by Jerry Oltion
"This isn't going to work," Allen said, "and Stevenson knows it. The government can't keep a lid on this forever. Hell, they can't even put a lid on it. The news is already out there." That was true enough. This particular genie would never fit back into the bottle, no matter how hard they tried. But someone was certainly going through the motions, and they had to have a reason for it. Was it just a knee-jerk reaction to losing control over the situation, or could they actually be accomplishing something?
She thought about it awhile, then said, "Maybe they're just trying to scare as many people as possible into staying home and keeping their heads down."
"The ones who would build their own spaceship aren't the kind to scare easily," Allen pointed out. Judy wondered about that. She was getting plenty scared. But she knew what he meant. "Well, then, maybe they're trying to keep the economic impact to a minimum, or trying to reassure the rest of the world that we're not going nuts over here."
"Or maybe they're trying to keep their tax base from evaporating away." Allen snorted in disgust. "I wouldn't put it past them."
"Whatever their reasoning, you're right: they can't keep the lid on forever." Judy wished she was really as confident as she sounded. She knew intellectually that she was right, but the presence of soldiers in TV studios scared the hell out of her. She'd never seen anything like that before, never even heard of it. Not in America, at least. That, more than anything else that had happened since she'd cast her lot with Allen, made her worry that she had made the wrong decision.
She tried to put it out of her mind and concentrate on what she was doing. Clean off the dirt, check out the air tanks, check the batteries and seals, run the control system diagnostics . . . . She was still at it when the TV station they had been watching cut to an on-the-scene report of a mysterious explosion in Lancaster, California. There was shaky footage of an old two-story house with piles of junk all around it, but the house didn't seem to be the site of the explosion. There was a crowd of people on the street, all looking toward the back yard, where used cars, bits and pieces of airplanes, various appliances, and tons of scrap metal filled every inch of space—except for a circular gap in the middle of the yard.
A reporter stood in the midst of the crowd and said, "Witnesses at the scene describe a single, loud explosion, like a thunderclap, but there were no clouds in the sky.
There was no smoke, and even more puzzling: no debris. Just this peculiar crater." It was hard to get a good shot of it through all the junk until the cameraman climbed onto the top of an old refrigerator and focused on the gap, and then its shape became apparent. It was a perfectly hemispherical bowl about fifteen feet across, defined by the sheared-off edges of the junk piled around it. It extended into the ground only four feet or so; the center of the hemisphere was about three or four feet in the air. The exposed dirt had a shiny, glassy look to it, as if it had been fused by tremendous heat, but there was no sign of heat on any of the junk surrounding it. Instead, the edges looked like they had been sliced with the world's sharpest blade. There was half a washing machine sitting there with its tub and electric motor exposed like a cutaway view in a service diagram, sitting on two railroad ties whose ends looked like they'd been carefully polished over days and days of work.
The reporter said, "The owner of the house cannot be located, but neighbors say he is—or was—a noted eccentric who collected anything he could get his hands on at swap meets, and often combined them in unusual ways." The camera panned into the driveway, where an old Ford Pinto had been refitted with a jet fighter canopy instead of its normal windshield and roof.
Judy looked over at Allen. "That explosion. Air filling a vacuum?"
"That's right," he said. He leaned back in his chair and smiled. "The first explorer is away." 18
The news was full of similar reports over the next couple of days, but that was nearly eclipsed by the backlash over the attempt at censorship. As both Judy and Allen had predicted, the news blackout didn't last long, and when it fell, it was like a sand dike under a tidal wave. Every political organization from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Ku Klux Klan filed class-action suits against the government, and since the conspiracy had struck so close to home, TV and radio stations and newspapers across the country gave the lawsuits prime coverage.
