David Gerrold - Jumping of the Planet

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JUMPING OFF THE PLANET

David Gerrold

[13 jan 2002—scanned, proofed and released for #bookz]

MOM AND DAD

"I've got an idea!" Dad said. "Let's go to the moon."

"Huh—?" I looked up from my comic.

"I mean it. What do you kids think? Do you want to go to the moon?"

"Yeah, sure," I said, not believing him any more than I had all the other times he'd dangled promises

in front of my nose. In the last thirteen years, or at least as much of them as I could remember, he'd

promised me the stars, the sky, and a trip to Disneyland. The only time I saw the stars was on TV, the sky

was brown, and I still hadn't ridden the Matterhorn bobsleds and probably never would, at least not until I

paid for the trip myself. So when he asked me if I'd like to go to the moon, it sounded like just another one

of those things that adults say for no other reason than to use up air.

Is it just me, or is there something about grownups? What happens when you turn twenty-one? Does

the brain shrivel up automatically or do you have to have an operation where your judgment lobes are

removed? Adults can't stay in the same room with a kid without having to talk. Adults think they have to

relate to me. But I don't want to be related to. I want to be left alone.

Dad shows up twice a year. We get him two weeks at a time.

"We" includes me, my weird older brother and my stinky younger brother. Sometimes the older

brother is stinky and the younger one is weird. I think they've got some kind of a deal where they have to

take turns. I hate being the middle kid.

Weird builds worlds. He never shows anybody what he builds, but he spends hours a day at his

terminal. He rents processor time from UCLA, and pays for it by fumigating code for the evolutionarily

challenged. He's in the scholarship pipeline, so he's deep into the net. As big brothers go, he's not the

worst, but he never pulled a bully off me either, so what good is he? Mom and him had a big fight just

before my birthday, about his money for college, and his job, and stuff like that. Nothing was resolved,

except that things were more sullen than usual, which is hard to do, because sullen is normal in our house.

The two of them avoided each other like they had been magnetized in the same direction. It was

fascinating to watch. I think they call it a gavotte. That's a kind of a dance where everybody moves slowly

and carefully and keeps out of everybody else's way. They didn't even talk to each other at my birthday

dinner.

That's when Mom announced that Dad would be coming early for us this year and we'd be spending a

month with him instead of two weeks. She said it while cutting the cake, like it was supposed to be an

extra present for me. She said it was what Dad wanted and she wasn't going to argue about it, it would be

good for us to spend a little more time with our father. But I figured she just wanted us out. She looked

tireder than usual, and she kept saying she wanted out of the war zone. Like she was blaming us. But we

didn't ask to be born. Especially Stinky.

Stinky doesn't do much of anything except whine and wet his bed. Dad thinks Mom is ruining him. I

think he's already ruined. I once told him he was an accident—the accident that split up Mom and Dad—

and that was another multimegaton war. Now I know why they call it the nuclear family. Mom spent half

the day trying to calm Stinky down, and the other half on the phone with Dad, and I got all the fallout

from everybody.

I spent the next three months trying to stay out of the house as much as possible. I would grab some

recordings and my headphones and get on my bike early in the morning and see how far I could ride

before it got too hot. Weird says I'm stupid for going up topside in the sun, the tubes are air-conditioned,

UV-safe, and have more trees, but he doesn't understand. It's quieter up topside. People don't bother you.

Sometimes, I try to see how far up the mountain I can get. All I want is a place where I can just sit and

listen to my music without anybody interrupting. But when I try to listen at home, all of Mom's sentences

begin with, "Charles, if you're not doing anything right now—"And when I tell her I am doing something,

she says, "No, you're not. You're just listening to your music." Hello? Is anybody home?

We live in Bunker City, which is supposed to be part of El Paso, but it's really just an old tube-city

built in a hurry to house refugees from the west, and then prettied up a lot when they didn't go home

afterward. So now it's another suburb, sort of.

What it is, is a place where a bunch of tube-houses have been buried up to their armpits in sand.

