Anywhere but here

by Jerry Oltion

  It was rapidly becoming an "Aw, shucks" moment. Trent looked over at Donna and said, "We ought to get going. We've got mail to deliver."

  "Yeah, we probably should." To Katata, she said, "We're going to take off now. It was a pleasure to meet you, and I'm glad you're all okay. Next time we're out this way, we'll look you up and see how you're doing."

  "Good luck to you," Trent said, reaching out to shake Magalak's tentacle. Magalak suddenly held up his tentacles and said "Bata-bata!" then rushed back to the tent and emerged with a bottle of green liquid about the size and shape of a two-liter pop bottle. He thrust it into Trent's hands and said, "Tarit! Bogota tarit, boo." He mimed drinking it, then staggered from side to side.

  "It's gotta be hootch," Trent said to Donna.

  She laughed. "The universal thank-you."

  "Must be pretty good stuff, the way he's acting." Trent said to Magalak, "We appreciate the thought. Thank you. We'll, uh, save it for a special occasion."

  He and Donna went back to the pickup and folded up the tarp that Katata and the kids had been sitting on, then got their Ziptite suits out of the camper and pulled them over their clothes. Magalak watched for a moment, then suddenly burst into a long speech, pointing over toward the creek as he spoke. He mimed driving over there, then made a "pop" noise and threw his tentacles into the air.

  "You want us to take off from over there?" Trent asked. "It'll leave a big crater right beside the creek." Then he realized what Magalak wanted. "A pond! Sure, we can dig you a pond." He repeated Magalak's gestures, then held his hands out in a circle. "How big you want it?" He widened the circle, then made it smaller.

  "Taga!" Magalak said, making a big loop with his tentacles. "Bataga!" Trent laughed. "Okay, one big honkin' reservoir comin' up."

  Katata and Magalak and the kids all gave them one more round of squeezes, then they climbed into the pickups cab and sealed it up. Trent checked the air gauges—full—and the power gauge—down to three-quarters again after the morning's drive—and Donna got the computer out and hooked it up. Trent overpressurized the cab and watched the gauge for a couple of minutes to make sure they didn't have any leaks. When they were sure they were in good shape for space, they waved goodbye to everyone and drove across the meadow toward the spot where Magalak wanted the reservoir.

  "How wide should I set the jump field?" Donna asked.

  The wider they set it, the more power it would take, especially right on the surface of a planet. And from the sounds of it, they wouldn't have a chance to recharge at their next stop. On the other hand, a puddle wasn't likely to do anybody much good, especially if the summers were dry here the way Trent suspected. "How about thirty feet or so?" he said. "That'll hold quite a bit of water, and it'll still leave us with quite a bit of juice to get around on."

  "Thirty feet it is." Donna tapped at the keyboard.

  Trent pulled the pickup about twenty feet from the creek. Magalak would have to dig a short ditch to fill his reservoir, but this way it wouldn't wash out or silt up.

  The whole family was standing next to their water-tank home, Magalak and Katata with their tentacles wrapped around each other's waists, and the children in stairstep progression beside them.

  "Onnescu Gothic," Trent said. He waved. The aliens waved back, and Dixit jumped up and down, trying to break free of Talana's grasp and run toward the pickup.

  "We better go before he gets loose," Trent said.

  "I'm ready any time."

  "Then let's do it."

  Donna punched the "enter" key, and the planet vanished.

  10

  Gravity vanished with it, but a second later the pickup surged upward, pressing them into the seat again. Rocks and dirt flew past the windows, chased by billowing clouds of steam.

  "Whoa!" Trent said. "I didn't expect that."

  "There must have been a lot of water in the ground right next to the stream," said Donna. "It's all boiling at once."

  They watched their soggy dirt bowl break up and blow away, the upward pressure slowly easing as it did. The fog glowed bright white in the sunlight, and the rocks cast long shadows through it.

  "This must be what it looks like inside a comet," Donna said.

  "Yeah? I thought they were mostly ice."

  "Nope. They're full of rocks, too."

