Anywhere but Here

38

Trent and Donna and Dale stayed under the parachute, swapping stories about their travels and about Rock Springs and the things that had happened to them there. Trent told Dale about meeting Judy and Allen on their space station, and how the Galactic Federation had refused to get involved in human politics.

“Makes sense, in a way,” Dale said. “You start micro-managing everybody else, and you just wind up like the U.S., fighting wars on a dozen different fronts and not doing anybody any good.”

“That’s fine, in principle,” Trent said, “but it doesn’t do us a whole lot of good, either. We’re still stuck with the government from hell.”

“So change it,” said Dale. “It’s designed to let us throw the rascals out every four years. Do you vote?”

“Yes, I vote, for all the good it does. There isn’t a candidate on the ballot who’s any better than the people in office.”

“So run for office.”

Trent snorted. “Yeah, right. I can just imagine how well that would go over.”

“You’d get my vote,” Donna said.

“And I’d get laughed out of the country,” Trent said.

Dale examined his empty beer can as if there was some hidden truth in its side. “You don’t have to start at the top, you know.”

“Dogcatcher,” Trent said with a laugh. “Now there’s a race I could probably win.”

“It’s a start,” said Dale.

“Sure. And it would do the country a whole lot of good to have me out there with a net, goin’ after loose poodles.”

Dale shrugged. “Hey, we do what we can. I bought into the instant success idea for so long, the best I can do now is take myself out of the picture. Be glad you can do more than that.”

Trent was starting to get embarrassed by the way the conversation was going, so he was actually kind of relieved when there was a cry of alarm from out in the open. He jumped to his feet and rushed out from under the parachute to see everyone looking upward, where a big meteor was drawing a fiery line across the sky.

His first thought was that the U.S. had decided to bomb Australia, too, but this was coming in at much too shallow an angle for a meteor-bomb.

“I wonder if that was somebody trying to land,” he said quietly.

Whatever it was, parts were breaking off and burning in separate little chunks, spreading apart until there were a whole swarm of pieces streaking across the sky side by side.

Then another one flared up way in the north, moving at a wide angle to the first. Two people making bad landings within seconds of one another? That didn’t seem likely.

Trent climbed into the pickup and turned on the radio, but there was only static. Way out here in the middle of nowhere, he hadn’t expected much else, but it had been worth a try.

The meteors burned themselves out high in the atmosphere, leaving thick smoke trails behind them that persisted long after the fireballs were gone. Billy walked over to where Trent and Donna and Dale were standing and said, “That looked like the time Skylab came down.”

“Skylab?” Trent asked.

“Before your time,” said Billy. “It was a space station that fell out of the sky.” He held up his rock-on-a-thong necklace and said, “My father made us walk for days so we could watch it. He was a little too accurate in his dream. This piece hit him on the head.”

Donna said. “Did it… did it kill him?”

Billy laughed. “No, it was moving too slowly by the time it found him. But the centrifuge gave us all a scare.” He let the rock—more likely a fire-blackened bolt or piece of a solar panel or something—fall back to his chest and said, “The dream is never clear. I had no idea there would be more than one good omen today.”

“You think that was a good omen?” Trent said.

“Undoubtedly, for someone,” said Billy. “This one, I think, is good for you.”

Trent couldn’t see how. After Mirabelle, he didn’t think meteors were good luck at all. But he held his tongue.

He and Donna could feel themselves already starting to sunburn, so they retreated under the parachute and had another beer, waiting out the rest of the day until they could jump around to the other side of the planet and land in the light. The aborigines came and went from the shade, listening to their conversation with Dale and Billy or just napping in the long, lazy afternoon.

When the sun went down, Trent and Donna folded up their parachute and packed it away, but the computer’s atlas said it was still too early for daylight in North America so they helped gather wood and started a fire, roasting hot dogs over the flames and sharing whatever else they had left in the camper that didn’t require water to cook. The temperature dropped fast in the clear night air, and it wasn’t long before they were putting on sweatshirts and sitting close to the fire.

