Anywhere but Here

3

They left first thing in the morning. Trent drove them out of town a ways, then found a spot way off the road and between a bunch of rocks where their launch crater wouldn’t get in anybody’s way. They got out and put on their Ziptite suits—human-shaped plastic bags that would theoretically hold air long enough for them to get back to the ground if something went wrong—then climbed back into the cab, keeping their helmets rolled down around their necks so they wouldn’t waste the internal air. The suits weren’t any more legal in the U.S. than the hyperdrive, but there was a lively black market business in them, along with electronic parts and air tanks and the various other equipment a person needed to build and fly an interstellar vehicle. Trent just hoped there was some quality control on all that stuff. It would have been a whole lot safer if the government regulated it, but of course they didn’t care about that. Just like they did with drugs, once the feds outlawed something, they figured it was your own damned fault if you used it and got hurt.

The only thing a person could do was to inspect everything as carefully as he could himself, and have a backup for as many systems as possible. The suits were like that; with any luck, it wouldn’t matter if they worked or not, because they were the backup for the truck itself.

So they checked all the door latches and the window seals, then overpressurized the cab to 20 p.s.i. and waited for ten minutes to see if the pressure would hold. Trent checked to make sure the .270 in the gun rack was strapped down, and he looked for anything else that might be loose or get loose, but he’d taken care of all that last night. Donna turned on the radio and they listened to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and Lynard Skynard on KSIT while they waited, singing along to “Have a Cigar” and “Sweet Home Alabama.” When the station broke for commercials and the pressure gauge on the dash was still holding steady, Trent switched off the radio and looked over at Donna.

“Ready?” he asked.

She was the computer expert, so she held the laptop that controlled the hyperdrive. She checked its screen, then said, “Ready.”

He opened the stopcock by the door handle and lowered the pressure to normal again. Rock Springs was over a mile high, so “normal” was only 12 p.s.i. It felt thin after breathing nearly twice that for a few minutes, but they hadn’t been overpressured long enough to worry about the bends. He closed the stopcock, tugged his seatbelt tight so he wouldn’t bonk his head on the roof when gravity let go, and took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s do it.”

She was belted in on the passenger side, not normally where she rode when they were just out for a drive, but this time she needed the shoulder belt as well as a lap belt. She grinned. “Hang onto your hat, cowboy. We could wind up miles from here.” And she tapped the “enter” key.

The Earth vanished, except for the hemisphere of dirt and rock that was inside the jump field. That immediately started boiling out from under the truck, drifting away in all directions. A few bits of dirt drifted up inside the cab, but Trent had vacuumed to keep debris from getting into their eyes, so there was only what they had tracked inside just a couple minutes ago.

The seatbelt held him down well enough that he didn’t feel like he was falling. Donna loved roller coasters and stuff like that anyway, so she wouldn’t care even if she was falling.

She giggled. “That was half a million kilometers.”

Trent took a deep breath. Half a million. Kilometers were shorter than miles, but it was still a long damned ways from home. And this was just a pit stop to dump the dirt and make sure everything was working before they took the big jump between stars.

He ran through his mental checklist. The pressure gauge was holding steady. The air tanks were full. The batteries were charged. There was a steady patter of dirt and rocks against the undercarriage, but none of the ominous squeals or groans that would mean something was about to blow.

The Sun drifted diagonally from upper left to lower right across the windshield. It was brighter without the atmosphere in the way, but not too much so. The biggest difference was in the contrast: anything sunlit was bright and colorful as ever, but the shadows were stark and black.

The fact that the Sun was moving meant that the expanding cloud of debris was pushing unevenly against the bottom of the truck, putting it into a slow tumble. Not a big problem at the moment, but they would need to kill that spin before they tried to jump to anywhere in particular. The hyperdrive could send the pickup in any direction, so they didn’t need to be pointed at their target, but they did need to be steady when they jumped so the drive could aim properly.

Trent had installed compressed air jets on the corners of the bumpers for just that purpose. Now he watched for a moment until he got a feel for the trucks motion, then reached to the control panel he’d bolted below the radio and pushed the valve for the front left jet. There was a soft hiss from the air tank under his side of the seat, and a cone-shaped patch of fog shot upward in front of the truck.

“That looked almost like hitting a puddle,” Donna said.

He laughed softly. “I guess some things don’t change no matter where you go four-wheelin’.”

The shot of air slowed the truck’s tumble just a little, but not enough, so he pushed the valve again. That overdid it, and left them rolling to the side as well, so he hit both right-side valves for a quick burst to cancel their roll, then just tapped the right rear one. The pickup came to a stop with the Sun just below Donna’s window.

