Red Thunder

by John Varley

  “I’ll support you either way, I hope you know that.”

  She put an arm around me as we walked, and she hugged me close.

  “I do. The only reason I’ve kept at it so long is… it was your father’s dream. And it wasn’t even really a dream, I guess, I think it was more of an obsession.”

  “You don’t need to let it be your obsession, too.”

  “But I did. You’re right. Your father was determined to make it work, he wanted to show his parents… and even more, my parents, the white folks who never said a racist word to him but always managed to let him know he was their social inferior, right up to the day we married.

  “He wanted to make it work so bad… that he got a little stupid. Just once. He did something he’d never have done if he hadn’t wanted this so bad, for you, and for me.”

  And what was the stupid thing? What would be the worst possible way for him to die to perfectly satisfy my mom’s parents’ expectations? Why, a drug deal, of course.

  [241] Just this once, it was going to be. He lived long enough to tell Mom that, as he lay dying in the hospital. I remember Mom was crying, not much else.

  It wasn’t even a very big drug deal, certainly not by Florida standards. Just two Cubans and three Colombians and half a kilo of cocaine. But one of the Colombians was flying high, and he got mad, pulled out his gun, started shooting. None of the others could even recall what the fight was about. None of the others were hurt; the Colombian was too stoned to shoot very well, except for that first shot at point-blank range.

  They left my father there, all four of them, to bleed almost to death in a deserted parking lot and die of septic infection the next day. All of them are out of prison now except the one who was killed inside. I know their names. Maybe one day I’ll do something about that. Or maybe it’s better to just bury that kind of hatred.

  “Travis made a lot of sense, Manny,” Mom went on. “He asked why I hang on here. Why work so hard to keep this goddam place running when I know, when everybody knows, that one day it’s all going to come together at the same time, all the bad things, no customers, a big lawsuit, a hurricane, and the only thing different than if we’d gone belly up ten years ago would be ten years less of heartbreak.

  “When I think of selling it, it just hurts that after all our hard work it’s come to nothing. I think about getting another loan, someplace, do some renovation, make it nice, like your father wanted it. But this place is Old Florida, and it always will be, until some New Florida outfit comes along and puts up a shopping mall.

  “Well, I’m tired of being Old Florida. So I’m going to accept Grace and Billy’s help while you’re working on this thing you’re working on. Travis is right, you’re going to work yourself to death trying to do both things at once, you’re too good a son to let me and Maria handle it by ourselves, even though I’ve already told you to. You’re your father’s son, that way… and I’m proud of you.

  “But I’m telling you right now, Manuel. Whether you go or not, whether you come back or not… I’m through here.”

  “I’m glad, Mom.”

  [242] “When you… when you get back, we’re getting out of this life.” She shook her head and looked up at me. “You’re already out of it, Manuel, and I can’t tell you how glad that makes me. And, yes, I thank Travis for that… even though I’ll kill him if he harms one-”

  “I’m coming back, Mom. And we’ll be rich and famous.”

  She squinted at me, looking too old and too tired in the merciless sunshine.

  “Is that what you want, Manuel?”

  “Famous? Not really. But we probably will be. I only want to be rich enough not to have to worry about every dime, all the time. Have enough money to pay for college, maybe have a few nice things. Not have to… to worry all the time that I can’t get Kelly the things she’s used to.”

  “Well, you know I like her. Even though she’s rich.” We both laughed at that. “And if you don’t want to be famous, you’d better have a talk with her. She’s figuring on cashing in on this thing right from the git-go. She’s been talking to Maria and me about it. The lady has big plans.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Talk to her. And you go with Travis, and you come back.” She kissed me on the cheek, hugged me very tight, and we rejoined the people around the picnic tables.

  Big plans, huh? First I’d heard of it.

  SIXTY DAYS.

  That’s how much time we had if we were going to beat the Chinese to Mars. We put up a big calendar on a wall of the warehouse and Kelly marked off each day at midnight, when we were supposed to have been in bed for an hour, per Travis’s instructions. We were supposed to get up at six and run, having theoretically gotten seven hours of sleep. Instead, we were always up at four or five, unable to sleep.

