John Varley - Red Thunder

“It’s amazing how much stuff we’ll be able to buy, when the time comes,” Dak said. “Like, the best way to get electrical power in a ship is with fuel cells. And it so happens you can buy them in any electrical supply house, just like the ones that go up in the VStar, and they’re not even that expensive. A space program spin-off.”

“And we’ll bring batteries as backup,” I said. “Plain old nickel-cadmium car batteries, about the size of a lunch box.”

“Well, I’ll provide a better menu than frozen pizzas,” Alicia sniffed, and before she knew it she’d been elected ship’s cook. Oh, boy. I could hardly wait.

“So. Water, oxygen, food… what are the other necessities of life?”

“Music,” Alicia said.

“Damn right. Bring your whole collection, we’ll be equipped to play everything but eight-tracks and Edison cylinders.”

“Food, water, and air are three of the big five,” I said. “Then there’s clothing and shelter. Shelter in Florida means a place to get out of the rain. In Minnesota it means protection from the cold. Where we’re going, pressure is the big deal, and heat or cold right after that. The ship will be our shelter.”

“So we need a big space heater, or something?” Alicia asked. “Outer space is freezing cold, didn’t I hear that?”

“You probably did,” Dak said, “but it ain’t strictly true. Space is a vacuum, it’s not hot or cold, either one. If you’re in the sunshine it can get real hot, real quick. We gotta be ready to cool the air, or heat it, since if you’re in a shadow you lose heat, and you get real cold , real quick.”

“Not to mention the weather on Mars,” I said.

“Now that’s cold,” Dak agreed. “Nighttime, figure on it getting down around a hundred and fifty below, most nights.”

“You’re kidding.” Alicia looked alarmed.

“No joke, kiddo. Hottest it’s ever been-the last million years or so, anyway-is about sixty Fahrenheit, high noon, equator, perihelion.”

[215] “And perihelion is… what?”

“Closest point to the sun. Mars’s orbit is a lot more eccentric… that means it’s not circular, it’s elliptical, from one hundred thirty million to one hundred fifty-five million miles from the sun. On Earth the seasons are determined by the tilt of the axis, which part gets the most heat, northern or southern hemisphere, which is why Christmas is in the middle of the summer in Australia. On Mars it’s the shape of the orbit that determines the seasons, such as they are.”

“Sixty degrees doesn’t sound so bad,” Kelly said.

“I wouldn’t bother to pack any sunscreen,” I told her. “For one thing, it’s not Martian summer right now.”

“For another thing,” Dak said, enjoying this, “the air pressure is about one hundredth what it is on Earth, and ain’t none of it oxygen. That’s way below the pressure on top of Mount Everest. Ninety-five percent of the air is carbon dioxide, which, when you freeze it, is what we call ‘dry ice.’ And it does freeze on Mars, the carbon dioxide, most every night. So in addition to some real good thermal underwear, we’re gonna need us some space suits if we plan to leave the ship.”

“ ‘If we plan to?’ If we plan to?” Alicia looked scandalized. “We couldn’t go there and never set foot on it, could we?”

Dak shrugged, but the truth was, we were worried about that. You couldn’t just run down to the Goodwill store and pick up a few used space suits. I wasn’t sure you could buy them anywhere at all, new or used… or if we could afford them if we did find some. A custom-tailored NASA suit ran right around one million dollars, and that was a great savings over what they’d have run you ten years ago. Since our whole budget was one million dollars, I figured we had a problem.

Because, when you got right down to it… would landing on Mars count if you didn’t get out of the ship?

It sounds crazy, but what were Neil Armstrong’s first words while standing on the moon? “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind,” right? Anybody who knows anything about space history or any history at all knows that.

Actually, in the only way that makes sense to me, his first words were, “Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

[216] Think about it. If I’m standing in the pickup bed of Blue Thunder , I’m standing on Planet Earth, aren’t I? If not, then I spend very little time on the planet. Most of the time I’m standing on concrete, or asphalt, or wood, or carpet or I’m on the second floor of a building or I’m sitting in a vehicle.

Yet it is universally agreed that Armstrong was not “on” the moon until his foot was planted on lunar rock. His thickly booted foot, remember, or else his foot would have suffered a severe burn, not to mention the harsh effects of vacuum.

I had a sneaking feeling that, unless we were photographed actually standing on the Martian surface, our achievement of getting there first simply wouldn’t count. Or it would have an asterisk beside it, like Roger Maris’s sixty-one home runs. “They went there, but they didn’t go there.” They didn’t stand there.

It was a real problem. Because the difficulties of building a spaceship began to seem small beside the problem of making a space suit. A safe space suit. What could we buy and then adapt, perhaps a diving suit?

“So what about the rest of our clothing?” Kelly said, bringing me back to Earth again. Dak frowned at her.

“Blue jeans and T-shirts, right?”

“Well, I don’t plan on wearing any evening gowns,” she said, “but if we’re going to be on television, if we’re going to be famous, we shouldn’t look like slobs.”

“Maybe some kind of uniform,” I suggested. Kelly looked dubious. “Not dorky stuff like Captain Picard and his crew. Something cool.”

“I got a friend, she’s good at clothes,” Alicia said. “I’ll see if she has any ideas.”

“But don’t tell her, ‘Make me some uniforms for people going to Mars.’ ”

Nobody said anything. We couldn’t avoid being noticed, and we had to be able to tell people something when they asked what we were doing. We needed a cover story.

Alicia came up with the best idea the next day.

“Say we’re making a movie. Sort of a Tom Swift Goes to Mars thing.”

Dak looked stunned, then slapped his palm on the table.

[217] “That’s exactly right, baby. That way, we can make a spaceship, but we’re not making a spaceship . Just look at the damn thing. Is anybody going to look at that and think, These kids going to Mars, by golly!’ Hell no! Even if the spy spooks come by and take a look, in two seconds they’d walk right out. The thing don’t have an engine!”

He was right. We were all looking at the first rough mock-up of the ship, made from HO-gauge model railroad cars. It looked mighty silly. My confidence in the design, which went up and down, had reached a low ebb when we put it together. You looked at it, you had to figure whoever thought this up was nuts.

We did adopt the cover story of being prop makers for a movie in development. We went so far as to register the title Red Thunder with the Writers’ Guild, to announce we were in preproduction, and to set an imaginary start date almost a year away. The only downside to the idea was getting phone calls from agents and hopeful actors almost every day asking when we were casting. We always told them the script was in rewrites, and we’ll call you back.

“But the movie isn’t Tom Swift,” Kelly pointed out. “It’s The Little Rascals Go to Mars , right?”