Anywhere but here

by Jerry Oltion

  The slo-mo shell was empty. The bottom was half chewed away, and the inside was just a hollow cavity. The walls were about a quarter of an inch thick, and hard as bone. Definitely hard enough to stop an arrow, and probably bullets, too. Trent tried to bust out the rest of the underside, but it just flexed in his hands. He would have to take a hammer to it, and probably a file to smooth off the rough edges. The domed part was too big to fit comfortably on a human head, but with a little padding he supposed it would work okay.

  He tried to find a second one, but everything else in the meadow was still alive, except for several rocks that turned out to actually just be rocks. He went over to the bank and looked down into the creekbed, but that was so full of round rocks that he would have to go down and turn them all over just to see which ones were real and which weren't.

  He carried the empty one back to the camper. Might as well see if he could make one work before he hunted up another.

  "It's funny," he said. "It's just about the perfect shape for a helmet already. You've got to wonder how come."

  "Form follows function," said Donna, holstering her pistol. She had been keeping watch on the sky while he was out in the open. "It's basically the same shape as a turtle shell, too."

  "No it's not. Turtle shells are a lot flatter."

  "Tortoise shells, then. Land turtles. They're tall and round like this."

  "That's true." He got his tool box out of the camper and started chipping away what was left of the bottom, using a hammer at first, then busting off pieces with pliers when he got closer to the rim. The inside was smooth and dry, with little grooves crisscrossing it where muscles had been attached. There was still no indication of a mouth hole or an anus, and the shell definitely didn't open up to let the inhabitant stick its head out, which made Trent wonder if these things even had heads. Maybe they were just mobile stomachs, like starfish.

  Once he chipped away the last of the flat bottom, he stuffed a towel inside and tried it on. It came down over his eyes until he adjusted the towel, and then it bumped into his back at the base of his neck. That might not be such a bad thing, actually. Firemen's hats did that.

  "What do you think?" he asked Donna.

  "You look like a little kid with his dad's army helmet," she said, laughing. "But it looks like it should work."

  "Good. A little shoulder protection, and I think we'll be in business. Let's see if we can find another one."

  Keeping an eye out for cupids, he scrambled down the creek bank and stalled poking around among the rocks there. Most of them were just rocks, but there was a gravel bar at the tail of a bend in the stream where a bunch of driftwood had collected, and there were a couple of helmet-shaped rocks in among the branches. One was definitely a slo-mo; it was upside down and he could see the flat underside.

  It had a hole chewed in the bottom, too. He nudged it with the barrel of his rifle, but nothing leaped out of it, so he tipped it over and a bunch of brown water poured out the hole.

  "Eeew," Donna said. "You're wearing that one."

  "Okay." He swished it around in the pool, filling and emptying it until the water came out clean. The stream was cold; evidently it was runoff from snowmelt higher up in the mountains. That was too bad for bathing, but encouraging in terms of predators and parasites. On Earth, at least, cold-water streams had a lot fewer nasties in them than warm ones. It would also make a good place to chill his beer, once he made sure nothing would run off with it.

  He carried the shell back up the bank and set to work on it with the hammer and pliers until he'd chipped away all but the curved upper half. There were still some stringy ends of tendons attached to it, so he scraped those away with his pocket knife, then went back to the stream to wash it out again. While he was down there he hauled out a six-inch log from the driftwood pile that looked like it would make good shoulder guards and dragged it up to their campsite.

  While he set to work on the log with a saw, Donna went into the camper and started cleaning up the mess in there. She came out with the ripped-up parachute and asked, "What do you want to do with this, anyway?"

  "Keep it," he said automatically. He didn't want to throw anything out, not with civilization a million light-years away and maybe forever. The sections that had been weakened by sap were probably useless, but there were still big pieces of cloth that weren't. It would never make a parachute again, but if he and Donna were truly stuck here, they might wind up wearing it before they learned to skin and tan hides.

  "We should wash it," she said, "so the acid doesn't spread and eat the whole thing."

