Red Thunder

by John Varley

  “We’ll probably fly in that attitude anyway,” I said. “Might as well be safe. But we’ll have detectors, too, all around the ship, to let us know if the level’s rising.”

  “What good does that do?”

  “The water soaks up the radiation, babe.”

  “And then we drink the water?”

  “The water doesn’t get radioactive. Don’t worry about it. This ship will have steel walls that’ll stop ninety-nine percent of it. We won’t have any trouble keeping within safe limits.” But Dak and I could both tell Alicia was going to want to see figures, and that “safe” limits were endlessly arguable. And there was no way to pretend we weren’t going to get any more radiation than if we stayed home.

  In the end, it would be up to her. I was betting she’d go.

  “So, that’s the water situation,” Dak said, changing the subject as quickly as possible. “Then there’s oxygen. We need about two pounds per day, per person. We figure on taking regular compressed air. A pure oxygen atmosphere is touchy, a fire can get completely out of hand in [213] half a second, just ask Gus Grissom’s ghost if you don’t believe me. So for every pound of oxygen we bring we’ll also be bringing four pounds of nitrogen. Can’t be helped, but again, it’s not a problem. We’ll have air scrubbers that take out the carbon dioxide. My feeling is we’ll need an ‘air officer,’ or something like that, who worries full-time about the air quality.”

  “How about ‘environment control officer’?” I suggested. I figured Alicia would be a natural for that.

  “Okay, that’s air and water taken care of,” Kelly said. “How about food?”

  “I thought we’d go buy a freezer at Sears or something,” I told her. “Fill it up with frozen pizzas and TV dinners. Bring a hotplate and a microwave oven.”

  Kelly laughed, thought I was joking at first… then laughed again when she saw it was not a joke.

  “Except for ’Leesha,” Dak said. “For you, we figured we’d buy a big brick of tofu and a sack of rabbit pellets. Keep your dish full, you can graze whenever you like.”

  “I’m getting a little tired of health food jokes, gang,” she said, and shoved Dak hard enough he fell off his kitchen chair, pretending to be injured.

  We were having this discussion in Kelly’s office, that is, the office of the project manager. When we were deciding which of us would be the best at keeping all the details straight, all the bills paid, raw materials arriving in a timely fashion, all the jobs to be done, big and small… Kelly had won unanimously.

  The space was in one corner of our warehouse, up one flight of steps over an area that had been used for storage but was now empty. There was a row of windows looking down on the warehouse floor, and I couldn’t help thinking of her father’s office. I wondered if she’d made the connection.

  “That’s one thing we decided early on,” I told them. “When we can buy something off the shelf, that’s one more thing we don’t have to make. I know it sounds nuts, but a Sears freezer is just the sort of [214] shortcut we will take any time we can. Now, maybe it’s best just to bring dry rice and pasta and canned stuff, maybe the hot plate is all we need, really… but if we want to take frozen food, we can.”

  “It’s amazing how much stuff we’ll be able to buy, when the time comes,” Dak said. “Like, the best way to get electrical power in a ship is with fuel cells. And it so happens you can buy them in any electrical supply house, just like the ones that go up in the VStar, and they’re not even that expensive. A space program spin-off.”

  “And we’ll bring batteries as backup,” I said. “Plain old nickel-cadmium car batteries, about the size of a lunch box.”

  “Well, I’ll provide a better menu than frozen pizzas,” Alicia sniffed, and before she knew it she’d been elected ship’s cook. Oh, boy. I could hardly wait.

  “So. Water, oxygen, food… what are the other necessities of life?”

  “Music,” Alicia said.

  “Damn right. Bring your whole collection, we’ll be equipped to play everything but eight-tracks and Edison cylinders.”

  “Food, water, and air are three of the big five,” I said. “Then there’s clothing and shelter. Shelter in Florida means a place to get out of the rain. In Minnesota it means protection from the cold. Where we’re going, pressure is the big deal, and heat or cold right after that. The ship will be our shelter.”

  “So we need a big space heater, or something?” Alicia asked. “Outer space is freezing cold, didn’t I hear that?”

