John Varley - Red Thunder

“She shot at me!” he said, and he couldn’t quite keep the fear out of his voice.

“If I’d shot at you, Mister Private Dick, I’d of hit you. I shot at that parrot’s eye. I can put a round through your eye, too, if you give me any more trouble.”

He looked down and sure enough, the bullet had gone through a loose fold of cloth, precisely through the eye of a red and blue macaw. This evidence of her accuracy didn’t seem to reassure him… and it shouldn’t have. Mom was capable of putting a real, nonlethal but very painful hurtin’ on him with that little popgun.

“He came in an hour ago,” she told us, “handed me that silly card, and said we had to talk about some people was planning to go into outer space.”

“Unbelievable!” Travis said.

[288] “Said to get Kelly here, pronto. Said for a hundred grand-that’s what he said, ‘a hundred grand’-somebody’s daddy didn’t have to find out about it.”

“After all these years, you’d sell out my father?” Kelly sounded scandalized.

“He’s sort of pissed,” Lawrence said, defensively. “On account of I ain’t been able to dig up dirt on your sp-… on your boyfriend there.”

“It was real smart of you not to finish that word, Mr. Lawrence,” Mom said, and you could feel the tension in her trigger finger when she said it. Lawrence sure felt it; he couldn’t take his eyes off the gun, slapping dangerously against Mom’s thigh.

“Unbelievable,” Travis said again.

“What do you mean, Travis?” Alicia asked.

“Unbelievable anybody could be so stupid!” He looked around at us. “Don’t you see it? Your dad got a tour of Red Thunder just a few days ago, and the thought never entered his mind that it could fly. Because your dad is smart, whatever else he is. He knows a spaceship has to have a big, big engine to take off. Anybody with any sense takes a look at Red Thunder , they know instantly it couldn’t be a real spaceship. Hell, I could have given those FBI agents the tour, and they’d never have guessed, either.”

“But it can fly,” Dak pointed out.

“Exactly! But to believe it can fly, you have to either postulate an entirely new technology, or be so stupid, be so totally clueless as to how things work… it’s beautiful when you think of it. He’s so dumb he stumbled onto the truth.”

“Hey,” Lawrence said, but it was halfhearted.

“I got a rule,” Travis said. “I’ve never had to use it so far in my life, but I think it’s a good rule. Never pay ransoms or blackmail.”

“I like that rule, too,” Mom said.

Travis had his back to the prisoner, and we all saw him wink.

“Then I guess we gotta kill him.”

For a moment I thought he’d gone too far, the guy looked like he might have a heart attack. He started babbling about how he’d go away, [289] forever, forget about the whole thing, he’d leave town, he’d leave the state. He’d do anything.

We all watched him until he ran down.

“Maybe we don’t have to, Travis,” Caleb said. “All we gotta do is hold his sorry ass for twenty-four hours, then what can he do?”

“That’s kidnapping!” Lawrence said, then realized what the alternative was. He babbled again about how he’d be happy to stay here, he wouldn’t cause any trouble.

Travis went outside and everybody but Caleb followed him. Kelly spoke first.

“Travis, he’s a drunk, he… oh, sorry.”

“No offense taken. I was thinking the same thing. Get him liquored up. Alicia, you got anything in that drug cabinet we could use as a Mickey Finn?”

“A what?”

“Something to knock him out for a while.”

“Oh, sure. No problem.”

“Okay. Caleb can watch him. He won’t need a gun, Betty, Caleb could take that pathetic loser apart with his bare hands. Give him all the booze he can drink, pop some pills in it. Dump him in an alley someplace, later. What’s he gonna do? It’ll be his word against all of us.”

“That’s what we’ll do, Travis,” she said. “He really burned me up. No way I was going to let the likes of him stop y’all.”

“Mom!” I said.

“You know I’d be happier if you didn’t go, Manny. But not this way.”

I gave her a big hug.

AND SO WEreturned to the warehouse, with one more night and a day to spend inside. 2Loose had erected scaffolds around the ship and hung tarps around it.

We climbed the ramp and sealed the outer air-lock door, cycled the lock, entered the ship interior. The Monopoly game was as we’d left it. [290] Other than our cans of Coke having grown warm, it was as if we’d never been gone.

TRAVIS DIDN’T THROWus any more emergencies.

“I feel dirty,” he told us over the phone. “It’s so easy to humiliate a man, especially when he’s down. So easy. I’m not proud of it.”

“That’s something,” Dak said. “You don’t take pleasure in it.”

“But I did, when it was happening.”

“So did I,” Kelly said. “Anyway, it had to be done.”

“Jubal wants to know if he can stay with y’all for a while,” Travis said.

“What, he has to ask?” Alicia said. “Send him in.”

So Jubal joined the Monopoly game for an hour. He seemed unusually quiet, sweating a lot, very nervous. I hoped it was just opening night jitters, anticipation. I know I was feeling it. He couldn’t be worried about the trip. Could he?

We slept, we woke up, and we sweated out the last hours until six P.M., when we swung the door open and came down the ramp. Mom was there, and Jubal, and Grace, and Salty, and Maria, and Sam. There was a big flat cake with a little model of the ship standing on it, and the logo of Red Thunder spelled out in red icing. Maria, who had baked it, cut it and we all had a piece.

“Where’d you get the model?” I asked.

“Oh, we got ten thousand of ’em,” Mom said. “Didn’t Kelly tell you? We’re going to merchandise the hell out of this trip.” I looked at Kelly.

“Well, I’ve got to have something to keep me busy while y’all are gone, okay?”

“Fine with me, Kelly,” I said.

Then 2Loose gave us a tour of his masterwork. All the scaffolding and canvas had come down while we slept, and his masterpiece rose high in the air before us.

He had rendered the Six Days of Creation, from Genesis.

The first tank depicted the dividing of the light from the darkness, and I had almost been prophetic. God wasn’t in a low-rider, he was [291] doing a wheelie on a big Harley, and the Light was coming out of one tailpipe and the Darkness from the other. Shapes loomed in the big white and black clouds.

Tank two, the creation of the Firmament, which means Heaven, I think. How would a Cuban/French-Canadian maniac render Heaven? With lots of gold and lots of blue, and angels partying to boom boxes on Miami Beach.

On the third day God separated the waters from the dry land. Raging seas, towering mountains. “Let the Earth bring forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit after his kind…” He showed all that, and in the foreground was a brightly colored jungle.

Tank four, the creation of the sun, the moon, and the stars. That may have been the most gorgeous panel of the six, stars whirling and exploding, the sun high above all.

Fifth day, creation of animals. Great whales, winged fowl, plus a lot of animals Noah must have forgotten to bring along on the ark.

And on the sixth day… created He the crew of the Red Thunder . That’s right, the six of us-2Loose not knowing Kelly wasn’t going, not knowing, in fact, that any of us were going, but one look at the last picture and you knew some vibe from our crazy little ship had touched his artist’s heart and told him the truth.