Red Thunder

by John Varley

  So we sat down together and we were treated to some sort of noodle soup with chunks of pork and vegetables in it, along with bowls of rice. Luckily, there was no bird-nest soup or thousand-year-old eggs or sauteed ducks heads, or anything gross like that. We all cleaned our plates.

  Travis then asked Captain Xu if we could send some short messages to our families back on Earth, since our own long-range radios were no longer working. Xu said he’d be happy to, but as we approached the television transmission desk one of the crew, Chun Wang, seemed to object. A few intense words were exchanged as we Americans busied ourselves looking around, not wanting to witness a family squabble. Xu won, though we weren’t exactly sure what it was he won, and we all broadcast simple messages; we’re safe, we’re happy except we miss you… and we were the first!

  Then we all boarded our separate chariots and headed south in search of the Grand Canyon of Mars.

  [348] The Chinese were awed by Blue Thunder, as who wouldn’t be? It dwarfed the Chinese rover, which looked a lot like the Apollo lunar rovers, but with bigger wire-weave tires. There were four seats, all occupied. They trusted their automatic systems to handle things while they were away, and I couldn’t argue with them. After all, the computer had landed their ship.

  But we did have to pause a few times as the Chinese driver had to find a way around big rocks. Dak waited patiently for them, a smug smile on his face.

  When we got there the Chinese geologist, Li Chong, leaped from the rover like an excited puppy and started banging on rocks with a hammer. He tried to be five places at once, dropping samples he was trying to stuff into plastic bags, picking up new ones. It must be incredible, I realized, to have an entire planet to study… and in this case, he was the first. The first rockhound on Mars.

  As for the rest of us…

  Never having been to the Grand Canyon in Arizona, or to any canyon, for that matter, I had nothing to compare it to. I saw incredible desolation. Incredible colors. Incredible immensity. I picked up a rock and hurled it out into space, and we all watched as it fell, and bounced, and fell some more, and bounced, until we lost it.

  I noticed Chun Wang didn’t seem to have much to do. Kuang Mei-Ling and Li hopped about like excited sparrows, and even Captain Xu seemed to have some geological training, helping gather samples. I didn’t say anything about it, since we were all on the same suit channel. But later I mentioned it to Travis.

  “Political officer,” he said. “Commissar, or whatever the Chinese call it. He’s a Party member, here to keep the others in line. Standard operating procedure on a Chinese vessel. Did you see how nobody talked to him much, at lunch?”

  Now that he mentioned it, I had noticed that. Chun seemed to sit off to himself somehow, even at the crowded table. The other three had virtually ignored him.

  “Some sort of social dynamic going on there. Mei-Ling is married to Captain Xu, and I figure that’s put a lot of strain on Chun and Li. And [349] Chun seems to be largely frozen out by the others. People problems, Manny. It was always in the cards that people problems would be at least as big a hurdle as engineering problems on a trip as long and as cramped as they’re on.”

  GOOD MANNERS DICTATED that we invite the Chinese aboard for a meal, so Travis did. We arranged it for Day M3, our third day on Mars, the second day for the Chinese. I drew the short straw that day and watched through the ports of the cockpit deck as the two vehicles headed off for the Valles again a few hours after sunrise, feeling a bit lost and abandoned. They would be back around midafternoon, a time dictated by the capacity of the suit oxygen tanks, and our stamina.

  “Let’s face it, friends,” Travis had told us. “The five of us are not going to be contributing a hell of a lot to our knowledge of Mars, unless we stumble over a dinosaur bone or an abandoned city or a giant face, or something. There’s no point in working sunup to sundown.”

  I hadn’t given a lot of thought to what we’d do when we got to Mars. None of us had, we’d all been far too absorbed in the task of getting here at all.

  But what the heck was I doing here, really? Why me, and not some infinitely more qualified scientist? I could walk right over some geological formation or group of rocks… or even cleverly camouflaged lichen or moss or some more alien form of life, blissfully unaware of its importance.

