Anywhere but Here

15

There was a long moment of silence in the cab of the pickup. Donna looked out the windshield, then over at Trent. “For the computer to not recognize anything, we had to jump at least a couple of hundred light-years. It’s supposedly good that far before the constellation patterns change too much. So if we jump back a hundred light-years at a time, we should eventually hit something it recognizes.”

He could hear the tension in her voice. She started talking faster when she got tense, which made it harder for him to understand her, which made him tense, as if he wasn’t tense enough already.

He took off his hat and scratched his head. “That would work as long as it actually jumps a hundred light-years when we tell it to. It didn’t go to Earth when we told it to do that.”

“Yeah.”

“And we can jump two hundred at a time, can’t we? If it’s good for two hundred light-years out, that’s a bubble four hundred across, right? So if we go two hundred at a time—”

“You’re right. Provided we go straight back the way we came. But if we’re off a little bit, we could cross through the edge of familiar space in one jump and keep on going.”

“We could, couldn’t we. Damn. Okay, then a hundred.”

She nodded. “Okay. So which direction is back the way we came?”

That was a good question. They hadn’t been pointed straight at the Sun when they jumped. The computer could correct for angle, so they had just let it lock on and do its thing. But Trent remembered seeing Orion out his side window just before they jumped. And afterward… what was out there then? He didn’t remember.

“Can you call up the webcam’s picture from right after we got here?” he asked.

“I think so.” Donna ran through the menus for a minute, then a starfield popped up in a separate window.

“Okay, if that’s what we were lookin’ at after our first jump,” Trent said, “then we were headin’ for this patch of sky right about here.” He tapped the screen over on the right side, where he remembered the blinking star that the computer had said was the Sun.

“You’re sure?” Donna asked.

“Pretty close. Back up to the image from before we jumped.”

She did, and he was relieved to see Sol shining right where he expected it to be. “There. We were sittin’ steady, so the same spot on the next screen has to be the direction the hyperdrive supposedly took us, right?”

“That sounds logical.”

She switched to the image from right after they had arrived, and Trent put his finger where the Sun had been a second ago. “There. So a hundred and eighty degrees away from that should take us back the direction we came, right?”

“I… think so. Yeah, that sounds right.

“So can that thing tell us what’s exactly a hundred and eighty?”

She shook her head. “It’s just a webcam image. Maybe if we spun the truck around and took continuous video we could time it or something, but the computer needs more data than just a picture to compute something like that.”

“Never mind,” Trent said. “We can figure that easy enough on our own.” He looked on the screen image for an easily recognizable landmark, found it in a triangle of three bright stars just a little to the left of the direction they had come, then looked outside to see if he could find it out there. He couldn’t, so he hit the front jets again, and watched the stars stream past.

He almost missed it. The three he was looking for were off to the left, hidden by the post between the windshield and his side window until he moved his head. That was definitely them, though. “There,” he said, pointing.

He hit the rear jets to stop their motion. Of course it was too much to ask that he could bring them to a perfect stop three times in a row. He undershot at first, then overshot correcting it, then undershot again before he finally got them stopped. “That’s this bit right here,” he said, pointing at the same stars on the screen. “And the direction we came is between those two stars there.” He looked outside again and found them directly out his side window, nearly obscured by the mud smeared across the outer glass.

Donna realized what he was doing. “So if that’s the direction we came, then that—” she turned and pointed out her window “—is the direction we want to go. We need a transit or something so we can get an exact angle.”

“Sorry, we’re fresh out of transits. But we do have this map.” Trent got their Wyoming road map out of the glove box and stuck it in the air between them, nudging it gently until one folded edge pointed at the stars that had replaced the Sun after they jumped. “Sight down that and make sure it’s aimed right,” he told Donna.

She bent her head down and peered along the edge while he leaned back out of her way. She adjusted the map’s position with her fingertips until it was just right, then said, “Okay, now.”

“Lean back,” Trent told her. She ducked aside and he sighted the other way along the same edge. He had to look through the cracks in her window, but he could see a few distinctive stars there. “Got it,” he said. “That little fishhook business under that bright one there.”

