by Jerry Oltion
"Hey!" she said. "You're supposed to wait until we're sure it's safe."
"I'm not going to let you take all the risk."
"Right, so now if it turns out to be deadly we both croak. That's smart." He didn't reply. He ducked down again, and she heard him panting and cursing for a few seconds, then he popped back into the hatchway without the upper torso of his suit. He stuck his arms out and pulled himself up to sit on top of the tank, leaving the lower half behind as well. Judy couldn't really fault him for it. She was so tired of the damned spacesuit she could cut it off with a knife and not feel bad about it. She dropped down onto her beanbag chair again and twisted the waist ring open, struggled out of the top, and kicked off the legs. She felt so free she could probably have floated out of the hatch, but before she stood up again she unzipped her sleeping bag and found the pistol and the bullets that Trent had given her, popped open the cylinder, and slid six of the thumb-sized bullets into the holes. .45 Colt, according to the ammunition box, but it didn't look a bit like the pistol Gerry had been waving around on the shuttle. This one felt more Western, with a fat, stubby barrel and a cylinder that clicked ominously as it rotated and a curved wooden handle that just begged to be twirled around a couple of times before it landed in your hand. Judy didn't really figure she would need it, but Trent would never forgive her if she got eaten on her first foray out of the ship.
"Whoa!" Allen said when she stuck her arms out to pull herself up. "What's that for?"
"Artificial self-confidence."
"Oh. Okay, that makes sense. Cover me." He slid off the side of the tank to land on his feet in the fern-grass.
"I said self confidence, not sidekick confidence. You're supposed to be backing me up." She climbed out and slid down beside him, but she kept the gun. "Stay here while I go have a look around." He folded his arms across his chest. "Boy, put a pistol in your hand and suddenly you're Annie Oakley."
She waggled the barrel back and forth, careful not to point it toward him. "Thanks for not saying
'Calamity Jane.'" She had never been a gun enthusiast, but right now the weight of the pistol in her hand was a comfort. It wasn't just the self-defense factor, either. After the last week of hiding out from the government and looking over her shoulder every time she turned around, it felt kind of nice to step out into the unknown with a little bit of a swagger.
She tried not to let it show. She took a couple dozen careful steps, paying attention to the gravelly texture of the ground beneath her suit-liner booties. The fern was too soft to feel through the tough fabric, but she could smell its piquant aroma as she swished through it. She couldn't help but smile. Her planet smelled nice!
She turned around and looked at the Getaway. The insulation at its base was crushed, just as they had intended. That had loosened some of the straps holding it on; they would have to tighten those before they jumped again.
The parachute was billowing softly in the breeze, its orange and white nylon fabric whispering softly against itself. That was fine now, but if a gust of wind came up, their spaceship could wind up dragged halfway across the continent. Judy made a quick circuit around it, checking for anything that looked dangerous, but she saw no animal life at all, so she said, "Okay, it looks clear. Come help me fold this up."
Allen took the long way around, checking out the bushes and one of the trees on the way. Judy kept her eye on him while she tugged the end of the parachute out straight. She felt a moment of panic when he turned away and she saw the ventilation tubes on his spacesuit liner; even though she'd seen them a million times before, in this new context they looked for just a second like a five-tentacled alien stuck to his back.
There didn't seem to be any aliens, not even insects. Judy bent down to look between the fronds of the tiny ferns at her feet, but all she saw was brownish black dirt. She grinned at the thought of having the first picnic in human history without ants, but she was still too excited to eat. A breeze wrapped the end of the 'chute around her legs. "Hey, come on, let's fold this up," she called out, and Allen abandoned his exploration.
"Those bushes have a hell of a thick trunk," he said as he came closer. "They're like barrel cactus with branches and leaves."
"I wonder if they're edible," Judy said.
He held up his hands, palms out. "I don't want you trying it until we know for sure. Breathing the air was bad enough, but I draw the line at that."
"Yes, Mom. Here." She handed him a fistful of parachute.
They had practiced repacking it before, but they'd done it inside Trent and Donna's garage. This was easier in one respect: they had more room to stretch it out, but every time they lifted it off the ground, the breeze would fluff up part of it that they didn't want to move. They had to resort to using rocks to hold it down, but even so it took them fifteen minutes to get it right, and by the time they shoved the last of it inside the stuff sack and re-laced the ripcord, they were sweating like dockhands inside their spacesuit liners.
"Well," Judy said as they leaned against the side of the tank, both of them breathing hard from the exertion, "I think we'd be dead by now if the atmosphere was going to kill us. We might as well get out of these things and into real clothes."
"Amen to that," Allen said. He climbed up onto the tank and dropped inside, and a moment later a pair of jeans and a T-shirt flopped over the edge of the hatch.
