by John Varley
“I planned to restore her to factory condition when I got her, years ago,” he said, “but I never got around to repainting, and eventually I got to liking the silly thing. But I decided we didn’t want to look like a bunch of goofs out there. I hear it’s pretty hairy, some places. We want to be taken seriously.”
“Too bad,” Dad said. “The paint job sort of reminds me of the old Red Thunder.” The old ship had been outrageously painted by a guy called 2-Loose La Beck, a friend of Mom and Dad, in a style that has been called “Barrio Krylon Heroic” by art critics. You can see the same style on railroad cars and schoolyards from Los Angeles to Miami.
“Me, too,” Mom said. “But you’re right, we should keep a low profile this time.” They shared a wistful look.
They discussed various aspects of the plan, the parts that could be anticipated, at any rate. Up to a point, it was easy. Travis had been as far as he could, up to the area the media were calling the “debris line.” That was where the wave had finally lost its momentum and started its long retreat. That was a few days ago, and he didn’t know much beyond that, except that main roads were being cleared and that, beyond the cleared roads, anarchy reigned in many areas.
I was listening when Elizabeth approached me with Evangeline trailing behind, grabbed me by the arm, and said, “Let’s go.”
SHE TOOK US out the back door and down a path to the shooting range.
Nothing fancy about it, at first glance. Just an open field with a high ridge of earth at the far end, and some old plywood cutout human forms. All the figures had old, faded pictures of Osama bin Laden pasted on them.
There was a bunker/blockhouse that Elizabeth opened with a key and we went in. Evangeline looked like she didn’t really want to be there. It’s a common enough attitude among Martians.
The room was a temple to the Second Amendment. That’s the part of the United States Constitution that . . . well, I can quote the whole crazy thing, it’s not very long:
A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.
Uncle Travis . . . sorry, Travis feels this should be tattooed on the trigger finger of every American citizen. Mom would like to melt down every gun on the planet and cast them into a giant iron statue of a four-year-old with the top of its head accidentally blown off while Daddy was cleaning his guns. I once heard them get into it.
The rule was written for an agrarian democracy!
Guns don’t kill people! I kill people! And I’ll take the responsibility for it!
So you’ll fight for the right of every pissed-off, drunken husband to walk into a courtroom and kill his wife, the judge, and anybody else in his way?
People kill people with knives, too!
Knives don’t go off when they’re “unloaded!”
And like that. They are civilized arguers, they never stay mad at each other, but when they really get into it you want to wear some serious body armor.
Myself, I’m not sure I get it. A well-regulated militia? Sounds like you ought to at least put them into a uniform before you hand them a bazooka. So why does that mean all those people getting off the airplane today get to pack? On the other hand, I guess the militia is Corporal Lizard, right? The IQ of a palmetto bug but not nearly as attractive, and with a bad attitude about people from my home planet, too. But what do I know, I’m only a dumb heathern red boy. And, being a boy, I’ll admit that I kind of like guns. Not that I’m anxious to carry one, like Travis, but shooting is fun.
There were maybe a hundred weapons in the blockhouse, and these were just Travis’s “working” arsenal. Nothing expensive or very fancy or collectible; those were all away in a much more secure place in the house itself. These were just the things the padrone of Rancho Broussard fired to keep his hand in. There were rifles and shotguns, and revolvers and automatic pistols.
I took a Winchester .30-06 (thirty-ought-six) rifle off the shelf, checked that it was unloaded, and a Mossberg shotgun, ditto. Elizabeth stuffed a Glock 9mm into the waistband of her jeans and picked out a smaller shotgun, which she handed to Evangeline, who looked at it like it was a snake about to strike.
“Uh-uh, I don’t want that thing.”
“Honey,” Elizabeth said, “do you want to be the only one aboard who’s not armed?”
“What? I mean, no . . . but . . .”
“If you don’t want to carry, I’d advise you stay right here.”
“But I don’t want to shoot anybody!”