  But… run?

  Mom got a big laugh at that, when she heard. And nobody could have been more surprised than me. I know I should exercise, get into [243] the habit of it since I didn’t plan to be a lumberjack or a rodeo rider, or anything else strenuous. Astronaut? In truth it’s a very sedentary occupation, especially in the free-falling space stations. They have to put in one or two hours’ exercise every day just to keep themselves from losing too much muscle mass and bone density.

  But running around and around a track always struck me as a stupifyingly boring waste of time. Running on the street was only slightly better.

  “That’s gotta change,” Travis told us, early on. “I want all of you to be in tip-top shape when we leave, not shriveled up from staring at a computer screen twenty hours a day. A strong mind in a strong body, that’s what I want.”

  I was going to ask Travis how much running he’d gotten in during the last four or five years of steady alcoholism… but then I saw how much one hour of jogging was costing him, the first time we all went out together, with the sun just coming up and dew sparkling on the leaves. But he was out there again the next morning. Neither Dak nor I could let an old ex-alky outrun us, of course, so we really pushed ourselves.

  And the girls? It was easy for them. They’d both been doing it since high school.

  “You think this gorgeous body comes for free?” Kelly had chided me, puttering along at half her normal speed as I huffed and puffed beside her.

  “Hell, no. I paid ten dollars for that body.”

  “Which you still owe me, come to think of it.”

  It took a week of torture, and a considerable amount of denial, for me to admit that after the morning runs I felt more rested and alert than at any other time of the day. After that I relaxed to the inevitable. After two weeks even Travis was getting back into shape. Jubal… well, Jubal was exempt, because nobody made Jubal do anything. Most of the time he was too engrossed in his calculations to drag himself away from the computer. But then one morning he did run with us, and he held his own. I’d forgotten about the midnight rowing trips on the lake.

  [244] We moved spare beds and dressers from the motel into some of the empty offices in the warehouse, and set up a prefab shower inside the rest room. Most nights Kelly and I slept over, and so did Dak and Alicia. Pretty soon the delivery boys from the local pizza and Chinese places could find their way to the Red Thunder Corporation blindfolded.

  THE SHIP WAS to be in two parts, the cradle and the life modules. Dak and I were ready to start construction on the top part quickly, but it couldn’t be built until it had something to sit on, which was frustrating. We devoted the time to materials testing. We also had weekly meetings at Rancho Broussard.

  “It’s a good thing we didn’t start building the cradle a week ago,” Travis said at our second meeting. “We thought we were ready, but Jubal did some more tests, and what he found out changed the parameters pretty radically.

  “You’ll recall I set out radiation sensors at that first test in the swamp. Didn’t find any. But now Jubal has found there’s two types of… maybe we should say ‘quantum states’ inside the Squeezer bubbles. Most of the ones we�
��ve tested, they’ve been what we’re calling Phase-1 bubbles. I’ll come back to them.

  “But there’s a second type of bubble.”

  “Let me guess,” Dak said. “Phase-2?”

  “I’m surrounded by geniuses. The stuff inside a Phase-2 is compressed so hard, so tight… we’re really not sure just what the matter inside them is like, but it may be like a neutron star, all the electrons stripped away and nothing but neutrons packed together like Japanese on a Tokyo subway car.

  “Whatever. What comes out is very hot, very fast, and releases radiation. If you were close to the exhaust, the neutrons would boil you like an egg.

  “But early on, I did a test I didn’t tell y’all about. I got to wondering what if we put a bubble over a city, like a big Bucky Fuller geodesic dome? Could it protect that city from a nuclear bomb?”

  I glanced at Dak. We’d had the same idea, a while back. But it didn’t [245] have anything to do with the trip to Mars, so we filed it away to ask Jubal about later. We had our hands full with just the work we had to do, without wasting time on hypothetical.

  “So… we tried it on a rat.”

  Jubal came back in, carrying a battered old U-Haul box, which he set on the coffee table in front of us. He reached in and came up with a white rat, the kind you can buy in any pet store to feed your pet pythons and boa constrictors. With his other hand he took out a three-legged lab ring stand, the kind you set up over a Bunsen burner. A piece of plywood was glued to the top. He put the stand down and put the rat on the platform. It sniffed around, exploring all the edges.