When the wind blows, the sky disappears and we get to spend a week at a time staring at the curved walls

of our pipe-rooms. Sometimes the lights flicker and go yellow. Twice we've had outages and had to sit in

the dark waiting for the wind farms to come back online. I don't know why a sandstorm should put a wind

farm out of commission, except it does. Anyway, sitting alone in the dark with no one to talk to except

Weird and Stinky is not my idea of a good time. It doesn't take too long before we're all really hating each

other. Weird says that during the sandstorms is when most murders happen. I can understand that.

Anyway, Dad shows up every June and the first couple days are always spent driving somewhere.

Usually Colorado or Arizona, although once we went to Mexico for two days. That was like a downtown

tube-city with hot sauce. I got to practice my Spanish in a restaurant. I understood two words of the

waiter's reply.

Dad works so hard trying to be a pal that it's embarrassing. He tells us how much he loves us, how

much he misses us, how he wishes we could spend more time together, and we all do the obligatory

performances of, "we love you too, Daddy," but it's like acting for a stranger. Who is this guy anyway?

Weird just grunts and Stinky just whines and it's up to me to carry on the conversation. And that's about

as much fun as kissing your brother. Either one.

Eventually, after two or three days of Dad's earnest attempts to be Dad, Stinky usually does

something ghastly, like peeing in the back seat or throwing up into the cooler, and Dad loses his temper,

and then everything is back to normal. Nobody talks. Dad turns up the stereo and we listen to Beethoven

or Wagner or Tchaikovsky and that's actually not so bad. It's better than trying to talk to each other.

Sometimes Dad tells us stories about the music, but not very often.

Dad works for a music consortium, so he knows a lot of gossip about composers and what they were

thinking of when they wrote this piece or that. Sometimes he really lights up when he talks about his

music and I remember we used to have fun times together when he tried to teach me about conducting—

but something happened, I don't know what, and it was like part of the fire went out. Now Dad still listens

to music, but he doesn't talk about it so much anymore.

So there we were, in Dad's rented minivan heading west toward someplace in Arizona and suddenly

he says, "I've got an idea. Let's go to the moon. What do you think, Chigger?" What was I supposed to

say? I said what I felt. So of course, Dad got angry at me. And then Weird and Stinky did too.

But if he didn't want to hear it, then why did he ask?

And why didn't he ask when it was important? It was my family too. Nobody asked me if I wanted it

split up. They just did it.

A HOLE IN THE GROUND

I don't know if the Barringer meteor crater is at the end of the world, but I'm pretty sure you can see it

from there. If there's a lonelier, uglier, more empty place in the world, I'm sure I don't want to go there.

You drive for hours across the desert, and then there's a sign with an arrow, so you turn off and

follow a two-lane road across some more desert, but the road still doesn't look like it's going anywhere.

The ground goes up a little, but there's nothing to see except a dinky little building. You go through the

building because you have to pay admission, and then you walk out the back, and up a path. Then you go

up some stairs and suddenly there you are—standing on the edge and staring down into the biggest hole in

the world and saying a lot of stupid things that don't come anywhere near to expressing how deep and

scary it really is.

Dad said, "Geezis."

Weird said, "Oh, wow!"

Stinky said, "Daddy, is that a real hole?"

And I said a word that got me a dirty look from all three of them.

It was the biggest empty space I'd ever seen in my life. It was eerie. At the bottom, there were some

buildings and even a couple of scooters and jeeps. That's how you could tell how big it was. Weird started

reading aloud from the souvenir pamphlet, "The Barringer crater is named for the American engineer,

Daniel M. Barringer, who theorized in 1905 that it was caused by the impact of a meteor. The meteor

struck the Earth almost head on, 25,000 years before the birth of Christ; it was mostly nickel and iron, 30

meters (100 feet) in diameter—actually, that makes it an asteroid—and weighed 63,000 metric tons. It

was traveling 8-16 kilometers, or 5-10 miles, per second. The blast was the equivalent of a 35-megaton

nuclear warhead. Most of the asteroid was vaporized, but approximately 30 tons of fragments have been

collected. The minerals coesite and stishovite, which can only be formed under very high pressure, have

been discovered here.

"The crater is 1.2 kilometers in diameter—that's about three-quarters of a mile. It's 180 meters deep,

surrounded by a rim rising 50 meters above the surrounding plain. This wall we're on is 160 feet high. So

that makes it 760 feet to the bottom."

