Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

Zero gee reminded him all too clearly how his stomach had felt a couple days ago, but he held it down. He wasn’t sick this time; just light.

Donna set the computer in its spot on the dashboard and let it get a look at the stars. After a few seconds the red arrow appeared on the top right corner of the screen, so Trent used the right-rear jet to tip the truck that direction until the arrow became a circle that drifted down with the stars. He stopped their motion with the front-left jet, and looked out at the patch of stars that the computer was flagging. “That’s where home is, eh?”

“That’s where I’m prayin’ it is,” Donna said. “Nineteen thousand, five hundred and thirteen light-years from here.”

“I thought you said it was twenty thousand even?”

“From where we first showed up. We made five more hundred-light-year jumps before we gave up looking for home and then backed up thirteen looking for a good planet.”

“Oh. Sure,” he said, feeling dumb. He’d totally forgotten that little detail. That’s why Donna was the navigator.

“So are you ready for the big jump?” she asked.

“Do it.”

She had already keyed in the figures on the ground. Now she just double-checked that they were right, then hit “enter.”

There was the same long moment of disorientation that they’d felt when they made their other big jump, and the starfield completely changed. The bright sun was gone.

“Okay, baby,” Donna whispered, “find something familiar.”

They waited, hardly breathing, for the computer to lock on, but after thirty seconds or so, it made the Homer Simpson “D’oh” sound and flashed “Unable to orient” on the screen. Trent didn’t recognize anything, either, but that didn’t mean anything. The computer was programmed for it; he wasn’t.

“Let’s give it a full picture to work with,” he said, hitting the buttons for both front jets. The nose tilted down, and more stars streamed up from behind the hood, but none of those proved familiar, either. He hit the side jets and let the odd corkscrew motion of rotation in two planes twist them around ninety degrees so the computer could see what had been to their sides, too, but still no luck.

Donna was biting her lip and making little hand motions toward the computer as if she wanted to help it out somehow, but didn’t know how.

Trent brought the pickup to rest with the point they’d been aimed at before out his window. “Okay,” he said, “so we didn’t hit it the first time. We’ve got plenty of power; let’s try jumping to the side a ways. Maybe our angle was off a little.”

“We could jump all day and never find it,” Donna said.

“We could. But at least we’ll have tried.”

She reached for the computer. “A hundred light-years?”

“Five hundred,” Trent said.

“That’s farther than—”

“—the star map is good for, I know. But we’ve got a lot of space to cover. Let’s cover some of it.”

“It’s going to be like jumping from hole to hole in a piece of Swiss cheese,” Donna said.

“Yeah, well, the holes are what makes it Swiss,” Trent replied.

“Huh?”

He shrugged. “That was supposed to be profound.”

“Oh.” She narrowed her eyes. “It wasn’t.”

“I gathered that. So let’s jump already.”

“Any place in particular look good to you?” she asked.

“An even ninety degrees to the side of where we were pointing when we got here,” he said. “Might as well make the math easy if we have to calculate how far we’ve gone.”

“Okay. Here goes.” She moved the cursor until the numbers in the popup display were right, typed in 500 light-years in the distance box, and hit “enter.”

The stars shifted again. The disorientation that went with the jump was less than last time, but that was the only indication that they’d gone only 500 light-years instead of 20,000.

They let the computer look for familiar stars, but it didn’t find anything this time, either. “Where to now?” Donna asked. “Ninety degrees away from the last time?”

“Sure, why not?” Trent said. It didn’t really matter, but they might as well be consistent.

They jumped again, and let the computer have a look at the entire sweep of sky. It found nothing familiar, but Trent felt his heart suddenly start to pound when he saw three stars in a row with another three at an angle above them. They looked just like the belt and sword of Orion. There were even two more bright stars where one shoulder and the opposite knee would be. The constellation was way smaller than Orion was from Earth, but it sure looked right to him.

“There,” he said, hitting the jets to bring the pickup to a stop before it slid out of sight. In his excitement, he overshot and had to correct twice more before he got it, but that left the stars still visible just to the right of center. “Isn’t that Orion?”

“Where?”

“On its side. Right there.” He tapped the computer screen; it was easier to point to a spot on that than at something outside.

“It… certainly looks like it,” Donna said, “but it must not be, or the computer would recognize it. I mean, it’s not like it can’t see it.”

“Tell it to try again,” Trent said.

She pulled down a menu and selected “Orient,” but the computer made the Homer “D’oh” sound again.

“Damn it, I know that’s Orion. I mean, what are the odds of there being another one just like it somewhere else?”

“I don’t know,” Donna said, “but what are the odds of the computer not recognizing something that obvious? It must see something we don’t, like the stars are the wrong distance apart or the wrong spectrum or something.”

“This is the same program that sent us twenty thousand light-years off course.”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“No ‘but.’ That’s Orion.”

She ran a hand through her hair. It stayed put when she let go, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Okay,” she said slowly. “If that’s Orion, then let’s see if I can figure out where we are myself.”

She called up the star map as seen from Sol and found Orion on that. “It’s a hell of a lot bigger from the Sun, that’s for sure,” she said.

“Wait a second,” said Trent. Something didn’t look right. He looked from the screen image to the one out the windshield. He had to cock his head sideways to get the same orientation on it, but when he did, the sword was pointing the wrong way, and the belt was hanging to the right instead of to the left.

“Shit, it’s not the same. It’s backward.”

She looked from one to the other, back and forth, and finally said, “What if we’re behind it?”

“Is that possible?” he asked. “I thought the stars in a constellation were all different distances away. That’s why they get all messed up when you go very far. There isn’t a ‘behind’ to a constellation, is there?”

“I don’t know.” She pointed the cursor at one of the belt stars on the computer’s image of Orion as seen from Earth and read the distance figure that popped up beside it. “Wow. Fifteen hundred light-years. That’s a ways.” She pointed at the next one. “Fifteen hundred to that one, too.” She hit the third belt star. “Same.” She pointed at the left shoulder and said, “Not that one; it’s only four hundred. The right shoulder is only four hundred, too, but that star right next to it is fifteen, and the sword and the left knee are, too. That’s bizarre. They’re all the same distance from Earth. I had no idea.”

“So they would still look like they went together from the other side,” Trent said. “But are those the right ones to make it look like this?”

“Left knee and belt and sword,” she said, “and this one here next to the right shoulder. We’ve got a left shoulder and a right knee and a belt and a sword. I think that’s it.”