Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

He pounded arrows in the ground and tied the shroud lines to them, then stood back and admired their handiwork. It flapped softly in the breeze, but the stakes held.

“Cupids coming,” Donna said. He looked up and saw four of them spiraling closer, no doubt attracted by his and Donna’s movement. Or maybe it was the parachute itself that attracted them. That wouldn’t be such a good deal if it drew cupids into the area. He splashed back across the stream under its cover and he and Donna waited under the tree to see what they would do.

They were definitely interested in the parachute. They swooped low over it and banked around for closer looks, and one of them tried to land on it until the cupid realized that it wasn’t solid enough to support its weight. The cupid croaked indignantly and flapped into the air again, plucked another arrow from a treetop, and flew away, and within a minute the others had lost interest as well.

“I think it’s a winner,” Trent said as he watched them go.

He was getting tired of slogging back and forth across the stream, so while Donna watched for cupids he sawed down another tree and made a log bridge, positioning it so he could reach the motor while he was standing on the log. Then he carried the new motor across and swapped it for the old one, which was easier said than done since he had to remove the tire with all its arrows and slo-mo shells tied to it, then mount it on the other motor, but with Donna’s help he was able to get it with only a couple knuckles bruised and one lug nut dropped in the water. He fished around for it with his hands, but couldn’t find it before they started going numb from the cold.

“The hell with it,” he said. “Three is enough to hold it. But next time we go star-hopping, remind me to bring some extras.”

Donna said, “Who knew that interstellar exploration would require so many lug nuts?”

“It’s never the stuff you plan for that gets you,” he said. “Well, let’s give this a try.” He swung the motor around until the slo-mo shells dipped into the waterfall, and smiled when it started spinning again. He went back to the pickup and got the battery they’d used through the night, and when he plugged it in, the wheel slowed under load and the battery’s charge light came on.

“All right,” he said. “We’re back in business.”

Trent spent the rest of the day taking the damaged motor apart and fishing out the pieces of arrow and wire. It would never work as a motor again, but with the guts removed it would at least hold a tire and freewheel so they could drive.

Donna went back to work on the computer, and around sunset she came out of the camper with a puzzled look on her face.

“What’s up?” Trent asked. He was mounting the motor back on the pickup.

“I’ve got a number,” Donna said. She should have been bouncing up and down with that news, but she just stood there, frowning.

“What’s the matter?” Trent asked. He slid out from underneath the truck and got to his feet.

“I don’t trust it.”

“Why not?”

“It’s twenty thousand. Even. What are the odds that a glitch in the navigation program would send us exactly twenty thousand light-years away?”

“Sounds pretty likely to me,” Trent said. “One digit and a bunch of zeros. A bit gets flipped in the ten-thousandth place, and here we are.”

“But that’s not what it looks like in binary. It’s nowhere near an even number in binary.”

“Maybe the part of the program with the bug in it isn’t written in binary.”

She shook her head. “None of it’s actually written in binary, but that’s how the numbers are stored. If something went wrong with one of them, it would show up as an even number in binary, not decimal.”

“So maybe the bug’s not in the numbers.”

“What else could it be? We know from looking at the log file that it’s not in the part that actually calculates the jump, because those numbers were right. That doesn’t leave much room in the program for a bug in the numbers while they’re still in decimal form. The navigation module hands them off to the hyperdrive control module, and that’s it. Even the handoff is probably done in binary.”

“Hmm.” Trent was beginning to see what she was getting at. He wiped his hands on his pants and said, “So how did you come up with the number? This morning you were just as stuck as ever.”

She said, “I kept thinking about what you said about working the problem backwards, picking a distance at random and seeing what the velocity would be at that point. There were only a couple of spots in the galaxy where I could do that with what little I’ve learned about orbits, but I got to thinking about the simulator program that we used when we were first learning how to navigate. It only simulates solar systems, but they’re kind of like little galaxies with just a few stars in ’em, so I figured I could set up a simulated solar system and jump around from place to place in it and see how much velocity difference I picked up.”

“I didn’t know you could do that,” he said.

“You can’t tell it where to put the planets, but you can tell it how many planets you want, so I gave it a hundred, plus a big asteroid belt. That gave me plenty of targets, so I just picked one to start with and set up the same angle of jump that we took to come out here, and checked the relative velocities of all the planets and asteroids along that line until I got the right number.”

“I didn’t think planets moved that fast.”

“They don’t. Everything’s about ten times slower, but all the angles are the same, and the distances are proportional. I was even able to account for our initial velocity when we left Mirabelle, and the orbital velocity of the planet we landed on before we came here.”

“But you don’t trust the result, because it’s an even number.”

“It’s just too pat. There’s got to be something wrong with my calculations.”

He didn’t know what to say to her. She was probably right, but this was the one time in their lives when telling her she was right would be the wrong thing to say. He looked out at the waterwheel, hard at work charging up their batteries, and said, “We can go have a look easy enough in a day or two.”

She looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “We can’t just jump twenty thousand light-years and hope I’m right. What if I’m not?”

“Then we look for another planet wherever we wind up. We can’t stay here anyway. We’ll be out of water in a week.”

She said, “We can make a still.”

“Rainwater’s about as close to distilled as it gets, and that didn’t settle any better than creek water. There’s something funky in it. And even if we could get it pure enough, we’re going to run out of food in a month anyway.”

She ran a hand through her hair. “We don’t know that we can’t eat anything here.”

“You want to play Adam and Eve?”

“I don’t want to be the one who gets us killed!” She turned away, her arms crossed and her fists clenched.

He reached out to put a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged him off. He waited a second, then said, “Doing nothing is what’ll get us killed. You may not trust your numbers, but I do, at least enough to go see if they’re right.”

She took a few deep breaths before she turned around and said, “Let me go run the simulation again.”

“Sure.”

She went back inside the camper, and he crawled underneath to finish mounting the motor.

The sun was down by the time he finished. The day had warmed up pretty well when the sun was out, but it started to cool off again pretty quickly as the stars came out. Trent was tired of being cold, and tired of wearing wet boots, so he lit another campfire and he and Donna sat beside it in their stocking feet while they dried out their clothes. Trent amused himself by tossing the tiny little darts off the leafy ends of arrows into the flames and watching them flare up, while Donna just stared out into the night. They heated up a can of chili over the fire and had another beer, and neither of them got sick on it or on the smoke, which pretty much hammered the last nail in the water coffin as far as Trent was concerned.