Red Thunder

by John Varley

  But… pink?

  [338] “The only color they had in stock,” Dak had said. “They’ll do the job.”

  The job they had to do was to protect the rubber of the gigantic tires from freezing and flaking away, like his experimental tire had done. It turned out sixteen was how many electric blankets they needed, modified with zippers around the edges, to cover the tires. Each nestled in its own pink cocoon, like weird, flattened Easter eggs.

  We got the wheels down and unwrapped, then jacked Blue Thunder up to the proper height, removed the regular tires and replaced them with the big ones. Each wheel weighed eight hundred pounds on Earth, but just three hundred on Mars. We could horse them around without too much trouble.

  They call it a Bigfoot, at monster truck rallies. They are all descendents of the original Big Foot, made by some maniac a long time ago. They have only one use: to bounce recklessly over lines of junk car bodies as quickly as possible, preferably without killing the driver by turning over on him.

  Only one use, until we took one to Mars, that is.

  “It’s perfect,” Dak had said, when Dak and Sam first revealed their creation to us, back at the warehouse. “You’ve seen the pictures, Mars is scattered with rocks, lots and lots of rocks, any size you want. This baby will crawl right over any rock smaller than a Buick. Bigger than a Buick, I figure we’ll drive around it.”

  “Isn’t the center of gravity kind of high?” Travis had asked. “I’ve seen them turn over, on television.”

  “That’s in a race,” Dak had said. “Fools be driving those rigs way too fast. Keep it down to five, ten miles an hour, it’ll climb over most anything.”

  “Yeah, but who’ll be driving at five, ten miles an hour?”

  “You’re lookin’ at him. I don’t always drive like I did that night I almost run you over. Right, Manny?”

  “Dak can be an extremely careful driver, when he wants to be,” I said.

  “And he damn sure will be, won’t you, son?” Sam had glared at his son.

  [339] It took about two hours, Travis barking in our radios if he thought we weren’t being careful enough, to reassemble Blue Thunder. I was glad we’d put in all that suit time at the bottom of Travis’s pool. You don’t dare get careless in a suit, not when there’s nothing outside it but extremely cold, thin, poisonous gas.

  Travis wanted us to come in for the night, but it was still several hours away so we talked him into allowing just a short jaunt. After all, we had to see if it worked as well on Mars as it had in the warehouse where we’d first seen it, didn’t we?

  So Dak climbed up into the cab, which had been completely stripped of doors, windshield, seats, roof, and most of its instrument panel. Dak had new instruments to look at, and simple plastic seats. He still had a steering wheel, but because space-suit boots were not very flexible he and Sam had substituted a hand control for the foot pedals. Push it forward to go, pull back to stop.

  Alicia pulled herself into the shotgun seat, and that was all the seats there were, except a backward-facing bench in the bed. Kelly and I climbed up there and secured our safety lines to a pipe that ran just below the roll bar. Standing up was by far the best way to ride, and Dak had promised to take it slow.

  Dak deliberately picked out some fair-sized rocks to climb and Blue Thunder performed perfectly… all in an eerie silence that was partly because of the thin air and partly because of the most important modification that had been made. Under the hood, where you’d expect to find an engine, there was now only two big tanks, one for oxygen and the other for hydrogen. The engine was sitting on the floor of Sam’s garage, and Blue Thunder was now powered by four electric motors, one for each wheel. Beneath my feet, under the truck bed, were six fuel cells. Blue Thunder could operate with only two of them online, but today, as the Martian evening progressed, I could see a line of six green lights on Dak’s dashboard.

  “One mile, tops,” Travis said over our radios.

  “Gotcha, Captain,” Dak said.

  There was a computer screen on the dash in front of Alicia. It showed a map of our landing area, part of the extremely detailed map we had [340] downloaded, free, from NASA. Alicia’s job was to try to match the terrain with the real-time map Blue Thunder’s navigational computer was generating. That information was being fed constantly by our inertial tracker, which was accurate down to about one inch.

