Anywhere but here

by Jerry Oltion

  She didn't answer. Fearing the worst, he dropped the tarp full of shells and sprinted the last few hundred feet to the pickup, his shoulder-guards slipping around and flailing at his chest and back as he ran. He stuck his head inside the door, but it was too dark inside for him to see anything. "Donna?" he said. "Donna!"

  "Mmmm?" she said sleepily.

  "Are you okay?"

  "Hmm?" He heard her move, then she said, "Holy shit, what happened to you!"

  "Nothing. I just . . . I was just running. You're all right?"

  "Yeah. I guess I must have fallen asleep." She tapped the computers keyboard and the screen lit up. It had gone to sleep, too. "Did you find what you were looking for?"

  "More than that. I found this planet's equivalent of a mountain lion. They hang out in trees." He backed out of the camper and looked up into the canopy of the one overhead, but he didn't see anything but leaves and branches up there.

  Donna didn't like his news. "A mountain lion! Jesus. That's all we need." Trent said, "It ran off when I threw stuff at it, so I don't think it was all that intent on gettin' me, but we've got to keep our eyes out." And of course they now had to worry about attack from above even when they were under the trees. The shine was definitely coming off this particular apple. He went back to the tarp and retrieved his slo-mo shells, dropping them next to the wheel he'd removed. He thought about setting to work cleaning them out and tying them onto the tire, but he was still too jittery to work, and besides, his stomach was growling worse than the cat. Donna was standing in the doorway with the blanket around her, shivering from the cold. And now that he thought about it, it hadn't been just the lack of the computer screen to light up the camper that had made it so dark in there; it was starting to get darker outside, too.

  "To hell with this," Trent said. "We've got to get some hot food in us. I'll start a fire and we can roast hot dogs or something."

  "Sounds good to me," Donna said.

  Trent picked a spot a little ways away from the truck, but still protected from the rain by the tree's canopy, and stacked some kindling there. He would normally get some rocks and make a fire ring, but the ground was so soaked that there was no real need, and he had thrown all the easy rocks on the counterweight anyway. He got a couple of bigger logs ready to put on the kindling, then got some matches from the camper and tried to light it.

  The sticks wouldn't catch. They were soaked through, because he'd used the tarp for a ground cloth and a carrying sack all afternoon. They sizzled and popped and even blackened a little after the fourth or fifth match, but he couldn't get a flame out of even the tiniest twig. He tried putting some paper underneath, and that burned merrily for a few seconds, but it didn't light the kindling any better than the match had.

  "Dammit," he said when the paper burned out. "That should have started at least the little stuff."

  "Maybe the wood's green," Donna said.

  "It's driftwood."

  "Maybe this kind of wood doesn't burn, then."

  "Huh?" He looked up at her.

  "It's alien wood on an alien planet. Maybe it doesn't burn."

  "It's wood," he said. "It's got to burn." He crumpled up another piece of paper and stuck it underneath the kindling, but it did no more good than the first one.

  "All right," he said. "Maybe this stuff won't light, but there's two kinds of tree. Let's see how arrows burn." He picked up one from the pile they'd brought over from the trees they'd cut down, digging to the bottom to get the driest one he could find, then breaking it over his knee to expose the even drier wood inside. It took a pretty good bend to make it snap, and when it did, it splintered into long fibers. Perfect. Except it wouldn't light any better than the other stuff. Trent used up three more sheets of paper just trying to get the toothpick-sized splinters at the ends to go, but no luck. They turned black like the other twigs, but when Trent rubbed them with his fingers he saw that the black was just soot from the paper. The twigs hadn't even charred.

  "Okay, time for a little chemical persuasion," he said, standing up, but he stopped before he had even taken a step toward the camper. He hadn't packed any charcoal or lighter fluid, because he hadn't packed a barbecue. Too much weight. Neither he nor Donna smoked, so they didn't have a butane lighter. He tried to think what else they might have that was flammable, but he came up blank. They didn't even have a camp stove, because they had an entire camper with an electric stove in it. About the only thing they had that was flammable was their clothing and bedding. There was the cabinetry, Trent supposed, but they would have to be a lot more desperate than they were now to start burning that.

