Red Thunder

20

SO WE HAD the go-ahead to build us a spaceship.

Hooray!

So we buckled down to work…

And nothing happened.

Nothing seemed to happen, for a while, anyway. Our biggest accomplishment during that early period was Kelly’s searching for and finding the ideal industrial facility where we could put the thing together and not be bothered too much.

But the first step of a project like this was planning. We didn’t know quite where to begin. In fact, for the first three days or so, Dak and I felt the whole load of this insane idea fall squarely on our backs, and we were terrified. Because Travis said that, at the beginning, this was our ship to design, and he’d consult, he’d help, he’d move mountains if he could… but getting started was up to us.

Actually there was what you might call a pre-preliminary stage. There were legal and financial questions to settle.

Legal? Are you seriously suggesting we bring lawyers into this, Travis? Dak and Alicia and I were appalled. Jubal just stayed out of it, [208] content to let Travis, his loco parent, handle his affairs. Only Kelly saw the wisdom in it. Count on the rich girl to understand.

“Believe me, sweetness,” she told me one night, “the best way to turn dear friends into deadly enemies is to have a handshake deal on an enterprise as complicated and potentially profitable as this one is. We don’t need to spell out every penny, but we need to outline the shape of the thing, the broad strokes.”

I certainly wasn’t going to argue. It was her fifty million pennies, and fifty million from Jubal, that made the thing possible in the first place. Myself, I’d have been happy to work for union wages and let the two of them split all the profits, if any.

In the end, Dak and Alicia and I had to lobby hard against her first proposal, which was a simple division of any profits into six equal shares.

“Not fair, not fair at all,” Dak said, and Alicia and I backed him up. “No way you two dudes put up all the money and don’t get back but a sixth.”

Eventually, after some dickering, Travis came up with a compromise. Kelly would get twenty-five percent, Jubal twenty-five, and the other fifty percent would be split three ways between me, Dak, and Alicia.

“What about you?” I asked him.

“My share is in Jubal’s, as always.”

Before we even got to the money part we had formed a corporation so things could be settled by voting. That was complicated enough in and of itself, even with Travis’s lawyer helping smooth the way. We were officially the Red Thunder Corporation.

I started to think that, after this, the engineering part would seem simple.

SHORTLY AFTER TRAVIS returned from visiting his daughters he and Jubal left for two weeks of testing the Squeezer.

“This time we’ll talk it over first,” he had said. “If I’d had us put our heads together before I dragged you all out into the swamp we might not be looking over our shoulders for secret agents now. And by the [209] way, if any of you see me running off like that again, I want you to bring it up, okay?”

What he proposed was to go on the road with Jubal and test more toy rockets.

“They saw something take off from the Everglades. I know a place we can do static testing quietly. But since it’s no longer possible to retain total secrecy, my thinking is that it would do us a lot of good if we kept them looking… in the wrong places. What if they detect another launch, but from North Dakota? Then another in Texas, and then one in Nevada. My feeling is, if they have to look all over the country, it will spread them too thin to do much good. Comments?”

“More launches will make them more interested,” Alicia had said. “Maybe if we just leave it alone, they’ll think the Everglades test was… I don’t know, a faulty radar or something.”

“Good point. But this bogey would have appeared on multiple screens. I think they’ll be looking hard, and they’ll keep on looking, whether it’s one launch or a dozen.”

“I think Travis is right,” Kelly said.

“Sorry,” Alicia said.

“Hell, no, Alicia. It was a very good observation. Keep ’em coming.”

The consensus was that Travis should fire off the red herrings, five or six of them, widely scattered, with no pattern.

Travis and Jubal took off in the van for points unknown. They carried Jubal’s tools and, of course, the Squeezer, of which there was still only one. They would buy the instruments and the materials they needed along the way.

So Dak and I could have waited for their return in two weeks. But two weeks wasted put us a lot closer to the deadline, and there was no way we were going to greet Travis without at least some proposal of where to get started.

