Red Thunder

by John Varley

  Jubal just started cleaning out our little kidney-shaped pool one day. What are you going to do, just stand there and watch him? Dak and I joined in-after our regular studies, Jubal would not allow us to shirk that-and soon the bottom had been caulked and painted, the pump and filter refurbished, and the pool was filled with water for the first [131] time in three years. We held a pool party to celebrate and I saw my mother and aunt in bathing suits for the first time I could remember. Owners of neighboring businesses came and ate Aunt Maria’s fabulous cupcakes and cookies and sipped Alicia’s tofu punch before tossing it to the potted palms and grabbing a beer. They complimented us on how great the old joint looked and spoke of their own plans to renovate, refurbish, and upgrade, often glancing up nervously at the looming concrete of the Golden Manatee. They knew they were in trouble and were looking for a way out. Half our neighbors had already sold to the Manatee’s parent corporation, Pillock and Burke. More would sell soon, you could lay money on it.

  We sent an invitation to the Manatee, as a joke. To everyone’s surprise the manager showed up. His name was Bruce Carter. He was courteous to Mom and Maria and spoke briefly to most of the business owners there. He even talked to me for a bit. He told me how much he admired the Triumph. He’d seen me and Jubal going by. He said he’d owned one, once, so we talked motorcycles for a while. Then he went back to work, leaving me depressed. I think it’s easier if your enemy is a genuine prick. This guy didn’t seem to enjoy what was happening to us. He never gloated. But he knew as well as we did that the days of the Blast-Off were numbered. If Pillock and Burke didn’t drive us out, somebody else would.

  ON THE TENTH, maybe the eleventh night of his stay with us we were deep in a Monopoly game and I was about to be driven to the poorhouse, as usual. It was my night on desk duty, so I was listening for the doorbell with one ear.

  Suddenly Jubal stood up and shouted, “Holly!” We all looked at him and he was pointing at the television screen. I looked, and it was one of those group portraits NASA is so fond of, with the seven Mars astronauts hovering chipmunk-cheeked and bushy-haired in their weightless wardroom. One of the women, Holly Oakley, was holding the mike and answering a question.

  “It’s Holly,” Jubal said, a bit more calmly.

  [132] “That’s right,” I said. “Do you know her?” Not too tough to believe, what with his cousin Travis having been an astronaut.

  “Where she at? She at de station?”

  “No, like it says there at the bottom, she’s aboard the Ares Seven.”

  “What dis Ares Seven?”

  “The Mars ship, Jubal,” I said. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it.”

  “Don’ watch TV, me,” he said, with a frown. Jubal didn’t follow current events at all, if he could help it. He turned up the volume.

  “-and we’d like to thank all of you for giving us so much of your valuable time. Captain Bernardo Aquino, First Officer Katisha Smith, Brin Marston, M.D., and mission specialists Doctors Holly Oakley, Cliff Raddison, Lee Welles, and Dmitri Vasarov. America’s Ares Seven astronauts. Good luck, and Godspeed, all of you!”

  There was a pause of fifteen full seconds as the astronauts hung there stupidly, smiles frozen on their faces, while the radio signal went out to the Ares Seven and came back at the speed of light. Television stations had taken to adding a countdown clock in a corner window so people didn’t become too impatient, but it didn’t help much. This was going to be the last live interview. From then on reporters would ask their questions all at once and the astronauts would answer them the same way, and it would be turned into a standard Q amp;A by tape editing.

  … 0.03… 0.02… 0.01… “It was our pleasure, and thank you,” Captain Aquino answered, and the seven of them waved for a few seconds before we were returned to the show, which was 60 Minutes, I think.

  “So, you know that woman, Jubal?” Aunt Maria asked him.

  “Oh, my, used to know her real good, me. She de mother a Travis’s two sweet daughters. She Travis’s ex-wife, she is.”

  THAT WAS THE end of Monopoly for that night.

  I think we were all amazed and delighted to have a connection to the Mars mission, however tenuous. We wanted to know more about her, but we didn’t get much. It was too painful for Jubal, for he was [133] endlessly loyal to Travis and yet liked Holly and the children enormously.

