The Getaway Special

41

Despite his multiple components, sometimes Tippet had a real one-track mind. But Judy supposed he had good reason at the moment: he and his hive-mates had no idea how the tree would behave on board their ship, and the sooner they could learn to communicate with it, the sooner they could relax. Or toss it out the airlock.

She looked up/out at the porthole. It wasn’t exactly an airlock, but she bet it could be opened if necessary. Maybe she would keep her spacesuit on a while longer…

She said, “Transmit on the walkie-talkie’s frequency,” and pushed herself back inside among the debris.

“What do you want me to say?” The voice came from somewhere low in the tank.

“Anything. Recite the Gettysburg address.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Then sing me a—never mind.” The walkie-talkie was slowly tumbling past Allen’s legs. She snagged it in her left hand and pulled herself partway through the hatch again, holding it out toward the tree.

Tippet said, “Should I echo some of the speech I recorded on the ground?”

Allen shook his head. “Given how it reacted last time you did that, maybe you should say something else.”

“That would be difficult,” Tippet replied. “I don’t even know the structure of its language yet, much less any of its individual words. But you have a good point. You were getting a response with cardinal numbers; perhaps I should try prime numbers and see what happens.”

Oh, great, Judy thought. Math again. Why did it always come down to math? She wondered if Columbus had tried prime numbers on the natives when he landed in the Caribbean.

“It’s worth a shot,” Allen said.

The walkie-talkie peeped like a sparrow going for the record on ascending trills. Judy heard no response, and evidently neither did Tippet.

“Nothing at all,” he reported. “Let me try something simpler.”

The beeps and twitters didn’t sound any different to Judy, and apparently the tree wasn’t any more excited by these than the earlier ones.

“Trying simpler yet,” Tippet said. This time Judy heard the ascending pattern of beeps, but after a few seconds Tippet said, “Still nothing. This is odd.”

“It’s probably going catatonic with shock,” Judy said. “After what it’s just been through, I wouldn’t blame it a bit.”

“Yet Allen got results by banging on the wall while we were still in space.”

He had, hadn’t he? And the tree had been active the whole time, trying to hide its head—well, its leaves—from the sun while the Getaway rotated beneath it. Judy looked at the window, then back to the tree, remembering the way the tree last night had frozen under her flashlight beam, and the way this one and its companions had held their fronds behind them, out of the light, while they charged.

Now it held them up to the light, leaves spread wide to gather the sun like any tree.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Does that window have a shade?”

“Yes,” Tippet answered. “Is the light too bright for you?”

“Not for me, but I think maybe it is for the tree. We’ve never seen them move except at night. During the day, they just stand there, even if you cut one down right next to them. I think maybe they only wake up at night.”

Tippet pondered that for a few seconds, then said, “I would have thought of that eventually.”

The window’s inner frame bulged inward, then slowly constricted, covering the clear lens like the iris of an eye.

Judy wondered if the space they were in had started out as an eye before Tippet s ancestors had genetically engineered the ship for their own needs. She shuddered at the thought, but she supposed it was better than some of the alternatives. The iris wasn’t the only contractile muscle in a living body, after all.

It grew darker in the garden. The iris stopped just short of closed, then a translucent membrane slid across the rest of the gap, leaving a pale white glow about as bright as a crescent Moon.

They waited for the tree to react, but after five minutes with no change, Judy found herself growing impatient. And thirsty. She tucked the walkie-talkie under one of the straps holding the parachute to the tank, then ducked back inside and found one of the cans she had filled with water, still wedged into its crevice in the wall. It hadn’t boiled dry, but what was left was a lump of ice. She supposed she could melt it with her hands, but she was already too cold. It didn’t seem worth it just for a drink of ice water.

On the other hand, the camp stove could solve both problems at once. Normally she wouldn’t even think of lighting an open flame on board a spaceship, but Tippet’s ship had air to burn. Literally. She patted around with her hands until she found the stove, then stuck her head and arms outside again and set the stove on the flat space between her hatch and Allen’s. Heating things could be tricky in zero-gee, but at least the can was mostly enclosed. If she set it spinning above the flame, the heat would be fairly evenly distributed, and the meltwater would flow out to the side of the can. There was enough of a lip that it wouldn’t pour out the mouth-hole immediately, and when it did start to escape, she could drink what had liquified and set the can back in the flame.

“Here,” she said to Allen. “Help me hold this down.”

He obligingly took the butane canister in his hands and pushed it down so the bottom of it was flat against the top of the Getaway. The reaction tried to push him outward, but his spacesuit’s backpack wedged against the underside of his hatch and held him in place. Judy braced her feet against the sides of the tank and pushed herself upward until she felt her suit hold fast as well. She made sure Tippet was out of range—he was drifting eight or ten feet above her head and still trying to talk to the tree—then she opened the gas valve and flicked the flint wheel.

The stove lit with a loud whoosh, and a cone of bright yellow flame roared out six or eight feet from the burner.

“Yow!” Judy yelled.

Allen jerked his hands back with a startled “Whoa!”

Tippet frantically flapped away from the flame, his walkie-talkie voice repeating “tpt-tpt-tpt-tpt-tpt-tpt!”

And across the garden, the tree thrashed its branches and yanked its roots out of the ground with a wet slurp.

Judy twisted the gas valve off again. “Sorry. That was stupid. I should have realized it would spray liquid butane out the burner.”

“You sure got the tree’s attention,” Allen said.

