The Getaway Special

48

“Brace yourself!” Tippet said.

Judy grabbed on to the window frame, which yielded under her fingers like high-density foam rubber, but she kept her eyes glued to the pickup outside. It was obviously Trent’s: deep red with every chrome accessory he could bolt on to it. There was a new addition this time: a big metal box in back, faceted like the top half of a Lunar Module and polished to as bright a shine as everything else. He’d welded together an interstellar camper shell.

They had maybe five seconds until impact. There was no way the starship could get out of the way in time, not even with the hyperdrive. The truck was already inside the jump field. There was a little sideways drift, enough to see that it would hit somewhere toward the back of the ship. That might save the ship, but the pickup was moving fast enough to smash itself flat.

Four seconds. Three. Judy could see two faces through the windshield, Trent in the driver’s seat, and Donna sitting right next to him. Their mouths were gaping wide as airlocks.

Then they vanished, pickup and all winking out like they had never been.

Judy let out her breath. A second later, Trent’s voice came over the radio. “Whoo-ee! That was close enough to leave skid marks. Sorry ’bout that. Couldn’t hit the button quick enough.”

“Trent!” Judy yelled. “Trent! Are you and Donna all right?”

“Judy?”

“Yes!”

“Well I’ll be a son of a… Yeah! We’re fine. How’d we get… hell, I don’t even know where we are. And how did you get that big-ass spaceship?”

“Allen brought you here,” she said. “Allen, can you hear us?”

“I can hear you” he said, “but not Trent. And I’m sure he can’t hear me, either. That was one little detail we forgot in the rush to go after him. The shortwave radio’s useless in vacuum.”

“Oh.” He was right. Without air, the microphone couldn’t pick up any sound and the speaker couldn’t make any. There was probably a way to patch it into a spacesuit’s intercom, but it would take cables Allen didn’t have.

“We hear him just fine now,” Trent said.

“Hey, I hear you now, too!” Allen said.

“Tippet must be relaying your signals.”

“Who’s Tippet?” Trent asked.

“It’s a long story. Hang on a second. Tippet, how are we going to pick them up?”

Tippet said, “Our relative velocity is not that great. We can use Jupiter’s gravity well to change our own vector and dock with them within half an hour. Trent, do you have enough air to last that long?”

“Yeah, easy,” he said. “We’ve got a tank and a half of that left. It’s parachutes we’re short of. The fuckin’ laser satellites nailed both of ’em when we tried to land. Pardon my French.”

“They shot at you?” Judy said. “I’d swear too. Well, hang tight, then, and we’ll be right there.”

“Uh, guys?” Allen said. “Maybe you could swing by and pick me up first? As long as you’re in the neighborhood, and have the right relative velocity and all. Just a thought.”

Judy grinned. “I don’t know,” she said. “How about it, Tippet?”

He was flying in tight little circles near the door. “Are you insane? Of course we’ll pick him up first. He would die of the bends if we—oh. That was humor.”

“Pretty lame,” she admitted, “but yeah.”

A moment later the Getaway blinked into existence a kilometer or so away—or rather Tippet’s ship moved that close to it—and then there was a minute or two of light thrust while the pilots matched velocity and brought the plastic tank in through the airlock.

As soon as the docking bay filled with air again, Judy and Tippet went to greet Allen. He was cursing at his spacesuit as he tried to take the helmet off against air pressure.

“Wrist seals first,” Judy reminded him.

“Oh. Yeah.” He pried off a glove, and after that the rest was easy.

They barely had time for Allen to push the Getaway back into its garden before Tippet announced that they were ready to pick up Trent and Donna. They watched out the window while the huge starship maneuvered to meet the tumbling pickup. The airlock was only thirty or forty feet from their window, so they got a good look as it approached. The truck looked incongruous as hell out there, even with a pressurized camper shell. Its four fat tires had looked silly enough on the ground; here they were a caricature of themselves. The passengers looked a bit out of place as well: Trent still wore his black Stetson, and Donna still sat right next to him on the bench seat and chewed gum like her life depended on it. The only thing that looked different was her hair, which had puffed out all around her face like a yellow halo.

They drifted closer to the airlock, their tumbling motion reminding Judy of the thighbone-to-spaceship transition scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Then they disappeared from view, and a few seconds later there was a loud thud and a deep vibration ran through the ship.

“That was them hitting the back wall,” Tippet said.

They waited until the docking bay was filled with air, then opened the connecting door and swooped in. The pickup was slowly drifting back toward the closed airlock, and Trent and Donna were struggling to open the doors.

“Open a window first!” Judy called out to them.

Trent slapped himself on the forehead, then cracked open his window. Air whooshed in, ruffling his beard and nearly blowing off his hat, then he popped open the door. Judy could see crisscrossed reinforcing bars welded on its inner surface and an extra layer of rubber molding around the edges to seal it tight against vacuum.

