Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

He heard soft footsteps behind him, and Donna whispered, “What do you see?”

“Looks a little like a buffaloceros,” Trent whispered back. He handed her the binoculars and pointed.

He would have sworn their voices couldn’t be heard more than a few feet away, but the animal raised its head and looked straight at them for a few seconds before turning back to denude another bush.

“It’s huge,” Donna whispered.

“Yeah. Glad it’s a plant-eater.”

It was getting harder to see. Part of that was because it blended in with the bushes, but the rain was starting to come down harder, too. It had been just a soft mist before, but now they could hear it pattering on the leaves overhead. A few drops were making it through now. Trent looked at his woodpile, then out at the sky. It didn’t look like it was going to stop raining anytime soon. He didn’t really want a fire at the moment, but by nightfall they might, so he went into the camper and got their blue plastic tarp and threw it over the wood, weighing the corners down with logs so it wouldn’t blow away. The buffaloceros paid him no attention; just wandered off into the mist.

They had breakfast, finishing what was left of the orange juice and eating cereal with powdered milk reconstituted with bottled water. If they started a fire tonight, Trent figured they could boil some stream water to make some hot chocolate or something. That would be a good first test of the local food supply.

After breakfast, they turned the bed into a table again. Donna got out the computer and went back to work on figuring out where they were. Trent sat beside her and read with her for a while, but he quickly became snowed by all the talk of square roots and inverse squares and gravitational constants. He tried to ignore the formulas and just follow the basic logic of the text, but when it came to figuring out the area swept out in a partial arc around a circle, it was nothing but formulas. “Hell,” he said at last, “they say here that pi are square, but any fool knows that pies are round. Cornbread are square.”

Donna gave him a sideways grin. “Go find something to do,” she said, “before I have to hurt you.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He put on his raincoat and his helmet and shoulder guards over that, then strapped on the pistol under his raincoat since he didn’t want to carry the rifle in the rain, and went outside.

It was raining harder now, a steady downpour that hissed against the leaves overhead and puddled up in the low spots out in the meadow. The stream had risen, and was churning loudly over the rocks. One would occasionally shift in the current, making a deep clunk that he felt as much as heard. He was glad he hadn’t put his beer in there; it would be halfway to the ocean by now if he had. He stood on the bank and watched the water rush past for a few minutes, trying to decide whether or not it would overflow the banks. If it did, the truck could wind up halfway to the ocean, too. There was probably enough juice in the batteries to drive across the meadow, but the minute Trent tried to climb a slope, that would be the end of their charge. There was no direction but down for the pickup anymore, and there wasn’t much downhill left. Maybe a couple hundred feet, total, before they left the mountains behind for good, but there was a lot of uphill and a lot of bushes to go around even on the downhill stretches between here and there.

Too bad. Coasting downhill was the one time when the pickup’s wheel motors generated electricity rather than burned it. Trent got an image of one way he could recharge the batteries: He could dismantle the pickup, carry it to the top of the mountain piece by piece, put it together again, and coast to the bottom. If he cleared a road straight down, he wouldn’t even use up any battery power going around obstacles. He would gain a kilowatt-hour or so with every trip. That meant he would only have to do it… what, a couple of hundred times? Piece of cake. He could probably have it done by the time the kids were ready for college.

That set him thinking, though. Coasting downhill wasn’t the only way to rotate a wheel. He could take off a tire and put a crank on the hub and save himself a lot of climbing. He wondered how much power he could generate by hand?

He had no idea, but the computer might. He went back to the camper and leaned in the door. “Hey, does the encyclopedia in that thing have conversion tables for calories to kilowatts?”

“What?” Donna looked up, puzzled, her face lit by the blue glow of the computer screen.

“I want to know how many kilowatts I can generate turning a crank.”

“Turning a crank?”

“Or pedals. That might work better.”

“For what?”

“Generating power using one of the wheel motors in brake mode.”

“Oh. All right. Let me see what I can find.” She set to work with a smile, happy to be doing something else for a while, and within just a few minutes she had an answer. “A thousand calories converts to just over a kilowatt-hour. And it says here that the human body burns two to five thousand calories a day, depending on how hard you’re working. So if you’re putting out five, minus the two it takes just to keep you alive, that gives you about three thousand calories going into the crank, so you can do three kilowatt-hours a day.”

And that was assuming a hundred percent efficiency, in both him and in the generator. “I think I’d do better hauling the truck uphill in pieces,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Long story. Never mind.” He went back outside and watched the rain come down.

He was on the right track, though. The wheel motors were already designed to generate electricity as well as use it. The trick was to find something else to spin them. Harness one of those buffaloceros guys? They could probably put out at least a horsepower. But Trent doubted they would break to harness very well, and even if they did, the motor needed to spin fairly fast to have any efficiency at all.

A windmill? That could work, except that down here in the valley there hadn’t been much wind yet. The storm had blown in without stirring much more than a breeze.

Another rock tumbled along the stream bed. Trent felt the hollow thuds as it banged its way to a stable spot. There was plenty of energy there, if he could just harness it.

He looked upstream to where he’d found the little waterfall above the bathing pool. A four-foot drop could turn a waterwheel. It probably wouldn’t have a whole lot more power behind it than him turning a crank, but it would be non-stop.

He tried to visualize how it could work. The simplest way would be to set the motor right out over the pool next to the waterfall, so the water could flow past the edge of the tire. He could tie tin cans or something to the tire to catch the water so its weight would turn the wheel. But how could he suspend the motor over the pool? It weighed at least a hundred pounds, a hundred and fifty with the tire.

Run a couple of logs across from bank to bank? The far bank was about the right height, but the one on this side was too high. He would have to dig down three feet to reach the right level. And besides, how could he get the wheel to rotate with the logs in the way? He would have to separate them wider than the tire and build a platform to set the motor on so the tire could spin between the two logs. That meant one of the logs would have to go in behind the waterfall, and there wasn’t room for that, so he would have to dig out a space for it, and that was rock rather than dirt back there.

Or he could build a flume, but that would probably be just as difficult. It was starting to look like more work than turning a crank. Okay, try again. Imagine holding the motor out over the pool in his hands. He wouldn’t need to stick his fingers out past the tire; why couldn’t he do that with the logs? Just stick them out from the far bank and tie the motor to their ends. The tire would be free to spin, and he wouldn’t have to build a platform or dig out behind the waterfall or anything.