I said, "I bet you could put the Empire State Building inside it and it wouldn't show."

"No," said Weird, still reading. "The Empire State Building is 450 meters high—1475 feet. The top

half would still be visible."

"You know what I like about you, Douglas?" I said.

"No, what?"

"Nothing."

"Hey, it says so right here, Chigger—" He waved the pamphlet at me. I slapped it away.

"All right. Knock it off, you two," Dad said. We both turned away from each other, annoyed.

The four of us were all alone on that crater wall. If there was anyone else around, we didn't see them.

Not even at the bottom of the crater. All around us everything was very hot and very silent and very dark

all the way down. There was no wind. It was like being frozen in time. The whole bottom of the crater

was one big shadow. And it looked haunted. It made me queasy.

"Look," said Weird, pointing. "There's a path. I'll bet it goes all the way down."

"Where?"

"There." He pointed. It spiraled around and down. The crater walls were too steep to get to the

bottom any other way. Stinky started being Stinky almost immediately. "Can we go down there, huh?

Huh?" He didn't wait for an answer. He just started running along the path.

Dad hollered, "No, wait—" but Stinky didn't stop. So Dad poked me and said, "Go, get him."

"Uh—" I didn't want to say that the height of the crater and the steepness of the wall scared me. "If I

chase him, he'll just keep running. If we just stand here, he'll give up and come back—"

"And what if he slips and falls?" said Dad. "Go get him."

I looked to Weird for support, but he just pushed me forward. "Go on, Chigger."

"You too!" I demanded.

"Both of you, go after him! Now!" said Dad. Weird pushed me again, and I was off. Behind me, I

heard Dad say, "You too, Douglas!" I could hear him following behind me, but it didn't sound like he was

making much of an effort. Apparently he thought this was just a kid thing, not worthy of serious geek

attention.

The path was narrow and steep and scary. It was like running down the side of a wall. I tried not to

look off to my left, where there was nothing at all except a lot of nothing at all. Maybe it was all that time

living in a tube-town, I just didn't like big open spaces—and this was the biggest and openest I'd ever

seen. So I didn't look. And if I didn't see it, then it wasn't there. I hoped.

"Stinky, you stop right there!" I called after him, but he giggled and shouted back, "You can't catch

me. You can't catch me." He kept running and laughing, like it was all a game. And to tell the truth, it was

almost kinda fun running down and around the crater wall. It was all downhill, so it was easy running.

You let yourself go loose and then you just keep falling forward and let your feet lump down in front of

you. If only there wasn't that big hole there—I slowed down automatically—

"Come on, Chigger!" Weird said impatiently. He gangled past me.

I looked back. Dad was following after us, but he wasn't running, just walking fast.

And then Stinky slipped at the first switchback and skidded off the path, which would have been

warning enough to any rational person that running down the side of a hole big enough to have its own

area code was not a good idea—but Stinky didn't have good ideas. He picked himself up, shouted, "You're

a big doo-doo head, and you can't catch me," and headed toward the next switchback.

"Bobby! Stop it! If you slip, you'll roll all the way down. You could get killed—!" But he didn't pay

any more attention to me than I paid to Dad. He just kept shouting and taunting.

I wondered if I could cut him off, but that would have meant taking the short-and-fast way down, and

I really didn't want to do that. So I slowed down for the turn, tried not to look, and kept after the little

bastard. Behind me, I could hear Dad shouting, "Go get him, Charles!" as if it was my fault he'd run down

here.

Eventually Weird caught up with Stinky, and so did I. Weird grabbed Stinky's arm and they skidded

along the path for a bit, and for a moment I thought they were going to lose it and just go on down the

side, but then their feet caught and they stopped. And then Weird started yelling at Stinky about how

dangerous it was to run down the side of a steep hill. "You almost slipped! What do you think you were

doing? You'd have rolled and bounced all the way down to the bottom. You'd have been killed!"

"Yeah!" I said. "And then we'd not only have to walk down to get you, we'd have to carry you back

up." Weird gave me his weird look. "Well, we would."

Stinky didn't say anything, he just did that nasty hate-stare that he's so good at, and we all stood

around for a minute not talking, just catching our breath, waiting for Dad to get to us. We hadn't gotten

very far down the side of the crater. Most of it was still below us, but we'd come a long way anyway, at

least half a klick, maybe more.

