The getaway special (16 page)

"A theremin is the first electronic musical instrument ever built. It's got an antenna sticking up out of the case, and it generates a tone that rises in pitch the closer your hand gets to the antenna. You wiggle your hand, and it makes a
woo-woo-woo
kind of sound. Sound engineers use them a lot to make spooky noises in horror movies."

"Oh." Judy had never heard of one, but she supposed it would be just the sort of thing for Allen. Maybe there would even be room enough out there for people to play them without annoying their neighbors, too.

But that wasn't a foregone conclusion. "What if those planets are already inhabited?" she asked. Allen grinned happily. "Then the Universe will be an even more interesting place than we thought." There were footholds molded into the corrugated side of the tank. He used them to climb up and lean in through one of the two manholes on top. They didn't really need two, but the tank had come with them, and it was easier to use them both as hatches than to seal one up. The lids themselves would need some reinforcement, but the collars were built like regular street manholes; thick enough to drive over. The plastic barely flexed under Allen's weight, but the tank echoed with his voice as he said, "Could you wiggle the wire so I can figure out which one it is?"

Judy obliged, and a moment later the wire slid in until it was snug against the side of the tank. While Allen hooked it to the security system mounted inside, she ran a strip of duct tape along the exposed length to hold it down. They didn't want anything loose to flap around and break during descent. The parachute would keep their airspeed down once they deployed it, but they could pick up a pretty good velocity in the upper atmosphere beforehand. Not enough for thermal effects to melt anything, but certainly enough to tear loose what wasn't held down.

Judy's skepticism about the tank was fading as she helped turn it into an interstellar spacecraft. It had charmed her right from the start with its color and shape: it was like a bright yellow bread loaf with alternating ridges and grooves running up and down its sides every four inches all the way around. It glowed with a cheery warmth from the safelight they had dangled inside, and when she climbed in and sat on the ribbed bottom, there was plenty of headroom. The domed top gave it the feel of a deep-sea submarine, which only added to the aura of scientific authenticity.

There was a sticker on one of the manholes that made her grin every time she read it: "Use only as a septic tank. Any other use will void warranty."

She wondered who would offer the first spaceship actually designed and warranted for the purpose. One of the airplane companies, like Boeing or McDonnell Douglas? Or would it be the auto manufacturers? Modern cars were already sealed and climate controlled; it wouldn't take much to make them airtight and put carbon dioxide scrubbers in the air-conditioning vents. She laughed at the image of American families taking weekend trips into space in their minivans and SUVs, but it might just come to happen.

Or not. A spaceship didn't have to actually fly anywhere, and it certainly didn't need wheels. Plastic tanks were a heck of a lot easier to mass produce than planes or cars, and a lot cheaper, too. The first interstellar spaceships on the open market could easily be built by unskilled labor in an injection-molding plant.

Too bad. Now that she was actually doing it, Judy had discovered that she enjoyed building her own spaceship. It gave her a sense of hands-on involvement that merely climbing aboard a ready-to-fly shuttle had never provided. She had studied every subsystem on board the shuttle until she could diagram the whole orbiter in her sleep, but even so, she didn't know it like this. She knew the tank with her body, felt the orange-peel roughness of the plastic and the sharp edges of its mold lines in her fingertips, heard its hollow echo resonating in her ears, smelled the vinyl and urethane vapors in her sinuses. She had handled every piece of hardware they had bolted, tied, or taped down, and with every component she added she could sense her own excitement building. Hour by hour, piece by piece, she and Allen drew closer to the moment when they would truly break the bonds of Earth and venture out into the cosmos. Even the most reckless NASA engineer would have gone into shock at the sight of their equipment, but she and Allen had tested every component. It was their lives on the line, after all. They had wrapped the tank itself in quarter-inch steel cable to keep it from expanding and splitting a seam in vacuum, and they had lashed together a separate framework of 4 X 4 posts to help it keep its shape. They had reinforced the thick plastic manhole covers with inch-thick marine plywood and sealed around the edges with heavy silicone rubber. The hatches swung inward rather than outward, so air pressure would hold them closed while in flight. It wouldn't be full atmospheric pressure anyway; they were going to use pure oxygen from a welding bottle and keep it at five pounds per square inch instead of fifteen. They had threaded a pair of simple water faucets into the septic tank's side—with the handles and spouts pointing inward—to serve as pressure relief valves if they had to vent the tank to space or equalize pressure on the ground. They would also be wearing spacesuits in case the tank didn't hold, but after seeing how tough it was, Judy doubted the suits would be necessary.

