Trent’s had been modified a bit more than most. Besides painting the body panels a deep pearlescent red and chrome-plating practically everything else, he had replaced all the glass with half-inch Lexan, oversized and set inside the frames so no amount of pressure could blow it out, and he had sealed every seam with industrial-strength adhesive. He had added extra latches to the doors to hold them tight against the extra seals he had also installed, and he had reinforced all the body panels with angle-iron to keep them from flexing. He’d welded three chrome roll bars across the outside of the cab for extra support, incidentally giving him a sturdy anchor lor the two army surplus cargo parachutes packed in separate carriers on top. In back, a homemade camper built of diamond plate aluminum looked a little like the top half of the Lunar Module that had taken Aldrin and Armstrong to the Moon half a century before. It was sealed just as tight, and he’d tested the whole works to 30 p.s.i.—two full atmospheres of pressure—before he had trusted his and Donna’s lives to it.

Those modifications had eaten up most of their bank account, but Trent figured he could take out a bit more without risking next month’s house payment. If there was a next month’s house payment. He didn’t want to stiff the loan company, but the way people were jumping off into space lately, you couldn’t give away real estate on Earth anymore. When Allen Meisner had dropped the plans for a cheap hyperdrive engine on the world, he probably hadn’t considered what it would do to the housing industry, but people were defaulting on their loans right and left, and the banks had yet to foreclose on any of them. They didn’t want to get stuck paying the taxes.

That was just the lip of the iceberg. A hyperdrive engine that cost only a couple hundred dollars in parts had changed a lot more than that.