by John Varley
“Georgia, Georgia, on my mind. Can’t get me out of Georgia soon enough.”
“What’s the matter with Georgia?”
“I hate coming to Georgia. I wish Kelly had booked me through Dulles, or even Miami. But you know Kelly. She saved me about five hundred dollars finding that fare.”
After ten minutes with his eyes closed he sat up and shook his head. He cracked the window to let the wet breeze blow in his face.
[260] “It was raining like this the day I set the Montana down at the Atlanta airport.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Didn’t I tell you about that?”
“I don’t think so.” I was pretty sure he knew he hadn’t told me. Why he’d decided to tell me now I had no idea, but I decided to just let him go. Which he did.
“There were warning lights from the diagnostic tests during my pre-flight. They’d come on, then they’d go out. I wanted to postpone the reentry, do an EVA, get out there and bang a few things around with a hammer, see if I could get the lights to stay on or stay off, one way or the other. But they sent me a ‘fix,’ they swore if I ran their program everything would be fine. That’s how it worked on the ground, anyway.
“I told ’em to go stuff their fix, I wasn’t pulling away from the station till I’d eyeballed the thing. And they told me to remember Senator So-and-so was aboard-as if I’d forget it-and he had to be back to make an important vote on the Senate floor, and my head would roll if he was late.”
“Senator So-and-so?”
“Yeah, I forget which one he was, now. God knows I took enough of ’em up back then. Ever since Garn and Glenn went up, back in the ’90s, a U.S. senator figures he ain’t no great shakes unless he’s been up. The ultimate boondoggle junket. Hell, some guys paid twenty million dollars to go up! Senators get to go for free.
“Sure enough, halfway down one of the speed brakes deployed at about Mach six. We flipped right over. Five times we rolled, me cussing and fighting all the way. I stopped the roll and looked out the window for the landing strip, and there she was. Happiest I’d been since I found that little grass strip in Africa. I brought her in, very hard and very fast… and about a hundred feet off the deck I spotted a 787 crossing the runway in front of me. Must of given the captain of that 787 something to remember, because we missed by maybe ten feet.
“And when we stopped, that’s when I knew I had landed in Atlanta.”
[261] He stopped for a while, sipped at the coffee he’d bought from a machine at the freight terminal. Then he-shook his head.
“I’d a found and fixed that hydraulic leak if they’d a let me go EVA. But since nobody at Hartsfield knew I was coming until I showed up on their radar dropping like a stone and because Senator So-and-so got a whiff of my breath, and since I was still blowing a one-point-eight an hour later…
“We compromised, NASA and me. When the inquiry happened I wouldn’t mention the warnings they’d told me to ignore, also that the reason for ignoring them was the senator’s goddamn fault… and I’d hand in my wings and never fly again.”
There was another long silence. I listened to the hiss of the tires on pavement and the sound of the wipers moving the red Georgia mud around my windshield.
“Sometimes I wish I’d a just gone for it, Manny. Tell the whole story, give the senator and those NASA turkeys what they had coming. But I was drunk. I was stinking drunk. The breath test was probably unconstitutional… but hell, lots of people knew I was a drunk, a drunk who’d been pretty lucky for a long, long time, and a bunch were ready to testify to that.
“Still, I might have… Then somebody mentioned Jubal. Didn’t make a threat, nothing like that. Didn’t have to. They’d looked into my private life enough to know about him. They could drop a hint here, a few bucks there, and the judge takes Jubal from me and puts him in an institution for retarded adults…”
We didn’t speak for the next twenty miles. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I’m sorry? Didn’t quite cover it, did it? Then I did think of something.
“Don’t tell that story to my mom, Travis, okay?”
“Deal.”
Pretty soon he was asleep, and snoring, very loudly. Oh, brother. Better put earplugs on the packing list.
* * *
[262] “THESE ARE ALL fifteen-year-old suits,” Travis said. “Only two of them have actually been in space. They’ve all been sitting in a warehouse for a long time.”