  The shallow gully we had landed in was curving off to the west as Dak drove down it, and we tried several gullies on the map, sort of like moving a transparent overlay map over a more detailed topographic map. Alicia moved the cursor into a place that might be right, but the computer didn’t like it. Again, same result. But on the third try the computer signaled we’d hit the jackpot.

  “I’ve got our position now, Travis,” Alicia said. “Uh… Dak, why don’t you turn right here… I mean, west. Go up that slope, and there should be a crater, about forty feet wide, on the other side.

  “West it is, hon,” Dak said, and Kelly and I held on, though the safety lines held us securely, as Dak powered up a slope of about 20 percent.

  “Just like four-wheelin’ in the hills!” Dak chortled. He was having the time of his life. How many NASCAR drivers got to hot-rod around on another planet?

  We got to the top of the ridge, a bit higher than the one we’d walked up, earlier, and down there at the bottom was exactly the crater Alicia had described.

  “We’ll call it Alicia Crater,” Dak suggested.

  “The hell we will,” she said. “We get to name stuff? If we do, you better name something a lot more impressive than that after me.”

  “Okay, baby.” Dak sounded so contrite that we all laughed, Travis, too.

  He drove us along the ridge for a while, but Travis’s voice came again, like a leash on a frisky dog. “I make you one point one miles from the ship right now, Dak. Time to turn around.”

  “Yassuh, boss,” Dak said. “Manny, Kelly, can you see anything from up there?”

  We’d been headed toward the Valles Marineris; the map showed it only 3.4 miles ahead…

  “I see a line, a little darker, maybe,” Kelly said.

  [341] “Maybe,” I said. “But the horizon here is confusing. Too close. We know it’s there, the valley, but I wouldn’t swear we’re seeing it.”

  “Me either,” Kelly agreed.

  “Tomorrow is another day,” Dak said, and brought Blue Thunder smartly around. We followed her outward-bound tracks for a short distance, then Dak went down through the next gully, up the crater wall, down to the inside, then up and out. We made about a quarter of a circle of Red Thunder, and came back home from the west.

  We got out except for Dak, and we laid electric blankets on the ground in front of each of the wheels. Dak drove onto them, and in another thirty minutes we had the blankets laced around the wheels and plugged into ship’s power. It was exhausting work, a lot harder than I’d expected, just like assembling the vehicle had been. Travis laughed when I mentioned it.

  “Now are you glad I had your lazy asses out running every lousy morning?”

  “I’d be even happier if you’d worked off that beer gut, Travis,” Alicia said.

  BACK INSIDE. WE all gathered in the cockpit to watch our first Martian sunset… the first Martian sunset ever seen by human eyes. We were the first!

  The stars came out, much brighter than I’d ever seen them on Earth… well, from Florida, anyway. Hundreds of years of industrial revolution had filled Earth’s skies with a lot of smoke and chemicals, the ozone layer seemed to be in trouble, and maybe the whole planet was warming up…

  It was impossible to worry about things like that while we watched the stars come out. But you had to wonder, would Jubal’s miracle drive make it possible for humans to live on more than just one, vulnerable planet? If we could lift things on a large scale, it would be possible to have a self-sustaining outpost on Mars in only a few years… and then there were those wild-eyed dreamers who spoke of “terraforming,” of [34
2] changing the very nature of Mars to make it more Earth-like, to fill its basins with water and its air with oxygen. But even the most optimistic of those dreamers said it would be a project for centuries, not years. I’d not live to see it. I wasn’t even sure if it was a good idea. Because… there were the stars, waiting out there. Some of those stars would have planets that were already Earth-like. Some of those Earth-like planets might already have intelligent life forms on them, but some may not.

  I might live to see that. I really might.

  Now the faint light of the sun from under the horizon faded out completely, and I realized what I’d been seeing before was nothing. Nothing at all. More stars in all their glory, endless thousands of them, and splashed across the sky like… well, like spilled milk, was the incredible immensity of the Milky Way, our galaxy, a hundred billion stars so thick you couldn’t pick out a single one.

