The getaway special (32 page)

"It is much larger than yours," Tippet said. "Or theirs. But they show no sign that they have discovered it. And if they continue to use radar as a location method, they are unlikely to. It is much farther away from the planet than they are, and it is mostly organic in composition."

"Oh?" She would love to know more about that, but not at the moment. But if it was big . . . "Turn it end-on to them so it presents the smallest cross-section," she said. "That way they won't be able to spot it optically. And how about your radio transmissions? Are they directional, or—"

"This is silly," Allen said. "We gave the hyperdrive to everyone, including the French. Hiding from them now is hypocrisy."

"It's prudence," Judy replied, "which is something we haven't been exercising enough of lately." Tippet didn't reply, except to say, "Our transmissions from the ship to the ground are directional. My relay to your radio is not, but the power level is far too low to be detected from space. And speaking of direction, we are drifting a bit to the left of a direct path back to your . . . spaceship."

"Thanks." Judy and Allen adjusted their course by a few degrees. Allen said to Judy, "I thought you agreed that giving the hyperdrive away was the best thing we could do."

"It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I'm not so sure."

"You gave it away?" Tippet asked. "I don't understand. How did you get here if—"

"Just the plans. We told everyone on Earth how to build their own engine. I didn't want soldiers to be the only people in space."

"Soldiers," Tippet said. "Professional fighters. Is that who has joined us?" Allen sighed. "Probably. Unless the Cousteau Society decided to retrofit a sub." Judy adjusted her grip on the bucket. All this work for five gallons of water, and someone out there had brought a submarine! "I wonder if they're going to try landing it in the ocean," she said. Allen shook his head. "I can't imagine how you could lower anything that heavy by parachute."

"Parachute?" Tippet asked. "Why would they need that?"

"The hyperdrive won't put something into a space that's already occupied," Allen explained. "We had to pop in as close to the top of the atmosphere as we could and drop from there under a parachute. Unless these guys have figured out a better way, that's what they'll have to do, too, but a sub is too big for that."

"Ah." Tippet made another hissing sound, then said, "This hyperdrive . . . it is still experimental?"

"No," Allen said. "We tested it a couple of weeks ago."

"Weeks? Your race has only had this technology for two weeks?" Allen shrugged. "I've known about it for over a year, but it took me that long to get a ride on the space shuttle to test it."

"Yet here you are already. In force. And how many other stars did you visit before you came here?" Allen squinted and wrinkled his nose in concentration. "Uh, let's see, there was Alpha Centauri, then the place with the weird organic-looking asteroids, then the—"

"Three," Judy said. "But we were starting to run out of air by time we got here. If this hadn't worked out, we would have had to go home."

She had meant to downplay the significance of it, but Tippet wasn't fooled. He made a sound like a bicycle wheel with a playing card flapping on the spokes, then finally stopped and said, "You would have gone home. You could do so right now, couldn't you?"

"Well, not
right
now, but yeah. As soon as we get back to the
Getaway
. That's what we call our ship."

"Of course you do."

Judy looked over at him: a fat-bodied butterfly in a yellow pressure suit clinging to Allen's shoulder and flapping his wings as if he was trying to lift him into the air by sheer force of will. At last he slowed down and said, "After we decided to attempt an interstellar flight, we spent nearly a century developing our starship. It took decades to cross the immense distance to our closest neighboring star, and years more exploring each of its planets in turn, but none of them were habitable. We went on to another star, and another. This was our fourth try as well. We have been away from our homeworld for over thirty generations; we remember it only through the collective mind. And you were on yours when?" Allen looked at Judy, then at Tippet. "Uh . . . yesterday."

"
Tptkpk
."

Judy could imagine well enough with that meant. If the trip from there to here had eaten her entire life, only to find someone else who had done it in an afternoon, she'd have said more than just "tptkpk." But these guys had built a starship the hard way. And they could augment their own intelligence at will. They had learned English in less than a day; she had no doubt that they could build their own hyperdrive in little more just from the clues Allen had already given them. And what else could they do that she didn't know about?

