The getaway special by Jerry Oltion Page A

pressing her spacesuit tight against her body as well. She shut off her oxygen flow and opened the equalization valve, then reached up to her helmet, twisted it sideways, and slid it off. She took a cautious sniff. The air was cold, and stank of scorched metal, carbon composites, and sagebrush. After days of canned air on board the shuttle, it smelled wonderful.
    Allen was lying on his side on what was now the floor. He had to struggle to get his hands free so he could pop his own helmet off, but even then he was having trouble. Judy loosened her straps so she could help him, and together they managed to lift the bubble from his head.
    "This reminds me of a car wreck I had once," he said.
    "That's encouraging," she muttered. She released her harness completely, bracing herself against the control panel, then climbed up on the seat backs and stuck her head and shoulders outside, wiggling sideways to get the life-support backpack past the hatch frame. It had been easier in zero-gee. The capsule had come to rest on a sagebrush-covered hillside. The ground between plants—and there was a lot of open space—was reddish dirt, scattered with rocks and covered spottily with snow.
    "It looks like we went to Mars after all," she said.
    "What?"
    "Never mind."
    She hoisted herself out and slid down around the capsule's curved side to stand in the dirt. The snow immediately around the capsule had melted, and little puffs of steam still rose from beneath the hot metal to blow away immediately in the breeze. Judy was glad for the snow; if they'd landed in the summer they might have started a fire. As it was, the capsule had gotten plenty hot. Soot streaked its sides, and the rivet heads holding it together had actually begun to melt. It was already cooling, though, with the air blowing onto it from the snowbanks.
    The parachute had tangled in the sagebrush. Good thing it had; there was enough wind for it to drag the capsule for miles if it hadn't. But now it was a huge orange-and-white target for anyone flying over. That was no doubt the designers' intent, but it was the last thing Judy wanted. She gathered it up while Allen tossed their helmets out through the hatch, then hoisted the getaway special canister up for her to take. The capsule teetered precariously when he stood up, so Judy wadded the 'chute between it and the ground to steady it, then took the canister from him and lowered it to the ground.
    "Is this the valuable one?" she asked, "or did we go to all that trouble just to save the radio beacon?"
    "I don't know," Allen said. He slid to the ground, then unscrewed the canister's top. Judy looked over his shoulders and was relieved to see the same nest of wires and circuitry that she'd seen inside the shuttle when he'd had to fix it.
    "We've got the right half," Allen said.
    "Good. I think. On the other hand, if we're going to get caught, I'd just as soon they don't find that." Allen said, "Let's try not to get caught." He looked at the blackened capsule. "I wonder if we can camouflage this thing." He tried breaking off one of the sagebrush stems, but the gnarled wood refused to give, even when he twisted it round and round like an apple stem.
    "Wait a second," Judy said. "The parachute." She pulled it back out from under the capsule and shook it out.
    The orange and white stripes were three feet wide. She and Allen had to fold it in layers so only the white showed, but they had plenty of material to work with, and plenty of shroud lines to tie it down. When they had finished, the descent module was just a white lump in a vast red-and-white desert.
    "Now what?" Allen said. He turned once around, scanning the horizon, but there was little more to see in the distance than at their feet. Sagebrush, rock, dirt, and snow went on in every direction. Presumably it did, anyway; the hillside they had landed on blocked their view to the north. At least Judy thought it was north; her direction sense was usually pretty good. If it was, then