Red Lightning

by John Varley

  “Would have killed a lot of people,” Travis said.

  “Sure, but not nearly as many as died in Hiroshima. Conventional bombing had already killed over a hundred thousand people in Tokyo earlier that year, 1945, right?” Travis nodded. “So, eighty thousand were killed in Hiroshima, not quite that many in Nagasaki. Wouldn’t killing five or ten thousand around Tokyo have been better than that? And a lot of Japanese would have seen it, heard it, felt it, and survived to talk about it, including the Emperor. It always struck me as a better solution, or at least a better first try. If it didn’t work, then you decide what to do next.”

  “Don’t want to kill nobody,” Jubal said, forcefully.

  “Neither do I, and if we can’t figure out how to make this work, then I vote for going home.”

  “You don’t get a vote,” Travis said, not unkindly. “Neither do you, Jubal and Evangeline. This is not a democratic ship. So, until you convince me you know how to scare the bejesus—sorry, Jubal—out of the most powerful people on Earth, without hurting anybody . . . well, then we’re on our way to Mars to get y’all back to your folks.”

  I turned to Jubal.

  “You said you could make a Squeezer bubble just about any size, didn’t you, Jubal?”

  He shrugged, clearly not interested in this discussion. Mentally, he was already pacing the limits of his exquisite prison again.

  “Any size, cher. Big, little, turn a big one into a little one, a little one into a big one . . . it don’t matter, since it ain’t really in this universe anyway, and it don’t use what we think of as energy, and the mass inside ain’t really inside, not the way we think of inside . . . it’s complicated . . .”

  “So here’s what I know about bubbles,” I said, and began to tick points off on my fingers. “They can be any size. Whatever’s inside comes apart. Whatever’s inside can be squeezed, and the energy let out gradually.” I paused. “And they are perfectly reflective.”

  And I laid it out for them. After about an hour that started out with shouting and ended with dawning realization, we shaped course for Earth.

  WE WERE ABLE to go slow getting there. The trick I had in mind could be done at any time, but would be most effective within a week of the vernal or autumnal equinox, and the latter was not far away, September 22. Jubal spent some of that time working on his gizmos, but it wasn’t all that complicated. Meantime we all discussed the plan, every possible detail of it, trying to think outside of the box, trying to come up with flaws, trying to think of every possible thing we might have forgotten. You never can, of course, so it was an edgy time.

  Early on we sent out another bottle rocket with another message, this one frankly designed to mislead. We told the folks on Mars—and anybody else who might be listening in—that we were on our way home. We expected to arrive back at the dear old Red Planet in two weeks. With any luck, a great part of the fleets of the various invaders would be waiting for us there, to take Jubal back into custody, or at least fight for the right to do so.

  That was fine with us, because it was a fight we intended to miss. With the right luck, it would be a fight that would never happen.

  The messages from the families came back pretty quickly, reassuring us we were doing the right thing, the better part of valor, sometimes you just can’t win, etc. Elizabeth was the only dissenter.

  “You must be crazy,” she said. “If I was out there with you, I’d fight! . . . but you go ahead and do what you think is best.” She showed us her new hand, and it was a marvel. She was already picking up things with the thumb and forefinger. Honest, you could hardly tell it wasn’t flesh.

  WE EASED BACK into the normal traffic patterns of the ecliptic so as not to attract a lot of notice from the wrong people, sort of lost ourselves in the stream of spaceships that now plied the spaces between planets.

  Then . . . there we were, hovering about four thousand miles above the North Pole, where there was very little but GPS and spy satellites in close orbits and no inhabited structures at all, and feeling very alone and conspicuous.

  Travis suggested that I should make the broadcast, since I was the one who had come up with the idea. The very idea completely terrified me. Luckily, I never had to admit to that. Evangeline scoffed right away.

  “Yeah, right. You keep calling us kids, so you think an ultimatum from either one of us would carry a lot of weight? It’s your ship, and your cousin, and you are the guys who started all this. Plus, whoever does this is going to piss off a lot of people. Ray doesn’t deserve that. And anyway, everybody on Earth pretty much hates you already, so what’s the difference if they hate you a little more?”

