Anywhere but Here

25

He joined Donna on the picnic blanket and took off his armor, using the towel to wipe the sweat off his neck.

“Any luck?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I’m really wishing I’d paid more attention in math class.”

“You’ll get it,” he told her.

“Yeah, but when? If I was smarter, I’d have figured it out when we still had power and air, and we’d be home by now.”

Trent reached out and put his arm around her. “Hey,” he said softly, “don’t you go beatin’ yourself up for not pullin’ a rabbit out of a hat. You got us down alive while I was sittin’ in back bein’ about as useful as tits on a boar.”

She took a deep breath and let it out. “It’s just… I’m sure the answer’s there, if I only knew how to find it.”

“You will.”

“I wish I had your confidence.”

He gave her a squeeze. “I’ve got the confidence because you’ve got the brains. And you’ve got all the time in the world to use ’em. Take a break and come back to it later.”

She shook her head. “I’m right in the middle of something.”

He considered insisting, but he knew how well that usually worked. “All right,” he said.

He got up and put on his armor again, checked the sky, and went down to the creek to see how the parachute was doing. To his surprise, the orange stains were just about gone, so he pulled it onto the rocks beside the pool, wringing it out as he brought each armful up, until he had the whole works out of the water. It was all he could do to carry it up to the meadow, but he slung it over his shoulder like a sack of cement and staggered up the bank with it, then he dropped it to the ground, untied the shroud lines from the tree, and pulled it out into a ragged circle so it could dry.

The sun had moved enough in the last few hours to give him a sense of which direction it was going, but by the arc of its track across the sky, it looked like it was setting in the east. That meant they were in the southern hemisphere, then. He wondered how long it would take him to get used to that.

There was still quite a bit of daylight left, so he started checking the pickup’s door and window seals, trying to find the place where they were leaking. It was pointless busy-work if he couldn’t figure out a way to recharge the batteries, but it would be vitally important if he could. No way did he want to breathe air from the tires again.

He couldn’t find anything wrong. The window seals were tight; he could see the rubber compressed all the way around them. He inspected the seals on both doors for anything that might have gotten wedged in the way, and he looked for nicks or cuts, but the rubber was as smooth and clean as the day he’d installed it. So was the mating surface on the doors themselves. He checked the doors for alignment, thinking maybe they had been tweaked when the pickup tipped over, but they looked straight. He checked the seal around the wiring conduit from the cab to the rest of the truck, but that looked good, too. Finally, in desperation, he used the foot pump to put forty pounds or so in the air tank, climbed into the cab, sealed it up, and let enough out again to raise the cab’s pressure a few pounds above the outside air. He listened for the hiss of a leak, but he was no more successful on the ground than in orbit. After ten minutes he realized why: the gauge hadn’t dropped a bit.

That didn’t make sense. Why would it leak in space, but not on the ground? He raised the pressure some more, but it held steady. He tried the air valve in his door and it hissed just fine when he opened it, but it sealed tight again when he closed it.

But he hadn’t been able to use the air valve when they were in space, because it had been plugged with dirt and bent over. He had had to crack the door seal instead. He did that, popping open the top latch and letting a couple pounds of pressure blow out through the top of his door, then he snugged it down again and watched the pressure gauge.

After a minute, it dropped another pound.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. It had to be the way the rubber got pushed outward by the air rushing past it. It probably folded over, and didn’t seal right when he latched down the door again.

He used the valve in his door to let all the extra pressure out, then opened the other door, climbed out, and went around to look at the driver’s door. Sure enough, the rubber at the top had pooched out through the crack between door and frame. He went back around and popped all the inner latches, then went around to the outside again and opened the door. The rubber seal snapped right back into place.

“Son of a bitch,” he said again.

“What’s the matter?” Donna asked from her spot on the picnic blanket.

“We didn’t have to do all that dumb shit with the tires. We had one more cabful of air in the tank; if we’d just opened the doors all the way, then closed them again and refilled the cab, we’d have been fine.” He bonked his head against the door frame a couple of times. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

“Hey,” Donna said. “Don’t beat yourself up for not pulling rabbits out of hats, either. How could you have known?”

“I don’t know. I should have, though.”

She looked at the door, then at him. “We used the same trick all the way from Mirabelle, and it didn’t start leaking until after we landed on the planet with bad air. Why would you suspect it to suddenly start then?”

That was a good question, he had to admit. Why had it started leaking then, and not before? Because he’d been more cautious at first, just cracking the seal a little bit and letting the air out slowly? He and Donna had completely vented the cab to space to get the bad air out before they’d refilled it and discovered the leak; maybe it took a lot of air to roll the rubber seal over. But if that was the case, then why had it done that just now? He’d only let out a couple pounds. Maybe because he had popped the latch all the way open, knowing that the reaction wouldn’t pitch the pickup over while it was on the ground.

It took a little experimentation to prove his theory, but that turned out to be it. If he let air out gently, it wouldn’t turn the seal inside out, but if he let it out in a big blast, even for just a few seconds, it would.

Okay, so now he knew. One more thing to cross off the list of things to do before they could fly again. That left only the two biggies: navigation and power.

Donna had gone back to the computer while he tracked down the leak. From what he could tell looking over her shoulder, she was indeed trying to teach herself orbital mechanics. She stopped long enough to help him fold up the parachute when it was dry, but she went right back to it afterward, and she was still at it when the sun hit the horizon.

“Hey, come on,” he said, kneeling down beside her. “You’ve been at that all day. Time to relax a little. Look at the sunset.” It was going down in the mouth of the valley, dropping through layers of clouds as it neared the horizon and giving them silver outlines while coloring them red at the same time.

Donna reluctantly closed the computer and put it in the camper, and the two of them stood beside the pickup and watched the sun go down over the plain beyond the end of the valley. If the ocean was out that way, it was lost in the haze of distance or completely over the horizon.

“I think the days are longer here,” Donna said.

Trent laughed. “We’ve had one hell of a long day, that’s for sure. I’m ready for a long night in the sack.”

After the sun went down, they fixed another sandwich for supper and ate it on the picnic blanket while they watched the sky grow dark and the unfamiliar stars come out, then they retreated into the camper for the night. Their surprise visit by Onnescu’s native “hoodlums” had made Trent reluctant to spend much time outside in the dark until he’d learned a little more about what kind of nocturnal animals might live around here. He made sure the air vents were open so they would have fresh air, and latched the door tight.

They folded the table down and made the bed, using the seat backs and bottoms for their mattress, but not long after they crawled in, Donna sat up and said, “I can’t sleep. I’m too close to figuring out how to do the math.” She reached for the computer, but Trent pulled her back down.

“Give it up for today. The problem will still be there in the morning. You’ll be fresher at it tomorrow anyway.”

“But I can’t sleep. I’ve got all these numbers running around in my head.”

“Like what? Seventeen? Forty-two?”

“Five hundred and thirty-seven thousand.”

“That’s a lot of number to be runnin’ loose. Why don’t you round down to half a million and then forget the zeroes? Doesn’t seem like near as much then.”

She poked him in the side. “All right, smarty pants. But if the answer comes to me in a dream, it’s going to be off by thirty-seven thousand kilometers an hour. Who knows how many light-years away from home that’ll leave us.”

“Close enough for the navigation program to recognize the stars,” Trent said. “Go to sleep.”

“I’ll try.”

She laid her head on his chest and he put his arms around her, but after a few minutes he realized he was just as wide awake as she was. He had numbers running around in his head, too. His were kilowatts instead of kilometers, but they were just as insistent. How was he going to generate enough power to recharge the batteries?