The getaway special

by Jerry Oltion

  The main parachute opened with a bone-jarring snap. The capsule had been traveling nearly parallel to the ground; there was a moment of freefall as it swung around like a pendulum to hang downward instead, and a sickening few seconds of oscillation before Judy used the attitude jets to stop their swing. The jet made a loud hiss in the air, but when it cut off, the capsule was nearly silent. Is . . . is it always like that? Allen asked. She still had to read his lips. Even though there was air around them again, his voice didn't make it through his helmet.

  She tried not to let her laugh become hysterical. "Are you kidding?" she replied when she could breathe again. "I was sure the whole way down that Gerry was telling the truth." She loosened her harness and leaned over to look out the hatch. The ground was still a couple miles below them. Judy could see another lake to the west, with some green that might have been scrub pine on the hills around it, but when she looked straight down she saw a whole lot of badlands and not much else. Snow covered the low ground and drifted in the lee of anything tall enough to provide a windbreak, but there was plenty of reddish-brown dirt sticking through.

  "Well, we don't have to worry about hitting anybody," she said, straightening up and tightening the straps again.

  They swayed slightly as the capsule descended through the different layers of air over the high desert. The parachute was oversized, designed to bring them in slowly so they would survive a landing on solid ground. Judy kept reminding herself that the Russians had done it that way for years, but as the horizon crept upward into view outside, she thought for a moment she could see the face of her father in its outline, then when she blinked she saw her mother in the clouds.

  My god, she thought, your life really does flash before your eyes.

  Then the capsule slammed into the ground, tipped over backward, and rolled, clanging against rocks and kicking dirt and snow inside the hatch. Judy saw sky, then ground, then sky again, then a sagebrush jammed momentarily through the opening, then finally, after about three complete revolutions, the capsule came to rest with the hatch pointing up into the air.

  "You okay?" Judy asked. She dangled sideways, only her harness keeping her from falling on Allen. I think so, he replied, his helmet still muffling his voice.

  Judy realized it wasn't just her harness that was squeezing her. Atmospheric pressure was pressing her spacesuit tight against her body as well. She shut off her oxygen flow and opened the equalization valve, then reached up to her helmet, twisted it sideways, and slid it off. She took a cautious sniff. The air was cold, and stank of scorched metal, carbon composites, and sagebrush. After days of canned air on board the shuttle, it smelled wonderful.

  Allen was lying on his side on what was now the floor. He had to struggle to get his hands free so he could pop his own helmet off, but even then he was having trouble. Judy loosened her straps so she could help him, and together they managed to lift the bubble from his head.

  "This reminds me of a car wreck I had once," he said.

  "That's encouraging," she muttered. She released her harness completely, bracing herself against the control panel, then climbed up on the seat backs and stuck her head and shoulders outside, wiggling sideways to get the life-support backpack past the hatch frame. It had been easier in zero-gee. The capsule had come to rest on a sagebrush-covered hillside. The ground between plants—and there was a lot of open space—was reddish dirt, scattered with rocks and covered spottily with snow.

  "It looks like we went to Mars after all," she said.

  "What?"

  "Never mind."

  She hoisted herself out and slid down around the capsule's curved side to stand in the dirt. The snow immediately around the capsule had melted, and little puffs of steam still rose from beneath the hot metal to blow away immediately in the breeze. Judy was glad for the snow; if they'd landed in the summer they might have started a fire. As it was, the capsule had gotten plenty hot. Soot streaked its sides, and the rivet heads holding it together had actually begun to melt. It was already cooling, though, with the air blowing onto it from the snowbanks.

  The parachute had tangled in the sagebrush. Good thing it had; there was enough wind for it to drag the capsule for miles if it hadn't. But now it was a huge orange-and-white target for anyone flying over. That was no doubt the designers' intent, but it was the last thing Judy wanted. She gathered it up while Allen tossed their helmets out through the hatch, then hoisted the getaway special canister up for her to take. The capsule teetered precariously when he stood up, so Judy wadded the 'chute between it and the ground to steady it, then took the canister from him and lowered it to the ground.

  "Is this the valuable one?" she asked, "or did we go to all that trouble just to save the radio beacon?"

  "I don't know," Allen said. He slid to the ground, then unscrewed the canister's top. Judy looked over his shoulders and was relieved to see the same nest of wires and circuitry that she'd seen inside the shuttle when he'd had to fix it.

  "We've got the right half," Allen said.

  "Good. I think. On the other hand, if we're going to get caught, I'd just as soon they don't find that." Allen said, "Let's try not to get caught." He looked at the blackened capsule. "I wonder if we can camouflage this thing." He tried breaking off one of the sagebrush stems, but the gnarled wood refused to give, even when he twisted it round and round like an apple stem.

  "Wait a second," Judy said. "The parachute." She pulled it back out from under the capsule and shook it out.

  The orange and white stripes were three feet wide. She and Allen had to fold it in layers so only the white showed, but they had plenty of material to work with, and plenty of shroud lines to tie it down. When they had finished, the descent module was just a white lump in a vast red-and-white desert.

