John Varley - Red Thunder

“Perfect,” I said. My generation loved those old “Our Gang” black-and-white comedy shorts just like Mom’s generation had, and the generation before that. The only difference was, we had watched them on DVD.

“I’m Stymie,” Dak announced. “You figure Manny for Spanky?”

“No,” Kelly said. “Manny is Alfalfa.”

“Alfalfa? That cross-eyed freckle-face dork? No way I’m Alfalfa.”

“I always liked Alfalfa,” Alicia said. “It’s true he wasn’t as handsome as Manny… but Dak is much handsomer than Stymie, too.” Dak kissed her.

“Alfalfa was the romantic one,” Kelly said. “He had the most heart.” I realized she was right. So that settled it. I was Alfalfa.

“Who gets to be Darla?” Neither of the girls leaped at it. The Little Rascals were mostly boys, now that I thought of it.

“Kelly’s gotta be Darla,” Dak said. “Darla wasn’t half bad, you know. She could be kinda sweet. And Alfalfa was in love with her.”

[218] “No way out of it, Kelly,” I said. “You’re Darla.”

“And that means Alicia is Buckwheat,” Dak said, with a grin.

“Buckwheat? Buckwheat? Was Buckwheat a girl?”

“What the hell was Buckwheat?” None of us were sure.

“So who’s Spanky?” she asked.

“Who do you figure?” I said. “Little fat kid, smartest of the bunch…” We looked at each other and said it simultaneously.

“Jubal!”

WE WERE STUMPEDfor a while about what to call Travis. In the end it was so obvious we wondered how we’d missed it. Travis was Hal Roach.

It took our minds off our other problems for a while, but eventually we had to buckle down to the planning again.

Never in my life had there been so many things I had to buy. Kelly set us all up with Platinum MasterCards and sent us out shopping every morning for a week. We had to rent a U-Haul truck just to cart it all back to the warehouse.

We saved money where we could. Heavy equipment we mostly rented. We got the very best welding equipment because our lives would depend on every weld in the ship. We needed pumps, to create vacuum for testing the durability of components, and to create pressure for testing the tank cars. I thought we should wait on pumps until Travis got back and either approved or shot down the entire idea of using secondhand railroad rolling stock to get to Mars. Kelly said no, we’d need the pumps one way or another, and time was passing.

We bought a standard cargo container like you see on railcars, the kind that can be loaded and off-loaded from freighters and then travel by either rail or truck. We welded it airtight, built a small air lock in its side, and started pumping the air out of it. It was going to be our vacuum testing chamber.

The pressure gauge was nowhere near the point we needed when I heard a squealing noise like a rusty hinge… and the container [219] collapsed on itself with an earsplitting clang! as if we’d dropped it from the overhead crane.

“Jesus squeezus,” Dak breathed. Alicia and Kelly came running down the stairs from the office, and we all stood together and stared at what had once been a rectangular container, like a huge box of Velveeta. Stomping on an empty aluminum Coke can, you could hardly have smashed it as flat as that container.

I felt every ounce of confidence drain right out of me. Were we nuts?

“Well,” Alicia laughed, “like you said, we need to make all our mistakes right here on the ground, because we can’t afford any mistakes out in space.”

I didn’t point out that there were plenty of mistakes we could make right here on the ground that could kill us.

“We gotta get that thing out of here,” I said. “If my mother sees that, she’ll have a heart attack.”

We rented a flatbed and hauled the twisted hulk away, sold it for scrap metal, which was good, because Kelly had paid not much more than scrap metal prices in the first place. That same day we went ahead and bought our first tank car. I got goose bumps watching the switch engine pushing the car over our siding and into the warehouse.

This was actually going to happen!

We cut away the wheel carriages then lifted it with the overhead crane and lowered it onto a cradle we’d slapped together out of used two-by-fours and plywood-Kelly being frugal again. I was beginning to see just how her family had got rich and stayed that way. She never spent an unnecessary penny. But she never scrimped when only the best and newest would ensure safety.

The weight of the empty car was stenciled right there on its side: LT WT 72,500 LBS. Thirty-six tons, and a bit. Also the capacity weight: 190,500 LBS., or about ninety-five tons. Over two and a half times the empty weight. That was very strong, I thought.

We hauled the wheel assemblies to a public scale and weighed them, subtracted that number from thirty-six tons, for a tank weight of twenty tons. Seven tanks would weigh 140 tons. To that we would add [220] the weight of the cradle we would build that would connect the thrusting engines to the main body of the craft, plus the landing legs, plus everything we added inside, including the Sears Kenmore freezer and six people. We guessed we could bring it in under two hundred tons.

No worries about keeping weight down, no fuel weight to consider, virtually unlimited thrust for a virtually unlimited time. If only Werner von Braun could see us, I thought, lifting far more weight than his Saturn 5s could, using little silver basketballs. He’d be flabbergasted!

We fitted the tank car cap with an extra-heavy-duty round hatch door, lined it with aircraft-grade silicone seals, dogged the door shut, and turned on the vacuum pump. None of us got close as the air was sucked out. It took a while, and the entire time my ear was listening for that first, awful rusty-hinge squeal.

It never came. The car held up under fifteen pounds per square inch pressure differential applied from outside. I had no doubt it would easily contain one internal atmosphere against the vacuum of space.

“We’re in business,” Dak said, as I turned the relief valve and air screeched into the tank. “You talk to Hal and Spanky today?”

“Mom did. He says to look out for them about noon tomorrow.” Travis had been calling in every day, and the calls had originated from places as distant as northern Maine and the Mojave Desert.

“Might as well hang it up for tonight, then,” he said. “We got a big day tomorrow, trying to sell this thing to him.”

“We’ll sell it,” I told him.

TRAVIS GRABBED MYface with both hands and kissed me on the forehead. While I was still too stunned to speak, he turned to everyone else, his arm around my shoulder.

“If they had a Nobel Prize for engineering, these guys would get it,” he announced. He let me go and moved toward Dak, who backed away cautiously.

“It was Manny thought it up,” he said. “I don’t need no kissing.”

“Genius. A stroke of sheer genius,” Travis said.

We were in a room we had been using for meetings, which had become a nightly ritual where we could all be brought up to speed on what everyone else had been doing, and figure out what most urgently needed doing the next day. It was down a short hallway from the office Kelly and Alicia shared, one of half a dozen rooms on the upper level of the warehouse, most of which were empty. This one had a big conference table and a few desks and tables against the back wall, all rented. There was a big brass espresso machine sitting on one of the tables, a gift from Kelly’s mom from when she dropped by one day to see how the “movie prop” business was coming. Now I was afraid I might be spoiled forever. It would be hard to go back to cheap coffee [222] after getting used to a couple lattes every morning before getting to work.