John Varley - Red Thunder

OF ALL OFus, the aftermath of the voyage has treated Jubal most cruelly. He lives on the Falklands. He is not a prisoner there, but if and when he leaves he is under enormous security. He hardly ever does leave these days.

Three months after our return, not long after Jubal came out of hiding, an attempt was made to kidnap him. It came very close to working, but ended up with eight dead would-be kidnappers and three dead Navy Seals, who had been assigned to guard him at Rancho Broussard. Travis believes the caper was planned and paid for in China, but Travis sees ChiCom Reds under every rock. Most of the eight criminals had Italian last names. “Chinese could have hired them,” Travis said. Me, I thought about Squeezer bombs in the hands of the Mafia, and shuddered. Or Irish rebels, or Palestinians, or Zionists, or any other group of paranoid malcontents you want to name.

So Jubal doesn’t tempt fate anymore. He hated the Falklands at first for its cold, windy climate, so different from the lands where he had spent all his life. The IPA does its best to make him happy. He has a fine house, a wonderful laboratory. All he has to do is ask for something and he gets it. All he’s ever asked for is Krispy Kremes. A dozen are delivered every afternoon on the daily plane.

He does a lot of rowing in the many bays of the islands, he told me, but nowadays he’s accompanied by a destroyer, part of the IPA’s protective fleet. It is such a funny picture, and so sad.

He’s become a world authority on penguins, like the Birdman of Alcatraz. Often you can find him sitting among them, completely accepted.

I asked him once how effective he thought the elaborate IPA system would be, in the long run.

“ Long run, don’ nothing work forever,” he said. “Dey say ain’t no Squeezer-buster gone ever be develop. Dat ain’t nuttin’ but swamp water. Dem seven smarties over yonder, dey done figgered out how to [408] turn one off, oh yeah. If’n you understan’ how to make dem bubbles, makin’ ’em go ’way ain’t too hard, no. Then, boom!

“Aside from dem smart boys and girls, somebody else apt to figger it out, jus’ like I did. I jus’ hope he don’ need to get whomp upside de haid, like I did!” He laughed and rubbed the dent in his skull.

So there it is. You can’t hide knowledge forever. The only encouraging thing I can think of about that is, we’ve had the atomic bomb for a long time now, and the last city we destroyed with it was in 1945. Maybe we can get by that long before somebody figures out how to make his own Squeezer.

WE TRY TOvisit Jubal at least once a year. Sometimes it’s a reunion with the whole happy family, sometimes just me and Kelly. The flight to Stanley, the capital, makes you feel the islands are almost as remote as Mars.

Six months after the return we got married as quietly as we could, not wanting to deal with shouting paparazzi and circling helicopters with long lenses. Two years later our daughter, Elizabeth, was born, and in another two years, our son, Ramon.

Kelly became more or less a full-time mother… but, being Kelly, still had time to handle a few projects on the side, little things like helping run our many business interests and serving for a term in the State Senate in Tallahassee, where she helped pass the first meaningful land-use laws Florida had ever seen.

Her father is currently between beauty queens, though he’s been seen with a former Miss Maine on his arm. Kelly and I made up with him, as far as it is possible to make up with a conniving, back-stabbing, larcenous racist. We usually spend Thanksgiving with him, unless he’s been too obnoxious the previous year. Even my grandparents, both sets, have decided that my being white, or Hispanic, doesn’t matter too much if I’m rich and famous. After they had appeared on their local television stations crowing about how wonderful I was, they couldn’t very well ignore me. We usually spend a stiffly polite Christmas Day with one or the other.

[409] Travis was right. Both MIT and Gal Tech sent cordial invitations for me to continue my education there. But who was I trying to kid? I simply didn’t have the kind of mind that would put me through either university without the kind of covert help they usually shower only on sports stars. And I’d be afraid that if I went, that’s exactly what they’d do, graduate me still unable to extract a cube root. So I turned them down.

Instead, after all the fuss had died down, I went to Florida State, where I eventually earned an M.B.A., with a major in… hotel management.

I didn’t give up my dream of going into space as a career, I just took a closer look at it. What did I want, exactly? Well, to be a spaceman. Wouldn’t that be great?

Mom says that when I was seven she found an old telescope in a thrift store and bought it. Instantly, I decided I wanted to be an astronomer. Then I discovered that real astronomers hardly every actually looked through their telescopes. They took pictures with long exposures, they ran data through computers. Where’s the fun in that? I went back to wanting to be a fireman.

Before Red Thunder there were basically four types of people who went into space: pilots, scientists/payload specialists, United States senators, and the occasional rich person willing to spend a million dollars or more for a week in space.

After Red Thunder… . everybody could go into space. There may have been things that changed human civilization as radically as the Squeezer drive-fire, agriculture, the Industrial Revolution, the automobile, the computer-but nothing else changed it so fast . Suddenly, you could just buy a ticket and go . For a while there were even trips you could take to be the “first.” One expedition took two hundred tourists to Uranus and those folks became the first to set foot on a dozen small moons. It was as if Lewis and Clark had pulled a Greyhound bus after them, full of folks in loud shirts, snapping pictures all the way to the Columbia River.

So managing a hotel made perfect sense for me… if it was a hotel on Mars. The Marineris Hyatt is about three months from completion [410] on a site within an easy Bigfoot drive of Red Thunder’s first landing. I have been hired to manage it, and that’s a job I can do well. After that…

Just as soon as it became possible to buy Squeezer bubbles to install in your homemade spaceship, there was an explosion of crazies-they seemed crazy to me, anyway-headed outward. Dozens of them, bound for all the nearest stars. The ones who aimed for Alpha Centauri should start arriving back at Sol System soon, those who lived, anyway. They will be only about a year older because most of the trip they will have traveled at nearly the speed of light. They will have the satisfaction of being the first to fly to another star and return, but progress has already overtaken them. They went hoping to find habitable planets, and we know Alpha Centauri has none. Gigantic telescopes on the far side of the moon have told us that. They have also discovered dozens of Earth-sized planets at the proper distance from the right kind of star, planets that show the signature of water in the spectrograph, all within thirty light-years.

Thirty light-years is an easy journey with a Squeezer drive. Any distance is easy, they all take about a year when you’re going so fast time virtually stops.

Several very large starships are now being built. The one closest to completion will be ready to shove off in about five years. It is owned by Red Thunder, Inc., so Kelly and I have a reserved berth, if we want it.

If we go, I won’t be driving the thing. I won’t be in charge of the engines, I won’t be in the landing party when we get there. But on the way, I can handle the human needs of the voyage very well. A starship is just a very large, very fast hotel, isn’t it?