The Getaway Special

16

They were still at it when Trent and Donna returned home from work. Trent showed up first, leaving his pickup parked on the street and walking warily to the front door rather than parking in the garage like he had last night. Judy met him at the door, and he looked past her into the living room before he spoke.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“The coast is clear.”

He nodded slowly. “Good. Be right in.” He went back out to his pickup and drove it into the garage. Judy could see him talking to someone on a cell phone as he went past the window. Had he arranged for backup if there was trouble waiting for him at home? It certainly looked like it.

He came in from the garage a couple minutes later, his right hand in his coat pocket. Judy thought the bulge there was bigger than his hand alone would make.

“How, um, how was your day?” she asked.

“Okay,” he said. “How was yours?”

“Pretty good. We’ve been making plans. We have a fair idea of what we need to do, and it looks like we can get the money to do it with.”

Trent looked over at Allen, still seated in front of the computer. “Have you checked the news yet?”

“Off and on,” he said. “Looks like the stock market is down. The government is still trying to blow a smoke screen, but the real news is spreading just as fast as the lies.”

Trent nodded. “Radio was full of it all day. They’re calling you crazy. Say you’re armed and dangerous.”

“Crazy is probably accurate,” Allen admitted. “Maybe even dangerous, depending on the circumstances, but I’m armed only in the biological sense.”

Trent thought it over, then pulled his hand free of his coat pocket. There was still a sizable lump left behind. He opened the closet by the door and hung his coat inside, rummaging around a bit longer than was necessary. Judy bet the gun wasn’t in the same coat anymore.

His hands were empty when he closed the door and stepped into the living room. “It was pretty hard to concentrate on roofing today, knowin’ you two were here.”

“I imagine so,” Judy said. “We’re sorry to be causing so much trouble.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Trent said quickly. “I don’t mind seein’ things get shook up a little around here. It’s kind of fun knowin’ something nobody else in town knows.”

Judy heard tires crunching ice in the driveway, and looked up to see Donna s car rolling past the window. A minute later she emerged from the garage, her cheeks glowing rosy from the cold and her arms full of groceries.

“I picked up some stuff on the way home,” she said. “I hope you like pork chops.”

Judy went into the kitchen and helped her unload the bags, then set to work peeling potatoes and boiling them while Donna and Trent cleaned up and changed into more comfortable clothes. Trent popped open Budweisers for everyone, handing the cold aluminum cans around without even asking if they wanted any, but Judy was glad to have it. The alcohol took the edge off her nerves, and the smell of food cooking made everything seem homey and safe, at least for the moment.

“So,” Trent said, spinning a kitchen chair around and straddling it backward, “what’s your plan?”

Judy looked at Allen. Allen looked at her, then at Trent . “We’ve, ah, found a suitable pressure vessel,” he said. “We’ve come up with a pretty extensive list of equipment we’ll need to turn it into a starship, but it’s mostly stuff we can buy locally. Except for the ultralight airplanes. We’ll have to have those delivered.”

“Ultralight airplanes?” Donna asked over the crackle of frying meat.

“Yeah. If we actually find a habitable planet, we figure we’ll want some kind of transportation when we get there. It would be a shame to go all that way and then be stuck exploring what we can reach on foot.”

“Good point,” Trent said. He cocked his head to the side, thinking, then shrugged and took a pull off his beer. “Lots of ways around that,” he said, “but a plane ought to do. Have you flown before?”

Judy laughed, “Yes. I’m a shuttle pilot, remember?”

“Oh, right.”

Allen cleared his throat. “We were wondering if you’d be amenable to going back out where you found us and seeing if our emergency descent module is still there. If nobody’s found it yet, we could use a lot of the hardware off of it.”

Trent took another drink of his beer. “We could do that. Gets dark awful early this time of year, though. We’d have to do it with headlights, unless the Moon’s out.”

Judy tried to remember what phase the Moon was in. It had looked full the last time she’d seen it, but that was because she’d been practically on top of it. She closed her eyes and visualized the geometry in her head: the Earth had been out the forward windows, a bright crescent cradling a dark ellipse, and the sun had been on the west side from her point of view, so that meant the Moon was about halfway between first quarter and full.

“It should be up until about three,” she said.

Trent nodded. “All right, then. I guess we’ll do a little midnight four-wheeling tonight.” He grinned at the prospect. This was clearly not a hardship as far as he was concerned. “How big is this thing?” he asked. “Will it fit in the back of the truck?”

She took the measure of it in her mind. “No problem.”

“How about weight? Can two guys lift it?”

Weren’t she and Donna invited? Donna had been out with him before, but Judy didn’t know what the protocol was in four-wheeling. Or maybe he was thinking to protect the women from danger if the Feds had staked out the EDM.

It didn’t really matter to her. Bouncing over sagebrush wasn’t her idea of a good time anyway, and she was long past the stage where she would let feminism make her do something she didn’t want to do just to prove a point. Let Trent and Allen hoist the thing into the back of the truck. “You could probably skid it up a couple of planks,” she said.

“Good. What about this whatchacallit… pressure vessel of yours? Will it fit in the garage?”

“Probably,” Allen said. “But I feel bad taking over your place like this.”

“Don’t worry about it. You won’t be here that long. And if you’ll show me how to build a starship of my own, I’ll consider it a fair trade.”

There was a loud clatter from the kitchen as Donna dropped the spatula she was using to flip pork chops.

“You okay in there?” Trent asked.

“Fine,” she said. “Why don’t you make yourself useful and set the table?”

“Yes ma’am.” He set his beer on the table and got four place mats from the top of the refrigerator, set out plates and silverware and napkins, then sat back down while Judy helped Donna mash the potatoes and make gravy. By the time they put the food on the table, Judy’s stomach was growling like a cornered wolf.

Trent finished his beer and crushed the can with a single squeeze of his right hand, then tossed it in the garbage can under the sink. Allen tried to copy him, but it took two hands. Trent didn’t even let on that he’d noticed; he just set out fresh beers all around, and when everyone had taken a seat he held up his can and said, “Here’s to going where no man—or woman—has gone before.”

“Hear hear!” Allen said, and everyone drank. Judy caught Donna’s eye and raised an eyebrow in question, but Donna just smiled and offered her the first pick of the pork chops.

Trent and Allen took off right after dinner, leaving Judy and Donna to clean up. Domesticity was new to Judy, but she found a certain pleasure in the simple repetition of washing dishes. At the moment, that was all she wanted to do. She and Donna talked about inconsequential things: the weather, Donna’s job in the mall, family. They compared genealogies and discovered that they were distant relatives, either third cousins or cousins thrice removed, neither knew which. Judy said she wasn’t surprised, given that everyone on Earth was supposedly only six degrees of separation from everyone else, and then they played that game for a while, trying to see who was more closely connected to various celebrities. Judy won practically every round—being an astronaut put her in some far-ranging circles—but Donna surprised her with one connection.

“You’re only two people away from the Dalai Lama?”

“Yep,” Donna said. “My brother went mounting climbing in Tibet with someone who knew him.” She laughed, then said, “But here’s the question nobody can answer me: when he dies and gets reincarnated somewhere else, are we still only two degrees apart or do we have to start all over again?”

Judy thought it over for a moment while she dried the last of the silverware. “Well, you can just rock me to sleep tonight,” she said at last.

Donna smiled. “It’s a stumper, isn’t it?”

When they finished in the kitchen, they went into the living room to watch the news. Judy and Allen were the top story on every channel, but the official word was still that the whole hyperdrive thing was a hoax. Judy felt her blood starting to boil as one anchor, a fiftyish man with the network standard touch of gray at the temples and the “trust me” dark blue suit, said in his officious voice, “NASA investigators have uncovered evidence of a conspiracy between Gallagher and Meisner that was hatched nearly two years ago, just months before Meisner applied for a crew position on board the space shuttle. It is still unclear what role the computer virus plays in their conspiracy, but top government officials…”

He stopped speaking, but his eyes continued to scan left and right, obviously reading ahead on his teleprompter. He narrowed his eyes, then said, “Who wrote this crap, anyway? We all know that’s not true. The truth is, the Space Shuttle Discovery disappeared from radar yesterday, reappeared eleven minutes later in a completely different orbit, got hit by a missile defense laser, then went to the Moon. We’ve got confirmation of that from half a dozen different sources, including NASA’s own flight telemetry. And the original email message wasn’t a virus at all. I’ve checked it out myself and it appears to be exactly what it says it is: detailed plans for the engine that allowed—”

A loud beep drowned out his voice and the picture swirled into static, to be replaced a moment later by a text message in white on a blue background: Network Difficulties: Please Stand By.

“Network difficulties, my ass,” Judy said. “The only difficulty they’ve got right now is the government trying to stomp all over the first amendment.” She looked at the message on the screen, imagining the chaos in the TV studio at the moment. Was the anchor being sacked? Arrested? Were there soldiers rushing through the station with automatic rifles, shooting up the broadcast equipment?

Suddenly she didn’t feel quite so smug about the anchor’s slick persona. If he’d had any idea how much trouble he was getting himself into, he had just shown the courage of a war correspondent.

She looked over at Donna, who was sitting beside her on the couch with the remote control in her hand and a surprised expression on her face. After a moment Donna switched the channel, but the other news stations were still regurgitating the official story. “This is starting to get scary,” she said after the fifth or sixth reassurance that nothing unusual had happened in space.

That was the understatement of the year. Judy felt goosebumps on her goosebumps, and she wasn’t even cold. “Allen and I should go,” she said. “We’re putting you and Trent in danger.”

Donna switched the channel back to the “Network Difficulties” screen. “No,” she said. “I won’t send anyone out in the cold to fend for themselves when I can help them. And we’re not in nearly as much danger as you are.”

Judy wasn’t sure if she should take heart at that comment or not. Donna was right, but only because Judy and Allen were in more trouble than practically anybody.

“Well, I can’t argue with you there,” she said. “But all the same, I don’t want to drag you into something just because you were nice enough to pick up a couple of hitchhikers.”

“You didn’t. Trent and I talked about it last night, and we want to help.”

Judy bit her lower lip, trying to decide whether to say anything more or not, but Donna saw her indecision and said, “What?”

“I was just thinking that it sounds like Trent wants to build a spaceship of his own. How do you feel about that?”

Donna laughed. “I’ve been living in this one-horse town all my life. I used to dream about going off to college or running away to Los Angeles and trying to get into the movies, but I never did. Once in a while I’ll drive down to Salt Lake to go shopping, but that’s about as exciting as it gets around here. If Trent wants to take me to Mars, I’m all for it.”

“It’s dangerous, you know. More dangerous than you can imagine.”

“I know.” Donna took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “We’ll read up on it. Well, I will. Trent’s not much of a reader. But I’ll make sure we’re ready before we go anywhere.” She hesitated a moment, then added, “And I’d listen to any advice you want to give me.”

Judy leaned back in the couch. What advice did she have for someone who had never been into space before?

“Take Dramamine.”