Information about the hyperdrive emerged between the lines, and in second-page sidebars. The story was too technical for the front page, but it provided an excellent source for commentary. Economic and sociological analysts argued about what it would do to everything from world trade to population pressure, while technologists discussed the repercussions for the aerospace and defense industries. Nobody agreed, not even on whether there would be repercussions, but everyone had an opinion. Even Carl Reinhardt had his say. In an interview from the space station, he reiterated his belief that the hyperdrive spelled the end of organized space exploration, but he was practically laughed off the air by Mary Hunter, the station commander. "Are you nuts?" she said. "Launch costs have just dropped from a thousand dollars a pound to something like a penny. Your local high school could put up a space station now! We're going to see more big projects than you can imagine." Carl begged to differ, but the interviewer went on to ask Mary what sort of projects she envisioned, and her description of classrooms in orbit and geology field trips to Mars trumped his message of gloom and doom.
Gerry Vaughn got his moment in the limelight as well, but he fared even worse than Carl. Nobody loves a traitor, and there was no amount of spin he could put on the situation that made him look like anything else. The idea that Russia still had sleeper agents in America caused an uproar almost as big as the censorship issue, and world tension ratcheted up another notch.
The international picture looked just as fractured as the domestic one. Practically every government had tried to stop the spread of the hyperdrive plans, and some were still struggling to contain them, but it was a lost cause and everyone knew it. The true struggle now seemed to be for control of the high ground. If people were going to go into space, then it would be their people who got first pick of the prime real estate, and it would be done in an orderly, government-controlled fashion.
"Yeah, right," Allen said when he heard that. He and Judy were in the garage by then, mounting hardware on their rapidly evolving spaceship and listening to shortwave radio on the multi-band transceiver they had bought for the trip. "Do those idiots have any idea how many planets there are out there? There's something like four hundred billion stars in the Milky Way alone, and the odds are good that most of them have planets. We could have a separate planet for every group who wants one, right down to left-handed theremin players who wear propeller beanies on Tuesdays. Territory is a dead issue."
"What's a theremin?" asked Judy. She was duct-taping a tiny video camera to the end of the plastic tank while Allen fed its data cable through the four-inch-diameter inlet pipe that jutted out of the end. It was part of a home security system: two gimbaled cameras mounted outside where they could swivel around to cover overlapping hemispheres of view, and two monitors inside to display what they saw.
"A theremin is the first electronic musical instrument ever built. It's got an antenna sticking up out of the case, and it generates a tone that rises in pitch the closer your hand gets to the antenna. You wiggle your hand, and it makes a woo-woo-woo kind of sound. Sound engineers use them a lot to make spooky noises in horror movies."
"Oh." Judy had never heard of one, but she supposed it would be just the sort of thing for Allen. Maybe there would even be room enough out there for people to play them without annoying their neighbors, too.
But that wasn't a foregone conclusion. "What if those planets are already inhabited?" she asked. Allen grinned happily. "Then the Universe will be an even more interesting place than we thought." There were footholds molded into the corrugated side of the tank. He used them to climb up and lean in through one of the two manholes on top. They didn't really need two, but the tank had come with th
em, and it was easier to use them both as hatches than to seal one up. The lids themselves would need some reinforcement, but the collars were built like regular street manholes; thick enough to drive over. The plastic barely flexed under Allen's weight, but the tank echoed with his voice as he said, "Could you wiggle the wire so I can figure out which one it is?"
Judy obliged, and a moment later the wire slid in until it was snug against the side of the tank. While Allen hooked it to the security system mounted inside, she ran a strip of duct tape along the exposed length to hold it down. They didn't want anything loose to flap around and break during descent. The parachute would keep their airspeed down once they deployed it, but they could pick up a pretty good velocity in the upper atmosphere beforehand. Not enough for thermal effects to melt anything, but certainly enough to tear loose what wasn't held down.