That’s when I had my brainstorm about the railroad tank cars.

KELLY EXPLORED THE world of tank cars for us. Like so many things, it was a lot more complicated than you’d think.

[210] “Your ‘average’ tank car is forty feet long by ten feet across,” she told us. “I’ve found half a dozen companies that make them. They’re all made of solid, thick steel, they’re very strong.”

“That’s what we need, strong ones,” I said.

“You can order a standard model, or name your own specs. You don’t carry milk in the same kind of car you’d carry gasoline in. Some are lined, some are refrigerated or insulated to carry liquid gases. You can have just about anything you want… and the price for a new one is one hundred thousand dollars and up.”

“Just your standard car,” I said, once more intimidated by the price tag.

“I presume you don’t mind a used one?”

“Please, yes, please, a used one.”

“Run you from ten to twenty thousand each. We’re in luck, there’s a glut right now. I can probably shave some off even that ten-thousand-dollar figure.”

Dak wondered if we should put a deposit down until Travis got back, but Kelly said there’d be no trouble getting as many as we needed.

We needed seven.

We tried for most of one day to figure out how to fit everything we were going to need into just one, but it was impossible. Next step up was three, bundled together, but that didn’t look good, either.

“Remember, weight is no object,” Dak said. “We can brace this sucker any way we think is necessary, inside and out.”

With a few mouse clicks he created a bundle of seven cylinders. Looked at from the end, it resembled a honeycomb, one circle in the middle surrounded by six others.

“Put the bridge in the center one,” Dak said. “It’s a longer one than the others, about ten feet or so. Put some windows in that. On the deck below the bridge we have flight stations for the rest of us.”

“So one deck below that,” I said, moving the mouse, “we have sleeping quarters. Still got a lot of space below.”

“Remember our cardinal rule. If you think you might need it, bring it. Right?”

[211] “Roger. And if you really have to have it, bring three.”

So it began to take rough shape.

“A HUMAN BEING needs about six pounds of water every day,” Dak told Kelly and Alicia the day we showed them Design A, about halfway through Travis and Jubal’s road trip. “That’s just for drinking. We want to stay clean, we’ll need more.”

“I’ll vote for clean,” Kelly said.

“It’s not a problem. A gallon of water weighs about eight pounds. Say we all drink one gallon a day. That’s forty-eight pounds a day. Trivial. Add another ten gallons for washing, brushing teeth, cooking, water balloon fights… we’re looking at five hundred pounds of water per day.”

“So how many days will we be gone?” Alicia asked.

“We’re expecting about two weeks,” I said. “That’s three and a half tons of water. But we intend to carry enough for twice that, as a safety margin. Say seven or eight tons. Two thousand gallons.”

“Seven tons?” Kelly asked.

“Two weeks?” Alicia looked surprised. “I thought we’d be gone, I don’t know, months and months.”

“Don’t have to with Jubal’s gadget, hon,” Dak said. “We can get there in about three and a half days. I don’t think you even want to know how fast we’ll be going when we get to the halfway point and turn around to slow down.”

I wasn’t sure I did, either. Three and a half million miles per hour. That’s almost a thousand miles per second, a long way from light speed of 186,000 miles per second… but we’d have to reset our clocks forward a few seconds when we got back. One day I’d have to do that calculation, too… when I figured I was emotionally ready for it.

“We figure the water can come in handy for radiation shielding, too,” Dak said, and I could have kicked him. In fact, I figured I would kick him, first chance I got.

“Radiation…?” Dak might as well have suggested we eat cyanide. [212] Alicia would not eat genetically engineered vegetables or fruit, but her special dislike was irradiated food. I liked Alicia, but she usually fell for the line of the Health Food Mafia.

“Yeah, hon, there’s radiation in space. Mostly it won’t be a problem, it isn’t strong enough to penetrate our steel hull. Astronauts get exposed to it every day.”

“So what’s the problem?” Kelly asked. She was looking dubious, too.

