by John Varley
“It worked. We got the bomb.
“The Apollo managers got all the money they needed because we were at war with Russia. Never got to shooting at each other, luckily, but it was war.
“Then, suddenly, we’ve made it to the moon… and what do we do for Act Two? Why… nothing. Nothing much, anyway. The public found the whole show boring. The funding dried up. We launched five [164] more… and those guys were incredibly lucky, because the LEM functioned perfectly every time, something we had no right to expect. Even so, we almost lost Apollo 13.
“So when we were building a space plane, the next logical step, what happens? There’s not enough money to build the ship we should have built, a very big, piloted, first stage that flies back to the Cape after the launch, mated to something that would have looked a lot like the original Shuttle. Instead, we give the Shuttle a pair of solid fuel boosters that fall in the ocean. It’s madness to put a solid fuel booster on a manned craft. Once you light a solid booster you can’t turn it off if something goes wrong.
“So something went wrong-with the booster, notice-seventy seconds into Challenger’s last flight, and seven more people die.
“Hurry-up is death, when you’re dealing with rockets. So is under-funding.”
“An’ now,” Jubal said, “now it happening all over ’gain.”
Travis threw himself down into his seat, puffed out his cheeks.
“It appears so. The powers that be decided we needed to go to Mars, if the Chinese were going. And soon. Hang the cost. Hang the engineering quibbles.” He looked dubiously at his cousin.
“Tell me this, Jubal. You say we can build us a spaceship, we can go out there and get them home if they get into trouble. And we can do it all-in five months. Isn’t this another space race? Aren’t we likely to build something that will blow up in our faces?”
“Not my Squeezer machine,” Jubal said. “It won’t blow up, I guar-on-tee!”
“Okay, I believe you. But what about all the other things we’d have to do? You really think we have time?”
“Don’ know. Maybe not.”
“This race is a little different, Travis,” Kelly said. “This time there’s no choice as to whether we take it slow and careful. Lives are at stake if we don’t build the rocket.”
“We can try it a step at a time,” I said, and Kelly looked sharply at me. “We can go test the rocket tomorrow, like you said. If it blows up, well, that’s that. But we tried.” Kelly gave me a short, relieved nod.
[165] “Makes sense,” Dak said. Alicia grabbed his hand.
“We do that t’ing tomorrow, Travis,” Jubal said. “Jus’ de test.”
Travis looked at each of us in turn, and sighed.
“Just the test,” he agreed. “Come on, I want to start in an hour.”
IT TOOK AN hour and a half, but we got rolling by that afternoon. I called home and told them I’d be out all night. Mom said things were going smoothly, not to worry.
By nightfall we were passing through Miami.
17
* * *
WE TURNED EAST on the Tamiami Trail and drove on into the night. We were in three vehicles: Travis’s Hummer, Blue Thunder, and a Ferrari demonstrator Kelly had chosen because it would piss off her dad to find it gone all night and the next day. The thing would go like a bomb, but what with the traffic we picked up around Palm Beach we never got a chance to open her up. The long, low, infernal machine seemed to be pouting most of the way.
It was one in the morning when we pulled into Everglades City, which was an exaggeration if there ever was one. Most of the few hundred inhabitants were snug in bed as we bounced over mud and shell roads until we stopped in front of an old Airstream trailer set up on cinder blocks. The porch light was on. Flowering plants hung from the awning and from poles.
As Travis pulled the Hummer in beside the rusting hulk of a pickup truck, a dog I later learned was a black-and-tan coonhound lifted his head and bounded down the steps. Half a dozen more came out from under the deck. The dogs didn’t bark, but circled the vehicles nervously. Travis held his hand out and the dominant male sniffed it, then started running in circles, wagging his tail. On the other side of the Hummer [167] Jubal was getting out, laughing and tussling with two other dogs, who were so happy to see him I thought they might have a little urinary accident, but they didn’t.
“I figure we stay in the car until we’re introduced,” Kelly said.
“Good plan.”
