Somebody Else's Space Program
Chapter two ". . . the wild winds of fortune . . ."
Summer heat baking the cobbles of the town square, a faint greenish smell from the pool in the center -- a pool that would have been a fountain if the mayor hadn't used the money to wine and dine guests.
"Ricky! Mama is looking all over for you!"
The youngster crouched at the side of the reflection pool looked up. "This is important. I just changed the sails, and I have to see how they work." She blew on the model, and watched as it came out of the lee of the statue in the center of the pool.
The older boy grabbed the girl by the collar and hauled her to her feet. "Do you know what Mama is going to do to me if I tell her you were playing and didn't come when I found you?"
Ricky shrugged, "The same thing she does every time. She yells, then she cries, and then she hugs. so you let her work through it."
Alonzo glared down at his sister. "I should tell her you said that."
"I should tell Juanita you were kissing Maria behind the shop yesterday."
Glare, wilt. "Go home. _Now_."
She made an arm and scooped her boat out of the pool. "Aye aye, Capitan!"
She scooted fast enough -- his swat didn't connect. Alonzo yelled and rushed after Ricky, through the town square and the market, back to the small house they shared with Mama and three other children. The house was freshly whitewashed, but that scarcely disguised the crack up near the eaves.
"I found her for you, Mama."
Mama nodded, not looking up. Spread in front of here was a mound of cloth cut to various pattern, and she was basting it into rough shape before taking it to the treadle powered sewing machine in the corner. the mechanism of the sewing machine fascinated Ricky, but she dreaded the times her mother had been too exhausted to pump the foot-piece.
"Don Espiridion came by, Enriqueta. He is very impressed by your schoolwork."
Ricky let out a deep breath she didn't realize she had been holding. Don Espiridion was in charge of the local school, but he was also foul tempered and had recently lost his wife. And Ricky was just barely below being marriageable. She wanted to be gone before her mother decided the family would be more comfortable with a wealthy man as an in-law.
"And you told him what, Mama?"
"That I would send you to talk to him as soon as you returned from your errand. Which shold not have been this long. So clean up, and go."
'Lario handed her a tortilla filled with spiced meat as she ran for the room she shared with her sister. Careful not to drip food juices on the dress, she carried it to the small washroom. She gulped the meal, then washed her hands and face before sliding the cream-colored dress over her head and securing the light blue sash around her waist. The style was for an older girl -- Ricky looked more like a boy pretending to be a girl. Her figure would get better -- her sister had half the boys in town staring at her, but not listening to a word she said, as if her wit were a parrot's squawking. Maybe not having a figure wasn't a disadvantage after all.
Then again, she wasn't sure that wasn't what Don Espiridion wanted. His late wife had been built like a stick -- Mama kept saying that she died because she didn't eat enough, and them with all that money, what a shame it was.
That's when Mama started to look at her when she talked about Don Espiridion. And why Ricky wanted out, urgently.
---
The church was a quick bit of shade most of the way to Don Espiridion's home. She stood in the dark, hearing the murmurring of the two sisters praying before a statue of the Blessed Mother. The burning wax of the votive candles added a faintly chemical taint to the air -- long gone were the days of beeswax candles and insense was only brought out for feast days and requiem masses.
"Good day to you, daughter."
The padre's warm, slightly gravelly voice startled her -- she ducked a curtsey before turning to greet him. "Good day to you, Father." Then she saw how the shadows had lengthened. "Your pardon, Father, but I have to run."
"No, my daughter, not unless you have somewhere other than home for refuge. Don Espiridion expected you an hour ago. He had visitors -- examiners from the Academy. But they could not wait all day for a little girl, no matter how brilliantly she designed toy boats." His hand swept toward a statue of St. Jude. "Perhaps a few prayers that your mother will not collapse from her rage."
Almost soundlessly, "Whaich direction did they go, when they left? Back to the capital? Or to another town?"
"I don't know. I'll have one of the boys ask around, see if anyone took note." But he was talking to empty air.
---
Ricky waited in the shadows until her mother was in another room, then slid up the stairs to her bedroom. In a mater of minutes, she had a pile of everything worth taking with her, including her sister's heavy walking shoes and all of her sister's extra socks. She hesitated for a moment, then left her boat on the table next to the bed. Packing it would crush it, and she didn't want anything in her hands while she was running.
The dress ended in a pile on the floor, and Ricky dressed in her most durable field clothes. She had just closed the satchel when she heard footsteps on the stairs -- her sister? her mother?
Just a year before, she had been able to climb down from the window, using cracks in the adobe and a vine that was trying to tear the house apart. But she had shot up some inches since, and weight to match. But what choice did she have? Out the window!