“The sun,” I said. “Every once in a while there’s a storm on the sun, a flare, and the radiation gets stronger. We’ll be cutting in toward the orbit of Venus, so we’ll be closer to the sun than anybody’s been yet.”

“Yeah,” Dak said, “but it varies on an eleven-year cycle, and we’re not at the peak.”

We’re only a few yean before it. But I didn’t say that.

“We figured we’d make the thousand-gallon water tanks wide and tall and thin, spread it out to cover as much area as possible. Then, if a storm comes, we orient the ship so those tanks are between us and the sun.”

“We’ll probably fly in that attitude anyway,” I said. “Might as well be safe. But we’ll have detectors, too, all around the ship, to let us know if the level’s rising.”

“What good does that do?”

“The water soaks up the radiation, babe.”

“And then we drink the water?”

“The water doesn’t get radioactive. Don’t worry about it. This ship will have steel walls that’ll stop ninety-nine percent of it. We won’t have any trouble keeping within safe limits.” But Dak and I could both tell Alicia was going to want to see figures, and that “safe” limits were endlessly arguable. And there was no way to pretend we weren’t going to get any more radiation than if we stayed home.

In the end, it would be up to her. I was betting she’d go.

“So, that’s the water situation,” Dak said, changing the subject as quickly as possible. “Then there’s oxygen. We need about two pounds per day, per person. We figure on taking regular compressed air. A pure oxygen atmosphere is touchy, a fire can get completely out of hand in [213] half a second, just ask Gus Grissom’s ghost if you don’t believe me. So for every pound of oxygen we bring we’ll also be bringing four pounds of nitrogen. Can’t be helped, but again, it’s not a problem. We’ll have air scrubbers that take out the carbon dioxide. My feeling is we’ll need an ‘air officer,’ or something like that, who worries full-time about the air quality.”

“How about ‘environment control officer’?” I suggested. I figured Alicia would be a natural for that.

“Okay, that’s air and water taken care of,” Kelly said. “How about food?”

“I thought we’d go buy a freezer at Sears or something,” I told her. “Fill it up with frozen pizzas and TV dinners. Bring a hotplate and a microwave oven.”

Kelly laughed, thought I was joking at first… then laughed again when she saw it was not a joke.

“Except for ’Leesha,” Dak said. “For you, we figured we’d buy a big brick of tofu and a sack of rabbit pellets. Keep your dish full, you can graze whenever you like.”

“I’m getting a little tired of health food jokes, gang,” she said, and shoved Dak hard enough he fell off his kitchen chair, pretending to be injured.

We were having this discussion in Kelly’s office, that is, the office of the project manager. When we were deciding which of us would be the best at keeping all the details straight, all the bills paid, raw materials arriving in a timely fashion, all the jobs to be done, big and small… Kelly had won unanimously.

The space was in one corner of our warehouse, up one flight of steps over an area that had been used for storage but was now empty. There was a row of windows looking down on the warehouse floor, and I couldn’t help thinking of her father’s office. I wondered if she’d made the connection.

“That’s one thing we decided early on,” I told them. “When we can buy something off the shelf, that’s one more thing we don’t have to make. I know it sounds nuts, but a Sears freezer is just the sort of [214] shortcut we will take any time we can. Now, maybe it’s best just to bring dry rice and pasta and canned stuff, maybe the hot plate is all we need, really… but if we want to take frozen food, we can.”

“It’s amazing how much stuff we’ll be able to buy, when the time comes,” Dak said. “Like, the best way to get electrical power in a ship is with fuel cells. And it so happens you can buy them in any electrical supply house, just like the ones that go up in the VStar, and they’re not even that expensive. A space program spin-off.”

“And we’ll bring batteries as backup,” I said. “Plain old nickel-cadmium car batteries, about the size of a lunch box.”

“Well, I’ll provide a better menu than frozen pizzas,” Alicia sniffed, and before she knew it she’d been elected ship’s cook. Oh, boy. I could hardly wait.

