by Jerry Oltion
A small plane flew over at a couple thousand feet. Nobody paid it any attention, not even when it banked around and circled the neighborhood. Judy just figured it was somebody out for a weekend flight, the pilot probably showing his passengers what their house looked like from the air. Not until Donna came out of the house with the cordless phone in her hand and a puzzled frown on her face did she think anything might be wrong.
"Someone named Dale is calling for you," she said to Allen.
Judy stopped pushing against the tank and looked up at him. "Dale? How did he know where to call?"
Allen looked just as puzzled as Donna. "Don't ask me. I didn't give him the number." He took the phone from Donna and said, "Hello, Dale? How did you—what? How? How do you know that? Oh. They got what? But that still shouldn't— Hello? Hello?"
He lowered the phone. "He hung up. But he says the Feds are onto us. They broke through the security on the credit card charge and traced it back to him, and when he went online to get his email just now, they hacked into his computer and got the list of supplies he bought for us." He handed the phone back to Donna.
"And here we are pushing a bright yellow septic tank out into the yard," Judy said, looking up at the airplane, which had just banked around for another pass.
Trent followed her gaze. "Time to go," he said.
"We're in the middle of your driveway," she pointed out.
"You're going to be in the middle of a maximum security cell in about ten minutes. Screw the driveway. Just go."
"But we don't have the food loaded! And we need to prebreathe oxygen for at least an hour before we put on the suits. We can't just—"
Trent turned to Donna. "Get some food. I don't care what; just throw it in there. You two, get in the tank. You pressure-tested it to twenty psi; you'll just have to keep it at full pressure until you can get the nitrogen out of your systems." He moved off toward his pickup, parked at the head of the driveway, then stopped when he realized nobody had moved. "Do it!" he shouted. "There's no other choice!" There didn't seem to be. Judy slapped Allen on the butt and said, "He's right. Get in." Allen blinked a few times, looked up at the airplane, then back at Trent. "What about you guys?" he said. "We can't just leave you here to face the cops by yourselves."
"I've faced cops before," Trent said. "They got nothin' on us. Once you're gone, they'll leave us alone, or they'll wish they had. Now go!" He ran off toward his pickup. Judy climbed up the side of the tank and dropped in through one of the manholes. A moment later, Allen, still protesting, climbed through the other. The hyperdrive in the getaway special canister filled the space between them in the center of the tank, and the spare drive, built into a five-gallon PVC bucket, shared the space below it with their oxygen tank. The video monitors mounted side by side at one end of the hyperdrive took up more space, leaving only a window-sized gap to see each other through, and their spacesuits and beanbag crash couches filled up what little room there was at their feet. Trent leaned in right after Allen and handed over a short-barreled revolver and a box of ammunition, evidently recovered from the glove box of his truck. "Here," he said. "They'll just take this away from me anyway, and you might need it where you're going."
"A gun?" Judy asked. "We don't need a—"
"You'll think different if the planet you land on's got tigers or something on it. Just take it." He dropped it in Judy's lap, and a moment later he started tossing in food. Boxes of macaroni and cheese, sacks of apples and potatoes, and cans of soup and beans rained down on them, bouncing off the hyperdrive and the monitors and the beanbag chairs and rolling to the sides of the tank. There was no space to put anything; the engines and the spacesuits and the beanbags took up practically all the room.
"Wait!" Judy shouted. "Hold up a sec—ow!"
"Sorry. Watch your head; six-pack of Bud coming through."
"We don't need—"
"Sure you do." He lowered it gently and she set it aside, then reached for the next item, but there wasn't any more. Trent took her hands in his and said, "Good luck. We'll see you in Orion or somewhere."
"Not Orion!" Judy said. "That's all hot new stars, and there won't be any planets. Go for—"
"I know, I know. I've got the list you gave us. And the starmap program for the computer. We'll be fine."
