John Varley - Red Thunder

There was an aluminum boathouse, prefab like the big barn back at the compound. I couldn’t see what was inside it, but judging from the [50] boat trailer sitting on a small concrete boat ramp, it was a fairly substantial craft.

Across the lake, maybe a couple miles away, I saw a few houses and other docks. Probably some good catfish in the lake. Maybe bass. I don’t much see the point of bass when you can catch catfish.

Last year’s crop of lemons were just dried rinds under the trees. It could be a heck of a nice place if somebody cared for it a little, I thought as I made my way back through the grove. But it would be a lot of work.

Off to my left as I went back toward the house was the prefab barn where the little chubby guy had been that night. The building sat on a low hill… well, call it a gentle rise. Florida is a vertically challenged state, and we natives tend to get way too enthusiastic about anything that raises you ten feet off the landscape.

That barn was by far the best-kept thing I could see.

I was about to head back to Dak and Alicia-I could see them sitting on the cushions of the lounge chair nuzzling each other, so I figured they’d managed to work it out-when my eye was caught by a glint of light on the ground in the direction of the barn. I’d probably never have seen it at all if it hadn’t been rolling slowly down the hill.

No, not rolling. It was blowing, like a soap bubble in the air. It was hitting the blades of grass, but not bending them. In fact, for a while I thought it was a soap bubble, and I watched it, waiting for it to pop. It never did, so I leaned over and picked it up.

It was a little bigger than a Ping-Pong ball but it had a silvery, mirror surface like a Christmas tree ornament. It didn’t seem to weigh anything at all. I held it up, between my thumb and two fingers… and almost lost it. It wanted to squirt right out of my grip.

I tried to toss it from one hand to the other, but it wouldn’t do it. It was too light, it kept getting slowed down by the air.

I really liked the thing, right from the first, so I went to my borrowed bike and put the bubble in my helmet… and changed my life and a lot of other lives forever.

AS I REACHEDthe concrete patio Dak was shaking charcoal from a sack into a big kettle barbecue. One of the sliding screen doors to the house opened quickly, on a motorized track, and Colonel Travis Broussard came out, holding a platter of raw steaks in one hand and a cocktail in the other. He glanced at me, grinned, and put the platter on the big picnic table. I shook his hand.

“You must be Manny,” he said. “Dak’s told me about you. Why don’t you go inside and grab something to drink out of the icebox? I got nineteen kinds of imported beer and I don’t check ID.”

“A little early for me, but thanks.” I went to the patio door, which got out of my way as I was reaching to slide it open.

“Never too early for Trav,” Alicia said as the door closed behind me. She was standing at a counter in the kitchen, looking out the window at Dak and Travis. “Man’s a big drinker. Look there, three empties and they all still got dew on the outside.” I saw the beer cans next to a big refrigerator. I mean, a huge refrigerator, the kind they use in convenience stores, with glass doors so you can pick out what you want before you open the doors. Beer and soda, Gatorade, fancy water, some bottles of white wine. Pretty much anything you’d like in the way of [52] something cool. Beside it was a restaurant-sized ice maker and on shelves above that a real professional bartender’s selection of hard stuff, racks of clear stemware hanging from the ceiling, other barware behind glass-doored cabinets. And on the other side of that, another refrigerator and a huge freezer.

“Look at this,” Alicia said with disgust. She opened a refrigerator door and the big shelves were almost empty. A brown half head of lettuce, a couple fuzzy gray tomatoes, half a chicken and some bones drying out on a plate, a stick of oleo.

“And this.” Inside the freezer were stacks and stacks of the same kind of thick sirloins he had carried outside and plastic bags of Ore-Ida frozen steak fries.

“Aren’t you the nosy one?” I said. She frowned, then decided not to take offense. I got a can of 7-Up out of the fridge and popped the top.

“It’s been a least a month since anybody’s had any vegetables here other than French fries. There’s cases of ketchup in one of those cupboards, I guess some folks call that a vegetable. I don’t see any fruit at all. The only reason there’s no dirty dishes in here is that nobody uses any dishes except forks and steak knives.” She tossed a pair of plastic salad tongs into a matching plastic bowl and sighed. “I told ’em I was coming in here to make a salad to go with the steaks. I’ll bet Mr… sorry, I mean Colonel Broussard had a good laugh about that one.”

I went over to a door I thought might be a pantry and pulled it open. Sure enough. The room was bigger than room 201 at the Blast-Off and there was enough food in it to feed a family of five for several years. On the floor were sealed metal barrels of dry pasta, rice, flour, sugar, stuff like that, safe from bugs and rats. On the shelves above them were cans of just about everything, tuna and Spam, peaches and pears, soups to nuts. All of it was covered with dust. I started tossing cans to Alicia.

“Pinto beans, wax beans, green beans, garbanzos, lima beans, kidney beans, black beans, aha! Even some pinquitos.” She dropped the fourth can while trying to catch the fifth, then another, and another, and we were both laughing as I tossed her more cans. “Make him a three-bean salad, why don’t you? Or maybe a seven-bean.”

“I can make something out of this he’ll hate .”

[53] I wandered into the living room. It was fairly neat, but dusty and stale smelling, with the occasional sweatshirt or pair of dirty socks tossed on the floor.

“Still early stages,” Alicia said from the door. “No puke that ain’t been mopped up. He still picks up stuff, when he trips over it.”

“Maybe he’s just sloppy.”

She laughed. “Manny, this is a military guy. If he started out sloppy, you wouldn’t be able to bulldoze through this place. He’s gone downhill a lot since he was a spaceman. They don’t let you clutter things up on a station. You know that.”

She was right, I did.

“He probably doesn’t even think he’s an alcoholic,” she said.

I turned back to the living room. There were a lot of framed photos on the walls, mostly of him with famous people, including the one of the President giving him his medal. I recognized some of the faces. One section showed two young girl children. Daughters? No wife anywhere I could see.

There were gaps on these walls, too, rectangles lighter than the wall. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out pictures had once hung there. Pictures of people the colonel didn’t like anymore, was my guess.

The one bare wall turned out not to be a wall at all, but an eight-by-twelve-foot Sony Hi-Dee screen. The audio parts were hidden behind a mahogany panel, and a dozen speakers hung from the ceiling. Here was something very expensive that I could really appreciate. If he had termites in the walls, they’d be deaf by now.

I looked around once more, taking it all in. How the rich live. I’d never had much chance to get a close look at it.

I figured I wouldn’t have all that much trouble swapping lifestyles with him.

ALICIA CAME OUTof the kitchen with her big bean salad in a bowl, Broussard trailing dubiously behind her. I followed them to the patio, where Dak was just flipping the steaks, wearing a grease-spattered apron. Broussard took over the grill.