The Getaway Special

45

They jumped to within two light-minutes of Earth. Their message was only forty-three seconds long; that left them plenty of time to send it and be gone before anyone even knew they were there. And it was far enough away that the ship would only be a speck in the best of telescopes, even if anyone managed to get one pointed in the right direction in such a short time. Plus the closer they were to Earth, the more signal strength they had. They were broadcasting on every commercial television and radio frequency at once, plus the microwave downlink frequencies the satellites in geosynchronous orbit used. Those signals would probably be fuzzy and distorted from coming in at the wrong angle, but what they lacked in direction they made up for in power. The starship’s communication equipment had been designed to punch a signal across a dozen light-years or more in order to make regular reports to the homeworld.

Judy waited by the window when they jumped. The stars didn’t shift, but a new one popped into view directly in front of her: a double star, both members showing tiny half-moon crescents. The smaller one was indeed the Moon. The other one was Earth.

She wasn’t prepared for the pang of homesickness that shot through her when she saw it. Her breath caught in her throat, and her eyes misted up so badly she had to squeeze them shut and shake the tears away. She was home.

Well, actually she was still farther away than any astronaut had ever gone until the last couple of weeks, but after where she had just been, what was a few light-minutes?

“Deploying relays,” Tippet said. The ship’s engineers had built a fleet of baseball-sized satellites that would stay behind and listen for any response to Judy’s message that people might send from Earth. They were small enough to be virtually undetectable, but they could record incoming transmissions and then jump to within useful radio distance of the starship and deliver their recordings in a compressed burst, and they would relay back and forth so there wouldn’t be any gaps in coverage. Even if nobody replied, they would listen in on radio and television signals so Judy and Allen and Tippet could learn what was going on.

They had decided to hide the ship in the asteroid belt beyond Mars. There were thousands of free-flying rocks out there, ranging in size from grains of sand all the way up to spherical bodies hundreds of kilometers across; nobody would notice if one of the medium-sized ones suddenly acquired a companion.

“Broadcasting message,” Tippet said.

From the workstation behind her, the voice of the Galactic Overlord growled, “People of Yaarth!” Judy grinned as she listened to it. She could see her own image reflected in the window, a ghost-Judy superimposed over Earth and Moon like a protective angel while her evil twin’s ultimatum raced outward at the speed of light to stir up trouble.

The message finished, and Allen, still hovering near the control board, let out a whoop. “Hah! Take that, foul minions of chaos!”

They didn’t replay it. A true Galactic Overlord would never repeat himself. Of course a true Galactic Overlord wouldn’t say what Tippet said next, either: “Heading for cover.”

Earth and Moon blinked out like headlights dropping behind a distant hill. Judy turned away from the window. Now they waited to see what people would do.

“How’s the tree holding up?” she asked Tippet.

“Very well,” he replied. “Our vocabulary improves by the minute. It finds our subterfuge amusing, and the reason for it horrifying. It wants to know, if your people treat each other so poorly, how do they treat the other trees on your planet?”

She and Allen exchanged a worried glance. By “other trees” it probably meant “all the other lifeforms,” but the answer was the same in either case. Judy said, “Um, it probably doesn’t want to know.”

Tippet said, “I told it as much. I find many alarming terms among the words I learned from your dictionary. ‘Clearcut.’ ‘Genocide.’ ‘Desertification.’ It’s a wonder your species has survived as long as it has.”

Judy nodded, feeling the crush of world pressure squeeze the joy out of her life again. “Well, it’s anybody’s guess whether we’ll make it through the next few days.”

The first burst of news from the relay drones wasn’t encouraging. The message had interrupted programming even better than they had hoped, but the United States had quickly branded it a hoax, and the rest of the world had accused the U.S. of doing it on purpose to confuse their enemies.

Allen snorted when he heard that. “Hoax, eh? That’s what they said about the hyperdrive plans, too. They apparently got a quantity discount on stupid excuses when they decided to start lying to the public.”