  “You probably did,” Dak said, “but it ain’t strictly true. Space is a vacuum, it’s not hot or cold, either one. If you’re in the sunshine it can get real hot, real quick. We gotta be ready to cool the air, or heat it, since if you’re in a shadow you lose heat, and you get real cold, real quick.”

  “Not to mention the weather on Mars,” I said.

  “Now that’s cold,” Dak agreed. “Nighttime, figure on it getting down around a hundred and fifty below, most nights.”

  “You’re kidding.” Alicia looked alarmed.

  “No joke, kiddo. Hottest it’s ever been-the last million years or so, anyway-is about sixty Fahrenheit, high noon, equator, perihelion.”

  [215] “And perihelion is… what?”

  “Closest point to the sun. Mars’s orbit is a lot more eccentric… that means it’s not circular, it’s elliptical, from one hundred thirty million to one hundred fifty-five million miles from the sun. On Earth the seasons are determined by the tilt of the axis, which part gets the most heat, northern or southern hemisphere, which is why Christmas is in the middle of the summer in Australia. On Mars it’s the shape of the orbit that determines the seasons, such as they are.”

  “Sixty degrees doesn’t sound so bad,” Kelly said.

  “I wouldn’t bother to pack any sunscreen,” I told her. “For one thing, it’s not Martian summer right now.”

  “For another thing,” Dak said, enjoying this, “the air pressure is about one hundredth what it is on Earth, and ain’t none of it oxygen. That’s way below the pressure on top of Mount Everest. Ninety-five percent of the air is carbon dioxide, which, when you freeze it, is what we call ‘dry ice.’ And it does freeze on Mars, the carbon dioxide, most every night. So in addition to some real good thermal underwear, we’re gonna need us some space suits if we plan to leave the ship.”

  “ ‘If we plan to?’ If we plan to?” Alicia looked scandalized. “We couldn’t go there and never set foot on it, could we?”

  Dak shrugged, but the truth was, we were worried about that. You couldn’t just run down to the Goodwill store and pick up a few used space suits. I wasn’t sure you could buy them anywhere at all, new or used… or if we could afford them if we did find some. A custom-tailored NASA suit ran right around one million dollars, and that was a great savings over what they’d have run you ten years ago. Since our whole budget was one million dollars, I figured we had a problem.

  Because, when you got right down to it… would landing on Mars count if you didn’t get out of the ship?

  It sounds crazy, but what were Neil Armstrong’s first words while standing on the moon? “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind,” right? Anybody who knows anything about space history or any history at all knows that.

  Actually, in the only way that makes sense to me, his first words were, “Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

  [216] Think about it. If I’m standing in the pickup bed of Blue Thunder, I’m standing on Planet Earth, aren’t I? If not, then I spend very little time on the planet. Most of the time I’m standing on concrete, or asphalt, or wood, or carpet or I’m on the second floor of a building or I’m sitting in a vehicle.

  Yet it is universally agreed that Armstrong was not “on” the moon until his foot was planted on lunar rock. His thickly booted foot, remember, or else his foot would have suffered a severe burn, not to mention the harsh effects of vacuum.

  I had a sneaking feeling that, unles
s we were photographed actually standing on the Martian surface, our achievement of getting there first simply wouldn’t count. Or it would have an asterisk beside it, like Roger Maris’s sixty-one home runs. “They went there, but they didn’t go there.” They didn’t stand there.

  It was a real problem. Because the difficulties of building a spaceship began to seem small beside the problem of making a space suit. A safe space suit. What could we buy and then adapt, perhaps a diving suit?

  “So what about the rest of our clothing?” Kelly said, bringing me back to Earth again. Dak frowned at her.

  “Blue jeans and T-shirts, right?”

  “Well, I don’t plan on wearing any evening gowns,” she said, “but if we’re going to be on television, if we’re going to be famous, we shouldn’t look like slobs.”

  “Maybe some kind of uniform,” I suggested. Kelly looked dubious. “Not dorky stuff like Captain Picard and his crew. Something cool.”

  “I got a friend, she’s good at clothes,” Alicia said. “I’ll see if she has any ideas.”

