Anywhere but here

by Jerry Oltion

  He felt a little wobbly himself. He had picked up two of them and carried them around without even knowing they were alive. If they'd been snapping turtles, they could have bitten his nuts off. There didn't seem to be any openings for a mouth or a tail. Trent wondered if the leg holes doubled as mouths, or if the shells opened up somehow when they were grazing. Assuming they grazed. The rock camouflage and the slow crawl could be for sneaking up on other animals—and then what?

  He looked at the arrow in his hand, and then at the mobile rock. Not camouflage; protection. These guys had sacrificed mobility for armor against aerial attack.

  He glanced skyward again. No more birds yet, but if these guys had evolved armor to protect themselves, then the birds had to be fairly common.

  "Oh no," Donna said suddenly, putting a hand to her mouth.

  "What?"

  "You trapped two of them under the tires!"

  He had. He went around to the front of the pickup, half expecting to see that they were making a break for it like their buddies, but the tires had scrunched them into the dirt hard enough to keep them put.

  "You've got to let them go," Donna said.

  "Yeah, I guess I should." He could find real rocks to block the truck with. But when he tried to nudge the live ones out from under the tires, they were wedged too tight to move.

  "I'll have to back it off of 'em," he said, going around to the driver's side. He opened the door, but the other tire was still in the seat, so he pulled that out and laid it on the ground, then climbed up into the cab, put the pickup in reverse, released the brake, and fed power to the motors. The gauge read empty, but there was still a little juice. The left rear wheel spun freely until he switched in the anti-slip traction control, and that fed all the power to the front wheels instead. The pickup didn't even budge, so he fed it a little more power, and suddenly the front wheels spun, spitting both rocks out to tumble down the slope like loose bowling balls.

  He let off the power and put on the emergency brake again, then climbed back down to the ground.

  "Damn," he said to Donna. "I don't know if I did 'em any favor."

  "They would have died if you'd kept them trapped under the tires." She looked over at the other rocks, still flopping softly away from them. "They must overbalance once in a while on their own. I'll bet they're designed to take a roll down a hill without hurting themselves."

  "Hope so." Trent looked at the tire on the ground, then at the empty hub it had come off of. "I'd kind of like to go after the other tire before something tries to poke holes in it or eat it or something, but I'm not too thrilled about the idea of hauling it back up here. What do you say I mount this one and we just coast downhill until we find the other one?"

  "Can we drive with just three tires?"

  "Downhill, we can. All the weight will be on the front."

  "Okay, I guess. There's no particular reason to stay here."

  Trent looked up into the sky. There was another bird, still a long ways off, but gliding toward them.

  "You can say that again," he said.

  22

  With the rear tire in place, the pickup leaned forward at an alarming angle. Trent buckled himself in and made sure Donna was belted tight, too. At this slant it would be easy to slip forward and whack their heads on the dashboard, and if Trent lost control and the pickup rolled, he wanted to make damned sure they both staved inside.

  "Ready?" he asked.

  She grinned at him. "Go for it, cowboy."

  He shook his head. Why she trusted him so much, he would never know. He sure didn't trust himself to get them down in one piece, not off a slope this dizzying, with one tire missing and precious little power to get them out of a jam. He had to raise up in his seat to see the ground in front of them. They'd driven down hills this steep before, but only for a couple hundred feet before they leveled off. This one looked like it went on forever.

  It wasn't going to get any easier by waiting. He released the emergency brake and eased off the foot brake, and the pickup rolled forward. There was a moment of free acceleration, then the motors'

  regenerative braking system kicked in and the pickup slowed as if it had hit a patch of glue. The cab rocked forward and slewed to the left. The tires on that side were both about half flat, which made the ride even mushier than usual, but it actually helped their traction, for which Trent was grateful. The motors and the foot brake could keep the tires from turning, but only traction could keep them from skidding. He eased his foot off the brake until the pickup was creeping downhill at just a couple of miles an hour, and concentrated on not running over any of the armored rock-creatures.

