Anywhere but here

by Jerry Oltion

  He had to reach way up around the motor to get to the power plug. He'd mounted all the motors that way so he wouldn't snag a wire on a branch or something while he was four-wheeling. It had worked pretty well until now, but he guessed he couldn't expect it to protect them from a whole tree. At least with the truck raised up so high, it was easy to work underneath it. He wrapped the loose power cable around a frame member and tied it in a knot so it wouldn't flop around, then crawled back out and slapped the dirt off his clothes.

  Donna had unlatched the airtight side windows and stowed them behind the seat, then rolled down the regular windows so they could breathe Onnescus air instead of their compressed Earth air. She had also unplugged the computer and stowed it in its slot beneath the dash. Now she was flipping through their music disks. "Twang or bang?" she asked Trent as he slid back into the driver's seat.

  "Bang," he answered without hesitation. You don't jump four light-years, fall fifty miles under a parachute, snap a tree on landing, and then listen to somebody whine about their no-good daddy. She slotted in a disk she'd burned last summer, before any of this hyperdrive business had happened. It started off with Slow Children's six-minute anthem, "Dumb Enough to Drive," which pretty well matched Trent's mood. He backed the truck away from the rock, ignoring the left-rear motor's warning light, and drove forward through a low patch of bushes. If they made any noise scraping past the undercarriage, he couldn't hear it over the music.

  Back home, four-wheeling was pretty much confined to existing roads. The BLM didn't like you driving over their prairie, and ranchers certainly didn't like you driving over their pastures. The forest service blocked off anything that even looked like you could drive a truck on it. There were lots of old logging and mining roads, though, if you knew where to look, and even the official access roads to the high lakes and stuff could get pretty hairy. Even so, road driving was nothing compared to striking out cross-country. The truck's big balloon tires provided some cushion, and the foot-and-a-half of travel in its suspension provided more, but nothing could smooth out the jolt when you found a rock with one wheel and a hole with the other. Trent kept the motors in low range, but he and Donna were still whooping and hollering and hanging on for dear life every few feet.

  He had no idea where they were going, and didn't really care. He aimed them in the general direction of Bigtown whenever he had a choice, but mostly he just drove. They weaved between rock outcrops and clumps of trees, dropped into gullies and climbed hills, detoured to look at a field full of blue flowers (Donna's idea) and a lightning-blasted tree trunk (Trent's idea), and sang along with the music when they weren't screaming in terror or laughing with relief at surviving yet another argument with gravity.

  Trent tried not to spin the tires or turn sharp enough to skid. A lifetime of being told that bare ground was fragile had burned the message into his head pretty deep. He didn't necessarily want to leave tracks so long as he could make tracks, and do it in style. The balloon tires helped; they distributed the pickups weight over a much wider patch of ground than regular tires would have. That hadn't been Trent's reason for buying them—he'd got them because they were good in mud and they looked cool—but he was happy enough to think that they were environmentally friendly to boot. Half a dozen times over the next hour they stopped to watch someone else land. Most of the new arrivals were too far away to see more than their parachutes, but one came right overhead: a bright green and yellow ultralight aircraft piloted by someone in a polar parka. Presumably he had a Ziptite suit on underneath all that insulation, but that looked to be his only concession to vacuum. He waggled his wings as he flew over Trent and Donna, and Trent tooted the horn at him in response.

  "Either that guy's nuts," Trent said, "or he's the smartest person I've seen yet." They watched him fly on toward Bigtown, covering the same distance in a couple of minutes that Trent and Donna had driven in an hour. He didn't have to worry about parachutes, either. Or leaving a launch crater. A guy could commute to work that way pretty easy.

  "Don't even think about it," Donna said.

  "Huh?"

  "I know that look, Trent Stinson. Space flight is dangerous enough; I'm not going to worry about you flyin' around in an electric kite, too."

