Jerry Oltion: Anywhere but Here

The driver was a big guy with a round head. Streetlight glow glinted off his bald—no, that wasn’t right. He was wearing a bubble helmet, already sealed up and inflated. It looked like he was just about to take off for somewhere, and was stopping off for some last-minute cash first.

Trent took a couple steps toward the van, thinking he would ask where the guy was off to, then thought better of it. This wasn’t a good lime to be walking up to somebody in a bank parking lot. He might have a wife with a gun, too, and she might not wait to see if Trent was friendly.

The van moved ahead a few feet, angling in closer to the building. That was odd; the driver looked like he was trying to get as close to the wall as he could. He drove right up over the curb and crushed one of the juniper bushes in the two-foul dirt strip.

“Hey!” Trent yelled at him, but if the guy noticed, he didn’t let on. Probably couldn’t hear a thing inside that spacesuit. But what the hell was he doing?

Then Trent figured it out. The vault was just on the other side of that wall. Most people drove out into the desert when they jumped into space, because the jump field was spherical and it made a lot more sense to take a bowl of sand with you than a bowl of pavement, but the hyperdrive didn’t care. It would take anything that was inside the field, including a bank vault.

And Trent as well, if he was too close when the driver of that van pushed the “go” button. Calibrating the size of the jump field was more of an art than a science; this guy could take half a block with him if he wasn’t careful. And Trent could already see the blue glow from the screen of the laptop computer that controlled the jump. It was up and running, probably set to go with just one keystroke. The van diver could take off any second now.

Trent ran for his pickup. It wasn’t provisioned for a trip. but he and Donna might at least be able to survive long enough to call for help if they couldn’t get out of the jump field in time.

He got three steps before the bank robber pushed the button. There was a clap of thunder loud enough lo make his ears ring, and a gale of wind snatched off his hat and slapped him backward. It didn’t just knock him off his feet, but whisked him like a leaf into the air, blowing him head over heels across the maybe ten feet of parking lot that was left and carrying him right out over the huge crater that had been carved into the ground.

A blizzard of papers met him from the other side. Pens and pencils pelted him, and he did a little mid-air dance with a desk chair before they both hit the ground and tumbled to the bottom of the crater.

The guy in the van had set his jump field pretty light after all: it was only fifteen feet deep or so, and it had only taken that much of a bite out of the bank, too. The part of the building that wasn’t halfway lo the Moon by now groaned under the sudden shift in load, but it didn’t collapse into the pit, Trent didn’t know why not; part of it actually hung out over the hole.

Water poured in from half a dozen severed lines, and it was cold . Trent rescued his hat before it got soaked and shoved it back on his head, then tried to climb up the side of the crater, but he could only gel a few feet before it grew too steep. The surface was slick as glass, sliced smooth down to the molecular level by the jump field. He could dig his fingers into it, but it just crumbled when he tried to climb.

He heard the door of the pickup slam, and footsteps as Donna raced toward him, “Trent!” she shouted. Trent, where are you?”

“Down here,” he hollered back at her. “Get a rope!”

Donna appeared at the edge of the pavement, her blonde hair lit up by the streetlight behind her like a halo around her head. “Oh, thank God you’re still here,” she said, “When that van jumped, it looked like you just disappeared with it. Are you all right?”

“Yeah.” he said, not actually sure yet. His right leg hurt something fierce, but not as bad as it would hurt if the damned bank fell in the hole on top of him. “Don’t get too close to the edge. It could cave in any second.” The smooth surface was already slumping, and dirt sifted down from a loose layer a couple feet under the blacktop.

“Jesus. Don’t go any—I mean—just wait right there. I’ll bring the truck up close and tie the rope to it.”

“Not too close!”

“I know.” She ran off, and he dodged the rocks and dirt that kept trickling down into the pit with him while he waited. The puddle of water was growing fast; his cowboy boots were already ankle-deep, and he could feel it seeping in through the stitching around the sole.

He heard the whine of the wheel motors and the slam of the driver’s door, a few seconds of silence after that, then the camper door slammed and he knew she’d gone for the rope in their survival supplies rather than the one he kept behind the seat for towing, but before she could toss it down to him the air filled with the sound of squealing tires and slamming doors. Red and blue light flashed into the open building, and someone shouted “Step away from the pickup and put your hands in the air!”

“Hey, you idiots,” Trent yelled up at them, “She’s trying to save my sorry ass! Win don’t you give her a hand instead of giving her shit.”

A face poked over the edge of the hole. “Hey, we got us another one down here,” said the cop.

“And I’d rather be up there,” Trent said as another shower of debris rained down from the loose soil layer, “Give me a hand out of here.”

“Right.” There was some muffled conversation overhead, then at last the rope sailed down and hit him in the face. He grabbed it tight and walked his way up the curved bowl until it was too steep for that, then let his feel drop out from under him and hand-over-handed it up the rest of the way. Two cops met him at the rim and hauled him out to stand on the pavement.

Donna just about knocked him back into the hole when she crabbed him in a hug and buried her fate against his chest. He was a muddy mess, but she didn’t seem to care. He wrapped his arms around her and rested his bearded cheek on the top or her head. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m okay.” The cops stood behind her, embarrassedly looking away.

“I thought I’d lost you. Just like that, I thought I’d lost you.

“It’ll take a lot more than some piss-ant bank robber to—wait a minute. I know who that was.”

“Who?” Donna said, just as both lops asked the same thing.

Trent hesitated. He’d never met the guy, but he knew him by reputation, and he was apparently a pretty good sort, for a thief. But Trent didn’t owe him anything, and the guy had damned near gotten him killed. Besides, Trent had already opened his mouth. So he said, “Dale Larkin. The guy who bankrolled Allen Meisner and Judy Gallagher’s first spaceship.”

One of the cups. Bill Tanner, was an old high school buddy of Trent’s. He said, “The same spaceship you helped ’em build in your garage?”

“Yeah.” Trent grinned sheepishly. He had never been much of a science geek, but he and Donna had been in the right place at the tight time and they had wound up in the middle of things.

Bill said. “Well, what goes around comes around, doesn’t it?”

“I didn’t have nothing to do with the money,” Trent said. “I just hid ’em out when the whole damned country was after ’em for no good reason, and—”

“No good reason?” the other cop said. “You call handing dangerous technology to every malcontent in the world no good reason? People have died because of that damned hyperdrive.” He waved a hand at the diamond-plate camper in the back of Trent’s pickup and added, “And by the looks of that thing, I’ll bet you’ve got one of your own right here, don’t you? You know you forfeit the entire vehicle if you get caught with one. Too bad; it’s a nice looking truck.”