The getaway special (2 page)

"What are those numbers?" she asked.

"Coordinates," Allen replied.

"Coordinates for what?"

Allen smiled and pushed the function key labeled "Jump."

"Us," he said.

The radio beeped again. Carl, who was still looking out the aft windows into the payload bay, shouted something like "Whaaa!" and leaped for the attitude controls. Judy's flinch launched her headfirst into the instrument panel in front of her. She swore and pushed herself over beside Carl. "What happened?"

He pointed through the overhead windows, but it took Judy a second to realize what he was pointing at, or rather what wasn't where he was pointing. In normal flight the shuttle flew upside down over the Earth, making for an excellent view of the planet overhead, but now there were only stars where it should have been. She pushed off to the front windows and looked out and to either side, but the Earth wasn't there either.

Allen said, "Don't worry, it's—"

"Not now," Judy cut him off. First thing in an emergency: shut up the passengers so you can think. Now, what had happened? She had a suspicion: Allen's experiment had blown up. It had to have. She pulled herself back to the aft windows to get a look down into the cargo bay where the getaway special canisters were attached, next to the forward bulkhead. She couldn't see that close in, but there was no evidence of an explosion, nothing that could have jolted the shuttle enough to flip it over. Besides, she realized, nothing had. They would have felt the motion. The Earth had simply disappeared. A long list of emergency procedures reeled through her mind. Fire control, blowout, toxic gasses, medical emergencies—none of them applied here. There was nothing in the book about the Earth disappearing. But there was always one standing order that never changed.
In any emergency,
communicate with the ground
.

"Don't use the jets," she said to Carl; then, turning to the audio terminal, she flipped it to transmit and said, "Control, this is
Discovery
, do you copy?"

Allen cleared his throat and said, "I don't think you'll be able to raise them." Judy shot him a look that shut him up and called again. "Control, this is
Discovery
. We have a problem. Do you copy?"

After a couple of seconds she switched to another frequency and tried again, but still got no response. She was at the end of her checklist. What now?

Allen had been trying to say something all along. She turned around to face him and said, "All right. What did you do?"

"I—ah, I moved us a little bit. Don't worry! It worked beautifully."

"You moved us. How?"

"Hyperdrive."

2

There was a moment of silence before Judy burst out laughing. She couldn't help it.
Hyperdrive
?

But her laughter faded as the truth of the situation started to hit her. Hyperdrive?

Behind her, Carl began to moan.

As calmly as she could, Judy said, "Put us back."

Allen looked hurt. He hadn't expected her to laugh. "I'm afraid I can't just yet," he said.

"Why not? You brought us here, wherever here is."

"We're somewhere between the orbits of Earth and Mars, and out of the plane of the ecliptic, but we could be off by as much as a few light-seconds from the distance I set. We shouldn't try to go near a planet until I take some distance measurements and calibrate—"

"Whoa! Slow down a minute. We're between Earth and Mars?" She felt a thrill rush through her as she asked the question. Could they really be? This was the sort of thing she had always dreamed of. Captain Gallagher of the Imperial Space Navy! Hopping from planet to planet at her merest whim, leading humanity outward from its cradle toward its ultimate destiny in space . . . But right behind it came the thought,
I'm not in command of my ship
. Allen said, "If my initial calculations were correct we are. We'll know in a minute."

"How?"

"I sent a timing signal just as we jumped. When it catches up with us I'll know exactly how far we moved. It should be coming in any second now."

Judy looked toward the computer. The top line of the display kept counting seconds and the radio remained silent. Allen began to look puzzled, then worried. He began typing on the keyboard again.

"Stop!"

He looked up, surprised.

"Get away from there. Reinhardt, get between him and that panel." Carl nodded and pulled himself over beside Allen.

"I'm just checking the coordinates," Allen said. "I must have miskeyed them." After a moment's thought, Judy said, "Okay, go ahead, but explain what you're doing as you go along. And don't even
think
of moving the ship again without my permission." She nodded to Carl, who backed away again, then she suddenly had a thought. "Christ, go wake up Gerry. He'd shoot us if we didn't get him in on this too."

