Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

He hated this math stuff. It made him feel helpless. He had always preferred just jumping into things and figuring them out by trial and error until he got ’em right, and most times that was all it took, but that didn’t seem to be the way it worked here. It was doubly frustrating because they knew which direction to go. All they really needed was a reasonable guess as to how far, and they’d be in business.

“Can you work it backwards?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“If you can’t figure the distance from the velocity, how about picking a distance at random and figuring the velocity you’d wind up with when you got there? It’d give you at least an idea of how far out of the ballpark you were, wouldn’t it?”

“It’s the damned angle,” she said. “I could do it if we stayed the same distance from the center of the galaxy, but it’s no easier figuring velocity than it is distance with that angle in there.”

He didn’t see why not, but then the whole deal was beyond him anyway. If he’d gotten stuck out here on his own, he wouldn’t even be trying to learn how to calculate anything; he’d just charge up the batteries and head down that nineteen-and-a-half-degree line until he saw something he recognized or ran out of juice, whichever came first. But interstellar distances weren’t like distances back home; his method would probably leave them stranded out in the ass end of nowhere with no more clue where they were than they had now.

“Hey, it’s lunchtime,” he said. “Let’s give it a break and hit it again with some food in our stomachs.”

“All right,” Donna said. She didn’t seem very interested in anything but her math problem, but that was just her usual obsessive focus. If he put food in front of her, she would eat it.

He went outside again to check the rain bucket and decided there was enough in it to boil some more noodles for lunch. The thought of noodles so soon after last night’s disastrous run-in with them didn’t sound all that good, but they really needed to see if they could use any local water at all, and Trent would rather find out in daylight than after dark again tonight. Maybe chicken-flavored ramen noodles would be enough like chicken soup to taste like comfort food rather than an experiment in alien cooking.

There was no reason why they both had to get sick if the rainwater wasn’t drinkable. He got a bottle of Earth water from the camper to use in Donna’s noodles, then rinsed out the cook pot with a little of it and dried the pot good with a towel before he poured the rest of the bottled water into it.

He got out the alien alcohol and started a fire, then hung the pot from the wire over the flames. It didn’t take long to boil—this plastic wood burned hotter than real wood—but Trent let it boil for a few minutes longer before he added the noodles, just in case he hadn’t gotten the pot clean enough.

When her soup was ready, he poured it into a bowl and took it into the camper for her, then made himself another potful with rainwater. He let that boil for a good, long time, but when he realized that he’d boiled off about half of what he started with, he added the noodles and made soup with it.

It smelled good. It tasted good, too. It even warmed up his insides the way it was supposed to. But a couple of hours later he was on his knees out in the meadow again, calling dinosaurs even worse than the first time. Not even rainwater was safe.

They didn’t see any animals that day. The rain continued to fall, and the waterwheel continued to spin. Trent checked the battery’s charge every couple of hours and watched it nudge upward, until by nightfall it was almost at thirty percent. That was better than he’d expected. A couple more days at that rate and it would be fully charged.

He swapped out that battery with the other one just before dark and installed the partially charged one in the pickup. Might as well have a real light in the camper tonight, and give the fridge a chance to cool off again. Not that it had ever warmed up much in this weather. It was cold enough to see their breath even inside the camper.

They forwent a fire that night even so. Neither one of them felt much like sitting outside in the rain, even by a fire. So they just closed up the camper and let their body heat warm it up as much as it was going to before they went to bed. Donna wanted to stay up and study some more, but Trent challenged her to a game of poker instead, and they wound up drinking beer and playing for matchsticks until they were both tired enough to sleep. They only had one beer each, because the beer and the bottled water they’d brought with them were the only things on this planet that they knew they could drink, but with the waterwheel recharging the batteries, Trent figured they would make another try for home before they died of thirst anyway, even if Donna didn’t come up with the distance.

They woke up to snow on the ground. There were just a couple of inches, but it completely transformed the valley, making it seem twice as open as before. It was much brighter, too, even though the sky was still cloudy.

Trent put on his jacket and checked to make sure his generator was still working. There were little knobs of ice on the ends of the arrows holding the slo-mo shells, but the stream hadn’t frozen, and the wheel was still spinning merrily. The battery read almost forty percent charged.

There were no paw prints near the camper, but there was a set running uphill along the top of the stream bank. They looked surprisingly like cat or dog prints, with pads and claws in the right places and the same left-right gait as anything you’d expect to see on Earth. They veered toward a clump of bushes and there was a messed-up patch of snow right there, intersecting a smaller set of prints. The small prints didn’t continue on.

The sky cleared as the day progressed. Sunlight on the snow was bright enough to make Trent squint even with sunglasses, but the snow didn’t last long under its intense rays. By mid-afternoon it was all gone, and the stream was running hard and fast. Trent wouldn’t want to cross it now unless he had to. The waterwheel was spinning about twice as fast as it had been that morning, though; he would probably have to swap out a fully charged battery by nightfall.

He kept his eye out for cupids, and it wasn’t long before he spotted a couple riding the thermals off the sides of the valley. Most of them already carried arrows in their claws, belying his earlier prediction that they couldn’t do that for long. They were either stronger fliers than he’d given them credit for, or they were hungry enough to put out the energy so they could attack at first sight of something edible.

Apparently to them “edible” meant anything in motion. Trent was standing under the tree just across the stream from the waterwheel and watching one circle its way down the valley when it suddenly straightened out and made a bombing run straight toward him. He was at the edge of the tree’s canopy, where he’d thought he was safe, but he backed up a couple of steps when he saw the cupid coming. It released its arrow anyway, and he dodged to the side before he realized that the arrow was going to fall way short of him. He watched it fall, then watched it hit what the cupid had been aiming for all along: the waterwheel spinning steadily in the rushing stream.

The arrow struck dead-on in the middle of the motor’s cylindrical case, and Trent expected it to bounce off harmlessly, but instead there was a big flash of electricity and the arrow burst into flame.

“Son of a bitch!” he yelled, rushing out from under the tree, but the stream was too high to walk across on the rocks. He had to wade through the tail end of the pool, struggling to keep his footing in the current while he kept watch overhead for a second shot aimed at him.