by Jerry Oltion
"They call me Billy when I need a name," the aborigine said.
"And I'm Dale," said the other man. "Dale Larkin."
It took a moment for the name to register, but when it did, it hit like a load of bricks. "The bank robber? You stole the whole damned—how did you wind up here?"
"Long story."
"I brought you here to tell it," said Billy. "So tell it."
"Here? Now?"
"The heat makes him a little crazy," Billy said. "Of course here. Of course now. This is where we are, and these people are only here for the day."
"How do you know that?" Trent asked.
Billy laughed softly. "Would you stay any longer in this heat?" That was a good point. But Trent wasn't going to stand around in it and listen to a story all day, either. "Why don't we find some shade before we roast?" he said. Billy laughed again and waved toward the bushes with the parachute draped over them. "You have already provided it."
That was a good point, too. "Fair enough," Trent said. "Want a beer?"
"That would be fabulous," Dale said.
"Yes, thank you," said Billy.
Trent looked out at the other people and realized he didn't have enough for everyone, but he and Donna went into the camper and brought out what they had, and the rest of their bottled water as well. The water proved to be a bigger hit than the beer; when the picking and choosing was over, the water was gone and there was a six-pack of beer left.
About half the tribe settled in under the parachute. The others spread out into the bush, digging for roots and who knew what else. Trent and Donna sat on the red dirt between two tufts of spiny grass, and Billy and Dale sat facing them. It was surprisingly more pleasant in the shade, even though the ground was still hot. Trent scooped up a handful of dirt and let it trickle through his fingers, and when he looked up at Donna, he saw that she was watching him and smiling.
"Earth," he said.
"There's no place like home, eh babe?"
"Nope." He popped open his beer and took a swig. Nice and cool. No need for a nipple to drink it through, either.
Billy nudged Dale in the ribs. "So tell your story."
Dale shifted uncomfortably. "What if they don't want to hear it?"
"Too bad. The Dream brought them here, and we walked a long ways to meet them. Your lives are connected. From what Trent said a minute ago, I think it started before today, hmm?"
"He bankrolled the guys who invented the hyperdrive," Trent said. "Donna and I helped them build their spaceship. But we haven't met before." He looked straight at Dale and added, "Then he robbed a bank right after I got some money out of the cash machine. I mean took the whole building and everything. The backwash blew me into the hole."
"Sorry about that," Dale said. If he blushed, it was impossible to tell behind his already-red skin. "I thought you were far enough away."
"You miscalculated a little."
"That wasn't the only mistake I made, believe me."
"Robbin' banks is generally a mistake," Trent said.
Dale shrugged. "We all fight the system in our own particular way. But I was out of cash, and almost out of options. After the Feds traced the money I gave to Allen and Judy, I had about ten minutes to grab what I could and get out of town. I holed up at my sister's place in Granger and finished turning my van into a spaceship, but I didn't want to go live on some frontier planet. I was getting pretty tired of living in the States, though, with all the anti-this and anti-that going on, so I figured I'd knock off one last bank and then go to Rio or something. But it didn't turn out quite the way I expected."
"What happened?" Trent asked, growing interested despite himself. Dale laughed. "Jesus, what didn't? When I jumped, I expected the cloud of air that went with me to push me away from the building a little when it expanded, but I didn't stop to think that the building would be full of air, too, and all of that would be rushing away from the other side of the wall. So the entire bank came at me instead of away, and it slammed into the van like a runaway train. It smashed the whole right side and busted the passenger window, so all the air rushed out and sent me corkscrewing away like a wobbly football. I had to use an entire fire extinguisher to stop the motion, and another one to push me back to the bank."
"Fire extinguisher?" asked Donna.
"Yeah, I had a bunch of C0 fire extinguishers for maneuvering around. They work great for that; 2
they've got those bell nozzles and everything. But you wouldn't believe how hard it is to steer a van with one when you're leaning out the door and spraying it into space.
"I managed to push the van back toward the building, but the building was tumbling, too, so I had to use another extinguisher to stop before I bumped up against it and got knocked away again. I'd planned to tie the van to the bank with a rope, but I couldn't do that with the building spinning around, either, so I had to cross over the last few feet on my own, wearing just my Ziptite suit.
"And that's when I realized that I hadn't set the jump field tight enough. I'd figured it would cut the vault in half and I could just go in and throw the loot into the back of the van and be done, but it was still locked tight. There was a little nick out of one corner, maybe big enough to reach an arm through, but the edges looked sharp, and that Ziptite suit was starting to feel awfully fragile. And cold. Nobody told me how cold it would be! Or how scary. All that loose dirt and rocks and stuff that came along for the ride kept whacking into me, and the air regulator kept making that little popping sound when I breathed—I thought it was the suit getting ready to blow."
Trent laughed. "Man, I know that feeling. So what did you do?"
"I went back to the van and made another jump. I was about ten feet away from the building, so I waited until it rotated around the way it was to begin with and sliced off a ten-foot chunk of it. It worked, too. When the interior spun around again, the vault was spilling its guts out into space." Dale ducked his head sheepishly when everyone laughed. "Yeah, it's funny now. At the time, though, man I was pissed. Coins and jewelry and paper money was flying out in a big spiral, whacking into the van's windshield—"
"Sounds pretty," Donna said.
