Red Thunder

by John Varley

  “ ‘Better go call nine-one-one, sugah,’ ” he said. “That was the last words I ever heard him say.

  “I didn’t go to the trial. I’ve never visited him in jail, five years now. He writes me letters, and I throw them away. The only thing in the world that scares me, much, is the idea that he might live through twenty-five years at Raiford. And that, friends, is the last time I will talk about him to any of you. Travis, do you want to take me up to Raiford to get his permission?”

  “No, no, of course not,” Travis said, mortified. “He’s clearly lost any parental right he might have had.”

  “Thank you.”

  Travis looked down at the table, but not quick enough to miss the glare Kelly gave him. Kelly knew this wasn’t the time, she would never bring up her problems in the face of Alicia’s shattering story… but her eyes told Travis this wasn’t over.

  * * *

  [203] MOM WENT TO the door with Travis and Jubal; there are certain things you do, a certain politeness to be observed even with an enemy. But she didn’t offer to shake hands, and she most emphatically did not open herself to a hug. Aunt Maria was in the kitchen cleaning up, removing herself from the scene of anger so thick you could cut it with a knife. And Jubal looked more in need of a hug than anyone I’d ever seen. So I got up and hugged him. Then they left.

  “I’ve got to get up in a few hours,” Sam said. “I’m not going to say any more until I’ve had some time to think it over. The food was wonderful, Maria.”

  Maria bustled out of the kitchen with a Tupperware box.

  “How would you know? You hardly ate any of it. Here, to take home.”

  Sam laughed, and took it.

  “I’ll go with you, Dad,” Dak said. He showed me his crossed fingers as he followed his old man out the door.

  “I’m going to see my mother,” Kelly said to me.

  Kelly’s real mom was a delightful woman, by now over the shock and shame of being kicked out of the house to make room for her husband’s girlfriend, who was once Miss Tennessee. She lived in a nice apartment, cashed her nice alimony checks, and was studying to be a real estate agent. Kelly spent more nights there than with her father, and possibly even more than with me. I never added it up.

  “You want me to come?”

  “Not tonight, Manny. I need to talk some things over with her. And don’t worry, I’ll keep all our secrets. Alicia, would you like to go with me? I’d like it if you did.”

  Alicia had been looking at least as gloomy as Travis. Now she brightened a bit.

  “I’d like that. Thanks.”

  Then it was only the three of us, and Maria quickly made herself scarce.

  “I can’t talk about any of this tonight, Manuel,” Mom said.

  “That’s fine by me, Mom,” I said, and kissed her cheek and skedaddled.

  [204] It felt mighty good to get out of that pressure cooker and back in my room.

  NATURALLY. I COULDN’T sleep.

  I wasn’t the only one. After about an hour there was a knock on my door.

  “Door’s open,” I called out, and sat up in the bed. Mom came in and sat beside me. We didn’t say anything for a long time.

  “Is there any way I can talk you out of this thing?” she asked.

  I knew what her problem was. Sam Sinclair had said it, just before leaving. “The way I’m seeing it, it’s this, or something else. I like to died when Dak got into racing dirt bikes, I got a thousand gray hairs every time he fell off one. But I knew he could do it then, and respect me, or wait till I couldn’t do anything about it, and detest me.”

  “Do you believe what Travis said?” Mom asked me now.

  “Do you?”

  “I want to, because if he’s right, you’re not going to Mars or anywhere else.”

  BY THE END Travis knew he wasn’t going to be winning any popularity contests, so he simply laid out the facts. “Here’s how I see it,” Travis had said. “One, we can start out to build a spaceship… and fail completely. I think this is pretty likely. I’m not sure thirty engineers could do it.

  “Two, we build a ship… and we’re too late. The Chinese land, then the Americans, and I have to start thinking of another way to attract enough attention so no one government gets this thing.

