Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

Trent supposed there was some sense in that. It was probably a lot easier to bomb somebody who didn’t speak your language.

He looked at the map again. “That crater to the north, there. How new is it?”

“About two months.”

“And you can see it from orbit?”

Greg nodded. “They were setting up a smelter. Big no-no.”

“I guess.” Trent stuck the paper in his wallet, and the five orange $20 bills that Greg gave him, wondering what he’d just gotten himself and Donna into. It looked like they’d find out soon enough.

The mailbag was just a big canvas sack about the size of an army duffel, and weighed maybe fifty pounds. Trent laid it on the floor of the camper where it couldn’t roll around too much, then he went to the front and unplugged the charger. Donna had already shut off the compressor when the air tanks were full, so they were ready to roll.

The drive back to the aliens’ landing site was much more fun in daylight. It was a lot easier to see where they were going, for one thing, and this time they had a chance to look at the scenery, too. The sun was coming in low to their left, lighting up the mountains full on and making them seem like they were towering over the town, even following the pickup out onto the plain. Trees to their right glowed silver in the morning light, and the ones to their left made dark silhouettes with silver halos around their edges. Houses peeked out between them, and little white columns of smoke rose from chimneys as people got up and started their day.

Nobody seemed inclined to try a pantomime conversation with so much to look at, so Donna slotted a disk into the player and everyone bopped and sang along to the music while Trent drove. They angled away from the Firehose, but the river was easy to spot even from a couple miles away. It was a solid wall of vegetation meandering from Bigtown all the way to the horizon. Off in the distance, where the trees blended into a single color, it looked like a piece of Christmas ribbon standing on edge. Every now and then another piece of ribbon would join it, and the Firehose would get wider and taller.

The ground between streams was much more open. People had plowed and planted crops for miles around town, which made Trent glad they had found the road on their way in last night. He could have ripped a long swath through a couple of dozen farms if he had just driven in cross-country.

The only open water was in the irrigation ditches that led from the Firehose to the fields. Trent wondered if the ditches would soon be choked with vegetation, too. It looked like plants here really huddled around water, which meant it must get good and dry in the summertime.

It already felt like summertime, but Trent had no idea what season it really was. Donna could probably figure it out from space just by looking at the way the sunlight hit the planet, and Nick’s sweetie, Glory, could probably calculate it from the angle of the Milky Way in the night sky or something, but Trent didn’t have a clue. He wondered if Nick had known when he’d landed here.

It was hard to believe those two were really going to play Adam and Eve somewhere. Trent didn’t even like camping out for more than a week or so; he couldn’t imagine someone living off the land for the rest of their lives. If he were Nick—hell, if he were Glory—he would make damn sure their hyperdrive still worked and their ship still held air for years to come, but they didn’t seem concerned about that at all.

Different strokes for different folks, he guessed. A lot of people thought he and Donna were nuts for sticking around Rock Springs, for mostly the same reasons he thought Nick and Glory were nuts. Too rural, nothing to do, no shopping, no culture, no whatever else people who didn’t like the place thought was important. They didn’t see what it did have, the rugged beauty of the rock outcrops, the wide open feel of the high desert, the sense of community you felt when you knew not only the people on both sides of your house but the people on both sides of you in the phone book.

It got pretty dry there in the summer, too. Rock Springs didn’t even have as much vegetation in its riverbeds as they had around here on the flats. Of course the rivers were dry most of the year, and it was pretty generous to call Bitter Creek or Killpecker Creek rivers in the first place. And the altitude was enough to make the air seem twice as dry as it actually was, and make your blood as thick as soup to boot. When he thought about it in those terms, nobody in their right mind would pick Rock Springs to settle in, not with so many more hospitable places right there on Earth, but somebody had started a town there a hundred years or so ago, and a lot more somebodies had moved in.

He looked at Onnescu rolling past under his wheels. Little bulb-shaped blue flowers dotted the ground where it hadn’t been plowed, and bushes with red branches and purplish-green leaves covered the hillsides. There were even rock outcrops. It was pretty enough, and there were certainly enough wide open spaces to suit just about anybody, but it didn’t call to him the way the countryside back home did. It wasn’t just the threat of war with the U.S., either, though that certainly put a damper on his enthusiasm. He just wasn’t sure if anything would measure up to the place he’d spent his entire life.

He owed it to Donna to give it a shot. She had always wanted to get out of that two-bit mining town and see the world. He laughed quietly to himself when he thought of the next world she would see. A French colony. Who’d have thought?

They found the Greenwall easily enough, and by daylight they could see that it was just the next drainage coming down out of the mountains south of the Firehose. The road led them directly to the ford, but from there they were on their own. Tire tracks led off in several directions, but none of them were clearly from Trent’s pickup, and the tracks petered out in just a few hundred yards anyway.

Trent drove up to the top of a hill and pulled to a stop. From up there they could see for miles in every direction, but they couldn’t see Katata’s landing site, not even when Trent got out the binoculars and scanned the terrain ahead of them.

“Well,” he said, “I guess we’ll have to do this by dead reckoning. We were camped closer to the mountains by a mile or two, and we headed pretty much south from there, so I think we need to angle that way.” He pointed at about a thirty-degree angle toward the mountain from south. “Does that seem right to you?”

“As right as anything,” Donna said. “Katata, what do you think?” She pointed out toward the south.

Katata looked out over the rolling hills and writhed her tentacles left and right over the dashboard, like a pair of snakes thinking about striking the windshield. At last she settled on roughly the same direction that Trent had pointed, and said. “Baktataka.”

Talana said. “Ti, ti!” and pointed farther to the left. Then of course Dixit spoke up with a squeal and pointed to the right, waving both of his tentacles out the passenger window.

Trent laughed. “Well, if we average everybody out, we’re in pretty good agreement.” He picked out as much of a route as he could see from the hilltop, then drove down onto flatter ground and tried to follow it from memory.

He climbed another hill every quarter mile or so to keep his bearings. From the fourth one, they could see something glinting in the sun quite a ways to the left of where he thought the landing site should be, but when he checked with the binoculars he could see the silvery parachute hanging from a tree, flapping softly in the morning breeze.

“That’s it,” he said.

Katata spoke excitedly with her kids, and they squealed in delight.