Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

“Don’t say ‘can’t’ when you mean ‘won’t,’ ” Trent said.

“Very well; ‘won’t,’ then.”

The snowball started chittering, and a moment later the arm speakers followed along behind it, saying, “We can do one thing. I have long felt that we should undertake a mapping project of the entire galaxy. Your experience with inadequate star maps underscores the need for a more comprehensive survey, and this is a task that falls directly in the Galactic Federation’s purview.”

“Better star maps,” Trent said. “People are gettin’ killed, and you’re going to make better star maps.”

“Yes,” said the snowball. “Those maps will save lives, too.”

That was probably true. They would certainly have helped him and Donna find their way home. But it was a far cry from the help they had wanted.

“Knock yourself out,” he said. Then he turned to Donna and said, “I think we’re done here. Let’s go home.”

They didn’t leave right away. They still needed to install a better navigation program on their computer, and Judy wouldn’t let them go without at least having a meal with them and catching up on old times. Donna wouldn’t have a meal with anybody without a bath first, so she and Trent wound up in a guest room just off the docking bay, trying to figure out how to use the plumbing.

They identified the bathroom easily enough by the mirror and the sink and the medicine cabinet, though the sink had a clear bubble over it with holes in the front to stick your hands through so water wouldn’t come flying out all over the place, and the medicine cabinet had clips and pockets instead of shelves to hold everything. The toilet was either disgusting or amazing; Trent couldn’t decide which. The seat was soft enough to seal around his butt when he sat down, and then the air pressure went down inside, sucking everything down to the bottom of the bowl before it could make a mess. It took a minute to get used to the steady breeze blowing down between his legs, but he eventually relaxed enough to get the job done.

The shower turned out to be a separate room beside the bathroom, an oblong big enough for two or three people at once, with lights at either end and little round bulges with holes in the ends of them sticking out of the walls every foot or two. Those had to be nozzles, but there was no obvious way to turn them on. Trent grabbed one and gave it a twist, then pushed on it, then pulled on it and a jet of warm water sprayed him right in the face. He shoved it in again and it stopped.

“Success!” he said, scraping the water off his face. It drifted away in fat globules, which Donna, watching from the open door, batted back inside the shower. She slipped on in and the door closed behind her, and Trent tugged the nozzle on again.

Water sprayed against his chest and bounced everywhere, dancing in the air all around them; then a soft breeze began to pull it up through an opening above their heads.

“I think that’s where our feet are supposed to go,” Donna said. She curled into a ball and turned over, stretching out again with her legs next to Trent’s face.

He wasn’t quite as limber, but he managed to turn around, too, and open another nozzle on that end so they had water flowing at both ends of the shower.

There was a bar of soap in a little mesh bag hanging right where they needed it. They had fun lathering one another up and washing each others hair and rinsing off, then they had even more fun experimenting with how other things worked in zero-gee. It was a long shower by the time they turned off the water jets and chased all the loose globs of water into the drain before they opened the door again, but they both felt a lot better about life by then.

They toweled off and put on fresh clothes that they’d brought from the camper, then set out to find Judy and Allen’s apartment. Trent wore his hat and boots, even though he wasn’t likely to need either inside a space station. He just felt naked without them.

Potikik guided them through the space station with instructions through their mobile speakers, leading them to a huge open atrium lined with shops and filled with airborne aliens—with a guy-line along the walls that they hung onto so they wouldn’t become airborne, too—and into a more conventional corridor that led past several more parks before ending at an unassuming slit in the wall.

“You’re there,” said Potikik. “Enjoy your dinner.”

There was no doorbell. There was no door to knock on, either. Trent rapped a knuckle on one of the lips, but it made practically no noise, so with a “what the hell” shrug, he pushed the two sides apart the way he’d learned to open all the other doors on the station.

This one didn’t open, but it did make a loud hum, like a singer warming up his voice. Nothing more happened for a few seconds, but just when Trent was wondering if he should make the door hum again, it opened to reveal Allen floating there with his arms out wide.

“Come in!” he said, reaching out and pulling them into the living room beyond. At least that’s what Trent assumed the place was; it had paintings on the walls, and bookshelves with little elastic webs across them to keep the books from drifting loose, and potted plants and some kind of twisted abstract sculpture that had to be alien. There was no furniture, but in zero gee there didn’t seem to be any need for it.

Allen didn’t even pause in the living room. He led them right on through, and through a video room with a six-foot screen on the wall, past archways that led to bedrooms—with hammocks rather than beds, just like in their guest room—on through a dining room that had a table with attached chairs and seatbelts to hold people to the chairs, and into a kitchen, where Judy was busy chasing vegetables through the air.

“We had a little accident with the salad spinner,” she explained, fielding a baby carrot and popping it into a yellow plastic tub with a lid full of flexible slots. Trent and Donna and Allen joined in the hunt, and they quickly brought the salad under control again.

“Cooking without gravity is a different experience,” Judy said. “I’m still not very good at it. Allen is much better.”

“I use the microwave a lot,” he said. “Heat transfer without physical contact is the key. Do you like rabbit?”

Trent laughed, somewhat ruefully. “Last time we were asked that, dinner got interrupted by a meteorite.”

“That was on Mirabelle?”

“Yeah.”

“Then we’ll have salmon.”

Trent said, “No, rabbit’s okay. I just—it just reminded me, that’s all.”

Allen nodded. Then a moment later he brightened and said, “Hey, I’ve invented something I think you’ll appreciate.” He opened a very ordinary looking refrigerator at the back of the kitchen and said, “Budweiser, right?”

“Absolutely,” Trent said.

“Here you go.” He handed over a regular can of beer, but it had a little plastic cap on it like a water bottle with a push-pull stopper. “You shove down on it like this to pop the top,” he said, demonstrating, “and then when you want a drink, you just stick the cap in your mouth and pull it open with your teeth. Internal pressure squirts beer into your mouth, and you push it closed when you’ve got enough. No foam flying all over the place.”

Trent gave it a try, and it worked like a charm. “Hot damn,” he said. “I hope you got a patent on this.”

Allen shrugged. “Eh. Managing a business is a pain. I just like to invent stuff.”

“How’s your alternate dimension thing going?” Donna asked, accepting another beer from him.

“Huh?”

“Last time we saw you, you were working on something that you said would let you see into alternate dimensions.”