“So. Water, oxygen, food… what are the other necessities of life?”

“Music,” Alicia said.

“Damn right. Bring your whole collection, we’ll be equipped to play everything but eight-tracks and Edison cylinders.”

“Food, water, and air are three of the big five,” I said. “Then there’s clothing and shelter. Shelter in Florida means a place to get out of the rain. In Minnesota it means protection from the cold. Where we’re going, pressure is the big deal, and heat or cold right after that. The ship will be our shelter.”

“So we need a big space heater, or something?” Alicia asked. “Outer space is freezing cold, didn’t I hear that?”

“You probably did,” Dak said, “but it ain’t strictly true. Space is a vacuum, it’s not hot or cold, either one. If you’re in the sunshine it can get real hot, real quick. We gotta be ready to cool the air, or heat it, since if you’re in a shadow you lose heat, and you get real cold, real quick.”

“Not to mention the weather on Mars,” I said.

“Now that’s cold,” Dak agreed. “Nighttime, figure on it getting down around a hundred and fifty below, most nights.”

“You’re kidding.” Alicia looked alarmed.

“No joke, kiddo. Hottest it’s ever been-the last million years or so, anyway-is about sixty Fahrenheit, high noon, equator, perihelion.”

[215] “And perihelion is… what?”

“Closest point to the sun. Mars’s orbit is a lot more eccentric… that means it’s not circular, it’s elliptical, from one hundred thirty million to one hundred fifty-five million miles from the sun. On Earth the seasons are determined by the tilt of the axis, which part gets the most heat, northern or southern hemisphere, which is why Christmas is in the middle of the summer in Australia. On Mars it’s the shape of the orbit that determines the seasons, such as they are.”

“Sixty degrees doesn’t sound so bad,” Kelly said.

“I wouldn’t bother to pack any sunscreen,” I told her. “For one thing, it’s not Martian summer right now.”

“For another thing,” Dak said, enjoying this, “the air pressure is about one hundredth what it is on Earth, and ain’t none of it oxygen. That’s way below the pressure on top of Mount Everest. Ninety-five percent of the air is carbon dioxide, which, when you freeze it, is what we call ‘dry ice.’ And it does freeze on Mars, the carbon dioxide, most every night. So in addition to some real good thermal underwear, we’re gonna need us some space suits if we plan to leave the ship.”

“ ‘If we plan to?’ If we plan to?” Alicia looked scandalized. “We couldn’t go there and never set foot on it, could we?”

Dak shrugged, but the truth was, we were worried about that. You couldn’t just run down to the Goodwill store and pick up a few used space suits. I wasn’t sure you could buy them anywhere at all, new or used… or if we could afford them if we did find some. A custom-tailored NASA suit ran right around one million dollars, and that was a great savings over what they’d have run you ten years ago. Since our whole budget was one million dollars, I figured we had a problem.

Because, when you got right down to it… would landing on Mars count if you didn’t get out of the ship?

It sounds crazy, but what were Neil Armstrong’s first words while standing on the moon? “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind,” right? Anybody who knows anything about space history or any history at all knows that.

Actually, in the only way that makes sense to me, his first words were, “Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

[216] Think about it. If I’m standing in the pickup bed of Blue Thunder, I’m standing on Planet Earth, aren’t I? If not, then I spend very little time on the planet. Most of the time I’m standing on concrete, or asphalt, or wood, or carpet or I’m on the second floor of a building or I’m sitting in a vehicle.

Yet it is universally agreed that Armstrong was not “on” the moon until his foot was planted on lunar rock. His thickly booted foot, remember, or else his foot would have suffered a severe burn, not to mention the harsh effects of vacuum.

I had a sneaking feeling that, unless we were photographed actually standing on the Martian surface, our achievement of getting there first simply wouldn’t count. Or it would have an asterisk beside it, like Roger Maris’s sixty-one home runs. “They went there, but they didn’t go there.” They didn’t stand there.

