John Varley - Red Thunder

“I know that.”

“I be doin’ okay, cher ,” Jubal said. “I been worryin’ ’bout you , oh yes, but you done good by me, you has.”

Travis looked up and spread his hands in surrender.

“Okay. We’ll build the ship.”

None of us said anything. You could feel the excitement in the air, but there was no celebration.

Just as well.

“As soon as we get permission from your parents.”

TRAVIS WAS GOOD. I think even Mom and Aunt Maria would have agreed, though nothing in their faces and their postures would admit [193] to it. Sam Sinclair just sat, neutral, not accepting and not rejecting Travis’s words. Sam Sinclair was a cautious man.

I knew a terrible surmise was growing in my mother’s mind. Why was Travis telling them all this? There was really only one way to go with it, wasn’t there? But she was afraid to let herself acknowledge it, because then she’d have an impossible problem. How do I tell Manny he can’t go… . when I can’t tell him he can’t go?

Travis outlined the present situation in space, with the Chinese due to arrive on Mars first, and the Americans taking a new, radical, and untested technology on a different path, which could not beat the Chinese… and might get them killed.

The spiel faltered only when he tried to get Jubal to help him explain the problems Jubal had found with the “Vaseline” drive. Jubal just wasn’t up to it. His best effort so far had been calling his bubble-generating device a “Squeezer,” and even then his mangled syntax had rendered it as “Squozer.”

“Get on with it, Travis,” my mom said, eventually. “If Jubal says it’s going to blow up, I’ll believe it’s gonna blow up.”

“That’s enough for me, too,” Sam said.

So Travis moved on to Part Two. That was good. Part Two was the real crowd pleaser. In Part Two he got to put the Squeezer through its paces.

Sam Sinclair sat up alertly from the very first time Travis made a silver bubble appear in the air. Mom and Aunt Maria looked puzzled. Clearly they understood this was something out of the ordinary, but they weren’t sure why. Travis made the bubbles pop loudly both from vacuum and from compressed air. Then he fitted one into a small device Jubal had made. With Jubal operating his controller, they made compressed air leak out of a minute pinhole, what Jubal called a “dis-continual-uity,” and particle physicists would more likely call a “discontinuity.” He let them feel the air coming out, and experience the pressure the little thing exerted on their hands.

“That’s thrust. It’s the same thing that happens when all the smoke and flames come out the bottom of a VStar. You can fire all your thrust in a few minutes and get up to a very high speed and coast all the way [194] to Mars. Or you can fire continually, like the Ares Seven . You’ll speed up slowly, but eventually you could end up going faster than the Chinese ship.”

“This don’t make too much sense to me,” Aunt Maria admitted.

“I know, I know,” Travis said. “Nobody gets this stuff easily,” he went on, “not without studying physics for years. Because it goes against everything you know. Cars don’t work like that, do they?”

Mom tried a question. “But with this thing Jubal has made…” I think I was the only one who knew how much this was costing her, to ask a question that might sound like a dumb question. Mom was mortified by her lack of education, and she didn’t deal with mortification well. “With this Squeezer thing, you can fire it all the way to Mars and never run out of gas?”

“Exactly. We get the best of both worlds with the Squeezer. We can fire a powerful rocket, the equal of any rocket that’s ever been built in terms of thrust… and we can fire it all the way there!”

Short pause for everyone to think about that, me included. I still found it almost impossible to believe. Free energy . The world had never seen anything like it. And every time I thought about it, it scared me more.

Sam Sinclair, too.

“I don’t like what I’m hearing here,” he said.

“How’s that, Sam?”

“Like you said. It’s a lot of power. In my experience, power is dangerous, if you don’t handle it right.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more.”

“How big can Jubal make these things?”

Travis paused, then looked at his cousin. I think he might have prayed a little, too.

“How about it, Jubal? How big?”

Jubal had been dying inside for almost an hour now. He hated it that Mom and Maria and Sam, his friends, were acting so hostile, and he hated it even more that he was the cause of it. Or the thing he had created, which was about the same thing.

“I don’ know, me. Plenty big, oh yeah.”

[195] “How about a ballpark figure?” Sam asked.

Travis fielded it, and Jubal relaxed some.

“We can make enough power to blast at one gee all the way to Mars and back,” he said. “That’s all we need to know to build the ship.”

“Yeah. But there’s power, and then there’s power . You know what I’m saying?”

“I think I do.”

“Why you? Why should you and Jubal control all that power? Shouldn’t it go to… I don’t know. The people in charge?”

Dak was looking at his father with admiration in his eyes… and panic everywhere else. Proud of the old man for seeing to the core of the issue, the part we’d hardly discussed, worried that the cat was coming out of the bag.

“Do you trust your government that far, Sam?”

“I’m an American.”

“So am I, and God bless her, forever. But that’s not what I asked you.”

Sam said nothing, but nodded slightly, allowing Travis the point.

“Why me?” Travis said. “Better ask why us? Because it’s on us now. Not just me and Jubal, and not just your sons and Kelly and Alicia. You, too, the three of you. We nine people are now the only people on the planet who know about this… and if there had been any way to keep your children out of it, I would have. But for better or worse, Jubal discovered it, and he didn’t know what he had… sorry, Jubal…”

“It’s okay, cher . I ain’t got no practicals about me, no.”

“He means he never sees the practical side of something he makes. That’s my job. Anyway, Manny found out about it, and that makes all of us responsible for it.”

He sighed and shook his head.

“I started out here asking you all to keep this matter private, to never tell anyone about it. I see now I can’t hold you to your promises about that. It’s too much. Sam, Maria, Betty, if any of you think the thing to do here is to turn it over to the government, say the word, and I’m on the phone to Washington.”

[196] I hope I concealed my horror a little better than Dak did. He looked like he’d been stuck with a hot poker. Alicia looked worried, too, but patted his knee. Kelly was imperturbable. Don’t let anybody know your business, she had once told me, and in this case it meant not showing your feelings openly.

“I’ll reserve that decision for now,” Sam said.

Mom and Maria looked at each other, then at Travis.

“Go on,” Mom said.

“Thank you. I promise you this. If we give this thing to anybody, it will be the United States.”

“If? What’s the alternative?” Mom asked. She was leaning forward now, a lot more interested in practical questions than blue-sky engineering. “I presume you mean sell it, not give it away. Or do you mean you might just hold on to it?”

“Forever? That might be an option if only me and Jubal knew about it. I’m not dissing anybody here, but secrets always leak, if more than one person knows the secret. I assume there are people who are looking for us. Some of them might resort to some pretty strenuous methods to get the secret. But I don’t think I’d try to hold on to it even if I was the only one who knew. Because someday someone else will discover this and… well, I can think of a lot of possibilities, none of them very good.”