They walked for a while in silence, each of them no doubt contemplating the things to learn—and to fear—from the other.

And now there was another factor in the equation. Another human one, but Judy had hoped to leave all that behind, at least for a while. She should have known she couldn't do that. She had learned at an early age that she couldn't run away from her problems; why should she have expected it to work now?

37

The
Getaway
looked just the same as they had left it. If Tippet's alter-egos had studied it while they were gone, they had cleaned up after themselves, but Judy doubted they had ever been there. The hatches were still shut tight, and the air smelled stale and plasticky from being closed up all morning. While Allen hooked up the computer to the hyperdrive again and made sure it would be ready to go when they needed it, Judy set up the stove and heated up a can of beef stew, with a canful of their hard-earned water and a couple of sliced-up potatoes thrown in to bulk it out into a meal for two. The stove had a tiny butane tank that seemed too small to hold enough fuel to boil even a cup of water, but when she opened the valve and gave the flint lighter a spin, it flared to life with a
whoosh
that singed her knuckles and wrapped flames all the way around the pot. She had to turn it down to practically nothing to keep the burner from overdoing it; at that rate she could probably boil the entire five gallons of water and have plenty of fuel left over. She'd had no idea camp stoves were that efficient. A breeze rustled the fronds of the trees all around her. Judy couldn't feel it on the ground, but that was fine with her. She was just now warming up again after her dip in the river. She had intended to change her clothing once she got back to the
Getaway
, but her pants and shirt had dried out during the walk back, and the sun had warmed the ground and the rock beside the tank enough that she felt comfortable enough as she was. She took off her shoes and set them on the rock to air out, then spread out her sleeping bag for a picnic blanket and started taking apart the pistol while the stew cooked.

Every inner surface had been coated with oil. She didn't have any to replace it with, so she was careful not to wipe the water off. She just blew it dry as best she could and let the rest of the moisture evaporate.

Tippet sat on her knee and watched her work. "Pretty primitive, eh?" she asked him as she removed the bullets from the cylinder and dried them with her shirttail. Allen still carried one of the walkie-talkies on his hip, but Judy had set up the other one beside her. Tippet's voice came to her in stereo; faintly from inside the
Getaway
, and more directly from near her feet.

"Perhaps," he said, "but nonetheless it looks effective. The projectile alone masses more than I do."

"It wouldn't do you any good, that's for sure." She blew through the cylinders one at a time, then said, "When we first met, you had a little pointy stinger in one hand. Is that a weapon?"

"Yes," he replied. He pulled it out of its holster and held it up for her to examine. She had to squint to see it.

"How does it work? You don't actually have to stab your target with it, do you?"

"No, it can be fired from a distance. It creates an electrical discharge that interferes with neural impulses. It does so with lifeforms from my world, at least. Whether it would do the same to you remains to be seen."

"I'm not volunteering to be zapped."

"I wouldn't suggest it." Tippet put the stinger away.

Judy finished drying the pistol and put it away as well. With any luck, they would never find out how effective their weapons were on one another.

The stew was bubbling softly. She gave it a stir, then tasted one of the hunks of potato. It was soft all the way through, and on an empty stomach it tasted wonderful.

"Soup's on!" she hollered to Allen.

He didn't need to be called twice. He hopped out of the tank and sat down next to her on the sleeping bag, and the two of them dug in. After their six-mile walk, they slurped it down with ravenous delight, eating directly from the cook pot and fighting over the bits of beef, which they as often as not fed to each other once they'd won. Even Tippet tried a bite, after analyzing it chemically and deciding it wouldn't poison him, but the taste set him to gagging for a full minute. If his reaction was typical, then food was one aspect of their cultures they wouldn't be sharing.

"Unless it's just my cooking," Judy said when he had recovered.

"I doubt—
skkllk
—if that's the problem," Tippet said graciously.

