Red Thunder

by John Varley

  “Oh, gosh, do I have to?”

  “Such a sacrifice,” Alicia laughed, and slapped my back.

  Kelly held out the chicken wishbone, hooked around her greasy pinkie finger, I took the other end and pulled.

  Oh, please, let us build this thing.

  Short end.

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” she said. “Maybe we wished for the same thing.”

  18

  * * *

  “JUBAL THINKS AMERICANS ought to be the first people to set foot on Mars,” Travis said. “I agree with him, but before a few weeks ago it was impossible. Now it is possible, with something Jubal has made, and I’m going to tell you how it can be done.”

  Travis, who had been pretty much on the wagon for several weeks, had told us he had to have a shot or two… or three, before facing an audience scarier than any he had ever faced in his life: Mom, Aunt Maria, and Dak’s father. Alicia had doled the whiskey out to him, and he had walked into the lion’s den.

  The three of them sat in Mom’s living room on the old sprung couch and easy chair that qualified as a “family heirloom” in my poor family. It was after midnight, the vacancy sign had been turned off and the office door locked. It was now just the six of us and the three of them. Travis was going to explain how he and Jubal proposed to build a spaceship and take their precious sons to Mars.

  You couldn’t find stonier faces on Mount Rushmore.

  Sitting on the coffee table along with a couple open two-liter bottles of generic cola and some Dixie cups was a pitiful torn bag of stick pretzels and a small plastic container of cold supermarket guacamole dip. I [184] swear, if Fidel Castro himself climbed out of his grave and came to visit, Aunt Maria would have at least heated up a little refried beans and salsa.

  Travis sighed deeply and started in on his spiel. I squeezed Kelly’s hand and said a silent prayer to Ares, the God of War.

  THE NIGHT AFTER we launched the test rocket we all pulled into the lot behind Strickland Mercedes and parked. Travis and Jubal got out of the Hummer and squeezed into the backseat of Blue Thunder. Dak beeped the horn once as he pulled out, and Kelly and I went to the back door. One of her keys opened it, and she hurried over to the security control on the wall and punched in a five-digit code.

  Kelly’s dad was the kind who liked to keep a close eye on his employees, even when he was busy with other things. Therefore, he’d had his office located above and slightly behind the salespeople’s cubicles. He could look down through a glass wall onto the tops of their desks, and beyond them to the showroom floor.

  “Master of all he surveys,” Kelly said as we climbed the broad spiral staircase. Another key got her into his office, and another five-digit number entered into another keypad got us secure access.

  I couldn’t help feeling like a burglar, and like a goldfish in a bowl. I knew I hadn’t done anything illegal, Kelly had a perfect right to invite me in, but I also knew I was emphatically not welcome by her father. And what Kelly was going to do was illegal. I hated it that I could see right outside to the new cars parked out in front, and the road, and the I-95 freeway just beyond it. Traffic was light at three A.M.

  She booted the computer and I pulled up a chair to watch an artist at work.

  “Enter Daddy Dear’s security code, right out of the book… done,” she muttered. “Password… oh, my, now whatever could his password be?” She looked at me, and I shrugged.

  “Let’s try something…” She typed, her fingers moving too fast for me to get any of it. In the password box ************ appeared, then the security page disappeared and a menu came up.

  [185] “Pretty good,” I said. She smirked at me, and pulled out a flat wood panel above the side drawers on the big executive desk. She turned it over. Taped to the bottom was a piece of paper with the word ferraristud in ballpoint, and several numbers.

  “PIN numbers,” she said.

  “Dumb.”

  “ ‘Ferrari-stud’ is his online handle, too. He uses that when he goes to an escort service website and has one of the girls drop by here when he’s working late. I have quite a file on him. I read all his mail. I know all his secrets, and believe me, some of them could get him ten to twenty in Raiford.”

  She called up an internal database and easily changed the color of her borrowed Ferrari from “red” to “black.” She did something involving dealer plates and registrations that I didn’t really understand. Then she went to the DMV.