  The sun was coming in from the right, creating a bright halo on that side of the pickup and an equally bright rainbow on the other. They were going to have to wait a while for it to dissipate before they could get a position fix on the stars.

  "I wonder if this'll be visible from the ground tonight?" Trent asked.

  "Hmm," Donna squinted her eyes, thinking hard. "We're five hundred thousand K out, which is like three hundred thousand miles, so it would be about . . . I'm guessin' at least a couple thousand miles per degree looking up from the ground, and this might spread to twenty miles or so before it's too thin to reflect much, so that would make it . . . what, a hundredth of a degree wide? I think that's too small to see. What are you smiling at?"

  "You're so sexy when you do math."

  She blushed. "No wonder you couldn't keep your eyes off Glory last night. And I thought it was just her boobs."

  Trent laughed. "I thought I was gonna drop my teeth when she started in with that velocity stuff. Blonde, boobs, and brains. Who knew?"

  "Just goes to show you shouldn't judge a book by its cover."

  "Yeah," Trent said. "I definitely prefer judging by what goes on under the covers." Donna gave him a playful whack on the shoulder. "Men," she said. An empty .45 shell floated up from the floor. Trent snagged it and tried to stick it in his pocket, then remembered he was wearing his Ziptite suit and stuck it in one of the seat cover's pockets instead. Then he remembered that the pistol was still in the camper. Here they were, a couple of Americans about to land on a French colony, and their pistol was in the back. It might as well be on Earth, unless he wanted to seal up his Ziptite, pop open the door, and go back and get it. He had considered putting a hatch between the cab and the camper, but he'd figured it would be too likely to break the seal when they landed, so he'd left the two compartments separate.

  At least the rifle was still behind the seat. That would have to do. Trent unbuckled his seatbelt and twisted around until he could reach it, then stuck it in the gun rack and pulled the bungee straps over it so it wouldn't drift loose.

  "Expecting trouble?" Donna asked.

  "Just makin' sure I'm ready in case there is any. You ready to make the jump?" She set the computer in place on the dashboard and brought up the destination menu. "Mirabelle's on the list, so we don't have to use the coordinates, but the computer can't get a lock on the starfield yet." Trent could just barely see a few of the brightest stars through all the fog and dirt outside. "We may have to jump again just to get out of this," he said.

  "You want to?"

  "Might as well. Won't cost us much now that we're off the surface. Assuming you've got the jump field tightened up." "I do."

  "Then let's give it a try."

  "Okay, another five hundred K." She pushed the "enter" button, and most of the fog vanished. Now the stars were much clearer, but so was Onnescu. It was a flat ceiling of clouds and ocean just overhead.

  "Jesus!" Trent said. "What did you do, hit reverse?"

  "We must have tumbled halfway around," she said. "We're still in launch mode, so the drive takes us straight up."

  And "up" was right back to Onnescu. That was a little too close for comfort. "Jump us again," Trent said.

  She did, and Onnescu blinked out. Now the stars were bright, and only a few rocks had followed them through both jumps.

  The pickup was nosing upward, so Trent gave the front air nozzles a burst. The air tank under the seat hissed, two jets of fog shot upward from the front bumper, and the stars steadied out.

  "We've got a fix now," Donna said.

  "All right, then, let's do it."

  "Okay. Loading Mirabelle. Hmm. It's 56.4 light-years away. Th
at's a pretty good jump." It would be the farthest they'd ever gone, that's for sure. Distance wasn't supposed to matter much to the hyper-drive, but it did to Trent. For a moment he wished they could just go back to Rock Springs and drop the mailbag off at the post office there, but he'd gotten them into this, and the only good way out was to go through with it.

  The computer put an arrow in the upper left corner of the screen. Technically you didn't need to be pointing at your destination when you jumped, so long as the computer knew your orientation, but Trent used the jets until it was on the screen anyway.

  "Fire when ready," he said.

