The Getaway Special

4

“Your hyperdrive engine,” Carl said, “is the worst disaster to befall the world since the invention of the nuclear bomb.” He’d finally awakened from the drugs Gerry had given him, and was hovering over Allen’s shoulders in the aft crew station, glancing nervously out the overhead windows from time to time, as if the Earth might slip by without his knowledge unless he were diligent in watching for it.

He was a nervous man anyway, thin and hatchet-faced. At least he looked that way on the ground. In orbit, the normal pooling of fluids in the upper body that came with zero-gee rounded out his features, making him look almost normal. Judy, watching him from the command chair where she’d been trying to assess the damage to the ship, wondered if that was why he liked spaceflight so much: because it improved his appearance.

Allen stood at his control panel, his feet tucked into floor grips so he wouldn’t have to hold himself down every time he pushed a button. He’d been there for nearly an hour, running diagnostics on the hyperdrive engine and using the shuttle’s navigation equipment to figure out where they were before he moved them anywhere else.

It was taking much longer than he’d expected, partially because of Carl’s interference. At this latest proclamation, Allen tilted his head back, looked at Carl upside down, and said, “You know, it amazes me how a Luddite could work his way so high in the space program. If you really think a major breakthrough in spaceflight is a disaster, why aren’t you back in Florida blowing up the Vehicle Assembly Building or something?”

Carl’s eyes bulged. “Luddite! I don’t have to be a Luddite to see what this will do to the world economy. If you give hyperdrive engines to everyone at once, people are going to use them all at once, and when they all leave their jobs to go gallivanting around the galaxy there won’t be anybody left to run the machinery. Our whole industrial society will grind to a halt.”

Allen laughed. “Oh come on, now. Our whole society? I’d be surprised if one person in a hundred actually goes anywhere. One in a thousand is probably a high estimate. All I’ve done is give the adventurous the option to get off an overcrowded planet. That doesn’t seem like a recipe for disaster to me.”

“It wouldn’t.” Carl wiped spittle from his lips. “Look, it doesn’t take a big upset to shake the world economy. Remember cold fusion back in the eighties? The stock market went berserk right after Pons and Fleischmann announced their discovery. If they hadn’t been proven wrong almost immediately, we would have had a major depression. These things need to be eased into use so people can adapt to them slowly, not dumped on us without warning.”

“That’s what they said when I introduced the electron plasma battery,” Allen said. “Everybody was worried that it would knock out the auto industry because it was such a better power source than the internal combustion engine, but it didn’t. What it did was give Detroit another chance to build something that would compete with foreign cars, and it incidentally helped clear up the air across the entire planet. The only people who were hurt were the ones with no faith in human ingenuity who bet against the auto industry in the stock market and lost.”

Carl reddened, and Judy wondered if he was one of those people. He didn’t let it derail his argument, though. He dismissed it with a wave of his hand and said, “You got lucky. This time there’s a lot more at stake.”

He glanced reproachfully at Judy as well. Before Allen could respond, she said, “Don’t look at me that way. There’s careful dissemination and there’s suppression. The military wanted full suppression, and there’s no way I’d go along with that.”

“You don’t know what they wanted,” Carl said.

“Wanna bet?”

Allen said, “Look, you’re both missing the point. Humanity isn’t some homogeneous mass that reacts like this or like that when something happens to it. It’s a bunch of individual people, living individual lives. Trying to manipulate their reactions to something is ridiculous. Worse than ridiculous; it’s fascist.”

“Oh, so now I’m a fascist Luddite?” Carl glanced out the windows, then back at Allen, who turned back to his computer and tapped another instruction into the program that analyzed the data from their previous jumps.

“That’s what it sounds like to me,” he replied.

Carl snorted contemptuously and reached for a handhold to pull himself closer to Allen. “Listen here, mister physicist. I’m probably a bigger proponent of freedom and technology than you are. That’s why this business has me so upset; I can see what’s going to happen to the space program from here on out.”

“Why should you be upset?” Allen asked.

“Because it’s going to die, that’s why! People aren’t going to spend money on space stations and orbiting colonies when they can zip off to Alpha Centauri on a wish and a prayer.”

“Hmmm,” Allen said, scratching his chin. “I never looked at it quite that way, but even so, I really don’t think—”

“That’s the problem! You really don’t think. You’re so hot for glory that you can’t be bothered to consider—”

“Carl.”

He glanced over at Judy, and the look in his eyes made her glad he was clear across the flight deck from her. Still, she didn’t want him around Allen anymore, either.

“I want you to inventory the consumables. We don’t know how long we’re going to be out here, so we need to figure out how long we can stretch it before we run out of food and air.”

Allen turned toward her. “Don’t worry, I’ll get us back before we run out of anything. I’m just about to start the calibration runs.”

