Special thanks to Eleanor Wood for being wonderful, Bob Gleason for being patient, the Oregon Writers Colony for refuge from the real world, and Pat Dooley for writing a computer program to calculate the Tangential Vector Translation Maneuver.

I owe you an explanation.

If you’ve read another book of mine called Abandon in Place, you’ve met a character named Allen Meisner. He’s a genuine mad scientist, a card-carrying member of the International Network of Scientists Against Nuclear Extermination, and he helped a couple of astronauts figure out how to make a spaceship out of goodwill and wishful thinking.

He’s in this book, too. In fact, he actually came from here first. The first section of this book predates Abandon in Place by about fifteen years. I wrote it as a short story back in 1984, and it was published in Analog magazine in April of ’85.

That was before the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down. The Cold War was still in full swing, and people were afraid the world could go up in a mushroom cloud at any moment. I wanted off the planet, and I wanted off now. From that impetus, “The Getaway Special” was born.

People liked the story. They kept asking me to write a novel based on it. I tinkered with it a little here and there, but years passed without much progress. In the meantime I wrote Abandon in Place, and I needed a mad scientist for that book, so I borrowed Allen from here. Never mind that the two books describe wildly different universes; Allen seemed adaptable enough, and he wasn’t doing much over here. He had to leave his invention behind, but that was okay, too; there was plenty of wonky science for him to do in Abandon.