Judy fielded the tumbling can of ice, then looked over at the tree. The silvery light from overhead seemed even dimmer after the bright flash of flame, and its afterimage left a bright blue triangle in her field of vision when she blinked, but she could see well enough when she held her eyes open for a second. The tree’s flinch had pulled it completely free of the ground; now it was drifting into the air and tipping slowly backward as it did. Fortunately, it was close enough to the irregular wall that its branches brushed the native bushes growing there, and the moment they made contact, the tree wrapped the tips of its branches around the bushes and pulled itself back. It did a complete somersault, then its roots hit the wall and they dug in. The tree held fast for a moment, and Judy thought maybe it had gone catatonic again, but then it let go with its branches and slowly stood away from the wall.

Now its trunk was sticking straight out at them. There was still at least thirty feet of space between it and them, but Judy got ready to duck if it tried to jump.

“I’m going to try another series of prime numbers,” Tippet said. The walkie-talkie beeped its ascending trill again, and this time the tree rustled its leaves and tilted them flat toward the source of the noise.

“Very good!” he said. “It’s echoing my numbers back to me.”

Judy hadn’t heard its response. The walkie-talkie squeaked again, then they waited a few seconds, then it squeaked some more, but she couldn’t hear a thing coming from the tree.

“Are you sure it’s saying anything?” she asked.

“Yes, I hear it quite clearly. And now it’s responding with the next prime numbers in the sequence.”

“Oh.” And it wasn’t attacking. That was good. Yet…

She stood in the hatchway, the cold air chilling her face and hands while the screeching radio sent chills of an entirely different nature down her spine. The trees were intelligent. She’d met two new alien species in two days. She was all for expanding her horizons, but things were moving a bit too fast for her at the moment.

Actually, at the moment they seemed to be moving right past her. Tippet was the one learning to talk with the tree. How could she talk to something she couldn’t even hear?

Her thoughts must have shown even in the dim light. Allen reached out with his free hand to touch the side of her face. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said automatically, then she said, “No, that’s not true. I think I’m about to collapse into a gibbering ball of goo.”

“Good.”

“What?” She hadn’t expected that.

“I thought maybe it was just me.”

“Oh. No, I think anybody would, after what we’ve been through.” She shoved the stove and the can of ice back inside the tank, then took his hands in hers and squeezed.

“If you would like to rest,” Tippet said, “that would be fine. I suspect it will be some time before we can communicate with any useful degree of facility.”

Any useful degree of facility. Right. And he’d learned English how long ago?

The foot or so of space between Judy’s and Allen’s hatches prevented them from getting any closer. That was intolerable.

Judy looked out at the tree, over at Tippet, then back to Allen. “Tippets right. At the moment, we’re as useless as propellers on a rocket. Let’s get some rest while we can, ’cause there’s no telling when we’ll have the chance again.”

He didn’t argue. He just let go her hands and pushed himself inside. She did the same, moving by feel after her head cleared the hatch. The dim light from the shuttered window didn’t even provide a hint of illumination inside.

“We’ve only got one sleeping bag left,” he said.

“That’s fine with me.” She started stripping off her spacesuit. “It’s warmer with two people in one bag anyway.”

“It’s going to be pretty cramped, too.” She could hear him fumbling with his own spacesuit as he spoke.

She banged her elbow on the hyperdrive, and the reaction sent her spinning until her head and shoulder met the beanbag chair, still strapped to the bottom of the tank. “At least we don’t have gravity pulling us down to the floor,” she said. “We can shove the water bucket aside and stick our feet through the gap. That ought to let us stretch out.”

“Yeah.” She heard more thumping and bumping, and a helmet clonked her gently in the back. She couldn’t tell if it was his or hers, and at the moment she didn’t care.

It was cold without her suit, but she stripped on down to bare skin. The best way for two people to get warm in one sleeping bag was to get naked, and besides, she wanted the human contact. At the moment she wasn’t sure she would ever let go.

“Foot of the sleeping bag coming through,” Allen said.

He must have already moved the bucket aside. Judy reached into the opening where it had been and pulled the bottom of the sleeping bag through into her half of the tank, then stuck her head and shoulders through into his side. There was a pleasant few minutes of fumbling in the dark while they climbed into the bag, then they zipped it up and wrapped their arms and legs around one another to hold themselves together. She could feel his arousal as he pressed up against her, and she thought briefly about losing herself in a few minutes of pure animal joy, but she wasn’t sure if she could handle the extra emotion at the moment. She pressed her face into the hollow where his neck met his shoulders and tried to relax instead.

Neither of them had bathed in days, unless you counted her unplanned dip in the river, but they were both too cold to give off much aroma. What scent she did get off Allen was actually kind of comforting. It was a human smell: honest sweat, a faint hint of shampoo in his hair, the indescribable maleness of his skin.

Outside, the walkie-talkie piped more of Tippet’s shrill math lesson at the tree.

“Sounds like a modem trying to connect out there,” Allen said softly.

“Mmm.” It did. Not surprising, she supposed: a modem was basically a device for encoding numerical data into sound waves, and that’s exactly what Tippet was doing. She wondered if the sound would change when he started learning the tree’s language. She couldn’t believe she was falling asleep with that going on just outside—after all, Tippet was talking to a tree!—but her capacity for wonder was just about maxed out, along with her ability to keep her eyes open any longer. Even her ears seemed to blank out for long seconds at a time; a sure sign that her brain was about to shut down whether she wanted it to or not.

She kissed Allen softly on the side of his neck. “Wake me up if anything interesting happens,” she said.

He snickered.

“To me,” she added, but if he said anything, she was already asleep.