Red Lightning

by John Varley

  2. Once made, there was nothing safer than a bubble. Just what a bubble was was still a subject of fierce debate and terrible frustration in physics labs all over the world. Travis and Jubal had never allowed them to be studied, and though a few had fallen into unauthorized hands over the years, nobody was any the wiser yet. Squeezer technology had upset a lot of applecarts in the world of physics, and what fruit they had managed to stack up again was badly bruised. But one thing was known, and that was, once you’d made a bubble, there was nothing you could do with it without the second unit, the one that introduced what Jubal called a “discontinuity” in the perfectly smooth, perfectly round, perfectly impenetrable surface.

  3. Jubal’s original Squeezer, cobbled together from parts gathered around his lab and a few mysterious items he’d never publicly described, for obvious reasons, could make bubbles and produce the discontinuities. But when they began to be produced in bulk, the machine was divided into two components: the primary Squeezers, of which there were only a few, and disrupters, of which there were many. A disrupter could be installed in a spaceship to provide direct thrust, or in a power plant to generate electricity. So they came in all sizes and could be found in many different types of machines, but they all had one thing in common: You fuck with them, they go boom!

  This had nothing to do with the bubbles themselves. If an airplane powered by a bubble drive crashed into the ground, the bubble was not harmed. You might find it in the wreckage, if it didn’t simply float off and waft its way into the upper atmosphere and then deep space. No, disrupters blew up because of booby traps built into the disrupter mechanisms. Jubal had built the booby traps, connected to ordinary explosive charges, just enough to ensure that the disrupter would be destroyed.

  Naturally, over the years some nasty people had gotten their hands on disrupters and tried to take them apart. Boom! Hell, I had a tiny disrupter unit in my airboard. I had no doubt that if I tried to take it apart, I’d lose a hand, minimum.

  So far, Jubal seemed to have thought of everything. If you X-rayed a disrupter with enough power to see anything ... boom!

  Magnetic resonance imaging? Sure, it had been tried. Subject a disrupter to a strong enough magnetic field and . . . not boom, not yet, but the unit suffered a meltdown internally, and if you tried to take it apart then . . . boom!

  Nobody talked about it much, but there were well-documented stories from people who had worked on these projects, in China, America, England, France, and other countries. The list of corporations that had tried to take them apart was long, too, as well as a few terrorists. The result was always the same. Jubal had built them well.

  Crushing a disrupter unit was simplicity itself, of course. They weren’t invulnerable. Just put the unit in a hydraulic press and turn it on. Crunch! Boom! And what do you have? A free-floating bubble and a crushed disrupter. Oh, my, the studies that had been done on those crushed disrupters! The smoking remains had been taken apart atom by atom, probed by microscopic nanobots. Thousands of experimental models had been built from the bits and pieces of knowledge painfully put together by destructive testing, then turned on . . . and nothing. They just sat there.

  Though there were a few diehards out there still trying, bubble research was so frustrating that not much of it was going on today. From time to time a theoretical physicist or a group of them would issue an impassioned plea to be allowed to communicate with Jubal, citing the enormous leaps in human knowledge that could be gained if only they understood . . . well, what the fuck a bubble was. So far, Travis and Jubal and the High Priests of Squeeze had resisted all attempts to let the genie of unlimited power out of the bottle.

  That was the public bet hedging, the part everybody knew about.

  TRAVIS: You know me . . . a belt and suspenders man . . . I learned piloting VStars that there’s never too many backups . . . so what if it all went very, very wrong? . . . what if somebody got their hands on a Squeezer machine and started making bubbles and putting them in suitcases with stolen disrupters? . . . the disrupters that are given out . . . there are thousands of them on Mars alone, they won’t make a bubble blow up, they won’t turn them OFF . . . but they can make them blast at such a rate that it might as well be an explosion . . .

  KELLY: What did you do, Travis?

