Anywhere but Here

30

He woke ravenous. It was dark as a coal mine in the camper, without even the pale moons of the air vents that had greeted him yesterday morning, but he felt completely slept out. He was warm again, and so was Donna. Whatever had made him sick last night was over. He felt ready to get to work on the generator and start-charging the batteries.

He slid out of bed and found his clothes by feel. The stuff he’d worn yesterday was still wet, but he was going to be working in the creek today anyway, so he put on the same things, wincing at the cold shock against his warm skin. He dressed in the dark, patted the counter until he found the flashlight, and slipped outside. There was just enough light to see the shapes of things, but no details. He didn’t know if the light was the first glimmer of morning or just starlight behind the clouds, but he didn’t care. He was too awake to go back to sleep.

He flipped on the flashlight and swept the beam around in a wide arc, then up into the tree. No wild animals waited to pounce on him.

The temperature couldn’t have been over forty degrees. He could see his breath. It was still raining, but he bet there was snow higher up the mountain. He went around to the side of the camper to check on his water collection system and found the bucket tipped over. Dammit. They needed that water. He wondered what had gone for it with the stream right there. The rat-cat, maybe, or a buffaloceros. He didn’t see any tracks, so it was most likely the cat. He looked around once more, righted the bucket and set it under the drip, then went back inside.

Breakfast was an apple and a couple handfuls of Cheerios, found by feel and eaten quietly in the dark so he wouldn’t wake Donna. He could have eaten the whole box of cereal, but this was the only one, and he didn’t know how much of their other food they were going to be able to eat. They had lots of noodles and macaroni and stuff like that, but only a case of bottled water to cook it in. Until they were sure they could drink the stream water, or could collect enough rainwater to make do, he didn’t want to use up the only food they knew they could eat.

He gathered up his tools and slipped back outside. It was growing lighter. He could see the tree trunk now, and the dark spot of ground where they had had their campfire. There were a bunch of slo-mos under the tree, too, or so it looked until he looked for the shells he had gathered yesterday and didn’t find them beside the truck where he’d left them. Something had been rooting through them, probably looking for anything edible. He would have bet anything it was the cat.

He swept the flashlight around again, checking out the tree carefully and walking all around the pickup, shining the light outward all the way around. He belatedly thought to check underneath the truck, too, and up on top, but there was nothing there, either. Whatever had checked out their camp, it was gone now.

He sat down on his camp stool and began busting the flat bottoms out of slo-mo shells. It was slow going, but he took his time, prying pieces off a little at a time with pliers and being careful not to weaken the helmet part of the shells. He had done half of them by the time the sky grew light enough to call it morning, and by the time Donna poked her head outside the camper, he was done.

“How long have you been up?” she asked.

“’Bout an hour.”

“Did you eat?”

“Yeah. Go ahead and get yourself something.”

“All right. Want me to make you something hot to drink?”

A cup of coffee would be great, but she would have to start a fire to do that. “No thanks. I want to get these mounted and get this bugger generatin’ power before I take a break.”

She gave him a dubious look, but she didn’t say anything; just went back into the camper. He got to work boring holes in the slo-mo shells; four each, big enough to pass a parachute shroud line through. That took almost as long as chipping away the shells had, but he kept at it until he got them.

Then he put on his helmet and shoulder armor and rolled the motor out to the logs he’d prepared yesterday. He had to splash across the stream with it, but with the tire taking most of the weight it wasn’t that hard. Getting it up the other bank was tougher, but he only had to get it high enough to swing the motor over the logs, then scoot it back out over the pool until he reached the end and could swing the tire around even with the waterfall. He gingerly let the logs take the entire weight, testing to make sure his counterweight of rocks would hold, but the logs barely even flexed, so he tied the motor down and got to work tying arrows and shells onto it. He didn’t trust the logs to support the motors weight plus his own, so he worked from the rocks at the head of the waterfall, leaning out to the tire and running the rope through the slots in the wheel. He made a loop around each arrow shaft, then cinched it tight around the knobby tread so it wouldn’t slip, leaving about a foot of arrow sticking out past the tread on either side of the tire, then he tied a slo-mo shell to each pair of arrows so it would hold water when it was on one side of the tire’s rotation, then dump it and rise up empty on the other side.

The first ones were easy, but when he got half of them done, he saw the flaw in his plan: he couldn’t do the others without the ones he’d already done sticking into the falling water. They were definitely going to work to generate power, because he couldn’t keep the wheel from spinning back around every time one of them caught some water.

