by Jerry Oltion
"Let's try both grabbing the handle. Maybe we can carry it between us." She took the stuff sack from him, leaving him with the computer in his left hand and his right hand free to help carry the water. It was awkward at first, but they soon discovered that it worked better if they leaned outward and walked in step on alternate feet. When they did that, they fell into a smooth gait that let the bucket glide along between them without jostling or even swinging much.
They had to sidle around clumps of bushes at first, but within a few minutes they had cleared the thicket around the river and had smooth sailing back home. Tippet called out directions, not even flying up above the trees to get his bearings as Judy would have expected, but doing it either by dead reckoning or by using some internal navigation equipment.
She felt her stomach rumble within the first quarter mile, but she didn't suggest stopping to fix lunch. If that rumble wasn't just hunger, she wanted to be as close to the Getaway as possible before she got sick. And the less time they left the hyperdrive unattended, the better she would feel. For the first time since this whole business had started, she understood why the governments of every nation on Earth had reacted the way they did. They might be glad to have the secret for themselves, but they were afraid, just as she was, that others couldn't be trusted with it. Her definition of
"other" was a little more broad than theirs, but it all came down to the same thing: fear. She didn't like what it said about her, or about humanity in general.
She wondered if Allen was having the same doubts. He had wanted to give his discovery to everyone on Earth, but did that generosity and trust extend to aliens, too? Should it? Judy could argue both sides of that question, but she knew the safe answer.
Tippet undoubtedly did, too, but he was either too polite or too circumspect to mention it. He chattered on like a child about his explorations since he had arrived here—only a few days before Judy and Allen, it turned out—and he asked endless questions about human society and life on Earth, but he steered clear of the hyperdrive.
They made it a mile or so back the way they had come before Allen called a halt, saying, "I've got to drink something or I'm going to fall over."
He hadn't had the inadvertent mouthful of water Judy had gotten in the river. That and her anxiety over leaving the Getaway unguarded had kept her going, but he was operating on a single apple for breakfast.
"Time for a break," she admitted.
They set the bucket down and got a beer out of the stuff sack. Allen popped the top and drank half of it in one go, then handed it to Judy, who took a more cautious sip and handed it back. She dug out the cheese and tore off a hunk for each of them, then said to Tippet, "What about you? Can you eat or drink any of this?"
He had been riding on Allen's right shoulder while they walked. For a moment Allen thought she was talking to him, and he said, "Of course I—oh," just as Tippet said, "I have my own food supply, but thank you for the offer."
"How long can you go in that environment suit before you have to resupply?"
"That depends on my exertion level. With you carrying me, I can last two days before dipping into emergency reserves. Otherwise I must return to my lander every night."
"Oh. You, uh, want to spend the night with us, then?"
"If you are amenable to that, yes. It would allow us more time to get to know one another. And perhaps I will see the mobile tree you discovered last night."
Judy laughed. "It discovered us, and I'm not sure if I want it to come back, but you're welcome to hang out with us and see if it does."
"You haven't seen any of them move before?" Allen asked.
"No," Tippet replied. "I have not seen any ambulatory lifeforms since I got here, other than you." They must not be all that common, then, Judy thought. She wasn't sure whether to be relieved or disappointed. Mobile plants were definitely the sort of exotic life she'd wanted to find, but a full-sized tree could be dangerous to someone her size even if it wasn't hostile.
She glanced over at Tippet, still riding on Allen's shoulder. Was that how he felt about her? Or did the existence of the hive mind reduce his individual fear of mortality? She couldn't think of a delicate way to ask him. Are you afraid of me? Not good. The only thing worse would be to ask, So, what's it like to be so small?
She and Allen finished their beer and cheese and picked up the water bucket again. It seemed to have doubled in weight just sitting there, but after a few hundred steps it was no worse than before. If nothing else, exploring was going to keep her and Allen in good shape.
They were puffing too hard to talk much, but Tippet regaled them with more stories of his exploits, describing the land to the south of the river and the vegetation he had found near his landing site there. He was telling them about the different kinds of bushes he had found in the drier badlands to the east when he suddenly stopped speaking.
