William Dietrich - Getting back

"I was coming here for the typical wilderness experience," he explained. "My transport crashed. I woke up still strapped to the bunk, half the plane gone, and everyone but the pilot dead. He unbuckled me, told me to wait, and went to the forward part of the wreckage I couldn't even see to get something. Then these strange people showed up- it was the Warden's convicts- and I ran. I fell, blacked out, came to. The pilot was missing. I think he told them they could get back if they caught me, but they couldn't. They let me live afterward because it was clear I didn't know a damn thing- or that if I did, I couldn't let it slip if I was dead. So the Warden took me back to Erehwon. There's a mix of convicts and refugee trekkers there, all of us confused. I thought I was stuck here forever until Raven came along."

Daniel glanced at the woman who had intrigued him. She seemed to have discovered a way out of this exile when everyone else had failed. Interesting.

With Ethan recognizing the country with increasing confidence, they found the transport by noon. It was in two pieces. There was the intact tail where Ethan had survived, its metal frame glinting in the heat. Then a stretch of unmarked desert where the nose section had skipped ahead over a rise, followed by a sand furrow still seeded with debris. At its end was the burned-out hulk of the forward section of the aircraft, the fuselage ripped open to the sky.

Ethan hung back. "Some of my friends might still be in there."

"Yuck," Ico whispered.

It wasn't the possibility of bodies that made Daniel reluctant to approach the forward fuselage. Rather, the derelict machine made clear just how completely cut off from civilization they now were. Somewhere in the sky above, satellites orbited. Somewhere across the heat-glazed horizon the sea broke, and out there ships ran and jets flew toward populated shores. But all that was across a gulf as impassable as the abyss between the stars, and instead of reassuring him of the reality of civilization, this burnt husk confirmed how far he was from it.

"It's not a sight to inspire confidence," he said.

"Where one transport came, another might follow," Raven countered. "Come on, this is the way home."

The group went cautiously forward. Despite Ethan's uneasiness, whatever corpses the transport had contained were long gone, disposed by scavengers and decay. One cockpit seat had disappeared where the pilot had ejected. The other remained, the instrument panel stained dark with what might have been the co-pilot's blood. It was the panel itself that interested Raven.

"See the empty place that held an instrument?" she said. "That must be what the pilot came back for: a transmitter."

"Which the Warden took and which doesn't work," Daniel summarized.

"Yes. So now we look at the tail."

It was a pillaged stub, some of its metal panels stripped for salvage and its seats uprooted. The absence of fire had saved Ethan's life and made that part of the wreckage valuable for salvage. Raven crawled into the rearmost recess and hunted, then backed out. "The other instrument I'm looking for is gone too," she reported. "There's a hole where it's been removed."

"Great," said Ico.

"No, that's good. It fits my guess. I think the pilot gave it to Ethan."

"How do you know that?"

"The pilot gave me something for safekeeping before we separated," Ethan said. "I was pretty groggy, but I knew he was anxious to get some other component and leave. He told me that what he was stuffing in my pack would keep us from having to walk to the beach, but I didn't understand what he meant."

"So what happened?"

"He left and the convicts came, drawn by the smoke I suppose," Ethan said. "And he was screaming, and I was running for my life and trying to lighten my load…"

"You threw it away."

"I didn't know what it was. I resented having to carry it."

"He threw the damn thing away," Ico repeated to Daniel. "Unbelievable."

"You'd better hope so," Ethan said with irritation, "or the Warden would already have taken the only way out of here."

Daniel looked out the oval opening of the sheared-off tail at the desert. "What if we can't find it?"

"That's not an option," Ethan said.

They came back out. "I'm looking for a box smaller than a shoe box," Raven told them.

"Oh good," Ico said, glancing around. "That will stick out."

Ethan pointed to some sandstone hills on the horizon. "I ran that way and threw things into a ravine. We'll have to search there."

As they hiked toward the hills, Flint's memory of the place began to come back to him. Here he'd left a GPS and range finder, he pointed, both long since pirated and scrapped by the Erehwon group to make metal tools. Farther on… yes, he'd come this way, he thought. The ravine looked familiar, as did the crest of the ridge. The convicts had found and looted his pack near here. But the useless box which he'd never mentioned to the Warden… it could have been dropped anywhere.

"All right, we'll spread out and search the ravine," Raven said. "Meet by that pink rock by dusk. Ethan, where did you fall from?"

"That way," he pointed.

"I'm going to look up there. The rest of you try here." The men slid down loose scree into the brushy gully.

It was stifling hot. Flies found Daniel, there was no water, and he searched in a fog of depression so thick that it was difficult to even function. This is what his life had come down to: searching a hot desert for a metal box to get back to a place he'd been desperate to flee from just two weeks before. What would he do if he did get back? He could no longer imagine a future.

Hours went by with no sign of a human artifact. He drifted down the ravine from the other two men, looking as much for shade as for an electronic black box. He suspected that Ico, skeptical of the whole story, was already napping.

Then, while sitting despondently beneath a gum tree and studying a sandy bottom raked by intermittent water as artfully as a Japanese garden, he realized their mistake. The floods! In the months since Ethan's crash there must have been enough rain to carry things downhill. Or downstream. It was the hunt for their supplies all over again! The box was heavy, no doubt, more like a rock than a log. Still, streams had the power to move entire boulders when running high. Think like an animal, Raven had told him. Now he had to think like a rock. How far could a flood push it? Where in the stream course would it come to rest?

He quickly walked a mile down the ravine bottom, seeing nothing, and then turned to return upstream more slowly and carefully, probing the center of the sandy basins where the heaviest debris would collect. He found rocks all right, and even at one point some dampness signaling water close to the surface. But a transmitter? He worried its weight would have carried it beneath a covering layer of sand.

What saved him in the end was that the box was orange, its battered surface flecked with scratches revealing a black undercoating like a speckled egg. The beacon was jammed under a larger boulder, sand sucked away from it by the current. Could such a thing still work?

The metal was hot to the touch so he wrapped it in his shirt like a baby, carrying it upstream. Ethan and Ico were waiting at the pink rock, looking hot, sticky, and depressed, and so he shielded it behind his back until he came up to them. Then he held it out.

"Here it is," he announced. "Phone home."

Ethan looked at it warily. "That's it?"

"I'm asking you."

He looked at it dubiously. "I can hardly remember." He peered closer, inspecting the switch and socket ports. The memory of it was coming back to him now- his familiar world of electronics seemed an eternity away! — but how much did he want his new companions to know? "I guess so."