We were all gathered at the ranch, beside the pool. The coffin boxes had been pried open. The space suits, a bright color Travis had called “Commie red,” were packed in a substance Sam had called “excelsior,” that looked like dried brown grass. Didn’t the Russians have Styrofoam peanuts? Travis pulled one suit out of its box and brushed it off.
“Isn’t fifteen years kind of old?” Kelly asked.
“Yes, and no.” He didn’t explain, and Kelly went on.
“And why weren’t they ever used?”
“Obsolescence.”
“Is that good?” Alicia asked. “I mean, are they-”
“Okay? They should be as good as new ones, mostly. I couldn’t afford to buy the new model, chilluns. These’ll have to do.” He removed a helmet from one of the other boxes and twisted it into place. He stood and admired his work.
“What you should know about Russian engineering, crew, is that it often doesn’t have the bells and whistles Americans usually design into their stuff. But it works. This kind of suit protected many a Russki behind during many a lonely man-hour. I’d stack ’em up against NASA suits any day.”
I picked up what looked like an instruction manual from the scattered debris. Naturally, it was printed in Russian.
“Do you read Russian, Travis?”
“Passably well. We’ll get one translated, and I’ll check you out on all the Russian labels that are actually on the suit.”
We helped him tie weights to the arms and legs of the suit and he snapped a fitting from the suit into an air compressor hose. Then we tossed it in the pool and started pumping it full of air.
Pretty soon the surface of the pool was boiling with foam, like we’d dropped in a giant Alka-Seltzer. Kelly turned away, grimacing. I think I may have groaned. I heard the freight train of history pulling away without me. Good-bye, trip to Mars. …
[263] Travis kicked off his shoes and put his wallet on the patio table. He picked up a swim mask and put it over his head, then jumped in the pool. He was down only a short time, then came to the surface and clambered out, sopping wet but grinning.
“All the leaks are coming from the connector gaskets,” he announced.
“This is good news?” Dak wondered.
“All according to plan, Dak. You know, the Smithsonian has dozens, maybe hundreds of space suits in the attic. They’re mostly falling apart, there’s no good way to preserve them. The plasticizers in these suit gaskets are simply going to bleed out eventually. All we have to do is change the gaskets and we’re in business.”
“Can you get them off the shelf?” Sam asked.
“No, they’ll have to be custom-made, but it shouldn’t be hard. I know an outfit in Miami can do it. Alicia, I’d like to put you in charge of-”
“Alicia’s classes are too important,” Kelly said. “Let me take it over, Travis. I’m beginning to have a little spare time, plus it’d be nice to do something with my hands other than type and move a mouse.”
Jubal, Sam, Dak, and I loaded the empty coffins back in the U-Haul, and I took them to the dump, glad Mom had not seen them or the leak-like-a-sieve space suits.
AT THE END of the day we all took Travis to the warehouse to see Red Thunder. His reaction was gratifying: his jaw dropped as his neck craned up.
The cradle was finished, and the central tank had been upended, lowered into place, and braced, awaiting the six other tanks which would provide it with more support.
It looked weird, sticking up like that. The top was off so we could install the flanges and the openings which
would soon hold the five Plexiglas windows of the cockpit, as Travis called it, or the bridge, as Caleb and Sam did.
[264] And all of it painted a bright Chinese red.
Travis took it all in, then grinned at us.
“Ladies and gents,” he said, “for the first time, I feel like we’re going to Mars.”
24
* * *
WE MOUNTED THE six external tanks over the next three days, and it was a perfect example of the learning curve. It took us all day to do the first one, but we did two the second day and the remaining three on the third. And there she stood, basically complete on the outside except for bolting on the tops of five of the tanks.