It wasn't until Dad showed up that Stinky started talking again. "I wasn't gonna fall it isn't fair I

wanna go to the bottom Dad make him let me go let go of me!" And then he did wriggle free and started

running down the path again. And Weird and I had to go after him again. With Dad walking behind. This

time Stinky was running away just to be nasty. "You can't catch me, neener, neener, neener!"

I was so angry, I started after him—which was exactly what he wanted. Only, I wasn't going to yell at

him like Weird. I was going to gut-punch him like he deserved. No matter what Dad said. Weird came

running after the both of us.

The path went back and forth down the side of the crater in a series of switchbacks. The first one

turned so sharply, it was hard to stop and turn back the other way. If you're going to fall, that's where it's

most likely to happen. And that's where he did slip—

Stinky was shouting and looking back, not watching where he was going, and he stumbled over a

bump and bounced face forward and slid down the slope—and for a moment, that queasy feeling in my

gut turned into a flash of black fear that he was going to slide all the way down—but then he stopped

sliding in a patter of loose dirt and gravel and just hung there on the steep side of the crater wall, caught

on a tiny bush. "Don't move!" I screamed. "Don't move!" And I knew even as I said it, that he would do

exactly the opposite, because that was the kind of stupid little monster he was.

Except—he didn't move. He was too scared to move. He was screaming as loud as he could. "Daaaa-

ddeeee!"

"Just hold on," I called. I was the closest. I looked back and Weird was just coming around the last

switchback. What I really wanted to say to Stinky was, "This is your own fault. We told you not to go—"

But I was close enough to see how scared he was and as angry as I was at him, I was even more scared for

him. "Just don't move, I'm coming to get you—" If only I could figure out how.

Stinky had slipped about five meters down the slope. It was mostly dirt, with only a few little things

pretending to be plants. He'd caught on a scraggly little bush that didn't look strong enough to hold him. It

was already bending precariously, and I was certain it was going to snap before I could get to him.

The problem was that the slope was too steep for me. If I tried to go down it, I'd just go skidding all

the way down to the bottom. And it was a long way down. There was that queasy sensation again.

Heights. Open spaces. Holes. Everything. I couldn't explain it. And there was no way to get down

underneath Stinky either, to catch him. I said a word, the one that Mom always tells me not to say.

"Charles! Go get him.'" That was Dad, always full of good advice ... from a distance.

I couldn't see how—the only thing I could think of was to lie down flat on the ground and try to inch

my way downward, and even that seemed like a really stupid idea, because if I slipped, we'd both go

rolling a hundred meters to the floor of the crater. Only it looked farther. I began edging myself down the

slope, all the time muttering through gritted teeth, "Just hang on, Bobby! Just hang on—" I went from

handhold to handhold. There weren't any rocks or weeds strong enough to hang onto.

I couldn't get close enough. I anchored myself as best as I could and unbuckled my belt, pulling it out

of my pants as safely as I could. I let the end hang down toward Stinky. He could almost reach it, but it

would have meant letting go. "No, wait—I'll try to get lower."

And that's when I froze. I realized I couldn't move either. Not up, not down. My mouth was dry and I

couldn't swallow—and the great empty hole yawned beneath us. We were stuck on the wall, just waiting

to slide down. I knew it then—we were both going to die here. And it really pissed me off. This was not

how I'd planned my life—

"Chigger, wait!" That was Douglas, above me. I turned my head. He was just taking off his belt. He

wrapped one end around his hand, then stretched out flat on the ground. He lowered his belt to me and I

grabbed hold. There was just enough to loop it around my wrist and grab the buckle. I wanted to beg him

to pull me up, but Stinky was starting to lose his grip below me. He was whining and crying the way that

he did when all hell was threatening to break loose around him—all that somebody had to do now was tell

him to shut up and he'd start flailing and screaming. It was very tempting.

"Okay, Stinky!" I said. "Look at me."

It worked; I got his attention. "Don't call me that!" he cried angrily.