“Nobody does. And I don’t expect we will. But think about this, spacegirl. Worse comes to worst, do you want to be the poor helpless one lying down at the bottom of the Duck and depending on everybody else to save your ass, or do you want to be at least able to fight back?”
It was clear from the look on Evangeline’s face that crouching in the bottom of the Duck in such a case didn’t sound all that bad to her, but I’d picked up on the fact that Evangeline idolized my big sister as a sort of . . . well, big sister.
“It’s just in case, Evangeline,” I said. “But Travis won’t take you along unless he thinks you can handle yourself. He doesn’t believe in helpless females, and neither does my mom or Elizabeth. Remember, this isn’t Mars. This is Earth, and even worse, this is America, and even worse than that, this is Florida. The people down here are trigger-happy enough even in the good times, and this isn’t a good time.”
She still looked dubious, but took the little shotgun when Elizabeth handed it to her. I showed her how to break it open and look down the barrel while my sister was gathering various types of ammo, then we went out to the range.
Elizabeth took her stance and put a group right into the nearest Osama’s chest, nodded in satisfaction, and looked at me.
“Ray, why don’t you show Eve how to load that elephant gun?” she said, and rolled her eyes where Evangeline couldn’t see.
Well, the best way to teach somebody how to shoot a long-barreled gun is to stand behind him or her—and in this case, very definitely her—and show how it’s done. This involves putting one’s arms around the student, in an objective manner, of course, resting one’s chin on the student’s shoulder, purely to be able to experience the sightlines of the weapon, adjusting this and that with one’s hands, nudging the student’s legs with one’s feet to achieve the proper stance . . . smelling the student’s shampoo and some other fragrance she was wearing, feeling the brush of a hip or an arm or a hand . . .
Luckily, the gun went off before I did. The first one startled her, but the kick wasn’t too great, and soon she was firing off rounds pretty confidently and we switched over to a little more authoritative rifle and tried to actually hit something. She was deadly at ten feet, not so great farther out.
We spent about half an hour at that before Travis and all the rest joined us. He put us all through refresher courses, and I could see clearly that he’d love to leave Evangeline there at the ranch, but he respected grit and gameness, and if she was up to it, so was he.
He nodded when he saw what Elizabeth planned to take, and handed out weapons to Dad and Mom and Mr. Redmond according to their preferences, but he frowned when he looked at my Winchester.
“Best to take something with a magazine,” he said, and found me a semiautomatic with a thirty-shot clip. “Something happened to this one, I’ve been meaning to fix it. Funny, you squeeze the trigger once and you get one shot, but you hold down the trigger and it just keeps firing until it’s empty. Craziest thing. Keep it in mind.”
“Even crazier,” Mom said. “This one seems to have the same flaw.” She pointed her rifle at an Osama, who quickly became a pile of splinters. “If I didn’t know you were such a good citizen, Travis, I might suspect you’d done something to them that isn’t strictly legal under Florida’s gun laws, such as they are.”
“Unconstitutional, every one of them, but I wouldn’t dream of breaking the law, you know me. I just hole up here like the crazy hermit
that I am and let the world go to hell by itself.”
When we were all checked out on the weapons, Travis led us all back to the big house, just in time to meet a delivery van that started unloading hot food, first, and boxed supplies later. There was Chinese, and barbecue, and big sloppy Cuban sandwiches, and pizzas the size of truck tires. Nothing healthy anywhere in sight.
“Still just as good a cook as ever,” Mom observed.
“Enjoy it. It may be MREs for the next few days.”
It was good stuff. Some of the best barbecue I ever ate, and the pizza wasn’t bad, either, though I wasn’t sure what all the stuff on it was, nor in the Cuban sandwiches.
Dad fell asleep at the table. Luckily, he didn’t fall forward into the food, but he just sort of drifted off and his chin rested on his chest. Travis and I helped him out of his chair. He woke up, more or less, as we put his arms over our shoulders and took him from the table, staggering like a drunk and muttering, “I’ll be okay, I’ll be okay, just a little nap is all I need.” We got him into one of the guest bedrooms and stretched out, and decided to let Mom undress him, if she wanted to. Then we stood over him and looked down for a minute.
