Anywhere but Here

24

He made another set of armor just like the first for Donna, then set to work on the table in the camper. The table itself wasn’t broken, so it was a simple matter of finding a sturdy stick and cutting it to the right size to replace the legs that had busted. That was the work of a half hour, then he took the Vise-Grips to the air valve in his door, bending it out straight again. He fished around in the pipe with the wire from the spiral notebook, pulling out a little plug of dirt, then blew through the spigot from the inner side. Free.

The driver’s mirror took another half hour to bend back into shape. There was a big crack in it, and the image in the two pieces didn’t quite line up, but it would work well enough until he could get a replacement.

He got out the foot pump and refilled the tires. He thought about filling the air tanks, too, but that would be a lot of work, and they weren’t going into space again unless he could recharge the batteries, and if he could figure out a way to do that, then he could use the compressor.

He cut up the rest of the log for firewood, and hauled up some smaller stuff from the driftwood pile for kindling. He wasn’t sure about sitting outside around a campfire in the dark until they learned what kind of nocturnal animals lived around there, but it never hurt to have a supply of firewood on hand, and it gave him something useful to do. It was starting to dawn on him how long a day could be when you didn’t have a plan to fill it.

They didn’t need to wear their helmets under the tree. Trent went out to the edge of its canopy and scanned the sky from time to time, and he saw the occasional cupid riding thermals high overhead, but none of them even came down to investigate. It looked like maybe they weren’t going to be as much of a threat as he had thought, but he was glad he’d made the armor just in case.

After Donna cleaned up the camper—which took all of half an hour—she settled down on the picnic blanket with the computer and started poring through the hyperdrive control program, trying to figure out what had gone wrong and where it had taken them. It wouldn’t do much good if they couldn’t recharge the truck’s batteries, but recharging the batteries wouldn’t get them home until they knew where they were.

Trent went through everything they had brought with them, counting up how many separate batteries he could find, but there weren’t many. Two flashlights, the computer, their phone, a calculator (solar powered, but it had a button battery for low-light use), and a couple spare flashlight cells. Granted, a flashlight battery would run the light for a couple of weeks of steady use, but it wouldn’t power a hyperdrive. The camper’s stove took its power from the truck’s main battery… as did the refrigerator, come to think of it. They were going to have to eat the perishable food first, which was probably why Donna had suggested ham sandwiches again for lunch. She was way ahead of him.

He thought briefly about using the calculator’s solar cell to recharge the truck’s battery, but a few minutes of number crunching with that same calculator convinced him that he and Donna would probably die of old age before a tiny solar cell could recharge a plasma battery.

There was still enough juice in the mains for the radio. He listened on all the channels, and he tried calling on the emergency frequency and the general talk frequency, but there was nobody out there. Ground-to-ground, the radio probably had only a fifty-mile range or so anyway; it would only be useful if someone popped into orbit directly overhead.

He switched it off and sat down beside Donna. “Any luck?” he asked.

“Not yet,” she replied. She was reading a help screen for the navigation programs targeting module. “Well, actually, I’ve learned a couple things. The program stores everything it does in a log file, but the log file says we only went sixty light-years on the jump from Mirabelle, so that probably means the bug in the program is between the part that sets the target and the part that actually sends the command to the hyperdrive.”

He wasn’t sure he followed all that, but he understood enough to ask, “Do you think you can fix the bug if you find it?”

“I doubt it,” she said. “I’m not a programmer, and I don’t have the right software for it even if I was.” She ran a hand through her hair and sighed. “I’m afraid you’d be better off with Nick and Glory at this point. Glory could probably just calculate how far we went by how much power we used, or by the density of the stars or something.”

“The velocity,” Trent said. “She was talking about how they move faster the farther away you go. She could probably just look at how fast that first planet we had to catch up with was movin’ and figure out right where we had to be.”

Donna cocked her head to the side and looked at him out the corner of one eye. “I hadn’t thought of that. Of course that’s why it was moving so fast. And why we didn’t have to do it again for the next one. Once we caught up to the first one, we were moving at the same pace as everything else around here. We just had to make up the difference in speed between the two planets going around their stars.”

Trent nodded. “Makes sense. So can you use that to figure out how far we went?”

She shook her head. “I’m not Glory. I don’t know how fast the galaxy rotates, or how fast we were moving back home, or—”

“Once every quarter of a billion years, and the stars around Earth are moving about half a million miles per hour.”