Judy set the pistol on the step molded into the side of the tank and peeled out of her suit liner. It felt deliciously dangerous to strip naked on an alien planet, to feel the soft fern tickle her toes and the breeze blow cool and fresh against her skin. She closed her eyes and leaned back against the sunlit warmth of the yellow plastic, savoring the heat and the light and the freedom of this new world. She heard thumps and curses from inside the tank, then Allen's startled, "Oh! Now that's a sight." She opened her eyes and tilted her head even farther back to look up at him. His chest was bare, and she was willing to bet the rest of him was, too. She felt her entire body tingle at the sight, and at the thought of what she wanted to do. To hell with a picnic; she had just endured the craziest week of her life, capped by what had to be the craziest day in recorded history, and she'd survived to tell the tale. She'd landed in paradise for her reward, but there was one more thing that would make it perfect, and the risk only added to the allure.
"Hey, sailor," she said in the sultriest voice she could manage. "Want to celebrate our landing?" 27
"Zork," she said, and she giggled as she held the sweating can of Budweiser up to her lips. Seated cross-legged on the unzipped sleeping bag that they were using for a blanket, still naked as a jaybird, Allen frowned. "Zork? What kind of name is Zork for a planet? It sounds like something out of a nineteen-fifties B-movie."
"Exactly!" Judy said. Her giggles prevented further speech, but a wave at the septic tank, its sides reinforced with steel cable and 4X4 posts, illustrated her point.
Allen shrugged. "All right, so it is appropriate right now, but millions of people are eventually going to have to put up with the name."
Judy took a long pull at her beer, nearly finishing it. "They'll be millions of people with a sense of humor," she said after she'd swallowed. "My kind of people."
"Not so," he said. "Your kind of people will be out planting bizarre names on every star and planet in the galaxy just as soon as they can get their own tanks sealed up."
"You're probably right," she admitted. "All right, let's not ruin it with a silly name. What do you suggest?"
"Hmm. Good question." He cocked his head sideways in thought, then said, "Maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves anyway. There could be natives with their own name for it already."
"I haven't seen any evidence of 'em yet," she said. "But if there are, they're probably ugly little green guys with knobby fingers and antennae. And their name will probably be worse than 'Zork.' "
"Only one way to find out," he said. "What do you say we go for a little walk and see what's out there?"
Judy stretched
luxuriously, knowing what the sight was doing to him. "Oh, I don't know," she said.
"I could settle in right here and take a nap just as easily." She drained her beer and threw the can casually over her shoulder, where it hit the big rock behind her with a metallic donk and clattered to the ground. His eyes grew even wider. "What are you . . . that's . . . we shouldn't start littering . . ." She laughed. "Gotcha!"
He closed his mouth and shook his head. "You did."
"Just keeping you on your toes. Sure, let's go for a walk. We're going to get sunburned if we don't put some clothes on anyway."
She retrieved her beer can and shook out the last few drops, then carried it and the remains of their picnic back to the Getaway. Allen's clothes were still flopped half out of the hatch; he started putting them on while Judy crawled inside and found some of her own. It was all hand-me-downs from Donna, but she was glad to have something that had a little history. All her history was sixty-some light-years away, and probably confiscated by the Feds by now anyway.
She found a pair of faded blue jeans and a long-sleeve shirt with vertical lilac and green stripes, then dug out underwear and socks from another bag and her hiking shoes from where she'd wedged them in next to the spare hyperdrive.
The inside of the septic tank already looked like a teenager's bedroom. Judy literally had to dig through layers of stuff to reach her shoes, and she could barely move without banging her elbows or knees into things. If she and Allen had to leave in a hurry again, they would be swimming in junk. With any luck, that wouldn't be a problem. "Zork" looked like a decent place so far. She came across the walkie-talkies they had bought when they had still thought they might be able to get ultralight airplanes, and gathered them up, too. She had no intention of splitting up on their first foray, no matter how benign the planet seemed, but radios might come in handy if they got separated by accident.
They didn't have a day pack. She put another couple cans of beer, some apples, and a wedge of cheese in her sleeping bag's stuff sack, then went back outside to get dressed, and in a few minutes they were ready to go. Allen climbed up on the tank and pulled the hatches shut, then dropped back to the ground. "Which way should we go?" he asked.
"How about uphill?" she replied. "Maybe we can find an overlook and see what the landscape's like. And it'll be easier coming back if we go uphill to start."
"That makes sense."
Allen took the sack of food. Judy considered putting the pistol in there, too, but that would make it too hard to reach in an emergency. Trent hadn't given them a holster with it, so she finally just tucked it in her waistband, making sure the cylinder was rotated partway around so the hammer wasn't on a live round. It felt awkward there, but its presence was still a comfort.
They held hands while they walked. Judy hadn't been a big touchy-feely person before, but somehow knowing how far she was from home made her want to remain in contact with the only other human being around. The fact that she was hot for his body probably had something to do with it, too, but whatever the reason, she liked the feeling. He didn't seem to mind, either, though he had to rein in his long natural stride to keep from outpacing her every couple of steps.
They stopped under one of the big trees to check it out. It was maybe thirty feet tall, with a trunk about a foot thick at the base, tapering up for half its height before it split into three branches that split again into three more each, and so on out to the leafy fronds at the ends. The bark was smooth and rubbery, like a gray-green wetsuit, and the branches behaved like soft plastic rather than wood. Judy jumped up and caught one, and it flexed easily when she pulled it down so she could examine the fronds more closely, but when she let go, it didn't spring back into place. Instead it slowly rose up, like a snake out of a basket, until its fronds were next to the others again.