  "Good thought. Here." He took it from her, unwound the shroud lines from the bundle of cloth, and threw the bundle down into the biggest pool in the stream. He tied the shroud lines to the tree so it wouldn't float off downstream. "It's not exactly washing, but that ought to give it a good soak, anyway." He didn't know if the sap was water soluble or not, but it was worth a try. He went back to work on the log, cutting off an eight-inch section and splitting it in half, then hollowing it out with the claw of a hammer until he had two inch-thick shells of wood that would fit over his shoulders. They stuck out like epaulets on a military dress uniform, but they would do the job. The wood was harder than pine, and fibrous enough to hang together under impact. He used a ratchet screwdriver to drill holes in the shoulder pieces and in the helmet, then strung them together with cord from the parachute shroud lines. He made a chin strap for the helmet, put the whole works on, and went to the camper door. "What do you think?" he asked. It was darker inside the camper than out in the open. He couldn't see Donna's expression, but her laughter told him plenty. "You look like a samurai!" she said.

  "Better than a kid in his dad's helmet."

  "Well, that, too, but the shoulder dealies are priceless. Hold on a second." She rummaged in a drawer, then came out with their camera. "Hold up your gun and look fierce," she said. He tried, but she kept snickering, and he couldn't hold a stern expression while she was doing that.

  "Take the damned picture, woman!" he said, but he was grinning when he said it, and sure enough, that's when she snapped the shot. He almost deleted it when she showed it to him, but she said, "No way!

  Take your own if you don't like this one, but that's mine. When we get home I'm going to print it out full-sized and frame it for the living room, and we can hang the helmet and armor underneath it and tell stories about it."

  "Oh boy," he said, but he handed back the camera without deleting the picture. In a weird way, it gave him something to look forward to. He hoped he would make it back home to be embarrassed by it, but if he didn't, then at least there would be one good thing about staying stranded the rest of their lives. 24

  He made another set of armor just like the first for Donna, then set to work on the table in the camper. The table itself wasn't broken, so it was a simple matter of finding a sturdy stick and cutting it to the right size to replace the legs that had busted. That was the work of a half hour, then he took the Vise-Grips to the air valve in his door, bending it out straight again. He fished around in the pipe with the wire from the spiral notebook, pulling out a little plug of dirt, then blew through the spigot from the inner side. Free.

  The driver's mirror took another half hour to bend back into shape. There was a big crack in it, and the image in the two pieces didn't quite line up, but it would work well enough until he could get a replacement.

  He got out the foot pump and refilled the tires. He thought about filling the air tanks, too, but that would be a lot of work, and they weren't going into space again unless he could recharge the batteries, and if he could figure out a way to do that, then he could use the compressor. He cut up the rest of the log for firewood, and hauled up some smaller stuff from the driftwood pile for kindling. He wasn't sure about sitting outside around a campfire in the dark until they learned what kind of nocturnal animals lived around there, but it never hurt to have a supply of firewood on hand, and it gave him something useful to do. It was starting
to dawn on him how long a day could be when you didn't have a plan to fill it.

  They didn't need to wear their helmets under the tree. Trent went out to the edge of its canopy and scanned the sky from time to time, and he saw the occasional cupid riding thermals high overhead, but none of them even came down to investigate. It looked like maybe they weren't going to be as much of a threat as he had thought, but he was glad he'd made the armor just in case. After Donna cleaned up the camper—which took all of half an hour—she settled down on the picnic blanket with the computer and started poring through the hyperdrive control program, trying to figure out what had gone wrong and where it had taken them. It wouldn't do much good if they couldn't recharge the truck's batteries, but recharging the batteries wouldn't get them home until they knew where they were.

