The getaway special by Jerry Oltion Page B

that the United States government has issued a warrant for your arrest. If you dock here, we'll have to confine you to quarters and turn you over to the Feds on the next flight down."
    Judy laughed. "Confined to quarters? Mary, the habitat module is thirty feet long. Where are we going to go?"
    "With Doctor Meisner's device on board, who knows? I don't particularly want to find out, and besides, we have orders."
    Judy looked over at Carl in the copilot's seat, strapped in for the thrust they'd never needed. Normally Gerry would be sitting there, but he was still locked into his bunk. He'd given them plenty of reason, but suddenly it didn't seem quite so unlikely that Mary would do the same to them.
    "Told you so," Carl said smugly.
    Turning around so she could see Allen in the equipment bay behind her, Judy said, "Well, it looks like we're in for a long wait in a closet until they have another shuttle ready to fly. Unless you have another trick up your sleeve."
    He shook his head. "It wasn't supposed to work this way. People were supposed to be overjoyed. We were supposed to go home to parades and speeches."
    Carl laughed. "Oh, there'll be plenty of parades, all right, with our heads on spikes out in front of
    'em."
    "Not funny," Allen said petulantly.
    "Neither is upsetting the global economy," Carl said. "Or giving every country on Earth an instantaneous delivery system for nuclear bombs. Or—"
    "It can't be used for that," Allen said. "You can't open a pathway into the atmosphere; there's too much matter already there."
    "How long you want to bet it'll be before somebody figures out how?"
    "They won't, because it's impos—"
    Mary's incoming voice cut him off. "What are your intentions, Discovery ?" I intend to stay free , Judy thought, but aloud she said, "I don't see that we have much choice."
    "Neither do we. Do I have your word that you'll submit peacefully to arrest?"
    "No," Judy said automatically. "I mean, give us a minute to talk this over. We weren't expecting quite this kind of reception." She turned off the radio. "Well?" Carl said, "Well what? We don't have any other option."
    "Sure we do," Judy said. "We've got over a week's supplies left, don't we?" Carl nodded reluctantly.
    "We've got twice as much oxygen as we'll ever need now that we can't use the OMS engines for landing, and the fuel cells will keep providing water, so we could actually stay two or three weeks before we have to give ourselves up. The question is, would we be any better off if we did that?"
    "Nope," Carl said. "You'll still be guilty of treason and piracy. They'll just add resisting arrest to the charges."
    "If they can catch us. Allen, isn't there any way you can use that drive of yours to set us down on the ground? Someplace out of the way, where we'd have time to escape before they caught up with us?" Allen shook his head. "Like I told you before, it won't put something into a space that's already got something in it. Not even air. It takes too much energy to open the gateway. I could maybe drop us down to thirty miles or so above ground, but anything below that would burn out the engine." She felt a moment of irrational annoyance. What good was a hyperdrive if you couldn't land once you got where you were going? She pushed the thought aside and tried to visualize the problem. "Can't you transport what's there into space, and put us in the vacuum left behind before it closes?" Allen shook his head again. "No. Not without another engine on the far end, and split-second timing. And you'd have to have the calibration down cold , to within a foot or two, or it wouldn't work. I suppose it might be possible, eventually, but with the way the jump field is affected by mass you'd have to account for so many variables that it'd take forever to calculate. The density of the air itself would probably affect it, and the composition of the ground below, and—"
    "Okay, okay, I get the picture." Judy looked out at the space station, its habitat module