The screen door flew open and a huge man came out, followed by a woman almost as big. Not fat, either of them, just built large and powerful. I could see immediately that the man was related to Jubal. They had the same eyes and the same mouth. One of his many brothers?
He shouted something at the dogs and they all came to him and sat, quivering.
“Y’all can come out now,” Travis called to us. “Let the dogs sniff your hands and you’ll be okay. They’re hunting dogs, not guard dogs. Cousin Caleb breeds the best black-and-tans in the state of Florida.”
“Georgia and Mississip’, too,” the big guy bellowed. Then he had his arms around Jubal and was pounding him on the back hard enough to kill a normal man. Travis embraced the woman, then they switched and did it all over again.
Introductions were made all around. Caleb was officially Celebration Broussard, but like all but one of his brothers, he had simplified his name “when Pappy went away.” His wife was Grace. Behind the two of them a boy-young man, really, about fourteen or fifteen-had come out of the trailer and was introduced as Billy, their son.
“Lord have mercy!” Caleb shouted when all that was out of the way. “If that ain’t the finest rig I ever did see. You do all that work yourself, Dak?” Dak allowed as how he had, and the two of them talked pickup trucks while Billy’s eyes went straight to the red Ferrari… and the gorgeous woman who had been driving it. The pimply-faced little jerk. He blushed when Kelly shook his hand. Out here in Everglades City, he probably never saw a pretty female except on television.
“Y’all been driving a long time,” Grace said. “You must be real hungry.”
“We had some ham sandwiches at a 7-Eleven,” Travis said. “Don’t put yourself out, we’re fine.”
[168] Well, I wasn’t all that fine, I was famished. But I was far too polite to say so.
It didn’t matter. Grace would have stuffed food into our mouths with a funnel, if that’s what it took. Pretty soon we were sitting around a big table groaning with fiery, rich, fattening Cajun food, and there’s no finer food in the world.
Jubal was on my right, and he jabbed me with an elbow. He had a twinkle in his eye and was practically wriggling with suppressed joy.
“Watch dis, Manny,” he said, then bowed his head, but looked up under his brow.
“Would somebody say grace?” Jubal asked.
“Grace,” Travis said.
“Yes?” Grace said.
Jubal giggled, and soon we were all laughing. Not much of a joke, I guess you had to be there. Jubal could be so childlike and innocent, and when he laughed it was almost impossible not to laugh with him.
“… and tell my peckerwood little brother not to let another five years go by ’fore he visits us again,” Caleb finished.
“Amen,” Jubal said, with feeling. Travis nodded, looking a bit guilty. Well, he should have been, if the brothers hadn’t seen each other in that long.
Then we all dug in.
I’d already demolished a plateful before I realized the big table was actually too big. Too big for the trailer, anyway. I saw then that Caleb and Grace had added on to the rig, tearing out one side, welding a second trailer to the one out front and then adding a structure on behind that. No telling what all was back there. Welding was one of Caleb’s many professions, along with carpentry and plumbing and “anything needs doing around here.” It looked like very good work to me, not the sort of redneck chaos I’d expected when we pulled up in front.
When we had each turned down a third invi
tation to eat more, Grace got up and called me and Kelly and Dak and Alicia to the doorway leading further into the trailer-building. We found ourselves in a narrow hallway with doors on each side.
[169] “We’d all love to sit around and chat with y’all all night,” she said, “but Travis says he wants to get an early start, so I figure y’all better catch a little rest. When Travis says early, he means early.”
It turned out all the doors were bedrooms. Grace opened a door and beckoned. On the other side was a room clearly belonging to a girl. From the rock star posters on the wall my guess was she would be twelve or thirteen. The room was immaculate, and smelled slightly of a floral air freshener. There were towels and washcloths neatly folded on the double bed.
“This is Dottle’s room,” Grace said. “She’s my eleven-year-old. The bathroom’s down at the end of the hall.”
“Oh, Grace,” Kelly said, “we don’t want to put your daughter out of her room. We’ll be all right just to-”
“Don’t you worry about Dottie, honey. She’s stayin’ over, slumber partyin’ with friends, and I’m sure they’re havin’ a ball. Probably all still awake. Y’all get some rest now, hear?”
