by Jerry Oltion
Waiting while gravity slowed them down was the hardest part of the whole trip. They tried calling on the radio for anyone who might be listening, but they got no response. They checked in every nook and cranny for loose food or equipment and made sure everything was tied down, and they pulled themselves down into their beanbag chairs and scooched around to make formfitting cradles to cushion the impact of landing, but when they had done everything they could think of to prepare, they still had twenty minutes to go.
How long had they been in space? It seemed like days, but when Judy checked her watch she saw that it had only been a couple of hours. That was long enough, considering the stress they'd been under. Maybe the light-headedness had a more mundane cause.
"How about some lunch?" she asked.
"I couldn't eat if I had to," Allen said.
Neither could she, but they needed something in their stomachs. She unzipped her sleeping bag and rummaged around through the canned goods until she came up with a sack of red delicious apples, took two of them out of the sack, and handed one to Allen.
He laughed when he took it from her outstretched hand. "Is this fraught with metaphorical significance, or what?"
"What? Oh. Garden of Eden. Well, we can always hope." She took a big bite. It was a fresh, crisp apple, sweet and full of juice. She had to chase a couple of drops with her tongue before they drifted away.
They crunched their way down to the cores, then Judy had to find a bag to hold the remains. The computer beeped for attention while she was doing that, and Allen said, "We're ready. Hang on; I'm going to put us back where we were and see if we need to tweak our vector any more." Judy stuffed the cores back in the same bag with the whole apples, zipped them into the sleeping bag again, and straightened up to see the sunlit planet on the monitors. It didn't seem to be moving, except through their own rotation, but they were still a couple thousand kilometers away.
"Take us closer," Judy said.
The planet swelled in the monitors, then drifted off to the side, but she couldn't tell if that was rotation or linear velocity. "Let's kill our spin," she said. They were going counterclockwise as seen from above; that meant she needed to blast a few seconds of air from her side. She did that, then a little more when it didn't seem to be enough, and finally the planet stayed put. It was cocked at an angle—or rather they were cocked at an angle relative to it—but that was even easier to fix. Judy made sure she was strapped snugly into her beanbag, then swung her arms around in a circle until the tank slowly tilted into the right orientation. She couldn't make a very wide circle, but it was enough to impart an equal and opposite force to the tank. She stopped swinging when the camera's direction indicator said the planet was straight down, and the tank stopped tilting.
If they were moving tangentially, they were doing it slowly enough that the motion was undetectable. They might have been falling or rising at a few hundred kilometers per second, but that was impossible to see from their altitude, either. Directly beneath them, a multicolored land-mass stretched from horizon to horizon.
It was time to land.
25
Judy felt her pulse rate rising again with the significance of what they were about to do. This time, she was pretty sure they were the first. She felt like she should have a recorder going to capture their first words from the surface, but they hadn't brought one and she wouldn't have used it if they had. Recording your own first words was just the sort of pompous behavior she abhorred about some of the glory hounds who had joined NASA for all the wrong reasons. True explorers didn't give a damn what anybody else thought about them; they did it for themselves. If Judy and Allen died in a crash here, no one else would ever hear about it, and even if they made it home safe, nobody would care. Not with all the new planets that people would be reporting in months to come. She and Allen would be like the Vikings who had discovered North America: first, but forgotten in the rush that followed. In a way it was a comforting thought. If they messed up out here, nobody would know.
She cleared her throat. "You ready on the landing sequence?"
"As ready as I'll ever be."
"Then let's do it before we lose our nerve."
"Okay."
She put on her helmet and made sure it was sealed, then helped Allen seal his own. He put on his gloves this time as well, then held his hands over the laptop computer's keyboard and carefully pushed the "Enter" key with the end of the pencil eraser he had taped to the side of his right index linger. He had already loaded the program he had written weeks ago for landing; pressing "Enter" activated it and made the rest of the keyboard control the hyperdrive in preprogrammed steps. Pressing one of the arrow keys would move them horizontally a hundred kilometers in the direction of the arrow, "D" would take them down ten kilometers at a time, "U" would go up, and "Esc" would bail them out 100,000 kilometers at once. He had told Judy that when he was programming it, he had thought about making that only 10,000, but he had thought better of it when he remembered that the hyperdrive didn't necessarily know which way was up, and in an emergency it was highly likely that the pilot wouldn't know, either. With a 100,000-kilometer jump, even if they were upside down when he hit the button, they wouldn't wind up trying to jump inside the planet and falling the rest of the way to the surface with a burned-out hyperdrive. He tapped the "D" key once. Nothing apparent happened in the monitor, but as he tapped it a few more times the view began to expand.
They were dropping straight down from a standstill, but even so they would pick up too much velocity for a modified septic tank to withstand if they simply fell all the way in. So with each push of the
"D" key, the hyperdrive flicked them ten kilometers closer to the surface without the associated gain in velocity. They would descend until the atmosphere became thick enough for a parachute, and then drop normally from there.
