The getaway special by Jerry Oltion

to him. The only reason she hadn't locked him into a bunk alongside Gerry was because she knew he wouldn't do anything to stop her or Allen from what they were doing. He'd lost the argument, but he wasn't the type to try forcing his way. He would wait for the courts to exonerate him, and in the meantime he would snipe at them and make them feel guilty.
    Judy would have felt guiltier if she believed him, but she still didn't buy his rationale. There might be some economic disruption as people got used to the idea that they weren't stuck on one planet anymore, but throwing the internet into chaos to stop the plans had probably caused more financial damage than the hyperdrive would. And as for the personal consequences, she might lose her job for failing to follow orders, but she couldn't believe she'd be in any real danger when they got home. This wasn't the seventeenth century, after all, and unlike Galileo, neither she nor Allen would have to recant their beliefs on pain of death. Once the secret was out, scientists everywhere would confirm it, and when that happened the government would have far bigger things to worry about than prosecuting Judy and Allen for giving it away.
    "Okay, I'm ready," Allen said. "Here goes." The notebook computer was dangling at the end of its data cable; he grasped it in his left glove while he pushed the "Enter" key with his right index finger. Space Rangers whirled into static, replaced by a bright blue screen with white words: "Emergency Alert. If you have videotape equipment, set it to record the following program." Allen's calm, classical-station-disk-jockey voice read the message aloud, then the screen cleared to show Allen himself, dressed in a white spacesuit liner, in a sequence that Judy had filmed just minutes earlier with one of the shuttle's public relations cameras. They had stored the image digitally on his computer's hard drive, and he was playing it back now through the video interface.
    "By now you may have already heard that the Space Shuttle Discovery has demonstrated a revolutionary new device, a faster-than-light engine for traveling through space. I am Doctor Allen Meisner, the inventor of that device, and I've interrupted your program today to give you the plans for it." He smiled wide for the camera, and Judy winced at how goofy he looked. Nobody was going to believe him. People all over the world were no doubt switching channels already, sure that he was selling something.
    But then, he was on all the channels. They could switch satellites if they wanted, but even then they would probably encounter him on at least half the channels there. All the communications satellites were linked these days, relaying signals around the globe. Even the European satellites were part of the system. They could be taken off-line from the ground, but Judy knew not all of them would be. Not in time, anyway. The ones under private control—like the one they had hijacked—probably wouldn't go off-line at all. After all, this was news, and none of the networks would want to be the only ones not carrying it. The video zoomed in on the computer screen, which showed an image of the circuit diagram that Allen had attempted to email to everyone. In a voice-over, he described how to assemble it and how the finished engine worked. The whole thing took less than ten minutes, including the last-minute addition that he had hastily cobbled together to explain the distance calibration. The presentation looked like a bad high school physics film the way he—or more often just his hand—pointed out various parts of circuit diagrams, but as Judy watched him describe how to build and operate a hyperdrive engine, she couldn't help but be impressed. Some people, anyway, would record it, and that's all that mattered. It wouldn't take long for them to realize it was genuine, and once the secret was in private hands, it would spread throughout the world just as fast as an email virus.
    The radio came alive with