Red Thunder

by John Varley

  “Yeah, that’s pure Jubal,” Travis said.

  We were all silent again for a time. Jubal wanted to use the silver bubbles as children’s toys, but it was pretty obvious they meant a lot more than that. Just what they meant was still an open question.

  Which Travis meant to solve. He got up from his seat and stretched. Then he looked at all of us again, in turn.

  “I told you, I’d be a lot happier if it was just Jubal and me aware of this.”

  “We won’t steal anything from you,” Dak said.

  “I trust you guys more than anybody I know.”

  “Because we didn’t rob you on the beach?” Alicia laughed. “I’ll fess up, I told Dak he ought to take a hundred for the taxi service.”

  “You had a right to,” Travis said.

  “And you said yourself you’ve used up all your friends but us. Who else is there for you to trust, except Jubal?”

  “Do you ever pull any punches, lady?”

  “Not that I ever saw,” Dak said, standing and stretching, too. “So what do you want from us, man? Swear us to secrecy?”

  “Until we’ve had a chance to learn more about it from Jubal.”

  “I’m okay behind that. What about the rest of you, musketeers? All for one…”

  “And one for all…”

  IT WAS JUST starting to get a little light in the east when Travis, Kelly, and I found Jubal out on the lake. When Jubal was rowing at night, he hung an old kerosene lamp from a davit in the bow, just as his father had done in the Louisiana bayous when out hunting at night. We could see it from some distance, flickering like an orange firefly.

  Travis’s boat was about what you’d expect from a guy who had been letting a Mercedes cook in the Florida sunshine. It was low, fast, and [102] plush, with a tiny cabin and head up front and room to seat six or seven in the open in back. But it was showing distress from the indifferent care it had been getting since drinking became a full-time occupation for Travis. Some of the seat material was cracking and there were patches where green slime was growing on the Fiberglas.

  The big Mercury outboard seemed healthy, though. It started at once, and then burbled with quiet authority as we pulled away from the dock.

  We eased up from behind. He didn’t acknowledge us in any way. I was amazed at the speed he was making in the old craft. It was easy to see how he got the big arms.

  “I’m sorry, Jubal,” Travis said. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you like that.”

  “Don’t matter none, no,” Jubal said. And kept rowing. Travis kept us off to Jubal’s right and just behind the sweep of his oars.

  “We’d all like to see those target bubbles again, Jube, see what they can do.”

  “Dey don’ do much,” he said. “Jus’ go pop!” He giggled.

  “Maybe you could show us how,” Travis suggested.

  “What I be out here fo’,” Jubal admitted, and now his brow furrowed. “Tryin’ to ’member how dey works.”

  “You mean you can’t make any more?”

  “No, cher, no, I can make plenty wit’ de squeezy t’ing I show you. I tryin’ to member how I make de Squeezer.”

  “It’ll come to you, mon ami,” Travis said.

  “Mebbe yeah, mebbe no.”

  “Come on, Jube, let me tow you in, we’ll have us some petty dejournez.”

  Kelly leaned over the side of the boat with an open cardboard box. “We got Krispy Kremes, Jubal,” she said.

  Jubal’s steady rowing pace faltered. Kelly angled the box so he could see inside it.

  “Only one lef, cher,” he said. “I don’ take you las’ Krispy, no.”

  “More coming, cher,” Kelly said. “Can you smell ’em?” It was clear [103] he could. Finally he grinned and tossed a rope to Travis, who tied it to a cleat at the stern of his boat. Kelly and I helped Jubal aboard, and we turned around and headed back home through the early morning light. There was a mist on the water, and a small V of ducks arrived, quacking loudly, and settled gently on the lake. I put my arm around Kelly. It showed signs of becoming a good day.

  SWAMP BIRDS AND other critters were greeting the day when Travis, Jubal, Kelly, and I walked the path back from the lake, with its crunching covering of new white shell. Dak and Alicia were pulling up in Blue Thunder.

  It seemed that Krispy Kremes were Jubal’s biggest weakness. They were Travis’s last resort. If he really had to get Jubal’s undivided attention, he offered him donuts.

  “Gotta be careful, though,” Travis had said. “Jubal would live on nothing but Krispys if he could drive a car to go get them.”

