Anywhere but Here

26

There were no windows in the camper. The three round moons of the air vents provided the only path for daylight to shine in, and with the mountain blocking their view to the east and the tree overhead, there wasn’t any morning light to speak of, either. Just a pale glow from the sides and overhead. Trent had no idea how long he’d slept, but it felt like a week, and he could have done another if his bladder hadn’t insisted he rise.

He stepped outside to find the sky gray and rain misting down silently in the meadow. The air was chilly, but not cold enough that he could see his breath. The ground was still dry under the tree. He went around to the other side to pee, but he hadn’t brought his armor, so he didn’t venture beyond the edge of its canopy. There was no evidence of birds overhead today, but those blue-gray scales of theirs would blend in perfectly with clouds, and he wasn’t willing to find out the hard way that they hunted in the rain.

The air smelled wonderful. Either the tree or the ground cover out in the meadow was giving off a new aroma now that it was wet; a crisp, minty scent that made up for the gray light and the rain.

Trent was about to go back to the camper and fix breakfast when he noticed a dark gray shape moving across the upper end of the meadow. It was hard to make out detail through the mist, but it looked like it was about the size of an elk, and it moved on four legs. Its head was big compared to its body, like a buffalo, and its back seemed segmented rather than furry. Was it armor plated? Trent backed away slow and easy, went around to the far side of the pickup to open the door and get out the binoculars, and left the door open while he leaned on the hood and focused on the new animal.

It was definitely armored. Big overlapping plates of bone or horn or some such covered its head and back. Its legs were thick and stumpy to support all that weight. That nixed the first idea that had come to mind: shoot it for the meat and for the full-body suit of armor. It might provide more complete protection from cupids than the stuff he had made yesterday, but not if he couldn’t carry it.

Trent watched the animal stump along, bending down every few steps to eat a mouthful of the low, leafy plants that covered the ground. It came to a bush and stripped half the leaves off that, too, by closing its mouth around one branch at a time and sliding it upward.

He heard soft footsteps behind him, and Donna whispered, “What do you see?”

“Looks a little like a buffaloceros,” Trent whispered back. He handed her the binoculars and pointed.

He would have sworn their voices couldn’t be heard more than a few feet away, but the animal raised its head and looked straight at them for a few seconds before turning back to denude another bush.

“It’s huge,” Donna whispered.

“Yeah. Glad it’s a plant-eater.”

It was getting harder to see. Part of that was because it blended in with the bushes, but the rain was starting to come down harder, too. It had been just a soft mist before, but now they could hear it pattering on the leaves overhead. A few drops were making it through now. Trent looked at his woodpile, then out at the sky. It didn’t look like it was going to stop raining anytime soon. He didn’t really want a fire at the moment, but by nightfall they might, so he went into the camper and got their blue plastic tarp and threw it over the wood, weighing the corners down with logs so it wouldn’t blow away. The buffaloceros paid him no attention; just wandered off into the mist.

They had breakfast, finishing what was left of the orange juice and eating cereal with powdered milk reconstituted with bottled water. If they started a fire tonight, Trent figured they could boil some stream water to make some hot chocolate or something. That would be a good first test of the local food supply.

After breakfast, they turned the bed into a table again. Donna got out the computer and went back to work on figuring out where they were. Trent sat beside her and read with her for a while, but he quickly became snowed by all the talk of square roots and inverse squares and gravitational constants. He tried to ignore the formulas and just follow the basic logic of the text, but when it came to figuring out the area swept out in a partial arc around a circle, it was nothing but formulas. “Hell,” he said at last, “they say here that pi are square, but any fool knows that pies are round. Cornbread are square.”

Donna gave him a sideways grin. “Go find something to do,” she said, “before I have to hurt you.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He put on his raincoat and his helmet and shoulder guards over that, then strapped on the pistol under his raincoat since he didn’t want to carry the rifle in the rain, and went outside.

It was raining harder now, a steady downpour that hissed against the leaves overhead and puddled up in the low spots out in the meadow. The stream had risen, and was churning loudly over the rocks. One would occasionally shift in the current, making a deep clunk that he felt as much as heard. He was glad he hadn’t put his beer in there; it would be halfway to the ocean by now if he had. He stood on the bank and watched the water rush past for a few minutes, trying to decide whether or not it would overflow the banks. If it did, the truck could wind up halfway to the ocean, too. There was probably enough juice in the batteries to drive across the meadow, but the minute Trent tried to climb a slope, that would be the end of their charge. There was no direction but down for the pickup anymore, and there wasn’t much downhill left. Maybe a couple hundred feet, total, before they left the mountains behind for good, but there was a lot of uphill and a lot of bushes to go around even on the downhill stretches between here and there.