"Tippet?" Allen asked. Judy looked down at the walkie-talkie on his hip, thinking maybe the battery had suddenly died, but the power light was still glowing red.
"Wait," Tippet said. "Something . . . happen . . . in space." Allen stopped walking. Judy took another step before she realized he wasn't keeping up with her, and nearly wrenched her arm before she could let go of the bucket. It hit the ground with a thump and tipped sideways, but the lid held. A handful of water glugged out of the holes in the lid, but Allen righted it and turned his attention to Tippet, "What's the matter?"
"Wait. Not sure. Mind . . . busy now."
Judy immediately imagined some kind of onboard disaster going on overhead. A fire, or a blowout, or a leaking fuel tank; in space, there were a million dangers just waiting to happen at any moment. Whatever it was, it was apparently demanding enough of the hive mind's attention that there wasn't any to spare for its members on the ground.
Tippet's wings quivered, and Judy realized she was shivering as well. Some of that was from her clothing, which was still damp even now, but not all of it.
"Can we do anything?" she asked, but she already knew the answer. They were still at least a mile from the Getaway. By the time they could get there and get into orbit, whatever was happening on board Tippet's ship would be over.
"Wait," Tippet said again. "Wait. Linking . . . again. Oh."
"What? What's happening?"
"Another spaceship has suddenly appeared in orbit."
36
"What kind of ship?" Judy asked. "What does it look like?"
"Not like yours," Tippet said. "This is much larger and more streamlined. It's cylindrical, with one rounded end and one tapered end. It has a single large fin about a third of the way from the blunt end, and four smaller fins spaced equally around its circumference near the narrow end." She tried to visualize it, and came up with a ballistic missile. Had someone converted a Titan or a Minuteman into an interstellar spaceship? But the guidance fins were on the wrong end for that, and what was the extra fin on the side?
Allen laughed. "Does it have a propeller on the narrow end?"
"A propeller?" replied Tippet. "In space?"
"If it's what it sounds like, then it wasn't built for space. I think it's a submarine." Judy flashed on the image of a sub suddenly jumping from the ocean into vacuum, carrying a sphere of water a couple hundred feet in diameter along with it. That must have been a sight. The water would instantly start to boil, throwing off a cloud of vapor kilometers across, but the loss of heat would freeze the middle of the sphere solid long before it all boiled away. The sub would be encased in ice until the sun melted it off, which would probably create a comet bright enough to be seen by day. That must have turned some heads back home.
Tippet considered Allen's guess for a few seconds, then said, "It does seem well adapted to maneuvering in water.
But why would a submarine be used in space? How could it be used in space?" Judy picked up the bucket and started walking again. Allen quickly joined her, saying, "It actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it. It's already airtight. And it's designed
to hold up against enormous pressure from outside, so the hull is more than strong enough to withstand one atmosphere pushing outward from inside."
"Yes, but how did it get into space? How did it get here?"
"Hyperdrive," Allen said.
"That word isn't in the dictionary."
"It means faster-than-light travel."
Tippet made a hissing sound; part of his link with the hive mind leaking onto the audio channel? Or maybe it was deliberate commentary, because his next words were: "That's impossible."
"That's what I thought, too," said Allen, "until I figured out how to do it."
"You? Individually?"
Allen beamed. "That's right."
"I have a hard enough time believing that your 'Getaway Special' is actually a spaceship," Tippet said. "Believing that it travels faster than light is ... considerably more difficult." So he hadn't accepted their story when they'd told him they had traveled from another star in it. Judy wondered if that meant his companions had left it alone these last few hours. If they hadn't thought there was anything valuable there, maybe so.
But he was hot on the topic now. "How does it work?" he asked. Judy cleared her throat in as theatrical a manner as she could. Allen looked over at her, and she shook her head slightly, but he just frowned at her and said to Tippet, "Do you understand quantum tunneling?"