  I had no business here. None of us did, except maybe Travis. Sure, we had worked our butts off, labored all summer to build the ship to get here, but the Chinese all held doctorates. Even Chun, the chief Commie, was an M.D. How bitterly ironic it must be to them for a group of barely educated kids to get here first.

  Before long I’d worked myself into a blue funk. I prowled the kitchen, looking at the food we’d brought. Frozen pizza. Infantile! Would the Chinese eat pizza? That’s the kind of thought I occupied myself with as I waited eight hours until the tiny caravan reappeared from the south. I helped people out of their suits and we all gathered [350] in the common room, quite crowded with nine people in it, four of them on folding chairs.

  It turned out pizza was okay.

  “We have many Western rapid-food places in China now,” Xu explained. “Most of us have eaten at them at one time or another.”

  Chun didn’t care for pizza, but smiled broadly when we showed him a Hungry Man Mexican dinner, with enchilada, tamale, and retried beans.

  But the real hit of the day was Alicia’s food.

  That’s what we’d been calling it, to bug her, but we’d all eaten our salads and fruit along with our frozen dinners. But the Chinese… you’d have thought they’d been stranded on a desert island for a year with nothing to eat but thistles and rats. Well, maybe that’s not a good example. For all I know Chinese may like thistles and rats, they seem to eat just about anything. But they almost drooled when they saw the fresh Florida oranges Alicia had brought by the bushel basket. And grapefruit, and tomatoes, lettuce, fresh broccoli, tons of other stuff.

  Mai-Ling, Li, and Xu each ate a slice of pizza, I suspect just to be polite, and Chun ate half his dinner, then they attacked the fruits and vegetables. Their own supplies had been used up months ago and they were down to the basic rations for the rest of the trip: rice, noodles, canned or frozen vegetables and meats.

  “They lost a lot of face yesterday, over dinner,” Travis told us later. He and Xu had developed a rapport quickly. Somehow Commissar Chun’s suit radio had developed a slight glitch, it wouldn’t receive channel four anymore… tsk, tsk, how unfortunate… so Travis and Xu had spent a lot of the day talking about things Chun shouldn’t hear.

  “Of course, the whole nation lost face big-time when we beat them here, but the Harmony’s crew doesn’t feel too upset by that because it wasn’t their fault. But setting such a poor table… of that they were very ashamed.”

  “I didn’t think it was so bad,” I said.

  “I didn’t either,” Travis said. “Space rations, what did they think we expected, Peking duck? Go figure, huh? Anyway, Chinese culture is different.”

  [351] “Must have lost heap big face today, eating them oranges,” Dak said.

  “Yeah, but they didn’t mind it so much. Good work, Alicia.”

  We were gathered in the common room at the end of the day. The others were all pleasantly exhausted from the day’s work. Me, I was wired as a two-dollar junkie, having done nothing all day but worry and fret. But it was good to sit with everyone and talk about the day’s events. The one we talked about the most concerned Commissar Chun.

  After dinner, when it came time to reciprocate on the tour we’d been given of the Heavenly Harmony, Travis caused an international incident, of sorts.

  “Captain Xu, are you a member of the Chinese armed forces?” Travis asked, knowing Xu wasn’t. He then turned to Chun. “Doctor Chun, you being the political officer of the Heavenly Harmony, I must respectfully decline to show you my ship above the level of this common room. There are things up there I must not allow the representative of a foreign power to see. I’m sure you understand.”
>
  Xu started to smile, quickly concealed it, and translated for Chun.

  Chun snapped off some choice comments which Xu did not translate, then told us he would wait for us outside. Travis also declined to let Chun off Red Thunder until we all went, pointing out that he didn’t want Chun getting a close look at the Squeezer drive, either. Chun nearly exploded. Again Xu didn’t translate, he didn’t really need to.

  “Manny, would you keep Doctor Chun company for a while?” Travis asked.

  “Sure.” Damn Travis. What was I supposed to do if Chun objected? Wrestle with him? Hit him over the head? I was ready for anything as the others went up the ladder to the control deck, but Chun just sat down in his chair. He looked at me, smiled vaguely, then began moving bits of orange peel around on the table in front of him. I’d never seen a man so tired, so depressed, in my life.