"I wish there was a way to adjust kinetic energy in a jump," Allen said as he took them down. His voice sounded thin and reedy through the spacesuit intercom. At least Judy thought it was the intercom's fault. "I tried to figure out how to do it, but kinetic energy just doesn't seem to have any meaning in hyperspace. It's all potential. Which is why we can use it to get from one place to another, so I guess I shouldn't gripe, but—what's funny?"
Judy stifled a giggle. "Nothing."
"Something is. What?"
She hesitated, then said, "The mad scientist discusses his invention. Sorry. I keep forgetting what we're doing here, and then it suddenly hits me."
"Don't apologize. It's too much for me sometimes, too, and I invented it." Allen grinned, an expression that made him look even more the mad scientist, and turned back to the monitor. They were coming in over the mountain range. He pushed the descent key a couple more times, until they were what Judy figured to be about sixty or seventy kilometers up, then he used the cursor keys to move them sideways until the mountains were comfortably off to the side. That put them over the sweeping arc of a storm front, so he moved them perpendicular to its path by one jump. The mountains ran at a diagonal to their path, so that brought them over its foothills again, but the storm was comfortably far away now, and the hills didn't look that rugged.
They fell for a few seconds while they both pondered the view. "What do you think?" he asked. Rivers made tiny jagged lines leading out into the plains from the mountains. There was snow on the peaks, but the foothills were green. Farther from the mountains the land looked more jagged, like badlands, but the ground directly beneath them was mostly rolling hills.
"Looks like this is about as flat as it gets," she said. "And it's green, but it doesn't look like jungle. And no lakes that I can see. I couldn't ask for much better."
"Me either." Allen pushed the descent key again, keeping his eye on the ammeter connected to the drive as he did. Judy watched over his shoulder. The meter had barely jiggled during their previous jumps, but now it bumped a little bit higher. "We're starting to hit air," Allen said. According to him, it took extra energy to put one mass i
nside another. The more mass you were dealing with, the more energy it took, so you could tell how dense your target area was by how much energy it took to put you there. Air at sixty kilometers up was pretty thin, but it was there. He hit "D" again and the ammeter jumped even more. So did the tank; Judy felt it lurch upward and to the side as the wind hit it. The force was no stronger than the acceleration in an elevator, but after hours of weightlessness, she definitely felt it. She steadied herself against the hyperdrive, and her hand met Allen's as he did the same. "I'm going to try once more," he said, "but then I think it's time for the drogue."
"Sounds good," Judy replied. She reached up between the hatches and grabbed one of the three D-rings that hung there, making sure it was the right one. The green one released a bedsheet on the end of a hundred feet of rope; that would provide just a little bit of drag and ensure that they were oriented properly before they yanked the red or the yellow handles and popped one of the two main 'chutes. The next jump was obviously the last. Judy could actually hear the engine strain: it buzzed for a second like a bugzapper with a moth in the grating, and the ammeter bumped halfway across the scale, but the circuitry completed the jump. The tank lurched again, and this time they could hear a high-pitched whistle that immediately changed pitch as they heeled over backward in the wind. They had put as much of the heavy equipment as they could at the bottom of the tank so the center of gravity would stay low and help keep them upright as they fell. Judy waited for the sideways motion to stop before she popped the drogue; if the tank started tumbling it could wrap the rope around itself and foul the main 'chute before it even opened.
The floor actually felt like a floor for the first time since they had left Earth. They were pulling less than half a gee, which was a good thing, since the entire source of the drag came from friction with the air. After a couple of seconds of stable descent, Judy yanked the handle and felt the knot that held the bedsheet in a tight ball come undone, and a moment later they felt another lurch as the sheet streamed out and caught air.
"Drogue 'chute's away!" Judy said. She had to speak up to be heard over the whistle of the wind. Some of that whistle probably came from the hole in the tank that the ripcord passed through. It was only a quarter-inch hole, and most of that was filled with rope, but Judy let go the D-ring and mashed the lump of modeling clay that had sealed it before back into place.
They began to feel gravity again, growing stronger as they descended deeper into the atmosphere and the bed-sheet streamer caught more air. They came in at quite an angle at first, but their residual orbital velocity slowly gave way to friction, and within a couple of minutes they were headed straight down. "Straight" was an average value; the blunt bottom of the tank wasn't aerodynamic at all, and they rocked back and forth in the turbulence it created as they fell.
They watched the ground draw closer, becoming more and more detailed as it did, until at something like ten kilometers above the surface Judy reached up and yanked the red D-ring that released the main parachute. She felt a moment of panic when nothing happened, then the 'chute hit the end of its shroud lines and filled with a bone-jarring snap. Something clanged like a kitchen accident in the space beneath the spare hyperdrive, and Judy sagged into her beanbag chair, but the shock-absorbing web that Allen had designed had done its job. The air pressure remained stable, and now the tank was steady as a rock, descending as majestically as any Apollo capsule under its orange-and-white canopy.
"Thrill a minute, eh?" Allen asked. He kept his finger poised over the escape key on the keyboard. If it looked like they were about to crash, a single keystroke would kick them back into space. They couldn't try another landing because the main parachute would be outside the jump field and would get left behind, but they could at least make it back to Earth orbit and use the reserve 'chute to land there. The ground took on more and more definition as they approached. Even without zooming in, they could see river valleys and patterns of vegetation on the hillsides. It drew closer, and now they could see individual boulders and trees. The canopies looked like round, green puffballs, but that's what just about any trees looked like from directly overhead. There were a lot of them down there, but there were open spaces between them. With any luck, they would come down in one of the gaps, but Judy didn't know if they could count on luck.