There was a long pause, then Tippet said, "Yes. Enough to know that the effect cannot be applied to large objects."
Allen nodded vigorously. "That's true. But it can be applied to a lot of small ones at once. That's how I made the electron plasma battery, and then I got to thinking about what would happen if I tried tunneling everything, not just electrons, and giving them a little kick on their way from point A to point B. When I tried it, I discovered that you can make the barrier arbitrarily large. Light-years across, if you want."
Tippet didn't reply. Maybe Allen's explanation was too full of unfamiliar technical terms. He apparently thought the same thing. Before Judy could think of something to say that would steer the conversation in another direction, he said, "Did you follow that?"
"Theoretically. As I said, believing it is difficult, even when faced with physical evidence of its veracity."
Judy said, "Have you tried talking to the sub yet?"
Tippet took another few seconds to answer. Judy wondered if these pauses were simply because the hive mind was busy on other fronts, or if it was mulling over its answers before it gave them its reply. Had it quit trusting them? Had it ever trusted them?
At last Tippet said, "We haven't. They have broadcast a greeting, but the language is neither ours nor yours."
"Oh?" Judy wondered if it was completely alien, or just not English. "Can you replay it for us?"
"We can do that. Wait." Another pause, then a deeper, more resonant voice said, "Bonjour. Est-ce qu'il y a quelqu'un ici?"
An icy shiver ran up her spine. "Well," she said. "There's a classic case of good-news/bad-news. They're not the government coming after us, but they're not exactly friendly with Americans these days, either."
"Who are they?" Tippet asked.
"They're French." Then she realized that probably wasn't enough of an answer. "They're people from Earth, just like us. But they're from another nation that's hostile to ours. They won't be happy to find us here."
"What about us?"
She considered her own response to Tippet: excited at first, then more wary when it became clear that he wasn't just a cute little butterfly who could speak.
"I don't know," she said. "It depends on what they're here for."
"Should we answer them and try to find out?"
"Not yet," she said, just as Allen said, "Sure."
He looked over at her. "Why not?"
"Because we're still half an hour from the Getaway, for one thing," she said. "I'd like to be able to make a run for it if they're not friendly. And because they probably won't tell us the truth even if we ask. We'd be better off watching them in action." She asked Tippet, "How big is your starship? Have they spotted it yet?"
"It is much larger than yours," Tippet said. "Or theirs. But they show no sign that they have discovered it. And if they continue to use radar as a location method, they are unlikely to. It is much farther away from the planet than they are, and it is mostly organic in composition."
"Oh?" She would love to know more about that, but not at the moment. But if it was big . . . "Turn it end-on to them so it presents the smallest cross-section," she said. "That way they won't be able to spot it optically. And how about your radio transmissions? Are they directional, or—"
"This is silly," Allen said. "We gave the hyperdrive to everyone, including the French. Hiding from them now is hypocrisy."
"It's prudence," Judy replied, "which is something we haven't been exercising enough of lately." Tippet didn't reply, except to say, "Our transmissions from the ship to the ground are directional. My relay to your radio is not, but the power level is far too low to be detected from space. And speaking of direction, we are drifting a bit to the left of a direct path back to your . . . spaceship."
"Thanks." Judy and Allen adjusted their course by a few degrees. Allen said to Judy, "I thought you agreed that giving the hyperdrive away was the best thing we could do."
"It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I'm not so sure."
"You gave it away?" Tippet asked. "I don't understand. How did you get here if—"
"Just the plans. We told everyone on Earth how to build their own engine. I didn't want soldiers to be the only people in space."
"Soldiers," Tippet said. "Professional fighters. Is that who has joined us?" Allen sighed. "Probably. Unless the Cousteau Society decided to retrofit a sub." Judy adjusted her grip on the bucket. All this work for five gallons of water, and someone out there had brought a submarine! "I wonder if they're going to try landing it in the ocean," she said. Allen shook his head. "I can't imagine how you could lower anything that heavy by parachute."
"Parachute?" Tippet asked. "Why would they need that?"