Trent watched the last of the rocks tumble away, wondering if any of them would make it back to Earth. NASA had suggested that people should go five hundred thousand kilometers or farther on the first jump so the Moon could sweep up most of the debris, but even that didn’t guarantee clear space around the planet. Several communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit had already been hit, and it was just a matter of time before something whacked the space station or another hyperspace traveller. Some people were worried that near-Earth space would become so dangerous in a few years that nobody could use it, but Trent imagined someone would figure out a cleaner way to launch before that happened. Big ski jumps, maybe, that people could drive off just before they hit the “go” button.

That would probably cut down on casual trips even more than the government ban. It was hard enough to jump from solid ground, but Trent didn’t particularly want to find out what a mid-air jump would feel like. What if you pushed the wrong button, or the hyperdrive decided not to work that one time? Catching air on a whoop-de-do was one thing, but coming back down hard after a truck-high jump could do nasty things to your suspension.

That was a worry for another time. They were here now, and their dirt cloud was pretty much dissipated. “Okay,” he said. “No point hanging around here. Let’s make tracks for Alpha Centauri.”

Donna nodded. Her hair billowed out all around her face, and she casually swept it aside with her left hand while she set the computer up on the dashboard with her right, shoving it against the windshield where its webcam could see straight out over the hood to get a position check on the stars. After a few seconds of comparing its internal star map to the view outside, the computer flashed the “locked on” window. She pulled down the “destination” menu and selected Alpha Centauri from the preset choices, and an automatic targeting window popped up with the coordinates and the distance. On their first trip into space they’d had to key in the coordinates by hand for the stars they wanted to visit, but now there were over a thousand choices already programmed, and new ones were added to the online database every day as people reported in from their travels.

The computer displayed the same image that they could see in front of them, and put a red circle around one of the bright stars. “There it is,” Donna said. “Alpha Centauri, here we come.” She pushed the “enter” key.

There was a moment of disorientation, so brief that it was hard to decide if it was even real or not. The stars may have shifted just a hair, but that was too subtle to be sure of, either. The only real difference was the position of the Sun: it had shifted from the right side of the truck to a little below and behind. Only it wasn’t the Sun now. It looked exactly the same to Trent, but unless the hyperdrive had messed up, this was Alpha Centauri A, the brighter of the two stars that made up the Centauri double.

“The computer needs a sky sweep to find planets,” Donna said.

“Okay.” Trent hit both of the front jets at once, and the nose of the pickup dropped downward. He let it go for a full revolution, then used the rear jets to stop their motion again.

The computer flashed an information box on the screen, and Donna said, “Looks like we’re about sixteen million kilometers from Onnescu.” That was the name of the first settler on Alpha Centauri’s habitable planet, and while he hadn’t tried to name it after himself, that’s what people had started calling it, and the name stuck.

Sixteen million kilometers wasn’t much in space. Trent looked at the computer screen and saw a red arrow pointing to the left and down, so he used the right jets and then the front jets until the arrow became a circle around one of the stars that drifted onto the screen. He looked out the windshield at the same patch of sky and eventually spotted the planet, just big enough to show as an oblong blob instead of a point of light.

“Taking us in closer,” Donna said, and hit the “enter” key again.

The planet jumped upward and much, much closer, filling the entire view out the windshield and to both sides with swirly white cloud patterns.

“Woo hoo!” Trent yelled, flinching backward. “That… was a good shot.”

Donna smiled. “Beats the hunt-and-guess method we used on our first trip, doesn’t it?”

“I dunno. I think I just about had a heart attack there. When we were huntin’ and guessin’, I kind of expected surprises.” He watched the clouds for a few seconds to see if they were getting noticeably closer, but instead they seemed to be receding. Good. That meant they had some time to check things out before they jumped again. “Let’s see if we can pick up their beacon,” he said. He flipped on the citizens’ band radio under the dash and punched the channel button down to 1, the agreed-upon frequency that colony planets would use to broadcast who lived there and who was welcome to join them. Trent already knew about Onnescu by word of mouth and the flyer they had picked up at the brew pub, but he wanted to check and see how the beacon system worked. CB radios normally had just a few miles of range, but the beacons were supposed to broadcast with a lot more power than usual, reaching anything within line of sight for thousands of miles. Theoretically, three of them in synchronous orbit could provide coverage to anyone anywhere near the planet. Trent had added a power amp to his transmitter, too, for the same reason. He wanted to be able to talk to the ground while he was still in orbit.

