Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

“Okay.”

She leaned in, but instead of leaning back, he leaned in, too, snatched the map out of the air between them, and gave her a big kiss.

“You silly, this is serious,” she said, but she was smiling.

He smiled right back. “Kissin’ you’s serious, too.”

“We’ll have time enough for that when we get home.”

“That sounds like a promise,” he said.

She looked him in the eye from two inches away. “You get us home safe, cowboy and you can consider it anything you want.”

“Deal.” He kissed her again, then set the map back in the air between them.

She lined it up on the two stars next to the triangle again, then he sighted down the edge to the same fishhook constellation. “That’s definitely it,” he said.

“Okay.” She stuck the computer on the dash, shoving it hard against the junction between dashboard and windshield so the webcam was aimed straight ahead. “We need to turn so it’s onscreen,” she said.

That meant blowing more breathing air into space, but Trent supposed there was no way around it. The computer expected to be lined up front-to-back, so they couldn’t just aim it out the side window. He used the jets as sparingly as possible, tipping the pickup to the right with the side nozzles, then stopping that motion and dropping the nose again until they were pointed pretty close to their target. There weren’t a whole lot of stars out there, only a couple dozen bright ones and maybe twice that many more dim ones. He wondered if any of them was the Sun. From a hundred light-years away, could you even see the Sun? He didn’t know.

Donna used the computer’s touchpad to scoot the mouse pointer to the little fishhook constellation on the screen. The touchpad wasn’t very responsive with her hand encased in a plastic bag, but she kept at it until she got it. “Right there?” she asked.

“A little to the right. Yeah, about there.”

She tapped a function key. “Okay. That’s now zero, zero. Now I enter the distance…” She hit another function key and typed in 100. “Check that to make sure,” she said.

“I trust you,” Trent told her, but she just looked at him until he leaned forward and looked at the number she’d typed in the “distance” box. “Says one zero zero.”

“All right.” She lapped another function key, and a little window popped up with the message, “Press Enter to jump.”

“Ready?” she asked.

He took a deep breath. “Ready.”

“I sure hope this damned thing works this time.”

“Me too.”

She pressed the “enter” key. There was the usual moment of disorientation, and most of the stars jumped a little, but not enough to lose track of. About half of them hardly budged. Those were the big bright ones a long ways off. Trent tried to make them resolve into any kind of familiar pattern, but had no luck.

Neither did the computer.

“Well,” he said, “I guess we couldn’t expect it to work the first time. Try it again.”

Donna did, but they had no more luck.

“Once more.”

Still no luck.

After the third jump they sat there side-by-side, looking out the windshield without saying anything. They had just gone three hundred light-years. Far enough to get lost if they weren’t already. Trent was pretty sure they were aimed at the right patch of sky, but if they were off even by a little bit, that error would get greater and greater the farther they jumped. How far could they go before even a couple of degrees of error became two hundred light-years wide? He wished he’d paid more attention to story problems in math class.

He looked at the battery gauge: already a nudge lower than it had been just a few minutes ago. They couldn’t just jump around at random until they hit a familiar section of the galaxy; at a hundred light-years to the leap, they couldn’t even cover a thousandth of it. They would run out of battery power if they kept jumping, but every breath took them a couple of seconds closer to the time when they would run out of air.

The Milky Way seemed thicker here. The whole windshield looked foggy with it. He was about to mention it to Donna when he realized that it was fog. The truck was losing heat to space, and their breath was condensing on the glass. He could run the heater, but that sucked juice out of the same batteries that the hyperdrive did. They were just going to have to towel off the windshield. And shiver, probably, before long. At least they had their coats.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked.

Donna shook her head. “We could search for weeks and not find anything familiar.”

“We don’t have weeks,” he said.

“Not in space. But if we can find a planet and land, we can take our time figuring out what happened. I could maybe find the bug in the program.”

“And if you can’t?”

She took a deep breath. “Well, we’d at least be on the ground somewhere.”

“Playing Adam and Eve like Nick Onnescu and his sweetie?”

She made a face. “No offense, but let’s try a couple more jumps.”

“Deal.” While she typed in another hundred light-years and checked to make sure that the computer was still locked onto the same point in space, Trent got the shop towel from under the seat to wipe the fog off the windshield, but when he shook it out, it fell to pieces.

“What the hell?” he said, and then he remembered. He’d used it to wipe the alien slime off the seat after they’d dropped them off at the doctor’s office. And then he remembered their romp in the camper that night. “Oho,” he said. “That explains it.”

“What?” Donna asked.

“Our clothes. When we ripped ’em off each other.” He could feel himself blushing. “I thought we were just hot, but it looks like we had a little help from Katata and her kids.” He showed her the shop towel. “That slime of theirs must be like battery acid.”

She laughed, but he could hear the disappointment in her voice when she said, “I thought that was a little strange. I felt like Supergirl or something, but I just figured it was that super strength you read about people gettin’ sometimes in accidents and stuff.”

“You were still super,” he said, and he kissed her again.

She was blushing, too, and batting her eyelashes in that “aw shucks” way she did when she was embarrassed, and she looked so beautiful he suddenly figured it wouldn’t be so bad finding an uninhabited planet somewhere and doing the Adam and Eve thing with her. But they were going to give it a couple more jumps first.

He stuck the towel back under the seat and got a paper napkin out of the glove box to wipe the window with. He had to stretch to reach Donna’s side, and his seatbelt kept trying to pull him back, but he managed it without knocking the computer off the dash. When he was done, the napkin looked a lot like the shop towel, but that was just moisture.

He checked the seat, but that seemed all right. Either alien slime didn’t eat vinyl, or he’d gotten it off quick enough. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s give it another try.”

The computer was ready. Donna hit “go,” and the stars shifted, but they were no more familiar afterward than before.

“One more?” she asked.

Trent shrugged. “Fifth time’s a charm.” He didn’t think it would do any good, but he didn’t particularly like the idea of landing on a strange planet and trying to debug a computer program, either, even if Donna did all the debugging.

Donna triggered the jump. More stars leaped past, but none of the ones that appeared in front of them were familiar.

“Well,” she said, “We’re building up a pretty good map of this section of space, wherever it is. We can triangulate on practically any star we can see from here.”