The getaway special (15 page)

"What do you think?" he asked. "Should we call him?" Judy grimaced. "I don't like taking bank robbery money, even if we let him charge it to your credit card. But we're in worse trouble than I thought, and the sooner we get back into space, the better I'll like it."

"Was that a 'yes'?"

"I guess so."

Allen dialed the number, blocking the caller ID first.

"Hi, Dale? Allen Meisner. We've got a shopping list. Got a pencil?" It took nearly five minutes to read everything. When he was done, Allen said, "Yes, I know that's a lot of stuff, and yes, we do need all of it. The cable is to reinforce the tank so it won't balloon out under air pressure, and the foam insulation will provide a cushion so it won't crack when it lands. That's right; we'll be coming down under a parachute. No, we've already got one." He rolled his eyes. "Yes, I know a spare would be nice, but do you know where to
get
one big enough to do the job? A regular sport parachute won't cut it."

He listened for a moment, then said, "Well, I'll be damned. Sure, that ought to do. Get us one. No, wait, get us three. Because we're building a second starship for a friend, that's why." Allen told him to buy three sets of all the electronic parts in the list he had broadcast, as well.

"There
is a
Radio Shack in this town, isn't there? Good. Sure, buy some for yourself, too." He laughed.

"Yeah, maybe I'll hold classes."

They discussed logistics, including where to have all the stuff delivered. Trent had suggested the building site where he was working; it wouldn't seem out of the ordinary to have a septic tank delivered there, nor most of the other equipment, for that matter, as long as it was boxed up. Trent could bring it all home in his pickup after dark, and claim it had been stolen if anyone asked where it had gone. Finally, Allen reeled off a credit card number from memory, and told Dale to charge an extra couple of thousand dollars to it for his trouble. Dale protested, but Allen insisted, and they went back and forth on it until they sounded as if they were about to call off the whole deal and hang up on each other, but Dale eventually gave in and they finished the conversation on a friendly note.

"Why do guys always do that?" Judy asked him.

"Do what?"

"Get all macho about who pays for what."

He grinned sheepishly as he set the phone back in its cradle. "I don't know. I guess it's how we keep score. You don't want to be the one left owing the other guy a favor."

"Why not? It means you're the one who just
got
a favor, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, but . . ." He shrugged. "It's not something I've ever thought out. It's just the way we do things."

She could tell she wasn't going to learn anything more from him about it. "So what was that about parachutes? He's got a source for those, too?"

"Yeah. He's apparently in the National Guard. They've got a whole bunch of 'chutes they use for airlifting supplies into disaster areas. Designed for great big cargo containers." Judy had seen those before: they were huge. Having one for a backup in case the first one fouled made her feel a great deal better about their impending expedition. The whole setup was such a haphazard affair that she hadn't even been thinking of redundancy, but her astronaut training had made her nervous at the idea of flying without fail-safes. There were still a couple of dozen criticality-one failure modes that they couldn't provide backup for, but at least this one was covered.

"So what do we do until our spaceship is delivered?" she asked. Allen nodded toward the door into the garage. "I thought I'd go through the hyperdrive and make sure it's okay. Maybe you could do the same for the spacesuits?"

"Sure."

The garage wasn't heated, so they brought their work inside. Allen set the getaway special canister beside the computer desk and opened it up, angling the light into it so he could see the electronics. He didn't have any specialized test equipment, but he did have the computer itself, so he hooked up the serial cable to the hyperdrive's communications port and started querying the status of its various subsystems that way.

The spacesuits were smeared with soot from the EDM and the boots were grimy from their hike, so Judy found a bright blue plastic tarp and unfolded it on the living room floor, then laid the suits on that and set to work cleaning them up and checking them for problems.

