The Getaway Special

20

His words sent a shiver of anticipation down her spine. Alpha Centauri. The closest star to the Sun, and the most similar star within telescope range. The two had almost certainly coalesced from the same gas cloud billions of years ago, and had stayed gravitationally bound ever since. From the time she was old enough to read, Judy had been fascinated by the idea of a companion star, and she had dreamed of someday going there to see if the system held a planet like Earth, too.

There could be more than one. Alpha Centauri was a double star, the Sunlike primary circled by a smaller orange companion in an elliptical orbit that never came closer than Saturn came to the Sun. They were far enough apart for planets to have settled into stable orbits around both stars, though astronomers still debated whether planets could have formed there in the first place.

Judy had always imagined that she would be an old woman before she got the chance to answer that question firsthand, if she ever did, but here she was just minutes away from fulfilling that dream.

Or dying in the attempt. None of the people who had left silvery craters in the ground over the last few days had returned to report on their travels. There could be as many reasons for that as there were explorers, but it could be possible that the hyperdrive was dangerous over long distances. Judy could be closer to answering a religious question than an astronomical one.

She swallowed. Took a deep breath. Nodded. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

Allen grinned. “That’s right. Here goes.”

He pushed the “Enter” key. There was no radio pulse like there’d been on the shuttle. There was no point in it; the signal would take years to catch up to them through normal space. Allen had wired an ammeter in series with the batteries so he could tell how much current the drive was drawing, but Judy kept her eyes on the video monitors. Nothing happened for a few seconds; the computer was waiting for the right moment. Then she felt the by-now-familiar instant of disorientation, no worse than any of the previous jumps, and the light from outside went out like a switch had been thrown.

Allen reached up and switched on the overhead lights: two industrial-strength flashlights shining into frosted plastic bags. “We’re there,” he said.

The stars hadn’t even flickered. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Nothing changed.”

“We only jumped four light-years. It’ll take a lot more than that to shift the stellar background in any random patch of sky.” He called up the comparator program again and let it crunch on the signal from the cameras.

Only four light-years. Merely a hundred million times the distance from Earth to the Moon, nine billion times the width of the United States; it was impossible to grasp the magnitude of that distance, yet the stars had hardly changed.

Except the Sun. It was so far away now that Judy couldn’t even pick it out among all the others. There was a bright one in Gemini that she didn’t remember being there before, but that couldn’t be Sol; not if the hyperdrive had taken them the direction they had intended. Sol should be in Cassiopeia from here.

But there was definitely a new star in Gemini, just inside the left knee. “Is that Alpha Centauri?” she asked, pointing.

Allen slid his finger across the touchpad until the arrow pointed at the star, then read the identification at the bottom of the screen. “Nope, that’s Procyon. But how about that third head?”

Sure enough, there was another star where there shouldn’t have been one. It was even brighter than Procyon, and just to the left of the two head stars, Castor and Pollux. If it had been visible there from Earth, the constellation would have been called “Trimini.”

Allen aimed the pointer at it and waited for the computer to figure out what it was. It took a second, but when the answer flashed on the screen, he said, “Bingo. Alpha Centauri B. The little brother. If we’re close enough to see that, we’re very close to where we want to be.”

A few seconds later the computer confirmed his assessment. It beeped for attention and drew a shimmering circle around another bright star in an otherwise blank patch of sky nearby. “Alpha Centauri A,” Allen said. “Just a second while I transfer the data… okay, we’ve got a lock. Triangulating on A, B, and Procyon, gives us… ten light-hours. About twice the distance from Pluto to the Sun. Not bad for a first shot, eh?”

“Pretty good,” Judy admitted. Her neck muscles loosened up a bit at the realization that they knew where they were.

He tapped at the keyboard for a few seconds. “Okay, I’ve set it to jump to three AU out. We should be able to spot planets pretty easily from there.”

“How was the current drain on that last jump?” she asked. She didn’t want to burn out the hyperdrive by jumping too often like they had done on the shuttle.

“Fine. Distance really doesn’t seem to matter. And those heat sinks I put on the voltage regulator should let us jump all we want now.”

“Okay, then, let’s go for it.” She gripped the sides of her beanbag chair, even though she knew there wouldn’t be any disturbance. She just needed something to hold on to.

Allen hit the “Enter” key, and in the next instant the walls of the tank glowed again with familiar yellow light. Judy looked at the monitor and saw the bright solar disk slide past as the tank’s slow rotation swept the camera across the star. They were there.

She bent forward across the getaway special canister and gave Allen a clumsy kiss. He looked a bit startled at first, then he warmed to the idea.

“Thank you,” she said.

He blushed. “I don’t think anyone’s ever thanked me for kissing them before.”

She stuck out her tongue at him. “I’m thanking you for bringing me here. It’s one of my biggest dreams come true. But thanks for the kiss, too.”

“Any time.”

She stretched out for a more serious one, but the motion opened the way for her intestines to vent the gas that had been building up ever since she had lowered the air pressure in the tank. The fart was audible even inside her spacesuit, and the smell that came boiling out of the neck ring killed the mood faster than garlic breath.

“Gack! Sorry.” She felt herself overheat with embarrassment.

Allen’s response was not what she expected. He sighed in obvious relief and let loose his own back pressure, fanning the air in front of his face with his hands. “Thank god,” he said. “I was about to explode.”

