Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

“No?”

“No. Not even if we tip over. Just hang—”

There was a loud crunch and they pitched forward, then an equally loud snap and they pitched back, wobbling and spinning around under the parachute. They’d just snapped off the top of the tree. Donna yelped, but she kept her hand off the keyboard, even when branches slapped and screeched upward past her window.

The rockpile swung past just a couple feet in front of them, moving around to Trent’s side, and then the tires hit the ground and the pickup lurched sideways. It rose up on two tires, but Trent turned the wheels into the roll and juiced the motors, and the truck spun halfway around before coming to a stop with a clang as the front bumper hit another rock. In a stock vehicle, that would have blown the air bags, but Trent had disabled those the first day he’d taken the pickup four-wheeling and had never hooked them up again.

He turned to Donna, and he couldn’t help grinning. “Okay,” he said. “Now we’re havin’ fun.”

The first thing they did was peel out of their spacesuits and turn them inside-out to dry. Trent flapped his a couple of times to shake the sweat out of it, then draped it over the hood while he and Donna gathered up their parachutes and re-folded them. The air felt cold at first as the sweat evaporated from his clothing, but it didn’t take long before he started to warm up again. His right leg hurt a little where he’d bruised it falling into the crater last night, but once he started moving around again it loosened up and he hardly noticed it.

One of the two canopies had wound up draped over the tree they had busted, so he had to climb up and carefully unhook it. The tree looked a little like a pine, but it didn’t smell like one. It had more of a vegetable smell, like broccoli or lima beans or something like that. Trent was afraid it would be rubbery like a vegetable, too, but the bark was rough textured and dry, and the branches were stiff enough to hold his weight. The ones that had busted were oozing orange sap. When Trent touched some and held his finger to his nose, he discovered that’s where the smell was coming from. It wasn’t particularly sticky, but he was willing to bet it would get that way when it dried a little.

“We can’t fold up the parachute with this stuff smeared all over it,” he said when he’d pulled the canopy free. He climbed back down out of the tree while Donna got a Taco John’s napkin from the glove box and dabbed at the gobs of sap.

“It comes off pretty easy,” she reported, so they set to work with napkins and a shop towel and within a few minutes they had it cleaned up. There were still orange stains on the white nylon, but that didn’t matter. Battle scars made for good stories back home.

By the time they’d cleaned and folded both chutes, their spacesuits were dry, so they turned them right-side-out again and folded those up, too. Trent wiggled under the truck to see if the tree had damaged anything vital, but aside from a big dent in the underside of the bed and a lot of scrapes between it and the bumper, everything looked fine. While he crawled back out again, Donna opened the camper and went inside to make sure everything had survived in there, and to open the vents in the roof and the walls to let air circulate even when the door was closed.

She came back out with a can of beer. “It’s kind of early our time to start drinking,” she said, “but I think the day’s just about over here. Doesn’t the sun look closer to the horizon than it did when we were coming down?”

It was hard to tell for sure, since the horizon was so much nearer now that they were on the ground, but it only took a few more minutes to see that the sun was dropping. “Looks like we’ve only got another hour or so of daylight,” Trent said. “Not enough time to make it to Bigtown before nightfall, and I’m not sure I want to go bushwhackin’ on unfamiliar ground in the dark. Looks like we’ll be camping out tonight.” He smiled as he said that. He hadn’t camped out in months.

Donna said, “Let’s at least find us a stream. I’ll want more than a spit-bath in the morning.”

“One stream coming up,” Trent said gallantly. From what he had seen on the way down, there were streams coming out of the mountains every few miles all along the front range.

They climbed back into the cab and he switched into reverse to back around the rock they’d clipped with the front bumper, but an amber light came on in the dashboard as soon as he fed the motors power.

“Uh-oh. Looks like that tree did more damage than I thought.” It was the right-rear motor light, so he got out and slid under the truck again, and sure enough, there was a six-inch-long piece of branch sticking out of that one’s control box. The motor itself looked okay, but the branch had speared the electronics that ran it. He could probably wire around the box and run the motor manually if he had to, but its power level and its regenerative braking system wouldn’t be coordinated with the other motors, so it would constantly be making the truck swerve left and right as he accelerated and decelerated. Better to just disconnect it entirely and run on the other three. When he got back home he would have to buy a new control box; another expense he didn’t need, but that was one of the risks of four-wheeling. Nature was tough on machinery.

He had to reach way up around the motor to get to the power plug. He’d mounted all the motors that way so he wouldn’t snag a wire on a branch or something while he was four-wheeling. It had worked pretty well until now, but he guessed he couldn’t expect it to protect them from a whole tree. At least with the truck raised up so high, it was easy to work underneath it. He wrapped the loose power cable around a frame member and tied it in a knot so it wouldn’t flop around, then crawled back out and slapped the dirt off his clothes.

Donna had unlatched the airtight side windows and stowed them behind the seat, then rolled down the regular windows so they could breathe Onnescus air instead of their compressed Earth air. She had also unplugged the computer and stowed it in its slot beneath the dash. Now she was flipping through their music disks. “Twang or bang?” she asked Trent as he slid back into the driver’s seat.

“Bang,” he answered without hesitation. You don’t jump four light-years, fall fifty miles under a parachute, snap a tree on landing, and then listen to somebody whine about their no-good daddy.

She slotted in a disk she’d burned last summer, before any of this hyperdrive business had happened. It started off with Slow Children’s six-minute anthem, “Dumb Enough to Drive,” which pretty well matched Trent’s mood. He backed the truck away from the rock, ignoring the left-rear motor’s warning light, and drove forward through a low patch of bushes. If they made any noise scraping past the undercarriage, he couldn’t hear it over the music.

Back home, four-wheeling was pretty much confined to existing roads. The BLM didn’t like you driving over their prairie, and ranchers certainly didn’t like you driving over their pastures. The forest service blocked off anything that even looked like you could drive a truck on it. There were lots of old logging and mining roads, though, if you knew where to look, and even the official access roads to the high lakes and stuff could get pretty hairy. Even so, road driving was nothing compared to striking out cross-country. The truck’s big balloon tires provided some cushion, and the foot-and-a-half of travel in its suspension provided more, but nothing could smooth out the jolt when you found a rock with one wheel and a hole with the other. Trent kept the motors in low range, but he and Donna were still whooping and hollering and hanging on for dear life every few feet.