He grasped Allen's hand, then helped Donna up to say goodbye as well. She looked a little shell-shocked, but Judy imagined she looked just as bad. "Thanks for everything," she said. "You're the best people I've ever met."
Donna blushed and said, "Oh, now, we didn't—" but Trent called out, "Cop cars down the street. Seal 'er up and go!"
Donna flew backward with a startled "Oh!" as he lifted her off the side of the tank.
"We're clear!" he hollered. "Go!"
They could hear tires squealing as cars pulled to a stop in the street. Doors slammed, and loud voices shouted, "Get your hands up! Step away from the septic tank." Judy slammed the hatch above her head and snapped the latch in place. It was a spring-loaded gate latch; it would provide just enough pressure to hold the hatch closed until air pressure took over the job. Allen was already busy powering up the hyperdrive and entering the first set of coordinates, so she closed and dogged his hatch, too. They could still hear voices outside, but they couldn't hear what anyone was saying.
"Diagnostics look good," Allen said. "Ready?"
"I'm not even strapped in! And there's loose stuff scattered all over. We can't launch like this!"
"We're going to have to. Hang on. Jump in five, four, three, two, one." He pushed the "Enter" key. Weight ceased all at once. The tank creaked ominously, then fell silent. All the food rose up off the floor, along with the spacesuit helmets, the gun and ammunition, and half a dozen other things that they had thought were tied down.
The light grew brighter on Judy's left, but the wall on her right lost its glow. There was no atmosphere outside to scatter sunlight anymore; it was all coming directly from the source. Judy's heart was pounding worse than it had during her first shuttle launch. "I'm . . . going to lower the pressure to ten psi," she said. They could drop that much without risking the bends, and it would relieve the stress on the tank by a third. She opened the faucet on her end of the tank and listened to the sucking noise as air rushed out, keeping her eye on the altimeter taped to the wall beside it and swallowing to equalize the pressure in her ears all the while. The gauge was just a simple hiker's barometer that Donna had bought for them at the mall, but it read in thousands of feet and inches of mercury. When the needle hit 10,000 feet—20 inches of mercury—she closed the stopcock and said,
"Okay, that should be good for now. We'll give it a little time at this altitude before we drop it again. In the meantime, let's get these suits on."
"The walls will hold," Allen said, but Judy pointed to the two security monitors, where the outside cameras showed the hemisphere of ground that they'd brought with them spewing out clods of dirt and rock in a slow motion explosion. The water in the soil was boiling in the vacuum.
"Uh . . . okay," he said. He helped her into her suit, and she did the same for him, as much as they could, anyway, through the tiny opening between the halves of the tank. They kicked floating food every which way, but Allen closed the lid on the computer so they couldn't accidentally trigger another jump and they ignored the drifting debris until they were both suited up. They left their helmets off, and Allen left his gloves off so he could use the computer easier, but they kept them ready to snatch up and put on at a moment's notice. Allen had taped a pencil-style eraser to the side of the index finger on his right glove so he could still press a key at a time, but it was clumsy enough that he didn't want to use it unless he had to.
The pressure relief valves were mounted at opposite ends of the tank, but not aligned along its axis. They were both aimed out the side, and the same side at that, so escaping air would act like a small rocket and send them into a slow spin. They had planned for that; it would help keep the temperature even on all sides.
Judy could hear something bumping into the walls, and she assumed at first that it was the food slowly coming to rest as centrifugal force pushed it outward, but a quick look at the external monitors revealed the true cause: The boiling dirt was pushing rocks away in all directions, and some of them were striking the tank.
She swallowed and forced herself to breathe. It wasn't dangerous. The disk of concrete that they'd cut out of the driveway might have been if it had been moving faster, but it had already bumped into them and was now drifting away into space, its mirror-smooth edges reflecting sunlight as it tumbled. There was a length of pipe that might have caused trouble if it had been aimed at them, but the jet of steam spewing out of both ends had set it spinning away as well.
"I think we cut their water line," Judy said.