"The hyperdrive won't put something into a space that's already occupied," Allen explained. "We had to pop in as close to the top of the atmosphere as we could and drop from there under a parachute. Unless these guys have figured out a better way, that's what they'll have to do, too, but a sub is too big for that."
"Ah." Tippet made another hissing sound, then said, "This hyperdrive . . . it is still experimental?"
"No," Allen said. "We tested it a couple of weeks ago."
"Weeks? Your race has only had this technology for two weeks?" Allen shrugged. "I've known about it for over a year, but it took me that long to get a ride on the space shuttle to test it."
"Yet here you are already. In force. And how many other stars did you visit before you came here?" Allen squinted and wrinkled his nose in concentration. "Uh, let's see, there was Alpha Centauri, then the place with the weird organic-looking asteroids, then the—"
"Three," Judy said. "But we were starting to run out of air by time we got here. If this hadn't worked out, we would have had to go home."
She had meant to downplay the significance of it, but Tippet wasn't fooled. He made a sound like a bicycle wheel with a playing card flapping on the spokes, then finally stopped and said, "You would have gone home. You could do so right now, couldn't you?"
"Well, not right now, but yeah. As soon as we get back to the Getaway. That's what we call our ship."
"Of course you do."
Judy looked over at him: a fat-bodied butterfly in a yellow pressure suit clinging to Allen's shoulder and flapping his wings as if he was trying to lift him into the air by sheer force of will. At last he slowed down and said, "After we decided to attempt an interstellar flight, we spent nearly a century developing our starship. It took decades to cross the immense distance to our closest neighboring star, and years more exploring each of its planets in turn, but none of them were habitable. We went on to another star, and another. Th
is was our fourth try as well. We have been away from our homeworld for over thirty generations; we remember it only through the collective mind. And you were on yours when?" Allen looked at Judy, then at Tippet. "Uh . . . yesterday."
" Tptkpk."
Judy could imagine well enough with that meant. If the trip from there to here had eaten her entire life, only to find someone else who had done it in an afternoon, she'd have said more than just "tptkpk." But these guys had built a starship the hard way. And they could augment their own intelligence at will. They had learned English in less than a day; she had no doubt that they could build their own hyperdrive in little more just from the clues Allen had already given them. And what else could they do that she didn't know about?
They walked for a while in silence, each of them no doubt contemplating the things to learn—and to fear—from the other.
And now there was another factor in the equation. Another human one, but Judy had hoped to leave all that behind, at least for a while. She should have known she couldn't do that. She had learned at an early age that she couldn't run away from her problems; why should she have expected it to work now?
37
The Getaway looked just the same as they had left it. If Tippet's alter-egos had studied it while they were gone, they had cleaned up after themselves, but Judy doubted they had ever been there. The hatches were still shut tight, and the air smelled stale and plasticky from being closed up all morning. While Allen hooked up the computer to the hyperdrive again and made sure it would be ready to go when they needed it, Judy set up the stove and heated up a can of beef stew, with a canful of their hard-earned water and a couple of sliced-up potatoes thrown in to bulk it out into a meal for two. The stove had a tiny butane tank that seemed too small to hold enough fuel to boil even a cup of water, but when she opened the valve and gave the flint lighter a spin, it flared to life with a whoosh that singed her knuckles and wrapped flames all the way around the pot. She had to turn it down to practically nothing to keep the burner from overdoing it; at that rate she could probably boil the entire five gallons of water and have plenty of fuel left over. She'd had no idea camp stoves were that efficient. A breeze rustled the fronds of the trees all around her. Judy couldn't feel it on the ground, but that was fine with her. She was just now warming up again after her dip in the river. She had intended to change her clothing once she got back to the Getaway, but her pants and shirt had dried out during the walk back, and the sun had warmed the ground and the rock beside the tank enough that she felt comfortable enough as she was. She took off her shoes and set them on the rock to air out, then spread out her sleeping bag for a picnic blanket and started taking apart the pistol while the stew cooked.
