Anywhere but Here

37

“Holy cow,” Donna said. “He’s got the targeting down cold.”

The planet was about the size of a basketball held at arm’s length; far enough to put them outside the range of the United States’s laser satellites, but close enough to see the continents so they could pick a preliminary landing site.

Provided they could recognize the continents. Trent squinted against the glare of sunlight on clouds, and finally managed to see a patch of brown beneath the white. There was a curved edge over to the left with a big bite taken out of it, and a big triangular island kind of below and to the left of that. There was a big white area to the left of that, too smooth to be clouds, but what clouds there were did seem to be kind of sticking out of it in big curls. Trent turned his head sideways to put them at the top of the picture, then the other way to put them at the bottom, and everything clicked into place. That was the south pole over there to the left, and the brown continent with the island to the south was Australia.

Which meant North America was on the night side of the planet.

“Dammit,” Trent said. “I don’t want to make a night landing.”

“You want to go back to Federation headquarters and try again in twelve hours?” Donna asked.

“Not particularly.”

“I don’t think we have enough air to wait it out here.”

“Probably not.” Trent didn’t have the patience, either. He looked at the brown continent, ringed with cloud and bare in the middle. Somebody was having a nice, sunny day down there. After all the rain and cold he and Donna had been through in the past few days, a little desert sun would be more than welcome. “Hell with it,” he said. “We’ve always wanted to go to Australia. Looks like now’s a pretty good time for it. We’ve even got twenty bucks left. What do you say we spend the rest of the day there and then go home?”

Donna smiled. “That actually sounds kind of fun. Anyplace in particular you want to go?”

“I don’t know Australia from a hole in the ground. Just pick a spot and let’s see what we get.”

“Okay, here goes.”

She put the target circle dead square in the middle of the continent and pushed “enter.” Earth vanished, to appear much larger and only half-lit off to the right, then after a couple minutes it shifted again so they were directly over a huge expanse of red desert. There was still some sideways motion; apparently the program had only killed part of their velocity so they could fly over their target area and pick a specific landing site more carefully.

Donna looked over at Trent, but he just shrugged and said, “Anywhere,” so she left the targeting circle right where it was and pressed “enter.”

The program took them halfway around the planet again to kill the rest of their velocity, then put them back where they were, only much closer to the ground. One more jump downward, and Donna said, “That’s it. We’re at the top of the atmosphere already.” Trent used the air jets to orient the pickup wheels-down while Donna said, “Get ready with the parachute in five… four… three… two… one… now.”

He flipped the switch for their new chute. No time like the present for testing new equipment. It streamed upward and tugged gently on the pickup, but not nearly as hard as their other chutes did. Was it fouled? Trent leaned forward and looked up just in time to see a series of cords break away from where they held the canopy closed, and the chute blossomed open a little at a time until it was fully deployed. There had been hardly a lurch through the whole sequence.

“Now that was a neat trick,” Trent said. “I’ll have to learn how they did that.”

There were big black letters on the chute. They were backwards from underneath, and in various languages including several that weren’t human, but Trent could read one set of block letters easily enough: Galactic Federation. He wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, but it was too late to worry about it now.

They drifted down through clear skies, watching the desert rise up to meet them. The ground was red, just like it was around Rock Springs, and they could see big swirls and arcs of rock outcrops from where it had folded and then been eroded flat over millions of years. Off toward the horizon were a couple of white patches that looked like salt pans.

“Looks like we’re in the outback,” Trent said. So much for spending that last twenty.

As they drew closer to the ground, they realized it wasn’t nearly as barren as it looked from higher up. Around each of the rock outcrops there was a light brown ring the color of dry grass, and between the rings were specks of green that turned out to be trees. There were actually lots of trees, just spaced a ways apart, and big tufts of grass or bushes or something growing between them.

Trent looked in the downward-facing mirror as they approached the ground, and he saw a group of twenty or thirty animals moving out in a circle around where they were going to come down. They were up on two legs—kangaroos? But their arms flailed as they ran, and brightly colored cloth billowed out behind several of them.

“People!” he said. “There’s people down there.”

“Oh, shit!” said Donna. “Should we jump?”

“They’re gettin’ out of the way.” Trent kept his eyes on the mirror just to make sure, but the runners on the ground were well clear now.

“Jeez,” Donna said. “What are the odds we’d land right on top of the only group of people for miles around?”

“Pretty slim, but we managed it. Hang on.”

They leaned back in their seats, and a moment later there was a hard jounce as the tires hit the red dirt. The pickup skidded to the left a little, but it didn’t feel like it was in danger of going over. A cloud of red dust rose up around them and drifted slowly to the left, rising to meet the parachute as it draped itself over a couple of bushes and several of the people who had watched them land.

They were aborigines. Dark skinned, dark-haired, except for the ones who had gone gray, with wide noses and big smiles. That was a good sign.

Trent popped the latches on his door and opened it, to be hit with a wall of heat. He had intended to apologize for landing right in the middle of their get-together, but instead the first words out of his mouth were “Wow, it’s hot.”