Judy's skepticism about the tank was fading as she helped turn it into an interstellar spacecraft. It had charmed her right from the start with its color and shape: it was like a bright yellow bread loaf with alternating ridges and grooves running up and down its sides every four inches all the way around. It glowed with a cheery warmth from the safelight they had dangled inside, and when she climbed in and sat on the ribbed bottom, there was plenty of headroom. The domed top gave it the feel of a deep-sea submarine, which only added to the aura of scientific authenticity.
There was a sticker on one of the manholes that made her grin every time she read it: "Use only as a septic tank. Any other use will void warranty."
She wondered who would offer the first spaceship actually designed and warranted for the purpose. One of the airplane companies, like Boeing or McDonnell Douglas? Or would it be the auto manufacturers? Modern cars were already sealed and climate controlled; it wouldn't take much to make them airtight and put carbon dioxide scrubbers in the air-conditioning vents. She laughed at the image of American families taking weekend trips into space in their minivans and SUVs, but it might just come to happen.
Or not. A spaceship didn't have to actually fly anywhere, and it certainly didn't need wheels. Plastic tanks were a heck of a lot easier to mass produce than planes or cars, and a lot cheaper, too. The first interstellar spaceships on the open market could easily be built by unskilled labor in an injection-molding plant.
Too bad. Now that she was actually doing it, Judy had discovered that she enjoyed building her own spaceship. It gave her a sense of hands-on involvement that merely climbing aboard a ready-to-fly shuttle had never provided. She had studied every subsystem on board the shuttle until she could diagram the whole orbiter in her sleep, but even so, she didn't know it like this. She knew the tank with her body, felt the orange-peel roughness of the plastic and the sharp edges of its mold lines in her fingertips, heard its hollow echo resonating in her ears, smelled the vinyl and urethane vapors in her sinuses. She had handled every piece of hardware they had bolted, tied, or taped down, and with every component she added she could sense her own excitement building. Hour by hour, piece by piece, she and Allen drew closer to the moment when they would truly break the bonds of Earth and venture out into the cosmos. Even the most reckless NASA engineer would have gone into shock at the sight of their equipment, but she and Allen had tested every component. It was their lives on the line, after all. They had wrapped the tank itself in quarter-inch steel cable to keep it from expanding and splitting a seam in vacuum, and they had lashed together a separate framework of 4 X 4 posts to help it keep its shape. They had reinforced the thick plastic manhole covers with inch-thick marine plywood and sealed around the edges with heavy silicone rubber. The hatches swung inward rather than outward, so air pressure would hold them closed while in flight. It wouldn't be full atmospheric pressure anyway; they were going to use pure oxygen from a welding bottle and keep it at five pounds per square inch instead of fifteen. They had threaded a pair of simple water faucets into the septic tank's side—with the handles and spouts pointing inward—to serve as pressure relief valves if they had to vent the tank to space or equalize pressure on the ground. They would also be wearing spacesuits in case the tank didn't hold, but after seeing how tough it was, Judy doubted the suits would be necessary.
The biggest danger was going to be on landing. They would be falling straight into the atmosphere from rest, rather than angling into it at just under orbital velocity like the shuttle did, but they were still going to be moving pretty fast when they deployed the parachute. The jerk when it snapped open could rip the mount right off the top, or buckle the floor if they wrapped the shroud lines all the way around. A bungee would solve the impact problem, but too much rebound would throw them right back up into the canopy, where they would tangle with the shroud lines and collapse the 'chute. Allen had come up with a tie-down system using a web made out of wide nylon cargo straps and twelve inches of loam-core insulation on the bottom of the tank. The straps would provide a little bit of stretch on their own, but the insulation would absorb most of the shock by crushing under the straps'
pressure. The deceleration would still be fierce, but it wouldn't be instantaneous, and the foam insulation that hadn't been crushed by the parachute opening would serve as a shock absorber again when they hit the ground.
A week ago Judy would never have believed that she'd be trusting her life to such a contraption, but here she stood in Trent and Donna's garage, happily putting the final touches on it and looking forward to the moment when they could test it out.