  TRAVIS: Hey, don’t type in that tone of voice with me . . . anyway, suitcase? Hell, they could be small enough to fit in your pocket and be able to destroy half a city . . . So I asked Jubal to build a booby trap into all the PRIMARY Squeezer units, too . . . he built it into the software, it’s buried real deep, I doubt if anybody could find it even if they were able to look, and naturally nobody but the folks at the Falklands have access to ANY of the insides of a primary unit . . .

  MANNY: I’m afraid to ask what the booby trap was.

  TRAVIS: Nothing fancy . . . nothing that’s going to hurt anybody . . . there was a password . . . too long to memorize and you had to enter it three times in a row . . . only Jubal and I have it . . . it makes the important stuff, the guts of the Squeezer unit, melt down into slag . . .

  RAY: And Jubal . . .

  TRAVIS: This is speculation, people, but it’s the only thing that could account for why they want him back so bad . . . sometime just after he left . . . it had to be after, because if it was BEFORE they’d have been on him in a flash . . . Jubal must have sent out the password . . .

  ELIZABETH: How many did he shut down?

  TRAVIS: There’s only one way to do it, hon . . . sending out the signal would shut ALL of them down . . .

  So now Earth was virtually without power, right? The vast machine humanity had constructed since the Industrial Revolution was grinding to a halt; they’d have to start dusting off the coal-burners, rebuild the torn-down dams, start drilling for oil again . . .

  Well, no.

  Not yet, anyway. So far, no one but those at the very top knew anything was wrong. Which was why there was a power struggle—literally—like the world had never seen to get Jubal back and make him start building primary Squeezers again.

  Squeezer bubbles came in a variety of sizes. The ones used in the big power-generating plants naturally had a lot more energy inside them than the little one that powered my airboard, which would last for about a year of heavy use. The amount of matter that was squeezed into a particular bubble was precisely measured and appropriate to the task. And just to be on the super, super, super safe side, even the power-plant bubbles didn’t contain enough energy to run the plant forever. Typically, they needed a new bubble twice a year. And new ones were sent ahead, so most of the plants had a year or two on hand. So it would be a while before the machine began to sputter. Enough time to at least begin to start looking for alternative sources of energy . . . if anyone dared even suggest that. Trouble was, firing up an old nuke or any power plant would raise some pretty awkward questions.

  You say you can’t make any more bubbles?

  You say Jubal Broussard blew up all the Squeezer plants?

  You say that the most carefully guarded man on Earth slipped through your fingers? You say you lost him?

  I’d call those awkward questions. Not the sort of thing the electorate would want to hear at any time, even less in the wake of the worst catastrophe since the Second World War, at a time of financial panic.

  But wait a minute . . .

  RAY: Something I don’t get, Travis.

  TRAVIS: I think I know where you’re going.

  RAY: Why don’t the . . . what do they call themselves? Why don’t the High Priests of Squeeze just make some more Squeezers?

  TRAVIS: . . . yes . . . why don’t they . . . . . . . . .

  KELLY: . . . my clock says it’s been two minutes, Travis . . .

  MANNY: Three minutes. Spit it out, Travis. What haven’t you told us?

  TRAVIS: . . . brace yourselves . . .

  And Travis told us his last secret. It was a doozy.

  I NEEDED TIME to think. We all did, I guess.

  I t
hink best in my hidey-hole on Phobos. I hadn’t been up there since the invasion . . . the first invasion, now. Tell you the truth, I’d been a little scared about getting back on my board. They say, on Earth, a shark takes a bite out of your board, you should get right back up on it, like if you’re thrown off a horse, or you’ll start thinking about it too much. I kept seeing that black ship swooping toward me like some predatory bird . . .

  So I let Evangeline drive, even though she didn’t have her license. No problem. Evangeline’s instinctive feel for free fall made her the best seat-of-the-pants boarder I’d ever seen. Maybe a little hard on the accelerator, for a rookie, but she never came close to getting into a jackpot I couldn’t have gotten her out of.

  We did what we usually did when we got to my trailer. It was wonderful. She seemed to think I was the best thing that had ever happened to her. I’m only average-looking, I’ve got no illusions, girls didn’t sigh and stumble when I walked by. She made me feel better-looking than I really am.

