by John Varley
SURE I WILL. Jubal. Sure.
I got as far as the tennis court and stopped. I looked back. I looked forward. I was about halfway between Travis’s house and Jubal’s barn and I had no idea where to go from here.
I’d parked the Triumph on the tennis court. I got the cell phone out of the sidecar and dialed Kelly’s work number.
“Strickland Mercedes-Porsche-Ferrari. How may I direct your call?” At least it wasn’t a mechanized phone menu. But it was supposed to be Kelly’s direct line.
“I’ll take two Boxsters and a Testarossa, to go.”
“You want fries with that?”
“Put me through to Kelly, please, Lisa.”
“Manny, I was told-”
“Lisa, you know how pissed she’s going to be if you don’t put me through. And you know we won’t tell on you.”
There was a silence. I didn’t envy her, stuck between the boss and the boss’s daughter, neither of them being the type of person you wanted to mess with. She sighed, and I heard Kelly’s phone ring.
“Jubal?” she answered, sounding worried.
[155] “Me, Kelly. My call didn’t go through.”
She sighed.
“Oh, don’t worry about it. Just my dad being an asshole again.”
“Yeah, but your caller ID thought this was Jubal calling. It’s his phone. The one in the sidecar that he never uses. So he’s blocking calls from Jubal, too.” Not that Jubal would ever call, but Mr. Strickland probably didn’t know that.
I could almost hear her simmer.
“Yeah, when I get home I’m gonna rip him a new… Can you believe that? He must have his spies working again, and now he’s messing with the computers. My computers. Oh, Manny, he’s going to be one sorry, racist mother-”
“I’m out at the ranch,” I said. Don’t want to let Kelly get started on her father, she could damage the phone.
“Some problem?”
“Yeah… you could say I’ve got a problem. I don’t know what to do.”
“Start at the beginning.”
I did, and I didn’t get very far before she cut me off.
“Don’t do anything. I’ll be right over.”
I FIGURED NOT doing anything didn’t apply to fishing. If you’re seriously doing something when you’re fishing, you’re missing the whole point.
I walked down the dock. The boathouse door wasn’t locked. I found a rod and reel in there, and borrowed a trowel. At a likely looking spot of ground, I turned over a few scoops of soil and immediately had half a dozen red wigglers.
That’s where I was an hour later when I heard footsteps. I turned and saw Kelly, dressed in a smart blue suit and blouse that looked uncomfortable out here in the blinding sunshine. She kicked off her medium-heeled shiny black shoes, then hiked up her skirt and quickly peeled down her pink panties and taupe pantyhose. It was over almost [156] before I knew she was doing it. She stuffed the frillies in her purse and sat beside me on the end of the pier and dangled her feet in the cool water, just like I was doing.
“Catching anything, Huck?”
“Could I have an instant slo-mo replay of that? I think I missed some of the finer points.” I lifted the stringer almost out of the water. Two big bass flopped on the end of it. I grabbed the other end of the string and unthreaded it from their gills. They floated there a moment, not quite sure they were free, then swam off. I never would have kept them at all except that, the one time me and Kelly went fishing together, I couldn’t even land a scrawny little perch. I had to show her I could catch fish. Manny, the mighty hunter, bringing the mammoth meat home to the cave.
“So, start at the beginning, okay?” she said.
“Well, Travis called me and… and he… you have no idea how distracting it is, you sitting there and me knowing you’re not wearing any panties.”
She looked at me dubiously, and snorted.
“Boys. Can’t educate ’em, can’t understand ’em, can’t do without ’em. Or so I’ve been told. I can’t dangle my feet in the water wearing pantyhose, Huckleberry. It wasn’t about you at all.” But I could tell by the glint in her eyes that it had been, at least partly. And I knew she was filing the fact that it turned me on, and one day soon I’d be treated to some little scenario she had worked out involving not wearing any underwear.
Life is so tough sometimes, ain’t it?
AS IT TURNED out, I didn’t tell my story then. Kelly had called Alicia, who had called Dak, and they were due out at the ranch soon. They arrived a few minutes later, and both kicked off their shoes and rolled up their pants legs and sat beside us. Not nearly as interesting to watch as Kelly.
