John Varley - Red Thunder

Luckily for us, NASA had already tested a vast number of substances to assess their suitability for use in launch vehicles and space stations. So 99 percent of the stuff we used was precertified. Again, as in so many things, if that work hadn’t already been done there was no way we could have met our deadline.

But there were a few items here and there that had never been scrutinized, and if we absolutely had to have them, we tested them ourselves in a small sealed chamber.

That was one kind of testing. We spent far more time and effort seeing if this or that could stand up to heat, cold, and vacuum.

Take automobile tires.

“Tires?” I asked Dak, thinking he was kidding.

“Yeah, tires, man. Just your ordinary synthetic rubber steel-belted radials. I want to see how they stand up to cold, and vacuum.”

I knew Dak wouldn’t waste my time, and I knew he probably wouldn’t answer too many questions, so the next day we had a top-of-the-line Goodyear tire delivered.

Our vacuum-testing chamber now had a tank of liquid nitrogen, three hundred and some degrees below zero, and a pump to move the supercold stuff through a grid of pipes inside the tank. We had powerful radiant heaters for testing the other extreme.

[255] We put the tire in the chamber and cooled it down to 150 below. Through the little Plexiglas window it looked okay.

“Take her down to one eighty, one ninety or so,” Dak said, so I did. We left it that way for twelve hours, then pumped out all the air for another twelve, and turned on the heater to about 150 Fahrenheit.

When we opened the chamber Dak picked the tire up in a padded glove… and chunks of hard rubber just peeled away from the tire. Dak didn’t say anything, just carried the tire to the trash Dumpster and tossed it in.

He frowned for two days after that. I began to think that expression would imprint permanently on his face. A couple times he shouted at me for nothing much, which was not like Dak at all. Then on the third day he came in with a big smile on his face.

“Something?” I asked him.

“You’ll see, a few more weeks,” he said, so I left it at that.

The next day sixteen king-sized pink Wal-Mart electric blankets were delivered to the warehouse. The next morning they were gone. Dak had taken them to the garage.

Problem solved , I figured, and turned to other things.

AND ON THEseventh day we rested… long enough to hold the weekly meeting, and for Kelly to tell us we were five days behind schedule. “The cradle is proving to be a lot more difficult to build than we’d planned,” Kelly said.

“Sorry, Kelly,” Caleb said. “If I’d been around for the early planning I’d of told you it was gonna take a bit longer than that.”

“How many more days you figure you’ll need?”

“Another week.”

Kelly began tapping on the screen of her clipboard.

“There are a few items here and there that I can move up. But in about four days there’s not going to be much for the rest of us to do until we get the upper stage in place.”

“There’s still the matter of the space suits,” Travis said.

“I’ve trusted you on that one,” Kelly said. “If you tell me it’s going [256] to take two weeks to make them, we might as well all relax, because the race to Mars is over.”

“I’ll need three, four days, tops,” Travis said. “I have to take a trip. Now might be the best time to take it, if Dak and Manny can handle the metal fabrication work alone, under Caleb’s orders, of course.”

“I can help, too,” Kelly pointed out.

“Sure,” Caleb said. “If I can pull Dak off the rover project four or five days, have him working full-time out here, then with Kelly… then I don’t figure we’d get ’er done any faster with or without you, Trav.”

“I can do that,” Dak said, but he didn’t look happy.

“What if I helped out?” Alicia said.

“No,” Kelly and Travis said at once. Kelly gestured for Travis to go on.

“You getting an EMT rating is one of the necessary factors made me agree to get involved at all. We’ve got to have somebody aboard who can handle a bigger medical problem than a hangnail, which is about all I’m qualified to do.”

“You make me nervous, Travis,” Alicia said. “If you figure I’ll be able to do a heart transplant when I’m done, you’re wrong. Why not take a doctor along?”

“I considered it,” Travis admitted. “I expect you to be able to treat most types of trauma, from a skinned knee to third-degree burns to sawing off a leg. What we’re going to have to deal with, if we have anything at all, is physical injury, pretty much like a bad car wreck. If there’s any hip bones that need to be rebuilt, or plastic surgery, or skin transplants, the patient will have to wait till we get back to Earth. I just want you to have a good shot at keeping trauma victims alive for a three-day ambulance ride.”

“I guess I can handle that,” Alicia sighed.

“You still making that list of stuff?” Dak asked her. Alicia dug in the pocket of her jeans and came up with a rumpled piece of paper which she passed over to Kelly.

“I’ve bought a lot of stuff already,” Kelly said, “We’re going to have a well-equipped infirmary for diagnosis and treatment. We’ve already [257] got just about all the instruments, from a sphygmomanometer to a little rubber hammer.”

“A spigomo…” Jubal looked delighted. A new long word!

“Measures your blood pressure,” Alicia told him.

“I won’t buy plasma and whole blood until we’re ready to leave,” Kelly said. “I’ve got a list of drugs, and only about half can be bought over the counter.”

“I can probably handle that,” Salty said. We all looked at him. Salty was a man of few words, he seldom had anything to say at the Sunday meetings. “I know somebody in Mexico. He can buy most of them over the counter down there, and anything he can’t buy legally, well…”

The obvious question hung in the air, but nobody asked it. His business, I figured.

Salty shrugged, and answered it anyway.

“He’s my connection. I’m not a user, what I buy from him is marijuana, sometimes codeine and morphine. My wife’s got rheumatoid arthritis, and the weed is the best thing she’s found for the day-to-day pain. On her worst days she takes the pills.”

It was clear that Caleb and Grace had known this, but Travis and Jubal looked shocked. Jubal looked ready to cry.

“It’s fairly well under control, don’t worry,” Salty said. “The doctors kept undermedicating her, so we took things into our own hands.”

“Naturally.”

“Sure thing.”

“Sorry to hear it, Salty.”

We all offered sympathy and Salty looked uncomfortable, so Alicia brought us back to the subject.

“Morphine’s on my list,” she said.

“I’ll get it for you.”

There were a few more items of business, dealt with in about half an hour. Then, I was ready to head back to the warehouse, but Travis insisted we go out on the lake and fish for a while. “And there will be no talking the project,” he declared.

It was hard to do that for the first hour. But then I landed a big bass, and took the fishing seriously for the next several hours.

[258] Travis was right, I think. You have to take a break every now and then. But when we got back we all went to work with even more determination.

That night Kelly told me where Travis was going.

“I just booked him Daytona, Atlanta, Moscow, Star City, and back,” she said.

“Star City? Star City?” I have to admit, the Russians’ name for their main space base beat the heck out of our old Cape Canaveral. I sure would have loved to go see for myself. “Maybe I could go along, help him carry his bags.”