Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

He reached forward and pushed the buttons for the front air jets. The air tank under the seat hissed, two jets of fog shot upward from the front bumper, and the truck nosed down.

“What are you doing?” Donna asked.

“Havin’ a look behind us. Maybe something will look familiar there.”

“Not likely, but it’s worth a try.”

He let the pickup nose over until he figured half the sky had slid past, then hit the rear jets until they came to a stop. It stopped cold this time, too. Twice in a row. He peered out at the stars in that direction, but he didn’t have any better luck seeing anything he recognized. Donna wedged the laptop between the dashboard and the windshield again and let it get a good look with its webcam, but after a few seconds it said “D’oh” again.

“I’m gettin’ mighty tired of that noise,” Trent said.

“I could change it.”

“I didn’t mean that. I’m just getting tired of it not knowin’ where we are.”

“Me too.” She sat back in her seat and said, “I can’t find what’s wrong. It thinks it sent us to Sol on that first jump, but now that it can’t figure out where we are, the only thing it will let us do besides ‘undo’ is ‘explorer mode,’ where we give it a direction and a distance.”

“That’d be fine if we knew what direction and distance to give it.”

“Yeah.”

Trent was starting to sweat inside his Ziptite suit, but he ignored it and tried to think things through. “Okay, we were pointed a little to the side of the Sun when we jumped. We obviously went too far, right? ’Cause if it was just the wrong direction, we’d still be able to see familiar stars.”

“Right,” Donna said.

“So if we just head back the way we came and keep jumping until we see something familiar, that ought to work, shouldn’t it?”

Donna considered that for a minute. “It would work if we knew for sure what direction we went, but that could have been off, too.”

“What are the odds of both numbers bein’ wrong?”

She shrugged. “I have no idea, ’cause I don’t know what happened.”

“Well, we’ve got to do something,” Trent said, “because we’ve only got about five hours of air. We didn’t refill the tank before we left. And we didn’t recharge the batteries, either.” He pointed at the gauge, currently reading only half a charge. “Drivin’ all over hell and gone today ate up a lot of juice.”

There was a long moment of silence in the cab of the pickup. Donna looked out the windshield, then over at Trent. “For the computer to not recognize anything, we had to jump at least a couple of hundred light-years. It’s supposedly good that far before the constellation patterns change too much. So if we jump back a hundred light-years at a time, we should eventually hit something it recognizes.”

He could hear the tension in her voice. She started talking faster when she got tense, which made it harder for him to understand her, which made him tense, as if he wasn’t tense enough already.

He took off his hat and scratched his head. “That would work as long as it actually jumps a hundred light-years when we tell it to. It didn’t go to Earth when we told it to do that.”

“Yeah.”

“And we can jump two hundred at a time, can’t we? If it’s good for two hundred light-years out, that’s a bubble four hundred across, right? So if we go two hundred at a time—”

“You’re right. Provided we go straight back the way we came. But if we’re off a little bit, we could cross through the edge of familiar space in one jump and keep on going.”

“We could, couldn’t we. Damn. Okay, then a hundred.”

She nodded. “Okay. So which direction is back the way we came?”

That was a good question. They hadn’t been pointed straight at the Sun when they jumped. The computer could correct for angle, so they had just let it lock on and do its thing. But Trent remembered seeing Orion out his side window just before they jumped. And afterward… what was out there then? He didn’t remember.

“Can you call up the webcam’s picture from right after we got here?” he asked.

“I think so.” Donna ran through the menus for a minute, then a starfield popped up in a separate window.

“Okay, if that’s what we were lookin’ at after our first jump,” Trent said, “then we were headin’ for this patch of sky right about here.” He tapped the screen over on the right side, where he remembered the blinking star that the computer had said was the Sun.

“You’re sure?” Donna asked.

“Pretty close. Back up to the image from before we jumped.”

She did, and he was relieved to see Sol shining right where he expected it to be. “There. We were sittin’ steady, so the same spot on the next screen has to be the direction the hyperdrive supposedly took us, right?”

“That sounds logical.”

She switched to the image from right after they had arrived, and Trent put his finger where the Sun had been a second ago. “There. So a hundred and eighty degrees away from that should take us back the direction we came, right?”

“I… think so. Yeah, that sounds right.

“So can that thing tell us what’s exactly a hundred and eighty?”

She shook her head. “It’s just a webcam image. Maybe if we spun the truck around and took continuous video we could time it or something, but the computer needs more data than just a picture to compute something like that.”

“Never mind,” Trent said. “We can figure that easy enough on our own.” He looked on the screen image for an easily recognizable landmark, found it in a triangle of three bright stars just a little to the left of the direction they had come, then looked outside to see if he could find it out there. He couldn’t, so he hit the front jets again, and watched the stars stream past.

He almost missed it. The three he was looking for were off to the left, hidden by the post between the windshield and his side window until he moved his head. That was definitely them, though. “There,” he said, pointing.

He hit the rear jets to stop their motion. Of course it was too much to ask that he could bring them to a perfect stop three times in a row. He undershot at first, then overshot correcting it, then undershot again before he finally got them stopped. “That’s this bit right here,” he said, pointing at the same stars on the screen. “And the direction we came is between those two stars there.” He looked outside again and found them directly out his side window, nearly obscured by the mud smeared across the outer glass.

Donna realized what he was doing. “So if that’s the direction we came, then that —” she turned and pointed out her window “—is the direction we want to go. We need a transit or something so we can get an exact angle.”

“Sorry, we’re fresh out of transits. But we do have this map.” Trent got their Wyoming road map out of the glove box and stuck it in the air between them, nudging it gently until one folded edge pointed at the stars that had replaced the Sun after they jumped. “Sight down that and make sure it’s aimed right,” he told Donna.

She bent her head down and peered along the edge while he leaned back out of her way. She adjusted the map’s position with her fingertips until it was just right, then said, “Okay, now.”

“Lean back,” Trent told her. She ducked aside and he sighted the other way along the same edge. He had to look through the cracks in her window, but he could see a few distinctive stars there. “Got it,” he said. “That little fishhook business under that bright one there.”

She looked out her window. “Let’s do it again to make sure.”