When I finished telling them what I’d heard in the last couple hours [157] they were all quiet for a while. Then Dak turned to me with a dubious but hopeful expression.
“It’s that ‘all of us’ interests me the most,” he said. “You’re sure that’s what he said? All of us? You and me? Not America, not NASA?”
“All of us.” Kelly pressed down hard on the first word. “As in me, you, Manny, Alicia, Jubal, and Travis. Okay?”
“What would you want to go to Mars for, Kelly?” Dak looked honestly puzzled. I was, too, but I knew better than to show it. “Sell BMWs to the Martians?”
“I’d want to go because it’s an adventure,” Kelly responded quietly, not taking offense. “You don’t get a shot like this twice in one lifetime. Plus, I have to watch over Manny.” She smiled at me, making me feel great, and a bit worried at the same time.
“Me, too,” Alicia chimed in. “Hell… heck, I rode every ride at Disney World, Universal, and Florida Adventure. This couldn’t be any scarier than that.”
Dak looked us over one at a time, then nodded. “This is what I was looking for from Travis from day one, only I was thinking more along the lines of a foot in the door at a good school.”
“It’s going to take some careful pushing and shoving,” Kelly said. I could already see the gears turning in the fabulous head. This was the sort of thing Kelly thrived on. “If it works out right, he won’t know what hit him, just one day he’ll wake up and realize he’s agreed to fly us all to Mars.”
“Don’t worry, hon,” Alicia said with a sniff. “The day I can’t push a coon-ass peckerwood in the direction I want him to go… that’ll be a cold day in heck!”
“I don’t think Jubal-” I began.
“Not Jubal, Huckleberry,” Alicia said. Did I really look like that much of a hayseed with my pants cuffs rolled up? “I’m talking about Travis, the Big Coon-Ass Peckerwood himself. Pardon my pejorative.”
“No problem, hon,” Dak said. “Ain’t nobody here but us darkies, the spic, and the white chick.”
“White chick? White chick?” Kelly said. “Yo momma.”
[158] “ ‘My mamma?’ Gal, yo momma so dumb she tripped over a cordless phone.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, yo momma so ugly she stuck her head out a car window and got arrested for mooning.”
“Oh, yeah? Sister, yo momma so-”
“-so fat she looks like she’s smuggling a Volkswagen,” Alicia said. “Now you guys cut it out.”
Fine with me, too. The way Dak felt about his absent mother, you’d think “yo momma” jokes would really bother him. But he and Kelly had discovered they were very good at the game, they could carry on for ten minutes and never repeat themselves.
“It’s just creative dissing, Manny,” Dak had once told me. “It ain’t about yo momma or my momma, it’s about the words. It’s street poetry, like rap.”
Which was clear as mud, because Dak had almost as little use for rap as his father, who called it antimusic, though Sam Sinclair admitted he’d stopped listening to new music about the time Marvin Gaye died.
A little Racism 101 footnote: “Coon-ass” doesn’t mean a black person, as many Yankees assume when they hear it. That would be “coon.” A coon-ass is a Cajun, and probably just as insulting as coon, but Cajuns usually don’t make a big deal of it.
“D
ak, Manny,” Kelly said, “we love you guys, but try to let me and Alicia do most of the talking. Whatever you do, do not ask if you can help Jubal build a spaceship and take you all to Mars. We’ve got to ease him into that frame of mind.”
I was more than happy to leave it to her. Who’s going to out-talk a car dealer? I figured it was in her genes, from when the Stricklands landed on the bay they named after themselves, and started selling buckboard wagons.
THE GIRLS WENT on ahead, whispering to each other, as Dak and I stowed the fishing gear back where I’d found it. When we reached the tennis court Kelly was nowhere to be seen, and Alicia came out the [159] barn side door, Jubal following reluctantly behind. In fact, I was sure that if Alicia hadn’t been pulling on his hand he wouldn’t have been moving at all. But he did come, looking like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon beside tiny Alicia.
We went into the house and found Kelly and Travis standing there. The colonel had his hands in his pockets and was looking at the floor. The big baby.
“Now, you boys are going to kiss and make up,” Alicia said. “Then we’re all going to sit down outside around the grill and eat the soy burgers I’m going to make, and talk about this thing that has come between you. Okay? Travis? Jubal?”
