Red Thunder

by John Varley

  “Where’s the barge?” I asked. Travis laughed.

  “That baby crinkled up like a potato chip and went straight to the bottom.”

  Damn. We didn’t own that barge, we leased it. Oh, well.

  “Hang on to your hats, friends. I’m outta here.”

  I quickly realized the noise I’d heard before was like a kitten purring. When Travis opened the throttles for a full two gees the sound became unimaginable. I think it might have deafened me if I hadn’t been wearing headphones.

  On the screen I saw the water dwindle away. Two Coast Guard cutters came into view, then the borders of Strickland Bay, then the freeway bridges. The bridges were bumper to bumper with stopped cars. I could see people standing on the roadway.

  Two gees is not bad. Imagine someone your exact size and weight lying on top of you. Not pleasant, but not really painful, either.

  On a VStar flight acceleration built up gradually as fuel was burned while thrust remained more or less constant. Near engine shutdown, VStar passengers experience up to five gees. Our two gees would be constant, falling off only as we left the pull of Earth’s gravity behind. Here at the launch, one gee was from gravity, and one gee from our acceleration.

  In moments I could see the whole city of Daytona on my screen. Then the whole county, then the whole state of Florida. Another camera showed the sky turning a darker and darker blue, then black. The [302] roaring of the engine faded to a grumble as the air thinned into nothingness.

  My God, I was in space.

  IT DIDN’T TAKE long before the gee forces fell to one and a quarter.

  “Okay, y’all,” Travis said. “I want an inspection, top to bottom, see if everything survived the strain. Get it done quick, and you can come up to the bridge. And move carefully! We’ll be heavy for a while yet.”

  One point two five gees was sort of like carrying a big backpack, it would have been easy to hurt myself if I got frisky. Before I opened the tank six interior air lock I checked the two pressure gauges, one for the interior of the small internal lock, one for the air-lock/space-suit module. Both gauges read a perfect 15 psi. I opened the hatches and swung out onto the ladder and down to the suit deck.

  I immediately saw that one of the suits had fallen from its rack. It was lying there, facedown. I wasn’t too worried. The helmet material was the stuff they use in “bulletproof” windows, and was guaranteed to withstand a.45-caliber slug.

  I was about to bend down and pick it up, when the suit moved.

  I jumped a mile, even in the high gravity.

  “Oh my god. Kelly?”

  She rolled over and sat up. I could hear her saying something, and helped her work the fittings of the helmet. I didn’t know whether to be happy or horrified. But pretty soon happy won me over. I had even started to laugh as I pulled the helmet off.

  “I can’t believe you-Jesus! What-” There was blood running from her eyebrow and down the left side of her face, into her mouth, over her chin.

  “I’m okay, I’m okay,” she said. “Hurry, help me get out of this thing!”

  “But…”

  “Hurry!” I asked no more questions, and in a minute I had it off her. She wore jeans and a T-shirt, just like I did. She scrambled for the ladder and started up. There wasn’t much I could do but follow.

  When she reached the crossroads deck she headed down, past [303] Travis’s quarters and the room that would have been Jubal’s if he had come, then down again… and into the head. She slammed the door, and I could hear her laughing in relief.

  “I’ve been in that thing all night,” she said.

  I heard someone coming down the ladder. It was Alicia, looking confused.

  “Kelly,” I said, and grinned at her. Her face lit up.

  “Oh, boy. Travis is going to be so pissed…”

  BUT HE WASN’T, not nearly as much as we had feared.

  When she followed me up the ladder onto the bridge he did a double-take worthy of Laurel and Hardy, then buried his face in his hands. When he looked up he had a small smile on his face.

  “I should have known,” he said. “I should have checked.”

  “Listen, Travis, you’re off the hook with my father. I mean, he’s going to hit the roof, sure, but he was going to do that anyway when he finds out how much of my trust fund I’ve spent. I’ll take full responsibility. You didn’t-”

  “If I had a brig, I would throw you in it.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Travis,” Dak said. “She outwitted you, fair and square.”