  “Like driving a spike straight into his own heart,” Alicia told us.

  “Would you believe Jubal was a skinny little thing when he lived on the bayou? Not much sugar in his diet out there, lots of rice and fish, collards and mustard greens and poke salads. He’s got a sweet tooth you wouldn’t believe.”

  Dak had wanted to get three dozen, but Alicia held him down to two. They also brought back supersized paper mugs of Mississippi Mud espresso. We all gathered around the patio table and the food. All of us were yawning.

  We dug in like wild javelinas, Alicia watching in horror and volunteering to make some oatmeal if anybody wanted it. But it wasn’t an oatmeal morning, and eventually even she admitted it and ate two donuts. I don’t even want to know how many sit-ups she did that day to make up for it.

  At last we all sat back, and I watched Jubal cleaning up the donut boxes like a kid licking the cake icing out of a bowl. He saw me looking at him, and we grinned.

  [104] Travis had brought the Squeezer out and set it on the table. Jubal eyed it unhappily, but finally settled back and laced his fingers over his big belly.

  “Jube,” Travis said, “I’d like to ask you some questions about this thing, what it does, how it does it… and so forth. I’m not angry, mon cher, and I’m not going to get angry later. We’re just trying to find out, okay?”

  “Fire away, Travis,” Jubal said. “Mebbe you get lucky, you.” And he laughed.

  “So, what’s in the bubbles, Jubal?”

  “In dese bubbles? Jus’ air. Nuttin’ but air.”

  “So you… you make this silvery stuff…”

  “A force field,” Jubal said. “Like in de comics books.”

  “A force field. You’ve lost me already.”

  “Los’ me, too, mos’ly. It don’ really ack like nuthin’ else I know from de books.”

  “From your physics textbooks.”

  “From any my books.” He frowned, then looked surprised. “It don’ take no power, no. No power to make de bubbles, no power to move ’em roun’.”

  “You’ve lost me,” Dak said. Travis nodded.

  “No power. Lookee here.” He popped open the battery chamber of the Squeezer. The two AA batteries that would normally be there were missing. Wires had been soldered to the two little springs that normally would have touched the bottom part of the battery cylinders. The wires went through two holes that seemed to have been burned with a soldering iron.

  “Dis gizmo here, dis be de part initiate de bubbles. Dis part, it take de… de… it take de framework an it twis’ it, ninety degrees from ever’thin’ else, so it ain’t really here in dis… dis… space-time condominimum.” When he mangled that last word, Jubal’s almost impenetrable Cajun accent was nearly gone. I could tell that talking about science was hard for him. His basic vocabulary was limited to the words he learned growing up, and everything he had learned since then was the result of incredibly hard work. Clearly, the idea of a space-time [105] continuum was not one that got a lot of discussion down on the Broussard bayou.

  “No power,” Jubal repeated. He took a huge Swiss Army knife from the pocket of his khaki Dockers, pulled out a thin blade. He peeled back a corner of duct tape, then popped that remote open.

  You didn’t need a degree in electronics to tell the inside of the remote hadn’t looked that way when it came off the Sony assembly line. There was something in th
ere that had started life as a printed circuit board, but pieces of it had been roughly sawed off-maybe with the saw blade of Jubal’s Swiss Army knife. There was a rubber band holding two parts together, and what might have been a big glob of Elmer’s glue. And other things. Right in the middle were two pieces of bright metal that I had to stare at for a moment before realizing they were the snipped-off barbs of fishhooks.

  “Dis where de continimum get twisted,” Jubal said, pointing with a finger callused from rowing. “Dis where de six-D-space get cut down to fo’, which has to cover itself up.” Jubal laughed. “Oderwise, it be a nekkid sinfularity.”

  I translated: six-dimensional space, naked singularity.

  “Jubal… maybe you just ought to show us what it can do,” Travis said. “And explain what’s happening, if you can. Can you do that?”

  “I can do dat.” He picked up the Squeezer, closed it back up. “To make a bubble,” he said, “all you got do is punch de little button here. De one used to say ‘Play.’ I done scratched de word ‘squeeze’ here under it, see?” He showed it around. He frowned at it. “I ain’t perzackly sure I done spell ’er right. I don’t spell so good, me. Is dis right?” He showed it to Dak.