“So what are we going to do about it?” Judy asked.

“Just what we planned to do,” Allen said. “Throw rocks.”

“I’m not enthusiastic about this part,” Tippet said.

Allen shrugged. “Me either, but we’ve got to convince ’em we mean business. Have you mapped the orbits of the asteroids we need?”

The butterflies’ stellar comparator equipment was designed to detect debris in the ship’s path while traveling in the darkness of interstellar space; they could spot a lump of coal a million kilometers away. Tippet said, “We have determined the orbit of every asteroid larger than… well, larger than your head, roughly. There are thousands of candidates with the required mass and vector to use as projectiles.”

“Good. Call up an image of Earth and let me show you what we want to hit.”

That proved to be more difficult than it sounded. Allen didn’t have the experience in space that Judy did, and didn’t realize how difficult it was to recognize familiar landmarks when they were partially obscured by cloud or stretched out at odd angles across the curving surface.

She edged closer to help him, squinting to see the tiny screen without bumping her nose on it or on the butterfly operating the controls. It reminded her of her first computer, an Osborne 1, one of the first portable computers ever built. In its day, “portable” meant it was the size and weight of a suitcase full of rocks, but it was a complete, functional computer—provided you had a magnifying glass to see the five-inch diagonal monitor.

“That’s the Atlantic Ocean,” she said, pointing at the blue-and-white swirls of cloud and water in the middle of the screen. She pointed to the right, at a hint of green and brown amid the blue. “There’s the U.S. coast. Lake Michigan. Gulf of Mexico.” On the left, she pointed out the Mediterranean.

“Oh,” Allen said. “It’s upside down.”

Judy rolled her eyes, then braced her feet against the wall, took him by the shoulders, and rolled him 180 degrees. “There. Now it’s right side up.” She pointed at the Earth again. “Asia and Australia are on the night side. We’ll have to wait for them to swing around into daylight before we can pick targets for them, unless you want to use your engines to light up the night side of the planet the way you did back at Zork.”

“Zork?” Tippet asked.

“My name for the trees’ planet.”

“Oh,” Tippet said. He fluttered his wings a time or two. “We could do that. If we only stayed for a few seconds, it should be safe enough. Perhaps that would be a better course of action than throwing rocks anyway. It would prove we were real without causing damage.”

“Never underestimate the human capacity for denial,” Judy said. “But yeah, it’s worth a try.”

This time they prepared the drive for use before they fired it up. It only took fifteen minutes or so, during which time Judy recorded another message. When everything was ready, Tippet had her and Allen move to the aft end of the communications room, then said, “Here we go.”

There was the moment of disorientation, followed within a couple of seconds by thrust. It was only a tenth of a gee or so, just enough to push them gently to the floor, but when Judy looked up at the monitor she saw the Earth suddenly blaze with light. She whistled softly. It was brighter than sunlight.

The Overlord growled, “Hoax, are we? Perhaps we should roast you slowly and see how long it takes you to decide we are real. But we feel magnanimous today; we will will give you one more chance. Disarm yourselves, and you will be allowed to join the rest of the galactic federation. Continue to bicker among yourselves, and you will die!” That much was true enough, anyway.

The drive went out with her last word, and a moment later they were back in the asteroid belt. Judy pushed herself up to the command center and pointed out the Persian Gulf, the Bay of Bengal, and the Australian outback in the image they had recorded during their demonstration.

A flash photograph of a planet, she thought. That was a cool trick.

The next relay satellite brought them the result: Television and radio reports from all over the world showed the bright new sun in the sky and the hysteria it had caused on the ground. Nobody called that a hoax, but the Arab nations still accused the U.S. of masterminding the whole situation, and a panel of scientists from the European Coalition agreed that it might have been nothing more than a thermonuclear explosion in space. It had only lasted for a few seconds, after all, and the Galactic Overlord had spoken English.

