by Jerry Oltion
He grabbed the steering wheel with one hand and helped her rotate the tire until the stem was on top, then he got the can opener out of the seat pocket—careful not to let it slip out of his hand—and passed it over to her.
"How much time left?" he asked, tapping his wrist in case she couldn't read his lips. She checked the computer, then held up three fingers. He had to move.
"I'll see you on the ground. I love you, baby." He reached forward with his free hand. She reached around the tire and grasped his hand in hers, and they just looked at one another for a moment through their foggy, condensation-streaked bubble helmets. He never wanted to let go, but he had to, and they both knew it. Without a word, they gave each other one final squeeze, then he backed up and untied the rope from the steering wheel.
He kept a death grip on the door frame until he looped the rope around the roll bar, then he wrapped the end around his hand a couple of times. If he slipped, at least he could reel himself back to the roll bar.
He grabbed the door in his left hand and the roll bar in his right and slammed the door, nearly knocking himself loose in the process. The pickup wobbled like crazy, but he held on and watched Donna reach over and snap the latches from inside.
He felt a moment of unreasoning panic at the sight. Locked out of his pickup in deep space! He knew this was their only hope of survival, but still.
He probably had less than two minutes before the computer took them back to the other side of the planet. With a final wave to Donna, he pulled himself hand over hand around the side of the pickup to the camper, opened the door, and pulled himself inside. The tire took up most of the space, but he had room enough to slide in below it. Wedging his feet against the sides of the cabinets so he couldn't slip back outside, he let go of the free end of the rope and pulled on the end tied to his waist, pulling it free of the roll bar and piling it all up in a writhing wad behind him.
He swung the door closed before anything could fly back out. It was pitch black inside now. He almost turned on the light, but stopped himself when he remembered that the camper drew its power from the same batteries that the hyperdrive did. Lights didn't draw much juice, but the batteries were down to so little that he was afraid even a minute's worth of light would put them below the critical level for their last jump. He felt around the door frame to make sure it was closed tight and the rope wasn't in the way of the seals, then turned to the tire and felt for the valve stem, took the cap off, and realized he didn't have anything ready to hold the valve open with.
There were a million pointy objects in the camper. Forks, toothpicks, paring knives, even can openers if he could just find them in the dark. He felt for the sink, finally found it up by his shoulders and realized he was upside down, then he patted his way along the cabinets until he found the silverware drawer, unlatched it, and reached in for a fork. Everything was jumbled up, and he couldn't tell a fork from a spoon in his pressure suit.
He had to have some light. The drawer below the silverware had a flashlight in it, if he could recognize that by feel.
Actually, he was already seeing light, and not the good kind. He reached to his waist and opened the air tank, and it hissed for another few seconds before falling silent. Empty. Okay, he had about two minutes left now.
Flashlight first. He opened the drawer, felt for anything cylindrical, found it next to something soft, and slid his hand up the side until he hit the switch. Light!
Three pot holders, a roll of duct tape, and a pair of scissors tumbled into the air, bouncing off the counters and ricocheting across the camper. There were already half a dozen forks and spoons and butter knives floating free, too, from the other drawer. Plus the lug nuts he had tossed in on the ground, and the parachute, drifting like a jellyfish behind the tire. The flashlight cast stark shadows as he waved it around. It was eerie; everything looked alive the way it moved so smoothly, yet none of it made a sound in the vacuum.
To hell with a fork. He let the flashlight go and grabbed the scissors, then turned to the tire, found the valve, and jabbed the pointed end of the blades against the tiny button, smiling at the jet of fog that rushed out around his hand.
There was no pressure gauge in the camper. He wondered how he would know when there was enough air to breathe, but then he slowly became aware of a faint hissing noise, and the soft tink of silverware and lug nuts bouncing off the cabinets. Yeah. The thicker the air was, the more sound it transmitted. There was more than one way to skin a cat.