  Jubal wanted to know everything there was to know about the Mars mission. That mostly fell to Dak and me, as our girlfriends and parents were not nearly so interested or informed on the subject as we were.

  But where to begin? It was as much a political story as a scientific one, just like Apollo, and Project Mercury before that. Back then it was the Russians.

  “Today it’s the Chinese we wanted to beat,” I said.

  “Good luck,” Dak snorted.

  THE CHINESE HAD been developing a space exploration program for the last decade. Russia’s once grand space program had been reduced from lack of money to a few station components here and there, and those arrived late and underfunded, often as not. In addition to the U.S. and Russia, a few other nations were in the lucrative satellite-launching business, including Japan, France, Brazil, and Indonesia. Analysts assumed China would find its place in that group.

  They had developed a type of vehicle known in the space business as a Big Dumb Booster, something NASA critics had been advocating for forty years or more. The Russians had had a BDB practically from the start, the Energia. The idea behind the BDB was easy to state: Make it big, and make it simple. It was much cheaper to put heavy payloads into orbit with a BDB than with a manned space vehicle like the old Shuttle or the VStar. Manned vehicles had to devote a huge amount of mass to life support facilities. The level of safety required for a manned launch was an order of magnitude higher than for an unmanned one, and all that was costly.

  The Chinese BDB did put big satellites in orbit. Then, in a surprise that did not quite rival the launch of Sputnik One in the 1950s, the Chinese lofted a small space station and a crew of three.

  Not too long after that, they sent out three Mars probes. Two of them landed safely on Mars. They were “pathfinder” ships, carrying the supplies needed for a long stay on Mars. Then came the Heavenly Harmony, [134] a manned ship taking the minimum-fuel Hohmann orbit path to Mars, and once more Americans went nuts.

  THERE ARE A thousand paths to Mars, but they all must take into account some inconvenient facts.

  First, all ways to Mars start off in the same direction. Before you even fire up your rocket, you are already traveling at 66,700 miles per hour, Earth’s orbital speed. To go in the other direction you would first have to kill that speed. So rule number one is: You go with the flow.

  You must always bear in mind that Mars and Earth move at different speeds in their orbits, and Mars is farther away from the sun. You must accelerate out of Earth’s orbit, and then bear in mind that every second of the way the sun’s gravity will be slowing you down.

  The third thing to remember is that you can’t aim at Mars when you fire your rockets. You have to aim at where Mars will be when you get there. It’s like a hunter leading a bird when he pulls the trigger.

  Then there comes the toughest of all the tough things about going to Mars. You can’t just set down on the Red Planet, scoop up some rocks, snap a few pictures, and then take off and head for home the next day. Because of fuel limitations and the movements of the two planets, all proposed trips to Mars involve a waiting period while the planets move back into a position where a flight between them is economically possible. With the Hohmann orbit the Chinese supply ships had used, the wait was over a year.

  A human needs three pounds of food, seven pounds of water, and two pounds of oxygen every day. All round trips to Mars that we can currently envision take well over a year. A crew of seven would consume thirty thousand pounds of food, water, and oxygen in a year, and that doesn’t include water for bathing and brushing your teeth. All that weight must be put into Earth orb
it, and then accelerated to a speed sufficient to reach the orbit of Mars. It takes a lot of fuel.

  On your way to Mars, you had better be prepared to fix any broken thing with what you’ve got, because Triple-A won’t be along any time soon to give you a jump start.

  Out there, you’re on your own.

  * * *

  [135] “THE CHINESE TOOK what most folks believe is the most sensible route to Mars,” Dak said. “You send unmanned ships first, by the slow but cheap path. Takes a year to get there. You send your astronauts along with just enough food, water, and air to get there. Then they use the stuff that went ahead of them. They figure to make their own fuel from the carbon dioxide in the Martian air. The Chinese are well on their way now. How long is it, Manny? Six months?”

  “About that.”

  “But what ’bout de Americans?” Jubal asked. “Dey be gonna get dere fust?”