It seemed odd to have equipment in someone's living room that was normally allowed only in an environmentally controlled clean room. As Judy sat cross-legged on the tarp and cleaned the spacesuits with a light blue sponge she'd found under the kitchen sink, she imagined herself as a nomadic tribeswoman sitting in her tent and preparing her family's possessions for the summer's travels. When she thought of it in those terms, it didn't seem quite so strange. People had been expanding into new territory for millennia. Going into space had always seemed so daunting that it took an entire nation to do it, but now that Allen had lowered the barrier, things had gone right back to the way they had always been. It was a lot more comfortable working cross-legged on a padded carpet than in a clean room. Sunlight slanted in through the front window and warmed her as well as cheered her up. She brewed a pot of tea, and she and Allen turned on the TV to keep an eye on the news while they worked. The news hadn't changed, but the reporting of it had. Commentators were still regurgitating the official story, but they were doing everything in their power to make sure people knew it was a lie. Judy just about laughed up a lung when she heard one anchor say, "This just in from the department of censorship" before reading the teleprompter in a monotone and twitching his head in jerky movements like a robot. Others ended their reports with "Yeah, right," or "Nudge-nudge, wink-wink." One station didn't even report; their cameras merely panned back and forth through the studio, revealing the armed soldiers standing guard in every doorway.

"Jesus," Allen said when he saw it. "How can they get away with that?"

"Who? The army, or the TV station?"

"Both. I mean, don't they have to declare martial law in order to suspend the Constitution? And since they didn't, why are the military guys letting the TV guys film them breaking the law?" Judy watched the silent exhibition of military presence and media defiance. "I'm guessing Stevenson wants to have his cake and eat it too. He doesn't want the political damage that would come from declaring martial law over something like this, but he can get the same result without it. When this gets hashed out in court in years to come, we'll probably find that all the orders can be traced back to a single fall guy."

Allen nodded. "Ollie North takes the heat, and the President gets off scot-free."

"Right. In the meantime, the individual soldiers are probably just as pissed about their orders as the TV stations are. So until they're ordered to stop this particular kind of broadcast, they're going to let it go."

"This isn't going to work," Allen said, "and Stevenson knows it. The government can't keep a lid on this forever. Hell, they can't even
put a
lid on it. The news is already out there." That was true enough. This particular genie would never fit back into the bottle, no matter how hard they tried. But someone was certainly going through the motions, and they had to have a reason for it. Was it just a knee-jerk reaction to losing control over the situation, or could they actually be accomplishing something?

She thought about it awhile, then said, "Maybe they're just trying to scare as many people as possible into staying home and keeping their heads down."

"The ones who would build their own spaceship aren't the kind to scare easily," Allen pointed out. Judy wondered about that. She was getting plenty scared. But she knew what he meant. "Well, then, maybe they're trying to keep the economic impact to a minimum, or trying to reassure the rest of the world that we're not going nuts over here."

"Or maybe they're trying to keep their tax base from evaporating away." Allen snorted in disgust. "I wouldn't put it past them."

"Whatever their reasoning, you're right: they can't keep the lid on forever." Judy wished she was really as confident as she sounded. She knew intellectually that she was right, but the presence of soldiers in TV studios scared the hell out of her. She'd never seen anything like that before, never even heard of it. Not in America, at least. That, more than anything else that had happened since she'd cast her lot with Allen, made her worry that she had made the wrong decision.

She tried to put it out of her mind and concentrate on what she was doing. Clean off the dirt, check out the air tanks, check the batteries and seals, run the control system diagnostics . . . . She was still at it when the TV station they had been watching cut to an on-the-scene report of a mysterious explosion in Lancaster, California. There was shaky footage of an old two-story house with piles of junk all around it, but the house didn't seem to be the site of the explosion. There was a crowd of people on the street, all looking toward the back yard, where used cars, bits and pieces of airplanes, various appliances, and tons of scrap metal filled every inch of space—except for a circular gap in the middle of the yard.

A reporter stood in the midst of the crowd and said, "Witnesses at the scene describe a single, loud explosion, like a thunderclap, but there were no clouds in the sky.

