Anywhere but Here

36

They didn’t leave right away. They still needed to install a better navigation program on their computer, and Judy wouldn’t let them go without at least having a meal with them and catching up on old times. Donna wouldn’t have a meal with anybody without a bath first, so she and Trent wound up in a guest room just off the docking bay, trying to figure out how to use the plumbing.

They identified the bathroom easily enough by the mirror and the sink and the medicine cabinet, though the sink had a clear bubble over it with holes in the front to stick your hands through so water wouldn’t come flying out all over the place, and the medicine cabinet had clips and pockets instead of shelves to hold everything. The toilet was either disgusting or amazing; Trent couldn’t decide which. The seat was soft enough to seal around his butt when he sat down, and then the air pressure went down inside, sucking everything down to the bottom of the bowl before it could make a mess. It took a minute to get used to the steady breeze blowing down between his legs, but he eventually relaxed enough to get the job done.

The shower turned out to be a separate room beside the bathroom, an oblong big enough for two or three people at once, with lights at either end and little round bulges with holes in the ends of them sticking out of the walls every foot or two. Those had to be nozzles, but there was no obvious way to turn them on. Trent grabbed one and gave it a twist, then pushed on it, then pulled on it and a jet of warm water sprayed him right in the face. He shoved it in again and it stopped.

“Success!” he said, scraping the water off his face. It drifted away in fat globules, which Donna, watching from the open door, batted back inside the shower. She slipped on in and the door closed behind her, and Trent tugged the nozzle on again.

Water sprayed against his chest and bounced everywhere, dancing in the air all around them; then a soft breeze began to pull it up through an opening above their heads.

“I think that’s where our feet are supposed to go,” Donna said. She curled into a ball and turned over, stretching out again with her legs next to Trent’s face.

He wasn’t quite as limber, but he managed to turn around, too, and open another nozzle on that end so they had water flowing at both ends of the shower.

There was a bar of soap in a little mesh bag hanging right where they needed it. They had fun lathering one another up and washing each others hair and rinsing off, then they had even more fun experimenting with how other things worked in zero-gee. It was a long shower by the time they turned off the water jets and chased all the loose globs of water into the drain before they opened the door again, but they both felt a lot better about life by then.

They toweled off and put on fresh clothes that they’d brought from the camper, then set out to find Judy and Allen’s apartment. Trent wore his hat and boots, even though he wasn’t likely to need either inside a space station. He just felt naked without them.

Potikik guided them through the space station with instructions through their mobile speakers, leading them to a huge open atrium lined with shops and filled with airborne aliens—with a guy-line along the walls that they hung onto so they wouldn’t become airborne, too—and into a more conventional corridor that led past several more parks before ending at an unassuming slit in the wall.

“You’re there,” said Potikik. “Enjoy your dinner.”

There was no doorbell. There was no door to knock on, either. Trent rapped a knuckle on one of the lips, but it made practically no noise, so with a “what the hell” shrug, he pushed the two sides apart the way he’d learned to open all the other doors on the station.

This one didn’t open, but it did make a loud hum, like a singer warming up his voice. Nothing more happened for a few seconds, but just when Trent was wondering if he should make the door hum again, it opened to reveal Allen floating there with his arms out wide.

“Come in!” he said, reaching out and pulling them into the living room beyond. At least that’s what Trent assumed the place was; it had paintings on the walls, and bookshelves with little elastic webs across them to keep the books from drifting loose, and potted plants and some kind of twisted abstract sculpture that had to be alien. There was no furniture, but in zero gee there didn’t seem to be any need for it.

Allen didn’t even pause in the living room. He led them right on through, and through a video room with a six-foot screen on the wall, past archways that led to bedrooms—with hammocks rather than beds, just like in their guest room—on through a dining room that had a table with attached chairs and seatbelts to hold people to the chairs, and into a kitchen, where Judy was busy chasing vegetables through the air.

“We had a little accident with the salad spinner,” she explained, fielding a baby carrot and popping it into a yellow plastic tub with a lid full of flexible slots. Trent and Donna and Allen joined in the hunt, and they quickly brought the salad under control again.

“Cooking without gravity is a different experience,” Judy said. “I’m still not very good at it. Allen is much better.”

“I use the microwave a lot,” he said. “Heat transfer without physical contact is the key. Do you like rabbit?”

Trent laughed, somewhat ruefully. “Last time we were asked that, dinner got interrupted by a meteorite.”

“That was on Mirabelle?”

“Yeah.”

“Then we’ll have salmon.”