  Captain or no captain, Travis knew he was outvoted on this one. It wasn’t until later I wondered… was it a total surprise to him? He didn’t search the ship before launch, and anyone who knew Kelly might have been suspicious at how little fuss she had given him about being left behind. Had he been giving her the opportunity to take matters into her own hands, so he could wash his hands of responsibility for her?

  Yeah, but I knew Kelly pretty well, and I never thought of it. My only excuse is, I was so busy I never had time to think of it. When, just for a moment, I felt a little hurt that she hadn’t even confided in me, I reminded myself I hadn’t thought of helping her stow away, and I should have. I really should have. I felt lousy about that.

  Alicia had examined her before we went to the bridge, cleaned up the blood and the wound, which turned out to be just a cut above the [304] eyebrow. She shined a flashlight into Kelly’s eyes, pronounced her fit and healthy, gave her two aspirins for her headache.

  “I fell off when Travis stepped on the gas, but before he reached the full two gees,” she told us. “A good thing, too. I hit hard enough at a gee and a half, or whatever it was. I wouldn’t recommend two gees in the prone position…”

  One drawback to blasting at one gee all the way to Mars is that it was hard to see where you’d been. Naturally we all wanted a look at the Earth. In a free-falling ship like the Chinese Heavenly Harmony you could just swing the ship into any attitude you wanted. But we couldn’t do that on Red Thunder, because while we were thrusting we had to keep the nose pointed toward where we were going.

  There were five round windows on the bridge, one at each point of the compass, and one overhead. We could see where we were going, but not where we’d been. Where we were going was nothing but a bright, reddish star. The window that faced the sun was polarized almost to black, to prevent burning and blindness.

  But Travis was able to angle the ship slightly by reducing the thrust of one of the three Phase-2 thrusters beneath us, enough that we could crowd close to the window and see a piece of the Earth. We were all astonished at how small it had become.

  “We’re past the moon’s orbit already,” Travis said. “Sorry to say the moon’s way over on the other side of the Earth right now, so we can’t see that, either. And in another few hours the Earth’s going to be just a real bright star.”

  I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck. So amazing to realize that, already, we were further from the Earth than any humans had ever been, except the crews of the Heavenly Harmony and the Ares Seven. …

  “Kelly,” Travis said. “Did you figure out how you’re going to leave the ship when we get to Mars?”

  “Sure. I got my own suit. I put Jubal’s suit in…” She frowned. “Where’s Jubal?” She was as shocked as we had been when Travis explained it to her. “His suit is aboard. The suit I was hiding in is mine.”

  “All those ‘defective’ pieces then…?”

  [305] “A few were actually defective. But I bought my suit piecemeal, an arm and a leg at a time. And I used my own money. Believe me, I was tempted to charge it all to you, after the way you’ve treated me.”

  “I told you-”

  “I know. Your reasons were good. But you’re off the hook, and I’m here, and that’s the way it had to be. So can we bury the hatchet?”

  “I don’t have a hatchet, Kelly.”

  “Uh-oh,” Dak said. “Friends, we got a problem.”

  Travis hurried to the window,
where Dak had been pressing his face close to get a last look at Earth before Travis straightened the ship again.

  “What?” I said. “What problem?” My stomach tightened.

  It was our “high-gain antenna.” That’s what we called it, anyway, though it had started life as a satellite dish and had sat for many years in Travis’s yard, obsolete and rust-streaked. It was mounted on a tripod mast that looked out over Module Five, and motorized so we could fine-tune the aiming. One leg of the tripod had twisted a little, enough to make a stress fracture at the base, where it was welded to the body of the ship.

  Travis sent Dak down to the systems control deck where the controls for the dish were part of his duties. Gingerly, Dak tested the motors: azimuth, altitude, skew. The dish moved okay, but with each move a small bouncing motion was introduced that made the weak weld open and close about a quarter of an inch.

  “We do that too much, we’ll snap it off like a dry stick,” Travis said. He sighed. “Dak, we’d better listen for a bit while we still have it, okay?”