  Dak snorted.

  “No way. People think if our guys just step on the gas pedal a little harder we could pass the commie ba-… bad guys, but it don’t work that way. The Chinese will hit Mars in six months, and either make a real big crater or come down soft. Our guys and gals will get there about two weeks later. End of story. The first foot on Mars will be a Chinese foot, dead or alive. Dammit.”

  Dak looked like he wanted to bite his tongue, but Jubal took no notice of the swearing. He was staring off into space, his mind occupied with calculations I doubted I’d ever be able to follow. Then he focused again.

  “De Americans, dey swingin’ by Venus, no?”

  “Yes,” I said. Wondering how he deduced that. “They swing by Venus and get a free boost from the gravity well there. They get to Mars, and then they only have to wait about a month before they can launch and return the ship to Earth. Our guys will be back before the Chinese.”

  Jubal brooded again, then looked at me.

  “ ’Merican ship, it don’ use reg’lar rockets, hah? Somethin’ else, I figger.”

  “It’s called VASIMR,” I said. “Variable Specific Impulse Magneto-plasma Rocket. It’s a plasma drive, very high specific impulse, very low acceleration. But you can keep thrusting through the whole mission. It adds up.”

  [136] “I’m afraid you lost me,” Kelly said.

  “Those astronauts a while ago,” I said. “They looked like they were weightless, but they weren’t, not quite. Their engine is firing, but it’s only putting out a fraction of one gee. Not enough to hold you in your seat. The VASIMR is slow, but it’s steady.”

  “The tortoise and the hare,” Alicia suggested.

  “… Sort of,” Dak said. “But this time, the bunny wins.”

  Jubal was still pondering. At last he looked at me.

  “Manuel, mon cher, I need to know all I kin fine out ’bout this VASIMR.”

  “Sure, Jubal,” I said. “I can show you some websites that will get you started.”

  “Good ’nuff,” he said, and slapped his knees and headed for the door. I heard him mutter as he walked ahead of me to my room.

  “Fus’ people on Mars got to be Americans,” he said.

  If anybody could make it so, I would have bet on Jubal.

  14

  * * *

  THE SUN HAD gone down, and the pool party was almost over.

  The Golden Manatee manager had returned to his glittering tourist trap.

  Aunt Maria had just brought out her sixth and last pan full of muffins and they were disappearing about as fast as the others had, even though everyone said they’d already had too many.

  Mom was sitting in a plastic lawn chair, talking guns and shooting with Ralph Shabazz, who owned the pawn shop a few blocks away.

  Dak was in the pool with a few of my old classmates from Gus Grissom High, using an old volleyball to play some variation of water polo with no goal cage.

  Alicia was tidying up the snack table, wondering if she should make another bowl of tofu punch for people to throw in the potted plants.

  Kelly was sharing a lounge chair with me. Since the chair had been designed for one, it took some squirming and a great degree of closeness to share it, but that was okay with me. She had had one drink over her usual limit and was making hickeys on my neck when she wasn’t running her tongue all around my ear.

  There were half a dozen guests still present, milling around as guests [138] do when they’re not sure if they should go home or stick around for one more free beer.

  That’s when the red and black Hummer pulled in. The windshield was spattered with bugs. There was a brief toot of the Hummer’s horn and Travis got out, waving and smiling at us.

  THE SIX OF us, the Rancho Broussard crowd, were gathered in Jubal’s room half an hour later. Alicia sipped at a 7-Up and the rest of us opted for bottles of beer.

  For a while nobody talked about what we all wanted to hear. He told us a few unlikely stories about adventures on the road not connected with his search for answers about the bubbles, and we filled him in on events at the Blast-Off. It all seemed interesting at the time, but looking at it later, what really went on? Jubal won a lot of Monopoly games, people checked in, people checked out, we repaired and filled the pool. Story of my life, so far. Listening to it, I vowed even more strongly to be out of here come this time next year, even if it meant finding a job desk-clerking in California… or Maine, or Alaska, or Timbuktu. Anywhere.

