Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

Trent wished he could decide. Jumping for a planet seemed like a step backward, especially when they were running low on power, but jumping around in the dark didn’t make any more sense. Nothing really made sense at the moment. He felt dumb, like he was missing something obvious. What was it? It was right there on the edge of his brain, but he couldn’t get a handle on it. What was he forgetting? He tried to think what it could be. Little alarm bells were going off in his head. They’d been going off since they’d gotten lost—what, fifteen or twenty minutes now—but this was different. This was… fifteen or twenty minutes.

“Shit, we’re runnin’ out of oxygen!” He cracked open his door seal and listened to the rush of air venting to space until the pressure gauge on the dash dropped to 5 p.s.i., then he sealed the latch and opened the air tank’s valve, watching the pressure rise again. When it hit 10 he stopped the flow and took a couple of deep breaths. He didn’t feel any smarter.

“We should have spent the extra money for carbon dioxide scrubbers,” he said. “This is about the least efficient system you can get.”

“Don’t go blaming yourself,” Donna said. “It was fine for what we intended to do.”

“Famous last words.” The air release had set them rolling again, so he had to vent more air through the bumper jets to bring them to a stop. He took another deep breath, trying to clear his mind. His heart was beating faster now, but he couldn’t tell if it was from oxygen deprivation or just plain old fear of dying. “Maybe we should find us a planet,” he said. “We need some thinkin’ time. Can you tell which of these stars are like the Sun?”

She nodded. “The computer can calculate their magnitude now that it knows their distance. We just have to look for one that’s the same magnitude as the Sun.”

That didn’t sound so hard. “Okay, then, let’s do it.”

Donna put the computer in her lap again so she could work easier, and after a couple of minutes she said, “There’s not that many stars around here. We’ve got only four good candidates within twenty light-years.”

“We only need one if it’s the right one. Do any of ’em stand out?”

“Nope.”

“Pick one, then, and let’s go.”

Their first jump took them close enough to spot planets. Donna let the computer get a good look, and Trent used more air to spin the pickup in a slow roll so the computer could see the whole sky, then they jumped again so it could triangulate on the planets.

It spotted seven of them, but the two closest to the star were gas giants, and there was nothing at all in the right orbit to support life. They picked another star and tried it again, finding a better spread of planets, but when they jumped close to the most likely candidate for landing, they could see that its atmosphere was thick and white from pole to pole, like Venus.

“Runaway greenhouse,” Donna said.

“Runaway planet, too,” Trent said. “Look at that bugger go.” It was receding visibly, like a home run going over the back fence.

“Wow.” Donna called up the landing program and had it calculate their velocity, and frowned when she read the number. “Five hundred and thirty-seven thousand kilometers an hour? That can’t be right.”

Trent watched the planet shrink from golf-ball size to the size of a grape. “I think it could be. That thing’s bookin’ it.”

“Well, we’re not going to land on it anyway, so I guess it doesn’t matter.” She made the landing program go away and popped the interstellar jump window back on the screen. “Let’s try another star.”

Trent eyed the power gauge. Down to a quarter now. But what else could they do? “Okay,” he said.

The next star had one gas giant close in, but there was a more Earth-like planet in the right spot for life. They jumped close to it and had a look. It was a brief look because that planet was moving just as fast as the other one, but they had long enough to see cloud patterns and blue oceans and brown continents that looked pretty much like home.

“That might do,” Trent said, “but damn, that speed. We’d be a week tryin’ to catch up.”

“Maybe not,” Donna said. “There’s that gas giant right there. If we used its gravity, we’d change velocity pretty quick.”

“How quick?”

She called up the landing program again and let it crunch on the information from their triangulation jumps. “Hard to say for sure until we make our first pass and figure out how massive it is, but if it’s Jupiter’s size, it would take us about three hours.”

Trent checked the pressure gauges on the air tanks. A nudge over two-thirds full on the left tank, and three quarters on the right. He hadn’t calibrated the gauges for time, but if each tank held about three hours’ worth, then… “We’ve only got about four and a half hours of air. That’d be cuttin’ it pretty close.”

“Yeah.” They watched the dwindling planet for a bit. Trent couldn’t help thinking that their hope for survival was dwindling just as fast. They had fifteen or twenty more jumps before they ran out of juice, and not enough air to take the time to use them right. “How many jumps does it figure we’d have to take to slow down usin’ the gas giant?” he asked. The only way to make this big a velocity change was to jump close to a planet and fall away from it, then when you got so far out that its gravity started to weaken, you jumped back closer and fell outward again, but the closer you jumped, the more energy it took.

She clicked the pointer on the “details” box and said, “Six jumps. We could cut it to five by drifting farther before we go back for another pass, but it would take longer.”

“Shit.” Landing would take three or four more, depending on how particular they were over their landing site. That wouldn’t leave them very many jumps to get home on.

He tried to think. “They can’t all be movin’ this fast, can they?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. All the planets in this solar system are.”

“We’d save a lot of power if we didn’t have to change so much velocity,” he said.

“You want to try another star?”

They would have to make two more jumps at the least—one to get there and one more so the computer could triangulate on the planets—and one more to get close enough to see if any of the the planets were any good…

“No,” he said. “Air’s top priority at this point. Power we can do without if we have to, but not air.”

“So you want to match velocity with this planet and land?”

“I don’t see much choice.”

“Me either.”

“Let’s do it, then.”

Donna called up the landing program and told it to catch up with the fleeing planet. She couldn’t pick an actual landing spot, since it was already so far away that it was just a blob on the computer’s screen, but they could do that later. The gas giant was already selected as the gravity source, so she just hit “go.”

The starfield on their left became a solid wall of yellow and orange haze. It looked like they were about six inches from it, but it began to recede the moment they arrived.

“Damn,” Trent said. “How can that program be so accurate jumpin’ from planet to planet, and so far off goin’ from Mirabelle to Earth?”

“I wish I knew,” said Donna.

They watched the gas giant recede, going from a flat wall to a three-quarter disk with a big nightside shadow on its lower-left side, then dwindling further until it was just a big parade-float balloon and finally about the size of a basketball, all within the space of a few minutes. Then the landing program jumped them back and they did it again, only slower.