  "For the first time," he said, "I wish I had a gas-powered rig. At least gasoline is good for startin'

  fires."

  Donna said, "How about booze? Alcohol burns, doesn't it?"

  That was a thought, but all he'd brought was a case of Budweiser. "We'd have to figure out some way to distill it out of beer," he said.

  "Which requires heat."

  "Not to mention wasting good beer."

  Donna squinted her eyes, obviously chasing down an elusive thought, but if she ever caught it, she didn't let on.

  "What?" Trent asked.

  "Nothing. I was thinking about the sap that we got on our parachute, but we washed most of that out."

  They had, but since it was water soluble, he doubted if it had been very flammable anyway. On the other hand . . . "We didn't wash out the shop towel. Let's try that." He opened the driver's door and was momentarily blinded by the dome light. He hadn't realized how dark the day was getting. He squinted so he wouldn't blow his night vision any worse than it already was and fished around under the seat until he found the shredded remains of the towel, then he closed the door and half felt his way back to the camp-fire. He nestled the towel under the little pile of kindling, then put a match to it and leaned back. The towel smoldered a little, but didn't catch. Trent moved the match right under an orange spot, but that didn't even smolder.

  "Shit," he said. "Doesn't anything alien burn?"

  "Wait a minute!" Donna said. "What about that stuff Katata's husband gave us?" They had never even opened the bottle. Trent wouldn't drink the stuff on a bet, not without finding out what was in it first, but he certainly didn't mind trying it as fire-starter.

  "What the heck; let's give it a whirl," he said, rising to go get it, but Donna was already ahead of him. She went into the camper and came back out a moment later with the bottle of green whatever-it-was and one of their flashlights. She handed the light to Trent and struggled to open the bottle.

  "Dang, the cap's on tight," she said, handing it to Trent and taking the flashlight. He gripped the cap hard and gave it a good twist, but it didn't budge. It was a twist-off, wasn't it?

  "Here, give me a light on this," he said, holding it out so Donna could shine the flashlight on it. The flashlight was even brighter than the light in the cab, but he squinted and looked at the cap. It was just a black cylinder over the narrow neck of the bottle, but he was able to tilt it so he could see up inside through the glass, and there were threads. Something didn't look right about them, though, and after a moment's thought he realized what it was.

  "It's left-hand thread!" he said, twisting the other way, and the cap came off with a loud hiss.

  "It's pressurized, too," Donna said.

  Bubbles immediately began forming inside, and foam started running over the top. Trent held the bottle over the would-be fire and let it drip onto the kindling and the rag beneath it, then capped the bottle again when he had enough to test whether or not it would burn. No sense wasting it if it didn't. Or if it did, for that matter. Especially if it did.

  The odor was enough to tell him for sure he wouldn't be drinking the stuff, even if it proved safe. Distilled garlic would have been sweet compared to the stench that came off the green foam. But that was an encouraging sign, since anything that stinky had to have at least one volatile component to it, and volatile gasses were generally flammabl
e.

  He set the bottle on the ground behind him and rubbed his hands clean on the wet weeds underfoot, then dried them off as best he could on his pant legs before striking another match. Donna held the flashlight on the sticks while he stuck the match in toward them.

  The stuff caught with a whoosh like rocket fuel. Trent snatched his hand back, but not before the hair on his wrist was singed. Flames roared upward at least three feet, burning bright blue all the way. The kindling sizzled and hissed, turned black, then burst into flame on its own, adding a yellow tint to the overall fire. Trent felt the heat, way hotter than a normal campfire, against his face and hands.

  "Woo hoo!" he said. "That did it."

  Donna clicked off the flashlight and held out her hands toward the fire. "Don't let it go out." The kindling was disappearing like ice on a stove. It didn't so much burn as melt, dripping down to the wet ground in little rivers of fire that bubbled and hissed as they continued to bathe the wood above them in flame. Trent shoved a couple of inch-thick sticks onto the top of the pile, then set an even bigger log on top of them. The kindling burned down until the flames were only a foot high, but they curled around the new stuff and started it melting, too, adding its liquid wood to the puddle of fuel.

