John Varley - Red Thunder

“I t’ought I fix dat, me,” Jubal said, and bent over his mechanical pet, stuffing the stray eyeball back in its socket. He was dressed like he was the first time I saw him, in khaki shorts, very loud aloha shirt, and flip-flops. A pudgy teddy-bear of a man, with his wild white beard and hairy arms and legs.

“Jubal, this is Manny, my best friend,” Dak said.

“Meet him already,” Jubal said, and turned and waddled off. Dak looked at me and shrugged. We decided to follow him.

Jubal’s barn was full of dinosaurs. Most of them were torn into a lot of pieces with wires and tubes sticking out and metal bones and hydraulic muscles exposed.

“This is where old animatronics go to die,” Dak explained. “When an attraction at some of the theme parks stops being popular, Travis and Jubal go buy it, cheap.”

We moved out of the dino graveyard and in among a bunch of what looked like mad scientist equipment. There were things that made yellow and purple sparks, and racks of tubes and glassware with colored fluids moving through.

“Looks like Doctor Frankenstein’s been here, right?” Dak said. “This is more props and stuff. They bought it off some of the movie studios. Like this Jacob’s ladder, and this Tesla coil. And this Van de Graaf generator. Supposed to make your hair stand on end from static electricity.” He put his hand on a brushed aluminum globe on the end of an aluminum pole. Nothing happened. “Well, it does for you white folks, anyway. Us AAs, our hair too kinky.” He pointed at me and as his finger got close a spark jumped-and so did I.

[76] “Hey, Jube,” he called out, “how about we turn off some of the special effects? We can hardly hear each other talk in here.”

In a moment all the sparking, spitting, popping, and hissing props got quiet. I followed Dak to the only open area we’d seen so far. Standing in the middle of it was Jubal, hands in his pants pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels, looking pleased with himself.

“Manny, how you like dis crazy place, you?”

“It’s fantastic, Jubal.”

“Every boy’s dream clubhouse,” Dak agreed, and Jubal roared with laughter, reminding me again of Santa Claus.

“Jus’ junk, mostly,” Jubal said. “Mos’ dis stuff jus’ git t’rowed away.”

“What do you do with it?” I asked.

“Parts, mos’ly. Stuff in dere custom made, sometime I can twis’ it around a little, make it do somethin’ else.”

“He’s working on a robot,” Dak said. “Come on, Jubal, show it to him.”

He took us to the far side of the barn, where the equipment wasn’t quite so eye-catching, but obviously a lot more useful. Tables and shelves were covered with tools and instruments and work in progress. I saw what I was pretty sure was an electron microscope, and a mass spectrometer. There were also more ordinary machines lined against a back wall, drill press, lathe, table saw, stuff like that.

But what my eye went to was a table with a metal skeleton on it. The table was waist high, a good level to work.

“Did you see that video, ‘Frankenstein Meets Madonna’?” Dak asked. “This table was one of the props. Show him, Jubal.”

Jubal spun a wheel at the side of the table and it slowly rotated until it was at a forty-five-degree angle. The thing on the table didn’t have a head, but the torso, hips, arms and legs were all in the right spots.

Jubal picked up a robotic hand from his worktable. He pulled some levers at the base, and fingers twitched. Jubal seemed wildly pleased by each motion, like a kid with a toy. That’s how Jubal seemed to approach all his inventions. Just a big, balding kid on Christmas morning.

“De han’s, dey sto’ bought, from… Sears and Roebuck.”

[77] Dak said, “Like, a catalog. Off the shelf, right, Jubal?”

“Off de shelf, yes! Dese from Universal Positronics. Dey figure out han’s long time ago. Travis, he get ’em cheap, him.”

“So he’s got hands from the Sears, Robot catalog,” I said.

Jubal looked puzzled for a moment, then his eyes widened.

“Sears Robot! From de Sears Robot!” And he laughed so hard he had to grab the table behind him to keep from falling over. And hey, I know it wasn’t all that funny, but his laughing was the worst kind of infectious. You just could not watch Jubal laughing without laughing yourself.

Jubal finally calmed down, but the rest of the day he kept muttering “Sears Robot” to himself, and then laughing aloud.

“We figger, we make a robot can really walk, we make us a fis’ful a money,” Jubal said.

“You bet, Jube, a fistful,” Dak said.

“Here, watch dis, y’all.” He cranked the table so it was perpendicular to the floor. He flipped some switches in the skeleton’s belly. Jubal took the thing by one arm and pulled. It put out one foot, then the other. Now it was standing on its own.

“Gyros,” Dak explained.

“Yessum, but dese don’ hold him up like a… like a…”

“Steadicam?” Dak asked.

“Yeah, dat, what you say. Dese gyros tell him which way up be.”

“Like an inertial tracker,” I said.

“Yeah, what you say.” He gave the thing a shove. Instead of falling backward it put a leg out and placed one foot behind itself, then straightened again. Jubal shoved it again, harder. It staggered, then it stabilized again.

“Pretty good,” I said.

“Yeah, I know what you’re thinking,” Dak said. “You’ve seen it before. We’ve even seen something like this climbing stairs.”

“I’ve never seen one run,” I said.

“Dis one, neither,” Jubal said, sadly. “Need some better sof’ware, me.”

“Well, I think it’s pretty damn fine already,” Dak said, and I agreed.

[74] “ Cher , sell him for twenny t’ousand dollah, we make a fis’ful a money!”

“Twenty thousand…” Dak was grinning at me. “What does something like this usually cost?”

“Manny, no need to even walk into the showroom unless you can write a check for half a million. Jubal thinks he can make one for under ten grand.”

“Maybe I kin,” Jubal said, scratching his head. “ ’Course, I done already spend fi’ty t’ousand on dis one!”

It was an awesome idea. A humanoid robot cheaper than a new car? I wondered if it could clean toilets.

“So what all do you figure it will do?” I asked Jubal. “Aside from walk around, I mean. Will it clean windows?”

“I fought long time on dat question, me. Dis t’ing, it could carry roun’ a bag full a dem golfin’ clubs, I t’ink.” He put his fists on his hips and glared at me.

“Robo-Caddy,” Dak said. “I think you got something there, Jube. And we could also walk dogs.”

Jubal frowned at the floor again, and twisted his shirttails.

“Mebbe,” he said. “Mebbe we could.”

He turned away from us and went to a worktable across the room, where he started sorting stuff that had already looked fairly well sorted to me.

‘‘He looks like I hurt his feelings,” I whispered to Dak.

“Not your fault, man. I’d a done the same thing but Travis clued me in. Heck, it’s my fault, I guess, I forgot to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“It’s more about… well, Manny, Jubal is some kind of genius, but he don’t have a practical bone in his body. He makes these wonderful things and doesn’t have any idea at all of what to do with them. Travis always figures that out. You and me, we think it over ten minutes, we’ll come up with a dozen things to do with it. Jubal won’t.”

Jubal had taken the top off one of those big glass jars you see in convenience stores with spicy sausages floating around in them. It was half full of shiny silver Christmas tree ornaments.