Anywhere but Here

18

The hyperdrive tossed them into space. The front couple feet of the spear clattered against Donna’s window, adding another set of cracks to the ones already there, then tumbled away to join the dirt and rocks and grass that came boiling up from below. The spare tire between them tried to tumble, too, but Trent held it steady with his right hand.

“Good reflexes,” he said.

She looked over at him with wide eyes. “He tried to kill us!”

“Yeah, he did. And now he’s probably at the bottom of a crater, tryin’ to claw his way out while the edges collapse in on him. Maybe it’ll make him think a little next time.”

“Why am I not convinced?” She took a deep breath. “Damn it, that’s twice in one day. I’m starting to get a little paranoid.”

“Me too,” Trent admitted. “But they haven’t got us yet, and they aren’t going to if I have anything to say about it.” He reached up to the upper latch on his door. “Okay,” he said. “Open yours the same time I do mine, and we’ll let all the air out. As soon as it’s gone, latch your door tight again and I’ll refill the cab with air from the tire.”

“Got it.”

“Go.”

He popped the latch open, and air whooshed out. When he’d used the door seal to let air out before, he had just cracked it open a little so he could control it, but this time he opened the latch all the way and let everything roar out as fast as it could. Donna did the same with hers, so the pickup didn’t pick up much spin, but it did start to tumble forward a little. They would have to use the jets to correct for that when they were done, but it couldn’t be helped.

Trent watched the fog blow out into space, dissipating into nothing a few dozen feet away. The stream of air grew fainter as the air in the cab got thinner and thinner, and at the same time his pressure suit grew stiffer. The little valve in the back of his helmet popped like a bag of microwave popcorn as it tried to keep the same pressure differential between inside and outside. At last Trent could see no more fog rushing away from the pickup, and the gauge on the dashboard read zero.

“Okay,” he said. “Button ’er up again.”

He looked around the tire at Donna. She was saying something—he could see her lips moving—but without any air in the cab, he couldn’t hear her at all. He watched her secure her door again, and he made sure his own was latched down tight, then he unscrewed the valve cap from the spare tire and realized his mistake. With his Ziptite suit on, he couldn’t get a fingernail into the valve to let any air out.

“Shit!” he muttered. He needed something pointy. A pen, or a knife point, or—or the wire he was using earlier to try to unplug the air release valve in his door.

He reached around the tire for the seat pocket where Donna had stowed it, fighting the inflated suit’s tendency to push his arms straight out, but she had seen his problem and was already ahead of him. She popped open the glove box and grabbed the can opener, handing it over with the round side toward him so he wouldn’t stab his suit.

That would do. He poked the tip into the end of the valve stem and sighed in relief when a cloud of fog billowed up into the cab. It took a few seconds for the air pressure to register on the dashboard gauge, but it slowly started to rise, and his Ziptite suit started to loosen up. Trent kept the valve button down until the gauge read ten pounds, then let off. He tucked the church key into the seat pocket on his side, then reached up and unsealed his Ziptite helmet.

The air stank like rubber, but his vision stayed steady after half a dozen breaths. There was oxygen in it.

“I think it’s safe,” he said.

Donna unsealed her suit and wrinkled her nose, then scratched furiously at her head. “Damn, these things itch.” Trent was so used to hearing her voice muffled from inside her suit, it sounded like she was shouting.

He couldn’t help laughing. “It saved your life, and you’re complaining because it itches?”

“I’m not complaining. I’m just making an observation.”

The tire kept trying to get away. There wasn’t anyplace for it to go, but in free fall it wouldn’t stay in the seat, and it kept banging into Trent or Donna or the dashboard or the roof. Finally Trent shoved the center seatbelt through the slotted wheel and had Donna latch it down on her side. It still tilted from side to side when either of them bumped it, but at least it wasn’t flying loose anymore.

Trent’s ears popped, adapting to the lower pressure in the cab. He worked his jaws until they settled down, then used the bumper jets to stop the pickup’s slow tumble. The jets were more sluggish now than when they had a full tank of air behind them, but that actually made them easier to use. Maybe he should put a pressure regulator on that line when they got home.

Donna put the computer into its spot on the dashboard and let it get a good look at the stars, and when it locked on, she picked the last Sunlike star from the list of nearby candidates. They had to drop the nose a little to get it onscreen, but not by much. “Here we go,” she said when the computer got a lock on it, and she hit the “enter” key.

It was a good jump. They could see their target as a much brighter-than-average star off to the left. Donna let the computer get a look at the stars from this vantage, then jumped closer, allowing it to triangulate the position of any planets it could see.

There were three; two bright ones that looked to be gas giants in close to the star, and a smaller one in the habitable zone. “So far, so good,” Donna said. “I’m taking us in for a closer look.”

