Red Thunder

by John Varley

  Boxes of Krispy Kremes had been set out in anticipation of Jubal’s return. At the rate he’d been going through them I thought we might look into getting a franchise ourselves, in case this whole Mars business didn’t pan out.

  We had gone to the Blast-Off to meet them when they arrived, but Kelly and I had both overslept and didn’t wake up until Aunt Maria pounded on the door and shouted, “They’re here, Manuelito!” We dressed quickly and went down to be embraced by Jubal and Travis. My guts were churning, because that afternoon we had to present our ideas to Travis and the whole project would either continue, or crash and burn, depending on his reaction. I didn’t even want to admit how much it had all come to mean to me.

  Before long we all piled into our various vehicles and were on our way to the warehouse, except Maria, who had to work the front desk while Eve, the temp girl we’d hired with money we really couldn’t spare, cleaned up the rooms.

  Travis had done a complete walk-around of the warehouse when we got there. The four of us kept up a constant nervous patter, handing it off from one to the next as we went, trying to anticipate any questions he might have.

  For the life of me, I couldn’t tell if he was giving us an honest chance. We had all realized during the two weeks of his absence that, let’s face it, all he had to do at any time was to say, “It’s not safe,” and the whole project would be over. Was he already determined to shoot it down? Was he just humoring us-and more important, misleading and humoring his brilliant but dependent cousin-never having intended to give his okay? Were we going to get a fair shake? And would we even know if we weren’t?

  THEIR VAN WAS good for some laughs. They had taken it into some places that would have been a lot easier in Travis’s Hummer. There was a dent in the left side where they’d slipped on a muddy dirt road in the [223] Oregon Cascades and banged into a tree. There were scratches from where they’d squeezed through thick brush. And there was dirt. Lots of dirt, with only the windows wiped clean.

  “We were in a hurry,” Travis had explained. “No time for car washes.”

  The inside was revealing, too. The front seats and floor were neat and orderly, but from there on back it could have provided some students with an interesting two-week archaeological dig. Travis’s military training apparently wouldn’t allow him to tolerate trash in his immediate vicinity, but once it was tossed over his shoulder into the backseat it was gone, as far as he was concerned. There were fast-food wrappers and boxes from all the major companies.

  “Krispy Kremes hard to find, up Yankeeland way.” Jubal sounded scandalized.

  There were plenty of soft drink cans and paper cups, too. I saw Alicia’s eyes scanning the litter, eyes that could spot a can of Bud in a mountain of empties a hundred yards away. She didn’t find a beer can. Which was a big relief to me, because the one time Mom and I had talked about this whole thing while they were gone, it was because Mom brought up Travis’s drinking.

  “That man takes one drink,” she had said, “that man takes one drop of liquor, Manuel, and I withdraw my consent. Then you can go or stay, which you’ll do anyway, but it will be without my permission.”

  “Mom, that man takes one drink, you won’t have to withdraw your consent,” I had said. “I won’t go if he drinks.” And ever since, I’d wondered if that was true.

  NOW OUR HO-gauge model spaceship was sitting in the middle of the conference table, considerably spruced up since we first glued it together.

  Inside what would be the bridge we had put a light to glow through the windows. We had mounted radio antennas and a big dish receiver on it. We’d built a cradle of plastic girders to set the whole thing on, made from bits scavenged from model plane and car boxes, just like [224] they used to do it in Hollywood. The three landing legs and pads came from, of all things, a model of the old Apollo Lunar Excursion Module. The big springs we’d need had come from a radio-controlled Hummer model. Tiny red and green flashing clearance lights gave it a more animated appearance.

  Down beneath were three globular cages built to hold five-foot-diameter Squeezer bubbles, now represented by silver Christmas tree ornaments. We didn’t know what that part would actually look like. That would be entirely up to Jubal.

  Then we’d sent it out and had it painted high-gloss candy-apple red. There was an American flag embossed on one side, and the bold words RED THUNDER on the other.

