The Getaway Special

10

It was slow going in their spacesuits, with the bulky arms and legs restricting their motion and the weight— especially the life-support backpack—throwing them off balance, but they needed the insulation. They would when they stopped exerting themselves, anyway; as it was they were panting and sweating when they reached the top, Judy carrying both helmets while Allen carried the hyperdrive engine. They hadn’t been in space long enough to lose much muscle or bone mass, for which Judy was grateful; after a long flight she was sometimes exhausted just climbing a set of stairs.

She had expected to see just more sagebrush and snow from the top of the hill, and that was nearly all they did see, but a couple miles to the north there was a straight line that might have been a fence or a road. It was hard to tell from this distance, but it was something artificial, anyway. The only other straight line, and it really wasn’t that straight, was the pair of footprints leading from the capsule to the top of the hill. Judy wondered how long it would be before somebody spotted it, and them. She looked up in the sky, but she only saw two contrails, and they were way too high to be search planes.

“Man, that’s the bluest sky I’ve ever seen,” she said.

Allen had set the canister on the ground. “We must be pretty high up,” he said, panting a bit from the exertion. “The sky gets darker with altitude.”

Judy almost told him she knew that already, but bit her tongue. No sense annoying him. But why was it, she wondered, that scientists all figured only they knew why the sky was blue?

She pointed at the line in the distance. “We might as well try for that.”

He nodded tiredly. “I guess.” He picked up the canister and they trudged down the north face of the hill.

They spotted the first search plane about half an hour later. They’d been keeping to low ground whenever they could, finding that their oversize boots made walking in snow much easier than climbing up and over the hills, so they heard the sound long before they saw the black arrow in the sky.

“Fighter plane,” Judy said the moment she heard it. The tearing-fabric sound of its engines practically screamed “military” at her. “Find a big patch of snow and lay down in it.”

“Lie down,” Allen said automatically, but he was already moving to obey. He set the canister in a drift in the lee of a waist-high sagebrush, scooped snow over it, then fell forward in the same drift and wiggled down into it. Judy was amazed at how quickly he disappeared from sight; his white spacesuit blended in perfectly.

Except for his butt. The fabric where he’d slid down over the scorched side of the descent module had been smeared with soot. Judy threw a couple more handfuls of snow over it, then sat backward in another drift a few feet away. She lay on her back and scraped snow up over the control panel on her chest with her arms, feeling a little like a child making a snow angel.

The plane roared past a couple miles to the south, heading west. Judy got just a brief glance of it as it flashed across her field of vision: a wedge-shaped dart, throttled down to just above stall speed, but still moving fast. Not the best search plane, but the Air Force had evidently scrambled whatever they had ready to fly. She waited for it to turn around and circle them, or the capsule, but it kept on going.

When its engine noise had faded below the level of the wind through the sagebrush, she stood up and helped Allen to his feet again. “One down,” she said.

Allen brushed the snow off his spacesuit. “How many more do you suppose there’ll be?” he asked.

Judy looked at the sky, once again empty except for the high contrails, and shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

The line they’d seen from the hilltop turned out to be a gravel road. It hadn’t been plowed, but a single set of tire tracks broke through the foot-high snowdrifts that crossed it at a thirty-degree angle. More blowing snow had nearly filled them in; Judy guessed they were half a day old at least.

“I wonder which way they were going,” she said, bending down to see if she could find any clues in the tread pattern, but the inch-wide ridges angled one way on one side of the tracks and the other way on the other.

Allen set the getaway special canister on end in the gravel and sat down heavily on it. His breath came in great wheezing gulps, and a vein on his forehead pulsed way too last.

“Hey, are you all right?” Judy asked, kneeling down beside him.

“Fine,” he said. “I’m just… in terrible shape. Too much… time in the lab.”

“Yeah, well this will take a few pounds off, that’s for sure.”

Allen didn’t speak for a few minutes. When he did, his voice was closer to normal. “We’re going to be running out of daylight pretty soon. I wonder if we should start thinking about shelter.”

Judy had never considered the possibility that they would last until dark without finding someone or being found, but it was beginning to look like they might. The sun was quite a bit lower in the sky now, and though a few more planes had passed over high in the sky, all but one had looked like commercial flights. The odd one had been another military jet, also flying a straight east-west swath, but it had been far to the north. Judy wondered why there weren’t more of them, but she supposed a couple dozen planes could be out there searching and still not cover a tenth of the possible ground track. These badlands were big.

So should they make an igloo or something? The wind had picked up, and it felt colder, too. Judy was glad for the snoopy hat, the communications carrier that held the microphone and headset for the radio, but she knew she would have to put the helmet back on eventually if it got much colder. And if they had to do that…

“I don’t think it matters much. These suits will insulate us from practically anything, and we can seal them up for another five hours or so if we have to. I think we’d be better off walking.”

“I was afraid you’d say that. Which direction?”

Judy looked both ways down the road. She could only see about a mile to the west before it dropped behind another hill, but she didn’t need to see that way to know what was out there. She’d seen it from the air, and there was nothing for a long ways. It didn’t look much better to the east, but she could only see five or six miles that way.

“East,” she said.

Allen stood up, groaning, slung the canister over his shoulder, and said, “Let’s get moving, then. The sooner we find someone, the sooner I can get out of this damned spacesuit.”

They had only walked another mile or so when they heard the whine of a motor ahead of them. This one was on the ground, and electric by the sound of it. The crunch of gravel beneath the tires was almost as loud as the motor. Judy took a step toward the side of the road, half expecting it to be a military jeep, but as it drew closer she saw a regular civilian pickup truck. Well, not so regular; it had been jacked up until the undercarriage sat nearly level with the tops of its oversize tires. It was painted deep red, and sported a chrome bumper with a winch on the front, chrome wheels, chrome footsteps, and a chrome roll bar behind the cab—bristling with chrome spotlights. All six lights had yellow smiley-face covers over their lenses.

Judy considered jumping into the barrow ditch and hiding, but this was the only sign of life on the ground they’d seen all day, and she was getting tired and hungry. They were just going to have to take their chances with the locals.

She stayed put in the middle of the road and waved her arms. The pickup rolled toward her, crashing through the snowbanks and swerving with each blow until it looked like the driver might careen right into her, but he finally noticed the white-suited astronauts and stamped on the brakes. The truck slid to a stop sideways in the road about twenty feet away from them, and the driver—a heavily bearded cowboy, by the looks of his black, potato-chip-shaped hat—stared in open-mouthed wonder at the sight before him.

Judy couldn’t resist. She marched up to the pickup, her spacesuit creaking in the cold air, and waited until the cowboy rolled down his window.

“Take me to your leader,” she said.