  “Three, we build a ship… and it ain’t safe. I will swear to you right here and now, by everything I hold holy, that I will never lift that ship one inch off the ground unless I believe it can get us there and back safely. Believe me, I’m not anxious to subject my worthless old hide to danger any more than I’d risk your precious children. I promise you [205] right here that I would never agree to pilot that ship unless I was willing to take my own daughters along with me. One is six, the other is eight. Maybe you’ll meet them someday.” He glanced at his watch. “In fact, I’ll be leaving and you won’t see me for a few days, because my monthly visitation starts tomorrow and I’ll be in New Jersey, where they’re staying with their grandparents while Mommy goes to Mars.

  “Then there’s possibility number four. We build a ship. It’s a good ship. We go to Mars, we come back, we’re heroes, we’re rich and famous. I’ve got no way of calculating what the likelihood of that is, but my guess is it’s one chance in a thousand that we ever even get to possibility number four.

  “And that, Sam and Betty, is as honest as I can be.” I waited for it… but nobody brought up possibility five, and six, and seven, and eight through eight thousand, which were all ways we could get killed along the way. Nobody needed to. It was right out there, unsaid, bigger than all of us.

  “I DON’T KNOW if I’ve ever told you how much I’ve always wished you’d outgrow this astronaut business,” Mom said, in the wee hours, the two of us alone in my room.

  “You didn’t have to. I could see that.”

  “When I was young, boys always wanted to be policemen, or firemen, or cowboys. Jet pilots. They usually gave it up later.”

  “I’m not going to give it up.”

  “I know that.” She shivered. “I hate those things, those VStar things. I’m always afraid they’ll blow up. I have nightmares about them falling down on us.”

  “They’re pretty safe, Mom.”

  “Don’t you start lying to me tonight, boy. Travis didn’t lie, or I don’t think he did, so don’t you start. I know they’re not as dangerous as I fear they are… but you can’t tell me something like that is safe as a hobbyhorse, either.”

  “Okay.”

  [206] “After your father died, you were all I had to live for. I could hardly bear to watch you cross the street. When you flew off on that airplane, I just knew it was going to fall out of the sky.”

  She was talking about my one trip out of Florida, to spend a month with my mother’s parents in Minnesota. Mom had thought they might be holding out an olive branch, but it turned out they still couldn’t stand their little spic grandson. It was a total disaster, and I was never so glad to get any place as I was to get back home.

  “Well,” she finally sighed, “I’m still going to talk more to Sam Sinclair about this… but what he said sure seems to sum it up. If it wasn’t this, it’d be something else, wouldn’t it?”

  “Probably so,” I admitted. She put an arm around me and hugged tight.

  “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you, my only son. Stay alive for me, please.”

  “I’ll try.”

  I couldn’t remember ever seeing my mother cry, and she didn’t cry then, either. But she had to hurry to the door.

  When she opened it Maria was standing there, not even pretending she hadn’t been listening. We both heard Mom’s quick steps on the stairs going down, then Maria leaned in the door and spoke softly.

  “When I was eight and your father six,” she said, “we and seven other family members came over on a raft no bigger than my kitchen. Seven days we floated, with no food, the last two days without water. Your family is tough, Manuelito, we’re survivors. Mars will be a piece of cake, eh?” She winked
at me.

  “I am so proud of you. Your father would be proud of you. And your mother will be proud of you, too. Now go to sleep.”

  “ ’Night, Tia Maria.”

  20

  * * *

  SO WE HAD the go-ahead to build us a spaceship.

  Hooray!

  So we buckled down to work…

  And nothing happened.

  Nothing seemed to happen, for a while, anyway. Our biggest accomplishment during that early period was Kelly’s searching for and finding the ideal industrial facility where we could put the thing together and not be bothered too much.

  But the first step of a project like this was planning. We didn’t know quite where to begin. In fact, for the first three days or so, Dak and I felt the whole load of this insane idea fall squarely on our backs, and we were terrified. Because Travis said that, at the beginning, this was our ship to design, and he’d consult, he’d help, he’d move mountains if he could… but getting started was up to us.

