Anywhere but here

by Jerry Oltion

  Chalk up another thing he wasn't any good at.

  He walked on and came to the stream, where he stood on the bank looking down into the water. It bubbled happily over rocks and shimmered in the pools, reflections obscuring what might swim beneath the surface. He supposed he could get out his fishing pole and see if anything in there would take a fly, but he wasn't in the mood for fishing. Not while Donna was reinventing calculus over there under the tree. He looked down the length of the meadow to where she sat, a little girl alone in the great outdoors. Isaac Newton under the apple tree. The pickup looked ridiculously out of place parked there beside her, a crude, barbaric relic of a world that prized adventure over learning. He blinked and for a second saw it with its tires flat and paint dull, rusting away after years of rain and snow. Would he and Donna still be living in the camper, hoarding their last precious relics of civilization, or would they have built a cabin by then out of arrow trees? Would there be half a dozen kids running around, wearing samurai armor and playing kick-the-slo-mo?

  A soft breeze blew through the meadow, rustling leaves and bringing up a spicy odor from somewhere. There weren't any flowers, but it still smelled nice. A little like sagebrush, only not so in-your-face. He could get used to a place that smelled like this.

  He crossed the stream at a narrow spot at the head of a little waterfall that fell maybe four feet into a wide pool. A nice bathing pool, if the water wasn't so cold. Maybe they could divert most of the flow around it so it could warm up in the sunlight.

  When he climbed to the top of the other bank, he heard more rustling in the bushes, and when he took a couple steps closer, a little brown leathery ball about the size of a porcupine burst out from cover and bolted across twenty feet of open space to another bush. Trent thought briefly about trying to bag it for dinner, but he didn't want to try eating any of the native life just yet. It was one thing to experiment with alien food when you could rush back to Earth and a hospital within a couple of hours, but when you were stuck in the middle of nowhere and your entire stock of medical supplies consisted of a traveller's first-aid kit, it made sense to move a little more slowly.

  He completed his circuit of their immediate surroundings without finding any bear dens or dinosaur footprints. The biggest animal he had seen any evidence of was whatever had left the pile of bones with the arrow through it. He felt himself relax a little as he walked back toward the pickup. Even if they did figure out where they were and charge the batteries, they didn't necessarily have to leave here, at least not permanently. They had been looking for a new home when they left Earth; they could do a lot worse than this.

  He wondered how Andre was doing, whether he had gone back to his ruined house to salvage any of his possessions, or if there was too much danger of another strike from orbit. He wondered if anybody else had lived within the blast zone of the first one. Andre had said that the French colonists lived apart from one another, but he'd been talking to an American. That wasn't necessarily the truth. Trent didn't think Andre had been lying to him. He seemed to be just what he said he was; a regular guy trying to make a new home away from the craziness that had swept over Earth in the last couple of decades. But he hadn't been able to escape. Nobody could, unless they were willing to cut themselves off completely. Hide out from America and its attempts to control every other human outpost in the galaxy.

  He wondered why the Galactic Federation hadn't done something about it yet. Could they already be as ineffective as the United Nations had been at reining in their out-of-control members? Or were they just reluctant to step into what was, after all, mostly a human problem? The alien races who made up the bulk of the Federation probably had growing pains of their own.

  Trent remembered his promise to Andre when they parted. Not much of a promise, really; just that he would do what he could to stop his country from behaving so abominably, but a promise was a promise, and he intended to keep it. But how was he going to do that from way out here?

  25

  He joined Donna on the picnic blanket and took off his armor, using the towel to wipe the sweat off his neck.

  "Any luck?" he asked.

  She shook her head. "I'm really wishing I'd paid more attention in math class."

  "You'll get it," he told her.

  "Yeah, but when? If I was smarter, I'd have figured it out when we still had power and air, and we'd be home by now."

  Trent reached out and put his arm around her. "Hey," he said softly, "don't you go beatin' yourself up for not pullin' a rabbit out of a hat. You got us down alive while I was sittin' in back bein' about as useful as tits on a boar."