  In fact, we’d spent more money on this whole presentation deal than I had thought necessary, and I had questioned Kelly about it.

  “Never skimp on the gloss and glitz,” she told me. “I would never try to sell a dirty car. We’ve got guys, soon as a rain shower passes over, their job is to go out in the lot and swab all the cars down with a chamois, so they don’t dry with streaks on them.”

  “I agree,” Alicia had said. “Guys, if Travis intends to give us a fair hearing, we need to give the impression that we do thorough work. For that, appearance counts.”

  So we made sure the plan, the ship model, and all the backup materials were as professional as possible, and hang the expense.

  We rented a huge flat-wall SuperHiDef screen and spent a few hours learning to use the Telestrator system in our shipbuilding program so we could point and click with an electronic wand to expand, slice and dice, rotate, swoop and swirl, pan, zoom, and dolly in or out with ease as we explained the various features. Pretty soon we were creating graphics as good as any television sports broadcast, in real time.

  Hanging on the walls around the Telestrator screen were three-by-four-foot color prints of some old magazine covers and Walt Disney posters from the 1950s, for no better reason than that they looked good… and showed some spaceships that actually looked like Red Thunder.

  We had found them during computer searches. An artist named [225] Chesley Bonestell had painted covers of spaceships for science fiction magazines, the result of the best scientific thinking of the time, some of them in space, others sitting on the Martian surface. And the Disney organization had made some short subjects around that time, speculating about how we might conquer space. One of the Disney ships bore a startling resemblance to Red Thunder, a central cylinder surrounded by cylindrical fuel tanks, though the tanks were not as large as Red Thunder’s tank cars. Printing and hanging them had been my idea, I admit it. I thought that, surrounded by these lovely old renderings, my crazy idea for a Martian ship didn’t look quite so crazy. I’d downloaded them and had them printed professionally, photo-quality.

  So what was the first thing that happened when Travis walked into the conference room with us and saw the model, sitting there in the middle of the conference table under a baby spotlight?

  He stopped and frowned for a moment, then he burst out laughing.

  My face felt like it was on fire. I actually felt dizzy for a moment. It’s not an experience I’d like to repeat. It was undiluted humiliation.

  Luckily, Travis realized it in a second, and the next thing I knew he was hugging me, kissing me, calling me a genius.

  FROM THERE. THE sailing was pretty smooth.

  We each took our turns at the Telestrator, as we had rehearsed it. Travis would watch, and nod or occasionally frown. When he frowned we waited to see if he had a question. We felt… we hoped we had an answer to all but a few of his possible objections, and thought we ought to get them taken care of as quickly as possible. But he always told us to go ahead.

  And he did seem to enjoy it. He kept looking back to the model, turning it slowly, squinting at it, so we’d stop and wait for his attention to return.

  We had divided the presentation into four parts. I got to go first because I’d been named chief design officer. Sure, I thought, until Travis gets back, and I pray for that day. I was terrified that, once he saw the details, he’d be laughing again.

  [226] But he didn’t laugh again. Most of the time he was nodding, some of the time he was even smiling. I got my part over in about twenty minutes, giving the broad general outlines of our thinking, showing eve
rything we had on the screen. Then I handed the control wand to Dak and sat down, wishing I had a towel for the sweat that was drenching me in spite of the powerful air conditioning.

  Dak was wearing two hats on the project. First, he was systems engineer. He had been hard at work learning what communications we needed to keep in contact with planet Earth. He was also struggling to design the ship’s internal power systems, and it was becoming a problem. He didn’t exactly gloss over it but he didn’t spend a lot of time on it, either. I knew a mental note had been taken.

  The second hat was surface transportation, and Dak hadn’t been around the warehouse much in the last few days as he and Sam got started on that.

  Then it was Alicia’s turn, and the rest of us crossed our fingers. We had named her environmental control officer. Yes, we were all officers. Why not?