She couldn’t have looked more surprised if he’d started quoting Shakespeare at her. “You—how did you—”

“You thought I was just staring at her boobs, didn’t you?” he said smugly. Truth was, he had been so shocked when Glory had started to talk astrophysics that her words had been burned into his brain like the image of an accident. He thought for a moment and said, “Earth is thirty thousand light-years out from the center of the galaxy, and that half million miles an hour is about thirty times the orbital velocity of a satellite around an average sized planet. I thought it was funny that both numbers came out thirty.”

She tapped him gently on the side of his head. “You got anything else tucked away in there?”

“I remember she said it would take days to match speed with another galaxy, so unless she was exaggerating, I’m guessin’ we’re still in the Milky Way.”

Donna laughed. “Now that’s a comfort.” She turned back to the computer and opened up a drawing window, where she quickly sketched a rough spiral galaxy with an “x” about halfway out from the middle, which she labeled “Sun.” She typed “30,000 ly” next to it, and “500,000 mph” next to that. Then she called up the navigation program again and dug through its log file until she found how much velocity change they had had to make—537,000 kilometers/ hour—and typed that in.

“Better convert that to miles,” Trent said, “or you’ll forget to later.”

“Actually, I’ll be better off converting Earth’s speed to kilometers,” she said. “All the other numbers in here are metric, too.” She did that, then stared at the diagram for a minute. “Okay, let’s say we jumped straight out toward the edge of the galaxy. We’d be moving slower than the stars out there. So how far would we have to go to be moving five hundred and thirty-seven thousand miles an hour too slow?”

She might as well have asked how many leaves were on the tree overhead. Trent’s schooling had topped out at general math, and he’d gotten a “B” at that. He snorted and said, “I have absolutely no idea.”

“Me neither,” Donna said, “but if we can figure that out, I think that’ll tell us where we are.”

For a moment, Trent felt the weight of their situation drop off his shoulders. Donna was a hell of a lot better at math than he was. Maybe she could do it. But a moment later he realized the flaw in her logic. “How do you know we went straight out?”

“I don’t,” she admitted. “But I have the coordinates of both Mirabelle and Earth, so I can figure out what direction we did go. Assuming we were right about the only bug being our distance.”

“And then you can calculate how far we went, just knowing how much faster everything was?”

“Maybe. I’ve got to account for the Earth’s motion around the Sun, and this planet’s motion around this sun, too, ’cause that’s not part of the galaxy’s rotation, but if I can do all that, then…” She stared at the screen again, then started drawing little circles and connecting them with lines.

“What’s all that?”

“That’s me thinkin’. Go find something else to do for a while.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He got up and put on his helmet and armor, picked up his rifle, and walked out into the open, figuring he probably ought to check out a little more of their surroundings. No cupids upstairs at the moment. Five or six slo-mos out in the meadow. No lizards, but there were little noises coming from the bushes that could be them, or could be something else. He looked for big piles of dung that a big animal would leave, piles of bones or skulls that might show tooth marks of big predators, holes in the ground that might be the dens of nocturnal animals—anything that would help him figure out what kind of place they had landed in. He kept an eye out for berries and nuts and fruit trees, too, finding several promising candidates, and he scuffed up the ground around a few plants that looked like they might have edible roots, but all the while his mind was on the big question: how could he recharge the truck’s batteries? He recognized that look on Donna’s face. She wouldn’t stop working on the math until she had figured out where they were. She might have to learn orbital mechanics first, but she would do it—hell, she would re-invent it if she had to—if that’s what it took to come up with an answer.

It made him proud as hell to see the way she dived into stuff like that, but he had to admit that it also made him feel dumb as a post. Before they had left on their first hyperdrive trip, he had tried to learn how to run the computer, figuring that the driving had always been his job when they went four-wheeling, and it would stay his job in space, too, but a couple of days spent reading about vector translations and gravity wells and how to calculate an orbit had shown him just how different flying a spaceship was from driving a truck. Donna had taken to it like a duck to water, though. Within an afternoon, she had run a series of simulated jumps out to Alpha Centauri and back, and she had only crashed their simulated spaceship a couple of times on re-entry before she got the hang of that, too. He had told himself that it didn’t bother him. and he built the camper and sealed both it and the pickup’s cab to hold against vacuum, and he had figured out the center of mass of the whole works and had hooked up the parachutes directly over that spot so the pickup would land on its wheels, and he had designed and built the maneuvering jets himself. He had done all that stuff, but all that time he had known that he couldn’t fly the thing himself. And now here was Donna number-crunching velocity figures in the hope of saving their asses from a long, slow descent into savagery, while he walked around looking for wild animals and wondering how he could recharge a dead battery without a power supply.