She closed the door, and Kelly leaned close to my ear and spoke softly.
“I should have known nobody in the Broussard family would have only one child,” she said. We tried to laugh quietly since the walls were thin. It turned out there were eight bedrooms in the rear extension, one for each child, with Caleb and Grace’s bedroom in the original trailer. “Just added a room on every time a new one was born,” Travis told us later.
We sat on the bed and fooled around a little, then admitted to each other that we were worn out from the long drive. We got into bed, and I was asleep instantly.
BREAKFAST WAS RUSHED. Travis kept us all moving. Me and Dak and Kelly were bleary-eyed, Dak muttering that if he never saw another crawfish it’d be too soon as he carefully sipped at a glass of milk. Alicia was one of those hateful people who woke up with a spring in her step and a song in her heart. She hummed as she made one of her horrible concoctions in Grace’s blender, adding who-knows-what that [170] she’d brought along herself to whatever fruit Grace had handy, then even got Grace to taste it. Grace was either an accomplished liar or she actually dug the stuff.
Travis and Jubal had been up all night and didn’t look the worse for wear. They each downed cups of strong coffee while I nibbled on the buttered toast Grace had made when she couldn’t persuade me to let her get out her skillet. We all drank lots of coffee.
I got in Blue Thunder and Kelly sat in the back of the Hummer with Jubal. That was Kelly’s idea. We’d decided we didn’t want to leave the two of them alone unnecessarily or they might cut us out of the spaceship project. I didn’t know what Kelly could do to prevent that, but if someone could, she was the one.
When Caleb started his pickup it shuddered hard enough to rain flakes of rust down on the dirt. He put it in gear and started out… and the whole tailpipe and muffler and cat converter assembly fell off. Caleb sprang out of the truck, grabbed the pipe, and tossed it on the side of the road.
“Dak, that is the sorriest truck I ever saw that could actually move,” I said.
“He done used it hard, all right,” Dak said. “Especially when you consider it’s only four years old.”
I looked again, and saw he was right.
“Running through salt water, carrying heavy loads down roads ain’t much more than deer tracks… it takes it out of a vehicle. But don’t be fooled. That engine is excellent, he’s got good struts and good rubber, heavy-duty power train. Caleb just don’t give much of a… flip what the thing looks like.”
We got under way as the sun was just breaking over the eastern horizon. I hoped we weren’t trying to sneak up on anybody, since Caleb’s truck with no muffler was now about as loud as an armored invasion.
We had left the Ferrari at the Broussards’ and I could soon see why. That Italian terminator would have high-centered out within the first quarter mile as we bounced over a deeply rutted road into the swamp. [171] Actually, further into the swamp, as daylight had made it clear that Caleb and Grace’s place was already well into it.
“Don’t worry about your car none, Kelly,” Caleb had told her as he climbed into the cab of the pickup. “Anybody looks at that whiz-banger crooked, Billy’ll wrap a gun barrel round his fool head. Slept out here on the porch last night with a shotgun ’crost his lap. Lucky thing a dog didn’t bark or he’d of blowed off a toe.”
Much of the vastness of the Florida Everglades is roadless, trackless, “where the hand of man has never set foot,” as the saying goes. The Jeep tracks that lead into it, like the one we’d used to reach the Broussard abode, tended to peter out in a few miles. Then, here and there, the passage of a few four-wheel-drive vehicles a week has made some informal routes along what little ground isn’t four feet deep in quicksand or gumbo mud. Some of them are indicated on maps, others aren’t. But we didn’t need any maps with Caleb leading the way. He knew them all, or claimed to.
This was not the Florida I knew. I could identify some of the plants from seeing tamer versions in people’s yards or in city parks. They grew differently out here. But I’m a city boy, don’t know much about plants even in town.
Don’t know much about birds, either, but this was the place to come if you wanted to learn. I never saw so many birds. They’d explode from the reeds and moss-hung trees when they heard us coming. Big birds, little birds, great big flocks of black birds, thousands of egrets or cranes or something like that who just stood there and watched us go by.