  I almost felt sorry for him. I mean, I’d been getting the shivers a few hours ago just being alone on good old, homey Red Thunder, with my friends only a few miles away, and Alicia said she’d felt the same way on her first watch. Chun’s nearest friend, assuming commissars have friends, was over one hundred million miles away.

  [352] And it was all baloney, anyway. Secrets? Rubbish. There were no big secrets in the controls of Red Thunder.

  “I couldn’t resist needling him,” Travis admitted that evening. “Did you see how he tried to walk under the ship, get a close look at the drive? Oh so casually, like strolling in the park… well, I casually just happened to get in his way.”

  “Might have been crueler, you let him see the drive,” Dak said. “What’s he gonna make of it, anyway?”

  “You’ve got a devious mind, Dak,” Travis laughed.

  Later I bought up what I’d spent part of the day thinking about, our lack of qualifications for exploring Mars.

  “What can I say, Manny?” Travis asked. “You’re right. None of us can say we ‘earned’ the right to be here, to be the first. But that’s just the luck of the draw. If we were going to be the only ones here, I’d say this was nothing but a publicity stunt. It is a publicity stunt, remember. But it’s in a good cause, and believe this: In a year, hundreds of geologists are going to be crawling all over this big ball of rock, and we led the way. Jubal made it all possible, and we did it. If you’re worried about what they’re going say about you in the history books, just remember that.”

  THE NEXT DAY, Day M4 for us, we rendezvoused at the canyon edge and then took off to the east, stopping every quarter mile or so for Dr. Li Chong to take more samples. This time I got to ride shotgun, it being Kelly’s turn to mind the shop while the rest of us were out joyriding. Alicia and I both warned her of the loneliness, and how it could sneak up on you and make you feel panicky.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll just smoke a little more weed,” she said, and for a moment I thought she was serious. Then she shoved us both toward the air lock, swearing she’d be just fine, she could take care of herself.

  We came to a part of the Valles that didn’t look that different from any other part, at least to me, and Li had Captain Xu stop. Dak pulled up next to them, and we watched Li go to the edge and stand there, hands on hips, looking down.

  [353] “What’s he want?” Dak asked.

  “The… the striations, the layering,” Xu told us. “He was looking for a formation like this, but it is too far down, too steep. He is frustrated because of this.”

  We all got out and looked down to where Xu was pointing.

  The previous night I couldn’t sleep, so I went to the commons and cranked up the DVD reader. We’d brought along a pretty respectable reference library. I found some encyclopedia articles about the Grand Canyon in Arizona, and read and looked at pictures until I finally began to yawn.

  It was easy to see that the Grand Canyon and the Valles Marineris didn’t have a lot in common other than both being deep and wide. The book said the rocks near the bottom of the Grand Canyon were about two billion years old. You could see the layering, like a million-layer birthday cake, from different stuff that settled out during different epochs. Then the land got shoved upward by the movements of the crustal plates, and erosion had begun.

  Had Valles Marineris been formed like that? Nobody knew for sure. If it did, where did all the water go? Boiled off into space? Sunk into the ground? How much water? Enough to be useful if humans decided to come here in large numbers?

  Most geologists-or areologists, as some preferred to be called-believed the Valles had been eroded by running water, just like the Grand Canyon.

  That was about as far as I got. So I knew what Dr. Li was talking about, in general terms. The layering here was different. But it all boiled down to… or more probably, froze down to… water. So far Li had not found moisture-bearing rocks or soils, which was what he wanted to find.

  “Down there at the bottom, you see it?” Li said, translated by Xu. “Layering, which was caused by a very ancient sea of water. Then… farther up, several more areas of layering, suggesting that seas once again covered this area, at very long… intervals. The water returned. The water must still be here… somewhere.”

  [354] We could see the layering he was talking about a long way down the slope, which was about sixty degrees.

