The getaway special (10 page)

11

His name was Trent. It turned out there was a passenger in the truck, too, a blonde, thin, heavily made-up girl named Donna, but she'd been sitting so close to Trent she hadn't been visible from outside. Judy wondered if they were on a date or if they were married, but she didn't think it would be polite to ask.

And Trent and Donna were nothing if not polite. After Trent's initial startled exclamation, "Where the heck did
you
come from?" and Judy's explanation that they had made an emergency re-entry from the space station, he had offered them a ride to town, treating them like any other random hitchhikers. Squeezing four people in the cab would have been impossible with two of them wearing spacesuits, so they took them off and stashed them in back, along with the getaway special canister, under a black vinyl cover that stretched drum-tight with more snaps around the edge than a satellites thermal shroud. Now, wearing just their spandex liners, crisscrossed with the cooling and ventilation tubes, Judy and Allen sat in the cab and held their hands out toward the heater coils while Trent drove. They covered the same distance Judy and Allen had walked in just a couple of minutes, and continued on westward. Okay, Judy thought, so she'd guessed wrong. It wouldn't have mattered. As they drove, she realized they could have walked for days in either direction at the rate they'd been going and never have reached anything.

The pickup shook its passengers almost as badly as the descent module. Rather than plow straight through the snowdrifts, its wide tires rode up over them, then rebounded off the road when they came down the other side, magnifying every bump and making Trent struggle for control every fifty feet or so. The laser-sighted rifle in the gun rack behind their heads rattled against the back window and threatened to fall free with every jolt, making Judy fear for a head injury from behind as well as from the front. To keep her mind off the imminent crash, she asked as nonchalantly as she could while bracing herself on the dashboard, "So what town are we heading for?"

"Rock Springs," Trent said, then when he realized that didn't mean anything to her he added, helpfully, "Wyoming."

"Ah," Judy said, trying to decide whether that was good or bad. Was this Rock Springs big enough to hide a couple of astronauts in, or would they stick out like polar bears in a tar pit?

Whatever its size, it had to be better than standing out in the sagebrush with the sun going down. Allen had been burning to say something ever since they saw the truck. He'd resisted for a couple of miles, but after maybe the hundredth time they surged over a snowdrift, then bounced two or three more times on the fat balloon tires, he could contain himself no longer. "You know," he said, "narrow tires are actually better in snow."

Trent thought about that for a bit, then said, "Depends on what you call 'better.' Smoother ride, I'll grant you. But we didn't come out here for a smooth ride." He grinned.

"Why did you come out here?"

Trent glanced to Donna, who was leaning against his side as if glued there, then said, "Oh, just a little four-wheeling."

"Ah."

They rode in silence for a minute or so. Trent had obviously been burning with barely suppressed questions himself ever since he'd seen them, but he'd been minding his own business admirably. Allen's unsolicited advice had broken the unspoken compact, though, and finally he asked, "So, what kind of emergency did you have up there on the space station, anyway?"

Judy had been trying to decide how much to tell him. She looked to Allen, who shrugged and said,

"The whole reason we're here is because we wanted to get the word out." Trent was immediately apologetic. "Look, if it's none of my business, I don't want to know."

"Yeah," Donna added, the first word she'd said besides "Hello." She was chewing furiously at a wad of gum, and evidently had taken to heart her mother's advice not to speak with her mouth full.

"No, it's all right," Judy said. "It's everybody's business. The government may not think so, but damn it, this is supposed to be a democracy."

Trent narrowed his eyes, and coming from under a black Stetson the way it did, and with a full beard hiding the rest of his face, his gaze looked cold and mean. But his words gave just the opposite impression. "Now I'm really not sure I want to know," he said. "Government secrets can be bad news."

"No, no, it's nothing like that," Judy said. "Well, actually, maybe it is, but—" She realized she was babbling. "Look, the reason we're here is because Allen invented a hyperdrive engine." Trent looked at her without saying anything.