  “Every car dealer in America has some kind of fiddle going with somebody at the DMV, if they can afford it,” she said. “The guy I’m leaving an e-mail with makes good money on the side by doing little chores for us, when the need arises.”

  A patrol car was passing along the street out there. His turn indicator was on, and he was about to enter the lot. I tapped Kelly on the shoulder and pointed.

  She stood and waved. The officer riding shotgun spotted her and waved, said something to his partner, and they sped off.

  “Safer up here,” she pointed out. “The cops are used to me working late.”

  When she shut the computer down we went to her office, where a printer was chattering. She pulled the paper out. It was a dealer’s window sticker listing equipment and options and price. She pointed to where it now listed the color as black. She said it was listed that way in all the documentation at the dealership, and in the morning it would be listed that way at the DMV, too.

  “They’d have to go all the way back to Italy to hear any different,” she said. “We don’t have any red Ferraris in inventory. They’ll have to look elsewhere.”

  [186] “The one problem I see with that,” I pointed out, “the car actually is still red.”

  “Not for long.”

  Out back, a guy was sitting in the car scraping the old dealer sticker off the window with a razor blade. Another, younger man was standing by the car. The older guy smiled at Kelly.

  “Midnight black, right?” he asked.

  “As soon as possible.” She held up two key rings.

  “Let my boy drive the Hummer. This is my son, Josh.” Kelly tossed him the Hummer keys. “What color you want it?”

  “Whatever’s most ordinary.”

  “That would be Desert Storm beige. Most of the right-wing militia generals in Florida drive around in Desert Storm camouflage Hummers.”

  They drove off, and Kelly told me that by this time tomorrow Travis’s flamboyant red-and-black super-jeep would look like a Gulf War veteran.

  “Sounds expensive,” I said.

  “Bob owes us some favors. He almost got himself in trouble a few years back, some pesky business about changing engine block numbers and paint on some cars whose ownership was… not quite crystal clear, let’s say.”

  “Stolen.”

  “We car dealers don’t like that term much. Misplaced.” She grinned at me, and I realized Kelly was more of a pirate than I’d ever suspected.

  I didn’t have a problem with that.

  THAT MORNING I caught up on some chores, got a few minutes’ sleep in the afternoon, and then spent the evening and night in Kelly’s little apartment on the beach south of town. We swam, lay on the beach and talked until it was dark, bought a pizza and took it to her place.

  Kelly talked a lot about making a final break with her father but she hadn’t done it yet. The fact was, she still kept a lot of her stuff in the huge, gated, fake-Greek pile of stone where her father lived with his [187] second wife. She spent some nights there, some with her mother in Ormond Beach, some with me, and some at her own place. She didn’t really live anywhere, in the way that most of us do.

  The fact is, she didn’t make enough money to afford the payments on her Porsche if she’d had to buy it herself.

  She had money. I didn’t know how much, but I figured it was substantial. It was in a trust her father had set up so she couldn’t use any of it until she was twenty-five. Until then, she had to get by on the wages her father paid her-which even she and I, who loathed him, ha
d to admit were fair for the work she did. He knew her value, and intended to keep her under his thumb as long as he could.

  “I could quit and find another job pretty easy,” she said. “I would probably take a small cut in pay, but it might be worth it not to have to deal with him every day. But I’d be just as bored as I am now. What I know is the car business. And I hate the car business. But what I do like is business, and I think I’d be good at it.”

  So she vacillated, and we talked. She never laughed at my plans to find a career in space, and she helped me with my studies. And we never talked about getting married.

  THE NEXT DAY Travis and Jubal picked us up, very early, in a five-year-old Ford van with enough seats for the six of us. Before getting in Kelly looked it over quickly and asked Travis what he’d paid for it. When he told her she winced.

  “You should have talked to me, Trav,” she said.

  “Just get in, Ms. Strickland Mercedes, okay?”

  We picked up Dak and Alicia and hit the road, destination unknown. Boxes of Krispy Kremes and cups of strong coffee were passed around.

