Anywhere but Here

32

Trent spent the rest of the day taking the damaged motor apart and fishing out the pieces of arrow and wire. It would never work as a motor again, but with the guts removed it would at least hold a tire and freewheel so they could drive.

Donna went back to work on the computer, and around sunset she came out of the camper with a puzzled look on her face.

“What’s up?” Trent asked. He was mounting the motor back on the pickup.

“I’ve got a number,” Donna said. She should have been bouncing up and down with that news, but she just stood there, frowning.

“What’s the matter?” Trent asked. He slid out from underneath the truck and got to his feet.

“I don’t trust it.”

“Why not?”

“It’s twenty thousand. Even. What are the odds that a glitch in the navigation program would send us exactly twenty thousand light-years away?”

“Sounds pretty likely to me,” Trent said. “One digit and a bunch of zeros. A bit gets flipped in the ten-thousandth place, and here we are.”

“But that’s not what it looks like in binary. It’s nowhere near an even number in binary.”

“Maybe the part of the program with the bug in it isn’t written in binary.”

She shook her head. “None of it’s actually written in binary, but that’s how the numbers are stored. If something went wrong with one of them, it would show up as an even number in binary, not decimal.”

“So maybe the bug’s not in the numbers.”

“What else could it be? We know from looking at the log file that it’s not in the part that actually calculates the jump, because those numbers were right. That doesn’t leave much room in the program for a bug in the numbers while they’re still in decimal form. The navigation module hands them off to the hyperdrive control module, and that’s it. Even the handoff is probably done in binary.”

“Hmm.” Trent was beginning to see what she was getting at. He wiped his hands on his pants and said, “So how did you come up with the number? This morning you were just as stuck as ever.”

She said, “I kept thinking about what you said about working the problem backwards, picking a distance at random and seeing what the velocity would be at that point. There were only a couple of spots in the galaxy where I could do that with what little I’ve learned about orbits, but I got to thinking about the simulator program that we used when we were first learning how to navigate. It only simulates solar systems, but they’re kind of like little galaxies with just a few stars in ’em, so I figured I could set up a simulated solar system and jump around from place to place in it and see how much velocity difference I picked up.”

“I didn’t know you could do that,” he said.

“You can’t tell it where to put the planets, but you can tell it how many planets you want, so I gave it a hundred, plus a big asteroid belt. That gave me plenty of targets, so I just picked one to start with and set up the same angle of jump that we took to come out here, and checked the relative velocities of all the planets and asteroids along that line until I got the right number.”

“I didn’t think planets moved that fast.”

“They don’t. Everything’s about ten times slower, but all the angles are the same, and the distances are proportional. I was even able to account for our initial velocity when we left Mirabelle, and the orbital velocity of the planet we landed on before we came here.”

“But you don’t trust the result, because it’s an even number.”

“It’s just too pat. There’s got to be something wrong with my calculations.”

He didn’t know what to say to her. She was probably right, but this was the one time in their lives when telling her she was right would be the wrong thing to say. He looked out at the waterwheel, hard at work charging up their batteries, and said, “We can go have a look easy enough in a day or two.”

She looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “We can’t just jump twenty thousand light-years and hope I’m right. What if I’m not?”

“Then we look for another planet wherever we wind up. We can’t stay here anyway. We’ll be out of water in a week.”

She said, “We can make a still.”

“Rainwater’s about as close to distilled as it gets, and that didn’t settle any better than creek water. There’s something funky in it. And even if we could get it pure enough, we’re going to run out of food in a month anyway.”

She ran a hand through her hair. “We don’t know that we can’t eat anything here.”

“You want to play Adam and Eve?”

“I don’t want to be the one who gets us killed!” She turned away, her arms crossed and her fists clenched.

He reached out to put a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged him off. He waited a second, then said, “Doing nothing is what’ll get us killed. You may not trust your numbers, but I do, at least enough to go see if they’re right.”

She took a few deep breaths before she turned around and said, “Let me go run the simulation again.”

“Sure.”

She went back inside the camper, and he crawled underneath to finish mounting the motor.