  My arm was around Kelly, and I hugged her tighter.

  I don’t know how long we stayed there like that, but eventually Travis suggested we all get some sack time.

  “Big day tomorrow,” he said. “Luckily, we get an extra thirty-seven minutes.” That was because it takes Mars twenty-four hours and thirty-seven minutes to turn once on its axis. We had decided to stick to Greenwich Mean Time for the ship’s log, and to simply tailor our working days as morning, noon, and evening. There was little to be done at night; with the temperature just outside that clear plastic porthole already down to one hundred degrees below zero.

  Of course, there were other things two people could do during off hours. Kelly and I retired to our room and did most of them.

  Mile High Club, Million Mile High Club, and now the Mars Club…

  We were the first!

  29

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, judging by the expressions on Dak’s and Alicia’s faces, we weren’t the first Mars Club members by much. Suiting up, Travis looked at us one at a time, and shook his head.

  “You guys are disgusting,” he groused. “Don’t you know we’re making history here? Don’t you have any-”

  “Who says you can’t make history in bed?” Alicia wanted to know.

  “We made some history last night,” Kelly agreed. Suiting up had to wait a few minutes until we all stopped laughing.

  ONE OF OUR hard and fast rules was that Red Thunder was never to be left empty. Another was that Dak was the official driver of Blue Thunder, unless he chose to delegate it, and none of us figured he would. Only fair, I guess. It was his truck. Since we planned to use the truck every time we went out, it meant that the other four of us had to share the ship duty. We tossed a coin-slowly, in the low gravity-and Alicia drew watch duty the second day. She was disappointed, as we all would have been, since it was to be a big, big day, but she submitted gracefully.

  [344] Once outside we removed the heat blankets from the tires and inspected them all very closely. They seemed to have come through the incredible cold of the night without any trouble. All systems checks were nominal, as they say at NASA, all six fuel cells humming-or gurgling?-along most satisfactorily. We boarded, Kelly and I in the back again, and took off in search of the Chinese pathfinder landers.

  They weren’t hard to find. Our map was spot on, and we had marked the valley where we needed to be, a bit over four miles to the east of us. Dak got us there in no time, dodging around all Buick-sized rocks, as he had promised. We retired to a spot a few gullies back, parked, and waited.

  We knew when the Chinese landing was to be, just about an hour from the time we parked. We hadn’t been in contact, so we couldn’t be 100 percent sure they’d be on time. That they would land here was a total certainty; that they would land at the appointed time about 98 percent certain, according to Travis. I had no reason to doubt him. But it was a nervous hour.

  Actually, fifty minutes, because we spotted the ship with ten minutes of retro-fire still to go, way, way up there in the beautiful sky. It was leaving a faint contrail in the icy air, and it was an awesome sight. I choked up, thinking about four frail human beings in that little ship, descending into this awful vastness.

  We had a surprise prepared for them. I almost felt sorry for them… I did feel sorry for them as fellow humans, but I had no sympathy at all for the cynical old men who had sent them here and who had arranged a riot that had killed a fellow American. May they all choke on their moo shoo pork.

  “Come on, come on, baby.” I don’t think Travis was aware he was coaxing the descending rocket to a soft landing. Politics are forgotten at a time like that.

  The ship was a simple cylinder, wider than any of our seven tank cars, but not much taller. The rocket drive would take up a lot of the bottom part. Those guys expected to be staying a long time in a habitat smaller than some jail cells.

  It came down frighteningly fast for a long time, then put on a burst [345] of energy that must have subjected the crew to a lot of gees, hovered at about fifty feet, then started easing down at about three feet per second. Another pause at the five-foot level, then it was bouncing on its big springs. We all looked at each other, and let out a cheer.

  “I gotta hand it to him, that was one sweet landing,” Travis said. “Yessir, whoever wrote that landing program was really good.” And he laughed.

