John Varley - Red Thunder

“Well, I’m tired of being Old Florida. So I’m going to accept Grace and Billy’s help while you’re working on this thing you’re working on. Travis is right, you’re going to work yourself to death trying to do both things at once, you’re too good a son to let me and Maria handle it by ourselves, even though I’ve already told you to. You’re your father’s son, that way… and I’m proud of you.

“But I’m telling you right now, Manuel. Whether you go or not, whether you come back or not… I’m through here.”

“I’m glad, Mom.”

[242] “When you… when you get back, we’re getting out of this life.” She shook her head and looked up at me. “You’re already out of it, Manuel, and I can’t tell you how glad that makes me. And, yes, I thank Travis for that… even though I’ll kill him if he harms one-”

“I’m coming back, Mom. And we’ll be rich and famous.”

She squinted at me, looking too old and too tired in the merciless sunshine.

“Is that what you want, Manuel?”

“Famous? Not really. But we probably will be. I only want to be rich enough not to have to worry about every dime, all the time. Have enough money to pay for college, maybe have a few nice things. Not have to… to worry all the time that I can’t get Kelly the things she’s used to.”

“Well, you know I like her. Even though she’s rich.” We both laughed at that. “And if you don’t want to be famous, you’d better have a talk with her. She’s figuring on cashing in on this thing right from the git-go. She’s been talking to Maria and me about it. The lady has big plans.”

“What do you mean?”

“Talk to her. And you go with Travis, and you come back.” She kissed me on the cheek, hugged me very tight, and we rejoined the people around the picnic tables.

Big plans, huh? First I’d heard of it.

SIXTY DAYS.

That’s how much time we had if we were going to beat the Chinese to Mars. We put up a big calendar on a wall of the warehouse and Kelly marked off each day at midnight, when we were supposed to have been in bed for an hour, per Travis’s instructions. We were supposed to get up at six and run, having theoretically gotten seven hours of sleep. Instead, we were always up at four or five, unable to sleep.

But… run?

Mom got a big laugh at that, when she heard. And nobody could have been more surprised than me. I know I should exercise, get into [243] the habit of it since I didn’t plan to be a lumberjack or a rodeo rider, or anything else strenuous. Astronaut? In truth it’s a very sedentary occupation, especially in the free-falling space stations. They have to put in one or two hours’ exercise every day just to keep themselves from losing too much muscle mass and bone density.

But running around and around a track always struck me as a stupifyingly boring waste of time. Running on the street was only slightly better.

“That’s gotta change,” Travis told us, early on. “I want all of you to be in tip-top shape when we leave, not shriveled up from staring at a computer screen twenty hours a day. A strong mind in a strong body, that’s what I want.”

I was going to ask Travis how much running he’d gotten in during the last four or five years of steady alcoholism… but then I saw how much one hour of jogging was costing him, the first time we all went out together, with the sun just coming up and dew sparkling on the leaves. But he was out there again the next morning. Neither Dak nor I could let an old ex-alky outrun us, of course, so we really pushed ourselves.

And the girls? It was easy for them. They’d both been doing it since high school.

“You think this gorgeous body comes for free?” Kelly had chided me, puttering along at half her normal speed as I huffed and puffed beside her.

“Hell, no. I paid ten dollars for that body.”

“Which you still owe me, come to think of it.”

It took a week of torture, and a considerable amount of denial, for me to admit that after the morning runs I felt more rested and alert than at any other time of the day. After that I relaxed to the inevitable. After two weeks even Travis was getting back into shape. Jubal… well, Jubal was exempt, because nobody made Jubal do anything. Most of the time he was too engrossed in his calculations to drag himself away from the computer. But then one morning he did run with us, and he held his own. I’d forgotten about the midnight rowing trips on the lake.

[244] We moved spare beds and dressers from the motel into some of the empty offices in the warehouse, and set up a prefab shower inside the rest room. Most nights Kelly and I slept over, and so did Dak and Alicia. Pretty soon the delivery boys from the local pizza and Chinese places could find their way to the Red Thunder Corporation blindfolded.

THE SHIP WASto be in two parts, the cradle and the life modules. Dak and I were ready to start construction on the top part quickly, but it couldn’t be built until it had something to sit on, which was frustrating. We devoted the time to materials testing. We also had weekly meetings at Rancho Broussard.

“It’s a good thing we didn’t start building the cradle a week ago,” Travis said at our second meeting. “We thought we were ready, but Jubal did some more tests, and what he found out changed the parameters pretty radically.

“You’ll recall I set out radiation sensors at that first test in the swamp. Didn’t find any. But now Jubal has found there’s two types of… maybe we should say ‘quantum states’ inside the Squeezer bubbles. Most of the ones we’ve tested, they’ve been what we’re calling Phase-1 bubbles. I’ll come back to them.

“But there’s a second type of bubble.”

“Let me guess,” Dak said. “Phase-2?”

“I’m surrounded by geniuses. The stuff inside a Phase-2 is compressed so hard, so tight… we’re really not sure just what the matter inside them is like, but it may be like a neutron star, all the electrons stripped away and nothing but neutrons packed together like Japanese on a Tokyo subway car.

“Whatever. What comes out is very hot, very fast, and releases radiation. If you were close to the exhaust, the neutrons would boil you like an egg.

“But early on, I did a test I didn’t tell y’all about. I got to wondering what if we put a bubble over a city, like a big Bucky Fuller geodesic dome? Could it protect that city from a nuclear bomb?”

I glanced at Dak. We’d had the same idea, a while back. But it didn’t [245] have anything to do with the trip to Mars, so we filed it away to ask Jubal about later. We had our hands full with just the work we had to do, without wasting time on hypothetical.

“So… we tried it on a rat.”

Jubal came back in, carrying a battered old U-Haul box, which he set on the coffee table in front of us. He reached in and came up with a white rat, the kind you can buy in any pet store to feed your pet pythons and boa constrictors. With his other hand he took out a three-legged lab ring stand, the kind you set up over a Bunsen burner. A piece of plywood was glued to the top. He put the stand down and put the rat on the platform. It sniffed around, exploring all the edges.

“Travis,” Alicia said, “is this going to be gross?”

“Not unless you love rats.”

“Well… I don’t like animal research…”

“Bunny rabbits and dogs and monkeys and stuff,” Dak explained.

“… but for rats I make an exception. I killed a lot of rats, growing up.”

“No sympathy for rats,” Dak agreed.

“No lyin’, cher ,” Jubal said, “it won’t do de rat no good, no. But no blood.”

“Go ahead, then.” She moved closer to Dak.

Jubal reached into the box again, pulled out his new, improved Squeezer. It was all housed in a unit the size of a shoebox. He fiddled with it, and a basketball-sized Squeezer bubble appeared where the rat had been. The three ring-stand legs clattered on the table, sliced off neatly by the formation of the bubble. The bubble hung there. I didn’t think I’d ever get used to that.