Anywhere but here

by Jerry Oltion

  He had positioned the pressure relief jet to push against the trucks center of mass, so it wouldn't start them spinning. They might pick up a few feet per second of sideways velocity, but that was nothing to worry about.

  He looked out again at the Sun hanging there ahead of them, then back at the dark planet blocking the stars behind them.

  "This is one of those, what-you-call-'em, metaphor moments, ain't it?" he asked. Donna gave him an odd look. "How do you mean?"

  He shrugged. "I don't know. Just . . . here we are, headin' out from the dark past into the bright new future, ready to roll the moment we get wherever we're going . . . ." He left it hanging, already embarrassed and afraid to say anything more, but Donna reached out and took his hand in hers, their plastic spacesuits crinkling softly, and the look in her eyes told him he'd said something right.

  But where were they going, anyway? Trent looked at the Sun hanging there in the distance, surrounded by more stars than he could see from the ground even on a clear dark night in Rock Springs, and wondered. Bigtown today, but where tomorrow? Where the day after that? He didn't have a clue. 4

  When their twelve minutes were up, the navigation program beeped a ten-second warning, then flipped them a third of the way around the planet, directly over Bigtown. The planet was overhead now, which meant that the pickup was about to enter the atmosphere upside down. Trent used the front air jets to shove its nose down until the planet slid around behind them, then beneath them. He hit the back jets to stop their motion, but inertia carried them on for a couple of seconds, and they wound up nose-down with the planet spread out in front of them like a map.

  Beneath scattered puffy clouds was a long mountain range, all snow-capped peaks and green forest, running diagonally from upper right to lower left. Rivers cut meandering lines out into the foothills, which gave way to smooth grassland stretching off into the distance. Nicholas Onnescu had picked a good spot to settle.

  Suddenly it expanded, then again and again as the navigation program dropped them ten kilometers at a time toward their target, which Trent assumed was not Bigtown itself, but a flat spot a ways out of town. The horizon went from curved to straight, and the view became more and more like the everyday sight from a high-flying airplane. Then the computer beeped at them and the view stopped changing.

  "We're as low as it can take us," Donna said, "but we still have some upward velocity, so don't pop the chute yet."

  "Right." They were at the wrong angle for that anyway. Trent used the rear jets to push them around until the planet was below them, then hit the front jets to stop that motion, but he'd reacted too late again and they overshot the other way, going in tailfirst now. "This is trickier than it looks," he muttered.

  "You're doing fine. We've still got fifteen seconds."

  "Heck, let's take a nap," Trent said, hitting the front jets, then immediately hitting the rear jets. That took them about halfway around to where they needed to be, so he did it again. That put them at the right angle front-to-back, but the left-side jets apparently had more push than the right-side ones, because now the ground was drifting upward on Trent's side. He tapped the right-side valves just as the computer apparently decided they had risen high enough for it to make another ten-kilometer jump downward, so it looked for a second as if the air jets had somehow shoved them down hard. Trent flinched back from the controls, then laughed nervously. "Damn! I'm gettin' a little punchy here."

  "You're doing fine," Donna said again. "According to this our velocity is just about zero, so we want to pop the chute in about five seconds anyway. Four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . now." There was no sound of air rushing past, but Trent knew that they had just sped up to about three hundred kilometers per hour in those five seconds. That was about two hundred miles an hour, a little fast to be opening a cargo parachute if you were down where the air was thick, but up here in the thin stuff at the edge of space, that was just about right.

  He reached up to the switch panel above the rearview mirror and flipped the left-hand toggle, but his plastic glove caught on the right-hand one and flipped it, too. There was a double bang from overhead as the fiberglass cover over both parachutes popped open, then a long couple of seconds while the chutes streamed upward.

  "Shit," he said in the silence. "That was our reserve chute, too." Now they didn't have any backup if they had to abort their landing. They could expand the jump field to include the canopies, but that took a lot more power, and it would still leave them with both chutes unfurled in vacuum. They would have to go outside in their Ziptites and fold them up, a job that was anywhere from dangerous to impossible, depending on whose stories you believed. But trying to enter an atmosphere with a chute already deployed was just as dangerous.

  He was expecting a hard jolt when they both filled at once, and it didn't disappoint him, but it was nothing like their first time. Then, they had been guessing their speed by eye, and the jolt had left marks on their butts from the seat springs.

  That had been on the way out. On the way home they'd guessed better, and their first chute had deployed just fine, only to get zapped by a laser satellite that had apparently thought they were an incoming missile. Their second chute had gone the same way a few minutes later, and they'd had to jump back into space and radio for help—help that wouldn't have come if Allen Meisner and Judy Gallagher hadn't just returned to Earth with the aliens they had met on their own travels.

  "Well," Donna said, "With two parachutes, we'll have a soft landing."

  "We can hope."

  Trent leaned against his side window and looked up. He couldn't see straight overhead, but he could see almost half of each parachute and they both looked fully inflated. A little scrunched on the sides where they touched, but nothing serious. They glowed bright white in the sunlight, brand new and clean with only the exaggerated exclamation point of the company logo breaking the smooth expanse of nylon. Trent couldn't read the Cyrillic words stenciled on the rim of the chutes even when he was standing right next to them, so he had no idea what the company was called, but as long as the chutes worked, he didn't really care.