  Trent went through everything they had brought with them, counting up how many separate batteries he could find, but there weren't many. Two flashlights, the computer, their phone, a calculator (solar powered, but it had a button battery for low-light use), and a couple spare flashlight cells. Granted, a flashlight battery would run the light for a couple of weeks of steady use, but it wouldn't power a hyperdrive. The camper's stove took its power from the truck's main battery . . . as did the refrigerator, come to think of it. They were going to have to eat the perishable food first, which was probably why Donna had suggested ham sandwiches again for lunch. She was way ahead of him. He thought briefly about using the calculator's solar cell to recharge the truck's battery, but a few minutes of number crunching with that same calculator convinced him that he and Donna would probably die of old age before a tiny solar cell could recharge a plasma battery.

  There was still enough juice in the mains for the radio. He listened on all the channels, and he tried calling on the emergency frequency and the general talk frequency, but there was nobody out there. Ground-to-ground, the radio probably had only a fifty-mile range or so anyway; it would only be useful if someone popped into orbit directly overhead.

  He switched it off and sat down beside Donna. "Any luck?" he asked.

  "Not yet," she replied. She was reading a help screen for the navigation programs targeting module.

  "Well, actually, I've learned a couple things. The program stores everything it does in a log file, but the log file says we only went sixty light-years on the jump from Mirabelle, so that probably means the bug in the program is between the part that sets the target and the part that actually sends the command to the hyperdrive."

  He wasn't sure he followed all that, but he understood enough to ask, "Do you think you can fix the bug if you find it?"

  "I doubt it," she said. "I'm not a programmer, and I don't have the right software for it even if I was." She ran a hand through her hair and sighed. "I'm afraid you'd be better off with Nick and Glory at this point. Glory could probably just calculate how far we went by how much power we used, or by the density of the stars or something."

  "The velocity," Trent said. "She was talking about how they move faster the farther away you go. She could probably just look at how fast that first planet we had to catch up with was movin' and figure out right where we had to be."

  Donna cocked her head to the side and looked at him out the corner of one eye. "I hadn't thought of that. Of course that's why it was moving so fast. And why we didn't have to do it again for the next one. Once we caught up to the first one, we were moving at the same pace as everything else around here. We just had to make up the difference in speed between the two planets going around their stars." Trent nodded. "Makes sense. So can you use that to figure out how far we went?" She shook her head. "I'm not Glory. I don't know how fast the galaxy rotates, or how fast we were moving back home, or—"

  "Once every quarter of a billion years, and the stars around Earth are moving about half a million miles per hour."

  She couldn't have looked more surprised if he'd started quoting Shakespeare at her. "You—how did you—"

  "You thought I was just staring at her boobs, didn't you?" he said smugly. Truth was, he had been so shocked when Glory had started to talk astrophysics that her words had been burned into his brain like the image of an accident. He thought for a moment and said, "Earth is thirty thousand light-years out from the center of the galaxy, and that half million miles an hour is about thirty times the orbital velocity of a satellite around an average sized planet. I thought it was funny that both numbers came out thirty." She tapped him gently on the side of his head. "You got anything else tucked away in there?"

  "I remember she said it would take days to match speed with another galaxy, so unless she was exaggerating, I'm guessin' we're still in the Milky Way."

  Donna laughed. "Now that's a comfort." She turned back to the computer and opened up a drawing window, where she quickly sketched a rough spiral galaxy with an "x" about halfway out from the middle, which she labeled "Sun." She typed "30,000 ly" next to it, and "500,000 mph" next to that. Then she called up the navigation program again and dug through its log file until she found how much velocity change they had had to make—537,000 kilometers/ hour—and typed that in.

  "Better convert that to miles," Trent said, "or you'll forget to later."

  "Actually, I'll be better off converting Earth's speed to kilometers," she said. "All the other numbers in here are metric, too." She did that, then stared at the diagram for a minute. "Okay, let's say we jumped straight out toward the edge of the galaxy. We'd be moving slower than the stars out there. So how far would we have to go to be moving five hundred and thirty-seven thousand miles an hour too slow?" She might as well have asked how many leaves were on the tree overhead. Trent's schooling had topped out at general math, and he'd gotten a "B" at that. He snorted and said, "I have absolutely no idea."