  She took a deep breath and let it out. "It's just . . . I'm sure the answer's there, if I only knew how to find it."

  "You will."

  "I wish I had your confidence."

  He gave her a squeeze. "I've got the confidence because you've got the brains. And you've got all the time in the world to use 'em. Take a break and come back to it later." She shook her head. "I'm right in the middle of something."

  He considered insisting, but he knew how well that usually worked. "All right," he said. He got up and put on his armor again, checked the sky, and went down to the creek to see how the parachute was doing. To his surprise, the orange stains were just about gone, so he pulled it onto the rocks beside the pool, wringing it out as he brought each armful up, until he had the whole works out of the water. It was all he could do to carry it up to the meadow, but he slung it over his shoulder like a sack of cement and staggered up the bank with it, then he dropped it to the ground, untied the shroud lines from the tree, and pulled it out into a ragged circle so it could dry. The sun had moved enough in the last few hours to give him a sense of which direction it was going, but by the arc of its track across the sky, it looked like it was setting in the east. That meant they were in the southern hemisphere, then. He wondered how long it would take him to get used to that. There was still quite a bit of daylight left, so he started checking the pickup's door and window seals, trying to find the place where they were leaking. It was pointless busy-work if he couldn't figure out a way to recharge the batteries, but it would be vitally important if he could. No way did he want to breathe air from the tires again.

  He couldn't find anything wrong. The window seals were tight; he could see the rubber compressed all the way around them. He inspected the seals on both doors for anything that might have gotten wedged in the way, and he looked for nicks or cuts, but the rubber was as smooth and clean as the day he'd installed it. So was the mating surface on the doors themselves. He checked the doors for alignment, thinking maybe they had been tweaked when the pickup tipped over, but they looked straight. He checked the seal around the wiring conduit from the cab to the rest of the truck, but that looked good, too. Finally, in desperation, he used the foot pump to put forty pounds or so in the air tank, climbed into the cab, sealed it up, and let enough out again to raise the cab's pressure a few pounds above the outside air. He listened for the hiss of a leak, but he was no more successful on the ground than in orbit. After ten minutes he realized why: the gauge hadn't dropped a bit.

  That didn't make sense. Why would it leak in space, but not on the ground? He raised the pressure some more, but it held steady. He tried the air valve in his door and it hissed just fine when he opened it, but it sealed tight again when he closed it.

  But he hadn't been able to use the air valve when they were in space, because it had been plugged with dirt and bent over. He had had to crack the door seal instead. He did that, popping open the top latch and letting a couple pounds of pressure blow out through the top of his door, then he snugged it down again and watched the pressure gauge.

  After a minute, it dropped another pound.

  "Son of a bitch," he said. It had to be the way the rubber got pushed outward by the air rushing past it. It probably folded over, and didn't seal right when he latched down the door again. He used the valve in his door to let all the extra pressure out, then opened th
e other door, climbed out, and went around to look at the driver's door. Sure enough, the rubber at the top had pooched out through the crack between door and frame. He went back around and popped all the inner latches, then went around to the outside again and opened the door. The rubber seal snapped right back into place.

  "Son of a bitch," he said again.

  "What's the matter?" Donna asked from her spot on the picnic blanket.

  "We didn't have to do all that dumb shit with the tires. We had one more cabful of air in the tank; if we'd just opened the doors all the way, then closed them again and refilled the cab, we'd have been fine." He bonked his head against the door frame a couple of times. "Stupid, stupid, stupid."

  "Hey," Donna said. "Don't beat your self up for not pulling rabbits out of hats, either. How could you have known?"

  "I don't know. I should have, though."

  She looked at the door, then at him. "We used the same trick all the way from Mirabelle, and it didn't start leaking until after we landed on the planet with bad air. Why would you suspect it to suddenly start then?"

  That was a good question, he had to admit. Why had it started leaking then, and not before?

