The Getaway Special

26

Both hatches had already popped open against their spring-loaded gate latches. They opened inward; as soon as the air pressure outside exceeded the pressure inside, they had loosened enough to let it equalize.

“I’m going to crack the seal on my helmet,” Judy said.

Allen put his hands out to stop her. “Are you sure you want to do that?”

“We’ve already been through this,” she said, pushing his hands gently aside. “It’s either this or go home with our tails between our legs.” She twisted her helmet sideways and pulled upward on it, but it wouldn’t release. “Oh,” she said. “Of course. The pressure is higher than inside my suit.” Even air halfway up Mount Everest would have more pressure than inside her suit, but she glanced at the altimeter and saw that the needle was reading a couple thousand feet below the zero mark. There was more air here than at sea level on Earth. No wonder she couldn’t lift off her helmet; there was at least a hundred pounds of force pushing it closed.

She opened the seal on her right wrist and pried off her glove. That let enough air in to allow her to equalize the pressure, but she left her helmet on and took a couple deep breaths instead. Let the little bit of air she’d already allowed into her suit mix with the rest, and see what a small dose would do to her first.

She had to swallow a couple of times to equalize the pressure in her ears, but she couldn’t detect anything wrong with it at all. She took another deep breath and held it in her lungs for a second, waiting for the moment when it would start burning like fire, but it never came.

She lifted her helmet, then set it down again and took another breath. This time she could smell living things, but none of the scents were familiar. Just green.

She felt a sneeze coming on. Was there some kind of allergen that would turn her into a sniffling blob of swelling mucus membranes until her throat closed up and suffocated her? She waited for that to happen, but the urge to sneeze went away.

Allen’s voice came through the intercom. “Are you all right?”

“Fine so far.”

“No dizziness?”

“Nope.” She lifted her helmet and took a breath straight from the tank. Now she could smell something like rosemary, probably from the plants they had crushed. It smelled wonderful, but then rotting garbage would probably have smelled wonderful after all the flatulence they had blown into the air after they had lowered the pressure.

She left the helmet off and took another breath. No allergens, no poisons, no problem at all. The air was fine.

She wished she could say the same for the gravity. Her legs were killing her. Hours of staying bent, and now full gravity—and maybe a little more, by the feel of it—were too much to bear. She couldn’t even stand up inside the tank.

“I’m opening the hatch,” she said.

Allen waved his hands. “Not yet!”

“Would you lighten up? I’m not even wheezing.” She reached overhead and tugged on the hatch, swung it down, and stuck her head outside.

It was surprising how different the reality was from the TV picture inside. The scrubby bushes she had thought looked like sagebrush were actually more like tiny pine trees, and the trees looked like huge ferns that branched into smaller and smaller shoots, like fractal drawings. A breeze rustled some of the fronds and they made a dry rattling sound like gravel skittering down a talus slope. There didn’t seem to be any animals around, but that wasn’t surprising. She would probably be cowering under a bush herself if a gigantic yellow box dropped out of the sky next to her.

“Hello!” she called out, but the trees and the distance swallowed up her voice without an echo.

The smell of rosemary wafted by on the breeze. It reminded her of her mother’s home cooking. She could definitely learn to like this place if the rest of it was as delightful as this. Even the temperature was right: somewhere in the mid to high seventies by the feel of the air on her face.

The hatch next to hers popped open and Allen stuck his head up through the hole. He wasn’t wearing his helmet.

“Hey!” she said. “You’re supposed to wait until we’re sure it’s safe.”

“I’m not going to let you take all the risk.”

“Right, so now if it turns out to be deadly we both croak. That’s smart.”

He didn’t reply. He ducked down again, and she heard him panting and cursing for a few seconds, then he popped back into the hatchway without the upper torso of his suit. He stuck his arms out and pulled himself up to sit on top of the tank, leaving the lower half behind as well.

Judy couldn’t really fault him for it. She was so tired of the damned spacesuit she could cut it off with a knife and not feel bad about it. She dropped down onto her beanbag chair again and twisted the waist ring open, struggled out of the top, and kicked off the legs. She felt so free she could probably have floated out of the hatch, but before she stood up again she unzipped her sleeping bag and found the pistol and the bullets that Trent had given her, popped open the cylinder, and slid six of the thumb-sized bullets into the holes. .45 Colt, according to the ammunition box, but it didn’t look a bit like the pistol Gerry had been waving around on the shuttle. This one felt more Western, with a fat, stubby barrel and a cylinder that clicked ominously as it rotated and a curved wooden handle that just begged to be twirled around a couple of times before it landed in your hand. Judy didn’t really figure she would need it, but Trent would never forgive her if she got eaten on her first foray out of the ship.

