John Varley - Red Thunder

“Now, what happens in there seems to happen instantaneously. There’s going to be a little bang, okay? But no explosion. Jubal?”

Jubal hit a button and the bubble vanished. There was a pop , and a very fine gray powder swirled in the air. What looked like a handful of iron filings fell to the table. The gray powder was so fine it took a few moments to settle into a small heap. Travis put his finger in the stuff and showed it to us.

“Your basic powdered rat,” he said.

[246] WE ALL FELTthat called for a drink. Travis took a long swallow of the raspberry-flavored Snapple he favored these days.

“The powder is carbon, calcium, little traces of this and that, everything that was in the rat but water. The water turned into monatomic hydrogen and oxygen. That’s what made the sound.”

Dak got some on his finger, pondered it. “Powdered rat, huh? Hey, maybe what we got here is instant rat. Scrape it up, put it in a package, like Kool-Aid, then you just add water, stir it up…” Alicia shoved him. Jubal thought it was hilarious. All day long he was muttering “instant rat, instant rat,” and laughing all over again. When Jubal found a joke he liked, like saying Grace, he stuck with it.

“You figure out how to put the rat back together again, Dak, that’d be something,” Travis said. “Anyway, it’s the same with the iron from the stand. It’s chopped up so fine it basically oxidizes in midair, rusts before it hits the table.

“But the deal here, ladies and gents, is that chemical bonds are broken. We don’t know why. Maybe it suppresses the charge on the electrons.”

“It turn off dem little hookin’ t’ings,” Jubal said.

“What he means is, it does something to the valence electrons, which is what allows chemical bonds to happen.”

“But if we squozes on jus’ water…” Jubal said.

“He means, with just the right amount of water, and just the right amount of squeezing… show ’em, Jubal.”

Two more things came out of Jubal’s box of mischief. First was a small construction of metal mesh. It was welded to a heavy metal base. Arching around the cage were the three brass or bronze prongs, sharp pointed, that caused the discontinuity, that let the power inside come out in a controlled stream.

Sure enough, Jubal took a small container from his box, opened it, and took out a marble-sized bubble. He put it in the cage, and expanded it until it fit snugly.

[247] “This is a Phase-1 bubble,” Travis said. “There’s just water inside it, squeezed just enough to… well, show them, cousin.”

Jubal manipulated his control box, and we heard a high whistling sound. The powdered remains of the rat stirred in a faint breeze.

“Coming out of the top of the bubble is hydrogen and oxygen,” Travis said. “We’ve adjusted the load inside so it doesn’t fully collapse, like a neutron star. No radiation is produced. Now look.” He struck a match and moved it over the bubble.

With a whoosh, it ignited in a fine, hard, bright yellow flame that went two or three feet into the air. It continued to burn while we all watched. After a full minute it was still firing, and Travis signaled Jubal to turn off the gas. The flame died.

“Clean power,” Travis told us with a satisfied smile. “Hydrogen plus oxygen plus ignition, equals power, and water. Just like the VStar, only they burn liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Not an environmentalist in the world could complain.”

“There’s enough to get us to Mars and back?” I asked.

“No. Well, not in any reasonable time. Lots of power, but not that much power. We’ll use these to get up above the atmosphere.” He unrolled a printout and pointed to the schematic drawing of the power cradle we were about to start building.

“Phase-1 bubbles here, here, and here, under tanks one, three, and five. Phase-2, what I’m calling SuperSqueezer bubbles, under two, four, and six. These bubbles will have enough power to get us to Alpha-Centauri and back, if we were foolish enough to try that. Plenty of power for Mars and return. And when we come back, we use the Phase-1 bubbles again to land.”

The doorbell rang. Travis frowned-he didn’t get a lot of visitors out at the ranch-and he excused himself to go answer it.

Dak was bent over the plans so he didn’t see what I saw… which was Travis glancing at the video screen just outside the dark vestibule. He stopped, stared, and then pivoted and hurried back to us. He spoke in a loud whisper.

“ Cops! I want y’all to stay quiet. Very quiet!” And he hurried over to [248] a big bookcase beside the television screen. He shoved some books aside and reached behind them. He came up with a flat pint of Jack Daniels.

I was stunned. Travis , no! But he twisted off the metal cap, raised the bottle to his lips, took a drink…

… and gargled with it.

He sprayed the mouthful of whiskey into the air, breathed deeply a few times, pulled out one side of his shirttail, kicked off his shoes, and mussed his hair. All of us tiptoed to the television screen, out of sight around the corner. I heard him open the door and we saw the two men in suits standing on the porch. The air reeked of Black Jack.

“Hey, hey!” Travis bellowed. “Watch-y’all want? I can’t eat Girl Scout cookies on account of bein’ on a diet.”

One of the men took a step back. The whiskey stench coming off Travis was pretty powerful. The other said something, and all I could make out was “… Federal Bureau…” I figured I could fill in the blanks easily enough.

“Well, shit fire and save the matches,” Travis said. “What’d I do this time?”

Travis stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door almost shut behind him, and the FBI agents’ voices didn’t carry very far. But Travis’s did.

“Say, are either of you ol’ boys from Texas? Friend of mine, he says nine out of ten FBI agents are from Texas.” A pause, something mumbled by one of the agents. “Oh, yeah? Where in Texas?”

Mumble mumble “… Dallas.”

“No fooling? My wife’s got folks in Dallas. Ex-wife, that is. And you’re from Lubbock? I don’t know anybody from Lubbock. Thank God.”

Travis listened a moment, then laughed himself into a coughing fit.

“Oh, that’s great. That’s great. We got guv’mint men checking out the likes of him? You figure he’s gonna be another Waco or something? Let me tell you gents, I don’t know what that ol’ boy saw that brought y’all out here, but he don’t do nothing but paint, paint, paint road signs and hold all-day prayer meetin’s on Sunday where they shout hallelujah all the goddamn day long. I swear, you look in the dictionary [249] under ‘eyesore,’ you’re gonna find a picture of ol’ Roscoe’s place. Unless you look under ‘damn fool religious nut,’ ’cause he’s there, too.”

He went on like that for a good long time. We could see easily enough from their body language that the agents just wanted to get out of there, as soon as possible. Which they finally did, thanking Travis, giving him bland FBI smiles.

We all hurried to the curtained front window and eased the drapes back. Travis joined us, and we all watched the car back out of the shell driveway and onto the road, and spray crushed shells all over as the wheels spun.

We dropped the drapes back and looked at each other, not knowing what to say. Then Alicia came up with something. “Travis…,” she said, and that’s all it took.

“I know, I know. It shouldn’t be in the house. There’s one more bottle, way back in the pantry under a sack of flour. You can get that one and pour it down the drain, too.”