He had to untie the motor and swing it around so the shells couldn’t fill up, tie on all the arrows and shells, then swing it back into place. It immediately started spinning, and he let out a wild “Woo-hoo!” when it did.

Donna came to the camper door and started clapping when she saw what he’d done. “Way to go, cowboy!” she yelled.

“It ain’t done yet,” he said, but it didn’t take much longer to finish. He went back to the pickup and pulled one of the two batteries from its cradle under the hood, unplugged the patch cord between it and the motor he’d removed, and carried them back to the logs, where he mounted the battery next to the motor, tying it down good so curious rat-cats couldn’t knock it into the water. Then he plugged the battery into the motor’s control box. The wheel slowed and the logs dipped downward a couple inches when he made the last connection, and he thought for a second that they would topple all the way into the pool, but the counterweight held, and the battery’s charge light went on.

Donna had come with him to the edge of the stream. “Now you can cheer,” he told her.

“Yay!” she said, and she gave him a big hug.

They watched the waterwheel spin. The ammeter was mounted in the pickup’s dashboard, so he had no idea how fast the battery was charging, but he counted revolutions of the wheel and figured it was doing maybe thirty rpm, which would be about three hundred feet a minute… which was pretty slow. He could walk that fast. Charging a battery that could drive a pickup a couple hundred miles at that rate would take a while.

The motor was waterproof, but he wasn’t so sure about the battery, so he got a garbage bag and covered it with that, tying the bag down tight. He couldn’t see the charge light now, but he could check it from time to time. It wasn’t like he had a whole lot else to do now.

Donna still did. Now the entire weight of their situation rested on her. She went back into the camper and started in on the computer again, grimly determined to solve their navigation problem by the time the batteries were charged.

Trent read over her shoulder for a while, trying to piece together what she was learning, but it might as well have been in French for all the good it did him. He watched her draw circles and triangles on the screen and call up the calculator program to crunch numbers, and he even recognized the numbers, but he couldn’t follow what she was doing with them.

He was afraid to distract her with a bunch of questions, but even so she finally said, “Go whittle on a stick or something. You’re making me nervous.”

It was actually a relief to be let off the hook. He’d felt obliged to help if he could, but he’d known as well as she had that he wasn’t going to magically figure out where they were. So he went back outside and watched his waterwheel spin, still pleased with himself about that, at least. The slo-mo shells dipping into the fall made a satisfying sploosh when they filled, and when they emptied out at the bottom of their arc they spread little skittering water balls across the pool. The logs supporting the motor flexed a little with each refill, their soft creak adding to the sound of flowing water. After a couple days of non-stop work, it was hard to believe that he could just stand there and watch more work being done without him. This must have been how the first guy to hoist a sail felt, suddenly freed of paddling everywhere.

The rain showed no sign of letting up. It wasn’t coming down hard; just steady. He checked on the collection bucket and was happy to see that it already had a couple of inches in the bottom, and while he was at it he pounded arrows into the ground around it to keep animals from knocking it over again.

Then he went out with his camp saw and gathered some more firewood. They might not use it, but they might, and he’d much rather haul wood during the day than after dark.

He spent a while inspecting the dents and scratches the truck had picked up over the course of their travels, and in a what-the-hell mood he went ahead and washed it, using their cook pot for a wash bucket and a sponge from under the sink. It looked pretty good when he was done, if you didn’t look too close and ignored the missing wheel.

He found the meteorite in the glove box while he was cleaning out the cab. Holding it in his hand was a surprising comfort. It wasn’t from Earth, or even from the solar system, but it was from someplace a lot closer to it than here. So was the pickup and everything in it, but for some reason the meteorite reminded him more of home than any of the man-made stuff. If they ever made it back, he would have a belt buckle or something made from a slice of it.

Donna was still at the computer when he went in around mid-day to check on her, but she wasn’t studying orbits anymore. She had a star map program on the screen, and she had a piece of paper on the table beside the computer, on which she had drawn a big circle with little dots scattered around one tiny portion of it.

“What’s that?” he asked.

He was half afraid she would tell him to go take another hike, but she just looked up and said, “The galaxy. I decided to hit the problem from another angle. Like you said yesterday, we know what direction we were headed in relation to Earth when we took the big jump, but I didn’t know what direction that was in galactic terms, so I mapped it out. I figured I might get lucky and it would turn out to be a direction that didn’t require a lot of math to figure out a velocity change.”