He kept letting air out of the tire, occasionally slapping his hand against the sidewall and listening to the whack. When it sounded about as loud as he remembered similar sounds before with his suit sealed, he reached up to the top of his helmet and opened it.
There was a little puff of air out of the suit. He took a cautious breath. The air in the camper stank just as bad as the air from the spare, maybe even worse, but he could breathe it. Or could he? He felt a moment of disorientation, almost as if he were going to pass out, but it was gone just as quickly. He took another couple of breaths, waiting for the swirling vision that would mean he was out of oxygen, but it didn't come. What had happened?
Then he realized what it was: the hyperdrive jump back over their landing site. He had maybe thirty seconds before Donna opened the parachute, and the air was full of utensils. He could never gather it all up in time. The only thing he could do was grab the tire and hold it to the floor so he wouldn't wind up under it when the jolt came, and try to hold himself down against the floor as well.
The seconds seemed to take forever. A hundred heartbeats, anyway, but that probably didn't mean much. He was probably thumping away at two hundred or so a minute. He couldn't remember it ever beating this hard. It'd be just his luck to have a heart attack now that he'd saved his ass again for. what, the third or fourth time today.
He heard the faint hiss of the air jets in the bumper, transmitted through the frame of the pickup. That would be Donna leveling out their approach into the atmosphere. Then he heard the bang of the parachute pod opening. He risked a glance upward. No knives overhead, but the flashlight was right there, ready to klonk him. No time to grab it; he just tucked his head down and made sure his butt was tight against the floor.
The jolt felt like a giant kicking the pickup upward, hard. Silverware rained down all around him, the lug wrench hit beside him with a loud clang, and the flashlight bounced off his head to skitter across to the door, throwing wild shadows everywhere as it spun. The camper floor had no give to it at all, but the tire did: it bounced up and smashed into the ceiling, broke off a couple of drawer handles on the way back down, and would have crushed Trent's knees if it hadn't flipped sideways off the drawers and smashed the table instead.
Then the camper was silent. Gravity kept everything on the floor. The parachute was holding. There was more than enough air in the tire to keep him breathing all the way to the ground. Donna would have enough in front even with the leak. Now all they had to do was survive the landing. And hope that this planet's air was better than the last one's.
Hell, that was the distant future, Trent thought. He didn't have to worry about dying for at least fifteen minutes or so. He leaned back against the cabinet and took a deep breath. 20
Something was clicking, like hot metal cooling off. Tick-ticka-tic-tic . . . tic-tic. He listened to see if he could figure out what it was, but of course it stopped just as he gave it his attention. He leaned back against the cabinet and heard it again: tick-ticka-tic-tic . . . tic-tic. There was a pause, then it came again. Donna! She was tapping "shave and a haircut" to let him know she was okay. He snatched up the lug wrench and whacked it against the metal floor, bang-banga-bang-bang . . . bang-bang. He heard more tapping, just a steady rhythm of it, then silence, so he banged out a dozen more himself. He wished he knew Morse code, but all he knew was SOS, and he didn't want to send that message.
"Hey, can you hear me?" he shouted.
If she could, he couldn't hear her response. It didn't matt
er; just knowing she was okay was all he needed.
He picked up the flashlight and shined it around the interior of the camper. The tire rested precariously on the remains of the table, the shredded parachute and his tow rope draped over it. Knives and forks and pot holders and lug nuts lay all around the floor. He supposed he could make himself useful and put those away before they landed. If they wound up rolling over, it might be nice not to have to worry about getting stabbed or beaten to death in the process.
He untied the rope from the lug wrench and from his waist, put the lug wrench and nuts in the tool box in the cabinet by the door, and started fielding silverware and shoving it back into its drawer. It felt strange to be riding in back, essentially doing the housecleaning, while Donna drove, but he had just as much confidence in her as he had in himself at the moment. She had always been better than him at running the computer, and she was the one who had thought of using the camper while he was still trying to wedge himself into the cab. If they were ever going to find their way home, it would be because she figured out where they were.