Tank one contained the air lock. We would enter that tank from the center, as with all the others. There was a deck there, with a hole and a ladder to climb down to the suit locker deck. There the five suits hung on simple racks. There were outlets to charge the suit batteries, and couplings to recharge the backpacks with compressed oxygen. Oxygen instead of the compressed air we’d be breathing aboard ship, because that’s how the suits were designed, and because, even if we could reengineer them, carrying compressed oxygen gave us five times the suit time that compressed air would have.
In the floor of the suit deck was an airtight hatch and another ladder down to the lock itself. When we had that deck finished we all practiced climbing up and down the ladder, fully suited, and operating the locks by ourselves, as we might have to do in an emergency. It was tough going. But we’d never have to do it in full Earth gravity.
[266] Outside the lock we built a platform large enough for four suited people to stand on, surrounded by a safety rail. Then we attached a ramp we could raise or lower with pulleys. It was ugly, but it was simple, and easy to fix if something went wrong.
Tanks two and five carried water and air. Compressed air was in ordinary pressure bottles, ten feet high and about a foot and a half across. The system was arranged so that one system could be entirely shut down without affecting the other, and either system would keep us alive for up to two months. It all fed into a system of fans and ducts and scrubbers. One of us would be awake and in charge of air control twenty-four hours a day, in four-hour shifts. We all had to practice on it until we knew what valve to turn for any possible situation.
Water was in big rubber bladders. We had debated mounting them up high, letting gravity provide our water pressure. But Travis pointed out we were going to have to bring water pumps anyway, in case we had to spend any significant amount of time in weightlessness, such as doing repairs on the ship or rescuing distressed Ares Seven astronauts. So down to the bottom they went.
The plumbing system of Red Thunder was about as basic as you could get: water bladder, pump, a T-joint and pipes that led directly to the cold water spigot over a deep sink, or to our Sears water heater and from there to the sink. The tap was the source for drinking water and bathing water. We were bringing enough clothes to change every day, but if we really felt we had to wash clothes we could do it in that sink.
Bathing would consist of running a measured amount of warm water into a bucket, then sitting on a stool in the bathing room-a prefab shower stall with a drain in the floor-and washing with soap and a washcloth. Alicia wrinkled her nose when we showed her that part of the plans, but said nothing.
But I thought she might mutiny when she saw the plans for the toilet.
“A hole and a bucket?” Alicia said, scandalized.
“We’ll have a toilet seat over the hole,” Travis pointed out.
“Oh, sure. And all the way to Mars and back, I’ll have to put the [267] damn seat down. Dak never puts it down, and I bet none of you do, either.”
Nobody denied it, though Kelly got a case of the giggles which we all caught. Eventually Alicia laughed, too.
“Keep it simple, keep it basic,” Travis said, over and over. “A flush toilet is too complicated, and it wastes water. Same with a shower.”
He was right. We’d discussed all the possibilities before settling on the “one-holer.” People who live in RVs and trailers have what they call gray-water and black-water tanks. Gray water is from the sinks and shower, and black water is from the toilet. We would have a gray-water tank, since all it needed was a pipe from the drain to the waste tank, in the bottom of tank two, and a valve that could be turned if we had to go into free fall, to prevent the water from backing up. As for the black waste…
“Down here we have an ordinary wire dirty-clothes hamper.” Dak showed us when the plans were being finalized. “You put a plastic bag into the rack, you put down the seat, you do your business. Then you take the bag and sprinkle in some of these blue crystals, twist the bag, tie it off, and drop it down the glory hole.”
“What’s this?” Alicia asked, pointing to a square shape on the plans.
“Exhaust fan,” Travis said. “Space stations smell bad. Be sure to turn on the fan when you use the toilet.”
“With a flush toilet you wouldn’t have so much of a problem,” Alicia muttered.
Travis had suggested we simply dump the waste bags over the side.
“You’d have the Greens all over us when we got back,” Dak told him.
“What for? We’re not contaminating the Earth with this sh-… this stuff.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I told him. “Believe me, Travis, my generation doesn’t think logically about pollution. They’d hate us for it.”