  "We need a name for those rock guys," he said, swerving a little to the left to miss one. The pickup tipped backward and to the right, the bare hub briefly kissing the ground before he pressed harder on the brake, bringing the front down again. They bounced on the low tire and skidded a few feet before the anti-lock brakes took over and brought the pickup to a shuddering stop.

  "Yow!" Donna said, gripping the Jesus bar, then she giggled and said, "Thrill a minute. How about creepers?"

  "Hmm. Maybe. That sounds more like a bug to me, though." Trent let off the brake and steered gently to the light to avoid a tree about thirty feet downslope.

  "Or floppers," Donna said. "That's more how they move."

  "That doesn't sound slow enough. How about bunkers, because they're armored. Or tanks because they're both armored and mobile."

  She made a face. "Too military. How about snailstones?"

  "Too . . . I don't know." He had almost said "Too plain," but that wasn't it. Besides, snails definitely called up the right image.

  "What do the French call those snails they eat?" he asked.

  "Escargot," she said.

  "Right. So these could be escar-don't-go. Or don't-go-very-fast."

  "Oh, sure. I can just imagine you about to trip over one, and me shouting 'Hey, watch out for that escar-don't-go-very—never mind."

  As they approached the tree, Trent saw that there were dozens of arrows in the ground all around it. He glanced up to see if there was a bird up there, but didn't see any. He didn't see any dead animals with arrows through them, either. It looked more as if the tree had just dropped a bunch of branches.

  "Oh, right," Trent said. "The rocks. Or the tire. When they hit the trunk, it shook the tree, and the arrows that were loosest fell out."

  Donna looked out at the thicket of newly planted seedlings around the trees base and said, "That makes sense. I hope the tire isn't full of arrows when we find it."

  "Me too."

  Trent tried a gentler turn to the left to aim them straight downhill again, and this time the pickup stayed on its front and left-rear wheels.

  "Snail rocks," he said, thinking aloud. "Slow rocks. Slow granite. Slow . . . what?"

  "Slow motion?"

  "Or just slo-mos."

  "Yeah! Slo-mos. I like that. So what do you call a group of 'em?" He dodged one, cutting it close so the pickup wouldn't tip, imagining the surprised creature running away at top speed for minutes after they passed, and making it about five feet in all that time. "A delay?" he said.

  "A delay of slo-mos," Donna said. "Yeah, that works."

  "So what about the birds? What do we call them?"

  "Cupids, of course."

  "Of course."

  He slowed to examine some black marks about ten feet up the trunk of another tree. Tire marks?

  Maybe. There were certainly enough arrows on the ground at its base. The tuft atop the tree looked about half bare.

  Donna said, "And a group of them could be a cherubim."

  "Hmm," Trent said.

  "Don't like that?"

  "It's kind of clumsy."

  She thought about it for a few seconds while Trent eased them around a fallen log. "How about a valentine?"

  "Perfect." Just then he saw a glint of something silver downslope to the right. "Hey, is that it?" Donna looked to see where he was p
ointing, then squinted. "I don't know. Could be." She got the binoculars out of their case and focused on the shiny object, and said, "Yeah, that's it!"

  "Hot damn." Trent aimed for it, letting off the brake a little in his eagerness to make his four-wheeler truly a four-wheeler again. They jounced over a rock—a real one, judging by its jagged shape—and teetered a moment on the right-front and left-rear tires, but Trent hit the brake again and brought the pickup back under control. He wanted to roll down on his wheels, not on the roll bar. The runaway had come to rest in a thicket of brush reminiscent of the stuff that clogged the streams on On-nescu. It didn't have orange sap, though, or thorns. Trent parked the truck a few feet away, checked cautiously for anything moving in the sky or on the ground, then climbed out while Donna covered him with the pistol. He picked up a fist-sized rock and pitched it into the thicket next to the tire, and was happy to see that the branches didn't writhe like tentacles or anything, so he tried a cautious step up on the trunk that had been bent over by the tire's impact. It held his weight, so he leaned forward and grabbed the tire and pulled it out of the branches. The sidewalls were scraped up from hitting rocks and trees on the way down, but it didn't look like anything had actually punctured it. Either the arrows weren't sharp enough to penetrate rubber, or the tire had bounced out of their way before they had time to fall to the ground.

