Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

The first ones were easy, but when he got half of them done, he saw the flaw in his plan: he couldn’t do the others without the ones he’d already done sticking into the falling water. They were definitely going to work to generate power, because he couldn’t keep the wheel from spinning back around every time one of them caught some water.

He had to untie the motor and swing it around so the shells couldn’t fill up, tie on all the arrows and shells, then swing it back into place. It immediately started spinning, and he let out a wild “Woo-hoo!” when it did.

Donna came to the camper door and started clapping when she saw what he’d done. “Way to go, cowboy!” she yelled.

“It ain’t done yet,” he said, but it didn’t take much longer to finish. He went back to the pickup and pulled one of the two batteries from its cradle under the hood, unplugged the patch cord between it and the motor he’d removed, and carried them back to the logs, where he mounted the battery next to the motor, tying it down good so curious rat-cats couldn’t knock it into the water. Then he plugged the battery into the motor’s control box. The wheel slowed and the logs dipped downward a couple inches when he made the last connection, and he thought for a second that they would topple all the way into the pool, but the counterweight held, and the battery’s charge light went on.

Donna had come with him to the edge of the stream. “Now you can cheer,” he told her.

“Yay!” she said, and she gave him a big hug.

They watched the waterwheel spin. The ammeter was mounted in the pickup’s dashboard, so he had no idea how fast the battery was charging, but he counted revolutions of the wheel and figured it was doing maybe thirty rpm, which would be about three hundred feet a minute… which was pretty slow. He could walk that fast. Charging a battery that could drive a pickup a couple hundred miles at that rate would take a while.

The motor was waterproof, but he wasn’t so sure about the battery, so he got a garbage bag and covered it with that, tying the bag down tight. He couldn’t see the charge light now, but he could check it from time to time. It wasn’t like he had a whole lot else to do now.

Donna still did. Now the entire weight of their situation rested on her. She went back into the camper and started in on the computer again, grimly determined to solve their navigation problem by the time the batteries were charged.

Trent read over her shoulder for a while, trying to piece together what she was learning, but it might as well have been in French for all the good it did him. He watched her draw circles and triangles on the screen and call up the calculator program to crunch numbers, and he even recognized the numbers, but he couldn’t follow what she was doing with them.

He was afraid to distract her with a bunch of questions, but even so she finally said, “Go whittle on a stick or something. You’re making me nervous.”

It was actually a relief to be let off the hook. He’d felt obliged to help if he could, but he’d known as well as she had that he wasn’t going to magically figure out where they were. So he went back outside and watched his waterwheel spin, still pleased with himself about that, at least. The slo-mo shells dipping into the fall made a satisfying sploosh when they filled, and when they emptied out at the bottom of their arc they spread little skittering water balls across the pool. The logs supporting the motor flexed a little with each refill, their soft creak adding to the sound of flowing water. After a couple days of non-stop work, it was hard to believe that he could just stand there and watch more work being done without him. This must have been how the first guy to hoist a sail felt, suddenly freed of paddling everywhere.

The rain showed no sign of letting up. It wasn’t coming down hard; just steady. He checked on the collection bucket and was happy to see that it already had a couple of inches in the bottom, and while he was at it he pounded arrows into the ground around it to keep animals from knocking it over again.

Then he went out with his camp saw and gathered some more firewood. They might not use it, but they might, and he’d much rather haul wood during the day than after dark.

He spent a while inspecting the dents and scratches the truck had picked up over the course of their travels, and in a what-the-hell mood he went ahead and washed it, using their cook pot for a wash bucket and a sponge from under the sink. It looked pretty good when he was done, if you didn’t look too close and ignored the missing wheel.

He found the meteorite in the glove box while he was cleaning out the cab. Holding it in his hand was a surprising comfort. It wasn’t from Earth, or even from the solar system, but it was from someplace a lot closer to it than here. So was the pickup and everything in it, but for some reason the meteorite reminded him more of home than any of the man-made stuff. If they ever made it back, he would have a belt buckle or something made from a slice of it.

Donna was still at the computer when he went in around mid-day to check on her, but she wasn’t studying orbits anymore. She had a star map program on the screen, and she had a piece of paper on the table beside the computer, on which she had drawn a big circle with little dots scattered around one tiny portion of it.

“What’s that?” he asked.

He was half afraid she would tell him to go take another hike, but she just looked up and said, “The galaxy. I decided to hit the problem from another angle. Like you said yesterday, we know what direction we were headed in relation to Earth when we took the big jump, but I didn’t know what direction that was in galactic terms, so I mapped it out. I figured I might get lucky and it would turn out to be a direction that didn’t require a lot of math to figure out a velocity change.”

“It makes a difference?”

She nodded. “As near as I can tell, if we went straight out or straight in or straight along the tangent—that’s this line that points the same direction that the galaxy rotates—then it would be fairly easy to guess our distance from the difference in velocity.

“So were you?”

“Was I what?”

“Lucky.”

She made a face. “No. We went about nineteen and a half degrees inward from the tangent. That means we went toward the core a little bit as well as across. That’s two variables instead of just one.”

The lines on her drawing were starting to make sense now. “So how far are we talking, anyway?” he asked. “I mean, if we went straight in or out or across?”

“What difference does it make? We didn’t.”

“But it might still give us a better idea of how far we came than we’ve got now.”

She sighed theatrically and said, “Well, if Earth is going half a million miles an hour this way,” and she pointed to one of the arrows she’d drawn on the galaxy, “then in order to gain another third of a million, which is what we had to make up, we would have to go two-thirds of the way farther out from the core. Or two-thirds closer in, depending on whether we had to speed up or slow down. That’s assuming that the galaxy is a solid disk, which it isn’t. The outside spins slower than the inside, which is just the opposite of what you’d get if it was.”

“So what does that mean?”

“It means my brain hurts. I’ve got to figure out how to calculate a star’s actual orbit around the galaxy, and then I’ve got to figure out how much difference in velocity there is between two stars partway around it and at different distances from the center.”

Trent looked at the drawing. Two-thirds of the way from Earth to the core of the galaxy? That was a long damned ways. The entire region of space that their star map could recognize was probably about the size of one of those dots Donna had drawn. If they couldn’t figure out an accurate distance back to that patch of stars, then knowing the right angle to aim for wouldn’t help them a bit.