Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

“We should wash it,” she said, “so the acid doesn’t spread and eat the whole thing.”

“Good thought. Here.” He took it from her, unwound the shroud lines from the bundle of cloth, and threw the bundle down into the biggest pool in the stream. He tied the shroud lines to the tree so it wouldn’t float off downstream. “It’s not exactly washing, but that ought to give it a good soak, anyway.” He didn’t know if the sap was water soluble or not, but it was worth a try.

He went back to work on the log, cutting off an eight-inch section and splitting it in half, then hollowing it out with the claw of a hammer until he had two inch-thick shells of wood that would fit over his shoulders. They stuck out like epaulets on a military dress uniform, but they would do the job. The wood was harder than pine, and fibrous enough to hang together under impact.

He used a ratchet screwdriver to drill holes in the shoulder pieces and in the helmet, then strung them together with cord from the parachute shroud lines. He made a chin strap for the helmet, put the whole works on, and went to the camper door. “What do you think?” he asked.

It was darker inside the camper than out in the open. He couldn’t see Donna’s expression, but her laughter told him plenty. “You look like a samurai!” she said.

“Better than a kid in his dad’s helmet.”

“Well, that, too, but the shoulder dealies are priceless. Hold on a second.” She rummaged in a drawer, then came out with their camera. “Hold up your gun and look fierce,” she said.

He tried, but she kept snickering, and he couldn’t hold a stern expression while she was doing that. “Take the damned picture, woman!” he said, but he was grinning when he said it, and sure enough, that’s when she snapped the shot. He almost deleted it when she showed it to him, but she said, “No way! Take your own if you don’t like this one, but that’s mine. When we get home I’m going to print it out full-sized and frame it for the living room, and we can hang the helmet and armor underneath it and tell stories about it.”

“Oh boy,” he said, but he handed back the camera without deleting the picture. In a weird way, it gave him something to look forward to. He hoped he would make it back home to be embarrassed by it, but if he didn’t, then at least there would be one good thing about staying stranded the rest of their lives.

He made another set of armor just like the first for Donna, then set to work on the table in the camper. The table itself wasn’t broken, so it was a simple matter of finding a sturdy stick and cutting it to the right size to replace the legs that had busted. That was the work of a half hour, then he took the Vise-Grips to the air valve in his door, bending it out straight again. He fished around in the pipe with the wire from the spiral notebook, pulling out a little plug of dirt, then blew through the spigot from the inner side. Free.

The driver’s mirror took another half hour to bend back into shape. There was a big crack in it, and the image in the two pieces didn’t quite line up, but it would work well enough until he could get a replacement.

He got out the foot pump and refilled the tires. He thought about filling the air tanks, too, but that would be a lot of work, and they weren’t going into space again unless he could recharge the batteries, and if he could figure out a way to do that, then he could use the compressor.

He cut up the rest of the log for firewood, and hauled up some smaller stuff from the driftwood pile for kindling. He wasn’t sure about sitting outside around a campfire in the dark until they learned what kind of nocturnal animals lived around there, but it never hurt to have a supply of firewood on hand, and it gave him something useful to do. It was starting to dawn on him how long a day could be when you didn’t have a plan to fill it.

They didn’t need to wear their helmets under the tree. Trent went out to the edge of its canopy and scanned the sky from time to time, and he saw the occasional cupid riding thermals high overhead, but none of them even came down to investigate. It looked like maybe they weren’t going to be as much of a threat as he had thought, but he was glad he’d made the armor just in case.

After Donna cleaned up the camper—which took all of half an hour—she settled down on the picnic blanket with the computer and started poring through the hyperdrive control program, trying to figure out what had gone wrong and where it had taken them. It wouldn’t do much good if they couldn’t recharge the truck’s batteries, but recharging the batteries wouldn’t get them home until they knew where they were.

Trent went through everything they had brought with them, counting up how many separate batteries he could find, but there weren’t many. Two flashlights, the computer, their phone, a calculator (solar powered, but it had a button battery for low-light use), and a couple spare flashlight cells. Granted, a flashlight battery would run the light for a couple of weeks of steady use, but it wouldn’t power a hyperdrive. The camper’s stove took its power from the truck’s main battery… as did the refrigerator, come to think of it. They were going to have to eat the perishable food first, which was probably why Donna had suggested ham sandwiches again for lunch. She was way ahead of him.

He thought briefly about using the calculator’s solar cell to recharge the truck’s battery, but a few minutes of number crunching with that same calculator convinced him that he and Donna would probably die of old age before a tiny solar cell could recharge a plasma battery.

There was still enough juice in the mains for the radio. He listened on all the channels, and he tried calling on the emergency frequency and the general talk frequency, but there was nobody out there. Ground-to-ground, the radio probably had only a fifty-mile range or so anyway; it would only be useful if someone popped into orbit directly overhead.

He switched it off and sat down beside Donna. “Any luck?” he asked.

“Not yet,” she replied. She was reading a help screen for the navigation programs targeting module. “Well, actually, I’ve learned a couple things. The program stores everything it does in a log file, but the log file says we only went sixty light-years on the jump from Mirabelle, so that probably means the bug in the program is between the part that sets the target and the part that actually sends the command to the hyperdrive.”

He wasn’t sure he followed all that, but he understood enough to ask, “Do you think you can fix the bug if you find it?”

“I doubt it,” she said. “I’m not a programmer, and I don’t have the right software for it even if I was.” She ran a hand through her hair and sighed. “I’m afraid you’d be better off with Nick and Glory at this point. Glory could probably just calculate how far we went by how much power we used, or by the density of the stars or something.”

“The velocity,” Trent said. “She was talking about how they move faster the farther away you go. She could probably just look at how fast that first planet we had to catch up with was movin’ and figure out right where we had to be.”

Donna cocked her head to the side and looked at him out the corner of one eye. “I hadn’t thought of that. Of course that’s why it was moving so fast. And why we didn’t have to do it again for the next one. Once we caught up to the first one, we were moving at the same pace as everything else around here. We just had to make up the difference in speed between the two planets going around their stars.”

Trent nodded. “Makes sense. So can you use that to figure out how far we went?”

She shook her head. “I’m not Glory. I don’t know how fast the galaxy rotates, or how fast we were moving back home, or—”