  "Yes ma'am," he said. Her tone of voice said she was joking, but he knew her well enough to know that it would remain a joke only as long as he didn't try it. There were limits to her tolerance for his gung-ho attitude, and he could push those limits only so far. He'd been surprised she'd let him build a hyperdrive and outfit the truck for space, but on that she had been curiously quiet, even encouraging. At first he'd thought maybe she was just being polite to their guests—Allen was, after all, the inventor of the hyperdrive, and Judy was an astronaut, so it wouldn't have looked good to badmouth space travel when they were around—but even after they'd left she'd been all for it. Getting shot at on the way home from their first trip hadn't even dampened her spirits for it.

  He wondered how Allen and Judy were doing. The Galactic Federation they had started was still expanding, adding new species every couple of days as the secret of the hyperdrive snowballed out into the galaxy, so Judy was almost certainly chin-deep in paperwork dealing with that, but Trent couldn't imagine Allen doing a desk job. He was more likely in a lab somewhere, probably on the enormous spaceship of the alien Tippets, inventing something new to surprise everyone with. Antigravity would be good, Trent figured. That would be the last step that would really make hyper-space travel safe. Maybe he should track Allen down and suggest it.

  The sun was getting pretty close to the horizon when they finally came up over a rise and saw a long, sinuous line of trees meandering off into the distance. Silvery water glinted between the trunks in the last rays of sunlight. It didn't look like a big river—maybe ten feet across—but it was plenty big enough to camp by. Trent drove the truck toward it down a long, gentle slope that ended in an impenetrable thicket of six-foot-high bushes, then drove along the side of the hill looking for a break in the thicket. It was a long time coming. The thicket went on and on, choking off access to the water as effectively as a prison fence. There were no fords, no game trails, not even a bare rockslide they could climb down. Every inch of ground within twenty feet of the water was covered with dense brush. "You know," Trent said after a while, "these bushes are starting to look downright unfriendly." She nodded. "Yeah. I wonder how the animals get any water."

  They hadn't seen any animals yet, but that wasn't surprising. Animals tended to get out of the way of something the size of a pickup, especially if they hadn't seen one before. Now Trent was beginning to wonder if they had been starved out long before he and Donna had gotten here. From the looks of those bushes, a rabbit would have a hard time getting down to the stream.

  "Nuts to this," he said at last, when the sun was below the horizon and the sky was starting to turn pink. "I've got a machete; let's just make us a gap."

  "That seems kind of destructive just to reach the creek," Donna said, "but it looks like that's going to be our only way."

  "It's a wild planet," Trent said, pulling to a stop on a grassy patch of level ground next to a spot that looked like it might be a little thinner than the rest. "Nobody's made any campsites here ahead of us." He got out and rummaged behind the seat for the machete, dug some more until he found a pair of gloves, and marched down to the brush line. He could hear the stream gurgling softly only a few feet away, but it was completely hidden behind the brush.

  He expected to see three-inch thorns studding the branches, but the bushes looked more like chokecherry, complete with clusters of dark brown berries, maybe a quarter inch in diameter, nestled among soft, round leaves. Trent wondered if they were edible. He wasn't about to try it on his own, but somebody had no doubt tried them already, and they—or their survivors—would know. He would have to remember to ask when they got to town.

  If they ever made it. Town was on the other side of the stream, and Trent's first whack with the machete fel
t like he'd struck a clump of steel cables. A couple of branches flopped over, broken but not cut all the way through. So much for the mighty swordsman image. He took a bigger swing and managed to slice them off, plus another one below. This was going to be work.

  He hacked away for five minutes or so before he had to take a break. In all that time, he'd only carved a tunnel about four feet into the bushes. He would have told Donna to forget it, that they'd just use water from their storage tank tonight, but he was already sweating so hard and stained with orange sap that he needed a bath before he crawled into his sleeping bag.

  As he stepped back from the bushes and swept his sweaty hair out of his eyes, he caught sight of a star way up in the darkening sky. It glowed like Venus at its brightest, but this was almost straight up, and now that he looked at it for a few seconds he could see that it was moving ever so slowly toward the south.

