Anywhere but Here

33

The other battery was fully charged in the morning. Trent installed it in the truck, then dismantled the water-wheel and re-mounted the motor, too. The sun hadn’t even cleared the mountain by the time they were ready to roll.

They put on their Ziptites and sealed the doors, then overpressurized the cab to make sure it was tight. There was no radio to listen to this time, and neither one of them felt like playing the stereo. Donna held the computer on her lap and ran one more time through what they were going to do.

“I calculated the exact spot in the sky where we want to go,” she said, “based on the position of the stars after the big jump and all the jumps we made after that. It’s about five degrees off from where we were aiming when we did that trick with the map, but I think it’s more accurate.”

“I’d be surprised if it wasn’t,” Trent said.

He looked out at the meadow that they’d called home for five days. There was a path worn from the pickup to the stream, and the logs were still there, too. There was a pile of arrows and slo-mo shells on the bank where he’d cut them loose from the waterwheel. Closer at hand, there was a smudge of plastic residue under the tree beside them where they’d had their fire. Other than that, there was nothing to indicate that humans had been here. They’d undoubtedly left some bacteria behind, but the odds of that thriving here were slim to none. Intestinal bacteria were just as specialized as people; they would have little better chance of surviving here than Trent and Donna would.

Still, he could reduce the odds of that down to practically nothing. He shifted the pickup into forward and drove out into the meadow, stopping right over the spot where they’d dug their latrine. He’d filled it with dirt, but this would be even better. Pack out what you pack in, and all that.

He looked at the pressure gauge. Steady as a rock. “Ready to do it?” he asked.

“Not really,” Donna said, “but I’m probably as ready as I’m going to get.”

“Good enough for me,” he said. He opened the stopcock in his door and listened to the excess air rush out until the gauge steadied out at eleven and a half pounds—atmospheric pressure here—then he closed it off again and said, “Let’s go.”

“Hang onto your hat, cowboy.”

He reached up and did just that, glad to be wearing it again. He’d stowed their helmets and shoulder guards in the camper for posterity, but if he never wore them again, it would be too soon.

Donna hit the “enter” key, and the valley blinked out of existence. Sunlight blasted in the driver’s window, casting stark shadows across the cab, at least until the usual cloud of debris rose up to mask it. The pickup rocked a little as the wet ground boiled away beneath them, but Trent let it go without correction until they were quite a ways away from the biggest mass of it and they weren’t getting bumped much any more. He didn’t want to waste a single puff of air that they didn’t have to.

Zero gee reminded him all too clearly how his stomach had felt a couple days ago, but he held it down. He wasn’t sick this time; just light.

Donna set the computer in its spot on the dashboard and let it get a look at the stars. After a few seconds the red arrow appeared on the top right corner of the screen, so Trent used the right-rear jet to tip the truck that direction until the arrow became a circle that drifted down with the stars. He stopped their motion with the front-left jet, and looked out at the patch of stars that the computer was flagging. “That’s where home is, eh?”

“That’s where I’m prayin’ it is,” Donna said. “Nineteen thousand, five hundred and thirteen light-years from here.”

“I thought you said it was twenty thousand even?”

“From where we first showed up. We made five more hundred-light-year jumps before we gave up looking for home and then backed up thirteen looking for a good planet.”

“Oh. Sure,” he said, feeling dumb. He’d totally forgotten that little detail. That’s why Donna was the navigator.

“So are you ready for the big jump?” she asked.

“Do it.”

She had already keyed in the figures on the ground. Now she just double-checked that they were right, then hit “enter.”

There was the same long moment of disorientation that they’d felt when they made their other big jump, and the starfield completely changed. The bright sun was gone.

“Okay, baby,” Donna whispered, “find something familiar.”

They waited, hardly breathing, for the computer to lock on, but after thirty seconds or so, it made the Homer Simpson “D’oh” sound and flashed “Unable to orient” on the screen. Trent didn’t recognize anything, either, but that didn’t mean anything. The computer was programmed for it; he wasn’t.