  “But don’t tell her, ‘Make me some uniforms for people going to Mars.’ ”

  Nobody said anything. We couldn’t avoid being noticed, and we had to be able to tell people something when they asked what we were doing. We needed a cover story.

  Alicia came up with the best idea the next day.

  “Say we’re making a movie. Sort of a Tom Swift Goes to Mars thing.”

  Dak looked stunned, then slapped his palm on the table.

  [217] “That’s exactly right, baby. That way, we can make a spaceship, but we’re not making a spaceship. Just look at the damn thing. Is anybody going to look at that and think, These kids going to Mars, by golly!’ Hell no! Even if the spy spooks come by and take a look, in two seconds they’d walk right out. The thing don’t have an engine!”

  He was right. We were all looking at the first rough mock-up of the ship, made from HO-gauge model railroad cars. It looked mighty silly. My confidence in the design, which went up and down, had reached a low ebb when we put it together. You looked at it, you had to figure whoever thought this up was nuts.

  We did adopt the cover story of being prop makers for a movie in development. We went so far as to register the title Red Thunder with the Writers’ Guild, to announce we were in preproduction, and to set an imaginary start date almost a year away. The only downside to the idea was getting phone calls from agents and hopeful actors almost every day asking when we were casting. We always told them the script was in rewrites, and we’ll call you back.

  “But the movie isn’t Tom Swift,” Kelly pointed out. “It’s The Little Rascals Go to Mars, right?”

  “Perfect,” I said. My generation loved those old “Our Gang” black-and-white comedy shorts just like Mom’s generation had, and the generation before that. The only difference was, we had watched them on DVD.

  “I’m Stymie,” Dak announced. “You figure Manny for Spanky?”

  “No,” Kelly said. “Manny is Alfalfa.”

  “Alfalfa? That cross-eyed freckle-face dork? No way I’m Alfalfa.”

  “I always liked Alfalfa,” Alicia said. “It’s true he wasn’t as handsome as Manny… but Dak is much handsomer than Stymie, too.” Dak kissed her.

  “Alfalfa was the romantic one,” Kelly said. “He had the most heart.” I realized she was right. So that settled it. I was Alfalfa.

  “Who gets to be Darla?” Neither of the girls leaped at it. The Little Rascals were mostly boys, now that I thought of it.

  “Kelly’s gotta be Darla,” Dak said. “Darla wasn’t half bad, you know. She could be kinda sweet. And Alfalfa was in love with her.”

  [218] “No way out of it, Kelly,” I said. “You’re Darla.”

  “And that means Alicia is Buckwheat,” Dak said, with a grin.

  “Buckwheat? Buckwheat? Was Buckwheat a girl?”

  “What the hell was Buckwheat?” None of us were sure.

  “So who’s Spanky?” she asked.

  “Who do you figure?” I said. “Little fat kid, smartest of the bunch…” We looked at each other and said it simultaneously.

  “Jubal!”

  WE WERE STUMPED for a while about what to call Travis. In the end it was so obvious we wondered how we’d missed it. Travis was Hal Roach.

  It took our minds off our other problems for a while, but eventually we had to buckle down to the planning again.

  Never in my life had there been so many things I had to buy. Kelly set us all up with Platinum MasterCards and sent us out shopping every morning for a week. We had to rent a U-Haul truck just to cart it all back to the warehouse.

  We saved money where we could. Heavy equipment we mostly rented. We got the very best welding equipment because our lives would depend on every weld in the ship. We needed pumps, to create vacuum for testing the durability of components, and to create pressure for testing the tank cars. I thought we should wait on pumps until Travis got back and either approved or shot down the entire idea of using secondhand railroad rolling stock to get to Mars. Kelly said no, we’d need the pumps one way or another, and time was passing.

  We bought a standard cargo container like you see on railcars, the kind that can be loaded and off-loaded from freighters and then travel by either rail or truck. We welded it airtight, built a small air lock in its side, and started pumping the air out of it. It was going to be our vacuum testing chamber.

  The pressure gauge was nowhere near the point we needed when I heard a squealing noise like a rusty hinge… and the container [219] collapsed on itself with an earsplitting clang! as if we’d dropped it from the overhead crane.

