Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

Trent laughed. “Man, I know that feeling. So what did you do?”

“I went back to the van and made another jump. I was about ten feet away from the building, so I waited until it rotated around the way it was to begin with and sliced off a ten-foot chunk of it. It worked, too. When the interior spun around again, the vault was spilling its guts out into space.”

Dale ducked his head sheepishly when everyone laughed. “Yeah, it’s funny now. At the time, though, man I was pissed. Coins and jewelry and paper money was flying out in a big spiral, whacking into the van’s windshield—”

“Sounds pretty,” Donna said.

Dale snorted. “Oh yeah, it was pretty. Some of it was Krugerrands. I opened the door and tried to catch some of it, but it just bounced off my gloves before I could grab it, and then I lost my grip on the door and almost slipped out into space again myself. And of course by then my breath was condensing inside my helmet, so I couldn’t see, and I was panting like crazy and the air regulator was popping away, and I got this sudden image from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid . You ever see that movie?”

Trent and Donna both shook their heads, but surprisingly, Billy nodded and said, “Robert Redford and Paul Newman. Their best work.”

“You re kidding,” said Dale.

“Yes, of course I must be. Their names must have come to me in a dream.”

Dale shook his head and said, “This guy’s a constant source of surprise. So in the movie, Butch and Sundance are robbing a train, but they use way too much dynamite to blow the safe, and when they touch it off it blows up the entire boxcar, safe and all. It throws all the cash up into the air, and it’s fluttering down like leaves around the Hole-in-the-Wall gang, who’re grabbing it and stuffing it into their hats. But the posse is already closing in on them, so they jump on their horses and ride, all but one of them, who can’t leave all that money behind. He keeps gathering it up even when Butch shouts at him to leave it and ride for safety, and a second later, the posse shoots him dead.”

He took a drink of beer and said, “I decided right there that maybe money wasn’t the most important thing in life, so I slammed the door and headed for home. Only it was the middle of the night at home, and the cops were no doubt hotter on my ass than ever before. I took a look at the sunny side of the planet and decided I’d always wanted to see Australia, so here I am.”

“He had a little trouble landing, too,” said Billy. “He came down on a big rock. It shorted the battery and started a fire.”

Dale said, “I barely got out before the whole van went up. So there I was in the middle of this, with just the clothes on my back.” He waved his arms to encompass the brilliant sunlit landscape beyond the shade of the parachute. “I would have died if these people hadn’t showed up when they did.”

Trent shook his head. “Man, it sounds like you’ve had more than your share of trouble. If it hadn’t started out with you robbin’ a bank, I’d almost feel sorry for you.”

Donna poked him in the side, but Dale said, “No, he’s right. I brought it all on myself.”

“So what are you going to do next?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I just know that I won’t be robbing banks anymore.”

“Do you want a ride home?”

Dale shook his head. “No, thanks. I don’t think North America is a good place for me. I’m not sure if the Australian outback is my place, either, but it’s refreshingly uncomplicated out here. And it’s right in the middle of the continent, so people are dropping in all the time. If I want a ride anywhere, one’s bound to come along in a few days.”

Trent wasn’t sure what to think about this guy. By all rights, he should be locked up. He’d stolen a couple of million dollars in cash and who knew what else in people’s safe deposit boxes, and he’d ruined an entire bank building in the process. The fact that he didn’t get to keep any of the money was something, but even so, just letting him walk free didn’t seem quite right. Except Trent couldn’t see how putting him in jail was going to help anybody else. He’d decided to stop robbing banks on his own. Locking him up now would just be an act of vengeance, and would ultimately cost people more than just letting him go.

He realized that Billy was looking at him with an amused expression on his face.

“What?” Trent asked.

“Life is complicated,” said Billy. “Even out here.” Then he stood up and walked out into the sunlight.

Trent and Donna and Dale stayed under the parachute, swapping stories about their travels and about Rock Springs and the things that had happened to them there. Trent told Dale about meeting Judy and Allen on their space station, and how the Galactic Federation had refused to get involved in human politics.

“Makes sense, in a way,” Dale said. “You start micro-managing everybody else, and you just wind up like the U.S., fighting wars on a dozen different fronts and not doing anybody any good.”

“That’s fine, in principle,” Trent said, “but it doesn’t do us a whole lot of good, either. We’re still stuck with the government from hell.”

“So change it,” said Dale. “It’s designed to let us throw the rascals out every four years. Do you vote?”

“Yes, I vote, for all the good it does. There isn’t a candidate on the ballot who’s any better than the people in office.”

“So run for office.”

Trent snorted. “Yeah, right. I can just imagine how well that would go over.”

“You’d get my vote,” Donna said.

“And I’d get laughed out of the country,” Trent said.

Dale examined his empty beer can as if there was some hidden truth in its side. “You don’t have to start at the top, you know.”

“Dogcatcher,” Trent said with a laugh. “Now there’s a race I could probably win.”

“It’s a start,” said Dale.

“Sure. And it would do the country a whole lot of good to have me out there with a net, goin’ after loose poodles.”

Dale shrugged. “Hey, we do what we can. I bought into the instant success idea for so long, the best I can do now is take myself out of the picture. Be glad you can do more than that.”

Trent was starting to get embarrassed by the way the conversation was going, so he was actually kind of relieved when there was a cry of alarm from out in the open. He jumped to his feet and rushed out from under the parachute to see everyone looking upward, where a big meteor was drawing a fiery line across the sky.

His first thought was that the U.S. had decided to bomb Australia, too, but this was coming in at much too shallow an angle for a meteor-bomb.

“I wonder if that was somebody trying to land,” he said quietly.

Whatever it was, parts were breaking off and burning in separate little chunks, spreading apart until there were a whole swarm of pieces streaking across the sky side by side.

Then another one flared up way in the north, moving at a wide angle to the first. Two people making bad landings within seconds of one another? That didn’t seem likely.

Trent climbed into the pickup and turned on the radio, but there was only static. Way out here in the middle of nowhere, he hadn’t expected much else, but it had been worth a try.

The meteors burned themselves out high in the atmosphere, leaving thick smoke trails behind them that persisted long after the fireballs were gone. Billy walked over to where Trent and Donna and Dale were standing and said, “That looked like the time Skylab came down.”

“Skylab?” Trent asked.

“Before your time,” said Billy. “It was a space station that fell out of the sky.” He held up his rock-on-a-thong necklace and said, “My father made us walk for days so we could watch it. He was a little too accurate in his dream. This piece hit him on the head.”