“I hope you know what a great dad you’ve got, Ray,” Travis said, softly.
“I guess so,” I said. “I don’t really know him that well. I don’t know why.”
“You should try harder. No reflection on you, I know how it is. But he’s one of the best men I ever met. You read his book?”
“Yeah. Quite a story.”
“He didn’t tell the half of it. When we found the American ship, blown to bits by that half-assed engine Jubal warned them about . . .
“There he was, Manny, your father, puking his guts out, I wouldn’t let him go over with the girls because he wouldn’t be any use. Then somebody had to go over, and it couldn’t be me, and I sent Manny. Hardest thing I ever did, landing that VStar in Africa was nothing compared to that ... but it was nothing, nothing, Ray, compared to what your father did. I saw him, suiting up, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody so scared. He didn’t put that part in his book. How his hands were shaking and he kept throwing up until somehow, he just stopped. Stopped puking, stopped shaking, walked into that air lock and out into space.” Once again he looked away into a distance much farther than the walls around us. “I’d do anything for him, Ray. Anything at all.”
I haven’t had a lot of “man-to-man” conversations with my father. For one thing, I don’t think either of us are very good at it. But we did have a pretty good talk once. It was only about a year ago, on the twentieth anniversary of the RedThunder flight, and he’d just finished the last of a dozen interviews and said his face was hurting from the artificial smile he’d had pasted on all day long. He fixed himself a big drink and let me have a little wine. We were in his office at the hotel, and Mom and Elizabeth were already gone. He said he was glad that was over, at least for the next five years. I asked him why he hated it so much.
He waved his hand with the drink in it at the office.
“It’s all this,” he said. He paused for so long I thought that was going to be all, but then he sighed and looked at me.
“They compare us to Charles Lindbergh. Neil Armstrong. Christopher Columbus, for crying out loud.”
“But . . . what you did was as important as what they did, wasn’t it?”
“What we did was important, there’s no point in denying that. But those men, they . . . they were great men, Ray. They worked hard to get the chance to do what they did. What I did, what we did . . . it just sort of fell into our laps. It was nothing but luck, being in the right place at the right time. Travis could have gone himself, without any of us, if he’d found that first bubble himself. I mean, I literally stumbled on it. I’ve felt like . . . like an imposter ever since.” He gave me a wry grin and sipped at his drink. His eyes were far away.
I thought about it a while. I could just say “You’re not an imposter” and leave it at that. But what he had said didn’t make sense to me, and I wondered how I could convince him of that. Probably no way, but it was worth a try.
“Columbus was pretty much a loser, wasn’t he?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he was a big deal for a while, but in history class these days he doesn’t come off so good. Sure, he was an adventurer and an explorer. But he and the ones who came after him enslaved and massacred the natives of the New World.” I looked around the office. “Don’t see any slaves in here.”
Dad laughed.
“Just wage slaves,” he said. “I wonder what would have happened if there had been natives?”
“We’d have bored them to death with appearances on every television show on Earth, or put them in zoos. Or married them, like Pocahontas. Anyway, there weren’t. And from what they told us, Columbus was one lucky fool. Luckier than you. His whole trip was based on the idea that the Earth was a lot smaller than it actually is. He thought he could get to the Orient—which is what he was planning to do, and come to think of it, he died still believing he’d landed in China—by sailing west. If the Americas hadn’t been there, he and his whole crew would have starved to death.”
He smiled, but didn’t say anything.
Okay, reality check number two.
“Lindbergh? Gimme a break. Well-known Nazi. His flight was nothing but a stunt, the Atlantic had already been crossed by air; who cares if he did it solo? He was a media creation, just like you think you are.”
His smile got bigger, and he shook his head a little.
