Jerry Oltion: Anywhere but Here

While Donna started packing food and clothing into the camper, he dug out the components for the hyperdrive and mounted them into their places. The field coil went into a cubbyhole between the camper and the cab, where it would be as close as possible to the center of the truck. The actual electronics went behind the seat, where they could get to it in an emergency even if they were in space. Not that they would be able to do much if anything went wrong. Neither he nor Donna were techie enough to troubleshoot more than a burned-out fuse, but they could at least do that much. The computer that controlled everything would sit on Donna’s lap during launch and on the dashboard afterward, Velcroed down so it wouldn’t drift loose in free fall.

The power to run the hyperdrive came straight from the truck’s plasma cells. They were good for about 200 miles on the ground, or maybe fifty hyperspace jumps, depending on how close to a planet you were for each jump. According to Allen Meisner, the more mass you were near, the more energy it took. It had something to do with the way space was bent around planets and suns and stuff. Trent had a hard time seeing how you could bend something like space, but Allen had sworn it was true, and the guy had designed an engine that not only bent it but folded it in two, so he ought to know.

Trent plugged everything in and tested the connections, then went inside to see if Donna had the computer ready. She was still working at it, her face glowing pale blue in the screens light.

“I had a hell of a time finding a copy of the control program,” she said when she noticed him standing beside her. “Homeland Security has been shutting down U.S. websites that post it, and of course most of the foreign sites I checked had the program in their language.”

“How about England, or Australia?”

She shook her head. “England can’t spit without permission from the U.S. anymore, and Australia’s sites are under pretty much constant hack attack from HomeSec. But I finally found an English-language version on a ten-minute mirror site in Denmark.”

“Good. Let’s plug in the computer and make sure it can talk to the drive.”

They went out to the pickup and set the computer in place on the dash, then connected all the various cables and powered it up. Donna loaded the program and ran a diagnostic routine, which reported everything ready to roll.

“Good enough,” Trent said. He felt his heartbeat quicken, and he looked out to the street, half expecting to see Tom the cop drive up in his patrol car. There wouldn’t be much defense if he did; the pickup was pretty clearly capable of interstellar flight now.

“You got enough food loaded?” he asked.

“There’s at least a couple month’s worth, if we don’t mind ramen noodles for the last week or so.”

“That ought to do.” He certainly hoped so. You never packed for a day in the mountains, not when a broken axle could strand you there for a week, and you didn’t pack for a week on an alien planet, even one with people already living on it. A mishap on landing could put you out of touch for anywhere from a month to forever, depending on the mishap.

Donna went back inside to finish packing their clothes and random other stuff. While she was doing that, Trent powered up the compressor and filled the air tanks. There were two of them, both under the seat, each one good for about three hours of breathing. More than enough time to jump from star to star, find a planet, match velocities, and land, provided everything worked right. If things didn’t work right, well, that’s why there were two tanks.

While the compressor huffed away on the tanks, he checked the door and window seals to make sure they hadn’t gotten scuffed in the five months since he’d installed them. Had it really been that long? He supposed it was. He’d poured all his time and money into fixing up the truck for space, but they hadn’t actually gone anywhere since their first trip. He couldn’t have said why not; they’d survived the experience well enough, and they’d had tons of fun in the process. There’d been a few harrowing moments, but no more than happened on any four-wheeling trip. Of course the government had done their best to discourage more trips, but that wouldn’t have stopped them if they’d really wanted to do it. They just hadn’t gone again.

Maybe he’d been afraid of scratching up the truck. Parachute landings didn’t give a guy a whole lot of control over where he came down.

It didn’t matter. They were going now. He whistled softly while he made his pre-flight check, stopping occasionally to look up at the starry sky.

They left first thing in the morning. Trent drove them out of town a ways, then found a spot way off the road and between a bunch of rocks where their launch crater wouldn’t get in anybody’s way. They got out and put on their Ziptite suits—human-shaped plastic bags that would theoretically hold air long enough for them to get back to the ground if something went wrong—then climbed back into the cab, keeping their helmets rolled down around their necks so they wouldn’t waste the internal air. The suits weren’t any more legal in the U.S. than the hyperdrive, but there was a lively black market business in them, along with electronic parts and air tanks and the various other equipment a person needed to build and fly an interstellar vehicle. Trent just hoped there was some quality control on all that stuff. It would have been a whole lot safer if the government regulated it, but of course they didn’t care about that. Just like they did with drugs, once the feds outlawed something, they figured it was your own damned fault if you used it and got hurt.

The only thing a person could do was to inspect everything as carefully as he could himself, and have a backup for as many systems as possible. The suits were like that; with any luck, it wouldn’t matter if they worked or not, because they were the backup for the truck itself.

So they checked all the door latches and the window seals, then overpressurized the cab to 20 p.s.i. and waited for ten minutes to see if the pressure would hold. Trent checked to make sure the .270 in the gun rack was strapped down, and he looked for anything else that might be loose or get loose, but he’d taken care of all that last night. Donna turned on the radio and they listened to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and Lynard Skynard on KSIT while they waited, singing along to “Have a Cigar” and “Sweet Home Alabama.” When the station broke for commercials and the pressure gauge on the dash was still holding steady, Trent switched off the radio and looked over at Donna.

“Ready?” he asked.

She was the computer expert, so she held the laptop that controlled the hyperdrive. She checked its screen, then said, “Ready.”

He opened the stopcock by the door handle and lowered the pressure to normal again. Rock Springs was over a mile high, so “normal” was only 12 p.s.i. It felt thin after breathing nearly twice that for a few minutes, but they hadn’t been overpressured long enough to worry about the bends. He closed the stopcock, tugged his seatbelt tight so he wouldn’t bonk his head on the roof when gravity let go, and took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s do it.”

She was belted in on the passenger side, not normally where she rode when they were just out for a drive, but this time she needed the shoulder belt as well as a lap belt. She grinned. “Hang onto your hat, cowboy. We could wind up miles from here.” And she tapped the “enter” key.

The Earth vanished, except for the hemisphere of dirt and rock that was inside the jump field. That immediately started boiling out from under the truck, drifting away in all directions. A few bits of dirt drifted up inside the cab, but Trent had vacuumed to keep debris from getting into their eyes, so there was only what they had tracked inside just a couple minutes ago.