As they fell the last couple hundred feet, she had to bite her lip to keep from saying "Abort!" At the last minute she almost did, but the sight of the ground rushing up to hit them froze her tongue and she was too late. Allen either had more nerve than she did or he was equally paralyzed, because he didn't push the button. The ground swelled until Judy swore she could count the pebbles, then with a thump that jarred them deep into their beanbag crash couches, they landed.
The Getaway tilted up on end, spun around, and crashed back down. The image on Judy's monitor gyrated wildly. For a moment she thought they were tumbling, but she didn't feel any more motion, and a second later she laughed with relief when she figured out what had happened.
"The camera pulled loose!" she said.
"I think my teeth did, too," Allen replied. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah. How 'bout you?"
"Aside from the heart attack, you mean?" He breathed heavily into his microphone. "Man, it was all I could do to keep from pushing the bail-out button."
Judy reached for her video controls and tried to swivel her camera around so she could see something other than the square foot of ground directly beneath it, but the motor turned the mount, not the camera, and the whole apparatus was hanging by the wires. All they could see in her monitor was dirt and small yellow fern-like plants.
Allen's camera still worked. They both eyed the screen as he panned it horizontally from lock to lock. They had come down on a bit of a slope, but not a steep one. There were trees and bushes and rocks scattered over the hillside, the trees more yellow than green and their branches more fern-like than leafy, but they were trees. The bushes could pass for sagebrush if a person didn't look too closely. The rocks looked like plain old everyday granite. They had a good view of one: they had missed a boulder bigger than their spaceship by about ten feet. The parachute had draped over part of it and spilled into a pile of cloth at its base.
Allen shook his head, and said with a laugh, "Well, that's certainly one giant leap for a septic tank." 26
Both hatches had already popped open against their spring-loaded gate latches. They opened inward; as soon as the air pressure outside exceeded the pressure inside, they had loosened enough to let it equalize.
"I'm going to crack the seal on my helmet," Judy said.
Allen put his hands out to stop her. "Are you sure you want to do that?"
"We've already been through this," she said, pushing his hands gently aside. "It's either this or go home with our tails between our legs." She twisted her helmet sideways and pulled upward on it, but it wouldn't release. "Oh," she said. "Of course. The pressure is higher than inside my suit." Even air halfway up Mount Everest would have more pressure than inside her suit, but she glanced at the altimeter and saw that the needle was reading a couple thousand feet below the zero mark. There was more air here than at sea level on Earth. No wonder she couldn't lift off her helmet; there was at least a hundred pounds of force pushing it closed.
She opened the seal on her right wrist and pried off her glove. That let enough air in to allow her to equalize the pressure, but she left her helmet on and took a couple deep breaths instead. Let the little bit of air she'd already allowed into her suit mix with the rest, and see what a small dose would do to her first.
She had to swallow a couple of times to equalize the pressure in her ears, but she couldn't detect anything wrong with it at all. She took another deep breath and held it in her lungs for a second, waiting for the moment when it would start burning like fire, but it never came. She lifted her helmet, then set it down again and took another breath. This time she could smell living things, but none of the scents were familiar. Just green.
Allen's voice came through the intercom. "Are you all right?"
"Fine so far."
"No dizziness?"
"Nope." She lifted her helmet and took a breath straight from the tank. Now she could smell something like rosemary, probably from the plants they had crushed. It smelled wonderful, but then rotting garbage would probably have smelled wonderful after all the flatulence they had blown into the air after they had lowered the pressure.
She left the helmet off and took another breath. No allergens, no poisons, no problem at all. The air was fine.
She wished she could say the same for the gravity. Her legs were killing her. Hours of staying bent, and now full gravity—and maybe a little more, by the feel of it—were too much to bear. She couldn't even stand up inside the tank.
"I'm opening the hatch," she said.
Allen waved his hands. "Not yet!"
"Would you lighten up? I'm not even wheezing." She reached overhead and tugged on the hatch, swung it down, and stuck her head outside.
It was surprising how different the reality was from the TV picture inside. The scrubby bushes she had thought looked like sagebrush were actually more like tiny pine trees, and the trees looked like huge ferns that branched into smaller and smaller shoots, like fractal drawings. A breeze rustled some of the fronds and they made a dry rattling sound like gravel skittering down a talus slope. There didn't seem to be any animals around, but that wasn't surprising. She would probably be cowering under a bush herself if a gigantic yellow box dropped out of the sky next to her.
"Hello!" she called out, but the trees and the distance swallowed up her voice without an echo. The smell of rosemary wafted by on the breeze. It reminded her of her mother's home cooking. She could definitely learn to like this place if the rest of it was as delightful as this. Even the temperature was right: somewhere in the mid to high seventies by the feel of the air on her face. The hatch next to hers popped open and Allen stuck his head up through the hole. He wasn't wearing his helmet.
