John Varley - Red Thunder

“Just your standard car,” I said, once more intimidated by the price tag.

“I presume you don’t mind a used one?”

“Please, yes, please , a used one.”

“Run you from ten to twenty thousand each. We’re in luck, there’s a glut right now. I can probably shave some off even that ten-thousand-dollar figure.”

Dak wondered if we should put a deposit down until Travis got back, but Kelly said there’d be no trouble getting as many as we needed.

We needed seven.

We tried for most of one day to figure out how to fit everything we were going to need into just one, but it was impossible. Next step up was three, bundled together, but that didn’t look good, either.

“Remember, weight is no object,” Dak said. “We can brace this sucker any way we think is necessary, inside and out.”

With a few mouse clicks he created a bundle of seven cylinders. Looked at from the end, it resembled a honeycomb, one circle in the middle surrounded by six others.

“Put the bridge in the center one,” Dak said. “It’s a longer one than the others, about ten feet or so. Put some windows in that. On the deck below the bridge we have flight stations for the rest of us.”

“So one deck below that,” I said, moving the mouse, “we have sleeping quarters. Still got a lot of space below.”

“Remember our cardinal rule. If you think you might need it, bring it. Right?”

[211] “Roger. And if you really have to have it, bring three .”

So it began to take rough shape.

“A HUMAN BEINGneeds about six pounds of water every day,” Dak told Kelly and Alicia the day we showed them Design A, about halfway through Travis and Jubal’s road trip. “That’s just for drinking. We want to stay clean, we’ll need more.”

“I’ll vote for clean,” Kelly said.

“It’s not a problem. A gallon of water weighs about eight pounds. Say we all drink one gallon a day. That’s forty-eight pounds a day. Trivial. Add another ten gallons for washing, brushing teeth, cooking, water balloon fights… we’re looking at five hundred pounds of water per day.”

“So how many days will we be gone?” Alicia asked.

“We’re expecting about two weeks,” I said. “That’s three and a half tons of water. But we intend to carry enough for twice that, as a safety margin. Say seven or eight tons. Two thousand gallons.”

“Seven tons?” Kelly asked.

“Two weeks?” Alicia looked surprised. “I thought we’d be gone, I don’t know, months and months.”

“Don’t have to with Jubal’s gadget, hon,” Dak said. “We can get there in about three and a half days. I don’t think you even want to know how fast we’ll be going when we get to the halfway point and turn around to slow down.”

I wasn’t sure I did, either. Three and a half million miles per hour. That’s almost a thousand miles per second, a long way from light speed of 186,000 miles per second… but we’d have to reset our clocks forward a few seconds when we got back. One day I’d have to do that calculation, too… when I figured I was emotionally ready for it.

“We figure the water can come in handy for radiation shielding, too,” Dak said, and I could have kicked him. In fact, I figured I would kick him, first chance I got.

“Radiation…?” Dak might as well have suggested we eat cyanide. [212] Alicia would not eat genetically engineered vegetables or fruit, but her special dislike was irradiated food. I liked Alicia, but she usually fell for the line of the Health Food Mafia.

“Yeah, hon, there’s radiation in space. Mostly it won’t be a problem, it isn’t strong enough to penetrate our steel hull. Astronauts get exposed to it every day.”

“So what’s the problem?” Kelly asked. She was looking dubious, too.

“The sun,” I said. “Every once in a while there’s a storm on the sun, a flare, and the radiation gets stronger. We’ll be cutting in toward the orbit of Venus, so we’ll be closer to the sun than anybody’s been yet.”

“Yeah,” Dak said, “but it varies on an eleven-year cycle, and we’re not at the peak.”

We’re only a few yean before it . But I didn’t say that.

“We figured we’d make the thousand-gallon water tanks wide and tall and thin, spread it out to cover as much area as possible. Then, if a storm comes, we orient the ship so those tanks are between us and the sun.”

“We’ll probably fly in that attitude anyway,” I said. “Might as well be safe. But we’ll have detectors, too, all around the ship, to let us know if the level’s rising.”

“What good does that do?”

“The water soaks up the radiation, babe.”

“And then we drink the water?”

“The water doesn’t get radioactive. Don’t worry about it. This ship will have steel walls that’ll stop ninety-nine percent of it. We won’t have any trouble keeping within safe limits.” But Dak and I could both tell Alicia was going to want to see figures, and that “safe” limits were endlessly arguable. And there was no way to pretend we weren’t going to get any more radiation than if we stayed home.

In the end, it would be up to her. I was betting she’d go.

“So, that’s the water situation,” Dak said, changing the subject as quickly as possible. “Then there’s oxygen. We need about two pounds per day, per person. We figure on taking regular compressed air. A pure oxygen atmosphere is touchy, a fire can get completely out of hand in [213] half a second, just ask Gus Grissom’s ghost if you don’t believe me. So for every pound of oxygen we bring we’ll also be bringing four pounds of nitrogen. Can’t be helped, but again, it’s not a problem. We’ll have air scrubbers that take out the carbon dioxide. My feeling is we’ll need an ‘air officer,’ or something like that, who worries full-time about the air quality.”

“How about ‘environment control officer’?” I suggested. I figured Alicia would be a natural for that.

“Okay, that’s air and water taken care of,” Kelly said. “How about food?”

“I thought we’d go buy a freezer at Sears or something,” I told her. “Fill it up with frozen pizzas and TV dinners. Bring a hotplate and a microwave oven.”

Kelly laughed, thought I was joking at first… then laughed again when she saw it was not a joke.

“Except for ’Leesha,” Dak said. “For you, we figured we’d buy a big brick of tofu and a sack of rabbit pellets. Keep your dish full, you can graze whenever you like.”

“I’m getting a little tired of health food jokes, gang,” she said, and shoved Dak hard enough he fell off his kitchen chair, pretending to be injured.

We were having this discussion in Kelly’s office, that is, the office of the project manager. When we were deciding which of us would be the best at keeping all the details straight, all the bills paid, raw materials arriving in a timely fashion, all the jobs to be done, big and small… Kelly had won unanimously.

The space was in one corner of our warehouse, up one flight of steps over an area that had been used for storage but was now empty. There was a row of windows looking down on the warehouse floor, and I couldn’t help thinking of her father’s office. I wondered if she’d made the connection.

“That’s one thing we decided early on,” I told them. “When we can buy something off the shelf, that’s one more thing we don’t have to make. I know it sounds nuts, but a Sears freezer is just the sort of [214] shortcut we will take any time we can. Now, maybe it’s best just to bring dry rice and pasta and canned stuff, maybe the hot plate is all we need, really… but if we want to take frozen food, we can.”