  The view out the side window went on forever. They were still a long ways up—probably fifty miles or so. It would be a long ride down. A long time to kick himself for his clumsiness. He couldn't believe he'd done that. One little slip, and now they could be in deep shit if anything else went wrong. He couldn't see straight down, either. He should have angled the side mirrors downward before they left Earth, but of course he'd forgotten to do that. He wondered what else he'd messed up, and how soon they would find out about it.

  Donna reached out and put her hand on his leg. "It's all right."

  "No, it's not all right. That was a dumb-ass move, and now we could find ourselves in trouble in a real hurry." "We'll be fine."

  He didn't say anything. Experience had taught him that times like this were when he was most likely to stick his foot in his mouth, adding that to the growing list of screw-ups. So he just sat there and watched the ground slowly become more detailed as they dropped.

  "At least we've got nice weather for a landing," Donna said.

  "There's that," he allowed.

  It was hard to tell from high up whether or not there was any wind on the ground. They were undoubtedly drifting sideways with whatever high-altitude winds happened to be blowing, and with two chutes holding them up longer they would drift farther than usual, but that wasn't a problem. It was the ground weather that mattered. It wouldn't take much of a crosswind to tip them over when they landed, if they came in sideways. That was one of the drawbacks of a jacked-up truck. One more worry to add to the list.

  The ground looked rougher and rougher the closer they came. What had seemed like smooth prairie now became filled with shadows of rock outcrops and meandering streams. It was either morning or evening down there, which meant the light was coming in low and highlighting the terrain, but it looked like there was plenty of terrain for it to highlight. It would be fun
four-wheeling once they were down, but it could make for a hairy landing.

  How had he gotten them into this mess, anyway? They could have just taken an afternoon drive out to Flaming Gorge or something and been home for dinner.

  The pickup was spinning slowly clockwise, giving them the full panorama every thirty seconds or so. One of the shroud lines must be a little longer than the others, spilling a little more air from one side of the chute and shoving it around.

  "Pretty, isn't it?" Donna said.

  "Huh?"

  "It's a whole different planet out there, stretching off as far as you can see. Look at the way the sun glistens off the river out there. And the mountains. That's a glacier, isn't it?" Trent looked where she was pointing. Tail gray peaks stuck up through a blanket of snow that looked white as cotton except for a long snakey line of dirt that wound down through a wide canyon from the middle of the range.

  "Yep, that's what it looks like," he said.

  "I wonder if anybody has skied down it yet?"

  "Glaciers are full of crevices. You ski over what looks like smooth snow, and the next thing you know you're a hundred feet down in a crack with a broken neck."

  She looked over at him. "What's gotten into you?"

  "Maybe some common sense."

  "Or maybe a little too much self-criticism. We're going to be okay, Trent. So we're coming down under both parachutes. People do that on purpose all the time."

  "They're idiots," Trent said.

  "And you think you're an idiot, too?"

  "Feels like it," he admitted. The mountains swept away to the left and he found himself looking out at the vast sea of grass. "I mean, just because everybody else is rushin' off into space, does that mean we have to do it, too? So what if we're out of work? We can find other jobs. We've got our own house and our families right there, too. What made us think we had to go zoomin' around the galaxy?"

  "Because it's there?"

  He snorted. "Yeah, right. So's Australia, and we never tried that."

  "We couldn't afford to go to Australia."

  "And now we're landing on Alpha Centauri." He shook his head. "I don't know. It made all sorts of sense when I was sealing up the truck and doing all the wiring and stuff, but now I just don't get it." Donna looked out her side window. "We're coming in." She took the computer off the dashboard and held it in her lap, tapping at the keyboard a few times. Trent recognized the emergency bailout screen when it popped up. Hit the "enter" key now and the hyperdrive would take them a hundred thousand kilometers straight up. Useful if they were about to land in the water or on a steep slope or something, but with the jump field set to fifty meters so it would include the parachutes, it would suck power like a short circuit, and then they would either have to go outside in vacuum and repack the chutes or go back to Earth and holler for help. Not something Trent wanted to do twice in a row. Bigtown wasn't hard to spot now that they were close to the ground. It was too far away to see houses or streets, but there was a dirty smudge of smoke in the air over one of the valleys up by the foot of the mountains. Trent guessed it was maybe fifteen miles away; an easy drive if they managed to land okay.

  He put his head up against his own window, trying to see as close to straight down as he could. It looked like they were going down in some rolling hills, but there were rock outcrops and steep gullies all around, any one of which could be a problem, and he couldn't tell what was directly beneath them. The pickup swayed gently. They must have crossed through the boundary between an updraft and a downdraft or something. This close to the ground the air could get turbulent. Duh! This close to the ground, the air was breathable, too. Trent laughed and popped his top and bottom door latches, then pulled the regular handle and opened the door. There was a little whoof of air as the pressure equalized, and the smell of green growing things came wafting in. He leaned out and looked straight down. "Shit. Big rocks. Get ready to jump."

