The getaway special by Jerry Oltion Read Free Book Online Page A

flat an abstraction that they looked unnatural, like a collar drawn with a felt-tip marker on a hologram of a cat.
    "Sure you don't want to stop off at Mars?" Allen asked softly. She took a deep breath, then sighed and looked away. "Not this time. Let's go home." 6
    "It'll take three jumps to put us back in orbit," Allen said. "I already figured out how to do it weeks ago. I call it a 'tangent vector translation maneuver.' "
    "That's kind of a mouthful," Judy said. She and Carl were looking over his shoulders again as he programmed the coordinates into his computer.
    "It's descriptive," Allen replied. "When you're in orbit, your vector is always tangent to the point you're occupying at the moment. So to slip into a particular orbit, you have to translate your current vector into one that's tangent to the orbit you want. What we do is jump to within a few thousand miles of Earth, where we're close enough to use the tracking satellites and ground radar to establish our vector but far enough away to keep from hitting anything if we're aimed the wrong direction. Then once we know how fast we're going and what direction we're headed, we jump to the right point over the planet for gravity to warp our trajectory into the right one for where we want to be, and then we pop into low-Earth orbit with just the right vector. It's a piece of cake."
    "Famous last words," Carl said.
    Allen ignored him. "First translation coming up." He pressed the "Jump" key. The radio beacon beeped. Judy looked out the forward windows just in time to see Saturn vanish like a switched-out light, and Earth pop into existence to the right of where it had been. It was much larger, filling about sixty degrees of view, which meant they were closer than the Moon, but still way beyond normal orbital altitude.
    "Checking our position . . ." Allen said slowly. "Hah! I was less than fifty kilometers off target."
    "Good for you," Carl said in a voice that said just the opposite. He turned away and pulled himself past Judy into the copilot's chair.
    "What are you doing?" she asked when she saw him reaching for the radio controls.
    "I want to find out how much damage we've done on the ground." Judy wasn't sure she wanted to know, but she supposed there was no point in delaying the inevitable. "All right," she said, "but no transmissions just yet. Let's find out how much trouble we're in before we let them know we're back."
    "They'll spot us quick enough with radar," Carl pointed out.
    "If they're looking out here. We must be ten thousand kilometers up."
    "Twelve," Allen said.
    "Won't matter," Carl said, but he set the radio to receive only and started sifting through the commercial frequencies, switching on the cabin speaker so all three of them could hear. There weren't many stations with the power to punch a clear signal that far into space, and there was a lot of static from stations that had just enough signal to create interference, but Carl managed to tune in an English-language station long enough to hear the end of the Beatles' "Yesterday."
    "Appropriate," he sneered. The deejay came on and told them that the weather was partly cloudy and fifty-seven degrees out with a slight chance of rain in the higher elevations. Judy chuckled as she always did when she heard that phrase from space, but her breath caught in her throat at the deejay's next words.
    "Here's an update on the new computer virus that . . ."
    Whatever else he had to say was lost in static.
    Judy felt her heart lurch. "Get that station back!" she ordered. Carl tried, but atmospheric conditions had apparently changed enough to block it. He tuned on across the spectrum until he heard another snippet:
    ". . . extremely virulent email virus has apparently mutated into three different forms already. The original 'hyperdrive plans' form hit less than an hour ago, but the Internet Virus Watch Consortium has already detected two variations, one with a subject line reading 'Wait, it's real!' and another one