"A faster-than-light spaceship drive," she said. "He tested it on board my shuttle, and took us out to Saturn in no time at all."

"Is that so?" Trent asked rhetorically.

"Yes, it is," Judy answered anyway. "And when we got back into orbit, the military wanted us to keep it secret."

"Why?"

Allen said, "Because it'll give everybody on Earth the chance to go exploring the galaxy on their own, that's why."

"How's that again?" Trent asked.

Allen laughed. "You heard me right. Anybody can build one. It's cheap, and easy, and it'll take you to Alpha Centauri as quickly as it'll take you to the Moon."

Trent laughed nervously. "Well, partner, it looks like this time it took you to Wyoming." Judy laughed with him. "That wasn't the hyperdrive," she said. "We came down in an emergency descent module, like a Gemini capsule. First time anybody's ever used one."

"That must have been a pretty wild ride."

"That's an understatement."

Judy leaned back in the seat and described their reentry, then backed up and filled Trent and Donna in on the rest of the flight. They listened to her with ever-growing astonishment, and when she was done, Donna said, "You were actually up there, looking at Saturn's rings,
today
?" Allen, who had been helping embellish Judy's story, said proudly, "That's right. And we could have gone even farther if we hadn't been worried about the world going up in flames while we were gone. Plus we had to get back and spread the word before the government could put a lid on it." Trent shook his head. "Man, that just burns me up. But it's just like 'em to go suppressing things they don't want us to have. They've been doing it for years. They sat on a hundred-mile-per-gallon carburetor since the nineteen-fifties because they were afraid it would upset the automobile industry, but they wouldn't release it even when everybody switched over to electric." Allen looked thoughtful for a minute, then said, "A hundred miles per gallon? Isn't that beyond even the theoretical limit for efficiency?"

Trent frowned. "Not the way I heard it."

Allen opened his mouth to pontificate, but Judy elbowed him in the side and shook her head and he closed it again without saying anything.

The gravel road led down one last hill, then joined up with a paved and—mercifully—plowed road leading north-south again. Trent slowed a bit for the turn, headed north, then fed power to the motor until the truck reached a hundred and started to drift from side to side on its balloon tires. Evidently he wasn't comfortable driving unless he was just barely in control.

Rock Springs turned out to be a medium-sized town, filling a two-or three-mile-wide low spot in the prairie where a river evidently ran through, and spilling up over the sides into the surrounding hills. When they were still about a mile away from the outskirts, Trent slowed the truck to a crawl and turned off the road, then flipped the switch for four-wheel drive and they bounced along over sagebrush and rocks as he climbed a hill.

"Where are we going?" Allen asked.

"Lookin' for roadblocks," Trent answered.

The sun had already set, and he'd been driving with his lights on, but he switched them off again and drove by the faint evening skyglow until they were just below the crest of the hill. From that vantage they could see the town spread out below them, most of its street lights already on and headlights streaming along the roads. They could also see police cars, their red and blue strobe lights flashing, on all the roads entering town, including the interstate highway that circled it to the north.

"Well now," Trent said, "It looks like time for a little more four-wheeling." He didn't sound dismayed at the prospect.

Judy and Allen hung on to the dashboard and the door and each other as Trent backed up and drove the truck around the back side of the hill, staying high enough to keep out of the worst of the snow, but low enough not to call attention to themselves. The truck tipped alarmingly, and every time they hit a bump with the uphill side Judy was sure they would go over, but Trent evidently knew just how much he could push it. The uphill side got pretty light a couple of times, but the wheels never actually left the ground.

The only sound was the soft whine of the motor, and an occasional klunk or rattle when they bounced over a rock. It reminded Judy of what driving the lunar rover must have been like. She wondered if she would ever have the chance to find out.

