The getaway special

by Jerry Oltion

  Every inner surface had been coated with oil. She didn't have any to replace it with, so she was careful not to wipe the water off. She just blew it dry as best she could and let the rest of the moisture evaporate.

  Tippet sat on her knee and watched her work. "Pretty primitive, eh?" she asked him as she removed the bullets from the cylinder and dried them with her shirttail. Allen still carried one of the walkie-talkies on his hip, but Judy had set up the other one beside her. Tippet's voice came to her in stereo; faintly from inside the Getaway, and more directly from near her feet.

  "Perhaps," he said, "but nonetheless it looks effective. The projectile alone masses more than I do."

  "It wouldn't do you any good, that's for sure." She blew through the cylinders one at a time, then said, "When we first met, you had a little pointy stinger in one hand. Is that a weapon?"

  "Yes," he replied. He pulled it out of its holster and held it up for her to examine. She had to squint to see it.

  "How does it work? You don't actually have to stab your target with it, do you?"

  "No, it can be fired from a distance. It creates an electrical discharge that interferes with neural impulses. It does so with lifeforms from my world, at least. Whether it would do the same to you remains to be seen."

  "I'm not volunteering to be zapped."

  "I wouldn't suggest it." Tippet put the stinger away.

  Judy finished drying the pistol and put it away as well. With any luck, they would never find out how effective their weapons were on one another.

  The stew was bubbling softly. She gave it a stir, then tasted one of the hunks of potato. It was soft all the way through, and on an empty stomach it tasted wonderful.

  "Soup's on!" she hollered to Allen.

  He didn't need to be called twice. He hopped out of the tank and sat down next to her on the sleeping bag, and the two of them dug in. After their six-mile walk, they slurped it down with ravenous delight, eating directly from the cook pot and fighting over the bits of beef, which they as often as not fed to each other once they'd won. Even Tippet tried a bite, after analyzing it chemically and deciding it wouldn't poison him, but the taste set him to gagging for a full minute. If his reaction was typical, then food was one aspect of their cultures they wouldn't be sharing.

  "Unless it's just my cooking," Judy said when he had recovered.

  "I doubt— skkllk—if that's the problem," Tippet said graciously.

  "Well, thanks for saying so." She rinsed out the pot with a quarter cup or so of water, then dried it by holding it in the camp stove's open flame until the last of the water drops sizzled into steam. It was easier than using a towel, and probably safer: the heat would sterilize it for the next time. A breeze rustled the treetops again. She was glad for the sound; it was one of the few noises she'd heard since she and Allen had landed here. It reminded her of lazy afternoons when she was an undergraduate in college, when she would sit out in the grass on the quad and let the world go by. She hadn't done that in way too long. When she was done drying the pot, she shut off the stove, leaned back on the sleeping bag, crossed her arms behind her head, and settled in for a long bout of cloud-watching. Allen lay crosswise with his head in her lap, and Tippet landed on her knee.

  "So what are the French doing?" Allen asked.

  "The submarine is still in space," Tippet replied. "They have refined their orbit into a stable circle just outside the atmosphere, and now, from the radar pulses reflecting off the ground, it seems clear that they are mapping the surface."

  Why here? Judy wondered. There were hundreds of stars closer to home with planets they could explore, starting with Alpha Centauri. She and Allen had come this far to get away from people, but the French Navy wouldn't need to do that. Hell, given their belligerence of late, she would have expected them to kick Onnescu and the other early arrivals off Centauri's planet and claim it for themselves. Apparently they wanted one they could claim without a fight. Maybe she and Allen should have told them to go away when they first showed up, but she didn't really want to claim the planet for herself. She just wanted to explore one that didn't already have people on it, but after meeting Tippet, even that didn't seem so important anymore. Let the French land. If their intentions were benign, she and Allen could contact them any time. And if they were setting up a secret military base or something, well, the U.S. had two pairs of eyes on site that the French didn't know about. Or several thousand, if you counted Tippet and his brethren.

  They spent the afternoon talking about Earth's sudden exodus into space. Tippet wanted to know the political situation that had led to Judy's decision not to greet her own people sixty light-years from home, and how it had come to be that way. Judy was reluctant to talk about it, mostly because she was so embarrassed for humanity, but Allen answered the alien's questions and asked dozens of his own. How did Tippet's people handle disagreements among nations? Did they even have nations, or was their whole planet covered by one huge networked mind?

  "Neither," Tippet replied. "There's a practical limit to the number of nodes in a link. Beyond a few thousand, the coordination effort overwhelms any further gain in intelligence. But any of us can link with any others, so the composition of a mind will shift over time, and disagreements between minds are usually settled by exchanging members until they reach consensus."

  "Usually?" Allen asked.

  Tippet said, "Some overminds become protective of their identity. It's probably a throwback to our evolutionary roots, when hives were discrete entities that competed for resources. It's uncommon now, but it happens."