“All right.” Trent’s ears popped, but he kept his eyes on the power gauge. It was already nudging the top of the “E,” but it dropped a needle’s width more when they jumped.

The planet was much closer, though. It was about as big as the Moon from Earth, and although it was mostly in shadow, they could see big swirls of cloud and blue ocean in the quarter that was lit by the star.

“Looks promising,” Trent said. “How fast is it moving?”

“Let’s see.” Donna called up the landing program and let it crunch on the image for a minute, but it didn’t return a value.

“We have to get closer,” she said, reaching for the computer again.

“Hold up there,” Trent said. “At this point we’ve got more air than power. Let’s think this through so we can do it in as few jumps as we can get away with.” He leaned forward to look at her around the front of the tire, and his ears popped again. He glanced at the air gauge, then took a cold, hard look at it.

Seven pounds of pressure, and dropping.

“Forget I said that. We’ve got a leak somewhere.”

He listened for the telltale hiss of air into vacuum, looked for fog drifting away outside, but he couldn’t hear or see anything.

“Check your door latches,” he said, doing just that on his own side, but they were tight. So was the window. He didn’t have a seatbelt caught in the door, either.

“I’m tight over here,” Donna reported.

“It’s going somewhere.” He bent down as far as he could to listen close to the floor, but he couldn’t hear anything there, either. Apparently it was a slow enough leak that it didn’t make much noise.

If they stayed at seven pounds for long, they would be courting the bends. Trent didn’t like it much, but he got the can opener out of the seat pocket and let more air out of the tire until the gauge read ten pounds again. When he shoved his thumb into the tire’s side, the rubber bent quite a bit; there wasn’t much air left in it.

“Okay,” he said, “we still need to make as few jumps as we can, but it looks like we’ve got to be quick about it after all. How few can we get away with?”

Donna looked out at the planet. He followed her gaze; it looked no different now than before.

“It’s not moving very fast,” she said. “We shouldn’t have to make more than one jump to correct our speed for landing. So one jump to get close, and if we can pick our landing site without jumping again, then one jump to match velocity, one more to put us back over the landing site, and two or three more to drop us to the top of the atmosphere. That’s, what, four or five jumps.”

“That may be more than we’ve got juice for,” Trent said. “I’d only bet on three for sure, especially close to a planet.”

She pulled the computer into her lap again. “Let me see what I can set in the preferences.” She tapped at the keyboard for a minute or so while Trent watched the air pressure drop a pound. With the tire between them, he couldn’t even see what she was doing, but by the sounds she was making he got the idea that there wasn’t just a “minimum jumps” option she could set. At last she said, “I can tell it to take us straight to the top of the atmosphere over our landing site after the tangential vector translation and not to give us any upward velocity when we get there. That should cut the number of jumps we need down to three, but if we guess wrong about where the top of the atmosphere is, we could fall a long ways before we get there, and burn up our parachute when we do.”

Trent said, “And if we try to jump too deep, we use up the last of the charge on our batteries without goin’ anywhere.”

“Right.”

He thought about that for a few seconds. “And it’ll only work if we can find a good landing site on our very next jump, right? So this one’s got to be just as accurate as the others.”

“Right,” Donna said. “We’ve got to make sure we wind up over the sunlit side of the planet, close enough to pick out a landing site.”

“Can we do that?”

“I think so. We’ve got a good fix on its distance now, and the only reason the computer can’t get a velocity reading is because it’s not moving fast enough to show any sign of motion from here, so if I click on a spot just a little ways out from the sunlit part that we can see, we should wind up within half its diameter or so of the surface, and not moving all that fast.”

“All right,” Trent said. “That sounds doable. Now let’s think about the air situation.” He looked at the gauge, down to eight pounds again. “We’ve got maybe five more minutes on this tire before it’s completely flat. It’ll take me at least five more to get another tire loose and wedged in here. Do you think we should do that before we jump, or is there going to be enough time on the other end?”

“There’ll be time during the vector translation,” Donna said. “That should take at least five minutes. But we’ve probably got enough air in our pressure suits and in the regular air tank to get us down, don’t we?”

Trent looked at the gauge. Seven pounds again. “It’d be really tight,” he said. “And we’ll need maneuvering air just as much as breathing air. I’d feel a lot safer saving what’s in the tank for that.”

“I’d feel a lot safer without you going outside in deep space,” Donna said.

“Me too,” Trent admitted, “but I don’t think we’ve got any choice.” He used the can opener to let the last of the air out of the spare, which brought the pressure in the cab up to nine pounds. “Let’s go pick us a landing site, and then I’ll switch tires while we’re changing our velocity to match it.”

