Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

It wasn’t all that late, Rock Springs time, but she got the hint. “Yeah, that sounds pretty good,” she said. She finished up her own beer, and the two of them stood up.

“Well,” Trent said, “It’s been a pleasure meetin’ all of you. Nick, Glory, good luck to you wherever you wind up. And Greg, thanks again for talkin’ us in.”

“Any time,” Greg said. “You going to stick around for a while?”

“Don’t know yet. If the alien kid’s doing okay in the morning, we’ll probably have to take the family back home tomorrow. That’s a long ways into the sticks, and a long ways back if we decide to drive it. We may just take off for another planet once we get out there. We wanted to see as many different places as we could before we have to go home.”

Greg nodded. “I understand. Drop by the dispatch office before you leave. I might have a courier job for you if you’re interested.”

“Carryin’ what?”

“We can talk tomorrow.”

“Right.” He obviously didn’t want to say anything more in a bar full of people. “Where’s the dispatch office?”

“Two blocks down and a block to your left.” He pointed. “It’s the building with the radar dish on top.”

“That ought to be easy enough to spot.”

“It is.”

“See you later, then.” Trent took Donna’s hand in his and they went out into the night.

The air was cooling off. Trent looked up at the starry sky before he got into the pickup. Except for Orion and Cassiopeia, the constellations looked just the same here as they did back home. The Big Dipper wasn’t in the north, though. At least Trent didn’t think it was. Without the sun to help him, he suddenly realized he had no sense of direction here. In more ways than one.

“What next?” he asked.

Donna said, “You know, I actually could just climb into bed and read for a while.”

Reading was a sure-fire way to put Trent to sleep, but he supposed that might not be such a bad idea. Morning would be along in just a few hours, and Katata and her kids would probably be eager to get back to the rest of their family as soon as they could.

“Sounds good to me,” he said. They walked down the boardwalk to their pickup, but when they climbed inside and closed the doors, he laughed and said, “I just realized we don’t have a good place to park for the night.”

“We could just drive out of town a ways.”

“We could, but we’d probably wind up in somebody’s driveway or something.”

Donna thought for a moment, then said, “Actually, the best place is probably right back at the hospital. That way if Katata gets a little jumpy being in a strange place all by herself, she can at least look out the window and see that we haven’t abandoned her.”

“Now that’s smart.” Trent backed out onto the street and headed back the way they had come. Spending the night in a hospital parking lot wasn’t exactly how he’d imagined their first night on Onnescu, but he supposed it could be worse. Given their landing today, they could easily be the ones inside the hospital.

He parked close to the building. While Donna went into the camper to make the bed, he went around to the emergency entrance to see how Talana was doing and find out if he could plug in and recharge the pickup’s batteries, but the lights were out and the door was locked. There was a big red button beside the door with a sign beside it that said “Ring for service” in about a dozen languages, but Trent didn’t think Dr. Chen would like to be dragged out of bed just to say “Sure, you can plug in.”

Trent decided he could pay the hospital a few dollars for the charge if it wasn’t okay, so he went back around the side of the building and searched along the wall until he found a power socket, but it wasn’t shaped right.

“Damn,” he muttered. This was getting ridiculous. Half the people on the planet didn’t speak English, and they didn’t even use standard power plugs. Was this what all the colonies were going to be like?

As Trent had expected, Katata was up and ready to go at the crack of dawn. Dr. Chen had given Talana one more checkup and decided she—he had apparently decided his patient was female and her younger sibling was male—was probably going to heal, so there was no reason to hold her any longer, and every reason to get back to make sure Katata’s mate, Magalak, was okay.

They stopped at the dispatch office on their way through town. Greg was right: it was easy to spot. The radar dish was only a few feet across, and it looked like it was made out of rabbit wire bent into a bowl, but it was the only parabolic reflector in town, and it called even more attention to itself with its constant circling. It squeaked as it turned, too.

Donna and the aliens stayed in the truck while Trent went in to talk to Greg. They had spread a tarp over the seat this time, and Donna had worn some old clothes, so she didn’t mind too much, and Trent was glad to have her there to keep Dixit from messing with things he shouldn’t. Trent had taken the pistol out of the glove box and put it in the camper last night, and he’d tucked the rifle behind the seat, but who knew what other mischief a baby could get into, even with its mother right there.

Greg met him at the door. “So you’re taking off today?”

Trent nodded. “Yep. Provided we can get a recharge somewhere. We used up a lot of juice doing all that driving yesterday.”

“Of course,” Greg said. “You can plug in while we’re talking.” He showed Trent the outlet closest to where he had parked, but it was the same as the hospital’s.

“You got an adapter?” Trent asked.

“Adapter? Oh, that’s right, you’re using American, and all our stuff’s from Australia. Just a sec.” He went inside, and a moment later came out with the right plug.

“Is it one-ten, or two-twenty?” Trent asked.

“Two-forty, actually. Will your charger work with that?”

“I don’t know. Let’s see.” He opened the hood and looked at the label on the power distribution unit, which wasn’t very helpful, but there was a slider switch in the back that had “115” showing through the window. Trent got a thumbnail on it and shoved it the other way, and sure enough, it said “230.” “That ought to be close enough,” he said. He pulled the cord out of its reel above the bumper and plugged it in.

“We got juice?” he asked Donna.

She looked at the dash light. “Says we’re charging.”

“All right. Don’t let me forget to set that back to normal when we get home.”

“Right.”

“And we might as well top off the air tanks while we’re plugged in,” he said.

“Good idea.” She flipped the switch, and the compressor started up.

Trent turned back to Greg. “So what kind of stuff do you want hauled, and where’s it going?”

“Mail,” Greg said. “And the destination, well, that’s the tricky part. It’s a French colony.” He led the way inside, while Trent tried to decide whether or not he was joking.

“I’m an American,” Trent said at last. “They’ll shoot us on sight.”

“Not if you have the right password.”

The inside of the building was divided into four rooms. Greg led him into the one in back on the left. It looked like a control room at NASA or something; there was a big desk with at least a dozen computer monitors surrounding the command chair, and there was a stack of short-wave radio transceivers off to the side. There were half a dozen conversations going on at once, turned down low, but still audible. One of the monitors showed the steady circling of the radar dish, and several specks of light flared as the refresh line swept over them.

Trent whistled softly. “I had no idea you were this hightech.”