  Travis thought this over, then grinned, and it was clear that the idea that everybody on Earth hated him had a certain appeal.

  So we all sat down at the control seats on the bridge, and he aimed the camera at himself and started to speak.

  “Hello, y’all, it’s me again, Travis Broussard. How are y’all doing? I’m here with my cousin, Jubal, and first I want to tell you that our hearts go out to all of you who have lost loved ones and property in the tsunami. Your leaders haven’t told you what caused it, so I guess I’d better.”

  He summed up the one certainty we had, and mentioned a few ways it might have happened. I was watching the radar screens.

  “Five ships have started to move from low-equatorial orbit and look like they’re headed our way,” I said, quietly.

  “Your leaders have just sent ships out to take us prisoner,” Travis said. “But we still have a little time to tell you the truth.

  “Some of you will blame us for the tsunami. That’s okay. That’s fair. We tried our best to give you this crazy source of power without making it possible for some pissant maniac to blow all of y’all to Hell, and it worked for a while, but we just plain never imagined the depth of human cussedness. The only thing I can say in our defense is that nobody else thought of it either.”

  I was still watching the screens. “Projected arrival of the first ship in . . . twenty minutes,” I told Travis.

  “Something else they haven’t told you is how Jubal escaped from the Falkland Islands prison . . . and yeah, they’d turned it into a prison, believe me . . . and why he did, and what they’ve been doing since then. They haven’t told you the truth about the recent events on Mars, and what they’re all about. In fact, even we don’t know the whole story. All I can tell you is, there are economic and political forces jockeying for the most valuable thing in the solar system: my cousin Jubal’s brain.

  “You’re going to have to ask them about that. All I have time to tell you right now is, Jubal is a human being, not a commodity, and he wants his life back. In a few minutes your leaders, or the people who have bought and paid for your leaders, are going to try to take us captive or, if they can’t do that, kill us. They’d rather nobody have the secrets of the Squeezer than let their rivals have it.”

  “Five more ships headed our way,” Evangeline said. “No missiles so far.” Travis nodded, and went on.

  “So far I’ve been talking to all the people of the Earth. Now I’m going to talk just to the people who own the warships that are heading our way, but I want all the people of the Earth to listen in, so if the worst happens, you’ll know whose fault it all was.

  “None of y’all have ever really grasped just how powerful the Squeezer is. I can forgive you for that, a little bit, because until recently I didn’t understand it all, either. If I had, we might never have used it to go to Mars, and we’d all still be stumbling around trying to make our oil supplies last another decade or so. We might just have buried the damn thing, never told anyone, and a lot of lives would have been saved. I still think I did the right thing, but I’m a lot less sure than I used to be, and I know I’ll go to my grave with that question hanging over my head. Even now, I’m tempted to just head out for the stars with my cousin and let y’all hash it out for yourselves without Squeezer power. I expect you’d muddle through . . . but I believe human bei
ngs should go to the stars, no matter what the risk, and I don’t know of any other way to do it but with the Squeezer.

  “So what we’re going to do is show y’all something. You’ll all be able to see it, it’s something your leaders won’t be able to hide from you. It’s going to be frightening, but no one is going to be hurt. We just thought we should show you what we could do, if we chose to. And what your leaders could do, if they ever got ahold of the Squeezer technology.

  “And a special message to the leaders. Both those obviously in power, and those behind them, pulling the strings. Like I said, we expected you to attack us, and that’s what you’re doing. We’re going to take out your ships if they come too close. We don’t want to, but we will. So here’s your ultimatum. Call off the dogs, or lose them. All of them. And believe me, we don’t know who all of y’all are, but we know some of you, and if you don’t surrender, immediately, we are coming to get you. We know where you live, whether it’s in presidential palaces or regular old mansions. We will squeeze you, you motherfuckers . . . sorry, Jubal . . . we will squeeze you and anybody who’s around you, and we’ll keep coming, and keep coming, until you all are dead. And then we’ll piss on your graves and sow them with salt.