The biggest danger was going to be on landing. They would be falling straight into the atmosphere from rest, rather than angling into it at just under orbital velocity like the shuttle did, but they were still going to be moving pretty fast when they deployed the parachute. The jerk when it snapped open could rip the mount right off the top, or buckle the floor if they wrapped the shroud lines all the way around. A bungee would solve the impact problem, but too much rebound would throw them right back up into the canopy, where they would tangle with the shroud lines and collapse the 'chute. Allen had come up with a tie-down system using a web made out of wide nylon cargo straps and twelve inches of loam-core insulation on the bottom of the tank. The straps would provide a little bit of stretch on their own, but the insulation would absorb most of the shock by crushing under the straps'

pressure. The deceleration would still be fierce, but it wouldn't be instantaneous, and the foam insulation that hadn't been crushed by the parachute opening would serve as a shock absorber again when they hit the ground.

A week ago Judy would never have believed that she'd be trusting her life to such a contraption, but here she stood in Trent and Donna's garage, happily putting the final touches on it and looking forward to the moment when they could test it out.

That wouldn't be long. Another two days at the outside. They were almost done with the video system; after that they only needed to mount the hyperdrive, load their supplies, and go. They had already installed and charged the batteries, found a used laptop computer to use as a jump controller, and tested the software on it.

Allen was building a spare hyperdrive just in case, and another pair for Trent and Donna. Their hosts were taking notes as the first starship neared completion, asking tons of questions and even offering the occasional suggestion when they figured out something ahead of Allen or Judy. It was Donna who pointed out that seats weren't worth the trouble in such cramped quarters, especially when mounting them could put enough stress on the tank to break it during the impact of landing. She had a much better suggestion: beanbag chairs. They would conform to practically any shape, even a spacesuit with a backpack life-support system attached, and they would provide much a better cushion during landing than a conventional acceleration couch. They could also be used for stuff sacks for anything soft. All a person had to do was remove an equal volume of filler and they had ready-made storage space for sleeping bags, pillows, extra clothing—even toilet paper.

So now the inside of the starship held a bright red bean-bag at one end and a bright green one at the other, both duct-taped to the floor and sporting seatbelts made from bungee cords and more duct tape. They weren't elegant, but Judy had to admit that they were far more comfortable than the shuttle seats; especially the little fold-up guys that the payload specialists and the mission specialists had to sit in on launch and landing.

They were going to have to do without ultralight airplanes, at least for their first foray. They had been unable to track down even a single plane that could be folded into a compact enough package to carry along, much less two of them. They could probably have done better if the internet hadn't been so bogged down with the government-introduced "virus-alert" virus, but it was practically impossible to get beyond the local node.

It didn't really matter to Judy. Traveling to a planet circling another star would be accomplishment enough; she didn't really have to fly another dozen miles once she got there just to say she was exploring. They could always pop back into space and drop to the ground again if they wanted to move to another location. Not the most efficient way to travel, perhaps, but it would work. Besides, if they really needed an airplane they could come back in a few weeks, after the chaos had died down, and try it again if they wanted to.

Provided it
did
die down. Judy wasn't convinced it was going to any time soon, especially not for her and Allen. The various governments of the world seemed determined to make the worst of Allen's gift, and they were still looking for him so they could trot him out for people to throw stones at. They hadn't done a house-to-house search of Rock Springs yet, but Judy suspected that was only because most of the people in those houses were armed rednecks who wouldn't take kindly to the invasion of their privacy.