He came upon a small arrow tree only eight feet high or so, with a scattering of yellow bones at its base. A cupid had apparently gotten lucky here a year or so ago. It looked like whatever it had killed hadn’t been much bigger than a dog, and the few teeth that Trent could find were flat-topped like a sheep’s rather than pointy like a wolf’s. That was good news.

The arrow had done well for itself, too. The tuft of branches at its top looked thick and healthy, bristling with mini-arrows a couple of feet long. He bent close to look at the tufts at the end of those and saw that the needles were actually smaller versions of the same thing, and if he squinted, the needles looked like they had little fuzzy barbs sticking out of their outer ends, too. Fractals. He remembered Donna telling him about fractals, how you could build something big out of millions of tiny parts that looked just the same as the big one. That had been something else she had learned on the computer, from a program that made cool-looking drawings on the screen just for fun.

He checked the sky. No cupids. No airplanes, either. He hadn’t seen or heard any sign of civilization since he and Donna had arrived. He tried to piece together the bones of the dead animal to see what it might have looked like alive, but they were scattered too much for him to even begin to guess what went where.

Chalk up another thing he wasn’t any good at.

He walked on and came to the stream, where he stood on the bank looking down into the water. It bubbled happily over rocks and shimmered in the pools, reflections obscuring what might swim beneath the surface. He supposed he could get out his fishing pole and see if anything in there would take a fly, but he wasn’t in the mood for fishing. Not while Donna was reinventing calculus over there under the tree.

He looked down the length of the meadow to where she sat, a little girl alone in the great outdoors. Isaac Newton under the apple tree. The pickup looked ridiculously out of place parked there beside her, a crude, barbaric relic of a world that prized adventure over learning. He blinked and for a second saw it with its tires flat and paint dull, rusting away after years of rain and snow. Would he and Donna still be living in the camper, hoarding their last precious relics of civilization, or would they have built a cabin by then out of arrow trees? Would there be half a dozen kids running around, wearing samurai armor and playing kick-the-slo-mo?

A soft breeze blew through the meadow, rustling leaves and bringing up a spicy odor from somewhere. There weren’t any flowers, but it still smelled nice. A little like sagebrush, only not so in-your-face. He could get used to a place that smelled like this.

He crossed the stream at a narrow spot at the head of a little waterfall that fell maybe four feet into a wide pool. A nice bathing pool, if the water wasn’t so cold. Maybe they could divert most of the flow around it so it could warm up in the sunlight.

When he climbed to the top of the other bank, he heard more rustling in the bushes, and when he took a couple steps closer, a little brown leathery ball about the size of a porcupine burst out from cover and bolted across twenty feet of open space to another bush. Trent thought briefly about trying to bag it for dinner, but he didn’t want to try eating any of the native life just yet. It was one thing to experiment with alien food when you could rush back to Earth and a hospital within a couple of hours, but when you were stuck in the middle of nowhere and your entire stock of medical supplies consisted of a traveller’s first-aid kit, it made sense to move a little more slowly.

He completed his circuit of their immediate surroundings without finding any bear dens or dinosaur footprints. The biggest animal he had seen any evidence of was whatever had left the pile of bones with the arrow through it. He felt himself relax a little as he walked back toward the pickup. Even if they did figure out where they were and charge the batteries, they didn’t necessarily have to leave here, at least not permanently. They had been looking for a new home when they left Earth; they could do a lot worse than this.

He wondered how Andre was doing, whether he had gone back to his ruined house to salvage any of his possessions, or if there was too much danger of another strike from orbit. He wondered if anybody else had lived within the blast zone of the first one. Andre had said that the French colonists lived apart from one another, but he’d been talking to an American. That wasn’t necessarily the truth.

Trent didn’t think Andre had been lying to him. He seemed to be just what he said he was; a regular guy trying to make a new home away from the craziness that had swept over Earth in the last couple of decades. But he hadn’t been able to escape. Nobody could, unless they were willing to cut themselves off completely. Hide out from America and its attempts to control every other human outpost in the galaxy.

He wondered why the Galactic Federation hadn’t done something about it yet. Could they already be as ineffective as the United Nations had been at reining in their out-of-control members? Or were they just reluctant to step into what was, after all, mostly a human problem? The alien races who made up the bulk of the Federation probably had growing pains of their own.

Trent remembered his promise to Andre when they parted. Not much of a promise, really; just that he would do what he could to stop his country from behaving so abominably, but a promise was a promise, and he intended to keep it. But how was he going to do that from way out here?