Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

“Once every quarter of a billion years, and the stars around Earth are moving about half a million miles per hour.”

She couldn’t have looked more surprised if he’d started quoting Shakespeare at her. “You—how did you—”

“You thought I was just staring at her boobs, didn’t you?” he said smugly. Truth was, he had been so shocked when Glory had started to talk astrophysics that her words had been burned into his brain like the image of an accident. He thought for a moment and said, “Earth is thirty thousand light-years out from the center of the galaxy, and that half million miles an hour is about thirty times the orbital velocity of a satellite around an average sized planet. I thought it was funny that both numbers came out thirty.”

She tapped him gently on the side of his head. “You got anything else tucked away in there?”

“I remember she said it would take days to match speed with another galaxy, so unless she was exaggerating, I’m guessin’ we’re still in the Milky Way.”

Donna laughed. “Now that’s a comfort.” She turned back to the computer and opened up a drawing window, where she quickly sketched a rough spiral galaxy with an “x” about halfway out from the middle, which she labeled “Sun.” She typed “30,000 ly” next to it, and “500,000 mph” next to that. Then she called up the navigation program again and dug through its log file until she found how much velocity change they had had to make—537,000 kilometers/ hour—and typed that in.

“Better convert that to miles,” Trent said, “or you’ll forget to later.”

“Actually, I’ll be better off converting Earth’s speed to kilometers,” she said. “All the other numbers in here are metric, too.” She did that, then stared at the diagram for a minute. “Okay, let’s say we jumped straight out toward the edge of the galaxy. We’d be moving slower than the stars out there. So how far would we have to go to be moving five hundred and thirty-seven thousand miles an hour too slow?”

She might as well have asked how many leaves were on the tree overhead. Trent’s schooling had topped out at general math, and he’d gotten a “B” at that. He snorted and said, “I have absolutely no idea.”

“Me neither,” Donna said, “but if we can figure that out, I think that’ll tell us where we are.”

For a moment, Trent felt the weight of their situation drop off his shoulders. Donna was a hell of a lot better at math than he was. Maybe she could do it. But a moment later he realized the flaw in her logic. “How do you know we went straight out?”

“I don’t,” she admitted. “But I have the coordinates of both Mirabelle and Earth, so I can figure out what direction we did go. Assuming we were right about the only bug being our distance.”

“And then you can calculate how far we went, just knowing how much faster everything was?”

“Maybe. I’ve got to account for the Earth’s motion around the Sun, and this planet’s motion around this sun, too, ’cause that’s not part of the galaxy’s rotation, but if I can do all that, then…” She stared at the screen again, then started drawing little circles and connecting them with lines.

“What’s all that?”

“That’s me thinkin’. Go find something else to do for a while.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He got up and put on his helmet and armor, picked up his rifle, and walked out into the open, figuring he probably ought to check out a little more of their surroundings. No cupids upstairs at the moment. Five or six slo-mos out in the meadow. No lizards, but there were little noises coming from the bushes that could be them, or could be something else. He looked for big piles of dung that a big animal would leave, piles of bones or skulls that might show tooth marks of big predators, holes in the ground that might be the dens of nocturnal animals—anything that would help him figure out what kind of place they had landed in. He kept an eye out for berries and nuts and fruit trees, too, finding several promising candidates, and he scuffed up the ground around a few plants that looked like they might have edible roots, but all the while his mind was on the big question: how could he recharge the truck’s batteries? He recognized that look on Donna’s face. She wouldn’t stop working on the math until she had figured out where they were. She might have to learn orbital mechanics first, but she would do it—hell, she would re-invent it if she had to—if that’s what it took to come up with an answer.

It made him proud as hell to see the way she dived into stuff like that, but he had to admit that it also made him feel dumb as a post. Before they had left on their first hyperdrive trip, he had tried to learn how to run the computer, figuring that the driving had always been his job when they went four-wheeling, and it would stay his job in space, too, but a couple of days spent reading about vector translations and gravity wells and how to calculate an orbit had shown him just how different flying a spaceship was from driving a truck. Donna had taken to it like a duck to water, though. Within an afternoon, she had run a series of simulated jumps out to Alpha Centauri and back, and she had only crashed their simulated spaceship a couple of times on re-entry before she got the hang of that, too. He had told himself that it didn’t bother him. and he built the camper and sealed both it and the pickup’s cab to hold against vacuum, and he had figured out the center of mass of the whole works and had hooked up the parachutes directly over that spot so the pickup would land on its wheels, and he had designed and built the maneuvering jets himself. He had done all that stuff, but all that time he had known that he couldn’t fly the thing himself. And now here was Donna number-crunching velocity figures in the hope of saving their asses from a long, slow descent into savagery, while he walked around looking for wild animals and wondering how he could recharge a dead battery without a power supply.

He came upon a small arrow tree only eight feet high or so, with a scattering of yellow bones at its base. A cupid had apparently gotten lucky here a year or so ago. It looked like whatever it had killed hadn’t been much bigger than a dog, and the few teeth that Trent could find were flat-topped like a sheep’s rather than pointy like a wolf’s. That was good news.

The arrow had done well for itself, too. The tuft of branches at its top looked thick and healthy, bristling with mini-arrows a couple of feet long. He bent close to look at the tufts at the end of those and saw that the needles were actually smaller versions of the same thing, and if he squinted, the needles looked like they had little fuzzy barbs sticking out of their outer ends, too. Fractals. He remembered Donna telling him about fractals, how you could build something big out of millions of tiny parts that looked just the same as the big one. That had been something else she had learned on the computer, from a program that made cool-looking drawings on the screen just for fun.

He checked the sky. No cupids. No airplanes, either. He hadn’t seen or heard any sign of civilization since he and Donna had arrived. He tried to piece together the bones of the dead animal to see what it might have looked like alive, but they were scattered too much for him to even begin to guess what went where.

Chalk up another thing he wasn’t any good at.

He walked on and came to the stream, where he stood on the bank looking down into the water. It bubbled happily over rocks and shimmered in the pools, reflections obscuring what might swim beneath the surface. He supposed he could get out his fishing pole and see if anything in there would take a fly, but he wasn’t in the mood for fishing. Not while Donna was reinventing calculus over there under the tree.