  "So how do those minds settle differences?"

  "They seldom do."

  That didn't sound encouraging. "What do you do with them, then?" Judy asked.

  "It depends on how disruptive they are to the rest of us. If they become dangerous, we swarm and disband them, but if they're merely eccentric, we allow them to pursue their own destiny. They occasionally prove useful."

  "How?"

  "They sometimes provide new insight that the rest of us miss. And . . ." He paused. "And they make good starship crews."

  "Aha!" Judy laughed. "You're a mad scientist too!" Then she had to explain about INSANE. She made Allen show Tippet his membership card to prove she wasn't kidding. Tippet didn't find it amusing. "You actually worry that your race will exterminate itself?"

  "Not anymore," Allen said. "But yeah, before I gave away the plans for the hyperdrive, it was looking pretty inevitable."

  Tippet said, "Apparently singleton societies react differently to outside stimulus. On our world, such a revelation would increase the tension between hives, rather than ease it."

  "It did on ours, too," Judy said.

  "That's just a short-term reaction," said Allen. "Once people have a chance to think it through and realize we're not all stuck on the same planet anymore, things will settle down."

  "I am not convinced," Tippet said. "The economic repercussions alone will destabilize your nations'

  governments for years to come. If things are truly as volatile as you say, your 'gift' could provide the final push into chaos."

  "You sound like Carl."

  "Who is Carl?"

  Somewhat reluctantly, Allen described the mission specialist on their shuttle flight, and his objection not only to the way Allen had distributed the plans for the hyperdrive, but to the hyperdrive itself. He made it sound like Carl was a classic head-in-the-sand Luddite, but even so, Tippet said, "His fears are well grounded. Even if your nations avoid war, the loss of population could lead to an industrial decline that may never recover."

  "So what if it does?" Allen said. "We've been spoiling the planet with industry as it is. Maybe slowing down a little would be a good thing."

  "Maybe," said Tippet. "I would not wish to experiment on my own homeworld in such a way."

  "You don't want the hyperdrive?" Allen asked.

  "I have not been offered the hyperdrive," Tippet replied. "And no, that is not a veiled reque
st for it. But even if you were to offer it, and I were to accept, I would not take it back to my homeworld without preparing them for it in advance."

  Allen sighed. "I honestly don't get it. I thought people would be excited by the prospect of getting around the light-speed limit, but the only things they can think about are the economic and political consequences."

  "Those are significant concerns." Tippet paused a moment, then said, "There is also the quarantine issue to consider. The immense distance between stars has until now served to keep the galaxy's intelligent races from interacting. What will happen now that the barrier is gone? You and I have become friends, but will our entire societies react the same way to one another? That remains to be seen. And . . . wait. Something just happened."

  Judy had actually been relaxing, despite the topic of discussion, but now she felt her pulse rate climb. "What? Not another ship?" She raised up on her elbows so she could look at Tippet.

  "No, but the French submarine has expelled several landing vehicles. They are firing rockets to reduce their orbital velocity."

  "What?" Allen asked. "Retro-rockets? That's stupid. They've got to have hyperdrive engines on board if they want to get back to the submarine. They could do a tangential vector translation and they wouldn't have to waste the energy."

  Judy laughed. "It's the military, Allen. They don't care about efficiency."

  "But—"

  "They've probably got the emergency descent modules from Mir. They have a standard procedure for using them, so that's what they're going to do, even if they launch them out of torpedo tubes." She imagined what that must be like: roaring out of the sides of the sub one after the other, lining up in formation, and lighting the engines. It would be a kick and a half! Maybe that's why they were doing it that way: for the sheer fun of it.

  Allen sat up and turned around to face her and Tippet. "How many of them are there?" he asked.

  "Ten," Tippet replied. "They seem to be aiming for a continent about a third of the way around the planet to the west of us."

  "That's smart, at least," Judy said. "That'll give them most of a day to explore before dark. What's surprising is that they're launching so many at once. They're all going to wind up coming down in the same place."

  "That's how the military does things," Allen said.

  Judy couldn't decide if he was mocking her or not, but either way, he was right. They might send a single scout if the situation demanded it, but if not, they would send a squad. She looked over at the bright yellow Getaway Special resting on its pad of crushed foam insulation, its 4 X 4 framework and steel reinforcement cables clinging to its sides like bargain-basement scaffolding. That was about as far from the military way of doing things as a person could get. The thought of a military invasion force landing on her planet—even if it was a continent away—raised the hair on the back of her neck. She had never taken the French very seriously, even when they had broken off diplomatic relations and closed their borders to Americans, but now that they had mounted a military expedition all the way out here, they didn't seem quite so insignificant.

  "How are they doing?" she asked Tippet.