Me and Alicia both craned our necks the first time Dak pointed out a big old alligator sunning himself beside a ditch. We watched him glide powerfully into the water and vanish up to his eye sockets. Wow!
Two miles later it was here a gator, there a gator, everywhere an alligator. Ho-hum. We actually had to wait for one to get out of the road in front of us. The gator probably thought of it as a gator track… and he’d be right. He was here first, he’d watched the dinosaurs come and go, and maybe he’d be here still once this critter calling itself “humanity” killed itself off.
[172] They say the Everglades are in trouble, what with the water being siphoned off up north, Miami advancing from the east, pesticides, global warming, I don’t know what all. And I believe them. But just driving through for the first time, I was in awe at the sheer numbers of the wildlife we saw.
Unfortunately, among that wildlife you had to count the mosquitoes.
Billions of mosquitoes.
Now we knew why Caleb had tossed a big plastic bottle of Off! on the front seat of Blue Thunder. We coated ourselves with the stuff, Alicia slathering it on Dak as he drove. Blue Thunder didn’t have an air conditioner-one of the few vehicles in Florida without one-but it wouldn’t have mattered, because we all knew we’d be out in the open soon enough, whenever Caleb got where he was taking us.
The repellent helped, but about one in a hundred of those critters seemed to think Off! was just there to oil up their bloodsucker, make it easier to slide it into the skin. It appears we’re breeding a better, stronger skeeter out there in the swamps, and when their kids grow up, look out!
OUR DESTINATION TURNED out to be the rotting remains of a dock, smack in the middle of nowhere. I know, because somebody had put up a sign: middle of nowhere. Redneck humor, I guess. The sign was about to fall over.
A flat-bottom Cajun pirogue could have made it through the shallow channels we saw winding around the hammocks and cypress knees and mangroves, but you’d have to pole it. An outboard propeller would have stuck in the mud.
Caleb and Travis pulled a big canvas tarp off a big lumpy thing sitting next to the dock and I wasn’t too surprised to see it was an airboat. Where the four-wheel tracks end, that’s where the airboat trails begin.
It was a wide, flat-bottom aluminum hull, extremely shallow draft, designed to skim over the water rather than cut through it. At th
e back was an aircraft engine mounted high in a safety cage. In front of it, almost as high, was a sort of crow’s nest seat for the pilot to sit in, way [173] up where he could more easily pick out his route. An airboat didn’t need much water under the hull. An inch was plenty. If you had a good head of steam and kept going, it would glide right over mud, too. Even dry land, for a while. “Don’t need no more water’n a skeeter can spit,” Caleb said as we boarded.
This one had once been a tourist boat. There were four rows of comfortable bench seats, with pads faded and cracked open by the relentless sun over the years, yellow foam stuffing showing here and there.
We all piled out of the vehicles, the mosquitoes swarming again now that we’d stopped. We put on more repellent, but nothing was going to make them go away completely, so we worked quickly, hoping to get moving again soon.
Travis and Jubal lifted a big cardboard box out of the back of Blue Thunder. It didn’t appear too heavy. They opened it and for the first time we saw the experimental test vehicle Jubal had cobbled together.
I can’t really say that it looked too impressive.
It was a five-foot tube of heavy-duty six-inch gray PVC pipe, the kind you’d buy for an ordinary plumbing project. A tapered nose cone had been fitted on the top of it. Below were three metal fins that also acted as legs for it to stand on. Under the tube was a spherical metal cage, the only part of the contraption that looked as if a fair amount of work had gone into it. Without knowing about Jubal’s Squeezer dingus, I’d never have known what it was for. It was intended to hold a silver bubble about the size of a softball.
I’d seen better rockets at the school science fair.
They put it on its side on the front bench of the airboat and tied it down with bungee cords. Two aluminum suitcases were set on the floor in front, and we were ready to go. Caleb climbed up into the pilot’s seat and started the engine.