  “So call your ships back, now, and pull all your troops off Mars. When I know Mars is free of invaders . . . then we can sit down and talk.”

  He paused and looked around at all of us. He had been sounding glib and even carefree, as he usually did, but his face was covered with sweat.

  “‘Squeezer technology,’” he muttered. “That’s gotta be the biggest lie I ever told. Far as I can tell, it’s magic, if only Jubal can do it.”

  I’d had the same thought myself.

  “Okay, friends. Now let’s see if we can pull off the biggest bluff in human history. Jubal?”

  We’d had to increase the dose of Jubal’s medicine. This had all taken a lot out of him. He looked up, vaguely, then seemed to realize where he was.

  “Oh, right,” he mumbled. He turned to his own console as I watched the ships getting closer. The first few were about ready to turn and decelerate. That was important as a signal of their intentions. If they didn’t turn, if they kept accelerating at us, that meant they didn’t intend to capture us, they were going to come in shooting, with their missiles moving very fast. We would be very busy for a while, trying to fight them off with our Squeezer.

  Jubal’s console had been jury-rigged, as most of his things were, and not cleaned up nice and neat. He’d engineered the most important part into a single button, which would start a series of events that would be handled by a computer. His thumb hovered over the button. He looked up.

  “Y’all sure this is the right thing to do?”

  “Best we could come up it, cher,” Travis said. “Nobody will get hurt.”

  Jubal sighed and pressed the button.

  We had been hovering directly above the North Pole, which took only a little thrust. That meant the Earth was behind us, invisible. Ahead was nothing but black, empty space.

  And then it wasn’t empty. Right in front of us, seeming only a few thousand miles away, was another Earth. Half of it was almost blindingly bright, and even the dark side gleamed with lights. I could pick out Oslo, Stockholm, London, Paris . . . hell, the whole night side below the Arctic Circle seemed lit up. Lots of people down there. Billions and billions of people.

  Travis let a few seconds pass, let people down there have a chance to take it in, then waited a few more seconds after that. Then he leaned into the mike.

  “Any questions?” he asked.

  22

  AND THAT’S HOW I saved Mars and maybe the whole human race, and in the process kicked some of the most powerful people on Earth in the butt.

  Well, I had some help. And of course, it wasn’t as quick or as easy as that. It never is. But it was my idea.

  What we did, Jubal built two of his famous little gizmos into two of Travis’s bottle rockets, and we programmed them to fly to positions over the Earth’s poles. The north one was right outside our window, the other four thousand miles over the South Pole. When the button was pushed, the Squeezer generators did that crazy thing they do: unraveled something that might or might not have been a superstring, something so tiny that we hardly have words or even numbers to describe how small it is, caused it to unfold itself a bit here, a bit there, through the seventh dimension, the eighth dimension, maybe the nine hundredth dimension (I’m as much in the dark here as anybody else), until a part of it that looked like a silvery sphere extruded itself into our universe . . . and kept unfolding it, and unfolding it, all in a time that Jubal said couldn’t even be measured in the dimension we used for time in this universe . . .

  ... and they got bigger and bigger ...

  ... and bigger, and bigger ...

  ... AND BIGGER ...

  ... and bigger ...

  ... and bigger ...

  ... and bigger ...

  ... and bigger ...

  ... and bigger ...

  ... and bigger ...

  ... until it was ... well, really big. One million miles in diameter, both of them. Large enough that, if the Earth were inside it, it would rattle around like a BB in a battleship, according to Jubal.

  Large enough to contain the sun.

  Food for thought, we figured.

  And then we skedaddled. Couldn’t go north; there was the little matter of a million-mile bubble up there. So we aimed ourselves away from the closest group of ships headed our way and blasted at two gees.

  I’d never done two gees before, for any period of time. After ten minutes or so, it begins to, well, weigh on you. Naturally Travis had provided his ship with the best acceleration couches money could buy. We nestled into them without our stereos—you don’t want anything on your face that might suddenly weigh five times what it used to—and watched the ship’s screen from our supine positions.