  "They're just entering the atmosphere now. We can see plasma trails forming behind them as their passage heats the air. Their radio signals are beginning to deteriorate, but we're following them down telescopically." He continued to report on their progress as they slowed down through the upper atmosphere, then regrouped using their attitude jets and free-fell to within a kilometer of the ground before opening their parachutes. They were clearly trying to land as close together as possible.

  "They've got guts, I'll give them that," Judy said.

  "Perhaps, but their targeting skills could be improved," Tippet replied. "Their formation flying is impressive, but the whole fleet is going down in a forest, one much more densely overgrown than this. The first of them is approaching the top of a large tree now . . . and has crashed through it. The parachute has been drawn tight over the tree's canopy, which would indicate that the vehicle has fallen through and is hanging by the shroud lines above the ground. The others are going in as well, some punching through and some getting hung up in the branches. One has vanished, leaving a spherical hole in the treetop it landed in. The tree . . . skkkkt . . . the tree is thrashing its remaining branches back and forth. Amazing."

  "They bugged out with the hyperdrive," Allen said. "And they took the top of the tree with them. I wouldn't be happy about that, either."

  "You are speaking of the tree," Tippet said.

  "Right."

  "I remain skeptical that a tree can feel anything, but the evidence does seem to support your claim. It is now bending over . . . no, it is falling. It has ripped two of the landing vehicles from neighboring trees on its way down. Now it is on the ground and. . . 'twitching' is the only word to describe it." Judy looked up at the trees around them. If she hadn't seen one moving last night, she would never have believed what Tippet was describing now. But this was an alien planet, and the rules apparently weren't the same here as they were back home.

  "How about the astronauts?" she said softly. "Can you see if they're okay?"

  "None have emerged from their vessels yet. There are several simultaneous radio transmissions, but they all seem to contain only one word. It is not in the dictionary."

  "What is it?" Judy asked.

  "It sounds like 'Merde,'" Tippet replied. "Just 'merde, merde, merde,' over and over again." 38

  Judy's first impulse was to go help them. They were fellow astronauts in a bind, after all, no matter what their nationality. But they were also a third of the way around the planet, and even if she and Allen could locate them precisely enough to land anywhere nearby, they would only wind up dangling from the treetops with them.

  She sat cross-legged on her sleeping bag while Tippet described the unfolding situation as the French astronauts on the ground emerged from their capsules, cut down the ones caught in the trees, and helped their companions out. There were two per capsule, which made eighteen in the landing party. The tree that had been topped by the hyperdrive had quit twitching, but the humans milled around on the ground next to it for a while, the other treetops obscuring all but the most general impression of their motion that could be detected through infrared sensors.

  After fifteen minutes or so, during which Judy supposed they were testing the air and cleaning out their spacesuits, they began dragging their landing vehicles together. That must have been a huge job, but they managed it one capsule at a time, six of the landing party going out for a lander and hauling it into the clearing made by the dead tree, then another six going for the next one, then the last six, and so on until they had retrieved them all.

  Then they started cutting down more trees.

  "What the hell do they think they're doing?" Judy demanded when Tippet reported another tree flailing its limbs, then falling over. "Didn't they see what happened the first time?"

  "They apparently don't care," Allen said.

  "I believe they have orders to create a secure perimeter that they can defend," Tippet said. "We are making a little progress deciphering some of their language, based on English cognates, and that seems to be the gist of the transmissions from orbit."

  "Military thinking again," Judy said. "Never mind if the trees are sentient beings; if they're in the way, cut 'em down."

  "Calling them 'sentient' might be overstating their abilities," Tippet said. "They react to injury, but they don't seem to be able to defend themselves, or even to notice that their neighbors have been killed."

  "The one we saw last night was curious, and when we shined our flashlights at it, it took off like a scared rabbit. That's sentient behavior as far as I'm concerned."

  "Perhaps so," Tippet said, but he didn't sound convinced.

  Judy grew more agitated as he continued to relay the French soldiers' actions. They felled a dozen more trees, then cut them into sections and dragged the trunks into a circle around their landing vehic
les. By that point, the butterflies on Tippet's starship could see directly into the camp through the gap in the forest, and they could see in detail as the soldiers also cut the limbs into lengths, which they attempted to use for tent poles. The rubbery branches proved too flexible for that, so they tried setting one on fire, and when that worked satisfactorily, they cut the rest into smaller lengths and stacked them in the middle of the camp.

  "Holy shit," Judy said. "The trees burn when they're green. How can that be?"

  "There must be a lot more oxygen in the atmosphere than we thought," Allen asked.

  "It is nearly one part in three," said Tippet.

  "That would explain it. We're used to twenty-one percent."

  Judy wondered if that was why the stove had burned so hot. She would have thought the fuel would be the limiting factor, but maybe the burner design wasn't totally efficient and the extra oxygen had reacted with the unburned excess.

  That still didn't answer her first question. "If green wood burns here, how could the forests keep from burning down? There'd be nothing to stop a fire. The first lightning strike would set off the entire thing, wouldn't it?"