  We took the A1A exit and crossed Merritt Island and entered the Kennedy Space Center grounds through an entrance I’d never used before. Travis showed a special pass to the gate guard, so I guess he still had a little pull around there.

  We got there in time to witness something I’d never seen before: the raising of the world’s largest garage doors to reveal the retired Shuttle [188] Atlantis and the old Saturn 5, newly restored after many years of sitting in the Florida sunshine and rain, now standing proudly and awesomely erect in one of the bays of the old Vehicle Assembly Building. All done to music, of course… Also Sprach Zarathustra, which was probably always going to be the anthem of space exploration, thanks to Stanley Kubrick.

  “I want y’all to just look at that Saturn 5 for a moment, kiddies,” Travis said. “I want you to look at it, and I want you to consider the concept of hubris.”

  “And dat be… what?” Jubal asked.

  “That’s what the ancient Greeks said when somebody was getting too big for his britches… or whatever Greeks wore under their togas. Excessive pride. Arrogance. I want you to look at that rocket and ask yourself… ‘Are we biting off more than we can chew?’ The builders of that thing are gods, in my book. And the Greeks warned mortals not to try to act like gods.”

  “It’s not the same, Travis,” I protested.

  “No. We’ve got a few advantages over the guys who built and launched these things. Chiefly, unlimited fuel. Ninety-nine percent of that rocket was fuel, liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, which are very tricky to handle, very dangerous in themselves, even if you don’t burn them in those huge engines. We don’t have to worry about that.

  “But we have to worry about just about everything else. Do you know how many million parts were in that thing, fully loaded, on its way to the moon?”

  “No, how many?” Alicia asked.

  “Well… I don’t know, but it’s a bunch. Somebody here can tell us. My point, though, is one faulty transistor could bring this behemoth down in flames. One screwup in space, and we’d be dead. Can we build that well?”

  “Sure,” Dak said, but it was impossible to stand in the shadow of that thing and say “sure” with any confidence. So I backed him up, and so did Alicia and Kelly. That left Jubal, and we all turned to him, the only guy whose vote really counted.

  [189] “I t’ink we can, ma fren’s. But I promise you dis. De firs’ minute I t’ink we cain’t do it, I tell you right off.”

  It didn’t bring a smile to Travis’s face, but eventually he nodded his head.

  “Let’s go see the museum,” he said.

  KELLY AND ALICIA had never seen it. Isn’t that always the way? I think our visit to Kennedy that morning fascinated them, gave them a glimpse of the fire that burned in Dak’s and my guts. And if you were even vaguely considering something as screwy as going to Mars in a home-built spaceship… well, you couldn’t help wanting to know more about the ones who had gone before you and the hazards they faced. The hazards you might soon be facing.

  We ate our picnic lunch at a table in the shade near the rocket park, where many of the early missiles launched from Cape Canaveral made a metal forest of white trunks. It was hot, there weren’t many tourists around. I had a funny thought. If we do this, and get famous, when they made a movie about us the director would want to shoot right here, where it all was decided.

  “Have you given any thought to how much all this will cost?” Travis asked.

  We all looked at each other. I’d certainly thought about it, but I didn’t have a clue. The one thing I could say with absolute certainty was that it would take far, far more money than I had. Another thing I was pretty sure of was that if Travis didn’t have enough money to do it, then it just wouldn’t get done.

  “One million dollah,” Jubal said.

  We all looked at him. Travis was frowning.

  “Where did you get that number, beloved cousin of mine?”

  “I pick it outta de air,” Jubal admitted, and we all laughed. “But it oughta be plenty enough, I t’ink.”

  “I t’ink so, too,” Kelly said, and Jubal patted her on the back.

  “Okay, where did you get that figure?” Travis wanted to know.

  [190] “It’s what I have in the bank, more or less,” she said quietly.

  Stunned silence.

  “But I thought-” I started, then felt the daggers she was staring at me. Well, of course. The night before last I had watched her turn a red car into a black one. She had the computers, she had the security codes, the passwords, the bank account numbers, the PIN numbers. She could probably steal her old man blind, if she wanted to.