  "Now what?" Allen said. He turned once around, scanning the horizon, but there was little more to see in the distance than at their feet. Sagebrush, rock, dirt, and snow went on in every direction. Presumably it did, anyway; the hillside they had landed on blocked their view to the north. At least Judy thought it was north; her direction sense was usually pretty good. If it was, then the sun was just a little west of south, so they still had a few hours of light. Not too many, though; the sun set early in the winter in Utah. Or had they gone all the way into Colorado?

  "Let's climb up to the top and see if we can see any sign of civilization," she said. 10

  It was slow going in their spacesuits, with the bulky arms and legs restricting their motion and the weight— especially the life-support backpack—throwing them off balance, but they needed the insulation. They would when they stopped exerting themselves, anyway; as it was they were panting and sweating when they reached the top, Judy carrying both helmets while Allen carried the hyperdrive engine. They hadn't been in space long enough to lose much muscle or bone mass, for which Judy was grateful; after a long flight she was sometimes exhausted just climbing a set of stairs. She had expected to see just more sagebrush and snow from the top of the hill, and that was nearly all they did see, but a couple miles to the north there was a straight line that might have been a fence or a road. It was hard to tell from this distance, but it was something artificial, anyway. The only other straight line, and it really wasn't that straight, was the pair of footprints leading from the capsule to the top of the hill. Judy wondered how long it would be before somebody spotted it, and them. She looked up in the sky, but she only saw two contrails, and they were way too high to be search planes.

  "Man, that's the bluest sky I've ever seen," she said.

  Allen had set the canister on the ground. "We must be pretty high up," he said, panting a bit from the exertion. "The sky gets darker with altitude."

  Judy almost told him she knew that already, but bit her tongue. No sense annoying him. But why was it, she wondered, that scientists all figured only they knew why the sky was blue?

  She pointed at the line in the distance. "We might as well try for that." He nodded tiredly. "I guess." He picked up
the canister and they trudged down the north face of the hill.

  They spotted the first search plane about half an hour later. They'd been keeping to low ground whenever they could, finding that their oversize boots made walking in snow much easier than climbing up and over the hills, so they heard the sound long before they saw the black arrow in the sky.

  "Fighter plane," Judy said the moment she heard it. The tearing-fabric sound of its engines practically screamed "military" at her. "Find a big patch of snow and lay down in it."

  " Lie down," Allen said automatically, but he was already moving to obey. He set the canister in a drift in the lee of a waist-high sagebrush, scooped snow over it, then fell forward in the same drift and wiggled down into it. Judy was amazed at how quickly he disappeared from sight; his white spacesuit blended in perfectly.

  Except for his butt. The fabric where he'd slid down over the scorched side of the descent module had been smeared with soot. Judy threw a couple more handfuls of snow over it, then sat backward in another drift a few feet away. She lay on her back and scraped snow up over the control panel on her chest with her arms, feeling a little like a child making a snow angel. The plane roared past a couple miles to the south, heading west. Judy got just a brief glance of it as it flashed across her field of vision: a wedge-shaped dart, throttled down to just above stall speed, but still moving fast. Not the best search plane, but the Air Force had evidently scrambled whatever they had ready to fly. She waited for it to turn around and circle them, or the capsule, but it kept on going. When its engine noise had faded below the level of the wind through the sagebrush, she stood up and helped Allen to his feet again. "One down," she said.

  Allen brushed the snow off his spacesuit. "How many more do you suppose there'll be?" he asked. Judy looked at the sky, once again empty except for the high contrails, and shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine."

  The line they'd seen from the hilltop turned out to be a gravel road. It hadn't been plowed, but a single set of tire tracks broke through the foot-high snowdrifts that crossed it at a thirty-degree angle. More blowing snow had nearly filled them in; Judy guessed they were half a day old at least.

  "I wonder which way they were going," she said, bending down to see if she could find any clues in the tread pattern, but the inch-wide ridges angled one way on one side of the tracks and the other way on the other.

  Allen set the getaway special canister on end in the gravel and sat down heavily on it. His breath came in great wheezing gulps, and a vein on his forehead pulsed way too last.

  "Hey, are you all right?" Judy asked, kneeling down beside him.

  "Fine," he said. "I'm just . . . in terrible shape. Too much . . . time in the lab."

  "Yeah, well this will take a few pounds off, that's for sure." Allen didn't speak for a few minutes. When he did, his voice was closer to normal. "We're going to be running out of daylight pretty soon. I wonder if we should start thinking about shelter." Judy had never considered the possibility that they would last until dark without finding someone or being found, but it was beginning to look like they might. The sun was quite a bit lower in the sky now, and though a few more planes had passed over high in the sky, all but one had looked like commercial flights. The odd one had been another military jet, also flying a straight east-west swath, but it had been far to the north. Judy wondered why there weren't more of them, but she supposed a couple dozen planes could be out there searching and still not cover a tenth of the possible ground track. These badlands were big.

  So should they make an igloo or something? The wind had picked up, and it felt colder, too. Judy was glad for the snoopy hat, the communications carrier that held the microphone and headset for the radio, but she knew she would have to put the helmet back on eventually if it got much colder. And if they had to do that . . .