The sun was down by the time he finished. The day had warmed up pretty well when the sun was out, but it started to cool off again pretty quickly as the stars came out. Trent was tired of being cold, and tired of wearing wet boots, so he lit another campfire and he and Donna sat beside it in their stocking feet while they dried out their clothes. Trent amused himself by tossing the tiny little darts off the leafy ends of arrows into the flames and watching them flare up, while Donna just stared out into the night. They heated up a can of chili over the fire and had another beer, and neither of them got sick on it or on the smoke, which pretty much hammered the last nail in the water coffin as far as Trent was concerned.

It didn’t matter. They were leaving anyway. In another day, maybe two, the batteries would be charged, and they would be off to face another problem somewhere else. Trent didn’t have any doubt that the universe would serve them up another one. Even if they made it home without incident, there were problems enough waiting there to last a lifetime.

Trouble was like an onion, he decided, only you peeled it from the inside out. Instead of working your way down to smaller and smaller ones, you worked your way out to bigger and bigger ones, and they kept going forever. There didn’t seem to be any shortcut through them, either. Simply bailing out for another life didn’t work. The very trouble they were trying to escape had followed them to Mirabelle. He didn’t suppose he could blame the United States government for the programming glitch that brought them here, at least not directly, but their refusal to let people develop better software and sell it on the open market had definitely contributed to Donna’s picking this version to download.

That was something else to worry about. Would the software take them back to Earth? It had worked fine jumping around out here in the middle of nowhere, but if they did wind up in familiar space again, could they just pick Earth off the menu and jump to it, or would they wind up another twenty thousand light-years away? Maybe they should try for Onnescu again. The program had at least taken them there okay.

He supposed he and Donna would have to hash that out before they left, but he didn’t feel like getting into it tonight. Not while she was so unsure of her calculations to even get them back to familiar space.

The alien wood didn’t leave much in the way of coals, so they had to keep feeding fresh wood into the flames to keep it going. After a while it became more trouble than it was worth, so Trent suggested they turn in, and Donna just shrugged and said, “Why not?”

The long days and long nights were really messing with Trent’s sleep patterns. He had no trouble sacking out, but it was still pitch black when he awoke, and he just lay there for hours afterward, waiting for daylight. When it finally came, he was tired again, but he got up and went outside to check the waterwheel.

It was still spinning, though not as fast as yesterday. The stream was back down to the level it had been when they first arrived. The battery was fully charged, though, so he swapped it out for the other one and installed the charged one in the pickup.

He spent the rest of the day going over everything he could think of, making sure that it was ready for space. He used the foot pump to refill the air tanks under the seat and the tanks in their Ziptite suits. He could have used the compressor, but the battery was fully charged now and he didn’t want to draw it down even a little bit if he could help it. Besides, he was beginning to see how long and boring a day could be with nothing to fill it, and refilling the tanks by hand was at least something he could do.

Donna alternated between double-checking her logic on the computer and battening down the hatches in the camper for zero-gee. By nightfall, the pickup was as ready to go as the day they’d left Earth, except for the second battery, which was still at only three-quarters of a charge. It would be ready by morning, though.

Trent had an even harder time sleeping that night. Tomorrow they would be in space again, for better or for worse. They would either find their way home, or have to find another planet that would be more hospitable than this one.

It occurred to him that they’d never named the place. They’d named its creatures, but not the planet itself. What would be appropriate? Plasticland? That sounded more like a shopping mall than a planet. Styrohome? Better, but it wasn’t actually home. He tried to come up with a play on polystyrene or polyurethane or PVC, but he never came up with anything he liked. Unless Donna had a bright idea, he guessed it would just have to be “that place with the cupids where we stopped to recharge the batteries and figure out where we were.” Kind of a shame to discover a planet and not name it, but he didn’t think they’d be back, and this wasn’t the sort of place he wanted to name after himself or Donna. He wanted their planet to be habitable, at least.

What would his ideal planet be like, he wondered? He and Donna had gone out looking, but they hadn’t really defined their terms ahead of time. He tried to think about it now, and decided that it would probably look a lot like this one, with mountains and streams and trees, only without the risk of getting an arrow through the top of your head. He would opt for a spot that was a little more open, though. Close to the mountains, but not in them. He was already getting tired of looking at the same old valley day after day.

As he drifted off to sleep, he realized that the picture forming in his mind was of the red buttes around Rock Springs.