Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

Greg laughed. “The computers and radios were bought used in Korea, and the radar is made from a microwave oven.”

“An oven?”

“A magnetron’s a magnetron. As long as it broadcasts microwaves, that’s all you need. And a dish to pick up the reflections.” He sat in the chair and pointed at the screen. “We’ve got nine incoming commuters this morning. There’s usually ten, but Sergei’s out with the flu.”

“That’s pretty good radar if it can tell you that.”

Greg grinned. “We subversives have our ways. So would you take a bag of mail to a French colony?”

There was an extra chair beside the desk. Trent spun it around and sat on it backwards. “What happened to your regular courier?”

“He’s out with the flu.”

“Ah. And what makes you so sure you can trust me? I am an American, after all.”

“So was I, until I moved here. We’re not all a bunch of warmongering imperialists. You went to a lot of trouble to help somebody yesterday, and you’re going to a lot more trouble to help them again today. Plus you’re out here looking for work, despite your government trying to keep you locked away at home. Not your typical party-line American.”

“I could be a spy, settin’ you up to trust me.”

“You could. In which case, you’ll get to read a lot of letters to friends and family. Just make sure you put them back in the right envelopes before you deliver them.”

Trent took a deep breath. A French colony. All his life, he’d been told that the French were stuck-up, hateful, anti-American bastards who opposed anything the U.S. did just out of spite. He didn’t believe that any more than he believed that all Arabs were terrorists, but a lifetime of indoctrination hadn’t exactly left him a Frog-lover, either. And he suspected the feeling was mutual.

“So we just pop into orbit, give them the password, and they welcome us with open arms?” he asked.

“Your contact does. You probably won’t see anyone else.”

“And if we do?”

“Say ’bonjour.’”

“Yeah, right.” He could imagine how that would play out. “Are we supposed to bring a mail sack back here?”

“Normally, yes, but I doubt if they’ll trust you that far.”

Trent ran his fingers through his beard. “But you think they’ll let us go once we know where the colony is?”

“The U.S. already knows where it is. Unfortunately. They’ve got no secrets anymore.”

“Hmm.” So they said. Trent watched the little blips descend through the radar screen for a minute, imagining him and Donna as a blip on a French radar screen. What else besides an old microwave oven would be pointed at them?

“How much does this pay?” he asked.

“A hundred bucks Australian. That’s about two-forty American. Paid up front, because I trust you.”

Two hundred and forty bucks. A day’s pay at a decent job. It would be good money for a simple jump and drop, but not nearly enough if anything went wrong. And Trent couldn’t legally bring Australian money into the U.S., not since the Australians wound up on the uncooperative nation list. On the other hand, it might be good to have some non-U.S. money while he and Donna were in space. By the sounds of things, being a U.S. citizen outside the U.S. was even less of a good idea than he’d originally thought. And if they still had any cash left when they decided to go home, he supposed they could exchange it in Canada before they crossed the border.

“We just drop off the mail sack and we’re free to go,” he said. “No questions asked, no shots fired.”

Greg nodded. “That’s right.”

Trent drummed his fingers on the back of the chair. He should go ask Donna what she thought, but he already knew what she would say. A couple of hundred bucks and a chance to see a French colony and live to tell about it; of course she would want to go.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll do it. Where is it, and what’s the password?”

Greg wrote down a name and a set of coordinates on a piece of note paper. “The planet is called Mirabelle, and it’s probably already in your preset destination list if you’ve got a recent update of your navigation software, but here’s the coordinates in case it’s not. Those are relative to here, so don’t forget you’re already 4.2 light-years from Sol if you use the coordinate system to go anywhere else from there.”

Trent made a mental note to tell Donna, even though she would probably already know that.

“When you get there, you’ll see a continent shaped like this.” Greg drew an elongated bird shape, and made a little circle on the upper back. “Right about here is a big crater, easy to spot from orbit. It’s flooded, so it’ll look like a perfectly circular lake. You want to land about ninety kilometers to the south of it, at the junction of two major rivers. Land on the east bank. It’s a big, grassy plain, so you’ve got lots of room for error.” He drew the rivers, and a squiggly circle for the plain.

“When does the password come in?” asked Trent.

“You’ll use two of them, actually. The first one, on channel 8, just before you enter the atmosphere, you say ‘Le facteur va attérir,’ which means ‘the mailman is landing,’ and they’ll say, ‘Quel est le mot de passe,’ and you say—”

“Hold on, hold on. You’ve got to write all that down.”

“Sure.” Greg jotted the words below the drawing of the continent. They didn’t look much like they sounded. “Okay,” he said. “Today’s password for entry is ‘poisson.’ ”

Trent laughed nervously. “Poison? This is getting more cloak-and-daggerish by the second.”

“Actually, poisson means fish.”

“As in ‘something’s fishy here.’ ”

Greg looked hurt. “It’s just a mail drop, I swear. But if you don’t want to do it…”

“I said we’d do it.” Trent took the note and read aloud, “Lee factor va a terrier.”

“Spoken like a native.”

“Yeah, right.” He folded the note and went to stick it in his pocket, but then he remembered that Greg said he’d need two passwords. “I assume the other password is for when we turn over the mailbag to whoever’s on the ground?”

“That’s right. But this time it’s you asking them for the word, so you know you’re giving the mail to the right person.”

“Makes sense.” Trent supposed there were just as many French thieves who would steal a mail shipment as there were any other nationality. “So we say…” He opened the note. “We say ‘Quel est le mot de passe,’ and after they’re done laughin’ their asses off at our pronunciation, they say what?”

“Chapeau.”

“Which means… ?”

“Hat.”

“So we say ‘fish,’ and they say ‘hat.’ Got it. What else do we need to know?”

Greg glanced at his radio rack. “Don’t be too talky on the radio. You’ll be safe enough while you’re still in space, but it’ll put them on the spot. They don’t like transmitting too much from one point on the ground.”

“Why not?”

“It gives the bombs a signal to home in on.”

They looked at one another for a few long seconds before Trent said, “Bombs.”

“Actually, just rocks coming in at high velocity, but they have about the same effect. The U.S. hits anything that looks like a military installation.”

Trent looked around the dispatch office, and felt the hair standing up on the back of his neck. “Like a radar base?”

Greg nodded. “Yeah, like that. This’ll be one of the first targets if Nick’s right about the future of Alpha Centauri.”

“But you don’t think he is.”

“Not for a while yet. Maybe never, if public opinion back home changes fast enough. But there’s a reason the guy with the American voice is running the radios.”