Anywhere but here

by Jerry Oltion

  "Damn. Remind me never to get him mad at me." He put the microphone back in its clip and turned down the radio. "Well, hell, I guess we might as well take advantage of it. I'll bet you anything the military's too busy shittin' their pants to worry about people landing in Rock Springs." Donna took them in closer so they could find it, then she slid the targeting circle to the east of Salt Lake and just past the pincer-shaped Flaming Gorge Reservoir. It was rising pretty fast to meet them, but she was quick about it. "That ought to do," she said, hitting "enter." The computer took them around to the other side of the planet for a few minutes, then set them back where they had started and dropped them down to the edge of the atmosphere in two more quick jumps. "Ooh, I like this program," Donna said. "Get ready on the parachute." Trent reached for the switch, deciding at the last moment to use their original parachute this time. It might not be a good idea to have "Galactic Federation" written across their chute today. He flipped the toggle when Donna called "zero" and they endured the lurch and the few seconds of worry afterward that they would somehow be shot down even now, but they descended peacefully through the atmosphere, watching the ground slowly rise to meet them. It looked a lot like the outback down there; the same red soil and spotty vegetation, but with much more varied terrain. Trent couldn't help smiling when he saw the flat-topped buttes with their sheer cliffs and the talus slopes of shale at the base. Then he realized that they were coming down right on top of one. Worse, they were going to hit on the edge. "Get ready to bail out," he said. "This doesn't look good." Donna was already holding her hand next to the keyboard. Trent waited until the last moment to be sure, but when there was less than two hundred feet between the pickup and the rocks, he yelled "Bail out!" and Donna hit the "enter" button, throwing them a hundred thousand kilometers back into space. She had widened the jump field enough to include their parachute, but now it hung out there in the vacuum, twisting itself up in its shroud lines and getting in the way of the other one.

  "Shit," said Trent. So close. But it was only a matter of time before they had to do a bailout, and they'd been lucky so far. "Button up," he said, sealing his suit. Donna did the same, and when he was sure they were both okay, he let the air out of the cab, tying the rope around his waist and the other end to the steering wheel while the pressure dropped. When it was down to zero he opened his door and unbuckled his seatbelt, then stood up in the doorway and reached over the top of the cab, pulling the parachute down one-handed and wadding it into its pod while he hung on with his other hand. There was no way he could get the parachute folded right in space, so he didn't even try.

  The fabric tried to get away like something alive, but he wrestled it into the pod and managed to latch the cover with only a few puckers of it sticking out the edges. Good enough. Then it was back inside, close the door, latch it tight, and refill the cab with air and open his helmet.

  "Okay, let's try this again." he said.

  They already had the right velocity relative to their landing site, so it was a simple matter to pop back to the edge of the atmosphere and give it another shot. Donna used the arrow keys to scoot them sideways a few miles, putting them over flatter terrain, and when they hit the air, Trent popped the other chute.

  It yanked them hard, too, now that it didn't have its special rigging, but it held, and they descended without incident until they were just a couple of miles above the ground, when a fighter jet roared past just a few hundred feet away.

  "Son of a bitch," Trent said. "Now what?"

  The pickup bounced through the turbulence while the plane banked around and came back for another pass. "Get ready to jump again," Trent said, but he picked up the microphone and turned the radio to channel 9, the emergency channel, and said, "Hey, what the hell do you think you're doing?" He didn't really expect a response, but the radio crackled to life and a voice said, "You're in restricted airspace. Leave immediately or be shot down."

  "Restricted, my ass," Trent said. "Near as I can tell, I'm right over my own goddamned house. I'm an American citizen and I'm going home. You gonna shoot down a civilian?"

  "It says 'Galactic Federation' on your parachute," said the fighter pilot. "That doesn't look like an American chute to me.

  "Why don't you check the license plate on my pickup, then?" Trent said. "You're flying goddamned close enough!"

  The plane roared straight toward them, banking at the last second and peeling away to the side.

  "County four," the pilot said. "Well, I'll grant you that much, but I can't let you land."

  "The hell you can't," Trent said. "You want to arrest us for possession of a hyperdrive, you go right ahead and do that, but it's sure as hell legal to parachute for recreation around here, and that's what we're doing."

  "Nobody lands," said the pilot. "We're in a state of national emergency."

  "Fuckin' right we are," Trent said. "We've been in a state of national emergency for twenty years. Well it's time to decide whose side you're on, buddy, because I'm an American citizen and I'm landing on American soil. You want to shoot me for buildin' a spaceship in my back yard, you go right ahead, but you just try looking in the mirror when you get back home tonight."

  The plane banked around again, and Trent watched it come toward them, his heart pounding. How much time would they have if he fired a missile? Time enough to jump away? He glanced over at Donna, saw her hand shaking over the keyboard, and he opened his mouth to say "Jump," but she shook her head and said, "Not yet."

  The plane swooped toward them, nose to nose again, but it roared beneath them without shooting and then it banked around and began to circle. "I'm gonna lose my damned commission for this," the pilot said, "but welcome home, cowboy."

