Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

“Hot damn. How far away do you figure?”

She looked at it, then closed her eyes and said, “It looks about half the size that I remember it. Is that about what it looks like to you, too?”

“About that,” he admitted.

“Then we’re twice as far away as Earth is, which would put us about—jeez, three thousand light-years? Could we be that far off?” She answered her own question. “Of course we could. My calculations were about as accurate as a shotgun.”

“Hey,” Trent said, “shotguns hit stuff, too.”

“Well, we seem to have hit something this time. Let’s go around to the other side and see if the computer recognizes it from there.” She brought up the real-time image on the screen and pointed the cursor at the middle star in the backward Orion’s belt, then keyed in 3,500 light-years. “That ought to make it nice and bright,” she said.

She hit “enter” and the stars shifted. The computer tried to orient itself, but after thirty seconds it made the Homer “D’oh” and gave up.

“Okay, it can’t see anything familiar up ahead,” Donna said, “but neither can I. Orion should be behind us. Turn us around and let’s see.”

“Here goes,” Trent said. He hit the front jets and the nose tilted down. He watched stars sweep up into view, some of them pretty bright. A really bright one popped over the hood, then just as it was about out of sight overhead, another one rose up to replace it. There was a big halo of light around it, and Trent was just starting to wonder if this and the one before it could possibly be the belt stars when Donna gasped and he looked over at her.

And past her, to the gorgeous blue nebula that rose up above the right fender. There were four or five more bright stars embedded in it, clearly the source of the light that made it glow like a neon cloud, There were wispy filaments of dark dust scattered throughout, and distant stars shone through the edges of it.

Then the big one rose into view. Much larger than the blue nebula, this one was reddish, and filled half the windshield. It was brighter on the left side, lit by four stars in a squat diamond buried in the densest part of the nebula, and trailing off into long wisps on the right. A little to the left, a smaller puff of red glowed by the light of another star embedded in the middle of it.

“Where’s the camera?” Trent managed to ask.

“In the back, of course,” Donna said.

“Of course.” Not that he would need a photo to remember this. All he would have to do, even if he lived to be a hundred, was close his eyes and this image would be there.

He brought the pickup’s motion to a stop and leaned close to the windshield. There were the three belt stars, and these two nebulas and that third bright star had to be the sword.

“We’re practically on top of it,” he said.

“Too close for the computer to figure it out,” Donna said. “We’ve got to back off a ways.”

Trent nodded. “Not just yet, though.” They had air enough for hours, and they weren’t lost anymore. He couldn’t imagine a place he’d rather be.

He glanced at the pressure gauge. Steady, but it had been twenty minutes or so since they had sealed up, so he opened the stopcock in his door and let half their air out, then closed it and refilled the cab from the tank under the seat. He smiled when he saw the little puff of steam that drifted away from the truck. Air that he and Donna had breathed was now part of Orion. Every time he looked into the sky at night and saw the constellation shining up there, he would think, I am part of that .

They finally realized that they could kill two birds with one stone. They had a lot of velocity to shed, and that would take some time, so they hunted down a nearby star and found a gas giant planet whose gravity they could use to bring them back into the same ballpark as the local stars. They had plenty of time to look at the nebulae while they let the planet do its thing. It was even better with binoculars. The gas clouds held detail that you couldn’t see by naked eye; folds and filaments and subtle variations of color on every scale.

At last the navigation program told them that they were moving at roughly the same velocity as the gas giant, so Trent aimed the pickup away from Orion and Donna set the distance for 1,500 light-years. They jumped, and Trent didn’t even have time to turn them around again so the computer could get a look at behind them before it flashed the “locked on” message on the screen. It had obviously recognized something else.

“Woo hoo!” Donna yelled. “We’re home free.”

Trent flipped the truck over anyway. Maybe the computer didn’t need to see Orion, but he did.

There it was, glittering just the way he remembered it. Bright as hell, even this far away. He took a deep breath and let it out, feeling days of tension flow out of him with the air. “Man, that’s a sight to behold.”

“It is.”

He pulled his eyes away from it and looked over at Donna. “I’ve been thinking about where to go when we got back to familiar territory, and I’m wondering if Galactic Federation headquarters might not be the smartest bet.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Earth has a nasty habit of shootin’ at people who drop in uninvited, and we’ve only got one parachute left.”

“That’s a good point. You think we could get another one from the Feds?”

“Probably. I wouldn’t mind talking to Allen and Judy about what to do once we get home, either. They might have a better idea than I do.”

“They might.” Donna pulled up the destination menu and found “Gal. Fed. HQ” on the list. When she selected it, all the stats popped into place in the target window.

“It’s only eighty light-years away,” she said. “Practically in our back yard.”

“Everything on that list is practically in our back yard compared to where we’ve been,” said Trent. He looked at the computer and saw the red arrow pointing straight up, so he used the rear jets to tilt the truck upward until the targeting circle started sliding down the screen. He stopped their motion when it was as close to dead center as he could get, and said, “Okay, let’s see if this damned program will take us there.”

Donna hit “enter,” but instead of the familiar shift of stars and light disorientation of a short jump, they felt the major lurch of a big jump and the stars completely changed.

“Son of a bitch,” Trent said. “It did it again.”

“It did.” Donna swallowed hard. “I’m starting to take this kind of personally.”

“Me too. Let’s get us turned around and head right back.” They had to do the edge-of-the-map trick again to find the opposite direction of where they were pointed, but Trent had been careful to note the exact star that had traded places with the targeting circle on the computer screen, so they were able to get a pretty good one-eighty from that. They set the targeting circle on their reverse course and set the distance for 20,000 light-years, and Donna hit the button.

Another big jump, and all the stars changed. The computer didn’t get a quick lock this time, but when Trent set the pickup spinning slowly, he picked up Orion just about the same time the computer did. The constellation was squashed quite a bit head-to-toe, which meant they were a long ways to the north or south of where they had started, but the computer claimed it knew where they were.

“Federation headquarters is now three hundred and thirty-two light-years away,” Donna reported. “I’m setting up this jump in explorer mode.”

“Good idea.”

She copied the distance figure and the coordinates from the automatic targeting window, double-checked to make sure she’d typed everything right, and hit “enter.” The stars did a pretty good shift this time, but a few of them stayed put, and one off to the right was close enough to show a disk.