Dale snorted. "Oh yeah, it was pretty. Some of it was Krugerrands. I opened the door and tried to catch some of it, but it just bounced off my gloves before I could grab it, and then I lost my grip on the door and almost slipped out into space again myself. And of course by then my breath was condensing inside my helmet, so I couldn't see, and I was panting like crazy and the air regulator was popping away, and I got this sudden image from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. You ever see that movie?" Trent and Donna both shook their heads, but surprisingly, Billy nodded and said, "Robert Redford and Paul Newman. Their best work."
"You re kidding," said Dale.
"Yes, of course I must be. Their names must have come to me in a dream." Dale shook his head and said, "This guy's a constant source of surprise. So in the movie, Butch and Sundance are robbing a train, but they use way too much dynamite to blow the safe, and when they touch it off it blows up the entire boxcar, safe and all. It throws all the cash up into the air, and it's fluttering down like leaves around the Hole-in-the-Wall gang, who're grabbing it and stuffing it into their hats. But the posse is already closing in on them, so they jump on their horses and ride, all but one of them, who can't leave all that money behind. He keeps gathering it up even when Butch shouts at him to leave it and ride for safety, and a second later, the posse shoots him dead." He took a drink of beer and said, "I decided right there that maybe money wasn't the most important thing in life, so I slammed the door and headed for home. Only it was the middle of the night at home, and the cops were no doubt hotter on my ass than ever before. I took a look at the sunny side of the planet and decided I'd always wanted to see Australia, so here I am."
"He had a little trouble landing, too," said Billy. "He came down on a big rock. It shorted the battery and started a fire."
Dale said, "I barely got out before the whol
e van went up. So there I was in the middle of this, with just the clothes on my back." He waved his arms to encompass the brilliant sunlit landscape beyond the shade of the parachute. "I would have died if these people hadn't showed up when they did." Trent shook his head. "Man, it sounds like you've had more than your share of trouble. If it hadn't started out with you robbin' a bank, I'd almost feel sorry for you." Donna poked him in the side, but Dale said, "No, he's right. I brought it all on myself."
"So what are you going to do next?" she asked.
"I don't know. I just know that I won't be robbing banks anymore."
"Do you want a ride home?"
Dale shook his head. "No, thanks. I don't think North America is a good place for me. I'm not sure if the Australian outback is my place, either, but it's refreshingly uncomplicated out here. And it's right in the middle of the continent, so people are dropping in all the time. If I want a ride anywhere, one's bound to come along in a few days."
Trent wasn't sure what to think about this guy. By all rights, he should be locked up. He'd stolen a couple of million dollars in cash and who knew what else in people's safe deposit boxes, and he'd ruined an entire bank building in the process. The fact that he didn't get to keep any of the money was something, but even so, just letting him walk free didn't seem quite right. Except Trent couldn't see how putting him in jail was going to help anybody else. He'd decided to stop robbing banks on his own. Locking him up now would just be an act of vengeance, and would ultimately cost people more than just letting him go.
He realized that Billy was looking at him with an amused expression on his face.
"What?" Trent asked.
"Life is complicated," said Billy. "Even out here." Then he stood up and walked out into the sunlight. 38
Trent and Donna and Dale stayed under the parachute, swapping stories about their travels and about Rock Springs and the things that had happened to them there. Trent told Dale about meeting Judy and Allen on their space station, and how the Galactic Federation had refused to get involved in human politics.
"Makes sense, in a way," Dale said. "You start micro-managing everybody else, and you just wind up like the U.S., fighting wars on a dozen different fronts and not doing anybody any good."
"That's fine, in principle," Trent said, "but it doesn't do us a whole lot of good, either. We're still stuck with the government from hell."
"So change it," said Dale. "It's designed to let us throw the rascals out every four years. Do you vote?"
"Yes, I vote, for all the good it does. There isn't a candidate on the ballot who's any better than the people in office."
"So run for office."
Trent snorted. "Yeah, right. I can just imagine how well that would go over."
"You'd get my vote," Donna said.
"And I'd get laughed out of the country," Trent said.
Dale examined his empty beer can as if there was some hidden truth in its side. "You don't have to start at the top, you know."
"Dogcatcher," Trent said with a laugh. "Now there's a race I could probably win."
"It's a start," said Dale.
"Sure. And it would do the country a whole lot of good to have me out there with a net, goin' after loose poodles."
Dale shrugged. "Hey, we do what we can. I bought into the instant success idea for so long, the best I can do now is take myself out of the picture. Be glad you can do more than that." Trent was starting to get embarrassed by the way the conversation was going, so he was actually kind of relieved when there was a cry of alarm from out in the open. He jumped to his feet and rushed out from under the parachute to see everyone looking upward, where a big meteor was drawing a fiery line across the sky.
His first thought was that the U.S. had decided to bomb Australia, too, but this was coming in at much too shallow an angle for a meteor-bomb.