Fire time was the aborigines’ turn for storytelling. Billy talked about the Dreamtime when the world was created, and how the beings that shaped the land lived on in spirit form, lending their knowledge to anyone who knew how to listen. Trent listened out of politeness at first, but he gradually realized he was interested in what Billy was saying. It was religion, certainly, but it made a lot more sense than the selfish gods and angry battles of the religions he had grown up with. Its central message, if he understood it right, was that human beings were a part of nature, inextricably linked with all other living things on Earth, which included the Earth itself. You didn’t have to appease anyone or anything, just live in harmony with it.

“I just realized something,” Trent said. “You guys aren’t going to colonize other planets, are you?”

“Does the fish move onto the land?” Billy asked. Then he laughed and said, “Yes, as a matter of fact, it does if you give it enough time. And so will some of us, I’m sure. But not today. Right now we belong here.” He threw a branch onto the fire and bright red sparks shot up into the night sky, but they winked out before they could settle on anything and catch it on fire.

At last, when the sky was pitch black and the stars were as bright as they were from deep space, Donna figured it would be morning over central North America. She and Trent said goodbye to Dale and Billy and the others, put on their Ziptite suits, and climbed into the pickup. They drove a few hundred feet out into the bush, swinging once around to make sure that nobody was sleeping where they intended to launch from, then they sealed up and jumped into space.

Donna took them around to the sunlit side of the planet, then dropped them a few thousand miles out over northern Canada. “I wonder how close to the border we can go before we get shot at?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Trent said. “Theoretically we should be able to land just north of Montana, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it. Let’s see if anybody down there can tell us.” He turned on the radio again and tuned to channel 19, but there was too much traffic to get a word in edgewise. He tuned up and down the dial, but it was the same everywhere. Every channel was packed with voices. At last he went back to 19 and called out, “Break one-nine. Break one-nine for information. Can anybody tell me how close to the U.S. border a guy can land these days?”

There was a moment of static when he let up the microphone, then a dozen voices tried at once to respond, so he waited for them to die down and said, “Too many of you! Just one, try again.”

Of course everybody broadcast again. “One guy!” Trent said.

“There were five or six voices this time, but one of them cut through the others. “Haven’t you heard? The laser satellites are down. Something dropped them all out of orbit about eight hours ago.”

“The laser satellites are gone?” Trent asked. “You mean it’s safe to land in the U.S.?”

“Well, that’s a matter of opinion,” said the voice with the strong signal. “It’s still the bloody States, after all. But they won’t be zapping you with a laser today, that’s for sure!”

“Holy shit,” Trent said to Donna. “That’s what we saw over the outback.”

Donna said, “I’ll bet you anything it was Allen. He said he was going to do something to get back at the U.S. for that navigation software.”

“But killing every laser satellite! How could he do that?”

“He’s part of a whole group of scientist geeks. They probably hacked into the guidance program months ago, and were just waiting for the right time to trigger it. What better message than to turn the whole country’s navigation software against them?”

“Damn. Remind me never to get him mad at me.” He put the microphone back in its clip and turned down the radio. “Well, hell, I guess we might as well take advantage of it. I’ll bet you anything the military’s too busy shittin’ their pants to worry about people landing in Rock Springs.”

Donna took them in closer so they could find it, then she slid the targeting circle to the east of Salt Lake and just past the pincer-shaped Flaming Gorge Reservoir. It was rising pretty fast to meet them, but she was quick about it. “That ought to do,” she said, hitting “enter.”

The computer took them around to the other side of the planet for a few minutes, then set them back where they had started and dropped them down to the edge of the atmosphere in two more quick jumps. “Ooh, I like this program,” Donna said. “Get ready on the parachute.”

Trent reached for the switch, deciding at the last moment to use their original parachute this time. It might not be a good idea to have “Galactic Federation” written across their chute today. He flipped the toggle when Donna called “zero” and they endured the lurch and the few seconds of worry afterward that they would somehow be shot down even now, but they descended peacefully through the atmosphere, watching the ground slowly rise to meet them. It looked a lot like the outback down there; the same red soil and spotty vegetation, but with much more varied terrain. Trent couldn’t help smiling when he saw the flat-topped buttes with their sheer cliffs and the talus slopes of shale at the base.

Then he realized that they were coming down right on top of one. Worse, they were going to hit on the edge. “Get ready to bail out,” he said. “This doesn’t look good.”