  "Check that out," he called to Donna, who was inside the camper fixing lunch or dinner or whatever they were going to call it. She stuck her head out and he pointed. "Somebody coming down in something shiny. They're still high enough to catch the sunlight."

  "Neat." She watched for a while longer, then went back inside. Trent went back to work on the bushes, but he kept sneaking glances at the descending "star." It grew redder as it fell deeper into the atmosphere, catching more and more sunset light. As it drew closer he could see that the parachute was the bright part; the payload was just a dark speck under the bright silver canopy. It really sparkled, like it was made of tin foil or something. Trent wouldn't be surprised if somebody had tried that—they tried everything else, it seemed—but he doubted if that's what this was. Whatever they'd used here was actually working.

  It was coming down a couple miles to the south. Trent watched until it dropped behind the hill, then went back to work on the bushes. He was getting better at it with practice; he learned to slice upward rather than downward, so the roots would hold the bushes in place while the machete cut through the stalks. That way it only took him another ten minutes or so to cut a path down to the water. It felt like the middle of the forest primeval down there. It was only thirty feet wide or so, but the bushes gave way to full-size trees along the banks, and the trees leaned over the water from both sides, shading out what little light was left in the day. Trent bet it would be gloomy down there even at noon. He stuck a hand in the water. At least it was cool. He wondered if it was safe to drink. Then he wondered if it was even safe to stand right next to the bank like he was. Some rivers on Earth had crocodiles in them, just waiting for dummies like Trent to lean over and provide an easy snack. He needed a flashlight. He backed away and scraped his way through the hole he'd cut in the thicket, went around to the passenger side of the truck, and got the light out of the glove box. It was a plasma-cell Q-beam, basically an aircraft landing light powered by a small version of the same kind of battery that ran the truck's wheel motors. He switched it on and aimed it at the tunnel into the forest. If it had looked spooky before, it looked doubly so now. Stark shadows splayed out in all directions, all pointing directly away from him and bobbing and weaving with his every motion. He advanced into it anyway, crouching low to squeeze through the gap. then standing up among the trees and shining the light around in a slow circle. The trees were covered in moss, and vines hung down over the water from some of them, but the vines didn't move, and the trees were just trees. He shined the light into the water and saw that it was crystal clear, and not very deep. It was mostly gravel-bottomed riffles connecting shallow pools. If there were crocs in it, they would have a hell of a time swimming very far. He shined the light straight up. Nothing waiting to jump on him from overhanging branches.

  "Trent?" Donna asked from the inner edge of the bushes. "Is it safe? Can I come in there and wash up?"

  "I think so," he answered, but when he thought of Donna leaning down over the water, maybe even sticking her face into it, he said, "You know what, we don't have to re-invent the wheel here. We're close enough to Bigtown to reach 'em by radio; why don't we fire it up and just ask someone before we do something stupid."

  "That makes sense, I guess," Donna said.

  They squeezed out through the bushes again, adding yet more orange stains to their clothes. Donna's white T-shirt looked like someone had tried to put tiger stripes on it. Trent was wearing a brown and blue cotton work shirt, so it wasn't so apparent on him, but he made a mental note not to wear anything he cared about until he knew whether or not the sap would wash out. He leaned into the cab of the pickup and flipped on the CB, tuning to channel 19, the informally agreed-upon general-contact channel. It was already busy, so he waited for a break where he could interrupt, but then he heard one voice say, ". . . at least twenty miles south of town . . ." and another voice said, ". . . nobody out that way that I know of," and he started listening.

  "We can't just leave 'em out there," said the first voice.

  "We can if we can't get to 'em," said the second. "They'll have to wait 'til morning. Unless you want to try drivin' twenty miles in the dark. Or landin' in the dark." Trent picked up the microphone and said, "Break one-nine. This is Trent Stinson, and I'm quite a ways south of town at the moment. Is there something I can help you with?" He had a bad feeling he knew what the problem was.

  "Hold up, Greg," the second voice said when he released the microphone switch. "There's somebody else on the channel. Who's that again?"