The U.S. denied everything, accusing first Russia and then France of using the confusion over the hyperdrive to maneuver for global control, and vowing to keep their military on red alert.

Japan broadcast a reply to the Federation: “Hey, don’t look at us; we’ve got no military.”

In the middle of it all, one tiny voice suggested banding together to fight the invaders. Judy nearly swallowed her tongue when she heard the report from the United Nations: Cuba, of all places, had taken the bait.

As usual, they were ignored. As the hours passed and world tension continued to escalate, Judy and Allen reluctantly agreed: it was time to knock some sense into people.

The butterflies had already picked their weapons and their targets. The chosen asteroids were only fifty meters across—big enough to make a big bang when they hit the atmosphere, but small enough to vaporize before they hit the ground—and they were in the right position in their orbits that they could be shifted into a collision path with Earth with a minimum of maneuvering. It took a couple of hours to pick them up and set them into the right trajectory, timing them so they would all arrive at the same time. While that was being done, Judy recorded one more message.

“What part of ‘disarm’ don’t you understand?” she demanded, crossing her arms in front of her chest. The Overlord would be writhing his tentacles at that point. “You try our patience. We hear your petty squabbling, and we see your weapons aimed at one another. Very well, then; fire them! We will help you along. Here, let this be the first shot in your demise!”

When Tippet lowered the camera, she burst into a fit of laughter. Allen, hovering near one of the workstations and helping calculate the asteroid vectors, looked over at her and said, “What’s so funny?”

“It just hit me. Dumb dreams do come true; just not the way you expect them to. I actually am Captain Gallagher of the Imperial Space Navy, but I’m fighting for the wrong empire. If anybody ever finds out what we’re doing, we’ll both be executed for treason.”

“So you’re laughing. Ooo-kay.” He turned back to his work, and she pushed off to watch the video tech graft the overlay to her performance. Maybe it wasn’t funny after all.

When the asteroids were all in position, they jumped to another spot only a few light-minutes out to broadcast the challenge, timing its arrival so people would have about five minutes to wonder what the Overlord was talking about before the rocks hit. Allen wanted to cut the time down to just a few seconds, but Judy argued against it. “We need to give them time to stand down from launch-on-warning status. Otherwise it really will trigger the war.”

Earth and Moon appeared in the window again when they jumped. Three times in a row wasn’t coincidence. At first she thought the butterflies must be orienting the ship that way just for her, but then she realized they probably liked to see who they were talking to as much as she did.

The message started playing. That meant the rocks were only a few thousand kilometers from the atmosphere. They were probably showing up on radar now, but it would be way too late to do anything about them. Laser satellites might melt the top few meters as they flashed past, but that wouldn’t make a bit of difference. A nuclear bomb might fragment one, but it would take a direct hit, and their high relative velocity—the rocks were coming from all directions at about 70,000 kilometers per hour—made that practically impossible.

Judy imagined the scramble that must be going on in war rooms all over the globe. Presidents and generals would be arguing whether it was a trick or a real threat from an authentic extraterrestrial government. They would be making frantic phone calls to observatories and science advisors, and probably a few priests and imams as well. Nobody would know what to do; all they would know for sure was that they couldn’t afford to be wrong.

There was only one logical choice. To shoot at each other meant certain death, and nobody had had enough time to set up a viable off-planet colony yet. There were probably dozens of attempts being made, but nobody could know for sure that their people would survive, not this early in the game. Not even a tin-pot dictator could be insane enough to start a war now, but Judy found herself holding her breath as her latest ultimatum played out. Counting on politicians and military leaders to make a logical decision was a dangerous gamble. She half expected to see mushroom clouds sprout from the planet like roll-up party whistles.

But the Earth floated on, a serene lapis sphere against the star-spangled velvet of space. The flash came from much closer, and off to the left, toward the aft of the ship. The ship lurched, and Judy had just enough time to wonder why the butterflies had lit the engines again before the entire outer wall, window and all, flexed inward and slapped her across the room.