It would be a long time before she and Allen could show their faces in public again. The best thing they could do would be to find a tropical paradise somewhere and hang out for a few months, and that was just what Judy intended to do, just as soon as they finished building their starship.
19

They were only a few hours short of being ready when their luck ran out. It was Saturday afternoon, and Trent was helping them drag their completed starship out into the back yard, where they intended to winch it up off the ground from a thick branch of the Chinese elm tree so they wouldn't take a spaceship-sized divot out of the lawn when they made the big jump. Allen had mounted the hyperdrive engine in the middle of the tank and tightened its jump field to minimize the amount of volume it enclosed, but it was still a spherical field. It would dig a pretty good hole if they didn't raise the tank in the air first. The sun was shining out of a clear blue sky, and the temperature had risen to nearly fifty degrees. Everyone was laughing and joking as they inched Allen and Judy's ungainly vehicle across the cement driveway, skidding it carefully on waxed 2 X 4s to avoid tearing up the thick pad of loam insulation strapped to the bottom. The yellow plastic shone brightly in the sunlight, and Judy felt lighter than she had in days. The country might be going to hell in a hand-basket, but she was going to Alpha Centauri. In a septic tank, to be sure, but still.

They had christened it that morning, and painted its name on the side in big, flowing black letters that followed the four-inch corrugations in and out:
Getaway Special
. Allen had suggested the name, and Judy had laughed at first, but when she realized he was serious she went along with it. Like the ship itself, the name was as functional as it was inelegant.

A small plane flew over at a couple thousand feet. Nobody paid it any attention, not even when it banked around and circled the neighborhood. Judy just figured it was somebody out for a weekend flight, the pilot probably showing his passengers what their house looked like from the air. Not until Donna came out of the house with the cordless phone in her hand and a puzzled frown on her face did she think anything might be wrong.

"Someone named Dale is calling for you," she said to Allen.

Judy stopped pushing against the tank and looked up at him. "Dale? How did he know where to call?"

Allen looked just as puzzled as Donna. "Don't ask me. I didn't give him the number." He took the phone from Donna and said, "Hello, Dale? How did you—what? How? How do you know that? Oh. They got what? But that still shouldn't— Hello? Hello?"

He lowered the phone. "He hung up. But he says the Feds are onto us. They broke through the security on the credit card charge and traced it back to him, and when he went online to get his email just now, they hacked into his computer and got the list of supplies he bought for us." He handed the phone back to Donna.

"And here we are pushing a bright yellow septic tank out into the yard," Judy said, looking up at the airplane, which had just banked around for another pass.

Trent followed her gaze. "Time to go," he said.

"We're in the middle of your driveway," she pointed out.

"You're going to be in the middle of a maximum security cell in about ten minutes. Screw the driveway. Just go."

"But we don't have the food loaded! And we need to prebreathe oxygen for at least an hour before we put on the suits. We can't just—"

Trent turned to Donna. "Get some food. I don't care what; just throw it in there. You two, get in the tank. You pressure-tested it to twenty psi; you'll just have to keep it at full pressure until you can get the nitrogen out of your systems." He moved off toward his pickup, parked at the head of the driveway, then stopped when he realized nobody had moved. "Do it!" he shouted. "There's no other choice!" There didn't seem to be. Judy slapped Allen on the butt and said, "He's right. Get in." Allen blinked a few times, looked up at the airplane, then back at Trent. "What about you guys?" he said. "We can't just leave you here to face the cops by yourselves."

"I've faced cops before," Trent said. "They got nothin' on us. Once you're gone, they'll leave us alone, or they'll wish they had. Now go!" He ran off toward his pickup. Judy climbed up the side of the tank and dropped in through one of the manholes. A moment later, Allen, still protesting, climbed through the other. The hyperdrive in the getaway special canister filled the space between them in the center of the tank, and the spare drive, built into a five-gallon PVC bucket, shared the space below it with their oxygen tank. The video monitors mounted side by side at one end of the hyperdrive took up more space, leaving only a window-sized gap to see each other through, and their spacesuits and beanbag crash couches filled up what little room there was at their feet. Trent leaned in right after Allen and handed over a short-barreled revolver and a box of ammunition, evidently recovered from the glove box of his truck. "Here," he said. "They'll just take this away from me anyway, and you might need it where you're going."