“And then how long before we can get back into the right orbit for a rescue mission, and how long before they can send a rescue mission?” Judy asked him. “No, we’re going to start conserving now, while it will do the most good.”

“I—”

“Save it, Allen. Carl, go below and do the inventory.”

Carl looked as if he wanted to protest, but apparently he wasn’t ready to add mutiny to the list of troubles he imagined awaiting him back on Earth. “Aye aye, Captain,” he said sarcastically, but he shoved away from Allen and pulled himself headfirst through the hatchway in the floor.

When he was gone, Allen said, “I meant it; the calibration shouldn’t take more than another couple of hours, and once I’ve done that I could put us back in orbit in no time. Of course, as long as we’re out here, we could just as easily do a grand tour of the planets.”

They could, couldn’t they? See the whole solar system in one mission. Somewhat reluctantly, Judy said, “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

“You too?”

She unbuckled her seatbelt and floated closer to him. “I don’t know what to think. I think Carl’s overreacting, but he does have a point. We may be moving too fast here. It could be too much for people to adapt to all at once.”

“We’ve already demonstrated what we can do,” Allen said. “The question now is whether we take advantage of it ourselves or let someone else.”

“That may be a good enough reason to slow down. Leave something for the next people to do. We don’t want to look greedy.” She looked at his notebook computer Velcroed to the workstation. The lettering was nearly worn off the number keys, and there was a semicircular streak on the screen where he had tried to clean it with a damp cloth. Nothing fancy about it. There were millions of computers just like it all over the world, and from what she’d seen inside the getaway special canister, the parts for the hyperdrive engine wouldn’t be hard to come by, either. It wouldn’t be long at all before someone else tried it.

“How many people did you send the plans to?” she asked. “Everyone in INSANE?”

Allen nodded. “There’s over three hundred of us.”

There would probably have been more if the organization had a different name, Judy thought. Three hundred wasn’t exactly a lot. As she thought about it, she felt the hair on the back of her neck start to tingle.

“You realize every member of the group is going to be a target now?” she asked.

Looking back to his computer, Allen said, “They will be if they don’t forward the email. I mentioned that in my letter. It’s a powerful incentive to share.”

“You’re assuming they get the chance to share,” Judy said.

“It takes about three mouse-clicks,” Allen pointed out.

“You need unbroken fingers to click a mouse.”

He frowned. “What do you mean by—”

“Email is hard to intercept, but snatching three hundred scientists would be a piece of cake. I’ll bet every spy agency and secret police force in the world is trying to do just that. A lot of them probably have plans in place just for this sort of contingency, so their response is going to be about three mouse-clicks away, too.” It seemed farfetched, but if she agreed with Carl about anything, it was that Allen’s hyperdrive was a big enough deal to rattle governments. And when governments got rattled, they usually became ruthless in trying to ensure that they wound up on top.

Allen’s eyes had gone wide. “You—no, that’s impossible. You’re talking about a globally coordinated kidnapping effort, timed to happen before anyone forwards the email. Once it’s out on the internet, it’ll spread like wildfire. Nobody can stop it.”

Judy sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m worried about nothing. When I first realized what we were dealing with, I was afraid we’d be killed before we could get the secret out, but now I’m starting to wonder how many people are going to be killed because of it.”

“Nobody,” Allen said. “The word is spreading as we speak, and it’s spreading way too fast to stop.”

“You hope.”

“I know.”

He turned back to his computer. “I’m ready to test it.”

“You’ve figured out where we are?” Judy squinted out the windshield at the sun. It was a tiny, bright circle against black space.

Allen shrugged. “Close enough. We’re somewhere past Jupiter’s orbit. Jupiter is clear around on the other side of the Sun right now, but that’s how far we are. I think.”

She gave him a sidelong glance. “I thought you were going to do your testing between Earth and Mars.”

He shrugged. “I thought so too, but with the Sun the size it is, we can’t be there. Evidently I miscalculated.”

A shiver ran down Judy’s back. What if he’d miscalculated on something more dangerous, like the diameter of the space warp his engine created, or whether people could live inside its sphere of influence? He could have killed them all the first time he pushed the “Go” button.

He might kill them yet. If something else burned out in the hyperdrive, they could be stranded millions of miles from help, and even if they did manage to make it back to Earth, there was no guarantee they could achieve orbit again. And if they managed that, they still couldn’t land the normal way. Not with the vertical stabilizer vaporized. Discovery would need major repairs before it could ever negotiate the atmosphere again.

Judy dreaded the investigations she would have to endure once—if—they landed. Maybe it was just Carl’s pessimism getting to her, but she was beginning to regret her rash defiance of authority, if only for the inconvenience it would cause her before she could actually use Allen’s device for exploring. But the alternative—letting it become a military secret—felt infinitely worse.

She took a deep breath and said, “Go ahead and do what you have to do.”