There was no smoke, and even more puzzling: no debris. Just this peculiar crater." It was hard to get a good shot of it through all the junk until the cameraman climbed onto the top of an old refrigerator and focused on the gap, and then its shape became apparent. It was a perfectly hemispherical bowl about fifteen feet across, defined by the sheared-off edges of the junk piled around it. It extended into the ground only four feet or so; the center of the hemisphere was about three or four feet in the air. The exposed dirt had a shiny, glassy look to it, as if it had been fused by tremendous heat, but there was no sign of heat on any of the junk surrounding it. Instead, the edges looked like they had been sliced with the world's sharpest blade. There was half a washing machine sitting there with its tub and electric motor exposed like a cutaway view in a service diagram, sitting on two railroad ties whose ends looked like they'd been carefully polished over days and days of work.

The reporter said, "The owner of the house cannot be located, but neighbors say he is—or was—a noted eccentric who collected anything he could get his hands on at swap meets, and often combined them in unusual ways." The camera panned into the driveway, where an old Ford Pinto had been refitted with a jet fighter canopy instead of its normal windshield and roof.

Judy looked over at Allen. "That explosion. Air filling a vacuum?"

"That's right," he said. He leaned back in his chair and smiled. "The first explorer is away."
18

The news was full of similar reports over the next couple of days, but that was nearly eclipsed by the backlash over the attempt at censorship. As both Judy and Allen had predicted, the news blackout didn't last long, and when it fell, it was like a sand dike under a tidal wave. Every political organization from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Ku Klux Klan filed class-action suits against the government, and since the conspiracy had struck so close to home, TV and radio stations and newspapers across the country gave the lawsuits prime coverage.

Information about the hyperdrive emerged between the lines, and in second-page sidebars. The story was too technical for the front page, but it provided an excellent source for commentary. Economic and sociological analysts argued about what it would do to everything from world trade to population pressure, while technologists discussed the repercussions for the aerospace and defense industries. Nobody agreed, not even on whether there would be repercussions, but everyone had an opinion. Even Carl Reinhardt had his say. In an interview from the space station, he reiterated his belief that the hyperdrive spelled the end of organized space exploration, but he was practically laughed off the air by Mary Hunter, the station commander. "Are you nuts?" she said. "Launch costs have just dropped from a thousand dollars a pound to something like a penny. Your local high school could put up a space station now! We're going to see more big projects than you can imagine." Carl begged to differ, but the interviewer went on to ask Mary what sort of projects she envisioned, and her description of classrooms in orbit and geology field trips to Mars trumped his message of gloom and doom.

Gerry Vaughn got his moment in the limelight as well, but he fared even worse than Carl. Nobody loves a traitor, and there was no amount of spin he could put on the situation that made him look like anything else. The idea that Russia still had sleeper agents in America caused an uproar almost as big as the censorship issue, and world tension ratcheted up another notch.

The international picture looked just as fractured as the domestic one. Practically every government had tried to stop the spread of the hyperdrive plans, and some were still struggling to contain them, but it was a lost cause and everyone knew it. The true struggle now seemed to be for control of the high ground. If people were going to go into space, then it would be
their
people who got first pick of the prime real estate, and it would be done in an orderly, government-controlled fashion.

"Yeah, right," Allen said when he heard that. He and Judy were in the garage by then, mounting hardware on their rapidly evolving spaceship and listening to shortwave radio on the multi-band transceiver they had bought for the trip. "Do those idiots have any idea how many planets there are out there? There's something like four hundred billion stars in the Milky Way alone, and the odds are good that most of them have planets. We could have a separate planet for every group who wants one, right down to left-handed theremin players who wear propeller beanies on Tuesdays. Territory is a dead issue."

"What's a theremin?" asked Judy. She was duct-taping a tiny video camera to the end of the plastic tank while Allen fed its data cable through the four-inch-diameter inlet pipe that jutted out of the end. It was part of a home security system: two gimbaled cameras mounted outside where they could swivel around to cover overlapping hemispheres of view, and two monitors inside to display what they saw.