  “Jesus squeezus,” Dak breathed. Alicia and Kelly came running down the stairs from the office, and we all stood together and stared at what had once been a rectangular container, like a huge box of Velveeta. Stomping on an empty aluminum Coke can, you could hardly have smashed it as flat as that container.

  I felt every ounce of confidence drain right out of me. Were we nuts?

  “Well,” Alicia laughed, “like you said, we need to make all our mistakes right here on the ground, because we can’t afford any mistakes out in space.”

  I didn’t point out that there were plenty of mistakes we could make right here on the ground that could kill us.

  “We gotta get that thing out of here,” I said. “If my mother sees that, she’ll have a heart attack.”

  We rented a flatbed and hauled the twisted hulk away, sold it for scrap metal, which was good, because Kelly had paid not much more than scrap metal prices in the first place. That same day we went ahead and bought our first tank car. I got goose bumps watching the switch engine pushing the car over our siding and into the warehouse.

  This was actually going to happen!

  We cut away the wheel carriages then lifted it with the overhead crane and lowered it onto a cradle we’d slapped together out of used two-by-fours and plywood-Kelly being frugal again. I was beginning to see just how her family had got rich and stayed that way. She never spent an unnecessary penny. But she never scrimped when only the best and newest would ensure safety.

  The weight of the empty car was stenciled right there on its side: LT WT 72,500 LBS. Thirty-six tons, and a bit. Also the capacity weight: 190,500 LBS., or about ninety-five tons. Over two and a half times the empty weight. That was very strong, I thought.

  We hauled the wheel assemblies to a public scale and weighed them, subtracted that number from thirty-six tons, for a tank weight of twenty tons. Seven tanks would weigh 140 tons. To that we would add [220] the weight of the cradle we would build that would connect the thrusting engines to the main body of the craft, plus the landing legs, plus everything we added inside, including the Sears Kenmore freezer and six people. We guessed we could bring it in under two hundred tons.

  No worries about keeping weight down, no fuel weight to consider, virtually unlimited thrust for a virtually unlimited time. If only Werner von Braun could see us, I thought, lifting far
more weight than his Saturn 5s could, using little silver basketballs. He’d be flabbergasted!

  We fitted the tank car cap with an extra-heavy-duty round hatch door, lined it with aircraft-grade silicone seals, dogged the door shut, and turned on the vacuum pump. None of us got close as the air was sucked out. It took a while, and the entire time my ear was listening for that first, awful rusty-hinge squeal.

  It never came. The car held up under fifteen pounds per square inch pressure differential applied from outside. I had no doubt it would easily contain one internal atmosphere against the vacuum of space.

  “We’re in business,” Dak said, as I turned the relief valve and air screeched into the tank. “You talk to Hal and Spanky today?”

  “Mom did. He says to look out for them about noon tomorrow.” Travis had been calling in every day, and the calls had originated from places as distant as northern Maine and the Mojave Desert.

  “Might as well hang it up for tonight, then,” he said. “We got a big day tomorrow, trying to sell this thing to him.”

  “We’ll sell it,” I told him.

  21

  * * *

  TRAVIS GRABBED MY face with both hands and kissed me on the forehead. While I was still too stunned to speak, he turned to everyone else, his arm around my shoulder.

  “If they had a Nobel Prize for engineering, these guys would get it,” he announced. He let me go and moved toward Dak, who backed away cautiously.

  “It was Manny thought it up,” he said. “I don’t need no kissing.”

  “Genius. A stroke of sheer genius,” Travis said.

  We were in a room we had been using for meetings, which had become a nightly ritual where we could all be brought up to speed on what everyone else had been doing, and figure out what most urgently needed doing the next day. It was down a short hallway from the office Kelly and Alicia shared, one of half a dozen rooms on the upper level of the warehouse, most of which were empty. This one had a big conference table and a few desks and tables against the back wall, all rented. There was a big brass espresso machine sitting on one of the tables, a gift from Kelly’s mom from when she dropped by one day to see how the “movie prop” business was coming. Now I was afraid I might be spoiled forever. It would be hard to go back to cheap coffee [222] after getting used to a couple lattes every morning before getting to work.