“All right.” Donna put the computer on the dash again, waited for it to make sure it knew where they were and what direction they were aimed, then put the pointer just over the day side of the planet and pressed “enter.”

The planet blossomed into existence outside her window. Trent could barely see it around the tire, but its light reflected brightly in the cab. “How’s it look?” he asked.

“Good. There are continents, at least.”

He reached forward and used the jets to tip the pickup sideways, then swung it around so they could both see the planet through the windshield. It looked like they were maybe a couple thousand miles up, far enough to see quite a bit of it. The right-hand third or so was in shadow, but there was plenty to see in the sunlit part. Now that they were close, their relative motion was easy to see. They were falling toward it at a fairly steep angle, and going in pretty fast. They had a few minutes before they hit, though. Time enough to find a place to land, if their air held out that long.

There were indeed continents: two long skinny ones on either side of the equator that looked like they had been one big one not too long ago, the edge of another big one just sticking out of the shadow, and a big triangular one that reached nearly from the equator to the pole out in the sunlit side.

“There,” Trent said, pointing at it. “That one covers the widest range of climate. If we wind up stuck here, we’ll want as many options as we can get.”

“That… makes sense, I guess. I wasn’t thinking that far ahead.” Donna didn’t sound very excited at the prospect, and he didn’t blame her. But without power to run the hyperdrive, they were about as stuck as stuck could be, even if they could plug their leak and refill the air tanks.

Unless someone else was already here. Trent turned on the radio and tuned it to channel 1, but got only static. Same on 2 and 3. He picked up the microphone and called out on channel 9, and again on 19, “Hello, is anybody home? This is Trent Stinson calling for anybody who can hear me. Hello?”

Static.

“No such luck,” he said. “All right, let’s assume we’re going to be living here a while.”

Donna said, “Do you see anyplace that looks especially good?”

He didn’t, not right away, but he could tell where not to go. “That looks like desert,” he said, pointing to a wide brown patch with no clouds over it that ran along one side of the triangle and extended deep into the interior. There was a long line of mottled white and green along another side, the side that ran diagonally from equator to pole, and there was a big arc of cloud just off the coast that looked like a storm front sweeping in. Compared to a desert, that looked ideal. “That looks like mountains,” he said. “If we could land close to those, we’d have better odds of findin’ water. And probably game and fish and trees, too.”

“Do we want the ocean side, or the inland side?” Donna asked.

That was a good question. Oceans, in theory anyway, were good for fishing, and they made the climate more steady. But there wasn’t a whole lot of flat ground between the mountains and the sea. If they missed just a little bit on either side, they could wind up in deep trouble. On the other hand, if they came down too far from the mountains on the other side, it looked like things got mighty dry mighty fast. And without power, they couldn’t drive to the mountains once they were down, either.

“Ocean side,” he said at last. “As far from the coast as we can get without actually landing in the mountains.” He fished the binoculars out of their case and started scanning for likely sites, but his ears popped again and a glance at the pressure gauge told him their time on this cabful of air was just about up.

So close! Another fifteen or twenty minutes and they could probably make it to the ground without having to use a second tire, but they only had another few minutes’ worth in their Ziptites and another few minutes in the air tank under the seat. That might get them to the top of the atmosphere, but they still had quite a while under the parachute before they fell deep enough to breathe it.

Provided they could breathe it. But there was no point in worrying about that. Unlike the last time, there really wasn’t going to be another chance if this didn’t work out.

They only had five minutes or so before they hit the planet. Not enough time to exchange tires, but they had to do it. “Tell you what,” he said, handing the binoculars over to Donna. “Zip up, and you keep searching for a good landing site while I’m swapping out the tire. If you find one, give a yank on my rope so I’ll know to tuck in close to the pickup, and you go ahead and make the jump to match velocity with it.”

“Your rope?”

“I’m not going out there without tying myself down.” He reached behind the seat and pulled out the tow rope he always kept there, tied one end to the steering wheel and the other end around his waist. He left six feet or so of loose end and tied the lug wrench to that so it couldn’t get away from him.

“That’s smart. Come here a second.” She leaned out and around the tire and puckered her lips.

He leaned forward and kissed her. She was sweaty and just as scared as he was, but she was still the most beautiful woman in the world as far as he was concerned. Hell, the most beautiful woman in the whole damned galaxy.

“You be careful,” she said.

“I will.” He pulled his hood over his head and sealed it, and she did the same for hers. He wouldn’t use the air out of his suit tank for a minute or two; that would give him that much more time before he ran out.

“Ready?”

“Ready.” Her voice was muffled again.

“Okay, let’s blow the door seals. One, two, three, go.”