She looked out her window. “Let’s do it again to make sure.”

“Okay.”

She leaned in, but instead of leaning back, he leaned in, too, snatched the map out of the air between them, and gave her a big kiss.

“You silly, this is serious,” she said, but she was smiling.

He smiled right back. “Kissin’ you’s serious, too.”

“We’ll have time enough for that when we get home.”

“That sounds like a promise,” he said.

She looked him in the eye from two inches away. “You get us home safe, cowboy and you can consider it anything you want.”

“Deal.” He kissed her again, then set the map back in the air between them.

She lined it up on the two stars next to the triangle again, then he sighted down the edge to the same fishhook constellation. “That’s definitely it,” he said.

“Okay.” She stuck the computer on the dash, shoving it hard against the junction between dashboard and windshield so the webcam was aimed straight ahead. “We need to turn so it’s onscreen,” she said.

That meant blowing more breathing air into space, but Trent supposed there was no way around it. The computer expected to be lined up front-to-back, so they couldn’t just aim it out the side window. He used the jets as sparingly as possible, tipping the pickup to the right with the side nozzles, then stopping that motion and dropping the nose again until they were pointed pretty close to their target. There weren’t a whole lot of stars out there, only a couple dozen bright ones and maybe twice that many more dim ones. He wondered if any of them was the Sun. From a hundred light-years away, could you even see the Sun? He didn’t know.

Donna used the computer’s touchpad to scoot the mouse pointer to the little fishhook constellation on the screen. The touchpad wasn’t very responsive with her hand encased in a plastic bag, but she kept at it until she got it. “Right there?” she asked.

“A little to the right. Yeah, about there.”

She tapped a function key. “Okay. That’s now zero, zero. Now I enter the distance…” She hit another function key and typed in 100. “Check that to make sure,” she said.

“I trust you,” Trent told her, but she just looked at him until he leaned forward and looked at the number she’d typed in the “distance” box. “Says one zero zero.”

“All right.” She lapped another function key, and a little window popped up with the message, “Press Enter to jump.”

“Ready?” she asked.

He took a deep breath. “Ready.”

“I sure hope this damned thing works this time.”

“Me too.”

She pressed the “enter” key. There was the usual moment of disorientation, and most of the stars jumped a little, but not enough to lose track of. About half of them hardly budged. Those were the big bright ones a long ways off. Trent tried to make them resolve into any kind of familiar pattern, but had no luck.

Neither did the computer.

“Well,” he said, “I guess we couldn’t expect it to work the first time. Try it again.”

Donna did, but they had no more luck.

“Once more.”

Still no luck.

After the third jump they sat there side-by-side, looking out the windshield without saying anything. They had just gone three hundred light-years. Far enough to get lost if they weren’t already. Trent was pretty sure they were aimed at the right patch of sky, but if they were off even by a little bit, that error would get greater and greater the farther they jumped. How far could they go before even a couple of degrees of error became two hundred light-years wide? He wished he’d paid more attention to story problems in math class.

He looked at the battery gauge: already a nudge lower than it had been just a few minutes ago. They couldn’t just jump around at random until they hit a familiar section of the galaxy; at a hundred light-years to the leap, they couldn’t even cover a thousandth of it. They would run out of battery power if they kept jumping, but every breath took them a couple of seconds closer to the time when they would run out of air.

The Milky Way seemed thicker here. The whole windshield looked foggy with it. He was about to mention it to Donna when he realized that it was fog. The truck was losing heat to space, and their breath was condensing on the glass. He could run the heater, but that sucked juice out of the same batteries that the hyperdrive did. They were just going to have to towel off the windshield. And shiver, probably, before long. At least they had their coats.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked.

Donna shook her head. “We could search for weeks and not find anything familiar.”

“We don’t have weeks,” he said.

“Not in space. But if we can find a planet and land, we can take our time figuring out what happened. I could maybe find the bug in the program.”

“And if you can’t?”

She took a deep breath. “Well, we’d at least be on the ground somewhere.”

“Playing Adam and Eve like Nick Onnescu and his sweetie?”

She made a face. “No offense, but let’s try a couple more jumps.”