"Hydrostatic pressure?" she asked.
Allen pulled another one down and let go. It, too, rose slowly back into place. "Could be. It would be easy enough to find out." He reached into one of his pants pockets and pulled out a Swiss army knife.
"Wait a minute," Judy said as he unfolded the corkscrew. "Let's not go poking holes in things just yet."
"No?"
"No. Not until we know a little more about the ecology."
"Poking holes in things is one way to learn about the ecology," he pointed out.
"And watching it in action is a less invasive way," she said. "There's plenty to see without dissecting the natives."
"It's a tree," Allen said, but he put away his knife.
Judy wondered why she'd been so reluctant to let him do it. It was just a tree, after all. By nightfall, if it got cold enough, she might start pulling dry branches off it herself for a fire. Well, not this particular tree. This one didn't have any dry branches. Nor did any of the others she could see from where she stood. They were all different sizes, but they were equally green from bottom to top. As she and Allen walked uphill through them, she couldn't see a single brown leaf or dead twig. Maybe that was it. They all looked so perfect, she didn't want to be the person to put the first scar on one.
She wondered if it was spring here. Earth trees always looked perfect in spring, too, before the caterpillars set to work on the leaves. She tried to think how this planet's poles had looked in relation to the sun, but she hadn't spent enough time in orbit to remember.
It didn't look like the explanation was that simple anyway. There were no dead branches on the ground, and no mat of decaying leaves, either. Just the myriad little ferns, none of which showed any more sign of mortality than the trees.
The forest was silent except for the rustle of the fronds in the breeze. Judy and Allen's footfalls hardly even made a noise, but as the ground grew steeper, they began panting enough to make up for it. Gravity was definitely stronger here than on Earth. Not by much, but even a little extra work for every step eventually added up. And the temperature that had seemed ideal when they were picnicking and making love now seemed about ten degrees too hot.
"Gah," Judy said, fluffing her shirt out in front to get some air inside it. "Nobody told me exploring was going to be hard work."
Allen wiped sweat from his forehead with the side of his hand. "I'd kill for a cold mountain stream to stick my feet in about now, but something tells me we're going the wrong direction to find water."
"Maybe we can at least see where there is some when we get to the top." She hoped she was right, but at the same time she wondered how smart it would be to soak their feet in a stream when they didn't know what was living in it. She planned to boil anything they drank, too, but of course they had left the camp stove in the Getaway along with the pots and pans. She hadn't expected their first foray to become a major expedition.
They could always go back, she supposed, but she wanted to at least get a look at their new world before they did that. She turned around to check their progress, but they hadn't climbed high enough yet to see much more than what they had already walked through. And the treetops were spaced just wrong to give them a view out to the horizon.
She couldn't see the Getaway. They had at least gone far enough for the trees to hide it as well. She felt a little satisfaction at that, but then she felt cold panic slide up her spine when she realized what that meant.
"Allen! We didn't mark our trail."
He turned around, too. "Good point. I'm sure we can find our way from here—it's pretty much straight downhill, after all—but it wouldn't hurt to build cairns from now on." He nudged a couple of head-sized rocks with his toe until he worked them loose from the ground, then stacked them precariously atop a third rock.
Judy eyed it critically. "That won't stay put very long."
"Long enough. We're not going to be gone all day."
As soon as he said that, she suddenly realized that they didn't even know how long "all day" was here. She looked up at the sun, trying to remember where it had been when they arrived, but she hadn't thought to look then and she didn't know which direction she was faci
ng now anyway. It was still high in the sky, for what that was worth. They had hours before they had to worry about nightfall.
They continued up the slope, building cairns every few hundred feet as they climbed. The trees were still fairly far apart, so it was easy to spot one pile of rocks from the next, but the farther away from their starship they got, the more nervous Judy became. If they got lost, it was a long way back home. The trees never grew close enough together to become an actual forest. The bushes never joined into thickets, either. Something kept them spaced just about as far apart as they were tall, and after a few minutes of thought, Judy realized they were the perfect distance to keep from shading one another. The bigger trees commanded more space than the smaller ones, and the bushes clustered in the spaces farthest from any of them. It seemed very logical at first, but the more she thought about it, the less sense it made. How did the trees know ahead of time how tall they were going to grow? They were spaced ideally now, but in another ten years they were going to be crowding one another out. There were still no dead trees, either. She and Allen had walked at least half a mile by now; they should have found at least a couple of fallen logs.
And birds. Shouldn't there have been some sign of them? Nests in the treetops, or a snatch of song off in the distance? So far Judy hadn't heard a sound since they had arrived other than the wind in the trees and the noises she and Allen had made. She hadn't seen a flicker of motion other than the rustling fronds, either. It was like walking through a movie set on an indoor soundstage; it didn't seem real without ambient noise to go with it.
"Could it be possible that there aren't any animals here?" she asked. Allen shrugged. "Anything's possible, I suppose, but I can't imagine how the ecosystem could work without 'em."