  "It's like plastic or something," Donna said.

  Trent wondered what kind of toxic fumes it was giving off. Plastic fires on Earth were usually bad news, but this stuff seemed to be burning clean, with hardly any smoke. And it put out enough heat that a person could stand back a ways. He wasn't sure about cooking meat on a stick over it, but they could sure as hell put a pot of water on and boil it.

  He held his hands out and let them warm up for the first time in hours. Oh, yeah, that felt good. Suddenly it was starting to look like a much better day.

  29

  They filled an aluminum cook pot with water from the creek and hung it by a wire from a tripod made of the longest arrows that Trent could find. He was afraid they might melt, too, the way the flames came roaring up from the puddle of molten wood, but he learned how to damp the fire down with a flat rock over part of the puddle before the arrows caught. He kept the end of a log sticking over the edge of the rock, providing a constant drip to replenish the pool, and managed to keep a fairly even fire going that way.

  They got their folding camp chairs out of the pickup and settled in to soak up the heat. Donna got a box of macaroni and cheese out of the camper, and when the water started to boil, she threw the macaroni in. Stirring it was a trick, until Trent duct-taped a spoon to the end of an arrow so they could do it from a distance. The macaroni took longer to soften than the seven minutes the directions said it would; probably the effect of lower air pressure on the boiling temperature of water. It didn't matter; they were content to just sit and warm themselves by the fire while it boiled. Donna had brought two mugs and two packets of hot-chocolate mix. When the macaroni was done and Trent had removed the pot from the flames, she dipped the mugs in the pot and filled them with water before she drained the rest of it out and added a squirt of squeeze-butter and the cheese packet to the noodles. She put a little powdered milk in with the cheese and stirred the whole works together, and it came out looking and smelling surprisingly like macaroni and cheese.

  She opened the hot chocolate packets and poured them into the mugs of hot noodle-water. Trent wondered how that was going to taste, but balanced against the extra time it would take to boil a fresh pot of water, he agreed with her choice. He hadn't realized how cold he was until he'd started warming up, and he wanted something warm inside him right now.

  It tasted pretty good. A little doughy, maybe, but that was probably just the power of suggestion. When Donna was done stirring hers, he raised his mug in a toast and said, "To Katata and Magalak, who gave us fire."

  "Hear, hear!" she said, and they clinked their mugs together.

  The fire lit up the tree overhead, and a good swath of the meadow beyond. The pickup's chrome bumpers and roll bars and door handles glinted in its light, and even its red paint took on a luster that hid most of the dents and scratches it had picked up in the last couple of days. It was amazing how much better things looked in the right light.

  Trent looked for glowing eyes out at the edge of the firelight's reach, but there were so many glistening raindrops on everything that he would have missed anything that didn't move. He imagined he and Donna were being watched, though. As hard as this wood was to light, he figured fire wasn't very common around here. He wished he could believe that the rat-cats would stay away from it, but the one he'd seen this evening had acted more curious than afraid of new things. He made sure his rain jacket didn't cover the pistol, and kept his ears perked for noise. At least this fire didn't crackle and pop the way a normal fire would.

  He and Donna ate the macaroni and cheese straight out of the pot. The hot chocolate hadn't killed either of them, so they didn't figure the noodles would, either. Water was water, after all, and ten minutes at a full boil should have killed anything living in it.

  The food tasted wonderful. "Why is it," Trent said between bites, "that everything tastes better when it's cooked over a campfire?"

  Donna shook her head. Her blonde hair was wet and stringy but it still glowed like gold in the firelight. "I don't know," she said, "but it does. Maybe it's because your taste buds are the only part of your body that's not miserable."

  "Hey, come on. We're warming up."

  "Thank goodness for that." She turned to toast her left side for a minute, and Trent actually saw steam rising off her jacket.