“That’s right,” Kelly said, and Alicia nodded.
Travis grinned. “You realize, anything we dumped overboard would be moving at solar escape velocity. Some of it will be doing three million [268] miles an hour. I gotta admit, I’m kind of tickled at the idea that the first man-made object to reach the stars could be a bag of superfast sh- superfast doo-doo.”
“Superfast doo-doo!” Jubal shouted, and slapped his knee. As usual when Jubal heard a good joke, he went around muttering it all day long.
TANKS THREE AND six held fuel and generators and batteries and fuel cells and heaters and air conditioners.
Me and Dak and Salty had debated a long time as to the best source of power. Red Thunder’s electrical needs were not enormous so carrying the means of producing that amount of power was not going to be a problem. But how to produce it?
I favored fuel cells. They are so elegant, it’s hard not to love them. You put in oxygen and hydrogen at one end, and water and power come out the other. But Salty thought they were too prone to failure.
“So just carry a bunch of them,” I suggested.
Dak liked the idea of generators.
“Talk about a proven technology,” he said. “Those things, after me and Dad go over ’em, there’s just no way they can fail.”
And in case they did fail, Dak said, we just bring two.
Salty liked nicad batteries. I thought they were too heavy. Salty said nobody’s supposed to worry about weight, like Travis said.
In the end, we took all three systems. Like everything else on Red Thunder, we wanted triple systems when possible, triple reserves when possible. Any of the three systems could have taken us to Mars and back.
Tank four was reserved for Sam and Dak’s mysterious Mars Traveler, which none of us had seen yet. Dak said all we needed to do to the tank was mount a heavy winch in the top and line it with insulation, as we were doing to all the other tanks. He and Sam promised to have something to show us in two weeks.
* * *
[269] THE CENTER TANK was living quarters.
At the very top was the bridge, Travis’s domain. There was a second chair for a copilot. All of us except Jubal trained on it for a day, but none of us kidded ourselves that if anything happened to Travis we could just step into his shoes.
For navigation we had basic optical instruments and the simplest computer program we could find. With luck, you could shoot a few stars, type in a destination, and the computer would tell you where to point and how hard to push. It even worked that way in training… most of the time. But I crash
ed the simulator Jubal had set up the first five times I tried to land it. And I was the best of the three of us.
“Just don’t get yourself hurt, Travis,” Kelly told him one dismal night after we’d run through the results of the training program.
“Don’t worry,” Travis said with a grin. “I contracted to bring you kids back alive, and to do that I’ve got to watch my own backside, too.”
Below the bridge were the other ships’ systems. There were thirty-five flat TV screens on the walls, larger than the ones on the bridge, one for each of the cameras we had mounted inside and outside the ship. These were good-quality cigarette cameras, smaller than your finger, cheap, and practically indestructible. A few were mounted on motors, but most delivered a static image of the state of the ship. The control consoles for each of the ship’s systems were here, and all four of our acceleration chairs. These were good, sturdy lounge chairs. The only problem I could see with them was they were so comfortable I wondered if I might nod off during an air watch.
The deck below that was the common room. One side was the galley, with a sink, an upright Amana freezer, and a refrigerator about the same size, both of them welded to the deck and fitted with strong latches. The freezer was full of high-end TV dinners from the local gourmet market, and the best brand of frozen pizza we could find. Travis told us the most frequent complaint from long-termers on space station duty was the quality of the food. We carried ice cream and Popsicles, too.
The fridge would hold cans of soda pop, and fresh fruits and vegetables. Alicia demanded we bring whole wheat flour so she could bake [270] bread. I wondered if she’d find time for it, but why not? I liked fresh-baked bread as much as she did. So we packed some cold cuts and peanut butter and jelly, too.
We had a microwave oven and a radiant-heat oven just big enough to heat a frozen pizza or bake a few loaves of bread. Beside them would sit our espresso machine.