John Varley - Red Thunder

Dak looked over and grinned at me from under his helmet.

“Just dropped by a few days ago to see how the poor bastard was doing,” he said. “Cousin Jubal had told him all about that night and Travis wanted to say thanks. I think he was pretty impressed we didn’t take him for everything but the lint in his drawers. He’s a man who has some experience in these matters.”

“I’ll bet,” I laughed.

“Oh, yes,” Alicia said. “Travis has been mugged before.”

[58] She was puttering along in her little 1965 VW Bug, ahead of us on the bikes. Dak had been helping her restore it. In fact, that little Bug was how they met in the first place. The outside was coated with primer except for the two front fenders, which were “screamin’ yellow and hollerin’ orange,” according to my mom. Alicia hadn’t yet decided what color to go with.

“We cracked a few brews, sat around shooting the breeze, making that rubber crocodile walk around on the bottom of the pool.”

“And he offered to do our homework for us?”

“Not at first,” Dak admitted. “He said, any little thing he could do for us, all we gotta do is ask. The dude may be a drunk, but he knows a lot of people, and I think a fair number of them still like him. These are the kind of people who can drop a hint, call in a favor from the right person at the right time, I figured. We got a long ways to go between here and the moon, Manny my man. We need to use every leg up we can get.”

“No argument, pal,” I said. “I just wish you’d let me in a little sooner. I felt like I was crashing somebody else’s party.”

“Sorry about that, man.”

There was a momentary silence in our earphones.

“He was a hero, once,” I said.

“No fooling?”

So I told them the story Pig had given me about saving the California’s crew and passengers. Dak loved it about as much as I had.

“Damn!” he said. “I’d pay to see that. Let’s hop a plane to Africa, Alicia.”

“Happy to, soon as you can pay for it.”

“Yeah… how come I couldn’t find any of that, Manny? I went to the NASA site, same as you. Didn’t find diddly.”

“For some reason, NASA wants to pretend Colonel Broussard never existed. They can’t, but they sure did minimize him. I don’t know why, Pig wouldn’t say.”

“Are we invited over again?”

“If you don’t mind sirloin for breakfast.”

“One more thing I’d like to know.”

[59] “Shoot.”

“Alicia, how did you find out Dak had been coming out here?”

“Because I’m nosy,” she laughed.

“You can say that again,” Dak said. “Raiding the man’s pantry.”

“He ate three helpings of the salad.”

“Salad? That what that was, salad?”

“It doesn’t have to have lettuce, Dak.”

“In my house it does. And tomatoes.”

“Alicia, you never did answer my question,” I said.

“Oh, that. You know Dak installed that inertial tracker-and I never knew why, since he already had the NavStar unit.”

“Just another gadget he couldn’t resist, I guess,” I said.

“Hey, Manny, Alicia. I’m right here, don’t forget.”

“Well, Dak forgot that machine keeps a record of your location and your route…”

“That’s it, woman!” Dak exploded.

“… it keeps that data for two weeks unless somebody remembers to erase it…”

“Who figured I needed to erase it? Damn, I’m surrounded by spies.”

THE BIG NEWSat the NASA site that day was the departure of the American mission to Mars.

The crew had gone up the night we almost killed Travis. The ship had been finished when the final components were delivered two weeks before that. Captain Aquino had used the intervening weeks to conduct as many tests and drills as were possible in the limited time available to him before the very tight launch window closed.

I watched the countdown, and the totally unimpressive lighting of the plasma torch at the rear of the long, lumpy, completely unlovely congregate of landers, orbiters, propulsion modules, reactors, solar panels… and doghouses and kitchen sinks, for all I knew, and its departure for the Red Planet.

Its very sloooooow departure. Proving once again that, aside from the liftoff from Earth, space travel was not and probably never would be a [60] feast for the eyes. Aside from the deathly quiet, everything I’d ever witnessed in space happened at a pace that would make a glacier look like an avalanche. No matter that everything I was seeing was hurtling around the planet at a speed of about sixteen thousand miles per hour. You couldn’t see anything move. You never could.

The plasma engine was slow but steady. It was fifteen minutes before the mission could be seen to have moved at all.

It didn’t bother me. It was beautiful.

I GOT MYhousekeeping chores done, then sat at the computer working on my calculus lessons. I did three weeks’ worth of reading and assignments in about three hours, now that so much more of it made sense to me. In fact, I found myself two days ahead of the recommended syllabus, for the first time since I’d enrolled. When I clicked the computer off, it was with a sense of satisfaction I hadn’t felt since graduation.

Then I turned my attention to my little silver bubble.

It had been nagging at me all day and my curiosity was killing me.

I had put the bubble in one of my desk drawers, because it didn’t want to stay in the same place. It drifted with the tiniest air current, like smoke. How could something so light be so tough?

Start by defining the problem. It’s light, it’s tough. How light? How tough?

The best scale I had access to was the postal scale in the office, and I knew without having to try that I wouldn’t be able to weigh the bubble with that scale. I wouldn’t even be able to get it to stay on the platform long enough to register any weight. By extension, I couldn’t [62] see how it would register anything on the analytical balance at school. But it couldn’t be weightless, could it?

Now, hold on, was I getting weight confused with mass, like so many people did?

It stood to reason that if I could get the bubble moving, it would have some inertia, wouldn’t it? If I could toss it against a scale, it would have to register something, right? Maybe. But I couldn’t test that at home, because I didn’t have any way of creating a vacuum to do the experiment in. Air density alone seemed to be enough to bring the bubble to a halt in midair as soon as it left my hand.

Okay, that got me nowhere, let’s move on to the next question.

Is the bubble frictionless?

It sure felt like it. It was very odd to hold it in my hand. I could feel the presence of its shape, but I didn’t actually feel anything. No texture, no unevenness, no pits. It was impossible to pick it up or hold it just between the tips of my index finger and thumb.

It was possible to secure the bubble using two fingers and my thumb. Not just the tips of those digits, though. Holding it with fingers curling around it established a multitude of contact points, so that if I held it that way, loosely, it would finally behave itself. More or less. If I squeezed it too hard the bubble would still squirt away, like when you squeeze too tight on a bar of soap.

So now where was I?

Results of first round of experiments:

It seems to be weightless.

It seems to be frictionless.

I didn’t need to log on to my physics textbooks to know both of those things were impossible, in the real world. Weightlessness, frictionlessness, those ideas were useful in math, to define a pure condition the real world never attains.