The vine almost held. When it finally gave under her weight, she was only two feet further off the ground than she had intended to be when she let go. Her sister's head looked out the window, and then pulled back in - she heard yelling. The alarm was out. Time to run.
---
"Do you know," Ricky remarked to the sand lizard she had just killed with a well-thrown rock, "the hero in adventure stories never has these problems." The lizard, not unexpectedly, did not answer. "I'm not going to bother to cook you, but I wish I had something better than my teeth to cut you into smaller pieces. I left my sword at home -- something else that adventurers don't do."
She examined the little carcass. "Do you have any Deinonychus in your ancestry?" The claws were tiny, but sharp. She was able to use one to penetrate the lizard's skin around its neck, and peeled the skin away from the meat. "Do you know where there's any water?" No answer. She bit the back of its neck, tearing away some of the meat. "Talk, you wretched creature!"
The prisoner stood mute. Eventually, Ricky piled small stones over the empty skin and bones, keeping the sharpest claw for a tool for later. She wiped her hands on the sand, to get rid of the blood, then on her trousers. "Got to keep moving."
She stopped long enough to change into the larger, sturdier shoes, with plenty of socks for padding. A long way ahead of her.
---
The moon's light was enough for her to keep to the wagon trail across the plain, and several more creatures, curious as to what a single human was doing on their turf, were now riding on top of her pack, paws tied together to prevent escape. She'd managed to stun two rabbits and a lizard with stones, and had killed another lizard.
"If I had some firewood, I would be in good shape. Something to drink would be nice, too.."
Movement in the distance. Beneath the dust, it looked like a wagon, but at that speed, it wasn't being drawn by horses. Had she been seen?
Flattening onto the ground, they might not see her. Ricky looked down -- saw a scorpion looking back up to her, accessing this large heat source for its food value. "Sorry, not me."
She took her pack off and retrieved her straw hat. "Here I am!" waving the hat. As loud as those things were, it would be useless to yell anyway, even close up.
---
"_What_ are you doing way out here?" asked the driver as he pulled up in front of the youngster. He pulled his goggles off and wiped them, peering at Ricky.
"And why are you carrying those animals?" he asked, startled.
She giggled. "They're my dinner. But I'll trade you one for a canteen of water."
"They're still _moving_."
She took off her pack and climbed into the open-topped car. The lizard and one of the rabbits were hissing at each other -- the other rabbit was not moving. "They keep better that way, if you're going to be several days on the road. I don't imagine that it's something _you_ have to think about." She peered at the controls. "How does this thing work?"
"Ah... It's really easier to explain if I can draw pictures. And I can't do that in the dark, and I can't do that while I'm driving."
"Okay. Let's go." The lizard hissed again. "Be quiet, you. By the way, do you have some water? I'm awfully thirsty."
He laughed and handed her a bota. "Try this."
She managed to squirt herself in the face at first, but got the hang of it soon enough. The water had been mixed with a little bit of lemon juice, which cut the acrid taste of dust, and it was still warm from the day's heat. "This," she sputtered, after she squirted just a bit too much into her mouth to swallow all at once, "is the best water I've ever tasted."
He grinned, teeth bright against the dust still caking his face. "Brewed it up myself. I'm John Worrell. What do you call yourself?"
"I'm Ricky."
"Pleased to meet you, Ricky. Throw your zoo into the back seat, and we'll get back on the road -- if that's what you call this sort of thing in these parts."
She turned in the seat to deposit her pack on the seat, careful to miss the bundle of rolled paper already there. "We'll have no fighting, understand?"
No answer, of course. Once she was back in her seat, John handed her a pair of goggles. "You might find these useful."
---
"What are the papers?"
She was turned around in the seat, trying to see what was on the rolls when the car hit a bump, and she almost went flying. John snagged her and put her back into her chair.
"Plans."
"I can _see_ that. For what?"
"For a spaceship."
It took a moment for that to sink in. Ships, she knew, of course. "Like airships?"
"Yes." John did something with a lever, and the car slowed and stopped. His arm swept toward the western horizon. "A ship for going to the moon."
Very slow exhale, "Ohhhhhh."
---
Another small town, north on the same coast as where Ricky's family lived. "Why are we here?"
John lifted an eyebrow at the "we" but let it slide. "I'm looking for launch sites. I need a high spot with a lot of water downrange, accessible by rail with very little effort."
"How big _is_ this thing?" She studied the plans, looking for a scale, but all she found was illegible scribles where there should have been numbers.
Big grin. "I have no idea. But once I start my experiments, I would rather not have to pull up stakes and go somewhere else when I could have thought the site through ahead of time."
Ricky had to agree with that.
---