Too bad. Coasting downhill was the one time when the pickup’s wheel motors generated electricity rather than burned it. Trent got an image of one way he could recharge the batteries: He could dismantle the pickup, carry it to the top of the mountain piece by piece, put it together again, and coast to the bottom. If he cleared a road straight down, he wouldn’t even use up any battery power going around obstacles. He would gain a kilowatt-hour or so with every trip. That meant he would only have to do it… what, a couple of hundred times? Piece of cake. He could probably have it done by the time the kids were ready for college.

That set him thinking, though. Coasting downhill wasn’t the only way to rotate a wheel. He could take off a tire and put a crank on the hub and save himself a lot of climbing. He wondered how much power he could generate by hand?

He had no idea, but the computer might. He went back to the camper and leaned in the door. “Hey, does the encyclopedia in that thing have conversion tables for calories to kilowatts?”

“What?” Donna looked up, puzzled, her face lit by the blue glow of the computer screen.

“I want to know how many kilowatts I can generate turning a crank.”

“Turning a crank?”

“Or pedals. That might work better.”

“For what?”

“Generating power using one of the wheel motors in brake mode.”

“Oh. All right. Let me see what I can find.” She set to work with a smile, happy to be doing something else for a while, and within just a few minutes she had an answer. “A thousand calories converts to just over a kilowatt-hour. And it says here that the human body burns two to five thousand calories a day, depending on how hard you’re working. So if you’re putting out five, minus the two it takes just to keep you alive, that gives you about three thousand calories going into the crank, so you can do three kilowatt-hours a day.”

And that was assuming a hundred percent efficiency, in both him and in the generator. “I think I’d do better hauling the truck uphill in pieces,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Long story. Never mind.” He went back outside and watched the rain come down.

He was on the right track, though. The wheel motors were already designed to generate electricity as well as use it. The trick was to find something else to spin them. Harness one of those buffaloceros guys? They could probably put out at least a horsepower. But Trent doubted they would break to harness very well, and even if they did, the motor needed to spin fairly fast to have any efficiency at all.

A windmill? That could work, except that down here in the valley there hadn’t been much wind yet. The storm had blown in without stirring much more than a breeze.

Another rock tumbled along the stream bed. Trent felt the hollow thuds as it banged its way to a stable spot. There was plenty of energy there, if he could just harness it.

He looked upstream to where he’d found the little waterfall above the bathing pool. A four-foot drop could turn a waterwheel. It probably wouldn’t have a whole lot more power behind it than him turning a crank, but it would be non-stop.

He tried to visualize how it could work. The simplest way would be to set the motor right out over the pool next to the waterfall, so the water could flow past the edge of the tire. He could tie tin cans or something to the tire to catch the water so its weight would turn the wheel. But how could he suspend the motor over the pool? It weighed at least a hundred pounds, a hundred and fifty with the tire.

Run a couple of logs across from bank to bank? The far bank was about the right height, but the one on this side was too high. He would have to dig down three feet to reach the right level. And besides, how could he get the wheel to rotate with the logs in the way? He would have to separate them wider than the tire and build a platform to set the motor on so the tire could spin between the two logs. That meant one of the logs would have to go in behind the waterfall, and there wasn’t room for that, so he would have to dig out a space for it, and that was rock rather than dirt back there.

Or he could build a flume, but that would probably be just as difficult. It was starting to look like more work than turning a crank. Okay, try again. Imagine holding the motor out over the pool in his hands. He wouldn’t need to stick his fingers out past the tire; why couldn’t he do that with the logs? Just stick them out from the far bank and tie the motor to their ends. The tire would be free to spin, and he wouldn’t have to build a platform or dig out behind the waterfall or anything.

He could feel his heart starting to speed up. This could work! Arrow trees were tall and straight, and if they were as stiff as the arrows themselves, then two of them would easily hold the motor’s weight without bending. He could pile rocks on the other ends to keep them from tipping into the pool. He would have to dismount the pickup’s batteries and set them close enough to the motor’s control box to hook them up to its leads, but he could do that easy enough.