“Let’s give it a full picture to work with,” he said, hitting the buttons for both front jets. The nose tilted down, and more stars streamed up from behind the hood, but none of those proved familiar, either. He hit the side jets and let the odd corkscrew motion of rotation in two planes twist them around ninety degrees so the computer could see what had been to their sides, too, but still no luck.

Donna was biting her lip and making little hand motions toward the computer as if she wanted to help it out somehow, but didn’t know how.

Trent brought the pickup to rest with the point they’d been aimed at before out his window. “Okay,” he said, “so we didn’t hit it the first time. We’ve got plenty of power; let’s try jumping to the side a ways. Maybe our angle was off a little.”

“We could jump all day and never find it,” Donna said.

“We could. But at least we’ll have tried.”

She reached for the computer. “A hundred light-years?”

“Five hundred,” Trent said.

“That’s farther than—”

“—the star map is good for, I know. But we’ve got a lot of space to cover. Let’s cover some of it.”

“It’s going to be like jumping from hole to hole in a piece of Swiss cheese,” Donna said.

“Yeah, well, the holes are what makes it Swiss,” Trent replied.

“Huh?”

He shrugged. “That was supposed to be profound.”

“Oh.” She narrowed her eyes. “It wasn’t.”

“I gathered that. So let’s jump already.”

“Any place in particular look good to you?” she asked.

“An even ninety degrees to the side of where we were pointing when we got here,” he said. “Might as well make the math easy if we have to calculate how far we’ve gone.”

“Okay. Here goes.” She moved the cursor until the numbers in the popup display were right, typed in 500 light-years in the distance box, and hit “enter.”

The stars shifted again. The disorientation that went with the jump was less than last time, but that was the only indication that they’d gone only 500 light-years instead of 20,000.

They let the computer look for familiar stars, but it didn’t find anything this time, either. “Where to now?” Donna asked. “Ninety degrees away from the last time?”

“Sure, why not?” Trent said. It didn’t really matter, but they might as well be consistent.

They jumped again, and let the computer have a look at the entire sweep of sky. It found nothing familiar, but Trent felt his heart suddenly start to pound when he saw three stars in a row with another three at an angle above them. They looked just like the belt and sword of Orion. There were even two more bright stars where one shoulder and the opposite knee would be. The constellation was way smaller than Orion was from Earth, but it sure looked right to him.

“There,” he said, hitting the jets to bring the pickup to a stop before it slid out of sight. In his excitement, he overshot and had to correct twice more before he got it, but that left the stars still visible just to the right of center. “Isn’t that Orion?”

“Where?”

“On its side. Right there.” He tapped the computer screen; it was easier to point to a spot on that than at something outside.

“It… certainly looks like it,” Donna said, “but it must not be, or the computer would recognize it. I mean, it’s not like it can’t see it.”

“Tell it to try again,” Trent said.

She pulled down a menu and selected “Orient,” but the computer made the Homer “D’oh” sound again.

“Damn it, I know that’s Orion. I mean, what are the odds of there being another one just like it somewhere else?”

“I don’t know,” Donna said, “but what are the odds of the computer not recognizing something that obvious? It must see something we don’t, like the stars are the wrong distance apart or the wrong spectrum or something.”

“This is the same program that sent us twenty thousand light-years off course.”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“No ‘but.’ That’s Orion.”

She ran a hand through her hair. It stayed put when she let go, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Okay,” she said slowly. “If that’s Orion, then let’s see if I can figure out where we are myself.”

She called up the star map as seen from Sol and found Orion on that. “It’s a hell of a lot bigger from the Sun, that’s for sure,” she said.

“Wait a second,” said Trent. Something didn’t look right. He looked from the screen image to the one out the windshield. He had to cock his head sideways to get the same orientation on it, but when he did, the sword was pointing the wrong way, and the belt was hanging to the right instead of to the left.

“Shit, it’s not the same. It’s backward.”

