The Getaway Special

27

“Zork,” she said, and she giggled as she held the sweating can of Budweiser up to her lips.

Seated cross-legged on the unzipped sleeping bag that they were using for a blanket, still naked as a jaybird, Allen frowned. “Zork? What kind of name is Zork for a planet? It sounds like something out of a nineteen-fifties B-movie.”

“Exactly!” Judy said. Her giggles prevented further speech, but a wave at the septic tank, its sides reinforced with steel cable and 4X4 posts, illustrated her point.

Allen shrugged. “All right, so it is appropriate right now, but millions of people are eventually going to have to put up with the name.”

Judy took a long pull at her beer, nearly finishing it. “They’ll be millions of people with a sense of humor,” she said after she’d swallowed. “My kind of people.”

“Not so,” he said. “Your kind of people will be out planting bizarre names on every star and planet in the galaxy just as soon as they can get their own tanks sealed up.”

“You’re probably right,” she admitted. “All right, let’s not ruin it with a silly name. What do you suggest?”

“Hmm. Good question.” He cocked his head sideways in thought, then said, “Maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves anyway. There could be natives with their own name for it already.”

“I haven’t seen any evidence of ’em yet,” she said. “But if there are, they’re probably ugly little green guys with knobby fingers and antennae. And their name will probably be worse than ‘Zork.’ ”

“Only one way to find out,” he said. “What do you say we go for a little walk and see what’s out there?”

Judy stretched luxuriously, knowing what the sight was doing to him. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I could settle in right here and take a nap just as easily.” She drained her beer and threw the can casually over her shoulder, where it hit the big rock behind her with a metallic donk and clattered to the ground.

His eyes grew even wider. “What are you… that’s… we shouldn’t start littering…”

She laughed. “Gotcha!”

He closed his mouth and shook his head. “You did.”

“Just keeping you on your toes. Sure, let’s go for a walk. We’re going to get sunburned if we don’t put some clothes on anyway.”

She retrieved her beer can and shook out the last few drops, then carried it and the remains of their picnic back to the Getaway. Allen’s clothes were still flopped half out of the hatch; he started putting them on while Judy crawled inside and found some of her own. It was all hand-me-downs from Donna, but she was glad to have something that had a little history. All her history was sixty-some light-years away, and probably confiscated by the Feds by now anyway.

She found a pair of faded blue jeans and a long-sleeve shirt with vertical lilac and green stripes, then dug out underwear and socks from another bag and her hiking shoes from where she’d wedged them in next to the spare hyperdrive.

The inside of the septic tank already looked like a teenager’s bedroom. Judy literally had to dig through layers of stuff to reach her shoes, and she could barely move without banging her elbows or knees into things. If she and Allen had to leave in a hurry again, they would be swimming in junk.

With any luck, that wouldn’t be a problem. “Zork” looked like a decent place so far.

She came across the walkie-talkies they had bought when they had still thought they might be able to get ultralight airplanes, and gathered them up, too. She had no intention of splitting up on their first foray, no matter how benign the planet seemed, but radios might come in handy if they got separated by accident.

They didn’t have a day pack. She put another couple cans of beer, some apples, and a wedge of cheese in her sleeping bag’s stuff sack, then went back outside to get dressed, and in a few minutes they were ready to go. Allen climbed up on the tank and pulled the hatches shut, then dropped back to the ground. “Which way should we go?” he asked.

“How about uphill?” she replied. “Maybe we can find an overlook and see what the landscape’s like. And it’ll be easier coming back if we go uphill to start.”

“That makes sense.”

Allen took the sack of food. Judy considered putting the pistol in there, too, but that would make it too hard to reach in an emergency. Trent hadn’t given them a holster with it, so she finally just tucked it in her waistband, making sure the cylinder was rotated partway around so the hammer wasn’t on a live round. It felt awkward there, but its presence was still a comfort.