It was a real problem. Because the difficulties of building a spaceship began to seem small beside the problem of making a space suit. A safe space suit. What could we buy and then adapt, perhaps a diving suit?

“So what about the rest of our clothing?” Kelly said, bringing me back to Earth again. Dak frowned at her.

“Blue jeans and T-shirts, right?”

“Well, I don’t plan on wearing any evening gowns,” she said, “but if we’re going to be on television, if we’re going to be famous, we shouldn’t look like slobs.”

“Maybe some kind of uniform,” I suggested. Kelly looked dubious. “Not dorky stuff like Captain Picard and his crew. Something cool.”

“I got a friend, she’s good at clothes,” Alicia said. “I’ll see if she has any ideas.”

“But don’t tell her, ‘Make me some uniforms for people going to Mars.’ ”

Nobody said anything. We couldn’t avoid being noticed, and we had to be able to tell people something when they asked what we were doing. We needed a cover story.

Alicia came up with the best idea the next day.

“Say we’re making a movie. Sort of a Tom Swift Goes to Mars thing.”

Dak looked stunned, then slapped his palm on the table.

[217] “That’s exactly right, baby. That way, we can make a spaceship, but we’re not making a spaceship. Just look at the damn thing. Is anybody going to look at that and think, These kids going to Mars, by golly!’ Hell no! Even if the spy spooks come by and take a look, in two seconds they’d walk right out. The thing don’t have an engine!”

He was right. We were all looking at the first rough mock-up of the ship, made from HO-gauge model railroad cars. It looked mighty silly. My confidence in the design, which went up and down, had reached a low ebb when we put it together. You looked at it, you had to figure whoever thought this up was nuts.

We did adopt the cover story of being prop makers for a movie in development. We went so far as to register the title Red Thunder with the Writers’ Guild, to announce we were in preproduction, and to set an imaginary start date almost a year away. The only downside to the idea was getting phone calls from agents and hopeful actors almost every day asking when we were casting. We always told them the script was in rewrites, and we’ll call you back.

“But the movie isn’t Tom Swift,” Kelly pointed out. “It’s The Little Rascals Go to Mars, right?”

“Perfect,” I said. My generation loved those old “Our Gang” black-and-white comedy shorts just like Mom’s generation had, and the generation before that. The only difference was, we had watched them on DVD.

“I’m Stymie,” Dak announced. “You figure Manny for Spanky?”

“No,” Kelly said. “Manny is Alfalfa.”

“Alfalfa? That cross-eyed freckle-face dork? No way I’m Alfalfa.”

“I always liked Alfalfa,” Alicia said. “It’s true he wasn’t as handsome as Manny… but Dak is much handsomer than Stymie, too.” Dak kissed her.

“Alfalfa was the romantic one,” Kelly said. “He had the most heart.” I realized she was right. So that settled it. I was Alfalfa.

“Who gets to be Darla?” Neither of the girls leaped at it. The Little Rascals were mostly boys, now that I thought of it.

“Kelly’s gotta be Darla,” Dak said. “Darla wasn’t half bad, you know. She could be kinda sweet. And Alfalfa was in love with her.”

[218] “No way out of it, Kelly,” I said. “You’re Darla.”

“And that means Alicia is Buckwheat,” Dak said, with a grin.

“Buckwheat? Buckwheat? Was Buckwheat a girl?”

“What the hell was Buckwheat?” None of us were sure.

“So who’s Spanky?” she asked.

“Who do you figure?” I said. “Little fat kid, smartest of the bunch…” We looked at each other and said it simultaneously.

“Jubal!”

WE WERE STUMPED for a while about what to call Travis. In the end it was so obvious we wondered how we’d missed it. Travis was Hal Roach.

It took our minds off our other problems for a while, but eventually we had to buckle down to the planning again.

Never in my life had there been so many things I had to buy. Kelly set us all up with Platinum MasterCards and sent us out shopping every morning for a week. We had to rent a U-Haul truck just to cart it all back to the warehouse.

