John Varley - Red Thunder

“You didn’t have to. I could see that.”

“When I was young, boys always wanted to be policemen, or firemen, or cowboys. Jet pilots. They usually gave it up later.”

“I’m not going to give it up.”

“I know that.” She shivered. “I hate those things, those VStar things. I’m always afraid they’ll blow up. I have nightmares about them falling down on us.”

“They’re pretty safe, Mom.”

“Don’t you start lying to me tonight, boy. Travis didn’t lie, or I don’t think he did, so don’t you start. I know they’re not as dangerous as I fear they are… but you can’t tell me something like that is safe as a hobbyhorse, either.”

“Okay.”

[206] “After your father died, you were all I had to live for. I could hardly bear to watch you cross the street. When you flew off on that airplane, I just knew it was going to fall out of the sky.”

She was talking about my one trip out of Florida, to spend a month with my mother’s parents in Minnesota. Mom had thought they might be holding out an olive branch, but it turned out they still couldn’t stand their little spic grandson. It was a total disaster, and I was never so glad to get any place as I was to get back home.

“Well,” she finally sighed, “I’m still going to talk more to Sam Sinclair about this… but what he said sure seems to sum it up. If it wasn’t this, it’d be something else, wouldn’t it?”

“Probably so,” I admitted. She put an arm around me and hugged tight.

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you, my only son. Stay alive for me, please.”

“I’ll try.”

I couldn’t remember ever seeing my mother cry, and she didn’t cry then, either. But she had to hurry to the door.

When she opened it Maria was standing there, not even pretending she hadn’t been listening. We both heard Mom’s quick steps on the stairs going down, then Maria leaned in the door and spoke softly.

“When I was eight and your father six,” she said, “we and seven other family members came over on a raft no bigger than my kitchen. Seven days we floated, with no food, the last two days without water. Your family is tough, Manuelito, we’re survivors. Mars will be a piece of cake, eh?” She winked at me.

“I am so proud of you. Your father would be proud of you. And your mother will be proud of you, too. Now go to sleep.”

“ ’Night, Tia Maria .”

SO WE HADthe go-ahead to build us a spaceship.

Hooray!

So we buckled down to work…

And nothing happened.

Nothing seemed to happen, for a while, anyway. Our biggest accomplishment during that early period was Kelly’s searching for and finding the ideal industrial facility where we could put the thing together and not be bothered too much.

But the first step of a project like this was planning. We didn’t know quite where to begin. In fact, for the first three days or so, Dak and I felt the whole load of this insane idea fall squarely on our backs, and we were terrified. Because Travis said that, at the beginning, this was our ship to design, and he’d consult, he’d help, he’d move mountains if he could… but getting started was up to us.

Actually there was what you might call a pre-preliminary stage. There were legal and financial questions to settle.

Legal? Are you seriously suggesting we bring lawyers into this, Travis? Dak and Alicia and I were appalled. Jubal just stayed out of it, [208] content to let Travis, his loco parent, handle his affairs. Only Kelly saw the wisdom in it. Count on the rich girl to understand.

“Believe me, sweetness,” she told me one night, “the best way to turn dear friends into deadly enemies is to have a handshake deal on an enterprise as complicated and potentially profitable as this one is. We don’t need to spell out every penny, but we need to outline the shape of the thing, the broad strokes.”

I certainly wasn’t going to argue. It was her fifty million pennies, and fifty million from Jubal, that made the thing possible in the first place. Myself, I’d have been happy to work for union wages and let the two of them split all the profits, if any.

In the end, Dak and Alicia and I had to lobby hard against her first proposal, which was a simple division of any profits into six equal shares.

“Not fair, not fair at all,” Dak said, and Alicia and I backed him up. “No way you two dudes put up all the money and don’t get back but a sixth.”

Eventually, after some dickering, Travis came up with a compromise. Kelly would get twenty-five percent, Jubal twenty-five, and the other fifty percent would be split three ways between me, Dak, and Alicia.

“What about you?” I asked him.

“My share is in Jubal’s, as always.”

Before we even got to the money part we had formed a corporation so things could be settled by voting. That was complicated enough in and of itself, even with Travis’s lawyer helping smooth the way. We were officially the Red Thunder Corporation.

I started to think that, after this, the engineering part would seem simple.

SHORTLY AFTER TRAVISreturned from visiting his daughters he and Jubal left for two weeks of testing the Squeezer.

“This time we’ll talk it over first,” he had said. “If I’d had us put our heads together before I dragged you all out into the swamp we might not be looking over our shoulders for secret agents now. And by the [209] way, if any of you see me running off like that again, I want you to bring it up, okay?”

What he proposed was to go on the road with Jubal and test more toy rockets.

“They saw something take off from the Everglades. I know a place we can do static testing quietly. But since it’s no longer possible to retain total secrecy, my thinking is that it would do us a lot of good if we kept them looking… in the wrong places. What if they detect another launch, but from North Dakota? Then another in Texas, and then one in Nevada. My feeling is, if they have to look all over the country, it will spread them too thin to do much good. Comments?”

“More launches will make them more interested,” Alicia had said. “Maybe if we just leave it alone, they’ll think the Everglades test was… I don’t know, a faulty radar or something.”

“Good point. But this bogey would have appeared on multiple screens. I think they’ll be looking hard, and they’ll keep on looking, whether it’s one launch or a dozen.”

“I think Travis is right,” Kelly said.

“Sorry,” Alicia said.

“Hell, no, Alicia. It was a very good observation. Keep ’em coming.”

The consensus was that Travis should fire off the red herrings, five or six of them, widely scattered, with no pattern.

Travis and Jubal took off in the van for points unknown. They carried Jubal’s tools and, of course, the Squeezer, of which there was still only one. They would buy the instruments and the materials they needed along the way.

So Dak and I could have waited for their return in two weeks. But two weeks wasted put us a lot closer to the deadline, and there was no way we were going to greet Travis without at least some proposal of where to get started.

That’s when I had my brainstorm about the railroad tank cars.

KELLY EXPLORED THEworld of tank cars for us. Like so many things, it was a lot more complicated than you’d think.

[210] “Your ‘average’ tank car is forty feet long by ten feet across,” she told us. “I’ve found half a dozen companies that make them. They’re all made of solid, thick steel, they’re very strong.”

“That’s what we need, strong ones,” I said.

“You can order a standard model, or name your own specs. You don’t carry milk in the same kind of car you’d carry gasoline in. Some are lined, some are refrigerated or insulated to carry liquid gases. You can have just about anything you want… and the price for a new one is one hundred thousand dollars and up.”