Allen peered closely at the screen. "I hope that was just a water line. If it was a gas line, there could be some excitement going on down there."
"I imagine there's some excitement anyway," Judy said. "I hope they don't wind up in too much trouble over this."
"Me too."
She looked at the monitors as they tumbled, hoping for a glimpse of Earth, but if Allen had used their pre-calculated initial jump coordinates then they were two light-minutes away. Earth would be just a bright dot from here. They could find it with the computer's starmap program and the video signal from the outside cameras, running a difference check to find the "stars" that weren't in the database, but there was no point in it. There was nothing they could do to help Trent and Donna now. The Sun swept through the field of view, and the camera automatically irised down to keep from burning out. It was a far cry from the first TV cameras that had gone to the Moon; those could be permanently damaged by just a second's exposure to direct sunlight. The Apollo 12 astronauts had learned that the hard way. These were designed for automated security systems; they could sweep back and forth across the sun all day and not be damaged.
The food was still drifting everywhere. Judy unzipped her beanbag chair and pulled her sleeping bag out of it, then began sweeping all the loose items into the bag. It made a fairly convincing mummy when she was done. She tied it to the bottom of the tank beside her somewhat-floppier-than-before beanbag, then looked outside again.
Nothing remained of the hemisphere of dirt but a rapidly expanding fog of particles and the flat disk of concrete. The septic tank wouldn't look much different if the walls blew: a little scrap of hard plastic amid a field of debris.
Judy's pulse rate was still bordering on tachycardia, and her breath was coming short. Had she miscalculated with the altimeter? She checked, but the needle was rock steady at 10,000 feet. No leaks, then, either. They couldn't be running out of oxygen yet; they'd only been in space a couple of minutes. She took a deep breath to calm down. They hadn't blown up yet. They were in a homemade spaceship way the hell and gone out into space, but they were okay.
Allen had opened up the computer again and was letting the sky comparator program collect enough data to calculate their rotation rate. The navigation software would correct for it, but it needed to learn the parameters so it would know when to trigger the jump. Otherwise they could wind up light-years from where they intended to go.
This wasn't quite how Judy had envisioned the beginning of their maiden voyage, but she had to admit that aside from their precipitous departure, things were going pretty much according to plan. A sudden thought made her laugh, and Allen said, "What?"
"I just realized, if we hadn't insisted on paying Dale back, we would have gotten away without a hitch."
He snorted. "Mom always said my morals would get me in trouble." The computer beeped. He studied its display for a moment, then said, "We've got a lock. We can make our interstellar jump any time. Shall we try something simple first, like Alpha Centauri?" 20
His words sent a shiver of anticipation down her spine. Alpha Centauri. The closest star to the Sun, and the most similar star within telescope range. The two had almost certainly coalesced from the same gas cloud billions of years ago, and had stayed gravitationally bound ever since. From the time she was old enough to read, Judy had been fascinated by the idea of a companion star, and she had dreamed of someday going there to see if the system held a planet like Earth, too. There could be more than one. Alpha Centauri was a double star, the Sunlike primary circled by a smaller orange companion in an elliptical orbit that never came closer than Saturn came to the Sun. They were far enough apart for planets to have settled into stable orbits around both stars, though astronomers still debated whether planets could have formed there in the first place. Judy had always imagined that she would be an old woman before she got the chance to answer that question firsthand, if she ever did, but here she was just minutes away from fulfilling that dream. Or dying in the attempt. None of the people who had left silvery craters in the ground over the last few days had returned to report on their travels. There could be as many reasons for that as there were explorers, but it could be possible that the hyperdrive was dangerous over long distances. Judy could be closer to answering a religious question than an astronomical one.
She swallowed. Took a deep breath. Nodded. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained." Allen grinned. "That's right. Here goes."