“Whoa!” Allen said when she stuck her arms out to pull herself up. “What’s that for?”

“Artificial self-confidence.”

“Oh. Okay, that makes sense. Cover me.” He slid off the side of the tank to land on his feet in the fern-grass.

“I said self confidence, not sidekick confidence. You’re supposed to be backing me up.” She climbed out and slid down beside him, but she kept the gun. “Stay here while I go have a look around.”

He folded his arms across his chest. “Boy, put a pistol in your hand and suddenly you’re Annie Oakley.”

She waggled the barrel back and forth, careful not to point it toward him. “Thanks for not saying ‘Calamity Jane.’ ” She had never been a gun enthusiast, but right now the weight of the pistol in her hand was a comfort. It wasn’t just the self-defense factor, either. After the last week of hiding out from the government and looking over her shoulder every time she turned around, it felt kind of nice to step out into the unknown with a little bit of a swagger.

She tried not to let it show. She took a couple dozen careful steps, paying attention to the gravelly texture of the ground beneath her suit-liner booties. The fern was too soft to feel through the tough fabric, but she could smell its piquant aroma as she swished through it. She couldn’t help but smile. Her planet smelled nice!

She turned around and looked at the Getaway. The insulation at its base was crushed, just as they had intended. That had loosened some of the straps holding it on; they would have to tighten those before they jumped again.

The parachute was billowing softly in the breeze, its orange and white nylon fabric whispering softly against itself. That was fine now, but if a gust of wind came up, their spaceship could wind up dragged halfway across the continent. Judy made a quick circuit around it, checking for anything that looked dangerous, but she saw no animal life at all, so she said, “Okay, it looks clear. Come help me fold this up.”

Allen took the long way around, checking out the bushes and one of the trees on the way. Judy kept her eye on him while she tugged the end of the parachute out straight. She felt a moment of panic when he turned away and she saw the ventilation tubes on his spacesuit liner; even though she’d seen them a million times before, in this new context they looked for just a second like a five-tentacled alien stuck to his back.

There didn’t seem to be any aliens, not even insects. Judy bent down to look between the fronds of the tiny ferns at her feet, but all she saw was brownish black dirt. She grinned at the thought of having the first picnic in human history without ants, but she was still too excited to eat.

A breeze wrapped the end of the ’chute around her legs. “Hey, come on, let’s fold this up,” she called out, and Allen abandoned his exploration.

“Those bushes have a hell of a thick trunk,” he said as he came closer. “They’re like barrel cactus with branches and leaves.”

“I wonder if they’re edible,” Judy said.

He held up his hands, palms out. “I don’t want you trying it until we know for sure. Breathing the air was bad enough, but I draw the line at that.”

“Yes, Mom. Here.” She handed him a fistful of parachute.

They had practiced repacking it before, but they’d done it inside Trent and Donna’s garage. This was easier in one respect: they had more room to stretch it out, but every time they lifted it off the ground, the breeze would fluff up part of it that they didn’t want to move. They had to resort to using rocks to hold it down, but even so it took them fifteen minutes to get it right, and by the time they shoved the last of it inside the stuff sack and re-laced the ripcord, they were sweating like dockhands inside their spacesuit liners.

“Well,” Judy said as they leaned against the side of the tank, both of them breathing hard from the exertion, “I think we’d be dead by now if the atmosphere was going to kill us. We might as well get out of these things and into real clothes.”

“Amen to that,” Allen said. He climbed up onto the tank and dropped inside, and a moment later a pair of jeans and a T-shirt flopped over the edge of the hatch.

Judy set the pistol on the step molded into the side of the tank and peeled out of her suit liner. It felt deliciously dangerous to strip naked on an alien planet, to feel the soft fern tickle her toes and the breeze blow cool and fresh against her skin. She closed her eyes and leaned back against the sunlit warmth of the yellow plastic, savoring the heat and the light and the freedom of this new world.

She heard thumps and curses from inside the tank, then Allen’s startled, “Oh! Now that’s a sight.”

She opened her eyes and tilted her head even farther back to look up at him. His chest was bare, and she was willing to bet the rest of him was, too. She felt her entire body tingle at the sight, and at the thought of what she wanted to do. To hell with a picnic; she had just endured the craziest week of her life, capped by what had to be the craziest day in recorded history, and she’d survived to tell the tale. She’d landed in paradise for her reward, but there was one more thing that would make it perfect, and the risk only added to the allure.

“Hey, sailor,” she said in the sultriest voice she could manage. “Want to celebrate our landing?”