“You get used to it,” said one of the group in surprisingly good English.

Trent squinted in the bright sun. This guy didn’t look like the others. He looked like a lobster that had been boiled too long, bright red and peeling even though he wore a big floppy hat and a loose-fitting gray robe.

Trent remembered what he’d meant to say. Stepping down to the red ground, he said, “I’m sorry we dropped in right on top of you. We didn’t—”

“We were expecting you,” said one of the aborigines, an older man with dreadlocked hair and a wispy brown beard shot with gray. His English was good, too, with just a little of the accent Trent would have expected from a native Australian.

“You were expecting us? How? We didn’t even know we were coming here ourselves until a few minutes ago.”

“The universe knows,” the aborigine said. He was wearing a leather thong around his neck with an irregular lump of black rock tied to it; he reached up and touched the rock as he spoke.

The red-faced man said, “We started walking here five days ago. He wouldn’t tell me why; just said I’d know when it was time. I thought we were headed for a town or a ranch or something, but we wound up here this morning and he says, ‘Now we wait.’ So we’re standing here in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the day, and I’m about out of patience, when here you come. My hat’s off to you, old man.” He lifted his hat, but dropped it right back on his head. Trent didn’t blame him; the sunlight felt like liquid fire.

He peeled out of his Ziptite and tossed it in the cab. Donna had already shed hers; she came around the front of the pickup, saying “Hi” to everyone on the way, until she stood next to Trent. “Hi,” she said to the aboriginal leader. “I’m Donna Stinson, and this is Trent.”

“They call me Billy when I need a name,” the aborigine said.

“And I’m Dale,” said the other man. “Dale Larkin.”

It took a moment for the name to register, but when it did, it hit like a load of bricks. “The bank robber? You stole the whole damned—how did you wind up here?”

“Long story.”

“I brought you here to tell it,” said Billy. “So tell it.”

“Here? Now?”

“The heat makes him a little crazy,” Billy said. “Of course here. Of course now. This is where we are, and these people are only here for the day.”

“How do you know that?” Trent asked.

Billy laughed softly. “Would you stay any longer in this heat?”

That was a good point. But Trent wasn’t going to stand around in it and listen to a story all day, either. “Why don’t we find some shade before we roast?” he said.

Billy laughed again and waved toward the bushes with the parachute draped over them. “You have already provided it.”

That was a good point, too. “Fair enough,” Trent said. “Want a beer?”

“That would be fabulous,” Dale said.

“Yes, thank you,” said Billy.

Trent looked out at the other people and realized he didn’t have enough for everyone, but he and Donna went into the camper and brought out what they had, and the rest of their bottled water as well. The water proved to be a bigger hit than the beer; when the picking and choosing was over, the water was gone and there was a six-pack of beer left.

About half the tribe settled in under the parachute. The others spread out into the bush, digging for roots and who knew what else. Trent and Donna sat on the red dirt between two tufts of spiny grass, and Billy and Dale sat facing them. It was surprisingly more pleasant in the shade, even though the ground was still hot. Trent scooped up a handful of dirt and let it trickle through his fingers, and when he looked up at Donna, he saw that she was watching him and smiling.

“Earth,” he said.

“There’s no place like home, eh babe?”

“Nope.” He popped open his beer and took a swig. Nice and cool. No need for a nipple to drink it through, either.

Billy nudged Dale in the ribs. “So tell your story.”

Dale shifted uncomfortably. “What if they don’t want to hear it?”

“Too bad. The Dream brought them here, and we walked a long ways to meet them. Your lives are connected. From what Trent said a minute ago, I think it started before today, hmm?”

“He bankrolled the guys who invented the hyperdrive,” Trent said. “Donna and I helped them build their spaceship. But we haven’t met before.” He looked straight at Dale and added, “Then he robbed a bank right after I got some money out of the cash machine. I mean took the whole building and everything. The backwash blew me into the hole.”

“Sorry about that,” Dale said. If he blushed, it was impossible to tell behind his already-red skin. “I thought you were far enough away.”

“You miscalculated a little.”

“That wasn’t the only mistake I made, believe me.”

“Robbin’ banks is generally a mistake,” Trent said.

Dale shrugged. “We all fight the system in our own particular way. But I was out of cash, and almost out of options. After the Feds traced the money I gave to Allen and Judy, I had about ten minutes to grab what I could and get out of town. I holed up at my sister’s place in Granger and finished turning my van into a spaceship, but I didn’t want to go live on some frontier planet. I was getting pretty tired of living in the States, though, with all the anti-this and anti-that going on, so I figured I’d knock off one last bank and then go to Rio or something. But it didn’t turn out quite the way I expected.”

“What happened?” Trent asked, growing interested despite himself.

Dale laughed. “Jesus, what didn’t? When I jumped, I expected the cloud of air that went with me to push me away from the building a little when it expanded, but I didn’t stop to think that the building would be full of air, too, and all of that would be rushing away from the other side of the wall. So the entire bank came at me instead of away, and it slammed into the van like a runaway train. It smashed the whole right side and busted the passenger window, so all the air rushed out and sent me corkscrewing away like a wobbly football. I had to use an entire fire extinguisher to stop the motion, and another one to push me back to the bank.”

“Fire extinguisher?” asked Donna.

“Yeah, I had a bunch of C0₂ fire extinguishers for maneuvering around. They work great for that; they’ve got those bell nozzles and everything. But you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to steer a van with one when you’re leaning out the door and spraying it into space.

“I managed to push the van back toward the building, but the building was tumbling, too, so I had to use another extinguisher to stop before I bumped up against it and got knocked away again. I’d planned to tie the van to the bank with a rope, but I couldn’t do that with the building spinning around, either, so I had to cross over the last few feet on my own, wearing just my Ziptite suit.

“And that’s when I realized that I hadn’t set the jump field tight enough. I’d figured it would cut the vault in half and I could just go in and throw the loot into the back of the van and be done, but it was still locked tight. There was a little nick out of one corner, maybe big enough to reach an arm through, but the edges looked sharp, and that Ziptite suit was starting to feel awfully fragile. And cold. Nobody told me how cold it would be! Or how scary. All that loose dirt and rocks and stuff that came along for the ride kept whacking into me, and the air regulator kept making that little popping sound when I breathed—I thought it was the suit getting ready to blow.”

Trent laughed. “Man, I know that feeling. So what did you do?”

“I went back to the van and made another jump. I was about ten feet away from the building, so I waited until it rotated around the way it was to begin with and sliced off a ten-foot chunk of it. It worked, too. When the interior spun around again, the vault was spilling its guts out into space.”

Dale ducked his head sheepishly when everyone laughed. “Yeah, it’s funny now. At the time, though, man I was pissed. Coins and jewelry and paper money was flying out in a big spiral, whacking into the van’s windshield—”

“Sounds pretty,” Donna said.

Dale snorted. “Oh yeah, it was pretty. Some of it was Krugerrands. I opened the door and tried to catch some of it, but it just bounced off my gloves before I could grab it, and then I lost my grip on the door and almost slipped out into space again myself. And of course by then my breath was condensing inside my helmet, so I couldn’t see, and I was panting like crazy and the air regulator was popping away, and I got this sudden image from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. You ever see that movie?”

Trent and Donna both shook their heads, but surprisingly, Billy nodded and said, “Robert Redford and Paul Newman. Their best work.”

“You re kidding,” said Dale.

“Yes, of course I must be. Their names must have come to me in a dream.”

Dale shook his head and said, “This guy’s a constant source of surprise. So in the movie, Butch and Sundance are robbing a train, but they use way too much dynamite to blow the safe, and when they touch it off it blows up the entire boxcar, safe and all. It throws all the cash up into the air, and it’s fluttering down like leaves around the Hole-in-the-Wall gang, who’re grabbing it and stuffing it into their hats. But the posse is already closing in on them, so they jump on their horses and ride, all but one of them, who can’t leave all that money behind. He keeps gathering it up even when Butch shouts at him to leave it and ride for safety, and a second later, the posse shoots him dead.”

He took a drink of beer and said, “I decided right there that maybe money wasn’t the most important thing in life, so I slammed the door and headed for home. Only it was the middle of the night at home, and the cops were no doubt hotter on my ass than ever before. I took a look at the sunny side of the planet and decided I’d always wanted to see Australia, so here I am.”

“He had a little trouble landing, too,” said Billy. “He came down on a big rock. It shorted the battery and started a fire.”

Dale said, “I barely got out before the whole van went up. So there I was in the middle of this, with just the clothes on my back.” He waved his arms to encompass the brilliant sunlit landscape beyond the shade of the parachute. “I would have died if these people hadn’t showed up when they did.”

Trent shook his head. “Man, it sounds like you’ve had more than your share of trouble. If it hadn’t started out with you robbin’ a bank, I’d almost feel sorry for you.”

Donna poked him in the side, but Dale said, “No, he’s right. I brought it all on myself.”

“So what are you going to do next?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I just know that I won’t be robbing banks anymore.”

“Do you want a ride home?”

Dale shook his head. “No, thanks. I don’t think North America is a good place for me. I’m not sure if the Australian outback is my place, either, but it’s refreshingly uncomplicated out here. And it’s right in the middle of the continent, so people are dropping in all the time. If I want a ride anywhere, one’s bound to come along in a few days.”

Trent wasn’t sure what to think about this guy. By all rights, he should be locked up. He’d stolen a couple of million dollars in cash and who knew what else in people’s safe deposit boxes, and he’d ruined an entire bank building in the process. The fact that he didn’t get to keep any of the money was something, but even so, just letting him walk free didn’t seem quite right. Except Trent couldn’t see how putting him in jail was going to help anybody else. He’d decided to stop robbing banks on his own. Locking him up now would just be an act of vengeance, and would ultimately cost people more than just letting him go.

He realized that Billy was looking at him with an amused expression on his face.

“What?” Trent asked.

“Life is complicated,” said Billy. “Even out here.” Then he stood up and walked out into the sunlight.