There was something sticky dribbling out of the refrigerator. He opened the door and saw the problem: the orange juice had boiled during the couple minutes in vacuum and the pressure had burst the seam on the carton. A tube of instant rolls had blown open, too, gooing up the top shelf. Trent thought about trying to clean it up, but Donna had wedged everything in tight so it wouldn't shift around during weightlessness or when they drove, and he didn't imagine he could get it repacked right in the few minutes left before they landed. He wiped up the worst of the mess from the floor with the ruined parachute, then folded the parachute so the goop was in the middle and laid it on the floor where he could sit on it and use it for padding.
Without its rear wheels, the pickup would tilt backwards pretty steep when it hit. Trent scooted past the tire and pulled it down to the floor, then shoved it up against the door, figuring he would rather wind up on top of it than under it if he had a choice. It wouldn't lie sideways, so he left it upright, but he wrapped the rope through the wheel a couple of times and tied it to the door handle so it couldn't bounce around in a crash. Then he sat down on the folded parachute, put his feet up against the tire, and waited. He heard more tapping from up front. No pattern, but after a few seconds he realized it was getting steadily faster. A countdown? He braced himself against the cabinets and against the tire, took a deep breath—and had it knocked right back out of him.
The jolt was way harder than the parachute opening. It would have broken his butt if he hadn't been sitting on something soft. As it was, it rocked him backward and yanked his legs to the floor, then pitched him forward into the tire. He reached out with his arms to keep from hitting his head on it, but the pickup spun sideways and he clonked his head on the cabinet instead. There was another hard jolt, another spin, then three more sharp shocks before they came to rest. This was definitely not their best landing. On the other hand, they didn't tip over. The pickup was listing to the left as well as to the rear, but that seemed to be the last of the banging around.
Trent untied the tire from the door and hauled it up the sloping floor out of the way, wedging it into the bench seat next to the table. Then he grabbed the door handle and pulled, but the door wouldn't budge. Was the camper stuck against something? That shouldn't keep the door from opening inward. The only thing that could do that would be air pressure, which meant that the atmosphere was thinner than normal. Or that Trent had overdone it when he had filled the camper with air from the tire. Relying on sound wasn't exactly the most accurate way to judge pressure.
He tugged again at the handle, but there was no way he could open it against even a few pounds of pressure, and the relief valve was on the outside. There was a vent in the ceiling and two in the side walls, though, put there so he and Donna could close the door at night and not suffocate, and the covers on those had a lot less surface area than the door. They wouldn't open with just a tug on their handles, either, but Trent dug a butter knife out of the silverware drawer and pried the edge of the ceiling vent away from its seal, and that did the trick. He heard a whoosh of air, and when he tried the door it opened easily. Light streamed in, and with it a big swirl of cool mountain air. He held his breath for a second, then forced himself to let it out and take another breath. They were going to have to breathe the stuff no matter what.
It smelled of green growing things. Recently crushed growing things. He took another breath and climbed down out of the camper, ducking his head to clear the top of the door. The pickup had come to rest at an angle on a fairly steep hillside, but the back end was facing mostly uphill, putting the ground outside almost as high as the campers floor. By the looks of the gouges in the dirt, the front wheels had rolled and the back end had dragged along behind it, slewing from side to side until the pickup had skidded to a stop. They had narrowly missed several big arrow-shaped trees, and had plowed up a couple of rocks the size of watermelons, but they hadn't rolled over. Trent couldn't figure why not; the pickup was listing so far to the driver's side that the rear bumper wasn't even touching the ground on the right.
