by Jerry Oltion
"So maybe the bug's not in the numbers."
"What else could it be? We know from looking at the log file that it's not in the part that actually calculates the jump, because those numbers were right. That doesn't leave much room in the program for a bug in the numbers while they're still in decimal form. The navigation module hands them off to the hyperdrive control module, and that's it. Even the handoff is probably done in binary."
"Hmm." Trent was beginning to see what she was getting at. He wiped his hands on his pants and said, "So how did you come up with the number? This morning you were just as stuck as ever." She said, "I kept thinking about what you said about working the problem backwards, picking a distance at random and seeing what the velocity would be at that point. There were only a couple of spots in the galaxy where I could do that with what little I've learned about orbits, but I got to thinking about the simulator program that we used when we were first learning how to navigate. It only simulates solar systems, but they're kind of like little galaxies with just a few stars in 'em, so I figured I could set up a simulated solar system and jump around from place to place in it and see how much velocity difference I picked up."
"I didn't know you could do that," he said.
"You can't tell it where to put the planets, but you can tell it how many planets you want, so I gave it a hundred, plus a big asteroid belt. That gave me plenty of targets, so I just picked one to start with and set up the same angle of jump that we took to come out here, and checked the relative velocities of all the planets and asteroids along that line until I got the right number."
"I didn't think planets moved that fast."
"They don't. Everything's about ten times slower, but all the angles are the same, and the distances are proportional. I was even able to account for our initial velocity when we left Mirabelle, and the orbital velocity of the planet we landed on before we came here."
"But you don't trust the result, because it's an even number."
"It's just too pat. There's got to be something wrong with my calculations." He didn't know what to say to her. She was probably right, but this was the one time in their lives when telling her she was right would be the wrong thing to say. He looked out at the waterwheel, hard at work charging up their batteries, and said, "We can go have a look easy enough in a day or two." She looked at him as if he'd lost his mind. "We can't just jump twenty thousand light-years and hope I'm right. What if I'm not?"
"Then we look for another planet wherever we wind up. We can't stay here anyway. We'll be out of water in a week."
She said, "We can make a still."
"Rainwater's about as close to distilled as it gets, and that didn't settle any better than creek water. There's something funky in it. And even if we could get it pure enough, we're going to run out of food in a month anyway."
She ran a hand through her hair. "We don't know that we can't eat anything here."
"You want to play Adam and Eve?"
"I don't want to be the one who gets us killed!" She turned away, her arms crossed and her fists clenched.
He reached out to put a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged him off. He waited a second, then said, "Doing nothing is what'll get us killed. You may not trust your numbers, but I do, at least enough to go see if they're right."
She took a few deep breaths before she turned around and said, "Let me go run the simulation again."
"Sure."
She went back inside the camper, and he crawled underneath to finish mounting the motor. The sun was down by the time he finished. The day had warmed up pretty well when the sun was out, but it started to cool off again pretty quickly as the stars came out. Trent was tired of being cold, and tired of wearing wet boots, so he lit another campfire and he and Donna sat beside it in their stocking feet while they dried out their clothes. Trent amused himself by tossing the tiny little darts off the leafy ends of arrows into the flames and watching them flare up, while Donna just stared out into the night. They heated up a can of chili over the fire and had another beer, and neither of them got sick on it or on the smoke, which pretty much hammered the last nail in the water coffin as far as Trent was concerned. It didn't matter. They were leaving anyway. In another day, maybe two, the batteries would be charged, and they would be off to face another problem somewhere else. Trent didn't have any doubt that the universe would serve them up another one. Even if they made it home without incident, there were problems enough waiting there to last a lifetime.
Trouble was like an onion, he decided, only you peeled it from the inside out. Instead of working your way down to smaller and smaller ones, you worked your way out to bigger and bigger ones, and they kept going forever. There didn't seem to be any shortcut through them, either. Simply bailing out for another life didn't work. The very trouble they were trying to escape had followed them to Mirabelle. He didn't suppose he could blame the United States government for the programming glitch that brought them here, at least not directly, but their refusal to let people develop better software and sell it on the open market had definitely contributed to Donna's picking this version to download. That was something else to worry about. Would the software take them back to Earth? It had worked fine jumping around out here in the middle of nowhere, but if they did wind up in familiar space again, could they just pick Earth off the menu and jump to it, or would they wind up another twenty thousand light-years away? Maybe they should try for Onnescu again. The program had at least taken them there okay.
He supposed he and Donna would have to hash that out before they left, but he didn't feel like getting into it tonight. Not while she was so unsure of her calculations to even get them back to familiar space.
The alien wood didn't leave much in the way of coals, so they had to keep feeding fresh wood into the flames to keep it going. After a while it became more trouble than it was worth, so Trent suggested they turn in, and Donna just shrugged and said, "Why not?"
The long days and long nights were really messing with Trent's sleep patterns. He had no trouble sacking out, but it was still pitch black when he awoke, and he just lay there for hours afterward, waiting for daylight. When it finally came, he was tired again, but he got up and went outside to check the waterwheel.