A minute later Gerry Vaughn, the copilot, shot up through the hatch from the mid-deck and grabbed the back of the command chair to slow down. He looked out the forward windows, then floated closer and looked overhead, then down. He turned and kicked off toward the aft windows, looked around in every direction, and finally backed away. Then, very quietly, he said, "Son of a bitch." Allen beamed.

"Where are we?"

Allen lost some of his smile. "I'm not sure," he admitted. "We're supposed to be two and a half light-minutes from Earth in the direction of Vega, but we either missed the signal or went too far."

"Signal?"

"Before we jumped, I transmitted a coded pulse. When the pulse catches up, we'll know our distance. Next time we jump I'll send another pulse, and as long as we jump beyond the first one then we can triangulate our position when they arrive. That way I can calculate the aiming error as well as the distance error."

"Oh," Gerry said. He looked out the windows again as if to assure himself that the Earth was really gone. Finally he said, "Look at the sun."

"What?"

"The sun."

Judy looked. It was shining in through the forward windows. She had to squint to keep it from burning her eyes, but not much, and now she could see what Gerry was talking about. The solar disk was about a fourth the normal size.

Carl, floating just above the mid-deck hatch, looked too. He made a strangling sound, looked over at Judy as if he was pleading for help, then his eyes rolled up and he went slack.

"Catch him!" Judy yelled, but it was hardly necessary. People don't fall when they faint in free-fall. Neither do they faint. Blood doesn't rush away from the brain without gravity to pull it. So what had happened to him?

As she debated what to do, the answer came in a long, shuddering breath. "Oh," she said. "He forgot to breathe." She laughed, but it came out wrong and she cut it off. She wasn't far from Carl's condition herself.

Get it under control
, she thought.

"Gerry, help him down to his bunk."

Gerry nodded and pushed Carl back through the hatchway into the mid-deck. When they had gone below, Judy said, "Well, Allen, this is a pretty situation you've got yourself in."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"I mean hijacking and piracy."

"What? You've got to be—" He stopped. She wasn't kidding. "All right, I can believe hijacking, but piracy?"

"We're carrying a full load of privately owned cargo, which you diverted without authority. That makes it piracy. You should have thought of that before you started pushing buttons." Allen looked at her without comprehension. "I don't get it," he said. "What's wrong with you people? I demonstrate a working hyperdrive engine and Carl curls up into a ball, and now you start talking about piracy? Where's your sense of adventure? Don't you realize what this means? I've given us the key to the entire universe! We're not stuck on one planet anymore! The human race can have some breathing room again. And what's more, I've ended the threat of nuclear extermination forever!" Judy hadn't even thought of that angle. She'd been too busy trying to suppress the hysterical giggles that kept threatening to bubble to the surface. Hyperdrive! But now she did think about it, and she didn't like what she came up with. "Ended the threat of nuclear extermination? You idiot! You've probably caused it! Do you have any idea what's going on at Mission Control right now? Full-scale panic, that's what. They've lost an orbiter—gone, just like that—and it's not going to take long before somebody decides that the Russians or the French or somebody shot us down with an antisatellite weapon. I think you're smart enough to figure out what happens then."

She watched him think it through. He opened his mouth to speak, but he couldn't. Judy said it for him: "We've got to get back within radio range and let them know we're okay, or all sorts of hell is going to break loose. So how do we do that?"

"I—without calibrating it we shouldn't—"

"I just want you to reverse the direction. Send us back the same distance we came. Can you do that?"

"Uh . . . yes, I suppose so. The error in distance should be the same both ways. But I don't think it's a good idea. We could be off in direction as well as distance. We could wind up in the wrong orbit, or underground for that matter."

Judy tried to weigh the chances of that against the chances of nuclear war. Since France had put missiles in Quebec in response to American missiles in England, both sides were on a launch-on-warning status. If somebody decided they had already used an A-sat weapon . . . ?

She was starting to feel like a captain again. At least she felt the pressure of being the one in command. Four lives against six billion, hardly a choice except that she had to make it. She heard herself say, "It's a chance we'll have to take. Do it."

