John Varley - Red Thunder

Jubal brooded again, then looked at me.

“ ’Merican ship, it don’ use reg’lar rockets, hah? Somethin’ else, I figger.”

“It’s called VASIMR,” I said. “Variable Specific Impulse Magneto-plasma Rocket. It’s a plasma drive, very high specific impulse, very low acceleration. But you can keep thrusting through the whole mission. It adds up.”

[136] “I’m afraid you lost me,” Kelly said.

“Those astronauts a while ago,” I said. “They looked like they were weightless, but they weren’t, not quite. Their engine is firing, but it’s only putting out a fraction of one gee. Not enough to hold you in your seat. The VASIMR is slow, but it’s steady.”

“The tortoise and the hare,” Alicia suggested.

“… Sort of,” Dak said. “But this time, the bunny wins.”

Jubal was still pondering. At last he looked at me.

“Manuel, mon cher , I need to know all I kin fine out ’bout this VASIMR.”

“Sure, Jubal,” I said. “I can show you some websites that will get you started.”

“Good ’nuff,” he said, and slapped his knees and headed for the door. I heard him mutter as he walked ahead of me to my room.

“Fus’ people on Mars got to be Americans,” he said.

If anybody could make it so, I would have bet on Jubal.

THE SUN HADgone down, and the pool party was almost over.

The Golden Manatee manager had returned to his glittering tourist trap.

Aunt Maria had just brought out her sixth and last pan full of muffins and they were disappearing about as fast as the others had, even though everyone said they’d already had too many.

Mom was sitting in a plastic lawn chair, talking guns and shooting with Ralph Shabazz, who owned the pawn shop a few blocks away.

Dak was in the pool with a few of my old classmates from Gus Grissom High, using an old volleyball to play some variation of water polo with no goal cage.

Alicia was tidying up the snack table, wondering if she should make another bowl of tofu punch for people to throw in the potted plants.

Kelly was sharing a lounge chair with me. Since the chair had been designed for one, it took some squirming and a great degree of closeness to share it, but that was okay with me. She had had one drink over her usual limit and was making hickeys on my neck when she wasn’t running her tongue all around my ear.

There were half a dozen guests still present, milling around as guests [138] do when they’re not sure if they should go home or stick around for one more free beer.

That’s when the red and black Hummer pulled in. The windshield was spattered with bugs. There was a brief toot of the Hummer’s horn and Travis got out, waving and smiling at us.

THE SIX OFus, the Rancho Broussard crowd, were gathered in Jubal’s room half an hour later. Alicia sipped at a 7-Up and the rest of us opted for bottles of beer.

For a while nobody talked about what we all wanted to hear. He told us a few unlikely stories about adventures on the road not connected with his search for answers about the bubbles, and we filled him in on events at the Blast-Off. It all seemed interesting at the time, but looking at it later, what really went on? Jubal won a lot of Monopoly games, people checked in, people checked out, we repaired and filled the pool. Story of my life, so far. Listening to it, I vowed even more strongly to be out of here come this time next year, even if it meant finding a job desk-clerking in California… or Maine, or Alaska, or Timbuktu. Anywhere.

At last Travis settled back against the headboard of Jubal’s bed, where he was sprawled, looking like he’d been driving a long time. Most of the day, he told us later.

“Well, friends,” he said, “I know a lot about what the bubbles are not .”

Dak groaned.

“Yeah, it is discouraging. Most of what I know now, we knew before I left, only now I know it even more so, out to the limits of currently available testing.

“It’s hard. Diamonds make no mark.

“It’s tough. A big hydraulic press ruptured itself trying to crack it. Everything I fired at it bounced off, from a high-velocity bullet to high-energy protons in an atom smasher, to coherent laser light powerful enough to knock a plane out of the sky.

“It’s reflective. Perfectly reflective. One hundred percent of visible [139] light that hits it comes right back. Same with gamma radiation, radio waves… probably neutrinos, if I could figure out how to measure neutrino reflectivity.

“I declare to you now, friends, this thing is the most significant discovery of the twenty-first century, sure-fire Nobel Prize material… and it scares me silly.”

“What for, Travis?” Alicia asked. “Jubal deserves a Nobel Prize.”

“You bet he does, hon. But I don’t think he wants one, do you, Jube?”

Jubal, who had been studying the new Reebok sneakers on his feet, looked up, shivered and shook his head, and looked down again.

“Jubal wouldn’t enjoy it, Alicia. Big fuss like that, reporters all over the place, buying a tuxedo and going to Stockholm to meet the king…”

Jubal shivered some more, and I thought he was about to bolt out of the room, looking for his pirogue boat to row around the lake. But Travis steadied him with a squeeze on his shoulder, and Jubal settled back on the floor.

“There’s a side to this thing you may not have thought of. Lots of power wrapped up in these.” He took a silver bubble from his pocket and held it carefully up to the light. “Free energy. Don’t look for that in any physics book. Energy is paid for, always . Only not here. Jubal’s Squeezer works without using any energy I can detect. You saw how much power was unleashed when I… stupidly… turned one of them off.”

“But that wasn’t power,” Kelly said. “That was just a vacuum. Wasn’t it?”

“It takes power to make a vacuum,” I told her.

“That’s pretty much it,” Travis agreed. “Reverse it, Kelly. You know it takes power to compress air into one of the bubbles, because you hear the explosion when the bubble goes away. Same with the vacuum, only in reverse.”

“I don’t know anything much at all about this,” Kelly said, with a smile. “I think I follow you, though.”

“Me, too,” Alicia confirmed.

[140] “So…” Travis said, and scowled. “I suppose there are things we could make to take advantage of the bubbles’ perfect reflectivity. I can think of a few. And as for its durability, everlasting ball bearings would be just the beginning.

“But it just stands to reason that the application most people will be most interested in is the ability to make a big bang. A real big bang.”

“A really, really big bang,” Dak said, and I knew he’d been thinking pretty much like I had, though we’d never talked about it.

“Lots of money in big, big bangs,” Travis said. “And I’m not talking about fireworks, sorry, Jubal.”

“No problem, Travis,” Jubal said, still studying his shoes.

“The people who like big bangs the most are the generals, of course. Put a small one of these in a cartridge, turn off the bubble, you got a free bullet. Put one in a steel pineapple, you got a free grenade. Make a real big one full of vacuum, you could probably implode a building. Jubal, how big can these things get?”

He looked up again, briefly, and shrugged.

“Don’ know, me. Maybe not too much bigger than you seen.”

“That would be a relief,” Travis said. “But I’m not going to put it in the bank just yet. Thing is, you and me all know that some of the people who like big bangs are not very nice people at all. Think about a terrorist who gets his hand on a Squeezer. Free bombs, an unlimited supply.