It was still spinning, though not as fast as yesterday. The stream was back down to the level it had been when they first arrived. The battery was fully charged, though, so he swapped it out for the other one and installed the charged one in the pickup.
He spent the rest of the day going over everything he could think of, making sure that it was ready for space. He used the foot pump to refill the air tanks under the seat and the tanks in their Ziptite suits. He could have used the compressor, but the battery was fully charged now and he didn't want to draw it down even a little bit if he could help it. Besides, he was beginning to see how long and boring a day could be with nothing to fill it, and refilling the tanks by hand was at least something he could do. Donna alternated between double-checking her logic on the computer and battening down the hatches in the camper for zero-gee. By nightfall, the pickup was as ready to go as the day they'd left Earth, except for the second battery, which was still at only three-quarters of a charge. It would be ready by morning, though.
Trent had an even harder time sleeping that night. Tomorrow they would be in space again, for better or for worse. They would either find their way home, or have to find another planet that would be more hospitable than this one.
It occurred to him that they'd never named the place. They'd named its creatures, but not the planet itself. What would be appropriate? Plasticland? That sounded more like a shopping mall than a planet. Styrohome? Better, but it wasn't actually home. He tried to come up with a play on polystyrene or polyurethane or PVC, but he never came up with anything he liked. Unless Donna had a bright idea, he guessed it would just have to be "that place with the cupids where we stopped to recharge the batteries and figure out where we were." Kind of a shame to discover a planet and not
name it, but he didn't think they'd be back, and this wasn't the sort of place he wanted to name after himself or Donna. He wanted their planet to be habitable, at least.
What would his ideal planet be like, he wondered? He and Donna had gone out looking, but they hadn't really defined their terms ahead of time. He tried to think about it now, and decided that it would probably look a lot like this one, with mountains and streams and trees, only without the risk of getting an arrow through the top of your head. He would opt for a spot that was a little more open, though. Close to the mountains, but not in them. He was already getting tired of looking at the same old valley day after day.
As he drifted off to sleep, he realized that the picture forming in his mind was of the red buttes around Rock Springs.
33
The other battery was fully charged in the morning. Trent installed it in the truck, then dismantled the water-wheel and re-mounted the motor, too. The sun hadn't even cleared the mountain by the time they were ready to roll.
They put on their Ziptites and sealed the doors, then overpressurized the cab to make sure it was tight. There was no radio to listen to this time, and neither one of them felt like playing the stereo. Donna held the computer on her lap and ran one more time through what they were going to do.
"I calculated the exact spot in the sky where we want to go," she said, "based on the position of the stars after the big jump and all the jumps we made after that. It's about five degrees off from where we were aiming when we did that trick with the map, but I think it's more accurate."
"I'd be surprised if it wasn't," Trent said.
He looked out at the meadow that they'd called home for five days. There was a path worn from the pickup to the stream, and the logs were still there, too. There was a pile of arrows and slo-mo shells on the bank where he'd cut them loose from the waterwheel. Closer at hand, there was a smudge of plastic residue under the tree beside them where they'd had their fire. Other than that, there was nothing to indicate that humans had been here. They'd undoubtedly left some bacteria behind, but the odds of that thriving here were slim to none. Intestinal bacteria were just as specialized as people; they would have little better chance of surviving here than Trent and Donna would.
Still, he could reduce the odds of that down to practically nothing. He shifted the pickup into forward and drove out into the meadow, stopping right over the spot where they'd dug their latrine. He'd filled it with dirt, but this would be even better. Pack out what you pack in, and all that. He looked at the pressure gauge. Steady as a rock. "Ready to do it?" he asked.
"Not really," Donna said, "but I'm probably as ready as I'm going to get."
"Good enough for me," he said. He opened the stopcock in his door and listened to the excess air rush out until the gauge steadied out at eleven and a half pounds—atmospheric pressure here—then he closed it off again and said, "Let's go."
"Hang onto your hat, cowboy."
He reached up and did just that, glad to be wearing it again. He'd stowed their helmets and shoulder guards in the camper for posterity, but if he never wore them again, it would be too soon. Donna hit the "enter" key, and the valley blinked out of existence. Sunlight blasted in the driver's window, casting stark shadows across the cab, at least until the usual cloud of debris rose up to mask it. The pickup rocked a little as the wet ground boiled away beneath them, but Trent let it go without correction until they were quite a ways away from the biggest mass of it and they weren't getting bumped much any more. He didn't want to waste a single puff of air that they didn't have to. Zero gee reminded him all too clearly how his stomach had felt a couple days ago, but he held it down. He wasn't sick this time; just light.
Donna set the computer in its spot on the dashboard and let it get a look at the stars. After a few seconds the red arrow appeared on the top right corner of the screen, so Trent used the right-rear jet to tip the truck that direction until the arrow became a circle that drifted down with the stars. He stopped their motion with the front-left jet, and looked out at the patch of stars that the computer was flagging.
