Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

Trent had to consciously force himself not to clench his fists. Nobody was going to take his truck without a fight, but there was nothing to fight about this time. Trent had a hyperdrive, all right, but it was in three pieces back home: the electronics built into an old CD boombox that still played music, the field coils in a spare wheel motor casing in the garage, and the laptop computer that controlled it sitting in plain sight in the living room where Donna used it to write letters and surf the Internet. The cops could even search the computer for a hyperdrive control program, but they wouldn’t find one. The program was everywhere on the Internet; Donna would just download a copy when they needed it.

“Go ahead, search all you want,” Trent said, “but you won’t find anything. I just like the look.” He stared the cop straight in the eye, fully aware of how menacing he looked with a full beard under a black Stetson.

“I just might do that,” the cop said, sticking out his chest and glaring back at him. The blue and red lights from the cruiser glistened off his badge.

“Oh, give it a rest, Tom,” Bill said. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry tonight.” To Trent, he said, “He’s been kinda touchy about hyperdrives ever since he his four-wheeler into a launch hole out by Quealy,”

“Ah.” Trent looked into the hole he had just come out of. “I understand how you feel about that. But that don’t make it right to ban ’em. We’ve given up too much freedom in this country already.”

“So says the man at the scene of a bank robbery,” said the cop named Tom.

“People have been robbing banks for years,” Trent said. “You’re not gonna stop ’en by bannin’ shit.”

Donna let go of him and said, “We got to get you into some dry clothes before you freeze to death.”

“That sounds good to me.”

“Not until we get your statement,” Bill said.

Trent nodded. “Come on up to the house, then. We can kill two birds with one stone.”

“Yeah, right, and leave the bank unguarded with a big hole in the middle of it.” Bill went over to the edge of the crater and looked down again. “We better call the utility guys to shut all that off before it turns into a swimming hole. How’d you wind up in the bottom of that, anyway?”

“I’d just got some cash when he drove up and took off. The backdraft blew me in.”

Bill whistled softly. “That must’ve been a moment.”

“Yeah.” Trent’s leg was still hurling. He looked for blood, but didn’t see any. It couldn’t have been broken, or he wouldn’t have been standing on it. Probably just a hell of a bruise.

“All right,” he said, “if you need a statement, let’s get started. It was a dark brown General Electric van, couple of years old, with Wyoming plates. Didn’t see the number. It was definitely beefed up for vacuum, and the guy inside was wearing a spacesuit…”

It was a couple of hours later before they finally pulled up in front of the brew pub. They had gone home for a change of clothes after the cops were finished with them, and Trent had nearly said to hell with it and just stayed there, but Donna still wanted to go out, so here they were.

You could tell where the pub was just by looking down the street. There were more cars parked in front of it than anywhere else along the five blocks of downtown Rock Springs. Even when the economy was going down the tubes—maybe especially then—people could always find a few extra dollars for a drink.

Apparently they could always find a few extra dollars for a gallon of gas, too. Trent scowled at all the gas-powered pickups and SUVs parked side-by-side in the wide diagonal slots that lined Main Street. Some of them were old, from back when that was the only form of fuel available and everybody thought the Arabs would keep selling it forever, but some of them were new, and those were the ones that particularly chapped Trent’s ass. A person could maybe be excused for driving a gas-guzzler if that’s all they could afford—and the used ones were definitely cheap if you didn’t count the operating expense—but a new one cost just as much as a new electric, and it still burned a gallon of gas every ten or fifteen miles. There were a few fuel-efficient cars around—Volkswagens and Toyotas and the like that people restored for fun—but most of the people who liked those kind of cars also cared about the environment, so they generally converted them over to electric anyway.

Somebody in a flat-black Suburban was just leaving as Trent and Donna drove up. His exhaust pipe belched a blue cloud of smoke when he started up the engine, and the noise was like machine-gun fire. If he had a muffler at all, it was just a glass pack. He revved the engine a couple of times just to make sure everybody knew he was an obnoxious bastard as well as a selfish one.

“Must have a little teeny dick,” Trent said as the guy backed out of his spot and roared away. “If the government wants to ban something, they ought to go for those damn things.”

Donna laughed. “What, little teeny dicks? I’d be for banning those.”

“You know what I meant, woman.” He poked her in the side, an easy move since she was sitting right next to him on the pickups bench seat.

She poked him right back. “Don’t go calling me ‘woman.’ ”

“What should I call you, then? ‘Girl?’ ‘Sweetie?’ Or how about ‘honey bunny ducky downy sweetie chicken pie li’l everlovin’ jelly bean?’ ”

“Chicken pie?” she asked dubiously.

“Hey, I’m quotin’ literature here. Don’t blame me if it don’t make sense.” He pulled into the vacant parking spot and the two of them climbed down to the pavement. Trent almost never locked his pickup, but this time he waited until Donna was right in front of it, then he clicked the remote. The sharp squeal of the alarm activating was almost as loud as her squeal of surprise.

“Beast!” she said.

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” He held out his arm and they strolled into the brew pub like royalty.

The place was busy, but there were a few tables free in back. Their waitress sat them down next to one of the big stainless steel brew kettles that stood in a row down the middle of the pub. Trent picked up the beer menu and tried to remember which beer was closest to Budweiser. Most of the stuff they served here was way too thick and dark for his taste.

A bright yellow flyer fell out of the menu. It showed a picture of a stream running out of a forest, and the caption said, “The fishing is excellent, too.” He flipped it over and saw the title: “Alpha Centauri, Land of Opportunity.”

“Samizdat,” Donna said.

“Gezundheit.”

“I said ‘samizdat,’ dummy. That’s what it is.”

“I know.” The Russian word sounded strange coming from a blonde Wyoming girl, but Trent supposed it was the the best term to describe the recruitment ads and political tracts that people kept passing around in defiance of the United States’ ban on all things interstellar. The Russians had developed an entire industry around banned literature back when they were trying to get the truth out past the socialist stranglehold on the press. Trent was embarrassed to think that such a thing had come to the U.S., but the government pissed him off on such a regular basis anymore, it was hard to work up much of a lather over it.

“Let me see that,” Donna said.

Trent slid the flyer across the table, glancing up to see if anybody was watching. He didn’t suppose the people in the bar would rat on him or Donna, but it was a two-hundred-dollar fine if somebody did.

Donna held it up to the light. “Looks pretty out there. We ought to go check it out.”

“Here,” Trent said, handing her a regular menu, but another flyer dropped out of that.