  Actually there was what you might call a pre-preliminary stage. There were legal and financial questions to settle.

  Legal? Are you seriously suggesting we bring lawyers into this, Travis? Dak and Alicia and I were appalled. Jubal just stayed out of it, [208] content to let Travis, his loco parent, handle his affairs. Only Kelly saw the wisdom in it. Count on the rich girl to understand.

  “Believe me, sweetness,” she told me one night, “the best way to turn dear friends into deadly enemies is to have a handshake deal on an enterprise as complicated and potentially profitable as this one is. We don’t need to spell out every penny, but we need to outline the shape of the thing, the broad strokes.”

  I certainly wasn’t going to argue. It was her fifty million pennies, and fifty million from Jubal, that made the thing possible in the first place. Myself, I’d have been happy to work for union wages and let the two of them split all the profits, if any.

  In the end, Dak and Alicia and I had to lobby hard against her first proposal, which was a simple division of any profits into six equal shares.

  “Not fair, not fair at all,” Dak said, and Alicia and I backed him up. “No way you two dudes put up all the money and don’t get back but a sixth.”

  Eventually, after some dickering, Travis came up with a compromise. Kelly would get twenty-five percent, Jubal twenty-five, and the other fifty percent would be split three ways between me, Dak, and Alicia.

  “What about you?” I asked him.

  “My share is in Jubal’s, as always.”

  Before we even got to the money part we had formed a corporation so things could be settled by voting. That was complicated enough in and of itself, even with Travis’s lawyer helping smooth the way. We were officially the Red Thunder Corporation.

  I started to think that, after this, the engineering part would seem simple.

  SHORTLY AFTER TRAVIS returned from visiting his daughters he and Jubal left for two weeks of testing the Squeezer.

  “This time we’ll talk it over first,” he had said. “If I’d had us put our heads together before I dragged you all out into the swamp we might not be looking over our shoulders for secret agents now. And by the [209] way, if any of you see me running off like that again, I want you to bring it up, okay?”

  What he proposed was to go on the road with Jubal and test more toy rockets.

  “They saw something take off from the Everglades. I know a place we can do static testing quietly. But since it’s no longer possible to retain total secrecy, my thinking is that it would do us a lot of good if we kept them looking… in the wrong places. What if they detect another launch, but from North Dakota? Then another in Texas, and then one in Nevada. My feeling is, if they have to look all over the country, it will spread them too thin to do much good. Comments?”

  “More launches will make them more interested,” Alicia had said. “Maybe if we just leave it alone, they’ll think the Everglades test was… I don’t know, a faulty radar or something.”

  “Good point. But this bogey would have appeared on multiple screens. I think they’ll be looking hard, and they’ll keep on looking, whether it’s one launch or a dozen.”

  “I think Travis is right,” Kelly said.

  “Sorry,” Alicia said.

  “Hell, no, Alicia. It was a very good observation. Keep ’em coming.”

  The consensus was that Travis should fire off the red herrings, five or six of them, widely scattered, with no pattern.

  Travis and Jubal took off in the van for points unknown. They carried Jubal’s tools and, of course, the Squeezer, of which there was still only one. They would buy the instruments and the materials they needed along the way.

  So Dak and I could have waited for their return in two weeks. But two weeks wasted put us a lot closer to the deadline, and there was no way we were going to greet Travis without at least some proposal of where to get started.

  That’s when I had my brainstorm about the railroad tank cars.

  KELLY EXPLORED THE world of tank cars for us. Like so many things, it was a lot more complicated than you’d think.

  [210] “Your ‘average’ tank car is forty feet long by ten feet across,” she told us. “I’ve found half a dozen companies that make them. They’re all made of solid, thick steel, they’re very strong.”

  “That’s what we need, strong ones,” I said.

  “You can order a standard model, or name your own specs. You don’t carry milk in the same kind of car you’d carry gasoline in. Some are lined, some are refrigerated or insulated to carry liquid gases. You can have just about anything you want… and the price for a new one is one hundred thousand dollars and up.”