  Because he'd been more cautious at first, just cracking the seal a little bit and letting the air out slowly?

  He and Donna had completely vented the cab to space to get the bad air out before they'd refilled it and discovered the leak; maybe it took a lot of air to roll the rubber seal over. But if that was the case, then why had it done that just now? He'd only let out a couple pounds. Maybe because he had popped the latch all the way open, knowing that the reaction wouldn't pitch the pickup over while it was on the ground.

  It took a little experimentation to prove his theory, but that turned out to be it. If he let air out gently, it wouldn't turn the seal inside out, but if he let it out in a big blast, even for just a few seconds, it would. Okay, so now he knew. One more thing to cross off the list of things to do before they could fly again. That left only the two biggies: navigation and power.

  Donna had gone back to the computer while he tracked down the leak. From what he could tell looking over her shoulder, she was indeed trying to teach herself orbital mechanics. She stopped long enough to help him fold up the parachute when it was dry, but she went right back to it afterward, and she was still at it when the sun hit the horizon.

  "Hey, come on," he said, kneeling down beside her. "You've been at that all day. Time to relax a little. Look at the sunset." It was going down in the mouth of the valley, dropping through layers of clouds as it neared the horizon and giving them silver outlines while coloring them red at the same time. Donna reluctantly closed the computer and put it in the camper, and the two of them stood beside the pickup and watched the sun go down over the plain beyond the end of the valley. If the ocean was out that way, it was lost in the haze of distance or completely over the horizon.

  "I think the days are longer here," Donna said.

  Trent laughed. "We've had one hell of a long day, that's for sure. I'm ready for a long night in the sack."

  After the sun went down, they fixed another sandwich for supper and ate it on the picnic blanket while they watched the sky grow dark and the unfamiliar stars come out, then they retreated into the camper for the night. Their surprise visit by Onnescu's native "hoodlums" had made Trent reluctant to spend much time outside in the dark until he'd learned a little more about what kind of nocturnal animals might live around here. He made sure the air vents were open so they would have fresh air, and latched the door tight.

  They folded the table down and made the bed, using the seat backs and bottoms for their mattress, but not long after they crawled in, Donna sat up and said, "I can't sleep. I'm too close to figuring out how to do the math." She reached for the computer, but Trent pulled her back down.

  "Give it up for today. The problem will still be there in the morning. You'll be fresher at it tomorrow anyway."

  "But I can't sleep. I've got all these numbers running around in my head."

  "Like what? Seventeen? Forty-two?"

  "Five hundred and thirty-seven thousand."

  "That's a lot of number to be runnin' loose. Why don't you round down to half a million and then forget the zeroes? Doesn't seem like near as much then."

  She poked him in the side. "All right, smarty pants. But if the answer comes to me in a dream, it's going to be off by thirty-seven thousand kilometers an hour. Who knows how many light-years away from home that'll leave us."

  "Close enough for the navigation program to recognize the stars," Trent said. "Go to sleep."

  "I'll try."

  She laid her head on his chest and he put his arms around her, but after a few minutes he realized he was just as wide awake as she was. He had numbers running around in his head, too. His were kilowatts instead of kilometers, but they were just as insistent. How was he going to generate enough power to recharge the batteries?

  26

  There were no windows in the camper. The three round moons of the air vents provided the only path for daylight to shine in, and with the mountain blocking their view to the east and the tree overhead, there wasn't any morning light to speak of, either. Just a pale glow from the sides and overhead. Trent had no idea how long he'd slept, but it felt like a week, and he could have done another if his bladder hadn't insisted he rise.