Eventually, about the time it was getting too dark to drive without lights, they rounded one last hill and came to a trailer court. There had once been a chain link fence surrounding it, but kids with bicycles and motorcycles had long since torn down a section of it at the end of the last street. Trent squeezed his pickup through the gap, switched out of four-wheel drive, turned on his lights, and drove through the trailer court. The police cars with their flashing lights were only a few blocks away; as he turned onto the main road and accelerated away from them, he grinned and said, "Hah. Roadblocks." Even so, he made Judy and Allen hunch down in the seat so they wouldn't be spotted while he drove on into town. Judy tried to keep track of their turns, at least, so she would have some idea of what part of town they were in, but the streets twisted and veered apparently at random even when they were obviously in a residential area, until she was thoroughly lost.

"What did they do, pave the cow trails?" she asked.

Trent laughed. "Yep. That's exactly what they did."

He drove up a steep hill, zigzagged down a couple more streets, and pulled into a driveway in front of a light pink single-story house. A bare-limbed tree stood in the middle of the front yard. There was an attached two-car garage to the left of the house; Donna pushed the button on the remote control clipped to the sun visor, the door slid upward, and Trent drove the pickup inside. Donna pushed the button again, and the door closed behind them.

Their joints popping, Judy and Allen climbed down out of the pickup, sidled around a more conventional-looking, boxy car parked next to it, and followed Donna into the house. Trent paused long enough to plug the truck's re-charger into the wall socket before he came in. As soon as they got inside the house, it became apparent that Donna ruled within its walls. Frilly curtains, kitchen wallpaper with strawberries on it, shelves full of knick-knacks in the living room—everything bore the stamp of femininity and comfort. To Judy, after hours in the cold and another hour or two in the bucking pickup, it looked like a little slice of Heaven.
12

After she and Allen had showered, put on clothing borrowed from their hosts, and eaten their first meal in half a day, they turned on the TV to see what kind of story the police had concocted to explain their roadblock. It turned out they hadn't. The news didn't even mention it, and the more Judy thought about it, the more ominous that silence felt. The government evidently still thought it had a chance to cover up the whole hyperdrive affair, or they'd have at least admitted that a couple of astronauts had made an emergency landing. As it was, Judy suspected that if she and Allen were caught, they would never be heard from again.

The announcer did mention the television broadcast they had made from the communications satellite, but he attributed it to a hoax played by a couple of Caltech students taking advantage of the confusion caused by the computer virus. There were even pictures of a mobile TV van surrounded by police cars, and two kids coming out the open back doors with their hands on their heads. The international news was a little more accurate. The European Coalition admitted that one of their anti-missile satellites had fired on an unknown object that had appeared on their radar, and the U.S. admitted that they had gone on red alert until the "misunderstanding" had been cleared up, but neither side would explain what had caused the incident in the first place. Except for one U.S. senator who suggested that the Europeans had staged the whole thing to test the American defenses.

"They missed an obvious connection," Judy said when a commercial came on. "They should have said the search planes were looking for a couple of French spies who parachuted out over Wyoming. It would have tied their story together perfectly."

"They probably didn't think of it," Allen said. "They're scrambling to keep ahead of the truth. But it's all futile. They can't keep a lid on it forever. People all over the country have already taped our broadcast. And not all the email messages that got sent out are the virus.
Somebody
is bound to try building the circuit, and it'll only be a matter of time before everybody realizes it's for real." Trent was sitting with Donna in the loveseat to one side of the screen. "That may be so," he said,

"but what are you going to do in the meantime?"

Allen said, "Well, I'll probably try to contact somebody from INSANE, though I'm not sure they'll be able to do us any good, since they're probably under close surveillance themselves. On the other hand, we've still got the hyperdrive. All we need are a few car batteries and a spaceship and we can go anywhere we want."

"Oh, well, sure," Judy said. "Just a couple of batteries and a spaceship. No problem. I'm sure they have dozens of both on clearance down at Wal-Mart. Or do you get them from a used spaceship lot? I forget."

Allen shook his head. "We're going to have to redefine our idea of what makes a spaceship. With the hyperdrive, just about anything that can hold air will do the job, as long as it'll survive a parachute landing."