  It only took a couple of minutes to mount it to the hub. He had to borrow a nut from one of the other wheels, which left only one wheel with all five nuts left, but that wouldn't matter for off-roading. Trent put the jack and lug wrench away, piled back into the cab, and rubbed his hands together in satisfaction. He had his pickup back. It was beat to hell and almost out of juice, but it was whole again.

  "All right," he said happily, "let's find us a place to call home for a while." 23

  They didn't make it all the way out of the mountains. Down toward the bottom they had to use too much battery power to drive around brush and downed logs. They wound up in a gently sloping valley with a stream running through it, with a flat meadow up on a bench above the water channel and trees and bushes all around. About half the trees were arrow trees, but the others were more like cotton-woods, with big branches holding up wide canopies that provided lots of shade—and cover from aerial attack. It was as good a camping site as they were likely to find, so Trent coasted the pickup to a stop beneath one of the broad-canopy trees and set the brake.

  "Well, Eve," he said to Donna, "it looks like this is what Eden's going to look like for you and me. What do you think?"

  "I think we could have done a lot worse," she said.

  Trent took the rifle off the gun rack and stepped down to the ground, looking all around for anything that might be dangerous, but except for a few mobile rocks out in the open meadow it looked like they had the place to themselves.

  The tree they had parked beneath looked like a regular Earth tree, with lots of wide branches and regular spade-shaped leaves at the ends. Nothing lived in it that Trent could see. The ground under it was covered with tiny little round-leafed plants, like those waxy little weeds that Donna kept pulling out of the garden. It looked like that was what this place used for grass. They hadn't seen any flowers on the way down here, and there weren't any in the meadow, either. Maybe plants on this planet hadn't evolved flowers.

  The stream was wide enough that a person couldn't quite jump across it, but there were plenty of stepping stones. It made a happy gurgling sound as it cascaded from pool to pool. It would be a good fishing stream, if there were fish in it. Several arrows standing in the pools made Trent guess that something lived in there, something that the birds could eat. He hoped he and Donna could eat it, too. And there were the slo-mos. If those guys proved edible, the two of them wouldn't have to worry about food for a long, long time.

  They needed helmets, though. They hadn't managed to drive out of cupid range, and they couldn't spend their whole lives under the canopies of these big leafy trees. They could probably dodge anything that they saw coming, but there was bound to come a time when they didn't look up quick enough, and as much as he would hate giving up his Stetson, generations of cavalry had proved that felt hats weren't much good at stopping arrows.

  He understood how people on Mirabelle must have felt all the time, wondering when death would rain down out of the sky on them. Except no amount of armor could protect them. Nothing could stop an asteroid moving thousands of miles an hour. The only way to stop that kind of attack was to stop the attacker.

  He wondered if that would be possible here. Or even desirable. Arrows dropping out of the sky weren't exactly a good thing, but the only way he could think of to stop it was to kill the cupids, and wiping out an entire species would probably cause a lot of damage up and down the food chain. Not to mention killing a lot of cupids, who might not be such bad guys once you got to know them. People thought wolves and bears had to be killed until they learned how to live with them instead. With any luck, the question would remain academic. He and Donna needed protection now, not years from now; he wouldn't even begin to consider eradicating the cupids unless they wound up stuck here for life.

  That was a real possibility. They didn't have enough battery power to drive out of the valley, much less jump from star to star, and even if they could charge the batteries somehow, they had no idea where they were. Way the hell and gone away from Earth, that much was sure, but that didn't help them figure out how to get home.

  Donna came around the back of the pickup and put her arm around his waist. "What you thinking about?"