Donna was already holding her hand next to the keyboard. Trent waited until the last moment to be sure, but when there was less than two hundred feet between the pickup and the rocks, he yelled “Bail out!” and Donna hit the “enter” button, throwing them a hundred thousand kilometers back into space.

She had widened the jump field enough to include their parachute, but now it hung out there in the vacuum, twisting itself up in its shroud lines and getting in the way of the other one.

“Shit,” said Trent. So close. But it was only a matter of time before they had to do a bailout, and they’d been lucky so far. “Button up,” he said, sealing his suit.

Donna did the same, and when he was sure they were both okay, he let the air out of the cab, tying the rope around his waist and the other end to the steering wheel while the pressure dropped. When it was down to zero he opened his door and unbuckled his seatbelt, then stood up in the doorway and reached over the top of the cab, pulling the parachute down one-handed and wadding it into its pod while he hung on with his other hand. There was no way he could get the parachute folded right in space, so he didn’t even try.

The fabric tried to get away like something alive, but he wrestled it into the pod and managed to latch the cover with only a few puckers of it sticking out the edges. Good enough. Then it was back inside, close the door, latch it tight, and refill the cab with air and open his helmet.

“Okay, let’s try this again.” he said.

They already had the right velocity relative to their landing site, so it was a simple matter to pop back to the edge of the atmosphere and give it another shot. Donna used the arrow keys to scoot them sideways a few miles, putting them over flatter terrain, and when they hit the air, Trent popped the other chute.

It yanked them hard, too, now that it didn’t have its special rigging, but it held, and they descended without incident until they were just a couple of miles above the ground, when a fighter jet roared past just a few hundred feet away.

“Son of a bitch,” Trent said. “Now what?”

The pickup bounced through the turbulence while the plane banked around and came back for another pass. “Get ready to jump again,” Trent said, but he picked up the microphone and turned the radio to channel 9, the emergency channel, and said, “Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

He didn’t really expect a response, but the radio crackled to life and a voice said, “You’re in restricted airspace. Leave immediately or be shot down.”

“Restricted, my ass,” Trent said. “Near as I can tell, I’m right over my own goddamned house. I’m an American citizen and I’m going home. You gonna shoot down a civilian?”

“It says ‘Galactic Federation’ on your parachute,” said the fighter pilot. “That doesn’t look like an American chute to me.

“Why don’t you check the license plate on my pickup, then?” Trent said. “You’re flying goddamned close enough!”

The plane roared straight toward them, banking at the last second and peeling away to the side. “County four,” the pilot said. “Well, I’ll grant you that much, but I can’t let you land.”

“The hell you can’t,” Trent said. “You want to arrest us for possession of a hyperdrive, you go right ahead and do that, but it’s sure as hell legal to parachute for recreation around here, and that’s what we’re doing.”

“Nobody lands,” said the pilot. “We’re in a state of national emergency.”

“Fuckin’ right we are,” Trent said. “We’ve been in a state of national emergency for twenty years. Well it’s time to decide whose side you’re on, buddy, because I’m an American citizen and I’m landing on American soil. You want to shoot me for buildin’ a spaceship in my back yard, you go right ahead, but you just try looking in the mirror when you get back home tonight.”

The plane banked around again, and Trent watched it come toward them, his heart pounding. How much time would they have if he fired a missile? Time enough to jump away? He glanced over at Donna, saw her hand shaking over the keyboard, and he opened his mouth to say “Jump,” but she shook her head and said, “Not yet.”

The plane swooped toward them, nose to nose again, but it roared beneath them without shooting and then it banked around and began to circle. “I’m gonna lose my damned commission for this,” the pilot said, “but welcome home, cowboy.”

Trent could barely hold the microphone in his shaking hands, and he had to swallow twice before he could say, “If you do, you come on around to my place and I’ll build you a spaceship of your very own.”

“We’re almost there,” Donna said.

He looked out and down, suddenly realizing that they had dropped nearly to the ground. He had just long enough to look in the mirror and see that they weren’t aimed for a cliff this time, then shoved himself back against the seat for the impact. The pickup bounced over a big sagebrush and the steering wheel spun crazily, but Trent fought it back around and steered into the slide before they turned over. They skidded to a stop, and the parachute slid down in front of them to hang up in the sagebrush.

“I think that was about as much fun as I want to have in one day,” Trent said. “Let’s go home.”