"Well, thanks for saying so." She rinsed out the pot with a quarter cup or so of water, then dried it by holding it in the camp stove's open flame until the last of the water drops sizzled into steam. It was easier than using a towel, and probably safer: the heat would sterilize it for the next time. A breeze rustled the treetops again. She was glad for the sound; it was one of the few noises she'd heard since she and Allen had landed here. It reminded her of lazy afternoons when she was an undergraduate in college, when she would sit out in the grass on the quad and let the world go by. She hadn't done that in way too long. When she was done drying the pot, she shut off the stove, leaned back on the sleeping bag, crossed her arms behind her head, and settled in for a long bout of cloud-watching. Allen lay crosswise with his head in her lap, and Tippet landed on her knee.

"So what are the French doing?" Allen asked.

"The submarine is still in space," Tippet replied. "They have refined their orbit into a stable circle just outside the atmosphere, and now, from the radar pulses reflecting off the ground, it seems clear that they are mapping the surface."

Why here
? Judy wondered. There were hundreds of stars closer to home with planets they could explore, starting with Alpha Centauri. She and Allen had come this far to get away from people, but the French Navy wouldn't need to do that. Hell, given their belligerence of late, she would have expected them to kick Onnescu and the other early arrivals off Centauri's planet and claim it for themselves. Apparently they wanted one they could claim without a fight. Maybe she and Allen should have told them to go away when they first showed up, but she didn't really want to claim the planet for herself. She just wanted to explore one that didn't already have people on it, but after meeting Tippet, even that didn't seem so important anymore. Let the French land. If their intentions were benign, she and Allen could contact them any time. And if they were setting up a secret military base or something, well, the U.S. had two pairs of eyes on site that the French didn't know about. Or several thousand, if you counted Tippet and his brethren.

They spent the afternoon talking about Earth's sudden exodus into space. Tippet wanted to know the political situation that had led to Judy's decision not to greet her own people sixty light-years from home, and how it had come to be that way. Judy was reluctant to talk about it, mostly because she was so embarrassed for humanity, but Allen answered the alien's questions and asked dozens of his own. How did Tippet's people handle disagreements among nations? Did they even
have
nations, or was their whole planet covered by one huge networked mind?

"Neither," Tippet replied. "There's a practical limit to the number of nodes in a link. Beyond a few thousand, the coordination effort overwhelms any further gain in intelligence. But any of us can link with any others, so the composition of a mind will shift over time, and disagreements between minds are usually settled by exchanging members until they reach consensus."

"Usually?" Allen asked.

Tippet said, "Some overminds become protective of their identity. It's probably a throwback to our evolutionary roots, when hives were discrete entities that competed for resources. It's uncommon now, but it happens."

"So how do those minds settle differences?"

"They seldom do."

That didn't sound encouraging. "What do you do with them, then?" Judy asked.

"It depends on how disruptive they are to the rest of us. If they become dangerous, we swarm and disband them, but if they're merely eccentric, we allow them to pursue their own destiny. They occasionally prove useful."

"How?"

"They sometimes provide new insight that the rest of us miss. And . . ." He paused. "And they make good starship crews."

"Aha!" Judy laughed. "You're a mad scientist too!" Then she had to explain about INSANE. She made Allen show Tippet his membership card to prove she wasn't kidding. Tippet didn't find it amusing. "You actually worry that your race will exterminate itself?"

"Not anymore," Allen said. "But yeah, before I gave away the plans for the hyperdrive, it was looking pretty inevitable."

Tippet said, "Apparently singleton societies react differently to outside stimulus. On our world, such a revelation would increase the tension between hives, rather than ease it."

"It did on ours, too," Judy said.

"That's just a short-term reaction," said Allen. "Once people have a chance to think it through and realize we're not all stuck on the same planet anymore, things will settle down."

"I am not convinced," Tippet said. "The economic repercussions alone will destabilize your nations'

governments for years to come. If things are truly as volatile as you say, your 'gift' could provide the final push into chaos."