“It makes a difference?”

She nodded. “As near as I can tell, if we went straight out or straight in or straight along the tangent—that’s this line that points the same direction that the galaxy rotates—then it would be fairly easy to guess our distance from the difference in velocity.

“So were you?”

“Was I what?”

“Lucky.”

She made a face. “No. We went about nineteen and a half degrees inward from the tangent. That means we went toward the core a little bit as well as across. That’s two variables instead of just one.”

The lines on her drawing were starting to make sense now. “So how far are we talking, anyway?” he asked. “I mean, if we went straight in or out or across?”

“What difference does it make? We didn’t.”

“But it might still give us a better idea of how far we came than we’ve got now.”

She sighed theatrically and said, “Well, if Earth is going half a million miles an hour this way,” and she pointed to one of the arrows she’d drawn on the galaxy, “then in order to gain another third of a million, which is what we had to make up, we would have to go two-thirds of the way farther out from the core. Or two-thirds closer in, depending on whether we had to speed up or slow down. That’s assuming that the galaxy is a solid disk, which it isn’t. The outside spins slower than the inside, which is just the opposite of what you’d get if it was.”

“So what does that mean?”

“It means my brain hurts. I’ve got to figure out how to calculate a star’s actual orbit around the galaxy, and then I’ve got to figure out how much difference in velocity there is between two stars partway around it and at different distances from the center.”

Trent looked at the drawing. Two-thirds of the way from Earth to the core of the galaxy? That was a long damned ways. The entire region of space that their star map could recognize was probably about the size of one of those dots Donna had drawn. If they couldn’t figure out an accurate distance back to that patch of stars, then knowing the right angle to aim for wouldn’t help them a bit.

He hated this math stuff. It made him feel helpless. He had always preferred just jumping into things and figuring them out by trial and error until he got ’em right, and most times that was all it took, but that didn’t seem to be the way it worked here. It was doubly frustrating because they knew which direction to go. All they really needed was a reasonable guess as to how far, and they’d be in business.

“Can you work it backwards?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“If you can’t figure the distance from the velocity, how about picking a distance at random and figuring the velocity you’d wind up with when you got there? It’d give you at least an idea of how far out of the ballpark you were, wouldn’t it?”

“It’s the damned angle,” she said. “I could do it if we stayed the same distance from the center of the galaxy, but it’s no easier figuring velocity than it is distance with that angle in there.”

He didn’t see why not, but then the whole deal was beyond him anyway. If he’d gotten stuck out here on his own, he wouldn’t even be trying to learn how to calculate anything; he’d just charge up the batteries and head down that nineteen-and-a-half-degree line until he saw something he recognized or ran out of juice, whichever came first. But interstellar distances weren’t like distances back home; his method would probably leave them stranded out in the ass end of nowhere with no more clue where they were than they had now.

“Hey, it’s lunchtime,” he said. “Let’s give it a break and hit it again with some food in our stomachs.”

“All right,” Donna said. She didn’t seem very interested in anything but her math problem, but that was just her usual obsessive focus. If he put food in front of her, she would eat it.

He went outside again to check the rain bucket and decided there was enough in it to boil some more noodles for lunch. The thought of noodles so soon after last night’s disastrous run-in with them didn’t sound all that good, but they really needed to see if they could use any local water at all, and Trent would rather find out in daylight than after dark again tonight. Maybe chicken-flavored ramen noodles would be enough like chicken soup to taste like comfort food rather than an experiment in alien cooking.

There was no reason why they both had to get sick if the rainwater wasn’t drinkable. He got a bottle of Earth water from the camper to use in Donna’s noodles, then rinsed out the cook pot with a little of it and dried the pot good with a towel before he poured the rest of the bottled water into it.

He got out the alien alcohol and started a fire, then hung the pot from the wire over the flames. It didn’t take long to boil—this plastic wood burned hotter than real wood—but Trent let it boil for a few minutes longer before he added the noodles, just in case he hadn’t gotten the pot clean enough.

When her soup was ready, he poured it into a bowl and took it into the camper for her, then made himself another potful with rainwater. He let that boil for a good, long time, but when he realized that he’d boiled off about half of what he started with, he added the noodles and made soup with it.

It smelled good. It tasted good, too. It even warmed up his insides the way it was supposed to. But a couple of hours later he was on his knees out in the meadow again, calling dinosaurs even worse than the first time. Not even rainwater was safe.