Judy giggled. “Ah, the romance of space exploration.” She looked at her watch. They had been sealed inside the tank for eleven minutes. She wouldn’t waste air just to flush out the smell, but it was probably time to refresh the oxygen supply anyway. They didn’t have any lithium hydroxide scrubbers to remove the carbon dioxide that built up as they breathed, so they would start hyperventilating from CO₂ poisoning if they let it build up too much. And despite her chagrin at spoiling the mood, she felt so giddy from their accomplishment that she would never know when they ran out of oxygen.

She opened the valve and let the pressure drop to 18,000 feet, then she shut it off and cracked the valve on the oxygen tank. She only pressurized it back to 14,000 feet; that was still enough to prevent the bends, and with the infusion of pure oxygen it was a richer mix than before. It smelled better, too.

The computer beeped again, and she looked over at the screen, where the star comparator program had identified four sources it couldn’t account for.

“They almost certainly have to be planets,” Allen said. “Let’s make a short hop across the system and get some distance figures.”

“Okay.”

He keyed in the coordinates, hit “Enter,” and the angle of the light changed. They waited another minute or so for the computer to find the planets’ new locations, then Allen fed the data from the comparator into the navigation program and let it calculate their actual positions in space. Judy pulled herself around so she could see the screen more clearly, but the figures were displayed in table form, and it took her a few seconds to make sense of them.

“You should program that to show us a diagram of the solar system.”

Allen pursed his lips and nodded. “That’ll be a feature for version 2.0. But it’s not too hard to puzzle out. This is the distance from us, and this is the distance from the primary. It’s in kilometers, so we want something on the order of a hundred and fifty million.”

There was one planet at 70 million, another at 100, and another at 180. Judy’s heart fell. The inner two would be too hot, and the next one would be considerably colder than Earth, unless it had a thick enough atmosphere to hold in more heat than Earth did. The outer one was all the way out to 450; the equivalent of Sol’s asteroid belt.

She pointed at the third planet. “That’s the only candidate, isn’t it?”

“Looks like. Shall we take a closer look?”

“Of course we should! I didn’t come this far just to turn back because it doesn’t look promising.”

Allen didn’t have to type in the coordinates this time. He cut and pasted them from the navigation program, but then he zeroed out the last two digits of the third coordinate.

“What was that for?” Judy asked.

“I shortened the distance, just in case the software got a really accurate fix. We don’t want to jump into the middle of the planet; we want to be ten or twenty thousand kilometers away.”

“Oh. Right.” She shivered. Allen had said the hyperdrive wouldn’t let them jump into a space that was already occupied, but she didn’t want to test it.

He hit the “Enter” key, and the light from outside grew brighter. They watched the monitor as the Getaway’s rotation made stars sweep by, waiting for their first glimpse of the planet.

When it came, it nearly took Judy’s breath away. She had been afraid they would find another cold, lifeless Mars or a Saturnian giant, but the curved horizon that slid into view held the familiar white swirls of storm systems marching across brown continents and blue ocean.

“It’s there!” Judy whispered. “My god, it’s real!”

They were only a few thousand kilometers above the surface: close enough to see a chain of mountains along the edge of a major continent directly beneath them. The peaks were covered in snow, but the lower slopes looked lush with greenery.

“There’s chlorophyll here,” she said. “Plant life!”

The atmosphere looked thicker than Earth’s. It might have been just an optical illusion, but the cloud layers looked more complex, and the horizon looked fuzzier than Earth’s. And by the looks of the vegetation, something was holding in heat. The planet’s extra distance from its sun didn’t seem to matter at all.

The camera panned across the entire continent as their spaceship continued its slow rotation. They could see more mountain ranges, river valleys, plains, and even a desert, which only accentuated how alive the rest of the continent was.

Allen switched on the radio. “I wonder if there’s anybody home?”

They had brought a shortwave set on the off chance that they might be able to detect alien radio transmissions with it. It had only a fraction of the bandwidth that they needed to search the whole electromagnetic spectrum, but it was the best they could do on short notice, and it would also come in handy if they needed to talk to anyone once they got back to Earth orbit. Allen had used the cable wrapped around the outside of the tank for an antenna, so it was extremely sensitive, but the speaker was quiet as the radio automatically scanned up and down the bands for a signal. There was an occasional crackle, probably from lightning in the clouds below, but that was it.

“Could there be an entire planet just waiting for us?” Judy asked. “That’s almost too much to ask.”

His eyes twinkled. “Almost?”

“Well, a person can dream, can’t they?”

He took the microphone off its clip and spoke into it. “Hello, is there anybody out there? Hello? Testing, testing, testing. This is Allen Meisner and Judy Gallagher broadcasting live from the Getaway Special. Is anyone listening?”

He let up the button and listened to the silence for a few seconds, then keyed the microphone again. “Hello! We’re your neighbors from next door. We come in peace. Well, actually, we came in a septic tank, but that’s another story.”

He listened again, but there was still no response. Judy reached for the microphone, and he handed it over to her. “Hello,” she said. “This is Judy Gallagher, and I’ve just got to say one thing to all you people back on Earth who may be listening when this message arrives there in four years: Nya, nya, we got here first!”

She giggled and reached out to hand the microphone back to Allen, but she gasped in shock and let go when the radio crackled to life.