That wouldn't be long. Another two days at the outside. They were almost done with the video system; after that they only needed to mount the hyperdrive, load their supplies, and go. They had already installed and charged the batteries, found a used laptop computer to use as a jump controller, and tested the software on it.
Allen was building a spare hyperdrive just in case, and another pair for Trent and Donna. Their hosts were taking notes as the first starship neared completion, asking tons of questions and even offering the occasional suggestion when they figured out something ahead of Allen or Judy. It was Donna who pointed out that seats weren't worth the trouble in such cramped quarters, especially when mounting them could put enough stress on the tank to break it during the impact of landing. She had a much better suggestion: beanbag chairs. They would conform to practically any shape, even a spacesuit with a backpack life-support system attached, and they would provide much a better cushion during landing than a conventional acceleration couch. They could also be used for stuff sacks for anything soft. All a person had to do was remove an equal volume of filler and they had ready-made storage space for sleeping bags, pillows, extra clothing—even toilet paper.
So now the inside of the starship held a bright red bean-bag at one end and a bright green one at the other, both duct-taped to the floor and sporting seatbelts made from bungee cords and more duct tape. They weren't elegant, but Judy had to admit that they were far more comfortable than the shuttle seats; especially the little fold-up guys that the payload specialists and the mission specialists had to sit in on launch and landing.
They were going to have to do without ultralight airplanes, at least for their first foray. They had been unable to track down even a single plane that could be folded into a compact enough package to carry along, much less two of them. They could probably have done better if the internet hadn't been so bogged down with the government-introduced "virus-alert" virus, but it was practically impossible to get beyond the local node.
It didn't really matter to Judy. Traveling to a planet circling another star would be accomplishment enough; she didn't really have to fly another dozen miles once she got there just to say she was exploring. They could always pop back into space and drop to the ground again if they wanted to move to another location. Not the most efficient way to travel, perhaps, but it would work. Besides, if they really needed an airplane they could come back in a few weeks, after the chaos had died down, and try it again if they wanted to.
Provided it did die down. Judy wasn't convinced it was goi
ng to any time soon, especially not for her and Allen. The various governments of the world seemed determined to make the worst of Allen's gift, and they were still looking for him so they could trot him out for people to throw stones at. They hadn't done a house-to-house search of Rock Springs yet, but Judy suspected that was only because most of the people in those houses were armed rednecks who wouldn't take kindly to the invasion of their privacy.
It would be a long time before she and Allen could show their faces in public again. The best thing they could do would be to find a tropical paradise somewhere and hang out for a few months, and that was just what Judy intended to do, just as soon as they finished building their starship. 19
They were only a few hours short of being ready when their luck ran out. It was Saturday afternoon, and Trent was helping them drag their completed starship out into the back yard, where they intended to winch it up off the ground from a thick branch of the Chinese elm tree so they wouldn't take a spaceship-sized divot out of the lawn when they made the big jump. Allen had mounted the hyperdrive engine in the middle of the tank and tightened its jump field to minimize the amount of volume it enclosed, but it was still a spherical field. It would dig a pretty good hole if they didn't raise the tank in the air first. The sun was shining out of a clear blue sky, and the temperature had risen to nearly fifty degrees. Everyone was laughing and joking as they inched Allen and Judy's ungainly vehicle across the cement driveway, skidding it carefully on waxed 2 X 4s to avoid tearing up the thick pad of loam insulation strapped to the bottom. The yellow plastic shone brightly in the sunlight, and Judy felt lighter than she had in days. The country might be going to hell in a hand-basket, but she was going to Alpha Centauri. In a septic tank, to be sure, but still.
They had christened it that morning, and painted its name on the side in big, flowing black letters that followed the four-inch corrugations in and out: Getaway Special. Allen had suggested the name, and Judy had laughed at first, but when she realized he was serious she went along with it. Like the ship itself, the name was as functional as it was inelegant.
