Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

It didn’t matter. They were leaving anyway. In another day, maybe two, the batteries would be charged, and they would be off to face another problem somewhere else. Trent didn’t have any doubt that the universe would serve them up another one. Even if they made it home without incident, there were problems enough waiting there to last a lifetime.

Trouble was like an onion, he decided, only you peeled it from the inside out. Instead of working your way down to smaller and smaller ones, you worked your way out to bigger and bigger ones, and they kept going forever. There didn’t seem to be any shortcut through them, either. Simply bailing out for another life didn’t work. The very trouble they were trying to escape had followed them to Mirabelle. He didn’t suppose he could blame the United States government for the programming glitch that brought them here, at least not directly, but their refusal to let people develop better software and sell it on the open market had definitely contributed to Donna’s picking this version to download.

That was something else to worry about. Would the software take them back to Earth? It had worked fine jumping around out here in the middle of nowhere, but if they did wind up in familiar space again, could they just pick Earth off the menu and jump to it, or would they wind up another twenty thousand light-years away? Maybe they should try for Onnescu again. The program had at least taken them there okay.

He supposed he and Donna would have to hash that out before they left, but he didn’t feel like getting into it tonight. Not while she was so unsure of her calculations to even get them back to familiar space.

The alien wood didn’t leave much in the way of coals, so they had to keep feeding fresh wood into the flames to keep it going. After a while it became more trouble than it was worth, so Trent suggested they turn in, and Donna just shrugged and said, “Why not?”

The long days and long nights were really messing with Trent’s sleep patterns. He had no trouble sacking out, but it was still pitch black when he awoke, and he just lay there for hours afterward, waiting for daylight. When it finally came, he was tired again, but he got up and went outside to check the waterwheel.

It was still spinning, though not as fast as yesterday. The stream was back down to the level it had been when they first arrived. The battery was fully charged, though, so he swapped it out for the other one and installed the charged one in the pickup.

He spent the rest of the day going over everything he could think of, making sure that it was ready for space. He used the foot pump to refill the air tanks under the seat and the tanks in their Ziptite suits. He could have used the compressor, but the battery was fully charged now and he didn’t want to draw it down even a little bit if he could help it. Besides, he was beginning to see how long and boring a day could be with nothing to fill it, and refilling the tanks by hand was at least something he could do.

Donna alternated between double-checking her logic on the computer and battening down the hatches in the camper for zero-gee. By nightfall, the pickup was as ready to go as the day they’d left Earth, except for the second battery, which was still at only three-quarters of a charge. It would be ready by morning, though.

Trent had an even harder time sleeping that night. Tomorrow they would be in space again, for better or for worse. They would either find their way home, or have to find another planet that would be more hospitable than this one.

It occurred to him that they’d never named the place. They’d named its creatures, but not the planet itself. What would be appropriate? Plasticland? That sounded more like a shopping mall than a planet. Styrohome? Better, but it wasn’t actually home. He tried to come up with a play on polystyrene or polyurethane or PVC, but he never came up with anything he liked. Unless Donna had a bright idea, he guessed it would just have to be “that place with the cupids where we stopped to recharge the batteries and figure out where we were.” Kind of a shame to discover a planet and not name it, but he didn’t think they’d be back, and this wasn’t the sort of place he wanted to name after himself or Donna. He wanted their planet to be habitable, at least.

What would his ideal planet be like, he wondered? He and Donna had gone out looking, but they hadn’t really defined their terms ahead of time. He tried to think about it now, and decided that it would probably look a lot like this one, with mountains and streams and trees, only without the risk of getting an arrow through the top of your head. He would opt for a spot that was a little more open, though. Close to the mountains, but not in them. He was already getting tired of looking at the same old valley day after day.

As he drifted off to sleep, he realized that the picture forming in his mind was of the red buttes around Rock Springs.

The other battery was fully charged in the morning. Trent installed it in the truck, then dismantled the water-wheel and re-mounted the motor, too. The sun hadn’t even cleared the mountain by the time they were ready to roll.

They put on their Ziptites and sealed the doors, then overpressurized the cab to make sure it was tight. There was no radio to listen to this time, and neither one of them felt like playing the stereo. Donna held the computer on her lap and ran one more time through what they were going to do.

“I calculated the exact spot in the sky where we want to go,” she said, “based on the position of the stars after the big jump and all the jumps we made after that. It’s about five degrees off from where we were aiming when we did that trick with the map, but I think it’s more accurate.”

“I’d be surprised if it wasn’t,” Trent said.

He looked out at the meadow that they’d called home for five days. There was a path worn from the pickup to the stream, and the logs were still there, too. There was a pile of arrows and slo-mo shells on the bank where he’d cut them loose from the waterwheel. Closer at hand, there was a smudge of plastic residue under the tree beside them where they’d had their fire. Other than that, there was nothing to indicate that humans had been here. They’d undoubtedly left some bacteria behind, but the odds of that thriving here were slim to none. Intestinal bacteria were just as specialized as people; they would have little better chance of surviving here than Trent and Donna would.

Still, he could reduce the odds of that down to practically nothing. He shifted the pickup into forward and drove out into the meadow, stopping right over the spot where they’d dug their latrine. He’d filled it with dirt, but this would be even better. Pack out what you pack in, and all that.

He looked at the pressure gauge. Steady as a rock. “Ready to do it?” he asked.

“Not really,” Donna said, “but I’m probably as ready as I’m going to get.”

“Good enough for me,” he said. He opened the stopcock in his door and listened to the excess air rush out until the gauge steadied out at eleven and a half pounds—atmospheric pressure here—then he closed it off again and said, “Let’s go.”

“Hang onto your hat, cowboy.”

He reached up and did just that, glad to be wearing it again. He’d stowed their helmets and shoulder guards in the camper for posterity, but if he never wore them again, it would be too soon.

Donna hit the “enter” key, and the valley blinked out of existence. Sunlight blasted in the driver’s window, casting stark shadows across the cab, at least until the usual cloud of debris rose up to mask it. The pickup rocked a little as the wet ground boiled away beneath them, but Trent let it go without correction until they were quite a ways away from the biggest mass of it and they weren’t getting bumped much any more. He didn’t want to waste a single puff of air that they didn’t have to.