Jerry Oltion: Anywhere but Here

When he tuned to channel 1, a clear, resonant male voice commenced in mid-sentence: “…la costa oeste en el continente mas grande del planeta, es uno que se parece a un taco mordido…”

“What the heck?” Trent switched to channel 2, but that was broadcasting in Chinese or Japanese or something similar. He switched to channel 3 and finally got English:

“…everything from desert to rain forest. It’s practically a second Earth, with an average temperature just three degrees warmer and gravity ninety percent of normal. The atmosphere is thirty percent oxygen, and the rest nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The plant life is non-allergenic, edible, and pretty, and the animal life is both exotic and plentiful. Our largest settlement is called Bigtown, on the banks of the beautiful Firehose river, which flows out of the Pointy Mountains. We’re located at forty-one degrees north latitude, seventy-three degrees east longitude, with the prime meridian running straight down the western coastline of the largest continent on the planet, the one that looks like a taco with a bite taken out of it. Drop in and say ‘Hi,’ and let us show you what we have to offer.”

There was a brief hiss of static, then the voice said, “Welcome to Onnescu. We’re the very first extrasolar colony, started by Nicholas Onnescu only two weeks after the release of the hyperdrive plans. We’re open to colonization, and we welcome anyone who shares our view that a planet is a place to live, not a place to exploit. We’re happy to see people of all races and religion, including no religion at all, but we ask people who practice fundamentalism of any sort to please find another planet. We also ask new arrivals to please leave their political agendas at home. We want our society to be based on compassion and courtesy, not conflict or—”

Trent switched off the radio. “Kinda talky, aren’t they?”

Donna laughed. “Well, with all the wackos looking for a place to practice their own breed of craziness, it probably doesn’t hurt to be specific.”

“I suppose not. I wonder where we fit into this grand scheme of theirs.”

“We won’t know until we go look.”

He took a deep breath, then nodded.

“Can that thing find Bigtown for us?”

“If it can recognize the shapes of the continents, it can.”

He looked out at the planet again. He couldn’t see much besides clouds at first, but then he spotted a sharp edge that had to be a coastline, and then his eye started to get calibrated to the view and he picked up a big lake and a river valley that emptied into a wide delta. “Is that the Firehose?” he asked hopefully. They had binoculars, but as close as they were, it didn’t seem like they needed them.

“I don’t think so,” Donna said. “According to this, we’re over an island called Weaselnose, about a third of the way around the planet from Bigtown.” Another window popped onto the screen and she said, “We’re moving at about twenty-six thousand kilometers per hour relative to Bigtown. That’ll take twelve minutes to cancel.”

Another twelve minutes in space. That was actually a fairly short time to match speeds with a target planet, but Trent was already sweating like a pig inside his plastic pressure suit. “Let’s get moving, then,” he said.

“Here goes.” She selected Bigtown from the “city” submenu. Trent saw that the “cancel velocity” option was already selected by default; that was smart. The landing sequence would take them to just outside the atmosphere right over their target, and you didn’t want to be moving twenty-six thousand kilometers per hour when you got there. Especially not if you were aimed at the ground.

The landing program would do what Allen Meisner called a “tangential vector translation maneuver,” calculating the right spot to take them so the planets gravity would slow them down and curve their path to match Bigtown’s. On their first interstellar trip—to a planet about fifteen light-years away in the constellation of Cetus—they’d had to figure out everything on their own, eyeballing their target and guessing their velocity, then keying that into Allen’s first-generation control program and waiting to see how close their guess had been. It had taken them several tries to get it right, leaping around the planet like a dog trying to find the right angle on a badger, and even then they’d gone in too fast for comfort. They’d had the first supersonic pickup in history for a minute there before air friction slowed them down enough to let them pop the chutes and come down the rest of the way easy.

More recent versions of the software would set them at the top of the atmosphere with a thousand-kilometer-an-hour upward velocity, do a quick check with landmarks on the ground to make sure their relative velocity was actually what it had calculated, and then drop them ten K at a time until the atmosphere got too thick to punch an instantaneous hole in. By that time—thirty seconds after they arrived—most of of that last thousand would be gone, and their downward velocity would be just about zero.

In theory. Like most Internet freeware, it worked so long as everything else worked, too, but there were always bugs in those programs just waiting to pop out the moment anything unusual happened. Commercial software might have been more reliable, but the U.S. government had put the skids on that right away, and as Donna had discovered last night, they were doing their damnedest to prevent people from getting foreign programs, either. Trent and Donna were lucky to have even a freeware version.

Bigtown was already selected, and the computer said it knew where they were, so Donna hit the “go” button and the program zapped them to the other side of the planet. Trent couldn’t see it directly, since it was night on this side, but there was a big dark patch behind them where no stars shone. He gritted his teeth for a second, waiting for the moment when they slammed into the atmosphere at thousands of miles an hour, but the program had worked the way it was supposed to and they merely rose up from the night side of the planet, losing velocity as gravity tried to reel them back in.

He looked over and saw Donna grinning like a thief. She loved this. Flying through space with nothing between her and instant death but a plastic bag and Trent’s welding job didn’t bother her a bit. He appreciated her faith in his abilities, but right now he could vividly recall every cold joint and curse word that had gone into reinforcing the pickup for space, and he remembered every story he’d heard of the poor bastards who hadn’t sealed up well enough or who simply didn’t understand how much pressure 14 p.s.i. put on a windshield. People went into space with no way to control a tumble, and no backup parachute in case the first one snarled on the way down. Trent had heard about several people who tried to land on the Moon, not understanding that the Moon had no atmosphere for a parachute to work in. Some of the new craters could apparently be seen from Earth if you knew where to point your telescope.

“You’re looking mighty serious for a guy on vacation,” Donna said. “What are you thinking about?”

“Nothin’,” he replied automatically.

“What kind of nothin’?”

He sighed. She was always asking him that, and he never knew how to answer. But she never gave up, so he said, “I guess I was thinkin’ about evolution. Space travel’s going to weed a lot of people out of the gene pool.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?”

“Guess it depends on your point of view. It’s mostly going to be the dumb ones or the unlucky ones who die, but it’s only going to be the dumb or unlucky adventurous ones. The ones who are too chicken to even try it will stay home and live to a ripe old age.”