"All right, but you have to look at me. I'm going to lower my belt. Don't reach for it until I tell you,

okay? Because you're only going to get one chance. I'm coming down now—"

Still holding onto the end of Douglas's belt, I edged downward, just a little bit at first—I felt myself

start to slide—and Douglas caught the slack instantly. Some rocks and pebbles rolled away around me.

But I didn't follow them. I might live through this after all. "A little bit more, Doug. I'm almost there." I

looped my belt around my other wrist, like Douglas had done, and lowered it to Stinky. It almost reached.

I stretched as far as I could.

"Okay, kiddo," I said. "On three—"

"I can't do it!" he whined. "I can't!"

"Yes, you can," said Douglas. "Just listen to me—"

That wasn't going to work, Stinky never listened to anyone, "No, Doug, Stinky's right. He can't reach

it. Stinky's just a little baby. He can't do anything—"

It worked. Before I'd finished the sentence, Stinky had swung and grabbed the end of my belt and

nearly yanked me off the wall of the crater, he grabbed so hard. Without thinking, I pulled back in

response, and Doug pulled on me, and Dad was there pulling on Doug, and somehow we all ended up

back on the path, Doug against Dad with Dad holding him tight, and me against Doug with Doug holding

me, and Stinky in my arms, hanging onto me like a human death-grip. The four of us just stayed like that

for the longest time, all of us trying to catch our breaths at once.

I kept my eyes closed. Because when I opened them, all there was to see was how deep the crater was

and how high we were—and all that empty space made me want to throw up more than ever now.

Eventually we untangled ourselves—very carefully. It would have been real stupid to fall down the

hole now. Dad looked gray and shaken, but he waved me off when I asked if he was all right. He looked

like he wanted to say something, but then he looked like he didn't know what—finally he just waved his

hand as if to erase everything and pointed back up the path.

Douglas took Stinky by the hand to follow him—and of course, Stinky tried to pull away. "Let me

go!" he whined. "I gotta go to the bathroom! I gotta pee!" That was what he always said when he didn't

want to cooperate. And it usually worked, because what if he was telling the truth?

But right now—Weird wasn't letting go.

"Go ahead," I said, coming up to block his other side. He wasn't running away again.

"Where?" he demanded.

"I dunno," I said in that really bland, passive-aggressive voice I'd learned to use on him. "Do you see

a bathroom around here?"

He looked around. We were a quarter of the way down the wall of the biggest hole in the world, and

we could see forever in all directions. There were no bathrooms, no water faucets, no elevators, no

nothing. Stinky started crying, "But I gotta pee!"

"Well, then, just pee!"

"Where?"

"Here!"

"But everybody'll see!"

"There's no one to see! And besides we're so far away from everything, no one could see anything

anyway. Just go!"

"I can't!"

"Then hold it till we get back to the top!"

"I can't! It's too far!"

"We told you not to come running down."

"But I gotta go!"

"Then go here!"

"I can't!"

The kid was paralyzed. No matter what anyone said, all he could say was "I can't!" So I said, "Well

then, just pee in your pants and stop whining!"

So he did.

Now he was wet, uncomfortable, and smelled bad. But this wasn't as bad as when he threw up in the

cooler and spoiled everyone's lunch, and at least now that we'd gotten Stinky's first accident out of the

way, we could get on with the fun part of the trip. Ha ha.

By this time Dad had realized we weren't following. When he got back down to us, Weird was

yelling at Stinky, "Why did you pee in your pants?" and Stinky was crying full blast that I'd told him to.

That's when Dad did something strange. Stranger than usual. He didn't say anything at all. He stopped

where he was and sat down. He put his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands and he just sat and

stared and looked sullen in that way he gets when he's thinking real hard about something—like a bad

decision. I was sure he was thinking about turning around and taking us all back to El Paso.

"Now look what you've done—" I began to say to Stinky, but Weird swatted me hard across the chest

with the back of his hand and told me to shut up, which actually startled me into silence, because Weird

almost never touches anyone, let alone me.

"What's he doing?" Stinky asked.

Weird shook his head and grunted. "I dunno." He sounded kinda faraway when he said it. That's

when I figured out that something was going on, but nobody had told me yet. Whatever Weird knew, he

wasn't saying.

"Are you all right?" Weird asked.