She looked from one to the other, back and forth, and finally said, “What if we’re behind it?”

“Is that possible?” he asked. “I thought the stars in a constellation were all different distances away. That’s why they get all messed up when you go very far. There isn’t a ‘behind’ to a constellation, is there?”

“I don’t know.” She pointed the cursor at one of the belt stars on the computer’s image of Orion as seen from Earth and read the distance figure that popped up beside it. “Wow. Fifteen hundred light-years. That’s a ways.” She pointed at the next one. “Fifteen hundred to that one, too.” She hit the third belt star. “Same.” She pointed at the left shoulder and said, “Not that one; it’s only four hundred. The right shoulder is only four hundred, too, but that star right next to it is fifteen, and the sword and the left knee are, too. That’s bizarre. They’re all the same distance from Earth. I had no idea.”

“So they would still look like they went together from the other side,” Trent said. “But are those the right ones to make it look like this?”

“Left knee and belt and sword,” she said, “and this one here next to the right shoulder. We’ve got a left shoulder and a right knee and a belt and a sword. I think that’s it.”

“Hot damn. How far away do you figure?”

She looked at it, then closed her eyes and said, “It looks about half the size that I remember it. Is that about what it looks like to you, too?”

“About that,” he admitted.

“Then we’re twice as far away as Earth is, which would put us about—jeez, three thousand light-years? Could we be that far off?” She answered her own question. “Of course we could. My calculations were about as accurate as a shotgun.”

“Hey,” Trent said, “shotguns hit stuff, too.”

“Well, we seem to have hit something this time. Let’s go around to the other side and see if the computer recognizes it from there.” She brought up the real-time image on the screen and pointed the cursor at the middle star in the backward Orion’s belt, then keyed in 3,500 light-years. “That ought to make it nice and bright,” she said.

She hit “enter” and the stars shifted. The computer tried to orient itself, but after thirty seconds it made the Homer “D’oh” and gave up.

“Okay, it can’t see anything familiar up ahead,” Donna said, “but neither can I. Orion should be behind us. Turn us around and let’s see.”

“Here goes,” Trent said. He hit the front jets and the nose tilted down. He watched stars sweep up into view, some of them pretty bright. A really bright one popped over the hood, then just as it was about out of sight overhead, another one rose up to replace it. There was a big halo of light around it, and Trent was just starting to wonder if this and the one before it could possibly be the belt stars when Donna gasped and he looked over at her.

And past her, to the gorgeous blue nebula that rose up above the right fender. There were four or five more bright stars embedded in it, clearly the source of the light that made it glow like a neon cloud, There were wispy filaments of dark dust scattered throughout, and distant stars shone through the edges of it.

Then the big one rose into view. Much larger than the blue nebula, this one was reddish, and filled half the windshield. It was brighter on the left side, lit by four stars in a squat diamond buried in the densest part of the nebula, and trailing off into long wisps on the right. A little to the left, a smaller puff of red glowed by the light of another star embedded in the middle of it.

“Where’s the camera?” Trent managed to ask.

“In the back, of course,” Donna said.

“Of course.” Not that he would need a photo to remember this. All he would have to do, even if he lived to be a hundred, was close his eyes and this image would be there.

He brought the pickup’s motion to a stop and leaned close to the windshield. There were the three belt stars, and these two nebulas and that third bright star had to be the sword.

“We’re practically on top of it,” he said.

“Too close for the computer to figure it out,” Donna said. “We’ve got to back off a ways.”

Trent nodded. “Not just yet, though.” They had air enough for hours, and they weren’t lost anymore. He couldn’t imagine a place he’d rather be.

He glanced at the pressure gauge. Steady, but it had been twenty minutes or so since they had sealed up, so he opened the stopcock in his door and let half their air out, then closed it and refilled the cab from the tank under the seat. He smiled when he saw the little puff of steam that drifted away from the truck. Air that he and Donna had breathed was now part of Orion. Every time he looked into the sky at night and saw the constellation shining up there, he would think, I am part of that.