  At last Travis settled back against the headboard of Jubal’s bed, where he was sprawled, looking like he’d been driving a long time. Most of the day, he told us later.

  “Well, friends,” he said, “I know a lot about what the bubbles are not.”

  Dak groaned.

  “Yeah, it is discouraging. Most of what I know now, we knew before I left, only now I know it even more so, out to the limits of currently available testing.

  “It’s hard. Diamonds make no mark.

  “It’s tough. A big hydraulic press ruptured itself trying to crack it. Everything I fired at it bounced off, from a high-velocity bullet to high-energy protons in an atom smasher, to coherent laser light powerful enough to knock a plane out of the sky.

  “It’s reflective. Perfectly reflective. One hundred percent of visible [139] light that hits it comes right back. Same with gamma radiation, radio waves… probably neutrinos, if I could figure out how to measure neutrino reflectivity.

  “I declare to you now, friends, this thing is the most significant discovery of the twenty-first century, sure-fire Nobel Prize material… and it scares me silly.”

  “What for, Travis?” Alicia asked. “Jubal deserves a Nobel Prize.”

  “You bet he does, hon. But I don’t think he wants one, do you, Jube?”

  Jubal, who had been studying the new Reebok sneakers on his feet, looked up, shivered and shook his head, and looked down again.

  “Jubal wouldn’t enjoy it, Alicia. Big fuss like that, reporters all over the place, buying a tuxedo and going to Stockholm to meet the king…”

  Jubal shivered some more, and I thought he was about to bolt out of the room, looking for his pirogue boat to row around the lake. But Travis steadied him with a squeeze on his shoulder, and Jubal settled back on the floor.

  “There’s a side to this thing you may not have thought of. Lots of power wrapped up in these.” He took a silver bubble from his pocket and held it carefully up to the light. “Free energy. Don’t look for that in any physics book. Energy is paid for, always. Only not here. Jubal’s Squeezer works without using any energy I can detect. You saw how much power was unleashed when I… stupidly… turned one of them off.”

  “But that wasn’t power,” Kelly said. “That was just a vacuum. Wasn’t it?”

  “It takes power to make a vacuum,” I told her.

  “That’s pretty much it,” Travis agreed. “Reverse it, Kelly. You know it takes power to compress air into one of the bubbles, because you hear the explosion when the bubble goes away. Same with the vacuum, only in reverse.”

  “I don’t know anything much at all abou
t this,” Kelly said, with a smile. “I think I follow you, though.”

  “Me, too,” Alicia confirmed.

  [140] “So…” Travis said, and scowled. “I suppose there are things we could make to take advantage of the bubbles’ perfect reflectivity. I can think of a few. And as for its durability, everlasting ball bearings would be just the beginning.

  “But it just stands to reason that the application most people will be most interested in is the ability to make a big bang. A real big bang.”

  “A really, really big bang,” Dak said, and I knew he’d been thinking pretty much like I had, though we’d never talked about it.

  “Lots of money in big, big bangs,” Travis said. “And I’m not talking about fireworks, sorry, Jubal.”

  “No problem, Travis,” Jubal said, still studying his shoes.

  “The people who like big bangs the most are the generals, of course. Put a small one of these in a cartridge, turn off the bubble, you got a free bullet. Put one in a steel pineapple, you got a free grenade. Make a real big one full of vacuum, you could probably implode a building. Jubal, how big can these things get?”

  He looked up again, briefly, and shrugged.

  “Don’ know, me. Maybe not too much bigger than you seen.”

  “That would be a relief,” Travis said. “But I’m not going to put it in the bank just yet. Thing is, you and me all know that some of the people who like big bangs are not very nice people at all. Think about a terrorist who gets his hand on a Squeezer. Free bombs, an unlimited supply.

  “There are people who would do anything to get this thing. Anything. Our own government is only one of them. Word of this gets out, we’d be lucky if all that happened was they took it away from us.”

  Everyone was silent, thinking that one over.

  “For now, can I get your word you won’t talk about this?”

  He looked at us one by one, and we all nodded. Kelly squeezed my hand. I’d never seen her looking so serious.