John Varley - Red Thunder

And the public was just getting tired of us. I was sure getting tired of them . When your face is on magazine covers and television screens as mine was, you can’t go anywhere without being recognized. You never get a moment’s peace.

So after the first anniversary we mostly withdrew from the public eye. You can never really erase your celebrity, once you’ve gotten it or had it thrust on you, but you can stop catering to it. I’m not complaining. Celebrity is a small price to pay for freedom from financial worries.

FAIRY TALES ENDhappily ever after. Real life never does. We came a lot closer than most. It’s just that things don’t always work out the way you had imagined. But sometimes the alternative is just as good.

Things didn’t work out as planned for Dak and Alicia. They had a falling-out and they parted company. But since Alicia remained friendly with Kelly and Dak was still my best friend, though growing more distant with each passing year, they see each other fairly frequently and they get along.

Dak never recovered from the humiliation he felt as the champion puker aboard Red Thunder . No one ever blamed him for it, but he punished himself. For the first year he made public appearances with the [400] rest of the crew, but when we got tired of the celebrity rat race, Dak was not. So he started touring the sports venues of America, anything from football games to tractor pulls, riding into the arena on Blue Thunder , which had been retrieved and restored to diesel power. It was quite a show. When he tired of it, he donated it to the Smithsonian, to be put in the crystal pyramid with Big Red.

He took up racing, mainly motorcycles and pickups, but he’d drive almost anything that went fast. Kelly says he’s still proving himself, over and over, and she’s probably right. But he seems happy, and that’s all I care about.

He and his father devote much of their time to their speed shop, not only building their own cars but working on and designing others. I always ask Dak if he’s ready to join the NASCAR circuit, and he always scoffs. NASCAR is “the last white good-ol’-boy club left in America,” he says, and stock cars are “the fastest billboards on the planet.”

On Sam’s first birthday after the return, Dak bought him a classic Harley. I bought Travis’s Triumph. Weekends when we can get together, we drive all over Florida with Dak on Green Thunder , his racing bike.

Dak has even made peace with his mother. They still seldom see each other, but now she sends him a present on his birthday, usually something hilariously inappropriate like a train set or a bicycle. He gives them to Toys for Tots. She isn’t really a bad person, she just has no clue about how to be a mother.

Alicia… well, Alicia is still Alicia. She puts all her money into her own foundation, which runs drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers all over the South. She seems sublimely happy, except for one week every year just before her father comes up for a parole hearing. Ironically, without booze in him he’s a model prisoner, so any year now he could get out. And start drinking again…

I figure that if Alicia lives as long as Mother Teresa she could win a Nobel Peace Prize, too.

[401] MOM DIDN’T SELLthe Blast-Off Motel, after all.

While we were away she and Maria sold tons of Red Thunder souvenirs. They had to set up a tent in the vacant lot across the street to handle the traffic. And from the day we lifted off, there has never been a vacancy. Now it’s a good idea to reserve at least a year in advance. Except for the fantasylands of Orlando, we are the third most popular tourist attraction in central Florida, behind the 500 and the space center. Some years we even beat out Kennedy.

Two years after our return Daytona was hit by a late-season hurricane. The Golden Manatee suffered a lot of damage, some of which exposed foundations shoddy even by Florida standards. The city engineer said the wind from a passing butterfly’s wings was apt to blow the thing over, which Mom and Maria and I wouldn’t have minded if it fell toward the beach, which was where it was leaning, but it might have blown the other way and buried us. With her new clout at City Hall Mom managed to get it condemned, and two days later they blew it up. Before the dust had even settled Mom bought the land, which we turned into a parking lot and large restaurant/souvenir stand with a pedestrian bridge to give the Blast-Off easy beach access. We added a new wing, too. All the rooms have unobstructed ocean views.

Mom wanted no part of the business other than as a part owner. It turned out Aunt Maria actually liked the motel business, just didn’t care for the physical labor. She hasn’t made a bed since Red Thunder took off. She hired Bruce Carter, formerly of the Golden Manatee, to take care of all the hard work, leaving Maria to relax in the shade with her friends, playing dominoes and making sculptures of shell people landing on Mars. The Blast-Off maids are the best paid in Florida, with medical benefits and a pension plan.

Mom suddenly had free time, something she’d had almost none of from the moment of my birth. She was at loose ends for a while, but she soon found many things to fill her day, including volunteering at one of Alicia’s dry-out academies.

She also spent several hours each week at the shooting range. Eventually she tried out for the Olympic team. She didn’t do well at skeet [402] but made it in fifty-meter rifle. Kelly and I and Dak went to Johannesburg, where she finished out of medal contention with a respectable eighth place. When she marched into that gigantic stadium with the American team on the first day, I thought I’d burst with pride.

THE HUGE BROUSSARDclan avoided all the publicity, except for Little Hallelujah, as the family called him, the youngest and shortest of Jubal’s brothers. Hallelujah was the only child of Avery who was still deeply religious. He had followed in his father’s footsteps, preaching in a little backwoods church. Red Thunder’s flight and his brother’s unwanted fame was just the kick in the pants his ministry needed, and today he has a cable television show where he often connects Mars and Heaven in some manner only he really seems to understand. But he shouts, and he sweats, and he heals, and he doesn’t handle snakes, so everybody seems happy.

TRAVIS JUST CELEBRATEDnine years of sobriety. A year of appearances and hearings knocked him off the wagon once, but Alicia was there to help.

Travis stayed in the background as much as he could during the first, frantic weeks. He was content to let the media run with the story of the four kids who built a spaceship almost by themselves, armed only with the strange machine built by Jubal-the man of mystery in the early days-Travis being nothing more than a hired driver. We all tried to correct that impression in all our interviews, but the fact was that our adventure was much the sexier story. Travis’s story concerned nothing more exciting than the possible destruction of human civilization. Can’t sell papers with that.

But eventually, when the media blaze died down a bit, people did start to think about the evil side of the new technology.

Naturally the United Nations wanted to be in charge, from discussions to resolutions to implementation. They offered their meeting halls and their huge staff to facilitate matters. Travis turned them down, [403] politely. Then he issued an invitation to all the countries of the world-except China. Travis was never going to forgive or forget that somebody in that government had ordered the destruction of Big Red and the death of her crew. The other nations were each to choose a delegation consisting of two scientists, two political leaders, and three ordinary citizens to assemble in three weeks at the Orange Bowl, in Miami, to meet with Travis and Jubal and the Red Thunder crew to determine what to do with the Squeezer drive.