They held hands while they walked. Judy hadn’t been a big touchy-feely person before, but somehow knowing how far she was from home made her want to remain in contact with the only other human being around. The fact that she was hot for his body probably had something to do with it, too, but whatever the reason, she liked the feeling. He didn’t seem to mind, either, though he had to rein in his long natural stride to keep from outpacing her every couple of steps.

They stopped under one of the big trees to check it out. It was maybe thirty feet tall, with a trunk about a foot thick at the base, tapering up for half its height before it split into three branches that split again into three more each, and so on out to the leafy fronds at the ends. The bark was smooth and rubbery, like a gray-green wetsuit, and the branches behaved like soft plastic rather than wood. Judy jumped up and caught one, and it flexed easily when she pulled it down so she could examine the fronds more closely, but when she let go, it didn’t spring back into place. Instead it slowly rose up, like a snake out of a basket, until its fronds were next to the others again.

“Hydrostatic pressure?” she asked.

Allen pulled another one down and let go. It, too, rose slowly back into place. “Could be. It would be easy enough to find out.” He reached into one of his pants pockets and pulled out a Swiss army knife.

“Wait a minute,” Judy said as he unfolded the corkscrew. “Let’s not go poking holes in things just yet.”

“No?”

“No. Not until we know a little more about the ecology.”

“Poking holes in things is one way to learn about the ecology,” he pointed out.

“And watching it in action is a less invasive way,” she said. “There’s plenty to see without dissecting the natives.”

“It’s a tree,” Allen said, but he put away his knife.

Judy wondered why she’d been so reluctant to let him do it. It was just a tree, after all. By nightfall, if it got cold enough, she might start pulling dry branches off it herself for a fire.

Well, not this particular tree. This one didn’t have any dry branches. Nor did any of the others she could see from where she stood. They were all different sizes, but they were equally green from bottom to top. As she and Allen walked uphill through them, she couldn’t see a single brown leaf or dead twig.

Maybe that was it. They all looked so perfect, she didn’t want to be the person to put the first scar on one.

She wondered if it was spring here. Earth trees always looked perfect in spring, too, before the caterpillars set to work on the leaves. She tried to think how this planet’s poles had looked in relation to the sun, but she hadn’t spent enough time in orbit to remember.

It didn’t look like the explanation was that simple anyway. There were no dead branches on the ground, and no mat of decaying leaves, either. Just the myriad little ferns, none of which showed any more sign of mortality than the trees.

The forest was silent except for the rustle of the fronds in the breeze. Judy and Allen’s footfalls hardly even made a noise, but as the ground grew steeper, they began panting enough to make up for it. Gravity was definitely stronger here than on Earth. Not by much, but even a little extra work for every step eventually added up. And the temperature that had seemed ideal when they were picnicking and making love now seemed about ten degrees too hot.

“Gah,” Judy said, fluffing her shirt out in front to get some air inside it. “Nobody told me exploring was going to be hard work.”

Allen wiped sweat from his forehead with the side of his hand. “I’d kill for a cold mountain stream to stick my feet in about now, but something tells me we’re going the wrong direction to find water.”

“Maybe we can at least see where there is some when we get to the top.” She hoped she was right, but at the same time she wondered how smart it would be to soak their feet in a stream when they didn’t know what was living in it. She planned to boil anything they drank, too, but of course they had left the camp stove in the Getaway along with the pots and pans. She hadn’t expected their first foray to become a major expedition.

They could always go back, she supposed, but she wanted to at least get a look at their new world before they did that. She turned around to check their progress, but they hadn’t climbed high enough yet to see much more than what they had already walked through. And the treetops were spaced just wrong to give them a view out to the horizon.

She couldn’t see the Getaway. They had at least gone far enough for the trees to hide it as well. She felt a little satisfaction at that, but then she felt cold panic slide up her spine when she realized what that meant.

“Allen! We didn’t mark our trail.”

He turned around, too. “Good point. I’m sure we can find our way from here—it’s pretty much straight downhill, after all—but it wouldn’t hurt to build cairns from now on.”

He nudged a couple of head-sized rocks with his toe until he worked them loose from the ground, then stacked them precariously atop a third rock.

Judy eyed it critically. “That won’t stay put very long.”