  Donna put her finger over the "enter" key, then looked out the windshield before she pressed it. There was a definite moment of disorientation, much stronger than before, and the stars changed this time. Trent looked for familiar patterns and didn't see any at first, but then he noticed the belt and sword and left leg of Orion shining just the same as always. The shoulders and the right leg were shifted upward and to the right a bit, but not too bad. Sirius wasn't near the left shoulder anymore. He looked up to find the dippers, but they weren't there. He saw a string of seven or eight fairly bright stars that might have been the big one, but it was scrunched pretty bad. The Little Dipper was unrecognizable, and so was Cassiopeia, assuming he was even looking in the right patch of sky. He took a deep breath and said, "That definitely took us somewhere." Donna nodded. "Yeah. Now we just have to find Mira-belle." She set to work with the computer, and in a few seconds it had crunched its star map until it matched the view outside. "Says we're still a light-year away. I guess that's not too bad for a fifty-light-year jump. Ready to go closer?"

  "Do it," Trent said.

  They jumped again, and this time a bright star shone in from Donna's side. The computer compared the starfield to its map, and they did the full sky sweep for it, but they had to jump again and let it do another check before it could tell which points of light were stars and which ones were planets.

  "According to this, Mirabelle is that one," Donna said, pointing high to the left. It was just a blob of white like any other star, but when Trent squinted at it he could convince himself that it showed a disk. One more jump and it was definitely a planet. It was half in shadow and half in light, and none of the continents they could see were shaped like a long bird, so they jumped to the other side and there it was. They didn't see the crater until they jumped to within a few hundred miles, but then it was pretty clear. With binoculars, it was sharp as a tack.

  "What's our ground speed?" Trent asked.

  "Only eleven thousand kilometers per hour," Donna said. "Heck, that's nothing. Five minutes of correction and we're there. Here goes." She called up the tangential vector translation menu, clicked the crosshairs just a nudge inland from the crater, and hit "go," and they popped partway around the planet to let its gravity cancel their velocity.

  They had only been in space for ten minutes or so. At this rate they could probably make it all the way to the ground without needing to refresh their air, but Trent wanted to make sure they were thinking as clearly as possible on their way in, so while they waited for the program to take them back over their landing site, he bled off half their air and refilled it from the tank.

  "Might as well see what their beacon says," he said, switching on the CB radio and turning it to channel 1,

  The broadcast was in French, of course. They couldn't make out any words at all. Trent switched to channel 2, and they could tell that one was in Spanish, but they couldn't understand it, either. Channel 3 sounded like Russian. There was nothing in English all the way up the dial. The vector translation program beeped at them, and a few seconds later zapped them back over the crater.

  "Okay, we need to get close enough to find where the two rivers join," Donna muttered, tapping at the keys.

  "Hold up a sec." Trent used the jets to point the nose of the truck straight down so they could see better.

  "Taking us in closer," Donna said, and the view expanded in three distinct jumps. There were clouds over maybe a third of the continent, but they could see a big river running out of a range of mountains into the crater, and another big river joining it a little ways inland, maybe ten times the crater's diameter away.

  "There it is."

  "Okay." Donna clicked the crosshairs on the computer image of the junction, and the landing program shifted them sideways until they were directly over it. Then it took them down two jumps. Donna zoomed the computer's view in on the junction between the two rivers. "There's the plain we're supposed to land on," Trent said, tapping the screen. It was more golden than green, but it looked flat where it peeked through the clouds.

  "Got it." Donna clicked on that, and the hyperdrive shifted them sideways again. "We're good," she said. "Twenty seconds to zero velocity."

  "Oh shit, I need to give 'em the password!" Trent yanked the microphone off its clip and punched channel 8 on the radio, then he realized the paper with the French phrase on it was still in his wallet. And the wallet was inside his Zip-tite suit.

  "Damn, damn, damn," he muttered as he peeled the suit down off his shoulders and jammed his hand between the plastic and his pants. He fumbled his wallet out of his hind pocket, tore it open, and grabbed the paper out of it, letting the wallet drift free. Donna caught it on the rebound from the windshield, and Trent turned the paper right-side-up to read, "Lee factor va a terrier. Lee factor va a terrier, over."