  “Just your standard car,” I said, once more intimidated by the price tag.

  “I presume you don’t mind a used one?”

  “Please, yes, please, a used one.”

  “Run you from ten to twenty thousand each. We’re in luck, there’s a glut right now. I can probably shave some off even that ten-thousand-dollar figure.”

  Dak wondered if we should put a deposit down until Travis got back, but Kelly said there’d be no trouble getting as many as we needed.

  We needed seven.

  We tried for most of one day to figure out how to fit everything we were going to need into just one, but it was impossible. Next step up was three, bundled together, but that didn’t look good, either.

  “Remember, weight is no object,” Dak said. “We can brace this sucker any way we think is necessary, inside and out.”

  With a few mouse clicks he created a bundle of seven cylinders. Looked at from the end, it resembled a honeycomb, one circle in the middle surrounded by six others.

  “Put the bridge in the center one,” Dak said. “It’s a longer one than the others, about ten feet or so. Put some windows in that. On the deck below the bridge we have flight stations for the rest of us.”

  “So one deck below that,” I said, moving the mouse, “we have sleeping quarters. Still got a lot of space below.”

  “Remember our cardinal rule. If you think you might need it, bring it. Right?”

  [211] “Roger. And if you really have to have it, bring three.”

  So it began to take rough shape.

  “A HUMAN BEING needs about six pounds of water every day,” Dak told Kelly and Alicia the day we showed them Design A, about halfway through Travis and Jubal’s road trip. “That’s just for drinking. We want to stay clean, we’ll need more.”

  “I’ll vote for clean,” Kelly said.

  “It’s not a problem. A gallon of water weighs about eight pounds. Say we all drink one gallon a day. That’s forty-eight pounds a day. Trivial. Add another ten gallons for washing, brushing teeth, cooking, water balloon fights… we’re looking at five hundred pounds of water per day.”

  “So how many days will we be gone?” Alicia asked.

  “We’re expecting about two weeks,” I said. “That’s three and a half tons of water. But we intend to carry enough
for twice that, as a safety margin. Say seven or eight tons. Two thousand gallons.”

  “Seven tons?” Kelly asked.

  “Two weeks?” Alicia looked surprised. “I thought we’d be gone, I don’t know, months and months.”

  “Don’t have to with Jubal’s gadget, hon,” Dak said. “We can get there in about three and a half days. I don’t think you even want to know how fast we’ll be going when we get to the halfway point and turn around to slow down.”

  I wasn’t sure I did, either. Three and a half million miles per hour. That’s almost a thousand miles per second, a long way from light speed of 186,000 miles per second… but we’d have to reset our clocks forward a few seconds when we got back. One day I’d have to do that calculation, too… when I figured I was emotionally ready for it.

  “We figure the water can come in handy for radiation shielding, too,” Dak said, and I could have kicked him. In fact, I figured I would kick him, first chance I got.

  “Radiation…?” Dak might as well have suggested we eat cyanide. [212] Alicia would not eat genetically engineered vegetables or fruit, but her special dislike was irradiated food. I liked Alicia, but she usually fell for the line of the Health Food Mafia.

  “Yeah, hon, there’s radiation in space. Mostly it won’t be a problem, it isn’t strong enough to penetrate our steel hull. Astronauts get exposed to it every day.”

  “So what’s the problem?” Kelly asked. She was looking dubious, too.

  “The sun,” I said. “Every once in a while there’s a storm on the sun, a flare, and the radiation gets stronger. We’ll be cutting in toward the orbit of Venus, so we’ll be closer to the sun than anybody’s been yet.”

  “Yeah,” Dak said, “but it varies on an eleven-year cycle, and we’re not at the peak.”

  We’re only a few yean before it. But I didn’t say that.

  “We figured we’d make the thousand-gallon water tanks wide and tall and thin, spread it out to cover as much area as possible. Then, if a storm comes, we orient the ship so those tanks are between us and the sun.”