He could do it. He went back into the camper and said, “I’ve figured it out. I’m building a waterwheel.”

Donna looked up from the computer. “A waterwheel?”

He told her his plan, talking too fast and tripping over his tongue in his excitement, and he forced himself to slow down and take it step by step. She started nodding as she realized how it could work. “That’s great,” she said, but she wasn’t smiling.

Trent could read her moods like a billboard. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Yeah, right. Out with it.”

She looked at the computer screen for a second, then back at him. “You’ve figured out how to fix our spaceship, but I still haven’t figured out where we are.”

He shook off the rain from his jacket and went inside to sit across from her. “Hey, you’ll get it. And if you don’t, we’ll find Earth by trial and error. We can charge the batteries and go hunting for it, and if we don’t find it the first time we can come right back here and try again.”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “Do you have any idea how big the galaxy is? It’s a hundred thousand light-years across. The volume of space that the computer will recognize is about four hundred light-years across. We could search at random forever and never hit it.”

“We don’t have to search at random. We know Earth is about thirty thousand light-years from the center of the galaxy, so we can go to the core, then jump outward thirty thousand light-years and work our way around the galaxy until we hit something we recognize.”

“That’s still a huge amount of space to search. And thirty thousand is an awfully even number. Glory probably rounded it off so she didn’t sound like Spock. If the actual distance is thirty thousand and a half, we’d never find what we were looking for.”

“Yeah, all right, but still. We can narrow it down a lot.”

“And I could pinpoint it if I was just smarter!”

He took her hands in his. “You’re the smartest person on the planet, babe. If anybody can pinpoint it, you can.”

“But I can’t! That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’ve been staring at this damned orbital mechanics textbook for hours now, and it’s not making any sense. If we went straight out from the center of the galaxy, and if the galaxy was rotating like a solid disk instead of a fluid, then maybe I could figure out how far we went, but the galaxy isn’t solid, and if we went at an angle across it I couldn’t figure out where we went even if it was.”

“We know what direction we went, don’t we?” he asked.

“What?”

“We have the webcam’s images of the stars after every jump, and we know what direction we intended to go every time, right? So like we figured before, unless there was an aiming error as well as a distance error, we know what direction we went, and we know what direction to aim to undo it all. All we’re missing is the distance of the one big jump.”

Even with the door open, not much daylight made it into the camper. Donna’s face was lit mostly by the computer screen, and its blue glow made her look icy cold. She pulled her hands away. “That’s all we’re missing? Hey, that makes everything better. That’s what I’m trying to figure out, dumb shit!”

“And you’ll get it! Don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry. That’s easy for you to say. You’ve solved your problem.”

“Well, excuse me! I’m sorry I’m so goddamned smart.” He got up and stomped the two steps to the door, but when he stopped and turned around for one last retort and saw her sitting there in the dim light, he took the two steps back and sat down across from her again.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Sure you didn’t,” she said sullenly.

“Look, if I was smart, I wouldn’t have pissed you off, now, would I? I mean, it stands to reason. You’re my honey bunny ducky downy sweetie chicken pie li’l everlovin’ jelly bean. I piss you off, and it’s no sex for me.”

“Oh, that’s flattering.”

“But it’s flawless reasoning.”

“You’re trying to use a logical argument to convince me you’re not smart?”

“How’m I doing?”

“Well, it is about the dumbest thing I’ve heard you say all day.”

“I could start praising President Stevenson.”

“That’s not necessary,” she said quickly. “You do that, and I’d just have to put you out of your misery.” She was trying not to smile, but it looked like she might lose that battle pretty soon.

“How ’bout if I quote him? ‘Space travel is bad for business. It’ll just encourage people to skip out on their debts, like the government does.’ ”

“He didn’t say that.”

“Sure he did. He just didn’t use those words.”

She pursed her lips, and finally cracked a smile, but it vanished as fast as it came. “Nice try, but I still can’t figure out where we are.”

He shrugged. “We don’t have to do it today. It’ll be a couple of weeks before the batteries are charged. Maybe I’ll have another brainstorm before then. Or maybe you will.”

“Fat chance.”

“You never know. In the meantime, come help me cut down a couple of trees.”