  “Travis,” Alicia said, “is this going to be gross?”

  “Not unless you love rats.”

  “Well… I don’t like animal research…”

  “Bunny rabbits and dogs and monkeys and stuff,” Dak explained.

  “… but for rats I make an exception. I killed a lot of rats, growing up.”

  “No sympathy for rats,” Dak agreed.

  “No lyin’, cher,” Jubal said, “it won’t do de rat no good, no. But no blood.”

  “Go ahead, then.” She moved closer to Dak.

  Jubal reached into the box again, pulled out his new, improved Squeezer. It was all housed in a unit the size of a shoebox. He fiddled with it, and a basketball-sized Squeezer bubble appeared where the rat had been. The three ring-stand legs clattered on the table, sliced off neatly by the formation of the bubble. The bubble hung there. I didn’t think I’d ever get used to that.

  “Now, what happens in there seems to happen instantaneously. There’s going to be a little bang, okay? But no explosion. Jubal?”

  Jubal hit a button and the bubble vanished. There was a pop, and a very fine gray powder swirled in the air. What looked like a handful of iron filings fell to the table. The gray powder was so fine it took a few moments to settle into a small heap. Travis put his finger in the stuff and showed it to us.

  “Your basic powdered rat,” he said.

  * * *

  [246] WE ALL FELT that called for a drink. Travis took a long swallow of the raspberry-flavored Snapple he favored these days.

  “The powder is carbon, calcium, little traces of this and that, everything that was in the rat but water. The water turned into monatomic hydrogen and oxygen. That’s what made the sound.”

  Dak got some on his finger, pondered it. “Powdered rat, huh? Hey, maybe what we got here is instant rat. Scrape it up, put it in a package, like Kool-Aid, then you just add water, stir it up…” Alicia shoved him. Jubal thought it was hilarious. All day long he was muttering “instant rat, instant rat,” and laughing all over again. When Jubal found a joke he liked, like saying Grace, he stuck with it.

  “You figure out how to put the rat back together again, Dak, that’d be something,” Travis said. “Anyway, it’s the same with the iron from the stand. It’s chopped up so fine it basically oxidizes in midair, rusts before it hits the table.

  “But the deal here, ladies and gents, is that chemical bonds are broken. We don’t know why. Maybe it suppresses the charge on the electrons.”

  “It turn off dem little hookin’ t’ings,” Jubal said.

  “What he means is, it does something to the valence electrons, which is what allows chemical bonds to happen.”

  “But if we squozes on jus’ water…” Jubal said.

  “He means, with just the right amount of water, and just the right amount of squeezing… show ’em, Jubal.”

  Two more things came out of Jubal’s box of mischief. First was a small construction of metal mesh. It was welded to a heavy metal base. Arching around the cage were the three brass or bronze prongs, sharp pointed, that caused the discontinuity, that let the power inside come out in a controlled stream.

  Sure enough, Jubal took a small container from his box, opened it, and took out a marble-sized bubble. He put it in the cage, and expanded it until it fit snugly.

  [247] “This is a Phase-1 bubble,” Travis said. “There’s just water inside it, squeezed just enough to… well, show them, cousin.”

  Jubal manipulated his control box, and we heard a high whistling sound. The powdered remains of the rat stirred in a faint breeze.

  “Coming out of the top of the bubble is hydrogen and oxygen,” Travis said. “We’ve adjusted the load inside so it doesn’t fully collapse, like a neutron star. No radiation is produced. Now look.” He struck a match and moved it over the bubble.

  With a whoosh, it ignited in a fine, hard, bright yellow flame that went two or three feet into the air. It continued to burn while we all watched. After a full minute it was still firing, and Travis signaled Jubal to turn off the gas. The flame died.

  “Clean power,” Travis told us with a satisfied smile. “Hydrogen plus oxygen plus ignition, equals power, and water. Just like the VStar, only they burn liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Not an environmentalist in the world could complain.”

  “There’s enough to get us to Mars and back?” I asked.

