The getaway special by Jerry Oltion Page B

the sun was just a little west of south, so they still had a few hours of light. Not too many, though; the sun set early in the winter in Utah. Or had they gone all the way into Colorado?
    "Let's climb up to the top and see if we can see any sign of civilization," she said. 10
    It was slow going in their spacesuits, with the bulky arms and legs restricting their motion and the weight— especially the life-support backpack—throwing them off balance, but they needed the insulation. They would when they stopped exerting themselves, anyway; as it was they were panting and sweating when they reached the top, Judy carrying both helmets while Allen carried the hyperdrive engine. They hadn't been in space long enough to lose much muscle or bone mass, for which Judy was grateful; after a long flight she was sometimes exhausted just climbing a set of stairs. She had expected to see just more sagebrush and snow from the top of the hill, and that was nearly all they did see, but a couple miles to the north there was a straight line that might have been a fence or a road. It was hard to tell from this distance, but it was something artificial, anyway. The only other straight line, and it really wasn't that straight, was the pair of footprints leading from the capsule to the top of the hill. Judy wondered how long it would be before somebody spotted it, and them. She looked up in the sky, but she only saw two contrails, and they were way too high to be search planes.
    "Man, that's the bluest sky I've ever seen," she said.
    Allen had set the canister on the ground. "We must be pretty high up," he said, panting a bit from the exertion. "The sky gets darker with altitude."
    Judy almost told him she knew that already, but bit her tongue. No sense annoying him. But why was it, she wondered, that scientists all figured only they knew why the sky was blue?
    She pointed at the line in the distance. "We might as well try for that." He nodded tiredly. "I guess." He picked up the canister and they trudged down the north face of the hill.
    They spotted the first search plane about half an hour later. They'd been keeping to low ground whenever they could, finding that their oversize boots made walking in snow much easier than climbing up and over the hills, so they heard the sound long before they saw the black arrow in the sky.
    "Fighter plane," Judy said the moment she heard it. The tearing-fabric sound of its engines practically screamed "military" at her. "Find a big patch of snow and lay down in it."
    " Lie down," Allen said automatically, but he was already moving to obey. He set the canister in a drift in the lee of a waist-high sagebrush, scooped snow over it, then fell forward in the same drift and wiggled down into it. Judy was amazed at how quickly he disappeared from sight; his white spacesuit blended in perfectly.
    Except for his butt. The fabric where he'd slid down over the scorched side of the descent module had been smeared with soot. Judy threw a couple more handfuls of snow over it, then sat backward in another drift a few feet away. She lay on her back and scraped snow up over the control panel on her chest with her arms, feeling a little like a child making a snow angel. The plane roared past a couple miles to the south, heading west. Judy got just a brief glance of it as it flashed across her field of vision: a wedge-shaped dart, throttled down to just above stall speed, but still moving fast. Not the best search plane, but the Air Force had evidently scrambled whatever they had ready to fly. She waited for it to turn around and circle them, or the capsule, but it kept on going. When its engine noise had faded below the level of the wind through the sagebrush, she stood up and helped Allen to his feet again. "One down," she said.
    Allen brushed the snow off his spacesuit. "How many more do you suppose there'll be?" he asked. Judy looked at the sky, once again empty except for the high contrails, and shrugged. "Your guess is as