Dad took a deep breath. "I was thinking about the moon." He pointed out at the big emptiness below

us. "On the moon, there are craters this size everywhere. And bigger ones too. There's nothing special

about a crater on the moon. Could you imagine living every day of your life in a place like this?"

Weird didn't answer. Neither did I. How do you answer a question like that? We just looked at each

other.

Dad took another breath. "Y'know, people say that kids are the hope of the future—that a baby is the

human race's way of insisting that the universe give us another chance. But I don't know. Sometimes it

feels like a baby is just another chance to screw things up even worse than before. There's so much you

kids don't understand, and I wish I could explain it to you, but I can't, because I'm not sure I understand it

myself. And I can't ask you to forgive us because ... well, I don't have the excuse that we did our best,

because I know we didn't."

I'd never heard Dad talk like this before and it sort of scared me. It was kind of like one of those

movies where someone knows he's going to die soon and is trying to get all his good-byes said in two

minutes. And everybody else is supposed to forgive him for being a jerk. I don't know why they always

forgive each other. I wouldn't.

But whatever Dad was talking about, I didn't think he was dying. Instead, he started talking about the

world and the mess it was in and all that kind of stuff. Corporate warfare. Chocolate dollars. Sugar

dollars. Beef dollars. Oil dollars. Plastic dollars. Kilocalorie dollars. Silicon dollars. Cyberdollars. All of

them spreading into new territories, like so many economic disease vectors, leaving a trail of infected and

collapsing economies behind them. Governments unable to control their own economies because

international corporatism had made all borders irrelevant. Money flowed like water seeking its level.

Where it got too hot, steam rose—where it got cold again, rain fell. The economic weather was turning

into a tropical storm and circling to become a global hurricane of dollars funneling around and around.

According to Dad.

I couldn't see exactly how or why it would affect us, but he said it was "tear-down time." Every so

often, people just get tired and frustrated with building—every twenty or thirty years or so, they start

tearing down what the last generation built, even if it still works, just to tear something down and rebuild

it. So the money was circling like flies, unwilling to land anywhere. Only this time, it wasn't landing. It

was going away. That was why we didn't have the money for the reclamation projects or the recycling we

needed and why everything was getting worse.

"This planet is no place to raise a family," he said bitterly. "It's just a matter of time until the whole

planet turns into Calcutta." That part I understood. There were plagues in Calcutta. All over India. And

Rome too. Black Peritonitis. African Measles. Europe was shutting itself down in panic, and brushfire

wars had broken out all up and down the eastern half of Asia. Fifth World revolutions. Wars and plagues.

Craziness everywhere. The planet didn't have the resources to manage itself anymore. Like the guy on TV

said, "The machinery is breaking down faster than we can fix it."

"The problem is, we're all in it together, whether we want to be or not," Dad said. "More and more I

look around at the way things are going, and I don't want to be part of it anymore. When I was your age,

Charles, everything seemed so simple and easy. You don't know how easy it is to be a kid—"

"Yeah, right."

"—but then I grew up and everything got complex, and I just wish I could figure out how to get back

to what's really important. You don't understand any of this, do you? And you won't, not until you turn

forty." He sighed. "But wouldn't you just like to get up and go away sometime? Someplace new, where

you can start fresh?"

Well, yeah. But there isn't any such place. It's all people, everywhere. So it's silly to dream of it. The

best you can do is go up in the hills once in a while and listen to your music alone. But I didn't say any of

this aloud. Why bother? In three and a half weeks, we'd be back in the war zone with Mom again.

I knew Dad wanted me to say something, but I'd stopped doing that a long time ago. There was no

cookie there. When he realized I was simply waiting for him to do something, he stood up and brushed

the dirt from his pants. "Well, come on, let's get going." He pointed toward the rim of the crater and we all

started hiking upward. It was a difficult climb, not because it was too steep—it was just hard because it

was all up.

Stinky whined the whole way that it was too hard and kept demanding that someone carry him, but

no one wanted to touch him because he smelled so bad. I said, "You shoulda thought of that before you

started running down." Then Weird made one of his pseudo-profound observations about how it's easier

to cooperate with gravity than fight it, like this meant something, so I called him a techno-geek, and he

said, "Yeah, so?"