  “Jube,” Dak said, “the things this gizmo can do, I think you’ll have everybody spelling it your way.”

  “A whole new verb,” Kelly agreed.

  Jubal didn’t look convinced, but shrugged and pointed the Squeezer into the air. He pressed the button with his thumb, and a silver bubble the size of a baseball appeared out of thin air.

  “De space done twis’ itself, see?” He looked at us, slowly realized none of us had any idea what he was talking about. “Dis button here, [106] dis lock it. Hold dat rascal in place.” He waved the Squeezer around, and the silver bubble stayed exactly three feet from the business end of the device, no matter how quickly Jubal cut it back and forth.

  “She work jus’ on de ball,” Jubal explained. “Now, dis button turn de bubble back t’ru ninety degree, all on a sudden.” He pressed the button marked stop, and the bubble was gone.

  “Now I make me anudder…” He pressed the SQUOZE button again, and an exact duplicate of the first bubble appeared. “Shoulda call her de twis’ button, me, but I done dis befo’ I done realyize what goin’ on.

  “Okay. Now, I twis’ dis dial rat cheer, and de bubble, she squeeze down some.” The bubble shrank until it was BB sized. Jubal thumbed the control several times, turning the dial after each bubble was formed, until we had half a dozen silver BBs floating in the air above the picnic table.

  “Now de fun part,” Jubal said with a big grin. He pointed at one of the BBs and fired. Kelly jumped a little as the BB vanished with a bang, about as loud as a firecracker.

  Jubal grinned wider as he aimed and shot at the rest of the BBs.

  “De air, it be compress, see? Den when de bubble go away… Boom!” He was happy as a kid with his first air rifle, only Jubal’s BBs exploded.

  “Let me see it, Jube,” Travis said. Jubal handed it over. Travis studied it, then hit the squoze button to create a bubble. He looked happy, too. He slowly turned the dial, and the bubble shrunk.

  “So you can make them larger, too, right?”

  “Dat right, Travis. Jus’ click dat little clicker dere de odder way, to de lef…”

  Travis held the Squeezer in front of him, squinting, and he turned the wheel…

  He didn’t turn it much, maybe about an inch. If an inch in the one direction had made a golf ball squeeze down to a BB, it seemed logical that an inch in the other direction would expand a golf ball to… oh, maybe a softball. None of us but Jubal knew the scale was not linear, and Travis had inadvertently moved the switch two clicks to the left instead of one…

  [107] The Richter scale, for earthquakes, is logarithmic, which means an 8 is ten times the force of a 7…

  Jubal’s device was not logarithmic, it was exponential. Which meant the expand/contract wheel on the Squeezer was now one hundred times more sensitive…

  The weird thing is that nobody saw it for a couple of seconds. The bubble, floating three feet above the business end of the Squeezer, suddenly seemed to warp in a weird way. I felt a breeze strong enough to muss up my hair, and saw Kelly’s hair blown around, then I finally looked up.

  And saw myself, looking down.

  It took another second for my mind to adjust to what I was seeing. Somebody had hung a perfect mirror, three feet above us. Looking up, I saw five people with their mouths hanging open, sitting in chairs around an upside-down picnic table.

  When Travis saw it, he gave an involuntary twitch… which probably saved us all from “a world a hurtin’,” as Jubal said later, because his thumb twitched on the push/pull button, and the bubble immediately rose to about fifty feet over our heads, just as I had been reaching up to touch it. The bubble had been that close.

  “Jesus,” Travis whispered, still staring up.

  And I saw his finger going to the off button… and I lunged toward the Squeezer in his hand as Jubal shouted, “Travis, no!”…. and Travis pushed the button.

  I’ve ridden out two hurricanes… from a safe distance inland. Mom maintaining the Blast-Off wasn’t worth dying for. Neither of them were square hits, but I know what a seventy-mile-per-hour wind feels like.

  This was worse.