“Neil Armstrong . . . well, there you got me. He’s a hero in my book. His trip was important, he worked for it, he deserved everything he got. Which, apparently, he didn’t want! After he got back he buried himself in Ohio and avoided publicity like the black death. Never tried to cash in on his fame.”
“I did. Big-time.”
“I’d say small-time, from what I know. And so what? Don’t you think I know I wouldn’t be where I am today if you and Mom hadn’t . . .”
“Sold out?”
“Sold out what? Cashed in, sure. And what’s wrong with that? Your book was a historical document. Somebody should complain that you made money off it? Quit kicking yourself over it, Dad. You made one giant leap for mankind.”
He actually laughed then, and shook his head.
“Okay, son, you’ve convinced me.”
I could tell that I hadn’t, not really, but the look that passed between us was far more important to me. I’d somehow managed to convey to him that, no matter what he thought of himself, I thought of him as a hero. And that that was all that really mattered to either of us.
God, why can’t we have more moments like that?
TRAVIS AND I left the bedroom and I thought we were done, but he put his arm around my shoulder and pulled my head down nearer to his level.
“I have two words of advice for you, Ray,” he said. “You want to hear them?”
“I guess so.”
“Don’t go.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Where we’re going, it’s no place for a kid, Ray. Now don’t take offense, I didn’t like being called a kid when I was seventeen any more than you do. But it’s a fact. You’re a kid. Your sister is almost a kid, too, and she’s sure too young and innocent for the Red Zone. Don’t even get me started on Evangeline, she’s got absolutely no business here. But there’s no shame in staying here at the ranch, my friend.”
“I’ve got to go, Travis.”
“I know you feel that way, but you don’t. Not really. We’re going to be seeing some things that will stick with you for the rest of your life, and nothing good will be accomplished by that. We may end up having to do things . . . well, whatever we have to do. You don’t need that, either.”
“Are you saying you won’t take me?”
“I never said that. I think you’re old enough to make your own decision. I just think you’re making the wrong one.”
�
�What about Elizabeth?” I asked, and I’m afraid I sounded a little petulant, even to myself. “I’ll bet you won’t ask her not to go.”
“You’re wrong. I’m going to advise her to stay here with Evangeline. What do you think my chances are?”
“Zero.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured. I’ll ask anyway. So. What do you say?”
“I have to go,” I said.
“So be it.” He patted my shoulder and walked away.
It was probably the best advice I ever got. But I didn’t take it.
8
IT DIDN’T TAKE long for us all to get a taste of what Travis was talking about, and we got it from the man himself.
“Listen up!” he shouted from the front of the newly painted Duck. We were all seated under the big canvas tarp with the sun just struggling to make itself seen through the thick haze to the east.
“There is only one way this thing will work, and that is absolute obedience. Right now this silly little vehicle is a truck, but before we get where we’re going it will be a boat, and we will all behave as if it is a boat at all times. A boat has only one captain, and that captain is me.
“Boat captains do not hold elections nor do they conduct polls, except at their own discretion. I may ask you for advice, but once I have received it, my decision in all matters is final, and my orders will be given accordingly, and they will be obeyed. We don’t have a brig on this vessel, so flogging will be the punishment of choice. Does anyone have any questions?”
“No, sir, Captain Bligh!” Mom replied. Travis looked at her and smiled with one corner of his mouth.
“You will all be allowed one smart-ass remark per day. That was yours, Kelly.”
I could see Mom struggling not to laugh, but she kept her mouth shut.
“This is your last chance to bail out,” Travis went on, un-smiling. “I won’t ask for a show of hands, but I’m about to start this thing up, and anybody still aboard when I get moving has agreed to abide by my orders until we get back, or until you decide to jump ship. Believe me, I won’t think any the less of anyone who gets off now.” He was staring daggers at Evangeline, who squirmed uncomfortably. I had an idea she’d been subjected to a much stronger argument than Travis had given me. But she didn’t move. He shifted his gaze to Elizabeth, who sat calmly. Then he glanced at me, shrugged, and turned away. He pressed the starter button and the engine instantly roared to life.