Dad started to say something about that, one of those comfort-lies that grownups tell, but Weird

interrupted him. "No, Dad—everybody's a geek about something. I am a techno-geek. You're a music-

geek. And Charles is a nastiness-geek because he doesn't have anything else to be geeky for."

It was the longest paragraph I'd ever heard out of Weird that didn't have the word gigabyte in it. I

didn't have the breath left to tell him what he was full of. I just grunted, "Devour my richard," which is the

polite way of saying it. "And Stinky's a pee-geek," I added, just a little louder.

"Daddy—" Stinky wailed.

"Well, it's your own damn fault! Dad told you not to go running down! Now we've all got to hike

back up—"

At this point, Dad should have been screaming at all of us to shut up. Instead, he stopped. He squatted

down in front of Stinky to look at him eye-to-eye. "There's a lesson here," he said.

"Huh?" Stinky rubbed his eyes.

"Do you know what it is?" Dad asked.

Stinky shook his head slowly.

"Two things. First—never go anywhere unless you know how you're going to get back. Look down.

Suppose we had let you go all the way down to the bottom. Do you think you could climb all the way

back up to the top? Look how much trouble you're having going just this short way."

"It's not a short way!" Stinky wailed. "It's a long way."

Dad ignored him. "And the second lesson—go to the bathroom before you go anywhere. Either that

or learn to poop in the bushes."

"I wanna go home," Stinky said flatly. "I wanna go home now."

Dad responded with that grunt of resignation he does so well, whenever he realizes that whichever

one of us he's talking to isn't really listening. Without saying another word, he straightened and started

back up the crater wall. If he was angry, it was a kind of anger I'd never seen before. He didn't show any

emotion at all. I looked at Weird, but he was pushing Stinky up the slope and no one was looking at me

and I wondered why I had bothered to come at all. Here we were, standing inside the biggest hole in the

world where a ton of rock had fallen out of the sky and blasted a hole so deep you could put a roof on it

and have a stadium large enough for the Godzilla Bowl—and the only important lesson to be learned from

our visit was that you should go to the bathroom before you went anywhere. Sheesh.

We finally got to the top and Weird took Stinky into the bathroom and got him cleaned up and into

some fresh clothes, while Dad and I sat on a bench and sipped sodas and waited. Dad didn't say anything.

He was still off somewhere else. On the moon, I guess.

"We're really screwed up, aren't we?"

Dad looked up. "Eh?"

"Us," I said. "Weird and Stinky and me. We're not exactly the Happy Family." He looked at me

blankly. "The Happy Family, like on TV? You know? George and June and all the little Happys."

Dad got it then. "Nobody is the Happy family," he said. "Not even the Happys. It's all pretend."

"Yeah, but we can't even pretend to be happy. We're really screwed." I don't know why I said the

next part, it just fell out of my mouth. "I don't blame you for hating us."

Dad looked startled. "I don't hate you," he said. "I love you, Charles. More than you realize. All of

you. And—" this was where his voice got funny "—I don't think you're screwed up. None of you. I think

you're terrific kids. I wish I could spend more time with you."

"Yeah, like this—" I waved my hand in the direction of the crater "—is a lot of fun."

"For me, it is. I'm sorry you're not having a good time."

"I'm having an okay time," I admitted. The crater had been interesting enough. Because it was so big.

Living in Tube-Town, you never really got an idea of the size of anything.

Dad sighed. "I really do wish I could live with you and be a real father. All the time. Maybe it would

be better for all of us."

"Yeah, well then why don't you?"

"It's a long story."

"I'm not going anywhere."

"Your mom—" He stopped himself. He said something else instead of what he almost said. "Your

mom is a good woman. She works very hard for you boys. I'd live closer to you if I could. She asked me

not to. She thinks it would be ... disruptive."

"Yeah, so? Don't you get a vote?"

Dad shook his head. "It's too complicated to explain." He looked at me sadly. "You really are having

a bad time of it, aren't you?"

"I'll do better in my next life, okay?"