  "Me neither," Donna said, "but if we can figure that out, I think that'll tell us where we are." For a moment, Trent felt the weight of their situation drop off his shoulders. Donna was a hell of a lot better at math than he was. Maybe she could do it. But a moment later he realized the flaw in her logic. "How do you know we went straight out?"

  "I don't," she admitted. "But I have the coordinates of both Mirabelle and Earth, so I can figure out what direction we did go. Assuming we were right about the only bug being our distance."

  "And then you can calculate how far we went, just knowing how much faster everything was?"

  "Maybe. I've got to account for the Earth's motion around the Sun, and this planet's motion around this sun, too, 'cause that's not part of the galaxy's rotation, but if I can do all that, then . . ." She stared at the screen again, then started drawing little circles and connecting them with lines.

  "What's all that?"

  "That's me thinkin'. Go find something else to do for a while."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  He got up and put on his helmet and armor, picked up his rifle, and walked out into the open, figuring he probably ought to check out a little more of their surroundings. No cupids upstairs at the moment. Five or six slo-mos out in the meadow. No lizards, but there were little noises coming from the bushes that could be them, or could be something else. He looked for big piles of dung that a big animal would leave, piles of bones or skulls that might show tooth marks of big predators, holes in the ground that might be the dens of nocturnal animals—anything that would help him figure out what kind of place they had landed in. He kept an eye out for berries and nuts and fruit trees, too, finding several promising candidates, and he scuffed up the ground around a few plants that looked like they might have edible roots, but all the while his mind was on the big question: how could he recharge the truck's batteries? He recognized that look on Donna's face. She wouldn't stop working on the math until she had figured out where they were. She might have to learn orbital mechanics first, but she would do it—hell, she would re-invent it if she had to—if that's what it took to come up with an answer. It made him proud as hell to see the way she dived into stuff like that, but he had to admit that it also made him feel dumb a
s a post. Before they had left on their first hyperdrive trip, he had tried to learn how to run the computer, figuring that the driving had always been his job when they went four-wheeling, and it would stay his job in space, too, but a couple of days spent reading about vector translations and gravity wells and how to calculate an orbit had shown him just how different flying a spaceship was from driving a truck. Donna had taken to it like a duck to water, though. Within an afternoon, she had run a series of simulated jumps out to Alpha Centauri and back, and she had only crashed their simulated spaceship a couple of times on re-entry before she got the hang of that, too. He had told himself that it didn't bother him. and he built the camper and sealed both it and the pickup's cab to hold against vacuum, and he had figured out the center of mass of the whole works and had hooked up the parachutes directly over that spot so the pickup would land on its wheels, and he had designed and built the maneuvering jets himself. He had done all that stuff, but all that time he had known that he couldn't fly the thing himself. And now here was Donna number-crunching velocity figures in the hope of saving their asses from a long, slow descent into savagery, while he walked around looking for wild animals and wondering how he could recharge a dead battery without a power supply.

  He came upon a small arrow tree only eight feet high or so, with a scattering of yellow bones at its base. A cupid had apparently gotten lucky here a year or so ago. It looked like whatever it had killed hadn't been much bigger than a dog, and the few teeth that Trent could find were flat-topped like a sheep's rather than pointy like a wolf's. That was good news.

  The arrow had done well for itself, too. The tuft of branches at its top looked thick and healthy, bristling with mini-arrows a couple of feet long. He bent close to look at the tufts at the end of those and saw that the needles were actually smaller versions of the same thing, and if he squinted, the needles looked like they had little fuzzy barbs sticking out of their outer ends, too. Fractals. He remembered Donna telling him about fractals, how you could build something big out of millions of tiny parts that looked just the same as the big one. That had been something else she had learned on the computer, from a program that made cool-looking drawings on the screen just for fun. He checked the sky. No cupids. No airplanes, either. He hadn't seen or heard any sign of civilization since he and Donna had arrived. He tried to piece together the bones of the dead animal to see what it might have looked like alive, but they were scattered too much for him to even begin to guess what went where.