When he tuned to channel 1, a clear, resonant male voice commenced in mid-sentence: “…la costa oeste en el continente mas grande del planeta, es uno que se parece a un taco mordido…”

“What the heck?” Trent switched to channel 2, but that was broadcasting in Chinese or Japanese or something similar. He switched to channel 3 and finally got English:

“…everything from desert to rain forest. It’s practically a second Earth, with an average temperature just three degrees warmer and gravity ninety percent of normal. The atmosphere is thirty percent oxygen, and the rest nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The plant life is non-allergenic, edible, and pretty, and the animal life is both exotic and plentiful. Our largest settlement is called Bigtown, on the banks of the beautiful Firehose river, which flows out of the Pointy Mountains. We’re located at forty-one degrees north latitude, seventy-three degrees east longitude, with the prime meridian running straight down the western coastline of the largest continent on the planet, the one that looks like a taco with a bite taken out of it. Drop in and say ‘Hi,’ and let us show you what we have to offer.”

There was a brief hiss of static, then the voice said, “Welcome to Onnescu. We’re the very first extrasolar colony, started by Nicholas Onnescu only two weeks after the release of the hyperdrive plans. We’re open to colonization, and we welcome anyone who shares our view that a planet is a place to live, not a place to exploit. We’re happy to see people of all races and religion, including no religion at all, but we ask people who practice fundamentalism of any sort to please find another planet. We also ask new arrivals to please leave their political agendas at home. We want our society to be based on compassion and courtesy, not conflict or—”

Trent switched off the radio. “Kinda talky, aren’t they?”

Donna laughed. “Well, with all the wackos looking for a place to practice their own breed of craziness, it probably doesn’t hurt to be specific.”

“I suppose not. I wonder where we fit into this grand scheme of theirs.”

“We won’t know until we go look.”

He took a deep breath, then nodded.

“Can that thing find Bigtown for us?”

“If it can recognize the shapes of the continents, it can.”

He looked out at the planet again. He couldn’t see much besides clouds at first, but then he spotted a sharp edge that had to be a coastline, and then his eye started to get calibrated to the view and he picked up a big lake and a river valley that emptied into a wide delta. “Is that the Firehose?” he asked hopefully. They had binoculars, but as close as they were, it didn’t seem like they needed them.

“I don’t think so,” Donna said. “According to this, we’re over an island called Weaselnose, about a third of the way around the planet from Bigtown.” Another window popped onto the screen and she said, “We’re moving at about twenty-six thousand kilometers per hour relative to Bigtown. That’ll take twelve minutes to cancel.”

Another twelve minutes in space. That was actually a fairly short time to match speeds with a target planet, but Trent was already sweating like a pig inside his plastic pressure suit. “Let’s get moving, then,” he said.

“Here goes.” She selected Bigtown from the “city” submenu. Trent saw that the “cancel velocity” option was already selected by default; that was smart. The landing sequence would take them to just outside the atmosphere right over their target, and you didn’t want to be moving twenty-six thousand kilometers per hour when you got there. Especially not if you were aimed at the ground.

The landing program would do what Allen Meisner called a “tangential vector translation maneuver,” calculating the right spot to take them so the planets gravity would slow them down and curve their path to match Bigtown’s. On their first interstellar trip—to a planet about fifteen light-years away in the constellation of Cetus—they’d had to figure out everything on their own, eyeballing their target and guessing their velocity, then keying that into Allen’s first-generation control program and waiting to see how close their guess had been. It had taken them several tries to get it right, leaping around the planet like a dog trying to find the right angle on a badger, and even then they’d gone in too fast for comfort. They’d had the first supersonic pickup in history for a minute there before air friction slowed them down enough to let them pop the chutes and come down the rest of the way easy.

More recent versions of the software would set them at the top of the atmosphere with a thousand-kilometer-an-hour upward velocity, do a quick check with landmarks on the ground to make sure their relative velocity was actually what it had calculated, and then drop them ten K at a time until the atmosphere got too thick to punch an instantaneous hole in. By that time—thirty seconds after they arrived—most of of that last thousand would be gone, and their downward velocity would be just about zero.

In theory. Like most Internet freeware, it worked so long as everything else worked, too, but there were always bugs in those programs just waiting to pop out the moment anything unusual happened. Commercial software might have been more reliable, but the U.S. government had put the skids on that right away, and as Donna had discovered last night, they were doing their damnedest to prevent people from getting foreign programs, either. Trent and Donna were lucky to have even a freeware version.

