortoise shells, then. Land turtles. They’re tall and round like this.”

“That’s true.” He got his tool box out of the camper and started chipping away what was left of the bottom, using a hammer at first, then busting off pieces with pliers when he got closer to the rim. The inside was smooth and dry, with little grooves crisscrossing it where muscles had been attached. There was still no indication of a mouth hole or an anus, and the shell definitely didn’t open up to let the inhabitant stick its head out, which made Trent wonder if these things even had heads. Maybe they were just mobile stomachs, like starfish.

Once he chipped away the last of the flat bottom, he stuffed a towel inside and tried it on. It came down over his eyes until he adjusted the towel, and then it bumped into his back at the base of his neck. That might not be such a bad thing, actually. Firemen’s hats did that.

“What do you think?” he asked Donna.

“You look like a little kid with his dad’s army helmet,” she said, laughing. “But it looks like it should work.”

“Good. A little shoulder protection, and I think we’ll be in business. Let’s see if we can find another one.”

Keeping an eye out for cupids, he scrambled down the creek bank and stalled poking around among the rocks there. Most of them were just rocks, but there was a gravel bar at the tail of a bend in the stream where a bunch of driftwood had collected, and there were a couple of helmet-shaped rocks in among the branches. One was definitely a slo-mo; it was upside down and he could see the flat underside.

It had a hole chewed in the bottom, too. He nudged it with the barrel of his rifle, but nothing leaped out of it, so he tipped it over and a bunch of brown water poured out the hole.

“Eeew,” Donna said. “You’re wearing that one.”

“Okay.” He swished it around in the pool, filling and emptying it until the water came out clean. The stream was cold; evidently it was runoff from snowmelt higher up in the mountains. That was too bad for bathing, but encouraging in terms of predators and parasites. On Earth, at least, cold-water streams had a lot fewer nasties in them than warm ones. It would also make a good place to chill his beer, once he made sure nothing would run off with it.

He carried the shell back up the bank and set to work on it with the hammer and pliers until he’d chipped away all but the curved upper half. There were still some stringy ends of tendons attached to it, so he scraped those away with his pocket knife, then went back to the stream to wash it out again. While he was down there he hauled out a six-inch log from the driftwood pile that looked like it would make good shoulder guards and dragged it up to their campsite.

While he set to work on the log with a saw, Donna went into the camper and started cleaning up the mess in there. She came out with the ripped-up parachute and asked, “What do you want to do with this, anyway?”

“Keep it,” he said automatically. He didn’t want to throw anything out, not with civilization a million light-years away and maybe forever. The sections that had been weakened by sap were probably useless, but there were still big pieces of cloth that weren’t. It would never make a parachute again, but if he and Donna were truly stuck here, they might wind up wearing it before they learned to skin and tan hides.

“We should wash it,” she said, “so the acid doesn’t spread and eat the whole thing.”

“Good thought. Here.” He took it from her, unwound the shroud lines from the bundle of cloth, and threw the bundle down into the biggest pool in the stream. He tied the shroud lines to the tree so it wouldn’t float off downstream. “It’s not exactly washing, but that ought to give it a good soak, anyway.” He didn’t know if the sap was water soluble or not, but it was worth a try.

He went back to work on the log, cutting off an eight-inch section and splitting it in half, then hollowing it out with the claw of a hammer until he had two inch-thick shells of wood that would fit over his shoulders. They stuck out like epaulets on a military dress uniform, but they would do the job. The wood was harder than pine, and fibrous enough to hang together under impact.

He used a ratchet screwdriver to drill holes in the shoulder pieces and in the helmet, then strung them together with cord from the parachute shroud lines. He made a chin strap for the helmet, put the whole works on, and went to the camper door. “What do you think?” he asked.

It was darker inside the camper than out in the open. He couldn’t see Donna’s expression, but her laughter told him plenty. “You look like a samurai!” she said.

“Better than a kid in his dad’s helmet.”

“Well, that, too, but the shoulder dealies are priceless. Hold on a second.” She rummaged in a drawer, then came out with their camera. “Hold up your gun and look fierce,” she said.

He tried, but she kept snickering, and he couldn’t hold a stern expression while she was doing that. “Take the damned picture, woman!” he said, but he was grinning when he said it, and sure enough, that’s when she snapped the shot. He almost deleted it when she showed it to him, but she said, “No way! Take your own if you don’t like this one, but that’s mine. When we get home I’m going to print it out full-sized and frame it for the living room, and we can hang the helmet and armor underneath it and tell stories about it.”

“Oh boy,” he said, but he handed back the camera without deleting the picture. In a weird way, it gave him something to look forward to. He hoped he would make it back home to be embarrassed by it, but if he didn’t, then at least there would be one good thing about staying stranded the rest of their lives.