The getaway special by Jerry Oltion Read Free Book Online

perfectly with the spot on the ground you're trying to land on, you'll be moving when you get there. But the other reason is that you can't appear where there's already something in the way. Even air is too thick. So you have to appear outside the atmosphere and fall the rest of the way in with a parachute."
    "Or fly in," Judy said. She looked out at the stump of the vertical stabilizer. Discovery wouldn't be flying anywhere for a while.
    She shuddered to think what would have happened if the A-sat weapon had hit the crew module instead of the tail. Or if they'd been just a few more minutes in repairing the hyperdrive, or if the space warp it generated hadn't been big enough to take the whole shuttle along with it. They were lucky to be alive.
    Saturn lured her attention again. Part of her, the little girl who'd dreamed of space travel, boggled at the sight, but the part of her who captained the space shuttle was thinking, He didn't even know how it worked before he yanked us out of orbit .
    Maybe knowing how many things could go wrong on a space flight made her paranoid, but the knowledge that Allen was flying by the seat of his pants didn't inspire confidence. What if he'd missed something else equally obvious? In fact... "Wait a second. Are we outside Saturn's radiation belts?"
    "Radiation belts don't extend over the poles," he said.
    "You're sure?"
    He nodded. "Relax. I know what I'm doing. And now that I know how to correct for mass, I can put us back in Earth orbit any time we want."
    Provided the hyperdrive didn't burn out again. Judy imagined them falling into Saturn if it failed. Or would they starve first? How far away were they, anyway, and how strong was Saturn's gravity at this distance? And even if they didn't fall into Saturn, what about the unwanted velocity they'd picked up from their time near the Moon? Aloud, she said, "You don't have any idea what our actual vector is, do you?
    Like you said, we could pop into the right place, but doing seventeen thousand miles an hour straight at the ground. Even if we start out a couple hundred miles up, that doesn't give us much time to react." Allen looked out over Judy's shoulder. He didn't say anything for at least a minute, and when he did speak it was only to say, "We're farther out than anyone has ever been. Seeing something nobody else has ever seen. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"
    The rings looked like tie-dyed silk. Specks of brightness just beyond them had to be the shepherd moons. Judy could almost hear the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey playing in the background. She shook her head and the music stopped. "Sure it does," she said, "but it also means if something goes wrong, we're dead. I'm just trying to keep that from happening." Carl chose that moment to float up through the hatchway, an even more worried than usual look on his face.
    "What's wrong?" Judy asked.
    "We've got eight days of consumables," he said, "but the toilet's broken, and Gerry's got to go. At least he says he does."
    "Oh, great." The power of suggestion made Judy suddenly notice the pressure in her own bladder, too. She tried to ignore it, but she knew it wouldn't be denied for long. Nor would Gerry's. "Well, he'll just have to use a waste bag," she said. "For that matter, he'd have to use one anyway, because I'm not letting him loose again."
    Carl scowled. "We can't keep him in that bunk forever."
    "We're not going to. Allen is just about done here, and I think we've pushed our luck far enough for one flight. As soon as we're sure it's safe, we're going back to the space station."
    "Good," Carl said. He pulled himself down into the mid-deck again without even looking out the window.
    Allen did. Judy found her gaze following his, once more drawn to the spectacle of Saturn floating just outside. The planet was half in light and half in shadow, the soft texture of its cloud layers giving it the puffy three-dimensionality of an overstuffed pillow. Its rings, on the other hand, were so