  “Roger, Captain. Calling Planet Earth …”

  After a few minutes of fiddling Dak picked up a strong signal. He frowned as he listened, static filling the television screen in front of him, then he grinned.

  “It’s CNN,” he said, and we saw two familiar anchorpersons, Lou and Evelyn. The banner beneath them read, THE FLIGHT OF RED THUNDER?

  “CNN has been unable to confirm the existence of a… as incredible as it may sound, of a home-built spaceship called Red Thunder, currently on its way to Mars at a speed almost impossible to believe. Here’s what we do know.

  [306] “At a little after seven this morning, Florida time, something lifted off from Strickland Bay in Daytona. It had been sitting on a barge, being towed toward the open sea, when a Coast Guard helicopter and two cutters intercepted it. We have been unable to get a comment from the Coast Guard, or for that matter, any government agency to confirm or deny this report, but we do have video.”

  Whoever they bought it from had a good camera. We watched great clouds of steam billow from Red Thunder. It lifted, hovered… then began to rise… and rise, and… then it was screaming into the sky.

  “Will you look at that,” Dak breathed. I think we were all astonished at just how quickly the ship dwindled into the sky.

  “Simultaneous with the liftoff, we received a press release via the Internet, and a website address, claiming to be from the families of the people aboard the ship. The release claims this ship, this Red Thunder, has a crew of four, headed by a man named Travis Brassard… no, sorry, I’m told his name is Broussard. Travis Broussard.”

  “Damn right, you idiot,” Travis said, as his picture filled the screen. It was one taken by Grace, as were all the following pictures. He had a smile in this picture that reminded me of Bruce Willis, though Travis doesn’t look much like Willis.

  “We have confirmed that Broussard is an ex-astronaut, a former VStar pilot who has made numerous trips into space. We have a crew on the way to his home.”

  “Good luck,” Travis said. “Nobody home there but a lawyer with a copy of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. The cops better have a search warrant… not that there’s anything to find. The place is absolutely clean.”

  Then Dak’s picture came up.

  One by one we were identified, an unlikely rogues’ gallery. I thought I looked pretty foolish, but then I always dislike pictures of myself.

  Then there was a photo of the six of us, Kelly and Jubal included. We were in our bomber jackets, posed almost like 2Loose’s portrait of us on the side of the ship.

  “Also involved in the project are a Kelly Strickland, age nineteen, [307] and Jubal Broussard, Travis Broussard’s cousin.” I was surprised that picture had been released, and looked at Travis. He shrugged.

  “Kelly approved it,” he said. “Her dad had to find out sooner or later.”

  “I wish I could watch when he finds out I’m here,” Kelly said with a giggle.

  “As for Jubal, there’s no point trying to keep him a secret. Too many people know about him. But everybody in the family has been instructed to describe him as… well, as retarded. Most everybody outside of the family thinks he really is retarded.” He looked at the ceiling, pursing his lips. “Sorry, Jubal,” he muttered. “You know Jubal doesn’t lie too well… but I’m hoping, first, that nobody finds him. If they do, Jubal’s been told just to act confused, not to answer any questions at all, that way he doesn’t have to lie. He can handle that. Hell, he will be confused, no acting necessary.”

  “You figure they’ll think it was you, invented the drive?” Dak asked.

  “Not for long, if they get a look at my physics grades at college. But I think they’ll be inclined to postulate a seventh person, a Dr. X, as the mastermind. They can look for him all they want, since he doesn’t exist.”

  “We here at CNN have been trying to contact Red Thunder since first reports came in,” said one of the anchorpersons, and got our attention at once. “We have confirmed that, when it last appeared on the weather radar at a local television station in Daytona, the ship was accelerating at a constant speed. We have also been told by an anonymous source that tracking radar indicates the acceleration has continued unabated.”

  The screen showed a huge satellite dish, and the announcer continued.