  "I can't do that if your doors open!"

  "I can't see where we're landin' with it closed. We're drifting a little; we might miss 'em." It would be close, but with two parachutes they weren't dropping all that fast, and the closer they got to the ground, the more it looked like they were going sideways.

  There were a couple of trees beside the rocks. It looked like the pickup would clear the first one, but it was going to come right down on the second one. Trent tried to gauge how big it was, but from this angle it was just a big puff of green. Then he thought to look at its shadow, and nearly told Donna to jump. The shadow was at least fifty feet long!

  And the trunk was only six inches thick. The light was coming in low, that was all. They were definitely going to hit it. He slammed his door and leaned back in the seat, grabbing the steering wheel and getting his feet ready on the juice pedal and the brake. "This is going to be rough, but don't jump no matter what."

  "No?"

  "No. Not even if we tip over. Just hang—"

  There was a loud crunch and they pitched forward, then an equally loud snap and they pitched back, wobbling and spinning around under the parachute. They'd just snapped off the top of the tree. Donna yelped, but she kept her hand off the keyboard, even when branches slapped and screeched upward past her window.

  The rockpile swung past just a couple feet in front of them, moving around to Trent's side, and then the tires hit the ground and the pickup lurched sideways. It rose up on two tires, but Trent turned the wheels into the roll and juiced the motors, and the truck spun halfway around before coming to a stop with a clang as the front bumper hit another rock. In a stock vehicle, that would have blown the air bags, but Trent had disabled those the first day he'd taken the pickup four-wheeling and had never hooked them up again.

  He turned to Donna, and he couldn't help grinning. "Okay," he said. "Now we're havin' fun." 5

  The first thing they did was peel out of their spacesuits and turn them inside-out to dry. Trent flapped his a couple of times to shake the sweat out of it, then draped it over the hood while he and Donna gathered up their parachutes and re-folded them. The air felt cold at first as the sweat evaporated from his clothing, but it didn't take long before he started to warm up again. His right leg hurt a little where he'd bruised it falling into the crater last night, but once he started moving around again it loosened up and he hardly noticed it.

  One of the two canopies had wound up draped over the tree they had busted, so he had to climb up and carefully unhook it. The tree looked a little like a pine, but it didn't smell like one. It had more of a vegetable smell, like broccoli or lima beans or something like that. Trent was afraid it would be rubbery like a vegetable, too, but the bark was rough textured and dry, and the branches were stiff enough to hold his weight. The ones that had busted were oozing orange sap. When Trent touched some and held his finger to his nose, he discovered that's where the smell was coming from. It wasn't particularly sticky, but he was willing to bet it would get that way when it dried a little.

  "We can't fold up the parachute with this stuff smeared all over it," he said when he'd pulled the canopy free. He climbed back down out of the tree while Donna got a Taco John's napkin from the glove box and dabbed at the gobs of sap.

  "It comes off pretty easy," she reported, so they set to work with napkins and a shop towel and within a few minutes they had it cleaned up. There were still orange stains on the white nylon, but that didn't matter. Battle scars made for good stories back home.

  By the time they'd cleaned and folded both chutes, their spacesuits were dry, so they turned them right-side-out again and folded those up, too. Trent wiggled under the truck to see if the tree had damaged anything vital, but aside from a big dent in the underside of the bed and a lot of scrapes between it and the bumper, everything looked fine. While he crawled back out again, Donna opened the camper and went inside to make sure everything had survived in there, and to open the vents in the roof and the walls to let air circulate even when the door was closed.

  She came back out with a can of
beer. "It's kind of early our time to start drinking," she said, "but I think the day's just about over here. Doesn't the sun look closer to the horizon than it did when we were coming down?"

  It was hard to tell for sure, since the horizon was so much nearer now that they were on the ground, but it only took a few more minutes to see that the sun was dropping. "Looks like we've only got another hour or so of daylight," Trent said. "Not enough time to make it to Bigtown before nightfall, and I'm not sure I want to go bushwhackin' on unfamiliar ground in the dark. Looks like we'll be camping out tonight." He smiled as he said that. He hadn't camped out in months. Donna said, "Let's at least find us a stream. I'll want more than a spit-bath in the morning."

  "One stream coming up," Trent said gallantly. From what he had seen on the way down, there were streams coming out of the mountains every few miles all along the front range. They climbed back into the cab and he switched into reverse to back around the rock they'd clipped with the front bumper, but an amber light came on in the dashboard as soon as he fed the motors power.

  "Uh-oh. Looks like that tree did more damage than I thought." It was the right-rear motor light, so he got out and slid under the truck again, and sure enough, there was a six-inch-long piece of branch sticking out of that one's control box. The motor itself looked okay, but the branch had speared the electronics that ran it. He could probably wire around the box and run the motor manually if he had to, but its power level and its regenerative braking system wouldn't be coordinated with the other motors, so it would constantly be making the truck swerve left and right as he accelerated and decelerated. Better to just disconnect it entirely and run on the other three. When he got back home he would have to buy a new control box; another expense he didn't need, but that was one of the risks of four-wheeling. Nature was tough on machinery.