Kelly gave Travis a shove, and the two slowly came together. They embraced, and Travis did kiss his cousin, and pounded him on the back.
“I’m sorry, Jubal.” He was a little hoarse. “This thing has got me behaving even worse than my normal shi-… lousy standard. Forgive me.”
“Nothin’ to fo’give, mon cher. I actin’ stupid, me.”
I was pretty sure I saw a tear in Travis’s eye. But Kelly grabbed them both, still hugging, and got them moving through the sliding doors out on to the patio.
IT TURNED OUT Alicia did have a sense of humor. She knew how popular soy burgers would be with this crowd so she didn’t even try. I started a fire in the kettle and she and Dak sliced huge beefsteak tomatoes and purple onions and Kelly formed half-pound burgers with her hands and Travis and Jubal set the picnic table and put out the deli mustard and pickles and a big jar of sliced jalapenos. I cooked the burgers from “almost raw” for Travis to “black and crispy on the edges” for Dak and Jubal. We didn’t have any lettuce, so Alicia volunteered to pick some dandelion greens and show us how good they were on burgers. We all declined, with varying degrees of panic.
It had been Alicia’s idea to do the lunch, let emotions get back under control before we all locked horns with Travis. Sitting there, working [160] my way through a sheer masterpiece of a hamburger, I figured it had been a good idea.
I wouldn’t have wanted to be Travis just then.
IT TOOK A while to bring Travis up to speed on Jubal’s new calculations. From his reactions, I could see he hadn’t understood that Jubal had gone beyond being simply worried about the chances of the Ares Seven, to feeling sure they were headed for a catastrophe. He followed Jubal’s presentation, Jubal pointing wildly at this or that part of the hundred or so diagrams he had brought with him.
The four of us non-mathematical-genius types watched, at first trying to follow it all but by the end just sitting there in Travis’s comfortable patio chairs. I don’t think sulking would be the right word, but we were all a bit chastened to see just how peripheral we really were to Jubal’s project. What the hell had we been thinking? There had to be many thousands of people who could understand all the stuff Jubal was explaining, who would now be nodding grimly as the flaws of the Vaseline drive came to light. Thousands of people, I could now see, much more qualified to ship out to space with Jubal and Travis than we were.
As it turned out, more qualified than Travis, too. He sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. Jubal got him a bottle of aspirin without having to be asked. Travis swallowed four of them.
“I don’t understand a lot of what Jubal just said,” Travis said. “Oh, wonderful,” Alicia breathed. “I was feeling so dumb!” “Join the club,” Dak said. “Jubal, can I have one of those aspirins?” “So what’s it going to do, Jubal?” I asked. “Will it blow up?” “Might could,” Jubal said, gnawing at a piece of his beard. “Dey didn’ do ’nuff long-term testin’, I figure. More likely, de engine she jus’ shut off and dat de end a dat. Won’t start no mo’, no.” Alicia frowned at him.
“Well, what’s the big deal, then?” she asked. “I thought it was gonna blow up. Didn’t you say it was gonna blow up, Manny?”
[161] “All I know for sure was that Jubal said they were in trouble,” I said. “But Alicia, if their main engine won’t fire… they’ll get to Mars still going… what, Jubal?”
“Real fas’,” he said, shaking his head. “Too dad-gum fas’.”
We were all momentarily stunned by Jubal’s use of what was, to him, a swearword. We’d never heard it before.
“Like he said, too fast,” I told Alicia. “They’ll go right on past Mars and nobody can do a thing about it. They can’t slow down, nobody’s got the juice to catch up with them. They’ll head on out to the stars and get there in about ten thousand years.”
“Nobody kin stop ’em but us’n,” Jubal said. “We got de juice to git us dere.” He looked at Travis. “Now we gotta git de ship to git us dere.”
Travis had his face in his hands. Now he looked up. Not a happy man.
“History repeats itself,” he said. “This country has never really had a ‘space program.’ What we’ve had is a series of races. Sputnik One went up in 1957 and scared the be-… the dickens out of us. Up to then the biggest part of our space program was something called Project Vanguard. Run by the Navy, of all things. In the ’30s the Navy ran the airship program, too. I don’t know why.”
