Jerry Oltion: Anywhere but Here

The seatbelt held him down well enough that he didn’t feel like he was falling. Donna loved roller coasters and stuff like that anyway, so she wouldn’t care even if she was falling.

She giggled. “That was half a million kilometers.”

Trent took a deep breath. Half a million. Kilometers were shorter than miles, but it was still a long damned ways from home. And this was just a pit stop to dump the dirt and make sure everything was working before they took the big jump between stars.

He ran through his mental checklist. The pressure gauge was holding steady. The air tanks were full. The batteries were charged. There was a steady patter of dirt and rocks against the undercarriage, but none of the ominous squeals or groans that would mean something was about to blow.

The Sun drifted diagonally from upper left to lower right across the windshield. It was brighter without the atmosphere in the way, but not too much so. The biggest difference was in the contrast: anything sunlit was bright and colorful as ever, but the shadows were stark and black.

The fact that the Sun was moving meant that the expanding cloud of debris was pushing unevenly against the bottom of the truck, putting it into a slow tumble. Not a big problem at the moment, but they would need to kill that spin before they tried to jump to anywhere in particular. The hyperdrive could send the pickup in any direction, so they didn’t need to be pointed at their target, but they did need to be steady when they jumped so the drive could aim properly.

Trent had installed compressed air jets on the corners of the bumpers for just that purpose. Now he watched for a moment until he got a feel for the trucks motion, then reached to the control panel he’d bolted below the radio and pushed the valve for the front left jet. There was a soft hiss from the air tank under his side of the seat, and a cone-shaped patch of fog shot upward in front of the truck.

“That looked almost like hitting a puddle,” Donna said.

He laughed softly. “I guess some things don’t change no matter where you go four-wheelin’.”

The shot of air slowed the truck’s tumble just a little, but not enough, so he pushed the valve again. That overdid it, and left them rolling to the side as well, so he hit both right-side valves for a quick burst to cancel their roll, then just tapped the right rear one. The pickup came to a stop with the Sun just below Donna’s window.

Trent watched the last of the rocks tumble away, wondering if any of them would make it back to Earth. NASA had suggested that people should go five hundred thousand kilometers or farther on the first jump so the Moon could sweep up most of the debris, but even that didn’t guarantee clear space around the planet. Several communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit had already been hit, and it was just a matter of time before something whacked the space station or another hyperspace traveller. Some people were worried that near-Earth space would become so dangerous in a few years that nobody could use it, but Trent imagined someone would figure out a cleaner way to launch before that happened. Big ski jumps, maybe, that people could drive off just before they hit the “go” button.

That would probably cut down on casual trips even more than the government ban. It was hard enough to jump from solid ground, but Trent didn’t particularly want to find out what a mid-air jump would feel like. What if you pushed the wrong button, or the hyperdrive decided not to work that one time? Catching air on a whoop-de-do was one thing, but coming back down hard after a truck-high jump could do nasty things to your suspension.

That was a worry for another time. They were here now, and their dirt cloud was pretty much dissipated. “Okay,” he said. “No point hanging around here. Let’s make tracks for Alpha Centauri.”

Donna nodded. Her hair billowed out all around her face, and she casually swept it aside with her left hand while she set the computer up on the dashboard with her right, shoving it against the windshield where its webcam could see straight out over the hood to get a position check on the stars. After a few seconds of comparing its internal star map to the view outside, the computer flashed the “locked on” window. She pulled down the “destination” menu and selected Alpha Centauri from the preset choices, and an automatic targeting window popped up with the coordinates and the distance. On their first trip into space they’d had to key in the coordinates by hand for the stars they wanted to visit, but now there were over a thousand choices already programmed, and new ones were added to the online database every day as people reported in from their travels.

The computer displayed the same image that they could see in front of them, and put a red circle around one of the bright stars. “There it is,” Donna said. “Alpha Centauri, here we come.” She pushed the “enter” key.

There was a moment of disorientation, so brief that it was hard to decide if it was even real or not. The stars may have shifted just a hair, but that was too subtle to be sure of, either. The only real difference was the position of the Sun: it had shifted from the right side of the truck to a little below and behind. Only it wasn’t the Sun now. It looked exactly the same to Trent, but unless the hyperdrive had messed up, this was Alpha Centauri A, the brighter of the two stars that made up the Centauri double.

“The computer needs a sky sweep to find planets,” Donna said.

“Okay.” Trent hit both of the front jets at once, and the nose of the pickup dropped downward. He let it go for a full revolution, then used the rear jets to stop their motion again.

The computer flashed an information box on the screen, and Donna said, “Looks like we’re about sixteen million kilometers from Onnescu.” That was the name of the first settler on Alpha Centauri’s habitable planet, and while he hadn’t tried to name it after himself, that’s what people had started calling it, and the name stuck.

Sixteen million kilometers wasn’t much in space. Trent looked at the computer screen and saw a red arrow pointing to the left and down, so he used the right jets and then the front jets until the arrow became a circle around one of the stars that drifted onto the screen. He looked out the windshield at the same patch of sky and eventually spotted the planet, just big enough to show as an oblong blob instead of a point of light.

“Taking us in closer,” Donna said, and hit the “enter” key again.

The planet jumped upward and much, much closer, filling the entire view out the windshield and to both sides with swirly white cloud patterns.

“Woo hoo!” Trent yelled, flinching backward. “That… was a good shot.”

Donna smiled. “Beats the hunt-and-guess method we used on our first trip, doesn’t it?”

“I dunno. I think I just about had a heart attack there. When we were huntin’ and guessin’, I kind of expected surprises.” He watched the clouds for a few seconds to see if they were getting noticeably closer, but instead they seemed to be receding. Good. That meant they had some time to check things out before they jumped again. “Let’s see if we can pick up their beacon,” he said. He flipped on the citizens’ band radio under the dash and punched the channel button down to 1, the agreed-upon frequency that colony planets would use to broadcast who lived there and who was welcome to join them. Trent already knew about Onnescu by word of mouth and the flyer they had picked up at the brew pub, but he wanted to check and see how the beacon system worked. CB radios normally had just a few miles of range, but the beacons were supposed to broadcast with a lot more power than usual, reaching anything within line of sight for thousands of miles. Theoretically, three of them in synchronous orbit could provide coverage to anyone anywhere near the planet. Trent had added a power amp to his transmitter, too, for the same reason. He wanted to be able to talk to the ground while he was still in orbit.