  "I don't think it matters much. These suits will insulate us from practically anything, and we can seal them up for another five hours or so if we have to. I think we'd be better off walking."

  "I was afraid you'd say that. Which direction?"

  Judy looked both ways down the road. She could only see about a mile to the west before it dropped behind another hill, but she didn't need to see that way to know what was out there. She'd seen it from the air, and there was nothing for a long ways. It didn't look much better to the east, but she could only see five or six miles that way.

  "East," she said.

  Allen stood up, groaning, slung the canister over his shoulder, and said, "Let's get moving, then. The sooner we find someone, the sooner I can get out of this damned spacesuit." They had only walked another mile or so when they heard the whine of a motor ahead of them. This one was on the ground, and electric by the sound of it. The crunch of gravel beneath the tires was almost as loud as the motor. Judy took a step toward the side of the road, half expecting it to be a military jeep, but as it drew closer she saw a regular civilian pickup truck. Well, not so regular; it had been jacked up until the undercarriage sat nearly level with the tops of its oversize tires. It was painted deep red, and sported a chrome bumper with a winch on the front, chrome wheels, chrome footsteps, and a chrome roll bar behind the cab—bristling with chrome spotlights. All six lights had yellow smiley-face covers over their lenses.

  Judy considered jumping into the barrow ditch and hiding, but this was the only sign of life on the ground they'd seen all day, and she was getting tired and hungry. They were just going to have to take their chances with the locals.

  She stayed put in the middle of the road and waved her arms. The pickup rolled toward her, crashing through the snowbanks and swerving with each blow until it looked like the driver might careen right into her, but he finally noticed the white-suited astronauts and stamped on the brakes. The truck slid to a stop sideways in the road about twenty feet away from them, and the driver—a heavily bearded cowboy, by the looks of his black, potato-chip-shaped hat—stared in open-mouthed wonder at the sight before him.

  Judy couldn't resist. She marched up to the pickup, her spacesuit creaking in the cold air, and waited until the cowboy rolled down his window.

  "Take me to your leader," she said.

  11

  His name was Trent. It turned out there was a passenger in the truck, too, a blonde, thin, heavily made-up girl named Donna, but she'd been sitting so close to Trent she hadn't been visible from outside. Judy wondered if they were on a date or if they were married, but she didn't think it would be polite to ask.

  And Trent and Donna were nothing if not polite. After Trent's initial startled exclamation, "Where the heck did you come from?" and Judy's explanation that they had made an emergency re-entry from the space station, he had offered them a ride to town, treating them like any other random hitchhikers. Squeezing four people in the cab would have been impossible with two of them wearing spacesuits, so they took them off and stashed them in back, along with the getaway special canister, under a black vinyl cover that stretched drum-tight with more snaps around the edge than a satellites thermal shroud. Now, wearing just their spandex liners, crisscrossed with the cooling and ventilation tubes, Judy and Allen sat in the cab and held their hands out toward the heater coils while Trent drove. They covered the same distance Judy and Allen had walked in just a couple of minutes, and continued on westward. Okay, Judy thought, so she'd guessed wrong. It wouldn't have mattered. As they drove, she realized they could have walked for days in either direction at the rate they'd been going and never have reached anything.

  The pickup shook its passengers almost as badly as the descent module. Rather than plow straight through the snowdrifts, its wide tires rode up over them, then rebounded off the road when they came down the other side, magnifying every bump and making Trent struggle for control every fifty feet or so. The laser-sighted rifle in the gun rack behind their heads rattled against the back window and threatened to fall free with every jolt, making Judy fear for a head injury from behind as well as from the front. To keep her mind off the imminent crash,
she asked as nonchalantly as she could while bracing herself on the dashboard, "So what town are we heading for?"

  "Rock Springs," Trent said, then when he realized that didn't mean anything to her he added, helpfully, "Wyoming."

  "Ah," Judy said, trying to decide whether that was good or bad. Was this Rock Springs big enough to hide a couple of astronauts in, or would they stick out like polar bears in a tar pit?

  Whatever its size, it had to be better than standing out in the sagebrush with the sun going down. Allen had been burning to say something ever since they saw the truck. He'd resisted for a couple of miles, but after maybe the hundredth time they surged over a snowdrift, then bounced two or three more times on the fat balloon tires, he could contain himself no longer. "You know," he said, "narrow tires are actually better in snow."

  Trent thought about that for a bit, then said, "Depends on what you call 'better.' Smoother ride, I'll grant you. But we didn't come out here for a smooth ride." He grinned.

  "Why did you come out here?"

  Trent glanced to Donna, who was leaning against his side as if glued there, then said, "Oh, just a little four-wheeling."

  "Ah."

  They rode in silence for a minute or so. Trent had obviously been burning with barely suppressed questions himself ever since he'd seen them, but he'd been minding his own business admirably. Allen's unsolicited advice had broken the unspoken compact, though, and finally he asked, "So, what kind of emergency did you have up there on the space station, anyway?"

  Judy had been trying to decide how much to tell him. She looked to Allen, who shrugged and said,