John Varley - Red Thunder

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Kelly was the only one of us with lots to do. She was on the phone right up to the point we had to strap in. She visited the New York Stock Exchange to check up on Red Thunder, Inc., which was trading up almost 100 percent before the exchange suspended trading to let things settle down. I hadn’t even known we had stock to be traded, much less that I owned a big chunk of it. I’d been too busy building and training.

The document presented in the Initial Public Offering was interesting, though. As a corporate statement of purpose there were just two things: “To construct and launch a manned vehicle to take human beings to Mars and return them safely to the Earth” and “To promote, publicize, and in any other manner to exploit the trademarked and copyrighted symbols associated with the ship and its crew and its mission, in any medium whatsoever.”

[393] While I was loafing through my last few hours in space, Kelly was determining what kind of sneakers I’d be wearing for the next year. She had Nike and Adidas in a bidding war. While the ship was still building, Kelly had made the acquaintance of the publicity and promotions departments of dozens of companies who relied heavily on advertising to sell their stuff… and who doesn’t? She had pitched it as a motion picture tie-in, naturally, and had to be careful not to get anybody too interested in our phantom flick. Then, the day before launch, she had e-mailed all those people… you may recall our conversation of August 9… telling them to watch the skies the next morning.

After launch-a thousand years ago, it seemed, and in a previous lifetime-she had worked the telephone until we lost the dish. She even inked a few deals by fax, all subject to our safe return, of course.

We were all going to be on the Wheaties box, if we lived…

TRAVIS BROUGHT USalmost to rest ten miles above Orlando, and began our descent at a speed not much greater than the express elevators at the Empire State Building.

“I’ve never eaten a single flake of Wheaties in my life,” I told Kelly.

“You’ll eat a whole bowl of it in a few days,” she assured me.

We watched on the screens as the grid of lines below us resolved into streets, and buildings. Then we could see the maze of freeways snaking their way through America’s theme park heaven. They were all gridlocked, no one moving an inch anywhere. But they didn’t seem to mind. They stood on their cars, beside the road, or behind yellow police tape, facing an almost solid line of squad cars from every community close enough to get there in two hours. A dozen helicopters were parked in Bambi Lot, one of them Marine One . Dozens more hovered at a safe distance, their telescopic lenses sending the picture back to networks all over the world.

Travis brought Red Thunder in like he did it every day.

“Touchdown on strut one!” Dak called out. “Touchdown three! Touchdown two! We’re down, Captain.”

“Shutting down engines,” Travis called back.

[394] But the engine noise did not die out. Red Thunder was still shaking.

“Manny, Kelly,” Travis said. “Get down there and see what the problem is. And hurry slowly!”

We did, and Alicia and Dak joined us. We entered the lock, overrode it by pulling the big red, recessed handle, and the outer door opened. We smelled the fresh air of Earth again… the fresh, hot air of Earth. The ship had heated the landing zone, buckled some of the asphalt. We lowered the ramp and looked out.

The roaring sound got louder. It was the crowd, half a mile away, a million people who had bought a ticket to a fantasy and got a glimpse of a dream come true instead.

We were home.

TEN YEARS LATER

* * *

FOR THE NEXTfive years Red Thunder sat right there, where Travis had put her down. They built a geodesic dome over her with a fantastically detailed diorama and they covered the asphalt with sand, gravel, and rocks, every grain of it imported from Mars. Goofy had to find himself another parking lot.

We were all there at the opening, and I watched with a creepy feeling as the ramp lowered and four lifelike robots walked down the ramp and started to sing… not “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” The copyright holders kicked up a fuss, because we hadn’t landed in their parking lot. So they sang “When You Wish Upon a Star.” I wish we had sung that, too. And I wish we’d sung better. On the tape, we were plain awful.

After five years Red Thunder, Inc., donated the ship to the Smithsonian, who installed it under a glass pyramid right out in front of the Air and Space Museum, watched over by the Wright Flyer , The Spirit of St . Louis , Chuck Yeager’s Glamorous Glennis , Alan Shepard’s Freedom-Seven Mercury capsule, and Apollo 11 . Rare company, but the magnificent old bird deserves it.

* * *

[398] IN THE EVENT, we had no trouble with the government. Is that because of the precautions we took, or do they exist only in the minds of paranoid novelists and screenwriters? The actions of some of the agencies we do know about scare me plenty.

What dealings we had with the government were open and friendly, mostly, though some voices were raised suggesting we ought to turn Jubal’s creation over to the government, if we were patriotic Americans. But the image of the American flag rising over the sand dunes of Mars, spoiling China’s moment of glory, was too firmly fixed in the American imagination for that point of view to last. When we testified before the Joint Committee of Congress there was not a breath of reproach in the air. We were honored guests invited to share our story with the world.

The first year was a whirlwind. In some ways it was more stressful than the trip to Mars, at least to someone like myself, camera shy and not fast with a quip, like Dak and Kelly and Travis. We rode in a ticker tape parade down Wall Street in New York, and in a parade I enjoyed a lot more through the town of Daytona, local kids who had made good. The parade ended at the racetrack, the Holy of Holies in Daytona, where we were given trophies with checkered flags on them. The little stock cars on top of the trophies had been unscrewed and replaced with Red Thunder models.

We could have paraded down the main street of every city and town in America if we’d accepted all the invitations.

If somebody wanted to use our images to sell something, or put us on their product, we researched them carefully… and then charged all the market would bear, which was plenty . Banana Republic sold thousands of Red Thunder leather jackets, and we got a piece of each one. We wore Adidas “Red Thunders” and ate Wheaties, though I only ate the one bowl. Nothing against Wheaties, I just don’t like cereal.

We made a lot of money. More than I ever dreamed possible. I never felt like we degraded ourselves. But it’s odd and not exactly pleasing [399] to see something that resembles your face on the muscle-bulging body of an action figure toy.

One of the things that left a bad taste in my mouth was the movie, which hit the cineplexes a year to the day after our return. It did okay, but not as well as expected. There were several reasons for that, one being that they didn’t wait until they had a good script. The twerp who played me didn’t look a bit like Jimmy Smits, but the girls loved him. The animated television series about us was much better, it ran for seven years.

Then there was the undeniable fact that, in Hollywood terms, the real story of a real pioneer trip just didn’t measure up to the likes of Star Wars , or any of hundreds of outer space adventures full of blazing ray guns and weird aliens.

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