  Trent could barely hold the microphone in his shaking hands, and he had to swallow twice before he could say, "If you do, you come on around to my place and I'll build you a spaceship of your very own."

  "We're almost there," Donna said.

  He looked out and down, suddenly realizing that they had dropped nearly to the ground. He had just long enough to look in the mirror and see that they weren't aimed for a cliff this time, then shoved himself back against the seat for the impact. The pickup bounced over a big sagebrush and the steering wheel spun crazily, but Trent fought it back around and steered into the slide before they turned over. They skidded to a stop, and the parachute slid down in front of them to hang up in the sagebrush.

  "I think that was about as much fun as I want to have in one day," Trent said. "Let's go home." 39

  The house was still there, just as they had left it. The mailbox was full of ads and catalogs, the answering machine was blinking its attention light, and when Donna logged on to check their email, they had over a hundred messages, not counting spam. Life had clearly gone on without them. They turned on the TV long enough to confirm the news that the entire system of laser "defense" satellites had simultaneously de-orbited and burned up in the atmosphere. Homeland Security was already screeching that it was the prelude to an alien invasion and was promising a new, more vigorous program of "incursion deterrence" just as soon as they could figure out what had happened to the old one. Never mind that the only aliens who even seemed interested in Earth were xenobiologists, and those mostly out of morbid curiosity. HomeSec had never seen a news story that couldn't be turned into a reason to boost public paranoia, and this was a golden opportunity for that. Trent dismantled the hyperdrive and stowed the pieces in their hiding places in case the cops paid a visit, and he and Donna cleaned out the camper. They put their slo-mo-shell armor on the mantel, and Donna printed the photo of Trent wearing his to set behind them. Trent wanted to drill a couple holes in his helmet and run an arrow through it, but Donna said that would look too tacky, so he just leaned a couple of arrows up against it. They put the meteorite on the mantel, too, and Trent wished they had a photo of Andre's house with the crater behind it, but like the view of Orion from up close, they would just have to remember that.

  They finished unpacking
and cleaning up by noon. It felt a lot later in the day to them, but the Sun was still high in the sky, and it didn't seem right to go to bed now. Donna had heard that the best way to beat jet-lag was to force yourself to stay up until bedtime, and they were too wound up to sleep anyway, so they just settled into their regular routines, Donna puttering around the house and Trent puttering around the garage. He had plenty of work to do on the pickup, pounding out dents and touching up scratches. He would eventually have to repaint it if he wanted it to look right, but he needed a new wheel motor first, and even that would have to wait until he got a job.

  He checked the classified ads in the paper to see if any construction jobs had miraculously come up while he was gone, but there weren't any. The front page from three days ago had an article about the new civic center, which the city council had voted down by the same one-vote margin that they'd had when they failed to reject the ban on hyper-drives. Bunch of short-sighted wimps with their heads in the sand, Trent thought. Give people in this town something to do on a Saturday night, and make it friendlier to come and go, and it might not look like a ghost town. Hell, start standing up for people's rights and they'd be moving in by the busload.

  He tossed the paper in the trash and went back to polishing the truck, but he kept thinking about the newspaper article, and how close the vote had been. One vote, and he would have a job. One vote, and he wouldn't have to hide his hyperdrive in a boombox and an old motor case. It wouldn't stop the federal government from harassing people on their way home, but it would at least be a step in the right direction. It would call attention to the cause, and show that not everybody in America was happy with the way the country was being run. Hell, it might spark a movement that would turn things around and make the United States a place to be proud of again.

  He snorted. Yeah, right. Like that was going to happen. The only people left in the country were people who didn't know or didn't care that they didn't have any civil rights anymore. The government had been whittling away at the Constitution since Trent was born, and they'd done it so slowly and deliberately that most people hadn't even noticed. Who would vote for a person who wanted to upset the whole applecart in one big shove, especially now when the world was in such turmoil anyway?

  He made himself grasp the thought he'd been nibbling around the edges of: Who would vote for him, Trent Stinson?

  Donna would. And he guessed it wasn't bad form to vote for yourself, so that was two. At least he wouldn't get skunked.

  But if he was on the council, he couldn't vote for the civic center. It would be a conflict of interest to vote for that and then make money building it. On the other hand, if he was on the council then he would already have a job, wouldn't he? And of all the things he could think of to pay off his promise to Andre, this was the one that actually stood a chance of making a difference.

  It was ridiculous. Trent wasn't a politician, and never would be. He didn't know a thing about running a city. But obviously neither did a one-vote majority of the people on the council right now. And it was just about the right time to start campaigning. It was spring, and elections were in November.

  He laughed out loud at the absurdity of it and focused on polishing up the truck, but the idea kept coming back, and finally he tossed his rag onto the workbench and started rooting around in his lumber scrap for some lath and a piece of foam-core. If he'd learned anything from this trip, it was that there was no better way to scare yourself away from something than to take a step toward it. He was just finishing up when Donna came out to see what he was doing. To her credit, she didn't laugh. She just looked at the sign, and then at Trent, and finally said, "Let's go stick it in the yard."