Bigtown was already selected, and the computer said it knew where they were, so Donna hit the “go” button and the program zapped them to the other side of the planet. Trent couldn’t see it directly, since it was night on this side, but there was a big dark patch behind them where no stars shone. He gritted his teeth for a second, waiting for the moment when they slammed into the atmosphere at thousands of miles an hour, but the program had worked the way it was supposed to and they merely rose up from the night side of the planet, losing velocity as gravity tried to reel them back in.

He looked over and saw Donna grinning like a thief. She loved this. Flying through space with nothing between her and instant death but a plastic bag and Trent’s welding job didn’t bother her a bit. He appreciated her faith in his abilities, but right now he could vividly recall every cold joint and curse word that had gone into reinforcing the pickup for space, and he remembered every story he’d heard of the poor bastards who hadn’t sealed up well enough or who simply didn’t understand how much pressure 14 p.s.i. put on a windshield. People went into space with no way to control a tumble, and no backup parachute in case the first one snarled on the way down. Trent had heard about several people who tried to land on the Moon, not understanding that the Moon had no atmosphere for a parachute to work in. Some of the new craters could apparently be seen from Earth if you knew where to point your telescope.

“You’re looking mighty serious for a guy on vacation,” Donna said. “What are you thinking about?”

“Nothin’,” he replied automatically.

“What kind of nothin’?”

He sighed. She was always asking him that, and he never knew how to answer. But she never gave up, so he said, “I guess I was thinkin’ about evolution. Space travel’s going to weed a lot of people out of the gene pool.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?”

“Guess it depends on your point of view. It’s mostly going to be the dumb ones or the unlucky ones who die, but it’s only going to be the dumb or unlucky adventurous ones. The ones who are too chicken to even try it will stay home and live to a ripe old age.”

“Not us, then.” She said it playfully, but Trent looked out the windshield at the hard, unblinking stars and felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

“Not if we do too much of this.”

She shrugged. “I’d rather die doing something than just sitting around waiting to grow old.”

“Me too, but I sometimes wonder what sort of things are worth dying for.”

She looked out the windshield, too. “Sights like this are worth it,” she said after a moment. She cocked her head to the side, then pointed. “Look, there in Cassiopeia. That extra star? That’s the Sun.”

Cassiopeia. The “W” shaped one up near the north star. A year ago, Trent wouldn’t have been able to tell it from Orion, but the last few months had made him a reluctant convert to popular astronomy. He followed Donna’s outstretched finger and saw the five zigzag stars, plus another zig.

“Which end is the extra one?” he asked.

“The left side.”

So that was the Sun. It was a little brighter than the other stars, a fact that Trent found somehow encouraging.

He checked his watch. They still had five minutes to go before landing, but they’d been sealed up in the truck for maybe fifteen minutes already; it was probably time to refresh their air. He opened the stopcock by his door handle and let a couple of pounds of pressure out, swallowing to make his ears pop and watching the moisture in the air flash to fog in the vacuum outside, then he closed the stopcock and replenished what he’d bled off from the compressed-air tank under Donna’s side of the seat. When he was designing their pickup starship, he’d spent a long afternoon trying to decide whether or not he wanted to store their breathing air and their maneuvering air in the same tank. It was just plain old compressed air in either case, but it somehow seemed scary to think of watching your breathing air whoosh into space every time you maneuvered, so he had decided to separate them. Then of course he had plumbed them together so he could use either one for either purpose, reasoning that it gave them a backup system in case one tank sprang a leak.

He had positioned the pressure relief jet to push against the trucks center of mass, so it wouldn’t start them spinning. They might pick up a few feet per second of sideways velocity, but that was nothing to worry about.

He looked out again at the Sun hanging there ahead of them, then back at the dark planet blocking the stars behind them.

“This is one of those, what-you-call-’em, metaphor moments, ain’t it?” he asked.

Donna gave him an odd look. “How do you mean?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Just… here we are, headin’ out from the dark past into the bright new future, ready to roll the moment we get wherever we’re going…”

He left it hanging, already embarrassed and afraid to say anything more, but Donna reached out and took his hand in hers, their plastic spacesuits crinkling softly, and the look in her eyes told him he’d said something right.

But where were they going, anyway? Trent looked at the Sun hanging there in the distance, surrounded by more stars than he could see from the ground even on a clear dark night in Rock Springs, and wondered. Bigtown today, but where tomorrow? Where the day after that? He didn’t have a clue.