Allen caught Trent as he stepped out and helped steady him, but then the two tried to shake hands and they both wound up wobbling around and laughing. Donna pushed herself out of the truck and floated more gracefully toward Judy, her arms outstretched for a hug. Judy held up her arms and said quickly, “Careful! Broken ribs.”

“Oh!” Donna tried to stop her forward motion, but there was nothing to grab except for Judy herself. The two women held one another’s hands and did a slow pirouette, Judy’s chest and right arm aching under the stress, but they managed to come to a stop without breaking anything more.

“Man, you two are a sight for sore eyes,” Trent said. “We was startin’ to get worried. Nothin’ like comin’ home from a thirty-light-year road trip and gettin’ shot at on your own doorstep.”

“Everybody’s gone to red alert with their missile defenses,” Allen explained. “They’re shooting first and asking questions later.”

Donna snapped a little bubble of gum. “That definitely sucks.”

“Yeah,” Allen agreed.

Trent looked around appreciatively. “This is one hell of a ride you’ve got here. How’d you score it?”

“It’s Tippet’s,” Judy said. She held her good arm out toward the butterfly, who fluttered up to land on her palm. “Tippet, this is Trent and Donna. They’re the ones who helped us build the Getaway” To them, she said, “We met Tippet on a planet way out in Cetus.”

Trent nodded toward the butterfly. “Pleased to meet’cha.”

“Likewise,” Tippet said through the walkie-talkie.

Trent looked at Judy’s waist, where the radio was clipped, then back up at her face. “We were in Cetus, too.

We met some guys who looked like strings of beach balls on sticks.”

“You did?” Judy tried to imagine Trent and Donna making first contact with an alien race. “How, uh, how did it go?”

He grinned. “They picked up a little English, and Donna picked up enough of their language to get along. We mostly went fishin’ during the day, and you don’t want to talk much while you’re doin’ that anyway.”

“Fishing?” Allen asked.

“Yeah. They’ve got trout the size of your leg just dying to take a fly.” He shrugged. “Well, they’re not really trout, but close enough.”

Tippet said, “These aliens—the beach balls on sticks— did you form a political alliance with them?”

Judy felt the back of her neck tingle. She knew what Tippet was getting at. If humanity already had allies, killing them off could be even messier than he thought.

Trent didn’t realize what was at stake. Before Judy could say anything, he shook his head and said, “No, we just made friends and had a good time.”

Tippet didn’t reply, but Judy could imagine the conversation going on in the hive mind.

While they had been talking, the pickup had continued its drift toward the airlock door and bounced off. Now it was coming back toward them, cab first. Trent nodded toward it and said, “Hey, we ought to tie that down before it hurts somebody. Where can I park it?”

“Let’s put it next to the Getaway Special,” Tippet said.

Allen and Trent grabbed the truck and brought it to a stop, bracing themselves on the walls, then pushed it toward the door into the garden.

“Careful!” Judy said as they both gave it a hearty shove. “It’s going to be just as hard to stop as it was to get it moving.”

It turned out to be harder, since there wasn’t a convenient wall to push against. The truck came in at an angle, digging a trench in the ground with its right front bumper and flipping end-for-end before they brought it under control, but they finally—with much whooping and laughter amid the curses and grunts—managed to orient it with its tires against the ground. Trent went inside the camper and got some rope, which he threw over the top and tied to the bushes on either side. Then he leaned back against the driver’s door, tucking one foot under the step to hold himself in place, and crossed his arms over his chest. “I gotta say thanks for coming along when you did. When those military bastards zapped our parachutes, I thought we were genuinely screwed.”

“Thank Tippet,” Allen said. “He’s the one who heard your ‘Mayday.’ He’s been monitoring transmissions from Earth for the last few days, trying to figure out what’s going on down there.”

Donna had been about to go into the camper, but she stopped herself against the door frame. “What is going on down there?”

“Long story,” Allen said. “I don’t know how long you’ve been away, but things have apparently been getting crazier and crazier since we left.”

Trent laughed. “They were crazy enough when you left. You nicked our water line on your way out, so we had us a fountain right in the middle of the driveway. All the cops got soaked, and then a bunch of news guys showed up and started taking pictures, so all our neighbors came over to see what all the ruckus was about, and somebody called the fire department so they showed up with a truck, and by the time we got everything sorted out it seemed like half the town was millin’ around in our yard.”

“Did the cops arrest you for harboring fugitives?” Judy asked.

Trent shook his head. “Are you kiddin’? They weren’t after us. Once they realized you were gone for good, they took one look at the crowd and lit out for greener pastures.”

“And so did you, apparently.”

Trent nodded. “It looked like a good time to be makin’ tracks. But hey, if we’re going to swap stories, I’m gettin’ a beer.”