"I wonder if that was somebody trying to land," he said quietly. Whatever it was, parts were breaking off and burning in separate little chunks, spreading apart until there were a whole swarm of pieces streaking across the sky side by side. Then another one flared up way in the north, moving at a wide angle to the first. Two people making bad landings within seconds of one another? That didn't seem likely.
Trent climbed into the pickup and turned on the radio, but there was only static. Way out here in the middle of nowhere, he hadn't expected much else, but it had been worth a try. The meteors burned themselves out high in the atmosphere, leaving thick smoke trails behind them that persisted long after the fireballs were gone. Billy walked over to where Trent and Donna and Dale were standing and said, "That looked like the time Skylab came down."
"Skylab?" Trent asked.
"Before your time," said Billy. "It was a space station that fell out of the sky." He held up his rock-on-a-thong necklace and said, "My father made us walk for days so we could watch it. He was a little too accurate in his dream. This piece hit him on the head."
Donna said. "Did it . . . did it kill him?"
Billy laughed. "No, it was moving too slowly by the time it found him. But the centrifuge gave us all a scare." He let the rock—more likely a fire-blackened bolt or piece of a solar panel or something—fall back to his chest and said, "The dream is never clear. I had no idea there would be more than one good omen today."
"You think that was a good omen?" Trent said.
"Undoubtedly, for someone," said Billy. "This one, I think, is good for you." Trent couldn't see how. After Mirabelle, he didn't think meteors were good luck at all. But he held his tongue.
He and Donna could feel themselves already starting to sunburn, so they retreated under the parachute and had another beer, waiting out the rest of the day until they could jump around to the other side of the planet and land in the light. The aborigines came and went from the shade, listening to their conversation with Dale and Billy or just napping in the long, lazy afternoon. When the sun went down, Trent and Donna folded up their parachute and packed it away, but the computer's atlas said it was still too early for daylight in North America so they helped gather wood and started a fire, roasting hot dogs over the flames and sharing whatever else they had left in the camper that didn't require water to cook. The temperature dropped fast in the clear night air, and it wasn't long before they were putting on sweatshirts and sitting close to the fire.
Fire time was the aborigines' turn for storytelling. Billy talked about the Dreamtime when the world was created, and how the beings that shaped the land lived on in spirit form, lending their knowledge to anyone who knew how to listen. Trent listened out of politeness at first, but he gradually realized he was interested in what Billy was saying. It was religion, certainly, but it made a lot more sense than the selfish gods and angry battles of the religions he had grown up with. Its central message, if he understood it right, was that human beings were a part of nature, inextricably linked with all other living things on Earth, which included the Earth itself. You didn't have to appease anyone or anything, just live in harmony with it.
"I just realized something," Trent said. "You guys aren't going to colonize other planets, are you?"
"Does the fish move onto the land?" Billy asked. Then he laughed and said, "Yes, as a matter of fact, it does if you give it enough time. And so will some of us, I'm sure. But not today. Right now we belong here." He threw a branch onto the fire and bright red sparks shot up into the night sky, but they winked out before they could settle on anything and catch it on fire.
At last, when the sky was pitch black and the stars were as bright as they were from deep space, Donna figured it would be morning over central North America. She and Trent said goodbye to Dale and Billy and the others, put on their Ziptite suits, and climbed into the pickup. They drove a few hundred feet out into the bush, swinging once around to make sure that nobody was sleeping where they intended to launch from, then they sealed up and jumped into space.
Donna took them around to the sunlit side of the planet, then dropped them a few thousand miles out ov
er northern Canada. "I wonder how close to the border we can go before we get shot at?" she asked.
"I don't know," Trent said. "Theoretically we should be able to land just north of Montana, but I wouldn't bet my life on it. Let's see if anybody down there can tell us." He turned on the radio again and tuned to channel 19, but there was too much traffic to get a word in edgewise. He tuned up and down the dial, but it was the same everywhere. Every channel was packed with voices. At last he went back to 19 and called out, "Break one-nine. Break one-nine for information. Can anybody tell me how close to the U.S. border a guy can land these days?"
There was a moment of static when he let up the microphone, then a dozen voices tried at once to respond, so he waited for them to die down and said, "Too many of you! Just one, try again." Of course everybody broadcast again. "One guy!" Trent said.
"There were five or six voices this time, but one of them cut through the others. "Haven't you heard?
The laser satellites are down. Something dropped them all out of orbit about eight hours ago."
"The laser satellites are gone?" Trent asked. "You mean it's safe to land in the U.S.?"
"Well, that's a matter of opinion," said the voice with the strong signal. "It's still the bloody States, after all. But they won't be zapping you with a laser today, that's for sure!"
"Holy shit," Trent said to Donna. "That's what we saw over the outback." Donna said, "I'll bet you anything it was Allen. He said he was going to do something to get back at the U.S. for that navigation software."
"But killing every laser satellite! How could he do that?"
"He's part of a whole group of scientist geeks. They probably hacked into the guidance program months ago, and were just waiting for the right time to trigger it. What better message than to turn the whole country's navigation software against them?"