Trent said, “No, rabbit’s okay. I just—it just reminded me, that’s all.”

Allen nodded. Then a moment later he brightened and said, “Hey, I’ve invented something I think you’ll appreciate.” He opened a very ordinary looking refrigerator at the back of the kitchen and said, “Budweiser, right?”

“Absolutely,” Trent said.

“Here you go.” He handed over a regular can of beer, but it had a little plastic cap on it like a water bottle with a push-pull stopper. “You shove down on it like this to pop the top,” he said, demonstrating, “and then when you want a drink, you just stick the cap in your mouth and pull it open with your teeth. Internal pressure squirts beer into your mouth, and you push it closed when you’ve got enough. No foam flying all over the place.”

Trent gave it a try, and it worked like a charm. “Hot damn,” he said. “I hope you got a patent on this.”

Allen shrugged. “Eh. Managing a business is a pain. I just like to invent stuff.”

“How’s your alternate dimension thing going?” Donna asked, accepting another beer from him.

“Huh?”

“Last time we saw you, you were working on something that you said would let you see into alternate dimensions.”

“Oh, that,” he said. “It… kind of got put on a back burner.”

“I convinced him it was a bad idea to open too many frontiers at once,” Judy said. “Hand me that knife.” She pointed at a paring knife stuck to a magnet on the wall, and Allen handed it over to her.

While she sliced radishes, Trent said, “How about anti-gravity? That would come in pretty handy on landing. Be a lot safer than parachutes.”

Allen laughed. “It would, if I had a clue how to do it, but I’m afraid that’s not my area of expertise.”

Donna asked him, “Did you have a chance to look at that navigation program yet?”

He lost his smile. “Yeah. Turns out it wasn’t a bug so much as a deliberate bomb. The basic code is the same program that I gave out with the hyperdrive plans, but there’s an added module that looks for any visits to planets on the United States’s interdict list, and after you visit any of them, it resets the navigation module to add twenty thousand light-years to any destination you choose off the menu.”

Trent felt a cold chill run down his spine. “Then that’s twice our own government has tried to kill us.”

“Looks like,” Allen said.

“I don’t suppose the Federation is going to do anything about that, either?”

“No, but I will.”

“What?”

“I’ve got a couple of ideas,” said Allen. “Don’t worry, the government will wish they hadn’t tried this.”

Trent wondered what he could do. Allen had a considerably higher profile than Trent did, but Allen was a criminal in the eyes of the U.S. He’d been branded a terrorist, and could legally be shot on sight. Under the Patriot laws, he had no rights whatsoever. He couldn’t take anyone to court for messing with his software, even if he had patented it, which he no doubt hadn’t. Whatever he did, he would have to do it from outside, and unless he wanted to declare all-out war, Trent was willing to bet it would have no more effect than the myriad other economic and political sanctions the U.S. had endured over the years. The U.S. wouldn’t change its tactics until it changed its politics, and now that the dissidents were leaving for more tolerable lives elsewhere, the odds of that happening were practically nil.

They changed the subject after that, and by dinnertime they were laughing and joking as if everything was all right. They learned why there was a dining table—it was much easier to strap yourself down and stick your plate to a solid surface than to chase it around the room—and they learned how to pass dishes around without spilling them. Judy and Allen told stories about some of the more interesting aliens who had been discovered in the last few months, and Trent and Donna told about being stranded on the plastic planet and how they had built a generator out of a wheel motor and slo-mo shells to recharge their batteries. After dinner they moved into the living room and talked for a couple more hours, but eventually Trent realized Judy had yawned about half a dozen times in as many minutes, and Allen was starting to space out even more than usual.

“Hey,” he said. “We’re keeping you guys up. What time is it around here, anyway?”

“Past midnight, for us,” Judy admitted.

“Holy cow. Sorry about that! We’ve only been up for a few hours.”

“The station never sleeps,” Allen said. “You can find plenty of things to do at any hour.”

“Thanks,” Trent said, “but I think Donna and I are about done sightseeing for a while. I’m kind of thinking it’s time to go on home. How about you, kiddo?”

Donna nodded. “I’d kind of like to sleep in my own bed tonight.”

That wasn’t likely, given that they would have to land in Canada and drive home from there, but Trent didn’t say anything. Just setting down on Earth again would be close enough for starters. Thinking of which…

“Hey,” he said, “we’re going to need our computer if we’re going to go anywhere.”