“Deal.” While she typed in another hundred light-years and checked to make sure that the computer was still locked onto the same point in space, Trent got the shop towel from under the seat to wipe the fog off the windshield, but when he shook it out, it fell to pieces.

“What the hell?” he said, and then he remembered. He’d used it to wipe the alien slime off the seat after they’d dropped them off at the doctor’s office. And then he remembered their romp in the camper that night. “Oho,” he said. “That explains it.”

“What?” Donna asked.

“Our clothes. When we ripped ’em off each other.” He could feel himself blushing. “I thought we were just hot, but it looks like we had a little help from Katata and her kids.” He showed her the shop towel. “That slime of theirs must be like battery acid.”

She laughed, but he could hear the disappointment in her voice when she said, “I thought that was a little strange. I felt like Supergirl or something, but I just figured it was that super strength you read about people gettin’ sometimes in accidents and stuff.”

“You were still super,” he said, and he kissed her again.

She was blushing, too, and batting her eyelashes in that “aw shucks” way she did when she was embarrassed, and she looked so beautiful he suddenly figured it wouldn’t be so bad finding an uninhabited planet somewhere and doing the Adam and Eve thing with her. But they were going to give it a couple more jumps first.

He stuck the towel back under the seat and got a paper napkin out of the glove box to wipe the window with. He had to stretch to reach Donna’s side, and his seatbelt kept trying to pull him back, but he managed it without knocking the computer off the dash. When he was done, the napkin looked a lot like the shop towel, but that was just moisture.

He checked the seat, but that seemed all right. Either alien slime didn’t eat vinyl, or he’d gotten it off quick enough. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s give it another try.”

The computer was ready. Donna hit “go,” and the stars shifted, but they were no more familiar afterward than before.

“One more?” she asked.

Trent shrugged. “Fifth time’s a charm.” He didn’t think it would do any good, but he didn’t particularly like the idea of landing on a strange planet and trying to debug a computer program, either, even if Donna did all the debugging.

Donna triggered the jump. More stars leaped past, but none of the ones that appeared in front of them were familiar.

“Well,” she said, “We’re building up a pretty good map of this section of space, wherever it is. We can triangulate on practically any star we can see from here.”

Trent wished he could decide. Jumping for a planet seemed like a step backward, especially when they were running low on power, but jumping around in the dark didn’t make any more sense. Nothing really made sense at the moment. He felt dumb, like he was missing something obvious. What was it? It was right there on the edge of his brain, but he couldn’t get a handle on it. What was he forgetting? He tried to think what it could be. Little alarm bells were going off in his head. They’d been going off since they’d gotten lost—what, fifteen or twenty minutes now—but this was different. This was… fifteen or twenty minutes.

“Shit, we’re runnin’ out of oxygen!” He cracked open his door seal and listened to the rush of air venting to space until the pressure gauge on the dash dropped to 5 p.s.i., then he sealed the latch and opened the air tank’s valve, watching the pressure rise again. When it hit 10 he stopped the flow and took a couple of deep breaths. He didn’t feel any smarter.

“We should have spent the extra money for carbon dioxide scrubbers,” he said. “This is about the least efficient system you can get.”

“Don’t go blaming yourself,” Donna said. “It was fine for what we intended to do.”

“Famous last words.” The air release had set them rolling again, so he had to vent more air through the bumper jets to bring them to a stop. He took another deep breath, trying to clear his mind. His heart was beating faster now, but he couldn’t tell if it was from oxygen deprivation or just plain old fear of dying. “Maybe we should find us a planet,” he said. “We need some thinkin’ time. Can you tell which of these stars are like the Sun?”

She nodded. “The computer can calculate their magnitude now that it knows their distance. We just have to look for one that’s the same magnitude as the Sun.”

That didn’t sound so hard. “Okay, then, let’s do it.”

Donna put the computer in her lap again so she could work easier, and after a couple of minutes she said, “There’s not that many stars around here. We’ve got only four good candidates within twenty light-years.”

“We only need one if it’s the right one. Do any of ’em stand out?”

“Nope.”

“Pick one, then, and let’s go.”