“Long enough. We’re not going to be gone all day.”

As soon as he said that, she suddenly realized that they didn’t even know how long “all day” was here. She looked up at the sun, trying to remember where it had been when they arrived, but she hadn’t thought to look then and she didn’t know which direction she was facing now anyway.

It was still high in the sky, for what that was worth. They had hours before they had to worry about nightfall.

They continued up the slope, building cairns every few hundred feet as they climbed. The trees were still fairly far apart, so it was easy to spot one pile of rocks from the next, but the farther away from their starship they got, the more nervous Judy became. If they got lost, it was a long way back home.

The trees never grew close enough together to become an actual forest. The bushes never joined into thickets, either. Something kept them spaced just about as far apart as they were tall, and after a few minutes of thought, Judy realized they were the perfect distance to keep from shading one another. The bigger trees commanded more space than the smaller ones, and the bushes clustered in the spaces farthest from any of them. It seemed very logical at first, but the more she thought about it, the less sense it made. How did the trees know ahead of time how tall they were going to grow? They were spaced ideally now, but in another ten years they were going to be crowding one another out.

There were still no dead trees, either. She and Allen had walked at least half a mile by now; they should have found at least a couple of fallen logs.

And birds. Shouldn’t there have been some sign of them? Nests in the treetops, or a snatch of song off in the distance? So far Judy hadn’t heard a sound since they had arrived other than the wind in the trees and the noises she and Allen had made. She hadn’t seen a flicker of motion other than the rustling fronds, either. It was like walking through a movie set on an indoor soundstage; it didn’t seem real without ambient noise to go with it.

“Could it be possible that there aren’t any animals here?” she asked.

Allen shrugged. “Anything’s possible, I suppose, but I can’t imagine how the ecosystem could work without ’em.”

He stopped to build another cairn, and this time when he dug out a half-buried rock, Judy bent down and examined the hole it left behind. No worms. No insects. The dirt didn’t even smell of fungus. She didn’t expect the same actinomyces that gave Earth dirt its characteristic smell, but there had to be something similar to break down organic matter here, didn’t there?

Did there?

“Maybe there isn’t an ecosystem,” she said. “Maybe the trees get their nutrients straight from the air and the ground, and since there’s nothing to eat them, they don’t have to grow or reproduce nearly as fast as they do on Earth.”

“Looks like they reproduce just fine,” Allen said, waving his arms to encompass the couple of dozen trees surrounding them.

“But we don’t know how often it happens. These trees could be thousands of years old.”

He cocked his head, looking from her to one of the trees and back. “That’s a good theory. Appropriately wacky. We need a core drill so we can count rings and see just how wacky.”

Judy led off farther up the hill. “If they don’t grow much from year to year, the rings would be microscopic, if there are any at all.”

“Then that would be pretty good evidence for your theory,” he said.

“And if I’m right, proving that theory could mean injuring something older than the dinosaurs.”

He laughed softly.

“What’s funny about that?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever met a pistol-packin’ tree-hugger before.”

She looked down at the revolver tucked in her waistband. She had never exactly considered herself a tree-hugger, but there was no denying the pistol-packin’ part. It was beginning to look like a useless weight, but she wasn’t ready to put it in the stuff sack just yet. There might not be any animals on this planet, or there might be a pack of wolves just over the rise.

Or there might be a cliff. Judy had noticed that the trees seemed to thin out up ahead, but she couldn’t see why until she was nearly on top of it. There was an outcrop of rock beyond the last of the trees, then a thousand feet or so of empty space beyond that. It wasn’t a sheer drop, but it wasn’t a slope she would try descending without a rope, either.

They had climbed the flank of the first mountain in the range. They weren’t to the top yet, but they were quite a ways up. There was another mountain directly across the chasm from them, its peak probably no farther away than the valley floor below. A rushing noise came from the valley, almost like the sound of the wind in the trees, but not quite the same. The forest was thicker down there; it took a moment to see anything other than its green canopy, but eventually Judy spotted a few glistening flashes of sliver and white.