The Getaway Special

21

The microphone sprang back on its coiled cord and clipped the getaway special canister, then bounced off and whacked Allen in the head before he could catch it.

He grabbed the cord before it could do any more damage and reeled it in. “Who’s there?” he asked.

The voice was male, and gravelly with time or smoke or garrulousness. “Name’s Nicholas Onnescu. I’ve been here two days already. What kept you?”

Judy heard a ringing in her ears and realized she was clenching her teeth hard enough to hurt. It was a ridiculous reaction, but she couldn’t help it. There was somebody else on her planet!

Allen had lost some of his giddiness, too. “We, uh, had a hard time tracking down all the equipment we needed,” he said. “Your name sounds familiar. Are you the guy from Lancaster?”

“Yep. ‘From’ is the operative term. Man, I am so out of there, you can’t believe. I may go back for the rest of my stuff, but not anytime soon. I’m too busy fishin’ and buildin’ a cabin.” He laughed. “So my departure made it on the news, eh? I wasn’t sure if anybody would report it, considering the lies they were spreadin’ around.”

Allen waited a second to see if he was done, then said, “They showed the crater you left behind. Boy, you had a lot of junk in that yard!”

“Collectibles,” Nicholas said. “Collectibles.” Then he laughed again and said, “No, you’re right. It was junk. Jeez, that was a lifetime ago. What an artificial bunch of crap we humans drag around with us, eh?”

Allen looked at the interior of the septic tank, festooned with equipment. His eyes met Judy’s, and he gave a little shrug. “You don’t know the half of it,” he said. “Well, hey, I’m glad you made it here okay. You have any trouble with the hyperdrive?”

“Nope. Worked like a charm. Bit my tongue landing, but that was the worst of it.”

“How’d you get here so fast? I mean, what did you do for a spaceship?”

“Hah! I had one already built. I made it a couple of years ago when I found the plans for a Dean drive in an old Astounding magazine, but the drive turned out to be a piece of junk. Barely lifted itself, much less a spaceship. Your little gadget, though—that’s a honey. Did you come up with that all by yourself?”

Allen grinned with pride. “Well, Einstein and Hawking had a little to do with the research, but the design is all mine, yeah.”

“Good for you. And thanks for sharing. A lot of guys would have took out ads in the back of Popular Science and sold mimeographed schematics for a hundred bucks a pop.”

Judy found her voice. “Ask him how many other people are here.”

Allen nodded. “Did you come by yourself?”

“Yep.”

“Did anyone else come afterward?”

“Two others that I know of. I may have missed some; this scanner doesn’t have the best range in the world. Well, maybe it does, come to think of it, but you know what I mean.”

Judy knew all too well. That there were any other scanners in the world was almost too much to bear. Who was this Onnescu guy, anyway? And who were the others?

She looked to the monitors. The planet was sweeping past again, a little closer than before. They were falling toward it. Some of that was probably their leftover vector from Earth s orbital motion, but gravity was definitely drawing them down as well.

“Let’s go,” she said.

“What?” asked Allen.

“Let’s go. Everybody and their grandma is going to come to Alpha Centauri first. Inside a week, this place will look like Tokyo.”

“Oh, come now. It’ll take years before… ah, right.”

She looked away from the monitor. It was too blurry for her to see much at the moment anyway.

Allen keyed the microphone again. “Uh, well, hey, it’s been nice talking to you, but we’re going to head on out a few more light-years and see what we can find. Give our regards to whoever else passes through.”

Nicholas didn’t sound very disappointed to see them go. “Will do. Good hunting.”

“Thanks. Um, Allen Meisner, signing off.” He stuck the microphone back in its clip. “Well. Where to next?”

“Anywhere but here.”

He gave her a look, the look, the one she would be seeing off and on for the rest of their lives if they stayed together. The one that asked, “Are you okay?” and answered that question at the same time.

“Well,” he said, “there’s Tau Ceti not far away, but that’s probably going to be overrun with science fiction fans. Same with Sirius and Arcturus and all the other sunlike stars that people have been writing about for years.”

“Then let’s go farther. You said distance isn’t a factor, right? Let’s go for the other side of the galaxy and see what’s there.”

Allen captured a loose screw that was drifting in the air between them and tucked it into a thigh pocket on his spacesuit. “That might be a bit extr—ah, risky. Our star map is just a commercial sky atlas compiled from an astronomical database of nearby stars; it isn’t going to be much help beyond a couple hundred light-years. That’s a tiny little bubble of space compared to the size of the whole galaxy. If we get lost out there we could have a hell of a time finding our way home again.”

He was right, damn him. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Okay, then, how about something still on the map, but a little less likely to have settlers already?”

He bit his lower lip and his eyes got a faraway look. “Well, there’s a whole slew of other G-type stars in Cetus. Some of them are pretty close together. There’s a cluster of them about fifty light-years out that I’ve always wondered about.”

She tried out the look on him. “You’ve always wondered about it? Like it’s kept you awake at nights?”

He shrugged; hard to do in a spacesuit, but at least possible under zero-gee. “Maybe a night,” he said. “The point is, they’re close enough together to support a nice little interstellar empire even with slower-than-lightspeed travel. If we’re looking for something interesting, that’s a good prospect, and it’s not all that well known.”

