Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

He looked down the length of the meadow to where she sat, a little girl alone in the great outdoors. Isaac Newton under the apple tree. The pickup looked ridiculously out of place parked there beside her, a crude, barbaric relic of a world that prized adventure over learning. He blinked and for a second saw it with its tires flat and paint dull, rusting away after years of rain and snow. Would he and Donna still be living in the camper, hoarding their last precious relics of civilization, or would they have built a cabin by then out of arrow trees? Would there be half a dozen kids running around, wearing samurai armor and playing kick-the-slo-mo?

A soft breeze blew through the meadow, rustling leaves and bringing up a spicy odor from somewhere. There weren’t any flowers, but it still smelled nice. A little like sagebrush, only not so in-your-face. He could get used to a place that smelled like this.

He crossed the stream at a narrow spot at the head of a little waterfall that fell maybe four feet into a wide pool. A nice bathing pool, if the water wasn’t so cold. Maybe they could divert most of the flow around it so it could warm up in the sunlight.

When he climbed to the top of the other bank, he heard more rustling in the bushes, and when he took a couple steps closer, a little brown leathery ball about the size of a porcupine burst out from cover and bolted across twenty feet of open space to another bush. Trent thought briefly about trying to bag it for dinner, but he didn’t want to try eating any of the native life just yet. It was one thing to experiment with alien food when you could rush back to Earth and a hospital within a couple of hours, but when you were stuck in the middle of nowhere and your entire stock of medical supplies consisted of a traveller’s first-aid kit, it made sense to move a little more slowly.

He completed his circuit of their immediate surroundings without finding any bear dens or dinosaur footprints. The biggest animal he had seen any evidence of was whatever had left the pile of bones with the arrow through it. He felt himself relax a little as he walked back toward the pickup. Even if they did figure out where they were and charge the batteries, they didn’t necessarily have to leave here, at least not permanently. They had been looking for a new home when they left Earth; they could do a lot worse than this.

He wondered how Andre was doing, whether he had gone back to his ruined house to salvage any of his possessions, or if there was too much danger of another strike from orbit. He wondered if anybody else had lived within the blast zone of the first one. Andre had said that the French colonists lived apart from one another, but he’d been talking to an American. That wasn’t necessarily the truth.

Trent didn’t think Andre had been lying to him. He seemed to be just what he said he was; a regular guy trying to make a new home away from the craziness that had swept over Earth in the last couple of decades. But he hadn’t been able to escape. Nobody could, unless they were willing to cut themselves off completely. Hide out from America and its attempts to control every other human outpost in the galaxy.

He wondered why the Galactic Federation hadn’t done something about it yet. Could they already be as ineffective as the United Nations had been at reining in their out-of-control members? Or were they just reluctant to step into what was, after all, mostly a human problem? The alien races who made up the bulk of the Federation probably had growing pains of their own.

Trent remembered his promise to Andre when they parted. Not much of a promise, really; just that he would do what he could to stop his country from behaving so abominably, but a promise was a promise, and he intended to keep it. But how was he going to do that from way out here?

He joined Donna on the picnic blanket and took off his armor, using the towel to wipe the sweat off his neck.

“Any luck?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I’m really wishing I’d paid more attention in math class.”

“You’ll get it,” he told her.

“Yeah, but when? If I was smarter, I’d have figured it out when we still had power and air, and we’d be home by now.”

Trent reached out and put his arm around her. “Hey,” he said softly, “don’t you go beatin’ yourself up for not pullin’ a rabbit out of a hat. You got us down alive while I was sittin’ in back bein’ about as useful as tits on a boar.”

She took a deep breath and let it out. “It’s just… I’m sure the answer’s there, if I only knew how to find it.”

“You will.”

“I wish I had your confidence.”

He gave her a squeeze. “I’ve got the confidence because you’ve got the brains. And you’ve got all the time in the world to use ’em. Take a break and come back to it later.”

She shook her head. “I’m right in the middle of something.”

He considered insisting, but he knew how well that usually worked. “All right,” he said.

He got up and put on his armor again, checked the sky, and went down to the creek to see how the parachute was doing. To his surprise, the orange stains were just about gone, so he pulled it onto the rocks beside the pool, wringing it out as he brought each armful up, until he had the whole works out of the water. It was all he could do to carry it up to the meadow, but he slung it over his shoulder like a sack of cement and staggered up the bank with it, then he dropped it to the ground, untied the shroud lines from the tree, and pulled it out into a ragged circle so it could dry.

The sun had moved enough in the last few hours to give him a sense of which direction it was going, but by the arc of its track across the sky, it looked like it was setting in the east. That meant they were in the southern hemisphere, then. He wondered how long it would take him to get used to that.

There was still quite a bit of daylight left, so he started checking the pickup’s door and window seals, trying to find the place where they were leaking. It was pointless busy-work if he couldn’t figure out a way to recharge the batteries, but it would be vitally important if he could. No way did he want to breathe air from the tires again.

He couldn’t find anything wrong. The window seals were tight; he could see the rubber compressed all the way around them. He inspected the seals on both doors for anything that might have gotten wedged in the way, and he looked for nicks or cuts, but the rubber was as smooth and clean as the day he’d installed it. So was the mating surface on the doors themselves. He checked the doors for alignment, thinking maybe they had been tweaked when the pickup tipped over, but they looked straight. He checked the seal around the wiring conduit from the cab to the rest of the truck, but that looked good, too. Finally, in desperation, he used the foot pump to put forty pounds or so in the air tank, climbed into the cab, sealed it up, and let enough out again to raise the cab’s pressure a few pounds above the outside air. He listened for the hiss of a leak, but he was no more successful on the ground than in orbit. After ten minutes he realized why: the gauge hadn’t dropped a bit.

That didn’t make sense. Why would it leak in space, but not on the ground? He raised the pressure some more, but it held steady. He tried the air valve in his door and it hissed just fine when he opened it, but it sealed tight again when he closed it.

But he hadn’t been able to use the air valve when they were in space, because it had been plugged with dirt and bent over. He had had to crack the door seal instead. He did that, popping open the top latch and letting a couple pounds of pressure blow out through the top of his door, then he snugged it down again and watched the pressure gauge.