The parachute should have been snagged in a tree, given the truck's zigzag path around so many of them, but it lay flat on the ground over to the right, draped over some knee-high bushes and rippling just a little in the soft breeze that blew up the hillside. Evidently the trees were just far enough apart, or the tufts of branches at their tops were flexible enough, to let it slip past. It didn't matter. They were down, and safe for the moment. Provided the pickup didn't tip over and roll on down the hill before Donna could get free. He rushed around to the passenger side to make sure she was okay. She had unlatched her door, but was having trouble holding it open against the pickup's sideways tilt, so he grabbed it and held it out for her, pulling down on it to make sure the pickup didn't roll over before she got free.
"We made it!" she shouted. "My god, I thought we were dead when I saw where we were coming down."
"I'm glad I couldn't see, or I'd have probably died of fright." He helped her get her feet on the step, then wrapped his arm around her and lifted her down to the ground. "Man, you're a sight for sore eyes." He held her close, resting his head on hers and breathing in the scent of her hair. Breathing. He was still breathing.
Metal creaked, and the pickup shifted. Trent grabbed the open door and pulled down on it again, and he was just about to ask Donna to grab the rope from the camper when he spotted the other one already tied to the roll bar right above her head. Donna had put it there so he could tie down the tires once they'd used their air, but he hadn't needed it.
They needed it now. "Grab that rope and run it up to that tree," he said. "I don't want this thing going over again if we can help it."
"Damn right." She pulled the loose end of the slipknot and backed up the hill with the coil, ran it around the closest tree and pulled it tight, then wrapped it around the trunk again and started a bowline knot. The tree looked stout enough; a foot thick at the base, and at least thirty feet tall. There were just a few branches up high, all pointing up at the same angle, which gave the whole tree the look of a huge arrow that had buried itself point-first in the ground. The branches looked a little like the trees themselves, bare and straight except for a tuft of needles at the outer end of each one. Beyond the tops of the trees, a bird circled high above the top of the ridge. The sky was dark blue, darker than Earth's sky even in Rock Springs, where the elevation made it bluer than most places. The air was definitely thinner here. There were still clouds, though; a couple of puffy ones out in the distance and some high wisps of horsetail overhead.
"Try that," Donna said when she finished her knot.
Trent let up on the door. The rope tightened, and the pickup shifted, but it didn't go over, even when he let the door swing closed.
"Whee-oo," he said, standing back and looking again at the hillside they had come down. "That was some pretty damned good driving, little girl."
"I didn't
do half of it," she said, picking her way carefully back down toward him. The hillside was dotted with round-topped rocks that looked good and slick, so she had to watch her footing. "We were jouncing around so bad, I only got my hands on the wheel a couple of times."
"Well, that was a couple of trees we didn't hit. You did great." The pickup had come to rest in a pretty good pile of rocks, too, but it seemed to have shoved most of them aside rather than bouncing over them. That was good; without the rear tires, it wouldn't take much to smash the wheel motors. Trent was sweating like a pig inside his Ziptite suit, even though the air temperature was probably only sixty degrees or so. He peeled the suit down around his waist, then sat down on the ground and pulled it off his legs. He helped Donna out of hers, rolled them up together, and took them inside the camper. While he was there, he popped open the fridge, which was a total mess inside now, and rummaged through it until he found a couple cans of beer. He wiped off the orange juice against his pants and carried them back outside.
"Now there's a good idea," Donna said, taking one of the cans from him.
"Careful when you open that," he said. "It got shook up pretty good."
"No shit."
Trent let the pressure out slowly, then opened the can and took a long swallow. This was what beer was supposed to taste like, and this was just about the best occasion for a beer he had ever had.
"Here's to landings you can walk away from," he said, tapping his can against Donna's.
"Walk is the word," she said. "I think our four-wheelin' days are probably over in this truck."
"Oh, I wouldn't be so sure of that," he said. "This is a tough old beast. We may not have a lot of battery juice left, but once I get the wheels back on 'er, we can coast a hell of a long ways." He peered around the side of the camper to see just how far that might be, and wasn't surprised to discover that they were maybe a thousand feet up a mountainside. It was peppered with more arrow-shaped trees and rocks and bushes, and the slope led down toward a valley that led out to an open plain.