Anywhere but here Jerry Oltion

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.ANYWHERE BUT HERE JERRY OLTIONFor the United States of America"Our country, right or wrong.When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right."—Carl SchurzMay we never forget the second half of that quote.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839AcknowledgmentsThanks as always to the Eugene Wordos for support and inspiration, especially Ken Brady, Aurora Lemieux, Eric Witchey, Dave Bishoff, and Blake Hutchins, who made sure I sat down and wrote when I said I would by the simple expedient of coming over to my house and doing it with me.Thanks to Elba Solano and Françoise Beniston for help with my Spanish and French.The pails I got right are theirs; any mistakes are my own.Thanks to Jack McDevitt for the title, which he found languishing unused in my previous book, The Getaway Special.1Trent Stinson just wanted to get some cash.It was Friday evening, and he and Donna were headed downtown for their traditional "start the weekend right" dinner out.He had enough cash in his wallet for fast food, but Donna wanted to go to the brew pub tonight, and two burgers and a couple of pints of ferry beer would just about clean him out.A weekend in Rock Springs without money was about the dullest prospect Trent could imagine, so he swung by Southside National on their way downtown and parked across the street from the ATM."Be back in a sec," he told Donna as he stepped out and down to the pavement.It was a long reach.His pickup was standard equipment for a Wyoming native: three feel high at the running boards, with knobby off-road tires too big for the fenders, each wheel individually powered by a General Electric 150 superconducting motor modified with a bank of ultracapacitors for even more torque on startup.Trent's had been modified a bit more than most.Besides painting the body panels a deep pearlescent red and chrome-plating practically everything else, he had replaced all the glass with half-inch Lexan, oversized and set inside the frames so no amount of pressure could blow it out, and he had sealed every seam with industrial-strength adhesive.He had added extra latches to the doors to hold them tight against the extra seals he had also installed, and he had reinforced all the body panels with angle-iron to keep them from flexing.He'd welded three chrome roll bars across the outside of the cab for extra support, incidentally giving him a sturdy anchor lor the two army surplus cargo parachutes packed in separate carriers on top.In back, a homemade camper built of diamond plate aluminum looked a little like the top half of the Lunar Module that had taken Aldrin and Armstrong to the Moon half a century before.It was sealed just as tight, and he'd tested the whole works to 30 p.s.i.—two full atmospheres of pressure—before he had trusted his and Donna's lives to it.Those modifications had eaten up most of their bank account, but Trent figured he could take out a bit more without risking next month's house payment.If there was a next month's house payment.He didn't want to stiff the loan company, but the way people were jumping off into space lately, you couldn't give away real estate on Earth anymore.When Allen Meisner had dropped the plans for a cheap hyperdrive engine on the world, he probably hadn't considered what it would do to the housing industry, but people were defaulting on their loans right and left, and the banks had yet to foreclose on any of them.They didn't want to get stuck paying the taxes.That was just the lip of the iceberg.A hyperdrive engine that cost only a couple hundred dollars in parts had changed a lot more than that.Trent's job, for one thing.He was a construction worker, but the only houses being built these days were on planets orbiting Alpha Centauri and Tau Ceti and places farther out.There was plenty of work to be had if he wanted it, but he'd never been excited about commuting, especially when it involved a multi-light-year jump and a parachute landing.And now commuting was impossible anyway, because the federal government had made it illegal to possess a hyperdrive engine.That didn't slop anyone, of course, but it cut down on casual trips, and it killed the one other source of income that Trent could have done: retrofitting other people's vehicles for space.Even though it wasn't illegal to seal up a truck, at least not yet, most people didn't want to make themselves targets for the police, and the ones who were willing to risk it were also generally capable of doing it themselves.The only decent prospect for work was the new civic center, which had been in the planning stages for over a year and was up for a final yea-or-nay vote at the next city council meeting, but with so many people bailing out of town, Trent didn't expect the council to go ahead with it.Donna Still had her job at the Mall, but it was only three days a week, and they couldn't live on just that.They could relocate, but neither one of them were quite ready to let go of their home town.They'd made one trip out to a sun-like star about fifteen light-years away in Cetus, found some friendly aliens, and gone fishing with them, but that was just a weekend lark before the government had cracked down on such things.They'd had no intention of staying.But if Trent couldn't find work on Earth.The bank's parking lot was deserted.It would normally be quiet this time of day, but there weren't any cars on the street, either.It seemed like half the people in town had headed for the stars in the five months since Allen had made it possible, and the rest of them weren't getting out much [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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