  "Nothin'," he said automatically.

  "What kind of nothin'?"

  He smiled and gave her a squeeze. "The way too serious kind. We've survived a meteor strike and almost runnin' out of air and a mountainside landing and hostile natives; that's probably enough serious shit for one day."

  "My thoughts exactly. How about we have us a picnic lunch? We never did get that meal Andre fixing for us, and that was hours ago. My stomach's trying to digest itself." Trent had been too scared and too busy to even think about food, but the moment Donna mentioned it, his mouth began to water and his stomach growled like a lion. "Oh, yeah, I could eat a horse," he said.

  "How about a ham sandwich?" she asked.

  "Make it two."

  "Coming right up." She went into the camper and started making domestic noises. Trent followed her long enough to get their picnic blanket from under the dining table's bench seat, then took it outside and laid it out on the ground beside the truck. He looked up into the tree and stepped out to the edge of its canopy to check the sky, but he still didn't see anything moving. All the same, he couldn't make himself relax. He kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  Donna came out of the camper a couple minutes later with three sandwiches and a bottle of water. Trent wasn't a big water fan, but he supposed they ought to ration the beer a little. No telling when they'd get more. Probably when he brewed some. He hoped his own stuff would taste better than the beer he got in brew pubs.

  The sandwiches were wonderful. Trent wolfed his first one in about six bites, then forced himself to make the second one last until Donna was done with hers. She wasn't wasting any time, either, so it wasn't a great hardship. Neither of them spoke more than "Mmmff, good!" until the sandwiches were gone.

  There were no ants. Trent kept waiting for little creatures to crawl up onto the blanket and go for the bread crumbs, but he only saw a couple of brown stick-like things about an inch long, and those just crossed the blanket on their long, spindly legs and kept going. There were no flies or mosquitoes, either. The air was just the right temperature, and the ground was soft under the blanket; perfect conditions for a nap, except Trent couldn't bring himself to let down his guard yet.

  There was plenty of work to do anyway. They were definitely sleeping inside the camper until they were sure it was safe outside, which meant he had to repair the table that the tire had smashed, because that folded down level with the seats to m
ake their bed. And there was the helmet question. What could he use to make helmets? He supposed he could cut up a tool box or something for the sheet metal and hammer it into some kind of hat, but he didn't really want to ruin a perfectly good tool box unless he had to. He wished he'd thought to bring some extra diamond plate along, but when you're coming down under a parachute, you don't want a whole lot of unnecessary weight. He hadn't brought welding equipment for the same reason.

  He had a saw. Maybe he could cut down a tree and hollow out a chunk of log for a helmet. And he could split a log and hollow the halves for shoulder-guards. Maybe saw one into boards for chest and back protection, like those advertising sandwich boards that people wore on street corners. He laughed out loud at the image. The thing would weigh a ton.

  "What's funny?" Donna asked.

  He told her what he'd been thinking, and she laughed, too, but not at that. "There's helmets lying around all over the place," she said. "Most of 'em are full of slo-mos, but I'll bet we could find a couple of empty shells without too much searching."

  He tilted his head back and gazed up into the branches of the tree. "Good grief, what else am I missin'?"

  She leaned forward and kissed him. "Nothing you can't solve the hard way, I'm sure."

  "I guess that's a compliment."

  "That's how I meant it."

  "Well, then, that's okay."

  He stood up and looked out at the meadow. There were several slo-mos out there, but he couldn't tell a dead one from a live one without going out and tipping them over. So he shouldered his rifle and walked out into the open, keeping a weather eye out for cupids while he walked up to each slo-mo in turn, tipped it over, and waited to see if it tried to right itself.

  One of them flipped much more easily than the others, and when it did, a lizard-like creature about the size of a hamster scuttled out of it and made a beeline for Trent's boot. He jumped back and kicked at it, and it changed course for a clump of bushes a few dozen yards away, zigzagging like a soldier storming a gun emplacement all the way.