“To keep it out of the hands of the fly-boys, that’s why,” Dak said.
“See there?” He pointed at Dak. “Your dad was a swabbo, wasn’t he?”
“Watch yo mouf’, white boy. My dad was a chief petty officer. Probably still would be, but he got kicked out during a force reduction. And I’ll give you Army and thirteen points right here and now.” Dak slapped a twenty on the table.
“You’re faded,” Travis said. “And the Navy wrecked every airship they had, the Akron, the Macon, the Shenandoah …”
“Prob’ly had Army pilots. Naval carrier aviation is the best-”
“Boys,” Kelly said. “Can we get back to the subject?”
“There was a subject?” Alicia wondered.
“Yeah,” Travis said. “Going off too soon, half-cocked. The Navy never did get a Vanguard off the ground. So Sputnik One goes up and goes, ‘beep, beep, beep,’ and every citizen of America sees the Russkis own [162] outer space, and they are asking their leaders what they’re going to do about it.
“What they did was hand it to Werner von Braun, the top Nazi Kraut we captured at the end of the war. He takes a Jupiter rocket, modifies it a little, and ninety days later there’s an American satellite in orbit.
“And we were off to the races. President Kennedy said we were going to the moon by 1969. Everybody knew it was not enough time, there was no way to get there that fast… safely. That’s the key word.
“There’s two ways we could have got to the moon. The way everybody assumed it would be done in the ’40s and ’50s was the piece-by-piece approach. Develop a ship something like the VentureStar, an SSTO, single-stage-to-orbit vehicle. Start putting hardware and people into orbit. Build a space station. It could be huge by now if we’d started in 1958. Then build your moonship in orbit. Make it a ship like the Lunar Excursion Module, in that it will never land on Earth, but not like the Lunar Excursion Module in that you don’t throw it away after you’ve used it once. It returns to Earth’s orbit, refuels, and goes right back to the moon with more people. More people, because right there, right from the very first flight, we would have been on the moon to stay. Put up some shelters on the first landing, stay there a week or so. Your moonships start regular trips back and forth. In a couple years you’ve got a decent colony, a f
ew hundred people. By about 1990 you’re sending people to Mars, by 2000 you’ve got ships on the way to Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons.
“That’s the way everybody figured it in engineering circles in 1958.”
Travis was up and pacing now, and he paused, getting his second wind. Obviously he had been angry about this for a long time.
“But there was another way to get to the moon. You’ve heard of ‘fast, cheap, and dirty?’ Call this the von Braun plan, fast, very expensive, and very dirty. But it was the only way to get there by December thirty-first, 1969.
“Say Columbus took the Apollo route to the New World. He starts off with three ships. Along about the Canary Islands he sinks the first ship, just throws it away, deliberately. And it’s his biggest ship. Come [163] to the Bahamas, he throws away the second ship. He reaches the New World… but his third ship can’t land there. He lowers a lifeboat, sinks his third ship, and rows ashore. He picks up a few rocks on the beach and rows right back out to sea, across the Atlantic… and at the Strait of Gibraltar he sinks the lifeboat and swims back to Spain with an inner tube around his shoulders.
“If that’s what it took to cross the Atlantic, this part of the world would still belong to the Seminoles.”
“Would that be so bad?” Dak asked.
“Not for the Seminoles,” Kelly said.
“The Apollo program was possibly the stupidest way of getting somewhere the human mind has yet achieved… but it was the only way to win the ‘race.’
“And the race took a toll beyond the money it squandered. It cost three astronauts their lives. They burned to death in a pure oxygen environment that was loaded with combustible material. Strapped in, the hatch bolted, those guys burned to death because there hadn’t been time to do the slow, methodical testing that should have been at the heart of the Apollo program.
“Don’t get me wrong. I am in awe of the pioneers who flew in those things, and the people who built them. Nobody will ever see a Saturn 5 launch again, but believe me, it was an incredible sight.
“The whole thing, from Sputnik to Neil Armstrong, was done using methods we usually only see in wartime. It wasn’t so much a race as a war. Look at the Manhattan Project. Time is critical, money is no object. We need the bomb now. So, if there’s six different ways to refine uranium 235 out of ore, which way do we try first? Answer: Try all six, all at once.