Anywhere but Here

39

The house was still there, just as they had left it. The mailbox was full of ads and catalogs, the answering machine was blinking its attention light, and when Donna logged on to check their email, they had over a hundred messages, not counting spam. Life had clearly gone on without them.

They turned on the TV long enough to confirm the news that the entire system of laser “defense” satellites had simultaneously de-orbited and burned up in the atmosphere. Homeland Security was already screeching that it was the prelude to an alien invasion and was promising a new, more vigorous program of “incursion deterrence” just as soon as they could figure out what had happened to the old one. Never mind that the only aliens who even seemed interested in Earth were xenobiologists, and those mostly out of morbid curiosity. HomeSec had never seen a news story that couldn’t be turned into a reason to boost public paranoia, and this was a golden opportunity for that.

Trent dismantled the hyperdrive and stowed the pieces in their hiding places in case the cops paid a visit, and he and Donna cleaned out the camper. They put their slo-mo-shell armor on the mantel, and Donna printed the photo of Trent wearing his to set behind them. Trent wanted to drill a couple holes in his helmet and run an arrow through it, but Donna said that would look too tacky, so he just leaned a couple of arrows up against it. They put the meteorite on the mantel, too, and Trent wished they had a photo of Andre’s house with the crater behind it, but like the view of Orion from up close, they would just have to remember that.

They finished unpacking and cleaning up by noon. It felt a lot later in the day to them, but the Sun was still high in the sky, and it didn’t seem right to go to bed now. Donna had heard that the best way to beat jet-lag was to force yourself to stay up until bedtime, and they were too wound up to sleep anyway, so they just settled into their regular routines, Donna puttering around the house and Trent puttering around the garage. He had plenty of work to do on the pickup, pounding out dents and touching up scratches. He would eventually have to repaint it if he wanted it to look right, but he needed a new wheel motor first, and even that would have to wait until he got a job.

He checked the classified ads in the paper to see if any construction jobs had miraculously come up while he was gone, but there weren’t any. The front page from three days ago had an article about the new civic center, which the city council had voted down by the same one-vote margin that they’d had when they failed to reject the ban on hyper-drives. Bunch of short-sighted wimps with their heads in the sand, Trent thought. Give people in this town something to do on a Saturday night, and make it friendlier to come and go, and it might not look like a ghost town. Hell, start standing up for people’s rights and they’d be moving in by the busload.

He tossed the paper in the trash and went back to polishing the truck, but he kept thinking about the newspaper article, and how close the vote had been. One vote, and he would have a job. One vote, and he wouldn’t have to hide his hyperdrive in a boombox and an old motor case. It wouldn’t stop the federal government from harassing people on their way home, but it would at least be a step in the right direction. It would call attention to the cause, and show that not everybody in America was happy with the way the country was being run. Hell, it might spark a movement that would turn things around and make the United States a place to be proud of again.

He snorted. Yeah, right. Like that was going to happen. The only people left in the country were people who didn’t know or didn’t care that they didn’t have any civil rights anymore. The government had been whittling away at the Constitution since Trent was born, and they’d done it so slowly and deliberately that most people hadn’t even noticed. Who would vote for a person who wanted to upset the whole applecart in one big shove, especially now when the world was in such turmoil anyway?

He made himself grasp the thought he’d been nibbling around the edges of: Who would vote for him, Trent Stinson?

Donna would. And he guessed it wasn’t bad form to vote for yourself, so that was two. At least he wouldn’t get skunked.

But if he was on the council, he couldn’t vote for the civic center. It would be a conflict of interest to vote for that and then make money building it. On the other hand, if he was on the council then he would already have a job, wouldn’t he? And of all the things he could think of to pay off his promise to Andre, this was the one that actually stood a chance of making a difference.

It was ridiculous. Trent wasn’t a politician, and never would be. He didn’t know a thing about running a city. But obviously neither did a one-vote majority of the people on the council right now.

And it was just about the right time to start campaigning. It was spring, and elections were in November.

He laughed out loud at the absurdity of it and focused on polishing up the truck, but the idea kept coming back, and finally he tossed his rag onto the workbench and started rooting around in his lumber scrap for some lath and a piece of foam-core. If he’d learned anything from this trip, it was that there was no better way to scare yourself away from something than to take a step toward it.

He was just finishing up when Donna came out to see what he was doing. To her credit, she didn’t laugh. She just looked at the sign, and then at Trent, and finally said, “Let’s go stick it in the yard.”