John Varley - Red Thunder

SIMPLY TO BUILD Red Thunder in sixty days would not have been a problem. But building it was not enough.

“Three parts to the problem,” Travis drilled into us. “Construction, testing, and training. Construction is the easy part. We’re not going to take off in a ship we don’t know how to operate.”

As the ship took shape we had to do exhaustive tests of each of the ship’s systems, testing right up to the point of failure, and sometimes beyond. We had that demonstrated to us vividly when an air system broke down and we were unable to fix it with the tools we would have aboard. So, tear it out, design it again, build the new system, and test that to its limits. Each item that didn’t work properly the first time and every time thereafter put us further behind schedule. Travis was uncompromising, and though we chafed at it, we knew he was right.

But training was the worst.

From the earliest Mercury days of manned space flight, training had been more extensive and more rigorous than almost any field of human endeavor. The idea being that, if you trained hard enough, you would know almost instinctively what to do in any given situation. Your response would become automatic, and you would remain calm because you’d been there before. It was proven, it was time-tested… and I just didn’t think we had time for all the training Travis insisted on.

As if this weren’t enough, we also had to train in the Russian space suits.

We had the manual translated, and by the time we were done we [272] all had practically memorized it. We each had to log ten hours working in the pool with weights on our feet. That meant that another person had to be there to operate the rented crane to yank us out of the water if something went wrong.

Things did go wrong. The suits had been sitting on the shelf for a long time, which wasn’t good for them. My very first training session, when I was supposed to be learning the use of a NASA-surplus zero-gravity power wrench, I spent the first fifteen minutes shivering as the suit cooling system brought me down almost to the freezing point, and when I had that adjusted right, my left glove sprung a leak and we had to abort.

We were at one of our regular Sunday meetings. Kelly was surrounded by stacks of paper and no less than three digital assistants, spread out on the picnic table at the Rancho. Each Sunday she handed each of us a small booklet detailing our every task, every movement for the coming week.

I looked around. Dak seemed to have lost weight, which he couldn’t afford. Alicia wasn’t smiling much. We had all been daunted to find how leaky the suits were.

“One more arm, and one more leg, and I think we’ll have five completely sound space suits,” she was telling us. She looked up at Travis. It was his money.

“Go for it,” he said. But he didn’t look happy. Donating the suits was turning out to be more expensive than he’d bargained for.

We spent an hour talking. When that was done Kelly opened the big cardboard box she’d brought to the meeting. She pulled something out of it.

“Bomber jacket?” Travis asked, with a grin.

“They had a special at Banana Republic,” Kelly said. She stood up and put the jacket on. She looked great in it, but that was no surprise, she looked great in everything.

Dak and Alicia were out of their chairs, finding their jackets and putting them on. Kelly tossed one to me. I looked it over before putting it on. It looked used, but with leather jackets that was good. Somehow they stress the leather without weakening it, so it becomes supple and [273] soft. I put it on and liked the feel of it, though it was far too warm for a Florida summer day. On the front, where a soldier would wear his medals, there was a name strip: garcia. Below that was an embroidered triangular mission patch. It showed the ship blasting in orbit around Mars, with Red Thunder written along the bottom. The patch was on the back, too, but larger.

“Did you do this?” Travis asked, pointing to the logo on the back of his jacket.

“I’m not that artistic. I’ve got a friend who’s a graphic designer. Do you like it?”

We all did. Nobody had any objections to the jackets, either. They beat the hell out of NASA’s tired old blue jumpsuits.

“Who’s the friend?” I asked.

“A guy named 2Loose.”

I was delighted. “You know 2Loose, too?”

“He did a mural on the new women’s center,” Alicia said.

Henry “2Loose” La Beck was an old classmate of mine, the Tagger King of Central Florida. In his outlaw days he must have painted a thousand walls and two thousand railroad cars. He did a little time for it, but often the owner of the violated building dropped charges after studying his work for a while, he was that good. Plus, he could run very fast.

Last I’d heard of him he’d cleaned up his act, gone legit, formed his own company and was doing pretty well. A lightbulb went on inside my head.

“Hey, how about we get him to paint Red Thunder!”

All I got at first were blank looks.

“It’s already painted,” Travis said.

“Yeah, but not like 2Loose can paint it,” Dak said, with a grin. “He did some work on Blue Thunder . Just the pinstripes, I didn’t want no Sistine Chapel ceiling.”

“But he could do the Sistine Chapel,” I said, “if you didn’t mind God driving around in a low-rider and Jesus with spiky hair and tattoos.”

“I like it,” Alicia said.

“Me, too,” Kelly laughed. “Let’s ask him.”

[274] “Hey, wait a minute,” Travis said. But we voted him down and, true to his word, this was still a democracy until we took off. So we decided to offer 2Loose the commission.

ANOTHER WEEK OFhard work, and we gained another day on the timetable.

It was becoming clear that the sticking point would be in the last week. Travis had scheduled a full-blown systems test for that week. For seven days, all of us but Travis and Jubal would be sealed into the ship, totally isolated from the outside environment. We would drink the stored water, breathe the canned air, and eat the frozen food, all the while we were training, training, training.

He was adamant that it had to be seven days.

“Seven days is already a compromise,” he told us. “I’d be a lot happier taking a full month. The only reason I’m settling for seven is that Red Thunder is so powerful and so fast that we’ll never be more than three and a half days away from Earth. I figure most things can be patched up well enough to last three and a half days.”

WE GAINED ANOTHERday by cutting out hours of sleep. With three days until M-day minus seven, the day we had to begin the long-duration systems tests, we bolted down the top of tank seven, the central module, and Red Thunder was complete… from the outside. But we still had five days of work that had to be done before the test could begin.

On that day the Chinese Heavenly Harmony ship arrived at Mars and began its aerobraking maneuvers. Aerobraking had been used by all but the earliest unmanned Mars missions. Instead of firing rockets to achieve an orbit around Mars, a spacecraft would dip into the upper reaches of the Martian atmosphere. Friction would slow the ship enough that it would fall into a highly elliptical orbit; that is, one that looped far away from Mars-to what was called apoapsis-before curving back down to the orbital low point, the periapsis. Once there, it [275] would dip into the atmosphere again, slowing more and making the orbit less elliptical. After half a dozen orbits of decreasing size the ship would settle into a circular orbit, and proceed to the Martian surface from there.