Allen slapped himself on the forehead, then got the computer from his workshop and gave it to Donna. They spent another fifteen minutes at the door the way people always seem to do when they know they won’t see one another again for a while, but Judy yawned again in the middle of a story about a cat that loved to set itself adrift in the commons and let the birds fly all around it, and Donna laughed and said, “Will you people go to bed so we can go home?”

“Right,” Judy said. “Bedtime it is. You guys take care, and keep in touch.”

They said their goodbyes, and Trent and Donna pushed off down the corridor. When they got to the central atrium, Trent saw the shops and said into his arm speaker, “Hey, is there someplace we can buy a spare parachute around here? We’re down to just one, and I get nervous trying to land without a backup.”

Potikik guided them to a shop right next to the corridor that led to the docking bay, where they found hyperdrives, plasma batteries, portable solar cells, air tanks, and all the other equipment a person might need to build or repair a hyperdrive spaceship, including parachutes. The proprietor was a spidery yellow bug about nine feet tall who didn’t speak a word of English, but Potikik helped translate for them and they found a cargo chute big enough for a loaded pickup.

“How much?” Trent asked.

“How much do you have?” the bug replied through Potikik.

“No, that’s not the way it works,” Trent said. “You tell me how much you want, and I tell you whether or not I want to pay it.”

The bug spoke at length, and the shoulder speakers said, “Peculiar. Basic economic theory predicts the development of class stratification if goods are priced without regard to the user’s ability to pay. It would lead to excess and oppression, possibly even war.”

Trent looked over at Donna, who said, “He’s got you there.”

“Okay,” said Trent. He fished out his wallet and opened it up. The five orange twenties that Greg had given him on Onnescu were right up front. “I’ve got a hundred bucks Australian, and about sixty American.”

“And how badly do you need the parachute?” asked the bug.

“We can live without it,” Trent said.

“How many other purchases do you need to make before you replenish your money?”

“God only knows,” Trent said. “I’m still lookin’ for work.”

The bug turned to an abacus-looking gadget on the counter beside him and flipped a couple of colored balls around its wire loops, then said, “For you, then, seventy-two Australian will do.”

That was actually a lot cheaper than he could buy a cargo chute at home. “Okay,” Trent said. He handed over eighty, and the bug handed him back three oblong yellow coins with little swirly galaxies stamped on them.

“Federation currency,” the bug said. “Good anywhere.”

“Right,” Trent said. He somehow doubted that they would be worth much in the good old US of A, but they were certainly worth no less than his remaining Australian twenty.

He picked up the parachute and followed Donna out into the atrium and down the corridor toward their docking bay. They stopped to collect their clothes from the guest room, and Donna packed those in the camper while Trent made sure the parachute was folded right and packed it into its pod.

The tug pilot showed up while he was doing that, so they clipped their mobile speakers to the tug’s framework again, then donned their Ziptite suits and climbed into the pickup. Trent closed the door, then looked out at the mirrors still pointing backward for driving. “This time,” he said, opening the door again and adjusting his mirror so it pointed straight down.

“My god, we remembered,” Donna said, opening her door and adjusting her mirror, too.

They closed up again and Trent turned on the radio. “Give us a few minutes to make sure we’re airtight.”

“Certainly,” said Potikik. “Take your time.”

Trent pressurized the cab and they watched the air gauge for a few minutes while Donna connected up the computer and loaded the new program that Allen had put on it. When the pressure had remained steady after ten minutes, Trent let the excess air out and said into the microphone, “Okay, we’re ready to roll.”

Potikik didn’t say anything, but they saw several holes open up in the walls and the air rushed out of the docking bay. The holes were in the inner wall, so Trent supposed the air was being held somewhere, maybe in a big set of lungs, to be exhaled into the bay again when the next ship docked.

The outer door opened and the tug disengaged its clamps from the inner wall, letting the last puff of air send them out into space. The pilot pushed them out past the protruding booms—one of which no doubt held Judy and Allen’s apartment—and when they were well into clear space, he released the tug’s hold on the roll bar and backed away.

“You’re clear for launch,” he said. “And you’re welcome back any time.”

“Thanks for the hospitality,” Trent replied. “We’ll be seeing you around.” He put the microphone back in its clip and said to Donna, “Anytime you’re ready.”

“Okay,” she said, pulling down the destination menu and selecting “Earth” from the list. Not just “Sol” like the other program, but “Earth.” She double-checked the numbers that popped into the “details” window, then said, “Looks good. Here goes.”

She hit the “enter” key, and the space station vanished, to be replaced in almost exactly the same spot by the sunlit Earth.