We saved money where we could. Heavy equipment we mostly rented. We got the very best welding equipment because our lives would depend on every weld in the ship. We needed pumps, to create vacuum for testing the durability of components, and to create pressure for testing the tank cars. I thought we should wait on pumps until Travis got back and either approved or shot down the entire idea of using secondhand railroad rolling stock to get to Mars. Kelly said no, we’d need the pumps one way or another, and time was passing.

We bought a standard cargo container like you see on railcars, the kind that can be loaded and off-loaded from freighters and then travel by either rail or truck. We welded it airtight, built a small air lock in its side, and started pumping the air out of it. It was going to be our vacuum testing chamber.

The pressure gauge was nowhere near the point we needed when I heard a squealing noise like a rusty hinge… and the container [219] collapsed on itself with an earsplitting clang! as if we’d dropped it from the overhead crane.

“Jesus squeezus,” Dak breathed. Alicia and Kelly came running down the stairs from the office, and we all stood together and stared at what had once been a rectangular container, like a huge box of Velveeta. Stomping on an empty aluminum Coke can, you could hardly have smashed it as flat as that container.

I felt every ounce of confidence drain right out of me. Were we nuts?

“Well,” Alicia laughed, “like you said, we need to make all our mistakes right here on the ground, because we can’t afford any mistakes out in space.”

I didn’t point out that there were plenty of mistakes we could make right here on the ground that could kill us.

“We gotta get that thing out of here,” I said. “If my mother sees that, she’ll have a heart attack.”

We rented a flatbed and hauled the twisted hulk away, sold it for scrap metal, which was good, because Kelly had paid not much more than scrap metal prices in the first place. That same day we went ahead and bought our first tank car. I got goose bumps watching the switch engine pushing the car over our siding and into the warehouse.

This was actually going to happen!

We cut away the wheel carriages then lifted it with the overhead crane and lowered it onto a cradle we’d slapped together out of used two-by-fours and plywood-Kelly being frugal again. I was beginning to see just how her family had got rich and stayed that way. She never spent an unnecessary penny. But she never scrimped when only the best and newest would ensure safety.

The weight of the empty car was stenciled right there on its side: LT WT 72,500 LBS. Thirty-six tons, and a bit. Also the capacity weight: 190,500 LBS., or about ninety-five tons. Over two and a half times the empty weight. That was very strong, I thought.

We hauled the wheel assemblies to a public scale and weighed them, subtracted that number from thirty-six tons, for a tank weight of twenty tons. Seven tanks would weigh 140 tons. To that we would add [220] the weight of the cradle we would build that would connect the thrusting engines to the main body of the craft, plus the landing legs, plus everything we added inside, including the Sears Kenmore freezer and six people. We guessed we could bring it in under two hundred tons.

No worries about keeping weight down, no fuel weight to consider, virtually unlimited thrust for a virtually unlimited time. If only Werner von Braun could see us, I thought, lifting far more weight than his Saturn 5s could, using little silver basketballs. He’d be flabbergasted!

We fitted the tank car cap with an extra-heavy-duty round hatch door, lined it with aircraft-grade silicone seals, dogged the door shut, and turned on the vacuum pump. None of us got close as the air was sucked out. It took a while, and the entire time my ear was listening for that first, awful rusty-hinge squeal.

It never came. The car held up under fifteen pounds per square inch pressure differential applied from outside. I had no doubt it would easily contain one internal atmosphere against the vacuum of space.

“We’re in business,” Dak said, as I turned the relief valve and air screeched into the tank. “You talk to Hal and Spanky today?”

“Mom did. He says to look out for them about noon tomorrow.” Travis had been calling in every day, and the calls had originated from places as distant as northern Maine and the Mojave Desert.

“Might as well hang it up for tonight, then,” he said. “We got a big day tomorrow, trying to sell this thing to him.”

“We’ll sell it,” I told him.