  “One theory… which Li likes very much, is that water is still present about two hundred meters down. Pressure might keep it from freezing at that depth. As the pressure builds up, water might be forced… what is the word?… laterally along rock strata. Then, at a place like this, that layer has been eroded away. The water is forced into the air, where it freezes. A plug forms. When the pressure is sufficient, the plug blows out, and a slurry of rock, ice, and some water sprays outward, forming an apron of debris much like what we see spreading away from that layer below us, about two hundred meters down. Li wishes he could take samples from that area.”

  “Well, heck,” Dak said. “Let’s just lower him down and let him chip some off.”

  When Li understood that Blue Thunder was equipped with a powered winch and a thousand meters of heavy-duty poly rope, I thought he would hurt himself dancing around. Travis was dubious, but I think he was interested in helping the Chinese regain some lost face, so he agreed.

  We secured Li to the rope and he went over the side, walking backward. In fifteen minutes he was down. He chipped for a while, and then our radios were filled with his excited chatter. Xu smiled hugely at us.

  “He has found ice!” he said. “Just where he expected to find it.”

  So, in the end, the crew of Red Thunder did get to do its little bit of discovery. Short of finding actual Martian life, it was as exciting a result as anyone could ask for.

  WHEN WE GOT back, Kelly was in tears. I just held her for a while, until she could stop shaking and get herself back together.

  “I feel so dumb,” she said. “Acting like I’m six years old or something.”

  “That’s just how I felt,” Alicia said.

  “With me, it was more depression,” I said.

  [355] “Why didn’t you call us on the radio?” Travis asked her. “We’d have come back and got you, made some other arrangement.”

  “That’s why. You would have come back. I kept telling myself I’d be okay, then I’d start shivering again. Couldn’t stop.” She blew her nose. “I almost decided to come looking for y’all. Follow the tire tracks.”

  “That’s crazy, Kelly,” Travis said, not unkindly.

  “That’s what I’m telling you, Travis. I was out of my mind. I’ve never been so scared in my whole life.”

  Travis told us that, starting tomorrow, we’d operate on the buddy system all the time. No one would be left alone. Since he was adamant about having someone aboard ship at all times, that meant that only three of us at a time could go exploring.

  “What the heck,” Dak said. “I’ll take my turn, too. Any of y’all can drive Blue Thunder … well, about half as good as me, and since I’m twice the driver I need to be, that ought to be all right.”


  Alicia hit him with an apple core.

  30

  * * *

  IT WASN’T UNTIL the next morning, Day M5, that we realized Travis hadn’t meant to include himself in the buddy system rotation.

  “I can handle it, don’t worry about me,” he said.

  Debate was allowed aboard Red Thunder until Travis cut it off. So we were still arguing about it when somebody knocked on the door. Whoever it was must have been pounding on the side of the ship with a wrench or something.

  “I wonder who that could be?” Kelly asked.

  “Marvin the Martian?” I suggested.

  It was still half an hour until the Chinese were due to join us for another day of exploration. Travis frowned and looked at his watch. Alicia tapped a few keys on her board and we saw a view from one of our outside cameras. There was a single Chinese standing on our threshold platform. We could see the Chinese rover parked a few feet from the ramp, and no one else was in it.

  “Who’s that knocking at our door?” Dak asked.

  “Captain Xu, Mr. Sinclair. Captain, may I come in? This is an emergency.”

  We all looked at each other, then Travis shrugged and made his way [357] down to the air lock. We heard it cycle, then voices too indistinct to hear. Travis shouted, “No!” and the rest of us scrambled for the ladder.

  “It happened about eight hours ago,” Xu was saying. Travis looked at us.

  “Xu says the Ares Seven blew up.”

  Though the news was not entirely unexpected, it was still shocking to hear it.

  “Apparently the crew had some warning,” Xu went on. “They declared an emergency and within two minutes telemetry ceased. But Ms. Oakley had indicated that at least three of the cosmonauts were still alive.”

  “Holly’s alive,” Travis breathed.

  “Well… that no longer seems likely.”

  “Likely or not, we’re going after them,” Travis said.

  This time it was Xu’s turn to be shocked. Red Thunder could fool longtime astronauts that way, at first. It could take them a while to realize, on a gut level, just how much Jubal’s baby had changed all the rules of space travel.