John Varley - Red Thunder

“Want me to book you?”

“First class, or tourist?”

“First class, naturally. But he’s paying for the ticket himself. ‘This is a below-the-line cost,’ is what he said. It’s what they say in Hollywood for items not on the regular budget. Like the star’s thirty-million-dollar salary.”

“What do you figure he’s gonna do in Russia?”

“Well, I’ve had a few hours to think it over. Unless he’s selling us out to the dirty Tsarist Russkis, he knows where he can get a deal on some used space suits.”

“Huh!” I was remembering my earlier thought, that there was no thrift store where you could pick up half a dozen used space suits. But there was, of course. Ever since the collapse of Communism, Russia had been one big thrift store, selling out to the bare walls. Crazy Boris Says , “Everything Must Go!” Spacesuits ought to be easy enough to find over there, with Travis’s connections.

WHEN KELLY WASnotified about Travis’s return flight, we flipped coins and I got to be the one who drove the U-Haul to Atlanta to pick him up. It rained all the way there and back, but I didn’t mind. It was nice to get out on the highway for a day.

Travis was waiting at a freight terminal with ten wooden crates covered with stenciled Russian instructions and warnings. Five of them were four-foot cubes, but the other five were pretty much the size and [259] shape of coffins. I asked him how the trip was. He seemed tired, but too wired to relax much.

“Mostly flying,” he said. “I don’t know if I’d a made it back in tourist class. I’m not as young as I was. I won’t lie to you, Manny, without the Antabuse I don’t know if I’d a made it. Free drinks all the way there and back. And everywhere you go, it’s ‘Let’s drink to this!’ and ‘Let’s drink to that!’ ” But then he grinned at me. “But I did it, boy-o. Clean and sober, there and back.”

“Congratulations. We’re all proud of you.”

I figured he had more to talk about than the drinking, but he wasn’t through yet.

“Over there, I’m still something of a hero, Manny. Not like here, where I’m washed up and most of my old friends have left. But the Russians… there was a Russian aboard that flight I had to set down in Africa, and they’ve never forgotten. That I was drunk doesn’t matter. In fact, there’s something in the Russian soul that makes them respect me more because I was drunk when I did it.

“Anyway, I got friends over there, friends I never got a chance to alienate. All it takes is a little cash to grease the wheels, then a little more for whatever it is you’re buying… and pretty soon you’ve got what you want, at a tenth of the cost.”

“So those are suits in the boxes?”

“You bet.”

“Why ten boxes?”

“Space suits ain’t like T-shirts. You need a few specialized tools. The helmets and backpacks are in the other boxes, too.” He looked out the window and shivered.

“Georgia, Georgia, on my mind. Can’t get me out of Georgia soon enough.”

“What’s the matter with Georgia?”

“I hate coming to Georgia. I wish Kelly had booked me through Dulles, or even Miami. But you know Kelly. She saved me about five hundred dollars finding that fare.”

After ten minutes with his eyes closed he sat up and shook his head. He cracked the window to let the wet breeze blow in his face.

[260] “It was raining like this the day I set the Montana down at the Atlanta airport.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Didn’t I tell you about that?”

“I don’t think so.” I was pretty sure he knew he hadn’t told me. Why he’d decided to tell me now I had no idea, but I decided to just let him go. Which he did.

“There were warning lights from the diagnostic tests during my pre-flight. They’d come on, then they’d go out. I wanted to postpone the reentry, do an EVA, get out there and bang a few things around with a hammer, see if I could get the lights to stay on or stay off, one way or the other. But they sent me a ‘fix,’ they swore if I ran their program everything would be fine. That’s how it worked on the ground, anyway.

“I told ’em to go stuff their fix, I wasn’t pulling away from the station till I’d eyeballed the thing. And they told me to remember Senator So-and-so was aboard-as if I’d forget it-and he had to be back to make an important vote on the Senate floor, and my head would roll if he was late.”

“Senator So-and-so?”

“Yeah, I forget which one he was, now. God knows I took enough of ’em up back then. Ever since Garn and Glenn went up, back in the ’90s, a U.S. senator figures he ain’t no great shakes unless he’s been up. The ultimate boondoggle junket. Hell, some guys paid twenty million dollars to go up! Senators get to go for free.

“Sure enough, halfway down one of the speed brakes deployed at about Mach six. We flipped right over. Five times we rolled, me cussing and fighting all the way. I stopped the roll and looked out the window for the landing strip, and there she was. Happiest I’d been since I found that little grass strip in Africa. I brought her in, very hard and very fast… and about a hundred feet off the deck I spotted a 787 crossing the runway in front of me. Must of given the captain of that 787 something to remember, because we missed by maybe ten feet.

“And when we stopped, that’s when I knew I had landed in Atlanta.”

[261] He stopped for a while, sipped at the coffee he’d bought from a machine at the freight terminal. Then he-shook his head.

“I’d a found and fixed that hydraulic leak if they’d a let me go EVA. But since nobody at Hartsfield knew I was coming until I showed up on their radar dropping like a stone and because Senator So-and-so got a whiff of my breath, and since I was still blowing a one-point-eight an hour later…

“We compromised, NASA and me. When the inquiry happened I wouldn’t mention the warnings they’d told me to ignore, also that the reason for ignoring them was the senator’s goddamn fault… and I’d hand in my wings and never fly again.”

There was another long silence. I listened to the hiss of the tires on pavement and the sound of the wipers moving the red Georgia mud around my windshield.

“Sometimes I wish I’d a just gone for it, Manny. Tell the whole story, give the senator and those NASA turkeys what they had coming. But I was drunk. I was stinking drunk. The breath test was probably unconstitutional… but hell, lots of people knew I was a drunk, a drunk who’d been pretty lucky for a long, long time, and a bunch were ready to testify to that.

“Still, I might have… Then somebody mentioned Jubal. Didn’t make a threat, nothing like that. Didn’t have to. They’d looked into my private life enough to know about him. They could drop a hint here, a few bucks there, and the judge takes Jubal from me and puts him in an institution for retarded adults…”

We didn’t speak for the next twenty miles. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I’m sorry? Didn’t quite cover it, did it? Then I did think of something.

“Don’t tell that story to my mom, Travis, okay?”

“Deal.”

Pretty soon he was asleep, and snoring, very loudly. Oh, brother. Better put earplugs on the packing list.

[262] “THESE ARE ALLfifteen-year-old suits,” Travis said. “Only two of them have actually been in space. They’ve all been sitting in a warehouse for a long time.”

We were all gathered at the ranch, beside the pool. The coffin boxes had been pried open. The space suits, a bright color Travis had called “Commie red,” were packed in a substance Sam had called “excelsior,” that looked like dried brown grass. Didn’t the Russians have Styrofoam peanuts? Travis pulled one suit out of its box and brushed it off.