  With no warning at all, like a flash of lightning, we were swept up in a howling gale. There was a clap of thunder, too. I was lifted along with my aluminum chair. Kelly was blown into the air with me, and we managed to hold on to each other’s hands. For a second or two we were swirling around in the funnel of a tornado, like Dorothy Gale, only she had a house all around her when she took off for Oz. [108] Something bumped me in the side, hard. It was the picnic table. Leaves and dirt sprayed over us. I realized we were both in the air, maybe ten feet off the ground.

  Then, almost as quickly as it began, the storm let up. I felt myself falling, still holding on to Kelly’s hand.

  I fell headfirst into the swimming pool.

  I could hardly tell up from down, there was so much trash swirling around. I had lost my grip on Kelly’s hand, and that worried me. But I finally got myself oriented and kicked for the surface.

  I came up looking right at Kelly, who spit out some water, brushed her wet hair out of her eyes… then pointed behind me and shrieked. I turned around and probably shouted, too, because a giant alligator was no more than five feet from me, and it seemed to be headed my way…

  Goddam rubber alligator. I’d disliked it from the first time I saw it.

  “Is anybody hurt? Is everybody okay?” It was Travis shouting, I could see him running along the edge of the pool. I looked around and saw Jubal and Dak, chins out of the water. The pool surface was almost solid with dry leaves and grass and sticks and even some fairly large branches. I saw the picnic table, floating with just an inch of the table-top above the water. I saw an empty cardboard box that used to hold Krispy Kremes.

  What I didn’t see was Alicia.

  We all started calling her name. Travis was looking frantically around him, in case she hadn’t been thrown into the pool. Dak immediately began diving, and I tried to, but the water was so thick with dirt and leaves she could have been two feet away and I wouldn’t have seen her.

  I came to the surface about the same time Kelly did. She shook her head, looking scared, and I probably did, too. It had only been fifteen or twenty seconds, but it felt like an hour. I saw Dak surface… and then Alicia came out from under the floating picnic table. I relaxed slightly. What a relief.

  “She’s bleeding! She’s bleeding!” Dak shouted, and swam to her as best he could with all the debris in his way. Travis was running around the [109] pool to where Alicia was, and he got to her before Dak and pulled her from the water.

  “Call a doctor! Call nine-one-one!” Dak was shouting. Travis had her in his arms and was examining her face.

  “It’s okay, Dak,” Alicia called out. “I’m not hurt bad.”<
br />
  Dak pulled himself out and ran to her, and hugged her.

  “Just a bloody nose,” Travis said. “I don’t think it’s broken.” Then he turned away from the two and looked bleakly at the ground. It was easy to see he was kicking himself for the dumb stunt he just pulled. Well, he ought to, I thought. But we got lucky, like I said. If that bubble, which must have been five hundred feet across, had been only three feet above us when it vanished, and the air all around us had instantly rushed in to fill the vacuum…

  That’s what it was, of course. That’s what Jubal and I had seen just at the moment it became too late to do anything about it. If squeezing a bubble compressed the air that was trapped inside, then expanding one with only a golf ball’s worth of air inside to the size of the Goodyear blimp was going to make one hell of a good vacuum.

  Travis had been thrown against the brick barbecue and managed to hang on until the wind died. Just about everything else in the backyard lighter than Jubal or the picnic table had been swept into the air, most of it coming down in the pool. All five of us landed in the pool… another stroke of luck, I realized, that the pool had been filled the day before. I had come down headfirst, from at least twenty feet in the air…

  TRAVIS’S HOUSE HAD three full bathrooms, all of them with big showers. Kelly and I took one. It wasn’t until I got there that I began to feel any pain. Excitement desensitizes you, I think, pumps some good chemicals in your blood so you can keep functioning, injured, until you’re away from danger.

  Then the chemicals go away, and you start to hurt.

  I had my pants unzipped and was starting to pull them down when I felt a sharp stab in my side.

  [110] “I think I may have cracked a rib,” I said. My shirt was torn on my left side, and there was some blood. Kelly carefully lifted the shirt and we looked at a rough scrape there at the bottom of my rib cage. The flesh around it was already a big purplish-yellow bruise. Kelly pressed gently above the bruise.

  “Does it hurt when I do this?”

  “It would if you pressed any harder.” She moved her hand below the bruise.

  “How about this?”