  “No. Well, not in any reasonable time. Lots of power, but not that much power. We’ll use these to get up above the atmosphere.” He unrolled a printout and pointed to the schematic drawing of the power cradle we were about to start building.

  “Phase-1 bubbles here, here, and here, under tanks one, three, and five. Phase-2, what I’m calling SuperSqueezer bubbles, under two, four, and six. These bubbles will have enough power to get us to Alpha-Centauri and back, if we were foolish enough to try that. Plenty of power for Mars and return. And when we come back, we use the Phase-1 bubbles again to land.”

  The doorbell rang. Travis frowned-he didn’t get a lot of visitors out at the ranch-and he excused himself to go answer it.

  Dak was bent over the plans so he didn’t see what I saw… which was Travis glancing at the video screen just outside the dark vestibule. He stopped, stared, and then pivoted and hurried back to us. He spoke in a loud whisper.

  “Cops! I want y’all to stay quiet. Very quiet!” And he hurried over to [248] a big bookcase beside the television screen. He shoved some books aside and reached behind them. He came up with a flat pint of Jack Daniels.

  I was stunned. Travis, no! But he twisted off the metal cap, raised the bottle to his lips, took a drink…

  … and gargled with it.

  He sprayed the mouthful of whiskey into the air, breathed deeply a few times, pulled out one side of his shirttail, kicked off his shoes, and mussed his hair. All of us tiptoed to the television screen, out of sight around the corner. I heard him open the door and we saw the two men in suits standing on the porch. The air reeked of Black Jack.

  “Hey, hey!” Travis bellowed. “Watch-y’all want? I can’t eat Girl Scout cookies on account of bein’ on a diet.”

  One of the men took a step back. The whiskey stench coming off Travis was pretty powerful. The other said something, and all I could make out was “… Federal Bureau…” I figured I could fill in the blanks easily enough.

  “Well, shit fire and save the matches,” Travis sa
id. “What’d I do this time?”

  Travis stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door almost shut behind him, and the FBI agents’ voices didn’t carry very far. But Travis’s did.

  “Say, are either of you ol’ boys from Texas? Friend of mine, he says nine out of ten FBI agents are from Texas.” A pause, something mumbled by one of the agents. “Oh, yeah? Where in Texas?”

  Mumble mumble “… Dallas.”

  “No fooling? My wife’s got folks in Dallas. Ex-wife, that is. And you’re from Lubbock? I don’t know anybody from Lubbock. Thank God.”

  Travis listened a moment, then laughed himself into a coughing fit.

  “Oh, that’s great. That’s great. We got guv’mint men checking out the likes of him? You figure he’s gonna be another Waco or something? Let me tell you gents, I don’t know what that ol’ boy saw that brought y’all out here, but he don’t do nothing but paint, paint, paint road signs and hold all-day prayer meetin’s on Sunday where they shout hallelujah all the goddamn day long. I swear, you look in the dictionary [249] under ‘eyesore,’ you’re gonna find a picture of ol’ Roscoe’s place. Unless you look under ‘damn fool religious nut,’ ’cause he’s there, too.”

  He went on like that for a good long time. We could see easily enough from their body language that the agents just wanted to get out of there, as soon as possible. Which they finally did, thanking Travis, giving him bland FBI smiles.

  We all hurried to the curtained front window and eased the drapes back. Travis joined us, and we all watched the car back out of the shell driveway and onto the road, and spray crushed shells all over as the wheels spun.

  We dropped the drapes back and looked at each other, not knowing what to say. Then Alicia came up with something. “Travis…,” she said, and that’s all it took.

  “I know, I know. It shouldn’t be in the house. There’s one more bottle, way back in the pantry under a sack of flour. You can get that one and pour it down the drain, too.”

  “Did you drink any?”

  “No, I haven’t, not even just now, and I can prove it.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a prescription drug bottle and tossed it to Alicia. “I’ve been taking this Antabuse stuff. And you know what? Looks like even the taste of booze is enough… You’ll have to excuse me a minute…” He was looking green, and he hurried down the hall and into the bathroom. We could all hear him vomiting.