"That's where home is, eh?"
"That's where I'm prayin' it is," Donna said. "Nineteen thousand, five hundred and thirteen light-years from here."
"I thought you said it was twenty thousand even?"
"From where we first showed up. We made five more hundred-light-year jumps before we gave up looking for home and then backed up thirteen looking for a good planet."
"Oh. Sure," he said, feeling dumb. He'd totally forgotten that little detail. That's why Donna was the navigator.
"So are you ready for the big jump?" she asked.
"Do it."
She had already keyed in the figures on the ground. Now she just double-checked that they were right, then hit "enter."
There was the same long moment of disorientation that they'd felt when they made their other big jump, and the starfield completely changed. The bright sun was gone.
"Okay, baby," Donna whispered, "find something familiar." They waited, hardly breathing, for the computer to lock on, but after thirty seconds or so, it made the Homer Simpson "D'oh" sound and flashed "Unable to orient" on the screen. Trent didn't recognize anything, either, but that didn't mean anything. The computer was programmed for it; he wasn't.
"Let's give it a full picture to work with," he said, hitting the buttons for both front jets. The nose tilted down, and more stars streamed up from behind the hood, but none of those proved familiar, either. He hit the side jets and let the odd corkscrew motion of rotation in two planes twist them around ninety degrees so the computer could see what had been to their sides, too, but still no luck. Donna was biting her lip and making little hand motions toward the computer as if she wanted to help it out somehow, but didn't know how.
Trent brought the pickup to rest with the point they'd been aimed at before out his window. "Okay," he said, "so we didn't hit it the first time. We've got plenty of power; let's try jumping to the side a ways. Maybe our angle was off a little."
"We could jump all day and never find it," Donna said.
"We could. But at least we'll have tried."
She reached for the computer. "A hundred light-years?"
"Five hundred," Trent said.
"That's farther than—"
"—the star map is good for, I know. But we've got a lot of space to cover. Let's cover some of it."
"It's going to be like jumping from hole to hole in a piece of Swiss cheese," Donna said.
"Yeah, well, the holes are what makes it Swiss," Trent replied.
"Huh?"
He shrugged. "That was supposed to be profound."
"Oh." She narrowed her eyes. "It wasn't."
"I gathered that. So let's jump already."
"Any place in particular look good to you?" she asked.
"An even ninety degrees to the side of where we were pointing when we got here," he said. "Might as well make the math easy if we have to calculate how far we've gone."
"Okay. Here goes." She moved the cursor until the numbers in the popup display were right, typed in 500 light-years in the distance box, and hit "enter."
The stars shifted again. The disorientation that went with the jump was less than last time, but that was the only indication that they'd gone only 500 light-years instead of 20,000. They let the computer look for familiar stars, but it didn't find anything this time, either. "Where to now?" Donna asked. "Ninety degrees away from the last time?"
"Sure, why not?" Trent said. It didn't really matter, but they might as well be consistent. They jumped again, and let the computer have a look at the entire sweep of sky. It found nothing familiar, but Trent felt his heart suddenly start to pound when he saw three stars in a row with another three at an angle above them. They looked just like the belt and sword of Orion. There were even two more bright stars where one shoulder and the opposite knee would be. The constellation was way smaller than Orion was from Earth, but it sure looked right to him.
> "There," he said, hitting the jets to bring the pickup to a stop before it slid out of sight. In his excitement, he overshot and had to correct twice more before he got it, but that left the stars still visible just to the right of center. "Isn't that Orion?"
"Where?"
"On its side. Right there." He tapped the computer screen; it was easier to point to a spot on that than at something outside.
"It . . . certainly looks like it," Donna said, "but it must not be, or the computer would recognize it. I mean, it's not like it can't see it."
"Tell it to try again," Trent said.
She pulled down a menu and selected "Orient," but the computer made the Homer "D'oh" sound again.
"Damn it, I know that's Orion. I mean, what are the odds of there being another one just like it somewhere else?"
"I don't know," Donna said, "but what are the odds of the computer not recognizing something that obvious? It must see something we don't, like the stars are the wrong distance apart or the wrong spectrum or something."
"This is the same program that sent us twenty thousand light-years off course."
"Well, yeah, but—"
"No 'but.' That's Orion."
She ran a hand through her hair. It stayed put when she let go, but she didn't seem to notice.
"Okay," she said slowly. "If that's Orion, then let's see if I can figure out where we are myself." She called up the star map as seen from Sol and found Orion on that. "It's a hell of a lot bigger from the Sun, that's for sure," she said.
"Wait a second," said Trent. Something didn't look right. He looked from the screen image to the one out the windshield. He had to cock his head sideways to get the same orientation on it, but when he did, the sword was pointing the wrong way, and the belt was hanging to the right instead of to the left.
"Shit, it's not the same. It's backward."
She looked from one to the other, back and forth, and finally said, "What if we're behind it?"