Jerry Oltion: Anywhere but Here

She giggled at his obvious discomfort, but she took the menu and covered both Alpha Centauri flyers with it. “I’m serious,” she said. “We’re running out of money, and all the jobs are on other planets nowadays. We should at least go have a look.”

“Yeah, I know we should.” He looked at the beer menu again and decided to try the India Pale Ale. If the name meant anything, it shouldn’t be one of the dark ones. That and a bacon cheeseburger might salvage the evening.

There was a sign over the archway that led to the bathrooms: Make Beer, Not Bombs. Trent agreed with that sentiment, even if it was ferny beer like what they served here. He agreed with Donna, too, that they should go look for a better place to live, but he wasn’t ready to pack up and go just yet. For one thing, now that it was illegal, they couldn’t simply take off for a weekend. The hyperdrive would take you away from anywhere, so long as you were jumping int6 vacuum, but it couldn’t put you back onto the ground, or even into the atmosphere. You had to pop into orbit just above the atmosphere and fall the rest of the way under a parachute, which meant that the U.S. would blast your chute with its laser satellites before you even came close to the ground. That’s what had happened to Trent and Donna the first time they tried it. It was an automated shot from the missile defense net, and they’d managed to jump back into space and call for help before they’d hit the ground, but rather than apologize and reprogram the lasersats to let parachutes pass, the government had instead made shooting at them official policy. That meant any trip a U.S. citizen took had to include a stopover in Canada on the way home, and it was getting harder to get back across the border. Trent had heard that you needed a visa nowadays even if you had a U.S. passport, and of course the government wasn’t handing out visas to interstellar travellers.

The waitress came by and took their order. Donna slipped one of the Alpha Centauri flyers into her menu when she gave it back, but she stuck the other one up between the salt and pepper shakers like a flag. “So when are we going to go?” she asked.

Free land ! the flyer promised. Emigrate now .

“I don’t know,” Trent said. He wasn’t just being evasive, either. He honestly didn’t know, and there were a million reasons for his indecision, starling with the word “emigrate.” He didn’t like that word. It sounded funny, and not funny ha-ha. It made him think of people dressed in ragged clothes pulling carts full of chickens and pigs. It practically screamed “defeat.” The construction industry might have tanked, and the country might be going to hell in a hand-basket, but Trent wasn’t defeated.

“We’ve got a whole galaxy to choose from,” Donna said. “Shouldn’t we at least see if we can find someplace better than Rock Springs?”

Trent snorted. “Hell, we could probably find places better than Rock Springs a hundred miles up the road.”

“I’m serious.”

“All right.” He drummed his fingers on the table, wishing the waitress would get back with their beer, but she was nowhere in sight, so he said, “I certainly don’t have much love for the government, but this is still my country. And this is my town. I grew up here. Everybody I know is here. Half of ’em may be right-wing idiots who think it’s okay to tell everybody else how to run their lives and kill anybody who disagrees, but the other half are pretty decent folks. Hell, the city council damn near voted to defy the federal ban on hyperdrives. They were only one vote short. If we emigrate, we’ll be giving up on that half, too.”

For once, Donna didn’t have a snappy comeback. She pursed her lips and cocked her head to the side, looking at him thoughtfully. “That’s a good point,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“Not good enough to make me want to stay here, but it’s a good point.”

He shook his head. “So what do you suggest we do? Move to Alpha Centauri? It’ll be just as full of idiots as America within a decade.”

“I bet it’ll take longer than that. It’s a whole planet, after all.”

“Maybe. But still, that’s where everybody’s going.”

The waitress finally showed up with their beer. Trent’s was considerably darker than he’d hoped, and when he tasted it, the intense bite of hops nearly made him choke. “Damn,” he said after she’d gone. “About the only thing this stuffs got going for it is it’s strong.”

“My, but you’re in a cranky mood today, aren’t you?”

“Gettin’ blown into a launch crater does that to a guy.”

“You know what I think? I think sittin’ around on your butt all day does that to a guy. You haven’t been happy since, hell, I don’t know how long. Certainly not since since the Palkos cancelled their house contract.”

“Considerin’ that was my last paycheck, I imagine you’re not too far off.”

She looked down at the tabletop.

“Hey, it’s okay,” he said. “I’m not pissed about that.”

She raised her head again, and her eyes were glistening. “How about if I lost my job?”

“Huh?”

“Would you be pissed if I lost my job?”

Donna worked in a jewelry store in the White Mountain Mall; probably the most stable job in America at the moment. People were dropping their money into gold and gems as fast as they could, before the value of the paper dropped all the way to zero. Donna only worked three days a week, but her job was why they were still able to eat out once in a while.

“You didn’t lose it, did you?” he asked.

“Not yet. But Cheryl told me to take next week off. Apparently the government has seized our inventory. ‘To prevent panic buying,’ they say.”

Trent would never understand how Donna could sit on news like that for hours, waiting for the right time to deliver it. When Trent lost his job, she’d known about it the moment he got in the house. Hell, before that, probably, by the way he’d slammed the garage door. But she—she hadn’t given him a clue until just now.

“Damn it,” he said. “Those sons of— Aw, damn it. I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

“Not your fault.” He reached across the table and took her hand in his. “I know just what you’re thinkin’ right now, and it’s not true.”

“What, you mean the U.S. government isn’t made up of selfish bastards who couldn’t give a shit about what’s actually best for the average person?”

He couldn’t help a wry grin. “Okay, that’s true enough, but I was thinkin’ about you. It’s not your fault.”

“I know that. But we’re going to be getting mighty hungry in about a month even so.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, wishing he could feel half as confident as he forced himself to sound. “We’ll figure out something.”

“I hope.”

He gave her hand a squeeze. “Now I know why you’re so hot to head off into the wild blue yonder.”

She shrugged. “Yeah, well. If nothing else, it’ll be a good vacation, and lord knows, we could use one.”

“I suppose we could.”

The waitress showed up just then with their hamburgers. Trent looked at the half pound of beef in a bun and the pound or so of “freedom fries” surrounding it on the plate. He’d been hungry before, but suddenly he felt ravenous.

“Eat up,” he said. “Sounds like we’re going to be up half the night packin’.”

The moment they got home, Trent plugged in the truck to recharge the batteries. They hadn’t used much power just on a trip downtown and back, but he liked to keep them fully charged, and he always started a trip that way. You never knew when your next chance to plug in would be, especially when you were going off-road, and interstellar travel was about as off-road as you could get.