  For a while, nothing happened. The ships hadn’t started to decelerate, but they hadn’t fired any missiles, either. That was not good news. We wanted them to fire a few.

  “Missile away,” Evangeline said. Travis swung his head in her direction.

  “I got it. Locking on.”

  “Estimated time to impact, three minutes.”

  “Let’s fire back at them, Ray.”

  “Okay.” We had drilled extensively on this. Travis’s missiles weren’t armed with anything, but the black ships back there wouldn’t know that. They did have seeking radar on them, though, and I locked a missile on each of the pursuers and fired them in sequence, five seconds apart. We watched them leave, pulling fifty gees.

  “More launches,” Evangeline said. “Four, five . . . six. Fifty gees.”

  “Okay, that’s a few more than I wanted,” Travis said. “So let’s show ’em how far we can reach.” He worked on his Squeezer control board. There was a joystick there, just like an old video game. He centered the cursor on each of them in turn and blip, blip, blip, they went away, wrapped in stopper bubbles that you wouldn’t ever want to open.

  No reaction at first, then the ships began sideways maneuvers, trying to evade our missiles. Their options were limited, with Earth on one side and the bubble on the other. I felt claustrophobic, with the real Earth visible out one window and the reflected Earth out the other. I thought it would be even worse for them, and wondered if they’d figured out yet what it was they were seeing . . .

  A BUBBLE A million miles in diameter presents a flat, mirrored face, for all practical purposes, the curvature being so slight you’d need a fine instrument to measure the degree of distortion of the image. With the Earth currently sandwiched between two bubbles that size it meant that everyone standing outdoors with no cloud cover was able to see the reflection of one of them. Folks close to the equator could see parts of both.

  How big did they look? Well, they were four thousand miles away, which made the virtual image appear to be eight thousand miles away. At eight thousand miles the Earth co
vers forty degrees of arc. Compare that to Luna, which covers one-half degree. The image the people of Earth were seeing was eighty times the width of the full moon, and it was visible whether it was night or day where you were standing.

  I’d call that a pretty impressive demonstration. It scared the hell out of me, and I’m the one who thought of it.

  Getting there at the equinox was a bit of luck, but it would have worked pretty well even if we hadn’t. At any other time, the sheer size of the bubbles would have blocked the sun entirely and Earth would have gone totally dark. Maybe that would have been even scarier.

  Suddenly Evangeline shouted, “One of the ships is decelerating!”

  We all had our eyes glued to the screens, where one of our pursuers was now showing a reverse vector. Our missiles were closing in . . . and in another few seconds they flew harmlessly by, as they’d been programmed to do.

  “Another one is slowing,” she said, tensely

  “Come on, guys, you don’t want to die, do you?” Travis whispered.

  And then, within a few seconds, all the others began showing negative acceleration. The distance between us began to increase. No more missiles were fired.

  Travis waited a decent interval, and we all watched the curve of the Earth in case something nasty might be hiding back there waiting to jump us. But there was little chance of that. Finally, Travis sighed.

  “My friends,” he said, “I think that was the shooting match. I think the most powerful people on Earth just blinked.”

  We all cheered, and Travis cut the acceleration to half a gee so we could get out of our couches without the risk of breaking bones. Travis gave us all high fives, we shouted, we danced, Evangeline kissed Travis, then Jubal, then me.

  Then Jubal threw up.

  WE KEPT ON going in the direction we had been going, still on alert. Within fifteen minutes the invitations started to come in. People wanted to talk to us. Like reasonable people, most of them said. Never mind that we just tried to kill you . . . and anyway, it wasn’t really us, it was those sharks over at . . . any number of accusations were made against countries, corporations, individuals. It was impossible to keep all the name-calling and finger-pointing straight, and we didn’t even try. Travis had made a checklist of people he knew were involved, along with a longer list of possibles. Within an hour we’d heard from all of them. Same message: