The Getaway Special

24

The next star was off to the side rather than farther away from Sol. Its actual position in space didn’t really matter to anyone but the computer, but Judy wanted to keep a picture in her mind of where they had been. The stars were just numbers and dots on the map, but it seemed more real to her to imagine a short line from the Sun to Alpha Centauri, then a long line out to the star with the weird pseudo-organic junk in orbit around it, then another line at a bit of an angle to where they were at the moment, and a final jog off to the left to their next attempt.

She tried to work up some enthusiasm for the jump. Captain Gallagher of the Imperial Space Navy explores yet another star! But flying around in a septic tank and finding incomprehensible mysteries was not her idea of a stellar career. She wanted planets she could land on and aliens she could talk to, and she wanted them now. She knew she was being unreasonable. The universe couldn’t be expected to answer to her whims, but at the same time she couldn’t help wanting it to. One little terrestrial planet, with one little tropical paradise where she could get a tan under an alien sun—was that too much to ask?

Apparently so, at least so far. But they had air enough for one more try, and she wasn’t quite ready to give up yet. She took a few deep breaths while Allen prepared the drive, then got ready on the video controls.

Three jumps later, they were at the target star. Another jump after that gave them data for the comparator to crunch. This star was almost a perfect match to the Sun in luminosity and spectral type, and there was a planet dead square in the middle of the habitable zone, but Judy still didn’t allow herself to get excited. It could be another airless rock, or a gas giant, or even a passing comet that just happened to be in that spot in its orbit.

Another jump put them within visual distance. Judy panned her camera around in a spiral, waiting for the moment when her hopes would be dashed again, but when she saw the planet, she let out a gasp of surprise.

“Oh! It’s… it’s… there it is!”

It was as Earthlike as anyone could ask for, at least at first glance. White sworls of cloud, blue oceans, and this time—this time—there were continents. The distribution of landmasses wasn’t the same as on Earth: This planet had a couple dozen continents ranging in size from Australian all the way down to that fuzzy boundary line where they become islands, with narrow seas dotted with smaller islands in between. The poles were covered with ice, and so were the continents down to about 40 or 50 degrees latitude, but where they weren’t frozen they were a medley of color.

“I think we want to land fairly close to the equator,” Judy said. “It doesn’t look as warm here as Earth.”

“You’re right. How about the one we’re coming up on?” Allen pointed at a continent that was just creeping up over the horizon. They watched it approach: an oblong patch of green and brown with a central mountain range running down its spine.

“It looks good to me,” Judy admitted.

Their rotation was carrying it toward the middle of her field of view. She zoomed in on it as they swept over it, checking out the coastline, forests, plains—whatever looked interesting. To Judy it all looked interesting; she felt it calling to her like a siren calling ancient mariners to a perilous but irresistible rendezvous. This was her planet. She could feel it.

But it was already slipping away. They were moving across the sunlit face of it maybe two thousand kilometers up, but they were going way too fast to orbit at this distance. They would have to slow down and move closer if they wanted to go into orbit, then slow down some more in order to land. Judy checked their oxygen gauge: under fifty percent now and it was time to refresh the air again. They would have time to adjust their velocity, but that wouldn’t leave them much room for error on the way back to Earth. Even if the planet’s air was breathable, they had no compressor to refill their tank with.

“Screw orbiting,” she said. “Let’s just pick a spot and land.”

Allen chewed his lower lip. “Mmm, I guess we could da that. The vector translation maneuver assumes we’re in orbit over the point we want to land on, but if we can make a good estimate of our vector, we can correct for that.”

They didn’t have Doppler radar or global positioning satellites to give them accurate numbers, but Judy had been in Earth orbit enough times to know what it looked like to be moving at 27,000 kilometers an hour just outside the atmosphere. It was harder to gauge their speed this far away, but it looked to her like they were crossing the width of the planet at least twice as fast as they should be, and moving away from it as well.

“I’d guess we need to kill about thirty thousand klicks per hour just to put us in orbit,” she said. “If we want to come to rest, we probably need to kill fifty or sixty.”

“That’s going to take a while,” Allen said.

“Then we’d better get started.”

“Shouldn’t we see if there’s anybody here first?”

Judy glanced at the radio. It was still on, still in scan mode, patiently sifting through all the channels it could receive in search of a signal, but there had been nothing but crackles. Now that she thought about it, there were more of them here than there had been at the last planet, but that probably meant only that the atmosphere was more active here. There might be a row of thunderstorms on the leading edge of a cold front. She supposed they should call and see if anyone answered, but they would still have to slow down in order to land, and this time Judy was determined to do just that. If there were aliens already living here, so much the better. And if there were humans—well, she was going to set foot on alien soil today even if Nicholas Onnescu and his entire family had already set up a land office.

“We can call while we’re slowing down.”

“Uh… right.” Allen set to work at the computer, and a couple of minutes later said, “Okay, this should put us just outside the atmosphere and falling outward, but it’s going to be on the night side of the planet, so we won’t be able to see for sure. Let me get another set of coordinates ready in case we’re headed the wrong way or something. We might need to jump in a hurry.”

“We won’t be headed the wrong way. We can see our motion.”

“Mmm hmm.” He copied a set of numbers into the computer’s clipboard anyway. “Okay, I guess we’re—”

“Do it, already!”

“Here goes.”

There was the brief moment of disorientation, and the video image went totally black. No planet, no stars, no anything. Judy tensed up, waiting for them to smack into the atmosphere at thousands of kilometers per hour, but after a few seconds she relaxed. If they were going to hit the planet, they would have done it already.

She swiveled her camera around until she could see the starscape peeking around the curved limb of darkness. New stars kept popping up from behind it as they rose; they were moving at a pretty good clip. It was frustrating not to have an actual velocity figure, though.

“Next time, we bring radar,” she said.

“Bingo.” Allen stretched, careful to avoid hitting anything vital with his arms. It was hard to do in the close quarters. “Still,” he said, “we’re doing pretty well, all things considered. I think we’ve proven pretty definitively that we don’t need high-tech gadgets to function in space.”

Coming from a guy in a million-dollar spacesuit, that statement seemed laughable on the surface, but when you realized that the only thing the spacesuit had accomplished so far was to get in the way, it didn’t seem so outrageous after all. Radar would be nice, and so would a spectrometer to help figure out what the atmosphere down below was made of, but they had a low-tech way to… no they didn’t.

“Shit!” Judy punched the wall of the tank as hard as she could.

“What?”

“We forgot the fucking mice!”

She watched him realize what that meant. They had intended to bring along half a dozen mice, one of which they would expose to the atmosphere of each planet they landed on. If the test subject lived, they would try the air themselves, but if not, they would go on to the next planet. But of course in their rush to escape the cops, they had left the mice in their cage in the house. They hadn’t needed them until now, but they didn’t have so much as a housefly to test the air below.

Allen looked as stricken as Judy felt. “What do we do?”

Judy swallowed. “I guess I get to play mouse.”

“No way! If anybody should, it’s—”

“It’s me. You’re the pilot. You’re also bigger than me. If you keel over, I’d have a hell of a time getting you back inside the tank, and even if I managed it, I’d have to fly us home.”

“You could do it. I’ve shown you how the programs work.”

“And I showed you how to land the shuttle, too, but I wouldn’t have let you do it unless there was no other choice. No, I’m the one who should test the air.”

He didn’t like that at all. “We should go home and get some mice,” he said.

She shook her head. “I didn’t come this far just to turn around and go home. Let’s at least give it a try. We can both stay right here inside, and you can put on your suit while I let some air in. I can do it just a little bit at a time, and if I start to get dizzy, I can pop my helmet on and be breathing pure oxygen in a couple of seconds.”

“If the atmosphere is cyanide, you won’t get a couple of seconds.”

“It’s not cyanide.”

“How do you know?”

“Intuition.” She stared him down, challenging him to counter that. Forty years of rabid feminism in America had been good for something: like most men, he’d been conditioned not to contest even the most outrageously sexist statement if it came from a woman.

She was starting to feel a little light-headed as it was. She opened the air valve on her side of the tank and bled out a couple of pounds, waited for Allen to do the same with his, then replenished their oxygen from the welding bottle. It didn’t help her light-headedness, but she hadn’t figured that was from the air anyway. Not directly.

Waiting while gravity slowed them down was the hardest part of the whole trip. They tried calling on the radio for anyone who might be listening, but they got no response. They checked in every nook and cranny for loose food or equipment and made sure everything was tied down, and they pulled themselves down into their beanbag chairs and scooched around to make formfitting cradles to cushion the impact of landing, but when they had done everything they could think of to prepare, they still had twenty minutes to go.

How long had they been in space? It seemed like days, but when Judy checked her watch she saw that it had only been a couple of hours. That was long enough, considering the stress they’d been under. Maybe the light-headedness had a more mundane cause.

“How about some lunch?” she asked.

“I couldn’t eat if I had to,” Allen said.

Neither could she, but they needed something in their stomachs. She unzipped her sleeping bag and rummaged around through the canned goods until she came up with a sack of red delicious apples, took two of them out of the sack, and handed one to Allen.

He laughed when he took it from her outstretched hand. “Is this fraught with metaphorical significance, or what?”

“What? Oh. Garden of Eden. Well, we can always hope.” She took a big bite. It was a fresh, crisp apple, sweet and full of juice. She had to chase a couple of drops with her tongue before they drifted away.

They crunched their way down to the cores, then Judy had to find a bag to hold the remains. The computer beeped for attention while she was doing that, and Allen said, “We’re ready. Hang on; I’m going to put us back where we were and see if we need to tweak our vector any more.”

Judy stuffed the cores back in the same bag with the whole apples, zipped them into the sleeping bag again, and straightened up to see the sunlit planet on the monitors. It didn’t seem to be moving, except through their own rotation, but they were still a couple thousand kilometers away.

“Take us closer,” Judy said.

The planet swelled in the monitors, then drifted off to the side, but she couldn’t tell if that was rotation or linear velocity. “Let’s kill our spin,” she said. They were going counterclockwise as seen from above; that meant she needed to blast a few seconds of air from her side. She did that, then a little more when it didn’t seem to be enough, and finally the planet stayed put. It was cocked at an angle—or rather they were cocked at an angle relative to it—but that was even easier to fix. Judy made sure she was strapped snugly into her beanbag, then swung her arms around in a circle until the tank slowly tilted into the right orientation. She couldn’t make a very wide circle, but it was enough to impart an equal and opposite force to the tank. She stopped swinging when the camera’s direction indicator said the planet was straight down, and the tank stopped tilting.

If they were moving tangentially, they were doing it slowly enough that the motion was undetectable. They might have been falling or rising at a few hundred kilometers per second, but that was impossible to see from their altitude, either. Directly beneath them, a multicolored land-mass stretched from horizon to horizon.

It was time to land.