He pushed the "Enter" key. There was no radio pulse like there'd been on the shuttle. There was no point in it; the signal would take years to catch up to them through normal space. Allen had wired an ammeter in series with the batteries so he could tell how much current the drive was drawing, but Judy kept her eyes on the video monitors. Nothing happened for a few seconds; the computer was waiting for the right moment. Then she felt the by-now-familiar instant of disorientation, no worse than any of the previous jumps, and the light from outside went out like a switch had been thrown. Allen reached up and switched on the overhead lights: two industrial-strength flashlights shining into frosted plastic bags. "We're there," he said.
The stars hadn't even flickered. "Are you sure?" she asked. "Nothing changed."
"We only jumped four light-years. It'll take a lot more than that to shift the stellar background in any random patch of sky." He called up the comparator program again and let it crunch on the signal from the cameras.
Only four light-years. Merely a hundred million times the distance from Earth to the Moon, nine billion times the width of the United States; it was impossible to grasp the magnitude of that distance, yet the stars had hardly changed.
Except the Sun. It was so far away now that Judy couldn't even pick it out among all the others. There was a bright one in Gemini that she didn't remember being there before, but that couldn't be Sol; not if the hyperdrive had taken them the direction they had intended. Sol should be in Cassiopeia from here.
But there was definitely a new star in Gemini, just inside the left knee. "Is that Alpha Centauri?" she asked, pointing.
Allen slid his finger across the touchpad until the arrow pointed at the star, then read the identification at the bottom of the screen. "Nope, that's Procyon. But how about that third head?" Sure enough, there was another star where there shouldn't have been one. It was even brighter than Procyon, and just to the left of the two head stars, Castor and Pollux. If it had been visible there from Earth, the constellation would have been called "Trimini."
Allen aimed the pointer at it and waited for the computer to figure out what it was. It took a second, but when the answer flashed on the screen, he said, "Bingo. Alpha Centauri B. The little brother. If we're close enough to see that, we're very close to where we want to be." A few seconds later the computer confirmed his assessment. It beeped for attention and drew a shimmering circle around another bright star in an otherwise blank patch of sky nearby. "Alpha Centauri A," Allen said. "Just a second while I transfer the data . . . okay, we've got a lock. Triangulating on A, B, and Procyon, gives us . . . ten light-hours. About twice the distance from Pluto to the Sun. Not bad for a first shot, eh?"
"Pretty good," Judy admitted. Her neck muscles loosened up a bit at the realization
that they knew where they were.
He tapped at the keyboard for a few seconds. "Okay, I've set it to jump to three AU out. We should be able to spot planets pretty easily from there."
"How was the current drain on that last jump?" she asked. She didn't want to burn out the hyperdrive by jumping too often like they had done on the shuttle.
"Fine. Distance really doesn't seem to matter. And those heat sinks I put on the voltage regulator should let us jump all we want now."
"Okay, then, let's go for it." She gripped the sides of her beanbag chair, even though she knew there wouldn't be any disturbance. She just needed something to hold on to.
Allen hit the "Enter" key, and in the next instant the walls of the tank glowed again with familiar yellow light. Judy looked at the monitor and saw the bright solar disk slide past as the tank's slow rotation swept the camera across the star. They were there.
She bent forward across the getaway special canister and gave Allen a clumsy kiss. He looked a bit startled at first, then he warmed to the idea.
"Thank you," she said.
He blushed. "I don't think anyone's ever thanked me for kissing them before." She stuck out her tongue at him. "I'm thanking you for bringing me here. It's one of my biggest dreams come true. But thanks for the kiss, too."
"Any time."
She stretched out for a more serious one, but the motion opened the way for her intestines to vent the gas that had been building up ever since she had lowered the air pressure in the tank. The fart was audible even inside her spacesuit, and the smell that came boiling out of the neck ring killed the mood faster than garlic breath.
"Gack! Sorry." She felt herself overheat with embarrassment.
Allen's response was not what she expected. He sighed in obvious relief and let loose his own back pressure, fanning the air in front of his face with his hands. "Thank god," he said. "I was about to explode."