  Alicia labored under a triple inferiority complex. The first part was math and science anxiety, which most girls I’ve known have. It seems to come with the territory. Second, she had never finished high school. Given her life story, I thought it was a miracle she had attended school at all; and learned anything at all. But Alicia felt outclassed by her three honor student friends.

  Third, she felt that Dak was much, much smarter than she was, and she was afraid she would never be able to keep him because of that.

  Some of that was obvious to anybody who was watching, and some of it I learned lying on my pillow with my arm around Kelly, who was doing everything she could-as Dak and I were, too-to convince Alicia she was wrong to worry about all three points. Which was the simple truth. Alicia might not know how to extract a cube root, but she had tons of smarts, in areas that really mattered. Come to think of it, I can’t extract a cube root, either, without a calculator.

  But, my lord, how that girl had been working.

  Her desk in the other office was piled high with printouts. Dak had [227] gotten her started, showing her which sites to go to for the information she needed. Most of them were government sites, many of those part of the NASAWEB. It’s amazing how much stuff you can get free from the government if you know where to look.

  She spoke for about twenty minutes, using the clicker to highlight the air tanks and fans arid ventilation ducts we’d designed. As she went on, her confidence grew. She talked knowledgeably about carbon dioxide scrubbers, carbon monoxide and smoke detectors, about the heating and cooling systems, and our biggest bugaboo, radiation.

  She had learned more about it than Dak and I had known.

  “Astronauts working on the space stations and flying in VStars have a radiation protection we’re not going to have,” she said. “The Earth’s magnetic field captures a lot of the radiation from the sun and twists it and turns it down at the poles, where you can see the results in auroras. The level of that radiation varies with activity on the sun’s surface. Solar flares and prominences produce high-energy protons that can be harmful if you aren’t protected from them.” With a click, she brought up a series of pictures of solar flares, beautiful and potentially deadly. “That radiation can even reach down to the Earth’s surface. In 1989 a flare shorted out the power supply in Quebec. Six million people didn’t have any electricity for a while.

  “But we can have a little warning about the solar radiation. We’ll have a piece of optical equipment aboard that will watch the sun and if it spots a flare, it will sound an alarm.” She brought up a graphic on the Telestrator. “The light from a flare will go faster than the dangerous protons. We would have a minute or so to get into what they call a ‘storm cellar.’ Basically, we’ll surround one room in the center of the center module with polyethylene, which will stop the protons. They use this stuff on atomic submarines to shield the crew from the reactor.”

  One more point Dak and I hadn’t known, discovered through Alicia’s diligence. I glanced at Travis and saw him nodding.

  “The other radiation is scarier, to me.”

  “Me, too,” Travis put in, quietly.

  “They call it ‘cosmic radiation.’ It comes from far out in space, from stars that blow up in a supernova. This stuff travels at almost the speed [228] of light and it’s very powerful. Even the Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t stop all of it, but exposures are higher in outer space. There’s no practical way to shield from it.”

  She paused, and it didn’t seem like a good place for a pause, to me. Skim over this part, I wanted to shout. But in the end I guess it’s better to be straight and honest.

  “To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t want to be on that Ares Seven ship, or the Chinese one, either. The best way to deal with cosmic radiation is to limit your exposure to it. We’ll get to Mars in somewhere between three and four days. That’s a chance we all agreed we’re willing to take.”

  I thought I heard a grumble from my mother, but when I looked at her she was just glaring at the flares on the Telestrator screen, looking as if she’d like to put a lot of bullet holes in it. Somehow I had just known that the idea of radiation passing through her son’s body was not going to exactly thrill her.

  It was only toward the end Alicia faltered a bit.

  “I haven’t had time to work on waste management,” she admitted. “I guess we’ll need some plumbing. Toilets, some way to heat water…”

  “When you go to Sears to get that freezer,” Travis said, “pick up a water heater, too. And a toilet seat.” Alicia smiled uncertainly. “I’m not kidding. Don’t worry about it, Alicia. It won’t be a problem.”