“Oh.” An interstellar empire? Wouldn’t the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project have found evidence of it if there was one? Fifty light-years was practically in Earth’s back yard from their point of view.

Which meant there probably wasn’t an empire out there. Or anybody else. At the moment, that was just what Judy wanted.

“Sure,” she said. “Let’s give it a shot.”

They got to the first star on Allen’s list in three more jumps: the first to get away from the Alpha Centauran planet’s gravity well, the second to cross fifty light-years of space, and the third to close in on their target. They popped into being about five AU out from the star; a little farther than they’d intended, but still close enough to search for planets.

Judy refreshed their air and lowered the pressure a little more while they gave the stellar comparator a chance to assemble a database from that vantage, then they jumped across to the other side of the star and let the program do its work. It took a while, but when it finally made its report, they understood why. It had catalogued 389 planets within ten AU of the primary.

Judy blew a soft whistle. “Holy cow. They must be thick as flies out there.” She studied the image in the monitor, but she couldn’t tell planets from stars. They were all just bright specks, and this far from the Sun, none of the constellations were familiar. “Can we get a size on any of them?”

Allen looked at the list. “There’s a couple that’re only half a million kilometers away. Not much farther than the Moon from Earth. We should be able to zoom in on one.”

He didn’t bother to state the obvious: if either of the nearby planets had been of any size, they would have seen it already as their spaceship rotated and gave them a 360-degree panorama.

He reached out to the camera controls mounted beneath his monitor and upped the magnification, but that merely narrowed his field of view and made the star field slide by faster, so he took the joystick and tried to direct the camera to follow one of the stars. That was tougher than it looked. Judy tried it with her camera, but she had no better luck than he.

“I don’t suppose you’ve got a program that’ll do this, do you?” she asked hopefully.

“Nope,” he asked. “I could probably cobble something together, but it would be simpler if we just stopped our rotation and let the program we’ve got point out where we need to look.”

“Um, that’s going to take a lot of air.” Each time Judy had vented air into space, the tank’s spin had increased. They weren’t rotating all that fast, but there was quite a bit of mass involved, and it would take an equal amount of Force applied in the other direction to cancel out all that angular momentum. They could do it with the valve tapped into the opposite side of the tank, but Judy had just refreshed their air; venting more now would be a waste.

On the other hand, waiting for their air to grow stale so they had a good excuse to vent it was kind of dumb, too. “Oh, to hell with it,” she said. “We’ve got six hours’ worth; let ’er rip.” She got ready on the oxygen tank while Allen opened the faucet next to his elbow, but she didn’t crack the valve right away.

“Uh, it’s getting a little thin, isn’t it?” he asked as the altimeter needle swung past 20,000 feet and began its second lap of the dial. He closed the faucet and swallowed to make his ears pop.

She kept her valve closed. “We can survive for a few seconds at low pressure. Keep going.”

“Ooo… kay.” He let more air out. She let it go up to 24,000, then nodded to him and turned on the oxygen flow while he closed the vent. She stopped at 16,000 this time; they’d been breathing oxygen-enriched air long enough that they were probably safe from the bends at that altitude by now.

Their spin had slowed considerably. Now they could let the program flag the points of light they were interested in and zoom in on them manually. It was still hard to hold the cameras on them at high magnification, but they could do it long enough to learn what they needed to: even at the highest power, they could detect no sign of a disk on either of the two closest planets. Nor did any of the others show as more than bright specks of light.

“Looks like a bunch of asteroids,” Judy said.

“It does, doesn’t it?” Allen stared at the screen for another thirty seconds or so, then typed in the coordinates for the closest target. “What the heck; we might as well go have a look. I’ve never seen an asteroid up close.”

“Up close” was the operative term. The moment he pushed the “Enter” button, the external monitors filled with a rugged, grayish-green surface that looked like it was only a couple feet away.

“Yeow!” Judy started backward in surprise and banged her head on the side of the septic tank, but she didn’t give herself even a moment to register pain; she just immediately pushed herself back down and checked the monitor again to see if they were moving toward it or away. She couldn’t tell at first. The image was sliding past too quickly. She grabbed the joystick to try following a landmark for a second, but the moment she moved it and saw how touchy the camera was, she realized she had left the magnification all the way up. When she zoomed out again, the surface didn’t look nearly as close.

Nor did it look like an asteroid.

It looked more like a thicket of vines entangling a pile of rocks, boards, and rusty scrap metal. It looked, in fact, like Nicholas Onnescu’s back yard. If she hadn’t seen the tiny size of the crater in his yard, she would have thought maybe he had come here first on his way to Alpha Centauri, but as her eyes picked out more details she realized that the scale was all wrong. This went on for miles. It wasn’t even remotely spherical, either. It was more of an oblong, like a stretched-out football, or maybe a disk seen mostly edge-on. The more Judy looked at it, the more she thought it resembled a cityscape. A cityscape reflected in a lake, with waves distorting the image at all angles, but there was definitely order to it.

Allen was staring at it like a deer staring at a pair of oncoming headlights. “Holy shit,” he whispered. “There is an interstellar empire.”