  "The name's Trent, and I'm south of Bigtown by at least fifteen miles with a good cross-country rig. You got an emergency out this way?"

  "We don't know for sure," said the first voice, Greg, "but we think there might be. We got a couple garbled transmissions from somebody on their way down about twenty minutes ago, but their signal stopped cold when they hit the ground. Could be nothing, but they could be hurt."

  "You sure they didn't just bail out at the last moment?" Trent asked.

  "It's possible, but we're pretty sure he went all the way. There was a hell of a crashing sound just before the signal cut off."

  Donna said softly, "That's got to be the one we watched come in."

  "Yeah," Trent said. The pretty light in the sky. Now he felt somehow guilty for enjoying its descent. He looked up at the patch of hillside it had gone behind and keyed the microphone. "Roger, unless somebody else was in the air about the same time, we saw 'em come down just a couple of miles away. I've got a pretty good direction fix on their landing site. We could probably be there in half an hour if there aren't any of these damned brush-choked streambeds between us and them." Greg said, "If you're south of the Greenwall, you're clear for quite a ways."

  "I don't know if this is the greenwall, but we're sure south of a greenwall."

  "Well then, I imagine the folks out there would appreciate it if you could go check in on 'em. Do you know first aid?"

  "The basics," Trent said. "We may need to talk with somebody who knows more once we get there. You got a doctor?"

  "We can get one by the time you need him."

  "All right, then. We're on our way."

  Donna said, "Give me a minute to batten down the hatches in back," and disappeared inside the camper.

  Greg said, "Let's shift up to channel 22 for further contact."

  "Okay. Shifting to 22." Trent punched the "channel-up" button three times. "Trent Stinson here, transmitting on 22. You read?"

  "Loud and clear."

  "All right. We'll keep you posted on our progress. Stinson out." Trent clipped the microphone back on the dashboard and climbed up to stand in the open doorway where he could reach the smiley-face covers over the spotlights mounted on the roll bars and on the top of the camper. There were six lights: three aimed forward, one for each side, and one aimed straight back. He uncovered them all, then sat in the driver's seat and flipped the master switch. The hillside and the brush and the trees flashed into brilliant relief, even brighter than with the handheld light. And all around them, only fifteen or twenty feet away, dozens of creatures the size of bi
g dogs stood blinking in the sudden glare.

  6

  They were dark gray, four-legged, and had big, round heads with large, toothy mouths. He didn't think they'd sneaked up just to see what he and Donna were doing. He yelled, "Close your door!" and slammed the driver's door, then lunged across the seat and grabbed the passenger door just as one of the creatures leaped for him. It clipped the end of the door as he swung it around and fell back to the ground with a loud yelp of surprise.

  "Donna, are you all right?" Trent shouted, but the screeching sound from the back of the truck didn't sound good. He flipped open the glove box and grabbed the pistol, aimed it out the passenger window, and fired at the nearest dog-creature. The noise was deafening inside the cab, and he didn't even come close to hitting his target, but the shot did what he'd hoped it would do anyway: all of the creatures on that side of the truck turned tail and ran into the night. Trent spun around on the seat and fired out the driver's window, and the few on that side that hadn't already fled left claw marks in the grass as they skedaddled—except for the one that his wild shot had hit. That one flipped end over end, yelping and contorting its body from side to side as it ran blindly into the thicket, bounced off the net of branches, and fell over, still twitching and howling in pain.

  Trent didn't give it a second glance. He threw open the door and raced around to the back of the truck, where he saw a big splash of blood in the spotlight's glare, with another of the round-headed creatures twitching in the middle of it. Donna stood in the camper doorway, a look of total surprise on her face and a bloody butcher knife in her hand.

  "Are you all right?" he gasped.

  "I was putting it away," she said.

  "What?"

  "I was making sandwiches while you were cutting brush. I thought I'd better put everything away before we started driving again, and then you shouted to close the door and I turned to do it but the . . . the whatever it was jumped for me and I just instinctively put my hands up and I . . . I got him in the throat."