  “Well, I guess that’s about it…”

  Kelly was already up. She embraced Alicia and invited her to sit down. Then she began her own presentation, clean, crisp, well ordered, and comprehensive without being long-winded, just as I’d expected from her. She covered the financial situation and the procurement status, all the business side of the project.

  When she sat down there was silence for almost a full minute. Who would fire the first shot? Mom, or Travis?

  Travis. And of course it wasn’t a shot at all.

  “Well, I’ve seen worse briefings before a liftoff. Many worse, in fact. Practically all of them.” He turned to Mom. “Betty, I’ll tell you the bad news first.”

  [229] “Travis, the only news I want from you is that you can build a safe ship. These kids are going to Mars if there’s even a one in a hundred chance of getting back, I know that. I figure Manny’d go if he had to pedal a bicycle and hold his breath. They’d lie to me if that’s what it takes; I would have, when I was their age. But from you, I expect the truth, or I’ll find a way to make you pay.”

  “Then the bad news is actually good news,” Travis said, not seeming to mind the threat. I did, though. I was getting a little bit pissed off at her.

  “We’ve got a terrific start here. They’ve laid out the basics of a ship that can get there and back.”

  “Then you’d let your daughters fly in it, is that what you’re saying?”

  “No way. There’s a hundred things wrong with it, and until I satisfy myself that they’re all fixable, and then that we can fix them, I’m nowhere near ready to sign off on it. The thing is, I expected there’d be a thousand problems. We’re much farther along than I’d dared hope.” He turned to Sam Sinclair. “What’s your feeling, Sam?”

  “I have to admit, it looks sound,” Sam said. He smiled wryly. “Given that the basic idea is flat-out nuts.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more. We’ve got a lot of work to do before it stops being nuts. Here’s where it stands, Sam, Betty… and the rest of you, too.

  “The biggest hurdle facing this project is that we’re not going to be able to test the ship before we set out for Mars. If I had my way, I’d take her into orbit first, alone. Then the moon. I’d only go to Mars after that. But you know why we can’t test that way.

  “So Jubal and I have been testing it every possible way but a full-scale liftoff. We spent about half our time experimenting to measure the thrust levels we can achieve. We know now how much reaction mass we’ll need for th
e trip. The bubbles seem to squeeze out just about the maximum power, total mass-energy conversion. So one bubble could produce thrust for years and years. Hell, for centuries.

  “The rest of the time we tried to make the system fail.

  “And we did have failures on the ground. Nothing to get alarmed [230] about, every research project has failures along the way, and it’s best to have them early on, on the ground, than to have them sneak up on you at the worst possible time, which is what usually happens.

  “I’d confidently raise ship and put her in orbit tomorrow, for a short orbital flight, if we had a full-scale ship ready and didn’t have to worry about who would see the launch and return. Jubal has engineered a system of containment and release of the ship’s thrust that is as foolproof as anything made by imperfect humans can be.

  “We told you about my fiasco in the ’Glades. That wasn’t any flaw in the bubble technology, it was caused by us not knowing how much energy would be released, and how fast, by Jubal’s… by what we’re calling the Phase Field Interrupter. The PFI. We got it calibrated now, I can release energy accurately down to one percent.

  “I told you the PFI makes a pinhole in the bubbles. That’s not strictly accurate. Jubal showed me the math but it was beyond me. What it does, it puts a twist in space so the matter trapped and squeezed inside the bubble makes a little trip through another dimension-and I’m not even sure if it’s the fifth or the sixth dimension-”

  “Fift’,” Jubal said. I was surprised, I’d almost forgotten he was there.

  “If you say so. The energy twists through some sort of wormhole and travels a distance much shorter than the diameter of a proton, and ends up in our universe, and when it gets here it produces thrust. I know this is hard stuff, I can go back…”