  And let’s get the word right out there. Love. I was pretty sure I was in love with her. I wanted to make her happy more than I wanted to make myself happy. I wanted to take care of her, have fun with her, be around her no matter what we were doing.

  I was jealous when other guys looked at her. Is that bad? Given her looks, it was going to happen a lot, but I never had to fight over her. She could shut a guy down with a few words, making him feel like he was something she’d scraped off the bottom of her shoe. It was awesome to see. Where do girls learn that? I guess beautiful girls have to learn it or never have a moment’s peace.

  Afterward, we relaxed with a pipe of Phobos Red, reputed to be the best marijuana in the solar system. I wouldn’t know; I’d never smoked anything else. It’s not illegal on Mars. Some people say it will lead to hard, dangerous drugs, like alcohol, but that’s not been our experience on Mars.

  I had a problem.

  I had sworn a solemn oath not to reveal what was discussed at the last meeting in the safe room, which had included only Grandma, Mom, Dad, Travis, Elizabeth, and me. And that didn’t seem right to me. It’s not like I wanted to tell the Redmond monsters . . . but I thought Mr. and Mrs. Redmond had a right to know just why they’d been put through so much hell, and of course, Evangeline.

  But I wanted to talk. Boy, did I ever want to talk.

  I took a last hit and was about to try to ease into the subject when the doorbell rang. This time Evangeline pulled on a robe and when she opened the door the FedEx guy looked sad, as if he remembered the last delivery, which he probably did.

  “See, here’s the deal, spacegirl,” he said. “That package you guys never did pick up? Tomorrow’s the last day before I have to send it back. Do you want it or not?”

  I’d forgotten all about it. I’d been sort of busy for a while after we made our last departure from Phobos.

  I didn’t get a lot of packages. Most of what I did get was from Jubal. That would be interesting enough in normal circumstances, but considering his status as a . . . what? fleeing felon? I guess destroying the Squeezers was probably against the law, even though he’d built them himself. Anyway, this must have been the last thing he sent me before he became a wanted man. Maybe it had a clue as to where he’d gone.

  “We’ll be down there in a minute,” I told him, and this time I gave him a tip. We made it down to the freight office before he did.

  IT WAS A standard shipping box, a four-by-four-by-four plastic cube with rounded corners and ridges on sides to make it slide easier. Stickers had been partially peeled off it or messily covered over with thick felt-tip pens. There was no single sticker still intact to tell us what its contents might be. The only things readable on the outside were the label addressed to me, Phobos, Big Bubble NW, and a red sticker with a white arrow that said THIS SIDE UP. Pointless in Phobos.

  We herded the box back to my trailer. You don’t carry things in Phobos, you walk behind them and urge them, or go ahead and tug them. We got it inside, pulled the handle, the lid popped up, and it seemed somebody had send me a box full of ...

  ... dried grass.

  “It’s from Jubal,” I said.

  Evangeline laughed. “It’s not smokable, is it?”

  “I guess you could smoke anything, but this wouldn’t do anything for you. This is plain old tussock grass. Now that the sheep are gone from the Falkland Islands, it grows pretty high all over the place. Great habitat for birds.”

  “So . . . what? You think he was planning to send you some penguins? This was to feed them?”

  “It’s packing material. Like excelsior.” I sighed. “Jubal does things different than other people do. He doesn’t like foam peanuts.”

  We pulled out handfuls of the stuff, and pretty soon we came to a black hole.

  I don’t know how else to describe it. It was like nothing else I’d ever seen. Nothing anyone had ever seen. It was like an antibubble.

  Like a Squeezer bubble, you couldn’t really touch it. I mean, you could put your fingers on it, but you couldn’t grip. Your fingers just slid right off. Nothing clung to it. The dried grass was full of dust, dirt, seeds, but none of it clung to the bubble.

  But where a normal bubble is totally reflective, this thing was the absence of reflection. Imagine an eight-ball on a pool table . . . and now forget it. An eight-ball is shiny. Imagine a ball made of charcoal . . . and forget that, too. Charcoal is dull and black, but you can see it. It reflects enough light to see features on it.

