Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

One of the guys across the table from Trent said, “You’re the Trent and Donna that brought the aliens in to the hospital?”

“That’s right.” His voice sounded familiar. “You’re Greg, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. Hey, that was a stand-up thing you did.”

Trent shrugged. “Actually, it was mostly sittin’ down and drivin’. Thanks for talkin’ us in.”

Greg laughed. “Hah! If sittin’ and talkin’ can help people out, I guess we’re in good shape around here! So how’s the kid?”

“Broken bone about halfway down one tentacle,” Trent said. “Doctor Chen put a cast on it, but he wants to keep her overnight to make sure it’ll be okay.”

“Good man,” Nick said. “I’ll miss him.”

“That’s an understatement,” Greg said. “First time you get a broken bone, you’re gonna do more than miss him.”

Donna said, “You’re moving?”

“Yep. Glory and I are going to find a planet of our very own. One that’s not likely to be found by anyone else for a long, long, time. Then we’re going to settle down and do the Adam and Eve thing.”

“The Adam and Eve thing?” Trent asked.

“Live by ourselves,” Nick said. “Raise a family. Start our own civilization from scratch, with our own legends and our own beliefs.”

Donna frowned. “You mean just the two of you?”

“Yep.”

“But… your kids would have to… have kids with each other.”

“Yep,” Nick said. “That ought to give evolution a good kick-start. I bet they’ll adapt to the planet inside a couple dozen generations.”

Trent figured that was just about the stupidest thing he had heard all day, and was trying to figure out a diplomatic way to say so when the bartender came over and set a couple pints of beer in front of him and Donna, plus a big bowl of popcorn.

“Any chance of gettin’ something serious to eat this time of night?” Trent asked.

“Sorry, no hablo inglés,” the bartender said.

“Kitchen’s closed anyway,” said Nick. “But there’s plenty of popcorn.”

“Oh. Well, thanks.” Trent shrugged. They could get some real food when they got back to the camper.

When the bartender left, the woman next to Greg said, “We’ve been trying to talk Nick and Glory out of it all night, but they’re committed.”

“Ought to be committed,” Greg said.

Nick laughed. “You aren’t the first person to say that! My neighbors back on Earth thought so, too, when I told ’em I was coming out here, but now look at this place. I might as well have moved to Los Angeles.”

Trent tried his beer. It was considerably thicker than Bud, but it actually tasted pretty good. He took a handful of popcorn and settled back in his chair, trying not to look too much like he was starving.

“How do you plan to keep from being discovered?” he asked. “From what I hear, about a third of the planets a person can live on are already inhabited. And humans aren’t the only ones lookin’ for new real estate.” He nodded toward the two aliens at their table.

“There are four hundred billion stars in the Milky Way alone,” Nick said. “Even if every third one is already spoken for, that’s still a lot of places to go. And the Milky Way isn’t the only galaxy, either.”

“You’re going to a completely different galaxy ?”

“We might.”

Glory shook her head. “I don’t think so. The velocity difference on that scale is huge. We’d be days just matching speed with the local stars. For that matter there’s the rotation of the galaxy to consider even if we stay right here in the Milky Way. The farther we go, the more the relative difference in velocity.”

“Oh,” Nick said.

Oh indeed, Trent thought. He could almost hear the rush of air as his first impression of Glory flew out the window. “You, uh, know orbital mechanics?” he asked.

“No, we’re just acquaintances,” she said. She winked at Trent, and he felt himself blushing.

Donna said, “How does that work, about things moving faster the farther you go?”

Glory thought about the question for a second, then stuck her finger in her beer and swirled it. “The galaxy spins kind of like that,” she said. “We’re about two-thirds of the way out from the middle, moving along with everything else. If we’re here—” she pointed to a spot near the handle of the mug “—then our vector is aimed toward Greg. But if we jump over here—” she pointed to a spot halfway around the mug “—everything else is moving away from Greg at the same velocity. So we have to kill twice our galactic orbital velocity to match speed with the stars in that region of space. That’s a worst-case scenario, but even if we just jump halfway around, everything’s going sideways. We’d have to change 1.4 times our orbital velocity to match the stars in this region of space.”

“How much velocity are we talking about?” Donna asked.

“Quite a bit. The galaxy rotates about once every quarter of a billion years, and we’re about thirty thousand light-years out from the center, so we’re moving about half a million miles per hour. That’s about thirty times the velocity of a satellite in low orbit around a planet.”

Trent hoped she hadn’t just calculated those numbers in her head. He was feeling dumb enough as it was; if she could do math like that on the fly, he didn’t want to know.

Donna seemed to be following her, though. “Holy cow,” Donna said. “No wonder you don’t hear of colonies more than a couple of hundred light-years away.”

“Actually,” said Glory, “It takes a few thousand for the difference to really become a problem. The biggest reason people don’t go farther is because our star maps aren’t that good. Until we got the hyperdrive, we couldn’t measure interstellar distances all that accurately beyond a hundred light-years or so.”

Trent wondered what she did for a living. Astronomer, maybe? Whatever it was, he bet she wouldn’t be doing much of it playing Adam and Eve with Nick.

“How far back to basics do you plan to go when you settle on your hideway planet?” he asked.

“That’ll be part of the experiment,” Nick said. “We’ll take what we can carry in one load—mostly tools and books and stuff—and we’ll teach our kids everything we know, but the tools won’t last forever, or the books, either. It’ll pretty much depend on memory after the first couple of generations.”

“And condoms,” Greg said, and everybody laughed.

Trent looked over at Donna to see if she understood what was so funny, but she shrugged and shook her head. “We’re missing the joke,” Trent said.

“Nick was showing us how to make a slingshot with a wedding ring and a condom when you walked in.”

Nick held up what Trent had thought was a rubber band. Now he could see that it was indeed a condom.

Nick said, “Unlubricated ones work best. What you do is, you poke the open end of the condom through the ring, then fold it back over the ring so you’ve got a stretchy pocket that’s held open in front. Drop a piece of gravel, or in this case a popcorn granny, down inside…” He did that. “Hold the ring tight between your fingers, stretch the end with the granny back to your nose, aim, and fire.” He let go and the condom flapped forward just like a regular slingshot. The granny pinged off the same beer mug as before, and zinged off toward the back of the bar.

“Use a thumb ring and a rock, and you can kill a chicken with it,” Nick said.

“You’re going to teach your kids to hunt chickens with a condom and a ring?” Trent asked.

“I’m going to teach them to hunt chickens with their brains,” Nick replied. “We’ll eventually run out of condoms and rings, but brains will be the one resource that’ll grow exponentially.”