  “We have aimed our largest transmitter at the spot where we believe Red Thunder would be if it continued to accelerate at the same rate-and I emphasize that all our scientific consultants tell us this is impossible… still, if you can hear us out there, Red Thunder, please transmit on the frequency that should be… there, at the bottom of your screen. We want to tell your story to the world.”

  Travis grinned at us.

  [308] “That sounds like our cue, lads and lassies. You ready to speak to the world?”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Dak said, gesturing frantically. “Look!”

  The scene had changed… to a close shot of the Blast-Off Motel sign. The camera pulled back, and a black woman moved into the shot, holding a microphone, pressing her ear with one hand, obviously trying to hear her producer over an earphone. Then she smiled when she realized she was on the air, live.

  “Lou, Evelyn,” she said, “this is La Shanda Evans reporting from the Blast-Off Motel here on the beach at Daytona. The Blast-Off is a local institution around here, dating back to the early days of the space program. There was even a suggestion a few years back to declare the sign a national historic site, though nothing came of it. Lately it’s fallen on hard times, and today it doesn’t seem to be open at all.”

  The camera panned to the door, and sure enough, the CLOSED sign was prominent in the window. I could see people inside. Evans knocked on the door, and Mom opened it a bit.

  “Mrs. Garcia, we’d like to have a word with you, if we could.”

  “Uh… not yet, okay? Like I told you, we’ll have a press conference in about an hour, as soon as the people aboard the ship send back their first messages.” She glanced at her watch, and I could see the worry on her face. I glanced at my own watch, and saw we weren’t really late, yet. But it was only a few minutes.

  “Travis, we-”

  “Just a minute, Manny. Just a minute.”

  The door was locked again, and the camera came back to Evans.

  “Well, you heard it, Lou. We’re waiting for word from this alleged Red Thunder, which I guess is your department. We were the first on the scene, about half an hour ago. But everybody else is arriving now, and it promises to be a bigger media zoo than the 2000 presidential election.”

  The camera turned to the parking lot, where people were running around and no less than three satellite trucks were setting up. There was police tape around the lot.

  [309] “So that’s the news from here, Lou and Evelyn. Oh, one more thing. Before Mrs. Garcia shooed us away fifteen minutes ago, I was able to buy this from her. Apparently it is a model of Red Thunder.” She held up something
and the camera zoomed in on it. It was a small plastic image of Red Thunder in a clear plastic snow globe. Evans shook it and the plastic snow swirled. I looked at Kelly, who was grinning.

  “Might as well make as much as we can off of this,” she said, unabashed.

  “Nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents,” Evans said. “I’ve got a feeling these are going to be collector’s items, one way or another.”

  The scene cut back to the CNN center. Lou was laughing.

  “Pick one up for me, will you, La Shanda?”

  Dak hit the mute button.

  “Ready to do the press conference, folks?” he asked.

  Nobody was real eager, but we had to make ourselves famous, right? Though, from what we just saw, we were already well on the way.

  Dak adjusted our antenna. I broke out the wide-angle TV camera and clamped it to the brace on the wall, then aimed and adjusted it by looking at the picture on the main screen.

  “CNN, can you read me?” Dak was saying. “CNN, this is private spaceship Red Thunder, calling CNN.”

  “Don’t forget about the time lag,” Travis said. “It should be about four seconds-”

  “Red Thunder, this is CNN. We are receiving your audio signal. We are not getting any television signal.”

  “That’s ’cause I ain’t sent it out yet,” Dak muttered, and flipped a switch. After a short pause, the technician’s voice came on again.

  “Got it! Tell Lou-”

  I looked at the TV with the incoming signal. Lou was looking excited. He waved at Evelyn, interrupting her. Dak turned up the sound and beckoned us all over to the wall. Soon I could see us all assembled on our TV screen, Dak seated at his console, the rest of us standing against the wall, like a police lineup. Dak turned up the volume.

  “-word coming in that we’ve acquired a signal from this alleged [310] Red Thunder. We should have the picture up in… here we go. Is this the… ah, the private spaceship Red Thunder?”