  We set up a television camera with a long lens, so that it was just peeking over the slight rise we had hidden behind. We moved back to Blue Thunder and waited again, this time watching the image on the television screen, which showed the lower part of the Chinese ship. We figured they had orders to get out and onto the planet soon, just in case those lousy Americans actually existed and had not blown up halfway into their journey.

  It took them a little over an hour. Then the lock door opened, a ramp was deployed, and a single cosmonaut came down it and, with no ceremony at all, stepped onto the Martian soil and set up a television camera on a tripod.

  “I think we’re witnessing a little white lie,” Kelly said.

  “How you figure?” Travis asked.

  “That camera, they’re going to send the picture from that as they all come out at once, and say that is the first human steps on Mars.”

  “I think you’re right. Well, it worked for Douglas MacArthur.” He saw our blank looks, and shook his head, as much as you can in a space suit.

  “We know who Douglas MacArthur is,” Kelly said-and she could speak for herself, as far as I was concerned, I had only a vague idea he was a general. “What’s the story, that’s what I don’t know.” So Travis told us how the general reenacted his “first steps” wading onto Philippine soil during the Second World War. He’d apparently made a promise, something like, “I’ll be back.”

  Sure enough, five minutes later the door opened again and all four Chinese cosmonauts got together on the ramp… and just as we had done, kicked off in step so their feet touched the ground at the same time.

  [346] “Time to saddle up and go,” Travis said. “Dak, you got a good idea where their camera is aimed?”

  “No sweat, Captain.”

  So we boarded and Dak drove down the gully to a spot that ought to be right in the center of the Chinese camera’s field of vision. Then he gunned it.

  Blue Thunder was a little friskier than he’d counted on. We left the ground with all four wheels as we topped the rise, then settled back easily in the low gravity, and the Chinese cameras caught it perfectly. “Sorry, Captain,” Dak said.

  “What the heck. Go for it.”

  The terrain was almost free of rocks, so Dak moved at a speed he hadn’t attempted before. He drove to within a hundred feet of the assembled Chinese and skidded to a stop. Old Glory, the Stars and Stripes, slashed back and forth from its mount on the end of our fifteen-foot radio antenna.

  Their backs were to us, they were lining up to salute the flag they had just erected, when something told one of them we were behind them, maybe a reflection in his ship’s shiny metal skin. He turned, jumped right into the air in surprise, and almost fell over co
ming down. He must have shouted, because the others turned, too, in time to see us clambering down from Blue Thunder.

  Travis was in the lead, holding up a sign he had made that said channel 4 in English, Russian, and Chinese. The first guy-who turned out to be the leader of the expedition, Captain Xu Tong-switched channels. Almost at once I could hear excited chatter in Chinese, then Travis’s voice booming over it…

  “Welcome to Mars!” he said, extending his hand. Xu was still suffering from shell shock. He let Travis shake his hand, and then took my hand when I offered it.

  It was at that point that the live television feed was cut, back on Earth… cut in China, anyway. But all of the television networks in the rest of the world were still sending out the signal for all to see. We lost a billion viewers at one stroke. That left only three billion watching…

  [347] And that’s what Travis meant when he said we were going to hijack their expedition.

  AFTER THAT, RELATIONS between the two crews were surprisingly cordial.

  The Heavenly Harmony crew had not been informed about the launch of Red Thunder, and they were furious about that. Not that they could do anything about it, or even dare mention it when they got home, but with us they could express their frustration.

  After introductions were made we got down to the serious business of taking pictures of each other. Kelly used four rolls of film and Kuang Mei-Ling, the exobiologist who spoke a little English, shot at least that many. Then we were invited in for lunch.

  The decks of the Heavenly Harmony were a bit wider than ours, but there weren’t as many of them. Basically, it was command and control on top, common room one floor below, and sleeping quarters below that. They did have a tiny shower, which Kelly eyed hungrily as we were given the tour, but their toilets were chemical like our own, if a bit fancier.