"Charles ... " Dad began carefully, his voice as serious as I'd ever heard it. "I want to ask you

something—"

But before he could ask, Weird and Stinky came back, and Stinky started crying immediately that he

wanted a soda too. And then he wanted something from the souvenir rack, and whatever Dad had wanted

to ask me was forgotten while Weird and Stinky played another round of I-Wanna-No-You-Can't. Dad

sighed and patted me on the shoulder. "Later, Charles." I followed him into the souvenir part of the store,

where he tried unsuccessfully to steer Stinky's attention toward the cheaper toys.

Finally, they compromised on a programmable monkey—which struck me as being sort of redundant,

especially for Stinky, but maybe it would keep him quiet for a while. Dad even bought some extra

memory for the monkey. He was chatting with the lady behind the counter while she rang up the sale and

suddenly she offered him some old memory cards that someone else had used and returned and she

couldn't resell as new, so Dad bought them at half-price. It was a lot of memory, but Dad bought it all. He

even paid cash, which for him is serious. Credit dollars are a lot more flexible, even though they're not

worth as much. Weird offered to install them, but Dad insisted on doing it himself. "Let me prove I'm

good at something besides paying the bills," he said as he snapped them into the monkey's backside.

Later, when we were back in the car and on the road again, with Stinky in the back happily trying to

teach the monkey how to fart, I asked, "Dad, you were going to ask me something back there—?"

"Never mind," he said. "It wasn't important."

Only we both knew he was lying. Whatever it was.

CROSSING THE LINE

Mexico is hot. Hotter than Arizona. Maybe hotter than Hell. And there are these little tiny lizards,

small as bugs, everywhere. They flicker across the sidewalk so fast, they look like heat ripples.

The surprising thing was how clean everything was. Everybody in Bunker City says that Mexico is

dirty, the streets are dirty, and the people are dirty. But it isn't like that at all. Everywhere we went,

everything was hot and bright and clean. Cleaner than Bunker City. Which just proved what I already

knew. When people don't know what they're talking about, they make stuff up.

And the Mexicans were friendly too. Dad's Spanish wasn't all that good, but Weird and I knew

enough to get by, and where we didn't, there was usually someone else around who spoke enough English

to help. So we weren't going to starve to death.

We headed south on the new highway. Dad didn't talk much, not about where we were going. He said

it was a Magical Mystery Tour, which meant that you weren't supposed to know where you were going

until you got there, so the fun had to be in the going, not the arrival; but I was pretty sure Dad had a

destination in mind. Every so often I'd catch him muttering about travel times and schedules, so I knew

this trip wasn't as random as he kept saying.

We stayed our first night in Mexico at a Best Inn, which is two lies in as many words, but never

mind. We were on the eastern coast of the Gulf of Baja, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, with dirty

blue ocean to the west and scruffy brown desert to the east and some purple hills in the distance beyond

that.

After dinner, there wasn't much of anything to do except stand around watching Stinky playing on the

swings with his monkey or look up at the stars. They were a lot brighter here than they were in El Paso. In

fact, in El Paso, we could hardly see them at all, so it was something different to just look up at the sky

and see how bright it really was. Weird saw a shooting star, and then I saw one too. Dad pointed out

Orion's belt and the Big Dipper and a couple of other constellations as if they meant something. I asked

him where Sirius was and Betelgeuse and some of the other places where the bright-liners went, but he

didn't know. Dad said that Sirius was the North Star, so all we had to do was look north, but Weird said

no, Polaris was the North Star, not Sirius.

Dad ignored it. Instead, he pointed south. "Look, you can almost see the beanstalk from here."

We squinted into the darkness. I couldn't see anything. Not at first.

"Look for a very, very thin line," Dad said. "Find the line. It'll be high. Up out of the shadow cone.

About ten o'clock high. Maybe eleven o'clock."

Weird was the first. "I think I see it," he said. "Is that it?"

"Where?"

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JUMPINGOFFTHEPLANETDavidGerrold[13jan2002—scanned,proofedandreleasedfor#bookz]MOMANDDAD"I'vegotanidea!"Dadsaid."Let'sgotothemoon.""Huh—?"Ilookedupfrommycomic."Imeanit.Whatdoyoukidsthink?Doyouwanttogotothemoon?""Yeah,sure,"Isaid,notbelievinghimanymorethanIhadalltheothertimeshe'ddangledpromisesinfront...

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David Gerrold - Jumping of the Planet

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