  He stepped outside to find the sky gray and rain misting down silently in the meadow. The air was chilly, but not cold enough that he could see his breath. The ground was still dry under the tree. He went around to the other side to pee, but he hadn't brought his armor, so he didn't venture beyond the edge of its canopy. There was no evidence of birds overhead today, but those blue-gray scales of theirs would blend in perfectly with clouds, and he wasn't willing to find out the hard way that they hunted in the rain. The air smelled wonderful. Either the tree or the ground cover out in the meadow was giving off a new aroma now that it was wet; a crisp, minty scent that made up for the gray light and the rain. Trent was about to go back to the camper and fix breakfast when he noticed a dark gray shape moving across the upper end of the meadow. It was hard to make out detail through the mist, but it looked like it was about the size of an elk, and it moved on four legs. Its head was big compared to its body, like a buffalo, and its back seemed segmented rather than furry. Was it armor plated? Trent backed away slow and easy, went around to the far side of the pickup to open the door and get out the binoculars, and left the door open while he leaned on the hood and focused on the new animal. It was definitely armored. Big overlapping plates of bone or horn or some such covered its head and back. Its legs were thick and stumpy to support all that weight. That nixed the first idea that had come to mind: shoot it for the meat and for the full-body suit of armor. It might provide more complete protection from cupids than the stuff he had made yesterday, but not if he couldn't carry it. Trent watched the animal stump along, bending down every few steps to eat a mouthful of the low, leafy plants that covered the ground. It came to a bush and stripped half the leaves off that, too, by closing its mouth around one branch at a time and sliding it upward.

  He heard soft footsteps behind him, and Donna whispered, "What do you see?"

  "Looks a little like a buffaloceros," Trent whispered back. He handed her the binoculars and pointed.

  He would have sworn their voices couldn't be heard more than a few feet away, but the animal raised its head and looked straight at them for a few seconds before turning back to denude another bush.

  "It's huge," Donna whispered.

  "Yeah. Glad it's a plant-eater."

  It was getting harder to see. Part of that was because it blended in with the bushes, but the rain was starting to come down harder, too. It had been just a soft mist before, but now they could hear it pattering on the leaves overhead. A few drops were making it through now. Trent looked at his woodpile, then out at the sky. It didn't look like it was going to stop raining anytime soon. He didn't really want a fire
at the moment, but by nightfall they might, so he went into the camper and got their blue plastic tarp and threw it over the wood, weighing the corners down with logs so it wouldn't blow away. The buffaloceros paid him no attention; just wandered off into the mist.

  They had breakfast, finishing what was left of the orange juice and eating cereal with powdered milk reconstituted with bottled water. If they started a fire tonight, Trent figured they could boil some stream water to make some hot chocolate or something. That would be a good first test of the local food supply. After breakfast, they turned the bed into a table again. Donna got out the computer and went back to work on figuring out where they were. Trent sat beside her and read with her for a while, but he quickly became snowed by all the talk of square roots and inverse squares and gravitational constants. He tried to ignore the formulas and just follow the basic logic of the text, but when it came to figuring out the area swept out in a partial arc around a circle, it was nothing but formulas. "Hell," he said at last, "they say here that pi are square, but any fool knows that pies are round. Cornbread are square." Donna gave him a sideways grin. "Go find something to do," she said, "before I have to hurt you."

  "Yes, ma'am." He put on his raincoat and his helmet and shoulder guards over that, then strapped on the pistol under his raincoat since he didn't want to carry the rifle in the rain, and went outside. It was raining harder now, a steady downpour that hissed against the leaves overhead and puddled up in the low spots out in the meadow. The stream had risen, and was churning loudly over the rocks. One would occasionally shift in the current, making a deep clunk that he felt as much as heard. He was glad he hadn't put his beer in there; it would be halfway to the ocean by now if he had. He stood on the bank and watched the water rush past for a few minutes, trying to decide whether or not it would overflow the banks. If it did, the truck could wind up halfway to the ocean, too. There was probably enough juice in the batteries to drive across the meadow, but the minute Trent tried to climb a slope, that would be the end of their charge. There was no direction but down for the pickup anymore, and there wasn't much downhill left. Maybe a couple hundred feet, total, before they left the mountains behind for good, but there was a lot of uphill and a lot of bushes to go around even on the downhill stretches between here and there.