  But that wasn’t something we had to share with everyone.

  “I know, it’s awful,” she said. “One person having so much, others having not anything. I can’t help it. It’s not easy, having money when your three best friends don’t, and they won’t let you give them some help here and there, when it’s needed. It hurts me to see Manny’s family struggling so hard… but none of them have ever asked me for a thing, and they haven’t held my money against me.

  “So, yeah, I’ve got money. About a million dollars. And I’ve been drifting since high school. I’ve been looking for something to do with my life. I’ve tried a lot of things. I met Alicia while I was volunteering at the battered women’s shelter.”

  “She did more than that,” Alicia said. “She put her money where her mouth was a couple times, saved the place from closing down once.”

  “It didn’t take much,” Kelly said. “And that kind of work is not for me, I found out. I’d get too depressed at the hopelessness of it all if I tried to make it my life’s work.

  “Today I learned about people who wanted to go to the moon, and they did it. It hasn’t been my dream, and it may never be, but it’s a place to start.” She looked at Travis. “So how about it, Mr. Ex-Astronaut? Do you want to go to Mars, or will you let the chance pass you by? I’ll bet you a million dollars we can do it.”

  Travis shook his head and smiled, slowly.

  “I won’t take that bet. Because if we do this thing, I’ll jump in with both feet. So I’d be betting against myself.”

  “You faded, Kelly,” Jubal said.

  “What’s that?” Travis asked.

  “I say, I bet her one million dollah we cain’t build us no ship and get [191] to Mars. Dat way, I win, I kin give her back de money she waste jus’ on account a believin’ in me. She win, we go to Mars and she get my one million dollah.”

  “Jubal, I hate to remind you of this-”

  “I know. You my loco parent. I always figgered dat one loco parent was plenty enough, yes.” He smiled, and I tried to smile back, but it was tough, thinking of Avery Broussard and what he’d done to his brilliant son.

  “In loco parentis,” Travis said, wearily. “It means I’m your legal guardian.”

  News to me, but not sur
prising. Somebody like Jubal would have to have someone to look after his affairs.

  Travis had mentioned once, before this whole scheme got started, that he and Jubal were living on the earnings from Jubal’s patents. Jubal was the creative one, he had the crazy visions and built the marvelous things. Travis was the financial side. Though he didn’t claim to be a whiz at handling money, he did it a thousand times better than Jubal ever could, and in fact, without Travis or someone like him to figure out the practical applications of Jubal’s inventions and discoveries, Jubal would have nothing at all. “We do well,” Travis had said. “Jubal’s never going to lack for anything.”

  Oh, no? Well, now little Jubal wants a toy, Travis.

  And now Jubal was frowning.

  “You done said it was jus’ to proteck me,” he said. “From dose bad folks, take our money away, we ain’t careful.”

  Travis was looking uncomfortable. I looked at Kelly, who was following with intense interest. She raised one eyebrow at me, and shook her head. Don’t interrupt.

  “ ’Bout all I ever spent it on is de Krispy Kremes,” Jubal said. Alicia laughed, and patted Jubal’s hand.

  “Is it my money, Travis? Is it my money?”

  “It’s your money, Jubal. Well, half of it is, anyway.”

  “And I gots de million dollah?”

  “Yeah, you gots it. More than that. I’ll show you the books, you don’t believe me.” He looked around at all of us, and got angry. “I’ll show all [192] of you the goddamn books if you want. I’ve never cheated Jubal out of a dime. Excuse the language, Jubal.”

  “Nobody ever thought you did, Travis,” Kelly said. “But have you maybe… sheltered him too much? I’m not criticizing, it’s none of my business, but Grace told me they’d like to see Jubal more. I think Jubal would like that, too.”

  Travis hung his head, then nodded, still not looking at us.

  “I’m a drunk, okay? I’ve spent a lot of the last five years pissed out of my mind, as bad off as I was the night you almost killed me. I went out there on the beach to watch my ex-wife take off on her way to Mars… because I was supposed to be on that ship!