Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

Donna put the computer into its spot on the dashboard and let it get a good look at the stars, and when it locked on, she picked the last Sunlike star from the list of nearby candidates. They had to drop the nose a little to get it onscreen, but not by much. “Here we go,” she said when the computer got a lock on it, and she hit the “enter” key.

It was a good jump. They could see their target as a much brighter-than-average star off to the left. Donna let the computer get a look at the stars from this vantage, then jumped closer, allowing it to triangulate the position of any planets it could see.

There were three; two bright ones that looked to be gas giants in close to the star, and a smaller one in the habitable zone. “So far, so good,” Donna said. “I’m taking us in for a closer look.”

“All right.” Trent’s ears popped, but he kept his eyes on the power gauge. It was already nudging the top of the “E,” but it dropped a needle’s width more when they jumped.

The planet was much closer, though. It was about as big as the Moon from Earth, and although it was mostly in shadow, they could see big swirls of cloud and blue ocean in the quarter that was lit by the star.

“Looks promising,” Trent said. “How fast is it moving?”

“Let’s see.” Donna called up the landing program and let it crunch on the image for a minute, but it didn’t return a value.

“We have to get closer,” she said, reaching for the computer again.

“Hold up there,” Trent said. “At this point we’ve got more air than power. Let’s think this through so we can do it in as few jumps as we can get away with.” He leaned forward to look at her around the front of the tire, and his ears popped again. He glanced at the air gauge, then took a cold, hard look at it.

Seven pounds of pressure, and dropping.

“Forget I said that. We’ve got a leak somewhere.”

He listened for the telltale hiss of air into vacuum, looked for fog drifting away outside, but he couldn’t hear or see anything.

“Check your door latches,” he said, doing just that on his own side, but they were tight. So was the window. He didn’t have a seatbelt caught in the door, either.

“I’m tight over here,” Donna reported.

“It’s going somewhere.” He bent down as far as he could to listen close to the floor, but he couldn’t hear anything there, either. Apparently it was a slow enough leak that it didn’t make much noise.

If they stayed at seven pounds for long, they would be courting the bends. Trent didn’t like it much, but he got the can opener out of the seat pocket and let more air out of the tire until the gauge read ten pounds again. When he shoved his thumb into the tire’s side, the rubber bent quite a bit; there wasn’t much air left in it.

“Okay,” he said, “we still need to make as few jumps as we can, but it looks like we’ve got to be quick about it after all. How few can we get away with?”

Donna looked out at the planet. He followed her gaze; it looked no different now than before.

“It’s not moving very fast,” she said. “We shouldn’t have to make more than one jump to correct our speed for landing. So one jump to get close, and if we can pick our landing site without jumping again, then one jump to match velocity, one more to put us back over the landing site, and two or three more to drop us to the top of the atmosphere. That’s, what, four or five jumps.”

“That may be more than we’ve got juice for,” Trent said. “I’d only bet on three for sure, especially close to a planet.”

She pulled the computer into her lap again. “Let me see what I can set in the preferences.” She tapped at the keyboard for a minute or so while Trent watched the air pressure drop a pound. With the tire between them, he couldn’t even see what she was doing, but by the sounds she was making he got the idea that there wasn’t just a “minimum jumps” option she could set. At last she said, “I can tell it to take us straight to the top of the atmosphere over our landing site after the tangential vector translation and not to give us any upward velocity when we get there. That should cut the number of jumps we need down to three, but if we guess wrong about where the top of the atmosphere is, we could fall a long ways before we get there, and burn up our parachute when we do.”

Trent said, “And if we try to jump too deep, we use up the last of the charge on our batteries without goin’ anywhere.”

“Right.”

He thought about that for a few seconds. “And it’ll only work if we can find a good landing site on our very next jump, right? So this one’s got to be just as accurate as the others.”

“Right,” Donna said. “We’ve got to make sure we wind up over the sunlit side of the planet, close enough to pick out a landing site.”

“Can we do that?”

“I think so. We’ve got a good fix on its distance now, and the only reason the computer can’t get a velocity reading is because it’s not moving fast enough to show any sign of motion from here, so if I click on a spot just a little ways out from the sunlit part that we can see, we should wind up within half its diameter or so of the surface, and not moving all that fast.”

“All right,” Trent said. “That sounds doable. Now let’s think about the air situation.” He looked at the gauge, down to eight pounds again. “We’ve got maybe five more minutes on this tire before it’s completely flat. It’ll take me at least five more to get another tire loose and wedged in here. Do you think we should do that before we jump, or is there going to be enough time on the other end?”

“There’ll be time during the vector translation,” Donna said. “That should take at least five minutes. But we’ve probably got enough air in our pressure suits and in the regular air tank to get us down, don’t we?”

Trent looked at the gauge. Seven pounds again. “It’d be really tight,” he said. “And we’ll need maneuvering air just as much as breathing air. I’d feel a lot safer saving what’s in the tank for that.”

“I’d feel a lot safer without you going outside in deep space,” Donna said.

“Me too,” Trent admitted, “but I don’t think we’ve got any choice.” He used the can opener to let the last of the air out of the spare, which brought the pressure in the cab up to nine pounds. “Let’s go pick us a landing site, and then I’ll switch tires while we’re changing our velocity to match it.”

“All right.” Donna put the computer on the dash again, waited for it to make sure it knew where they were and what direction they were aimed, then put the pointer just over the day side of the planet and pressed “enter.”

The planet blossomed into existence outside her window. Trent could barely see it around the tire, but its light reflected brightly in the cab. “How’s it look?” he asked.

“Good. There are continents, at least.”

He reached forward and used the jets to tip the pickup sideways, then swung it around so they could both see the planet through the windshield. It looked like they were maybe a couple thousand miles up, far enough to see quite a bit of it. The right-hand third or so was in shadow, but there was plenty to see in the sunlit part. Now that they were close, their relative motion was easy to see. They were falling toward it at a fairly steep angle, and going in pretty fast. They had a few minutes before they hit, though. Time enough to find a place to land, if their air held out that long.

There were indeed continents: two long skinny ones on either side of the equator that looked like they had been one big one not too long ago, the edge of another big one just sticking out of the shadow, and a big triangular one that reached nearly from the equator to the pole out in the sunlit side.