  The radio hissed for a second, then a heavily accented male voice said, "Who is this?"

  "Poisson," Trent read off the note before he realized that that wasn't the response he was supposed to get. Why had they spoken English? "Poisson," he said again, and then just to be sure he said, "Fish." There was a long silence before the voice said, "Very well, you may land." 11

  "Five seconds to zero velocity," Donna said. "Three, two, one, zero. Okay, now we're falling." Trent frantically worked the air jets to orient the pickup for the drop while she said, "Picking up speed. Fifty, a hundred, two hundred, three."

  The second the pickup was level with the ground, he flipped the parachute release switch, careful to hit just the first one this time. There was a bang from overhead, then a couple more seconds of free fall as the canopy billowed upward, then a hard lurch as it filled out.

  Trent waited for the sickening moment of free fall that would mean they'd been fired upon, but it didn't come. "Get ready on the bugout button," he said anyway. His heart was beating faster than when they'd landed on the tree.

  He wanted to call on the radio to this mysterious person on the ground and find out who they were and why they spoke English, but Greg had cautioned him against too much chatter. He was just going to have to wait until they landed and could talk face-to-face. Assuming the guy who spoke English was the same one they were supposed to hand over the mailbag to.

  He stuck his arms inside the Ziptite suit and pulled it up over his shoulders again, then looked out at the planet. There was a big arc of clouds out in front of them; part of a weather front by the looks of it. He leaned up next to the window to see how thick they were directly beneath them, but he couldn't see straight down.

  "Damn it, I forgot to turn the mirrors down again."

  "That's all right," Donna said. "When we get down where the air's breathable, you can do the same trick you did on Onnescu."

  "I guess. It just irritates me to be so dumb twice in a row. Makes me wonder what else I've forgot."

  "Nothing important, I'm sure." She grinned at him and said, "Don't sweat the small stuff."

  "Yeah. There's plenty of big stuff to worry about." He could think of a dozen things right off the top of his head, and most of them didn't even have anything to do with landing in enemy territory. But they were committed now, and everything he could do to ensure their safety had either already been done or it was too late to make any difference, so he tried to relax and admire the view on the way down. There was no sign of civilization. No town at the river junction, no plumes of smoke from
factories or power plants or even from houses as far as they could see, and no tilled fields, either. If there hadn't been radio beacons announcing who lived here, the place would look like an uninhabited planet.

  "I wonder if there was anybody here before the French," Trent said.

  "I don't know," Donna said. "I never saw any samizdat for Mirabelle."

  "Big surprise there."

  There was a hell of a mountain range off in the distance. The peaks went on and on, and were mostly covered with snow. Clouds hid some of them from view, while others stuck up clear through the clouds to glisten bright white in the sun. There was forest on the flanks of the front range, but that was the only vegetation above the plains; everything else was ice and rock.

  "Looks cold down there," Donna said.

  "It does."

  As they drew closer to the ground, they began to realize that a lot of what they had originally thought was clouds was actually snow-covered ground. There were still plenty of clouds, though, and it looked like they were going to fall right into a big one. Its billowy top rose up to meet them, looking almost solid in the bright sunlight.

  "If there's lightning inside that, we're out of here," Trent said.

  "Got it," Donna said, resting her hand on the dashboard near the computer. When they hit, the change was instantaneous. The world suddenly went totally white, then rapidly darkened to gray. Streaks of moisture beaded up on the windshield, and the truck jounced up and down as the clouds internal winds buffeted the parachute. Trent craned his neck to see if the canopy was staying open in the turbulence, but all he could see were the shroud lines disappearing into the fog.

  "Hope this doesn't go all the way to the ground," he said.

  "It won't."

  He wished he had Donna's confidence. He could easily imagine them coming down on one of those cloud-covered mountain peaks and tumbling all the way to the bottom. It had looked like level ground beneath them when they had picked their landing site, but who could say what was hidden inside the clouds? You could find single mountains off by themselves in various places on Earth; why not here?