Seconds later she was convulsed in laughter. It was an involuntary reaction. The giggles had won. Allen stared at her for a moment before he ventured, "Are you all right?" Judy fought for control, and eventually found it. She wiped fat globules of tears away from her eyes and sniffed. "Yeah," she said. "It just hit me." She pitched her voice in heroic tones and said, "'I'll take that chance, Scotty! Give me warp speed!' God, if only the
Enterprise
had flown." Allen looked puzzled for a second before comprehension lit up his face. "The first shuttle. Okay." He laughed quietly and turned to his keyboard. As he typed in the coordinates he said, "You know, I did try to buy the
Enterprise
for this, but I couldn't come up with the cash."

"I'm surprised you didn't build your own ship out of an old septic tank or something. Isn't that the way most mad scientists do it?"

"Don't laugh; I could have done it that way. The hyperdrive engine will take you directly into space from the ground if you want to. But I didn't think a flying septic tank was the image I wanted. I thought a shuttle would be better for getting the world's attention."

Judy felt a shiver run up her spine. "Well you definitely did that. I just hope we can patch things back together before it's too late. Are you ready there?"

"Ready."

"Let's go, then."

Allen grinned. "Warp speed, Captain," he said, and pushed the "Jump" button. Earth suddenly filled the view again. It was at the wrong angle, but just having it there made Judy sigh in relief. She tried the radio again.

"Control, this is
Discovery
. Do you copy?"

Response came immediately. "
Discovery
, this is Control. We copy. What is your status, over?"

"Green bird. Everything is fine. We've had a minor, uh, navigational problem, but we've got that taken care of. No cause for alarm. What is
your
status, over?" She realized she was babbling. There would be hell to pay when she got back on the ground, but she didn't care. Warp speed!

The ground controller wasn't much better off. "Everything is under control here too," he said.

"Barely. What is the nature of your navigational problem? Over." She suddenly realized that she had another big choice to make. Half the world must be listening in on her transmission; should she tell them the truth? Or should she do the military thing and keep it a secret? There were code words for just such a contingency as this.

It was a simple decision, even simpler than the one to return. She said, "Dr. Meisner has just demonstrated what he calls a hyperdrive engine. I believe his description of it to be accurate. We went—"

There was a violent lurch, followed by the beep of Allen's radio pulse, and the Earth disappeared again.

Judy turned away from the radio to see Allen lifting his finger off the keyboard. "Damn it, I told you not to touch that until I gave the word! Get away from there!"

Allen looked hurt. "I think I just saved our lives," he said. "Somebody shot at us." He pointed out the aft windows into the cargo bay, where a cherry-red stump still glowed where the vertical stabilizer had been. Hydraulic fluid bubbled out into vacuum from the severed lines. Judy took it all in, in less than a second, then whirled and kicked herself forward between the commander's and the pilot's chairs to look at the fuel pressure gauges. They remained steady, but the hydraulics and the auxiliary power units that drove them were both losing pressure fast. It hardly mattered, though; both systems were used only during launch and descent, and there could be no descent without a vertical stabilizer.

She shut off the alarms and clung to the command chair for support. "That was stupid," she said.

"Of course the laser satellites would fire on something that suddenly pops into orbit where it doesn't belong. Damn it! Now there really is going to be a war." She turned around to face Allen. "Take us back again, but this time put us short of the Earth. I don't want to go into orbit; I just want to be in radio range."

Allen hesitated. "I—I don't think we should—"

"Do it! The end of the world is about fifteen minutes away. I don't care what it takes, just get us within radio range. And
outside
laser range."

Allen nodded.

While he punched numbers on his keyboard, Judy tried to compose what she was going to say. She wouldn't report the damage yet, not until she was sure everybody had their fingers off of the missile launch buttons. Ground control would know by their telemetry that something was wrong, but they wouldn't know how it happened, and the military would know that the Russians or the French or the Chinese had fired an A-sat weapon, but they wouldn't know at what. Or—she had a sudden thought. Who said it had to be an enemy A-sat? It had to have been an automatic shot; that made it a fair chance that it was an American beam.