John Varley - Red Thunder

“Down here we have an ordinary wire dirty-clothes hamper.” Dak showed us when the plans were being finalized. “You put a plastic bag into the rack, you put down the seat, you do your business. Then you take the bag and sprinkle in some of these blue crystals, twist the bag, tie it off, and drop it down the glory hole.”

“What’s this?” Alicia asked, pointing to a square shape on the plans.

“Exhaust fan,” Travis said. “Space stations smell bad. Be sure to turn on the fan when you use the toilet.”

“With a flush toilet you wouldn’t have so much of a problem,” Alicia muttered.

Travis had suggested we simply dump the waste bags over the side.

“You’d have the Greens all over us when we got back,” Dak told him.

“What for? We’re not contaminating the Earth with this sh-… this stuff.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I told him. “Believe me, Travis, my generation doesn’t think logically about pollution. They’d hate us for it.”

“That’s right,” Kelly said, and Alicia nodded.

Travis grinned. “You realize, anything we dumped overboard would be moving at solar escape velocity. Some of it will be doing three million [268] miles an hour. I gotta admit, I’m kind of tickled at the idea that the first man-made object to reach the stars could be a bag of superfast sh- superfast doo-doo.”

“Superfast doo-doo!” Jubal shouted, and slapped his knee. As usual when Jubal heard a good joke, he went around muttering it all day long.

TANKS THREE ANDsix held fuel and generators and batteries and fuel cells and heaters and air conditioners.

Me and Dak and Salty had debated a long time as to the best source of power. Red Thunder’s electrical needs were not enormous so carrying the means of producing that amount of power was not going to be a problem. But how to produce it?

I favored fuel cells. They are so elegant, it’s hard not to love them. You put in oxygen and hydrogen at one end, and water and power come out the other. But Salty thought they were too prone to failure.

“So just carry a bunch of them,” I suggested.

Dak liked the idea of generators.

“Talk about a proven technology,” he said. “Those things, after me and Dad go over ’em, there’s just no way they can fail.”

And in case they did fail, Dak said, we just bring two.

Salty liked nicad batteries. I thought they were too heavy. Salty said nobody’s supposed to worry about weight, like Travis said.

In the end, we took all three systems. Like everything else on Red Thunder , we wanted triple systems when possible, triple reserves when possible. Any of the three systems could have taken us to Mars and back.

Tank four was reserved for Sam and Dak’s mysterious Mars Traveler, which none of us had seen yet. Dak said all we needed to do to the tank was mount a heavy winch in the top and line it with insulation, as we were doing to all the other tanks. He and Sam promised to have something to show us in two weeks.

[269] THE CENTER TANKwas living quarters.

At the very top was the bridge, Travis’s domain. There was a second chair for a copilot. All of us except Jubal trained on it for a day, but none of us kidded ourselves that if anything happened to Travis we could just step into his shoes.

For navigation we had basic optical instruments and the simplest computer program we could find. With luck, you could shoot a few stars, type in a destination, and the computer would tell you where to point and how hard to push. It even worked that way in training… most of the time. But I crashed the simulator Jubal had set up the first five times I tried to land it. And I was the best of the three of us.

“Just don’t get yourself hurt, Travis,” Kelly told him one dismal night after we’d run through the results of the training program.

“Don’t worry,” Travis said with a grin. “I contracted to bring you kids back alive, and to do that I’ve got to watch my own backside, too.”

Below the bridge were the other ships’ systems. There were thirty-five flat TV screens on the walls, larger than the ones on the bridge, one for each of the cameras we had mounted inside and outside the ship. These were good-quality cigarette cameras, smaller than your finger, cheap, and practically indestructible. A few were mounted on motors, but most delivered a static image of the state of the ship. The control consoles for each of the ship’s systems were here, and all four of our acceleration chairs. These were good, sturdy lounge chairs. The only problem I could see with them was they were so comfortable I wondered if I might nod off during an air watch.

The deck below that was the common room. One side was the galley, with a sink, an upright Amana freezer, and a refrigerator about the same size, both of them welded to the deck and fitted with strong latches. The freezer was full of high-end TV dinners from the local gourmet market, and the best brand of frozen pizza we could find. Travis told us the most frequent complaint from long-termers on space station duty was the quality of the food. We carried ice cream and Popsicles, too.

The fridge would hold cans of soda pop, and fresh fruits and vegetables. Alicia demanded we bring whole wheat flour so she could bake [270] bread. I wondered if she’d find time for it, but why not? I liked fresh-baked bread as much as she did. So we packed some cold cuts and peanut butter and jelly, too.

We had a microwave oven and a radiant-heat oven just big enough to heat a frozen pizza or bake a few loaves of bread. Beside them would sit our espresso machine.

Opposite this little galley we installed a prefab breakfast nook. We bought it at a local building supply store, and it had a ’50s diner look to it, with red vinyl padded seats and a Formica top. It would easily seat the five of us.

We carried playing cards, a Monopoly board, and dominoes. None of us but Travis and Jubal knew how to play dominoes. Travis promised to teach us, and I suspected they might be expensive lessons. I could end up back on Earth broker than when I left.

The deck below that was the one that contained the hatches to all five of the other tanks. We set up the infirmary there. At launch, and until and unless we needed it, the infirmary deck would be mostly bare. We carried enough folding cots to accommodate all of the Ares Seven if we had to. Alicia’s medical supplies and instruments were in cabinets against the infirmary walls.

The two decks below were crew quarters, two “staterooms” to a deck. The captain and Jubal had the two on the upper deck, and below were the one Dak and Alicia would share, and my own lonely bunk. The rooms were small and without many frills, though we painted them warm colors to make them feel a little less like jail cells. Each contained an air mattress on a platform with clothes storage beneath, a bedside table with lamp and alarm clock, and a simple intercom and alarm bell.

We built from the bottom up. When a deck was finished the ceiling would be lowered into the tank and welded in place, becoming the floor of the deck above. These floors were made of metal grills. This made the ventilation system simpler, since air could find its way through the floors as well as the ducts.

When a deck was finished we installed insulation on all the walls-we used ordinary Owens-Corning, the kind with the Pink Panther [271] printed on it-and covered them with big Styrofoam panels. All pipes and ducts and wires were exposed, for easier repair if that became necessary.

After two weeks we had capped one of the outer tanks and gained two days, putting us only three days behind schedule, with thirty days to M-day.

After another week we had capped two more tanks… but had had to remove the first one and tear out part of the air system, which was giving us no end of problems. We lost one of the days we had gained.