Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

He could feel his heart starting to speed up. This could work! Arrow trees were tall and straight, and if they were as stiff as the arrows themselves, then two of them would easily hold the motor’s weight without bending. He could pile rocks on the other ends to keep them from tipping into the pool. He would have to dismount the pickup’s batteries and set them close enough to the motor’s control box to hook them up to its leads, but he could do that easy enough.

He could do it. He went back into the camper and said, “I’ve figured it out. I’m building a waterwheel.”

Donna looked up from the computer. “A waterwheel?”

He told her his plan, talking too fast and tripping over his tongue in his excitement, and he forced himself to slow down and take it step by step. She started nodding as she realized how it could work. “That’s great,” she said, but she wasn’t smiling.

Trent could read her moods like a billboard. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Yeah, right. Out with it.”

She looked at the computer screen for a second, then back at him. “You’ve figured out how to fix our spaceship, but I still haven’t figured out where we are.”

He shook off the rain from his jacket and went inside to sit across from her. “Hey, you’ll get it. And if you don’t, we’ll find Earth by trial and error. We can charge the batteries and go hunting for it, and if we don’t find it the first time we can come right back here and try again.”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “Do you have any idea how big the galaxy is? It’s a hundred thousand light-years across. The volume of space that the computer will recognize is about four hundred light-years across. We could search at random forever and never hit it.”

“We don’t have to search at random. We know Earth is about thirty thousand light-years from the center of the galaxy, so we can go to the core, then jump outward thirty thousand light-years and work our way around the galaxy until we hit something we recognize.”

“That’s still a huge amount of space to search. And thirty thousand is an awfully even number. Glory probably rounded it off so she didn’t sound like Spock. If the actual distance is thirty thousand and a half, we’d never find what we were looking for.”

“Yeah, all right, but still. We can narrow it down a lot.”

“And I could pinpoint it if I was just smarter!”

He took her hands in his. “You’re the smartest person on the planet, babe. If anybody can pinpoint it, you can.”

“But I can’t! That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’ve been staring at this damned orbital mechanics textbook for hours now, and it’s not making any sense. If we went straight out from the center of the galaxy, and if the galaxy was rotating like a solid disk instead of a fluid, then maybe I could figure out how far we went, but the galaxy isn’t solid, and if we went at an angle across it I couldn’t figure out where we went even if it was.”

“We know what direction we went, don’t we?” he asked.

“What?”

“We have the webcam’s images of the stars after every jump, and we know what direction we intended to go every time, right? So like we figured before, unless there was an aiming error as well as a distance error, we know what direction we went, and we know what direction to aim to undo it all. All we’re missing is the distance of the one big jump.”

Even with the door open, not much daylight made it into the camper. Donna’s face was lit mostly by the computer screen, and its blue glow made her look icy cold. She pulled her hands away. “That’s all we’re missing? Hey, that makes everything better. That’s what I’m trying to figure out, dumb shit!”

“And you’ll get it! Don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry. That’s easy for you to say. You’ve solved your problem.”

“Well, excuse me! I’m sorry I’m so goddamned smart.” He got up and stomped the two steps to the door, but when he stopped and turned around for one last retort and saw her sitting there in the dim light, he took the two steps back and sat down across from her again.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Sure you didn’t,” she said sullenly.

“Look, if I was smart, I wouldn’t have pissed you off, now, would I? I mean, it stands to reason. You’re my honey bunny ducky downy sweetie chicken pie li’l everlovin’ jelly bean. I piss you off, and it’s no sex for me.”

“Oh, that’s flattering.”

“But it’s flawless reasoning.”

“You’re trying to use a logical argument to convince me you’re not smart?”

“How’m I doing?”

“Well, it is about the dumbest thing I’ve heard you say all day.”

“I could start praising President Stevenson.”

“That’s not necessary,” she said quickly. “You do that, and I’d just have to put you out of your misery.” She was trying not to smile, but it looked like she might lose that battle pretty soon.

“How ’bout if I quote him? ‘Space travel is bad for business. It’ll just encourage people to skip out on their debts, like the government does.’ ”

“He didn’t say that.”

“Sure he did. He just didn’t use those words.”

She pursed her lips, and finally cracked a smile, but it vanished as fast as it came. “Nice try, but I still can’t figure out where we are.”

He shrugged. “We don’t have to do it today. It’ll be a couple of weeks before the batteries are charged. Maybe I’ll have another brainstorm before then. Or maybe you will.”

“Fat chance.”

“You never know. In the meantime, come help me cut down a couple of trees.”

Arrow trees were tough. The wood was fibrous, and the saw kept binding. Worse, every time they jarred it, it dropped arrows. Donna kept an eye trained upward and called out a warning when one cut loose, but Trent was getting tired of jumping back every time he bound the saw blade. Plus he was starting to sweat under his raincoat.

“There’s got to be a better way,” he said, pausing for breath.

“We could throw rocks at the branches and knock down all the ones that are ready to come loose,” said Donna.

He looked up at the tuft of greenery at the top of the tree. It was forty feet up, at least. He could pitch a few rocks that far, but not many, and not accurately. He could shoot any individual branch he wanted with the rifle, but the bullet would go right through it. Donna was on the right track, though. What they needed to do was jar the whole tree with a good, solid jolt, and shake down all the loose branches at once.

There were a couple of big logs in the stream bed. They were from the leafy kind of tree, all twisty and not much use for suspending a motor over the stream, but one of them might work as a crude battering ram. Trent had to slosh out into the water to reach them, but it didn’t matter; his boots were already soaked from walking around in the rain and from fording the stream anyway. He cut off the small end of the closest log, leaving about eight feet of log about the size of his thigh, which he and Donna dragged up the bank to the arrow tree.

“Okay,” Trent said when they had gotten into position about ten feet from the tree. “We run toward it, hit it with the log, let go, and keep running. I’m going to go straight through, but I think you should swing wide and go to the side. You’ll get out from under the tree faster that way. And watch you don’t drop the log on your feet.”

“Right,” said Donna.

Trent took the front end, and Donna lifted the back. “Hit, drop, and run,” Trent said. “Ready?” “Yeah.”

“On the count of three. One… two… three.” He started toward the tree, wobbling a little under the weight, then caught his stride and rammed the log hard into the trunk. It rebounded and he let it go, continuing on past and shouting “Run! Run!”