  After they finished off the macaroni, Trent took the pot to the stream and rinsed it out, then brought it back full and hung it over the fire again. "It ain't a whole lot," he said, "but it ought to be enough to wash up with."

  "My god, a bath, too!" Donna said. "You're my hero."

  They sipped the last of their hot chocolate while the bathwater warmed up, and Trent experimented with various things in the fire, checking to see what would melt and what would burn outright. Arrows worked just the same as the other kind of wood, although the tuft of greenery at the end would burn like a torch if you stuck that end in the flames. It dripped flaming gobs of plastic, though, so you didn't want to hold it upright. The waxy-leaved ground cover was actually wax, by the looks of it; it certainly melted easy enough, and the liquid burned just like the molten wood. The chips that Trent had busted off the slo-mo shells the day before took a lot more heat to melt, but they finally did, and the flame from that was an intense white. He tried leaves from the tree overhead, and he ventured out into the night with a flashlight to gather twigs off the bushes, all to the same effect. Everything he could find except rocks and dirt melted and burned when he gave it enough heat.

  "Being rained on all day doesn't seem to affect it a bit," he said. "It's like water content isn't even a consideration."

  "I wonder if a fish would burn," Donna said.

  "Jeez, I don't know. We'll have to try it."

  Donna turned to toast her back. She didn't say anything for a while, but when she did, it was a bombshell. "What do you bet we won't be able to eat anything that grows here?" she said. He hadn't even thought about that, but she was probably right. If life on this planet was made out of plastic instead of protein, there was no way their bodies could digest it. They might as well try to eat a PVC pipe.

  "We haven't tested actual meat yet," Trent said. "That might be different."

  "It might. You gonna go fishing in the morning, then?"

  "I don't have to wait that long," he said. He got up and went over to where he'd dropped the tarp and its cargo of slo-mo shells, and sorted through them for the heaviest one. "This one's still got its innards."

  It took him a while with a screwdriver and a hammer to bust open the underside of the shell, and when he did, he wished he hadn't done it on a full stomach. The insides were a gooey mess of slippery organs that stank almost as bad as the alien liquor. He held his breath and cut out a long, stringy slab of somet
hing that looked like muscle and speared it with an arrow, then held it out over the fire. It sizzled at first and stiffened like regular meat would do, and when it got hotter it started to drip the way a steak would drip fat, but these drips looked suspiciously like the ones that came off wood. Trent took a closer look, and sure enough; it was just the end of the meat melting. He held it in the fire until it had completely dripped away, along with the end of the arrow.

  "Not good," he said. Not only that, but the odor was still strong in his nostrils, and his stomach was about to rebel. He picked up the ghastly shell and carried it to the creek bank, where he tossed the whole works into the rushing water and wiped his hands clean on the wet weeds, but when he sat back down by the fire, his stomach still felt queasy. "Gah," he said. "That was a mistake." Donna didn't look very good, either. "We've only got about a month's worth of food," she said.

  "A month is a long time," Trent told her. "We'll have power again long before we run out. We can go look for another planet if we have to."

  She didn't say anything, but he knew what she was thinking. If she could figure out where they were, then they wouldn't have to look for another planet. They could just go home. They huddled around the fire for a while longer, soaking up its heat for the long night ahead of them, and Trent's stomach slowly began to settle. When the fire started to burn down, he said, "You want me to put another log on, or should we call it a night?"

  "Let's go inside," she said, so they picked up their chairs and the pot of warm water and the bottle of fire starter and carried them in. They turned on the flashlight and set it on the countertop pointing upward, then closed the door and peeled off their wet clothing and took their bath, dipping washcloths in the pot of steaming water and rubbing themselves clean. The warm water felt great on their skin, but drying off with a fresh towel felt even better.

  "I hope this rain blows over in the night," Trent said. "I'm about half tired of it."

  "Me too." Donna rubbed her hair with the towel, setting her breasts ajiggle. Trent felt himself responding to the sight, but his stomach was still not happy, and Donna didn't seem to be in the right sort of mood, either, so he just toweled off his own hair and helped her set up the bed, piling every blanket they had on it this time.