  It had no temperature. It had no features. It looked like a hole in space.

  We pushed it out of the box and it hung there.

  “I don’t like that thing,” Evangeline said, softly.

  Here’s the best thing I can think of to describe how it looked. It made the real world look like a photograph with a perfectly round hole cut in it and nothing behind it but outer space.

  “I really don’t like this thing,” Evangeline said. I agreed. Black is okay, I like black as a color. This was so far beyond black . . . did you ever see that movie 2001: A Space Odyssey? Those black slabs in that movie? Compared to this thing, those slabs were bright as an emergency magnesium locator flare.

  “What the hell are you supposed to do with it?” she asked. “It’s from your uncle Jubal, right?”

  “Couldn’t be anybody else.”

  Then I remembered Jubal’s “lucky piece,” the little holosnap he’d told me to carry around with me as a “lucky piece.” Luckily, I had it in my pocket.

  “What’s that? Holosnap?”

  “Jubal sent it to me.”

  I thumbed the red button, expecting to see the little image of Jubal.

  “—ull of Grace, The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among . . .”

  The black hole was gone, and hovering there in the air, curled up in the fetal position, was Jubal.

  Who promptly began to scream, then to vomit.

  THINGS GOT PRETTY confused for a while. Evangeline didn’t scream, but she let out a little squeak. Hell, I probably squeaked myself.

  “I’m fallin’, I’m fallin’!” Jubal was shouting. “Make it stop!”

  There was nothing I could do about that, but I tried to put my arms around him, to at least give him some comfort.

  Bad idea. First I got smacked in the face by one of his flailing hands. I was sent swirling head over heels to the far wall. Jubal is strong, and he was in total panic, like a drowning man. I waded back in. Evangeline had hold of one of his feet and was hanging on for dear life. I grabbed an arm, and we all three did a violent dance around the small space, banging into walls.

  Finally, I worked myself into position in front of him and grabbed his face.

  “Jubal! Jubal! Ease up, you’re hurting me!”

  He stared at me and started to cry.

  “Oh, Ray, oh, Ray, I’m so sorry, me! I can’t . . . I’m falling!”

  “Just hold on to me, Uncle Jubal, just hold on, everything will be okay.”

  I DIDN’T BEL
IEVE it, and neither did he, but he did calm down a little. He puked again, all over my shoulder, and then he buried his face in my chest and shook with great racking sobs. He was vibrating like a tuning fork.

  Evangeline wasn’t doing a lot better. I saw building panic in her face, and I couldn’t have that. One panicky person was more than enough.

  “Ray, what are we going to do?”

  “First we’ve got to get him calmed down. We could use some falling sickness pills. You know anybody who’s got any?” Evangeline, who’d never had a second of falling sickness in her life. But I had to ask.

  Having something to do seemed to focus her mind and calm her down.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, and was gone out the door.

  I spent a long ten minutes. At some point one of the little gizmos he’d made and sent me floated by in the chaos of stuff we’d stirred up and, without thinking about it, I grabbed it. It was the little box with the hand that came out and turned the machine off.

  “Jubal, Jubal, look at this!” I said. “Look, Jubal! It’s that great thing you sent me. Remember, Jubal? Remember? Look, I’m going to turn it on.” I flipped the switch, and the little box rumbled and groaned and the lid flipped up and the little plastic hand came out and grabbed the switch, pulled it, and popped back into the box. “See, Jubal? What a neat thing this is. Thank you for sending it to me.”

  His eyes were fixed on the box like he was seeing Jesus.

  “Do it again,” he whispered.

  I punched the button again, and the little hand came out. It turned off the machine. I did it again, and again, and again. We were still doing that when Evangeline returned. She held up a small hypodermic and showed it to me.

  “They told me this will tranquilize an elephant,” she said.

  Mistake.

  Jubal’s eyes rolled toward her, saw the needle, and rolled back to me.