Red Thunder

PART ONE
1

I ALWAYS THOUGHT the VentureStar looked like a tombstone. When it was standing on end it was twice as tall as it was wide. It wasn’t very thick. It was round at the top. For a night launch it was illuminated by dozens of spotlights like an opening night in Hollywood. It could have been the grave marker for a celebrity from some race of giant aliens. The stubby wings and tail seemed tacked on.

The VentureStar didn’t spend much time flying, which was just as well, because it flew about as well as your average skateboard. Sitting on the ground it looked more like a building than an aircraft or a spaceship.

That’s okay. In about thirty seconds it would leave every airplane ever built in a wake of boiling smoke and fire.

“Manny, a Greyhound bus leaves Cocoa Beach every day for Tallahassee. Why don’t we go watch that some night? We could get a lot closer.”

That was my girlfriend, Kelly, trying to get my goat. Her point being that VStars left Canaveral once a day, too. Point taken.

“Who wants to neck at the Greyhound terminal?” I said.

“Hah. The only thing you’ve necked with so far is those binocs.”

[8] I put down my binoculars and thumbed up the brightness of the little flatscreen on my lap. I got a view looking into one of the windows of the cockpit blister. The flight crew were on their backs, going through the final items on the prelaunch checklist with no wasted motion. A woman with curly red hair was sitting in the left seat. I could read the name sewed on her NASA-blue flight tunic: WESTIN. A younger man with a blond crewcut sat on the right.

“VStars are noisier, I’ll give you that,” she said. We were sitting side by side on the tailgate of Dak’s truck.

“Ain’t you got no poetry in your soul, woman?”

I used the tip of the screen’s stylus to touch 7, then 5, then enter on the tiny flatscreen keypad. Camera 75 showed a view looking up from the massive concrete abutments that supported the VStar. Center screen were the long, pinched shapes of the six linear aerospike rocket engines that stretched across the ship’s wide tail. Wisps of ice-cold hydrogen and oxygen escaped from the pressure valves and swirled in the warm Florida night air. Down in the corner were the words “VStar III Delaware,” a mission number, and a countdown clock. In less than a minute camera 75 would be toast.

In a corner of the screen the countdown clock went from twenty-five to twenty. I pressed 5, then 5, then enter. A head-on angle of the cockpit crew, slightly fish-eye from a wide-angle lens. There were no more checks to perform, no more toggles to switch. They were almost motionless, waiting for the automatic launch sequence.

I pressed 4, then 4 again: Looking down the center aisle of the passenger compartment. It was built to carry as many as eighteen, but only seven chairs were filled, all of them toward the front of the module.

I knew those seven faces as well as an earlier generation of space nuts had known the faces of Al Shepard, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Deke Slayton, Gordon Cooper, Scott Carpenter… the original Mercury astronauts. None of this seven looked particularly nervous or excited. The white-knuckle days of space travel were over, or so everyone said. Mom says they’ll never be over for her generation, who saw Challenger explode.

I don’t think they’ll ever be completely over for me, either. I mean, [9] I didn’t expect the ship to blow up or anything, but was I the only guy on the planet who thought this VStar launch was just a little out of the ordinary? Was I the only one who noticed the Ares Seven had discarded the standard NASA-blue coveralls for bright red ones?

Mars. They’re going to Mars. The passengers in the VStar were the Ares Seven, the crew, on their way up to the Ares Seven, the ship.

Fifteen seconds.

3, then 1, then enter: The last gantry arm detached and quickly swung to the left, out of the way.

Eleven seconds.

5, then 4, enter: A view from a camera on a helicopter three miles away, vibrating slightly because of the long lens.

Nine seconds.

75, enter: I was looking up at the engines. The floodgates opened and a million gallons of water streamed down, to cool the launch pad and soak up some of the thunder that would kill an unprotected man before the flames vaporized him.

Five seconds.

The candle was lit, with a huge cough of orange flame that quickly moderated to an icy blue.

Two seconds. Camera 75 melted.

45 enter: A camera looking at the hold-down latches.

One second.

The latches fell away and the VentureStar immediately leaped into the night sky.

62 enter: This one was perched on the top of the tower. The deep blue body of the VStar roared upward, followed by a fountain of fire. Camera 62 melted.

The sound hit me, miles away. As always, I thought I could feel it blowing my hair, like an explosion. I looked up to see the line of fire arcing in the night. I could see the VStar accelerate.

55 enter: The flight crew were pressed back into their chairs, their faces distorted by an acceleration of two gees and growing. I looked up again. The ship was completing a roll maneuver, and turning down-range.

[10] 44 enter: The Ares Seven were all grinning like fools. Cliff Raddison held one hand out in the aisle, palm up. That took strength at 2.4 gees. Across the aisle, Lee Welles took up the challenge, reached out and slapped Raddison’s palm. Then they got their arms back as the gee forces continued to mount.

39 enter: I saw four globular objects in a line. Two were very dark, the other two a much lighter brown.

What the hell? Camera 39 was supposed to be aft-looking, mounted on the ship’s tail. It was one of my favorite angles, looking back to see light-spattered Florida shrink and vanish over the horizon…

“Dak!” I shouted. “You bastard!”

I jumped down from the high tailgate, raced around the pickup, and was just in time to see Dak and Alicia straightening and pulling up their pants. I gave Dak a shove and he was laughing so hard he simply fell over onto the sand. Dak’s laugh was a high-pitched giggle; Alicia had more of what I would call a belly laugh, and she was not in much better shape than Dak, leaning against the truck, holding her pants up with one hand. I turned away; I didn’t want Dak to see me smile.

Kelly came around to the front of the truck in time to see Alicia collapse in the sand beside Dak.

“Can somebody tell me what’s going on?”

I went to the front of the truck and pointed to the o in Dodge.

“There’s a camera in there,” I told her. “It’s about the size of a postage stamp.” Kelly bent to study it, but couldn’t see anything.

“Television camera?”

“Just in case,” Dak said, sitting up with tears streaming from his eyes. “Bad things can happen to a Nee-gro in the deep south. If the cops ever do a Rodney King on my nappy head, I’m not going to cross my fingers and hope somebody has a camcorder.”

“I still don’t get it,” Kelly said.

I showed her the flatscreen, thumbed the backup button until I had the image Dak had pirated into the NASA data stream.

“Yes sir!” Dak shouted. “That rocket ain’t going to Mars, it’s going to the moon, baby!”

There was barely enough light for me to see the smile on Kelly’s face [11] as she realized what she was seeing. I looked at the sky, where the VStar had now dwindled to a very bright speck to the southeast. A white vapor trail, barely visible by starlight, was twisted by the high-altitude winds.

“You’ve got a big zit on your ass, Dak,” Kelly said.

“Huh? Let me see that.”

She held it out of his reach, then tossed it back to me. Dak realized his leg was being pulled. He helped Alicia to her feet. The four of us stood together a few moments, watching the VStar’s light dwindle and vanish below the horizon.

“Say hi to John Carter, swordsman of Mars, when you get there, guys,” Dak said.

“Or Valentine Michael Smith,” I added.

“Just so it isn’t those H. G. Wells Martians,” Kelly said.

It was a pleasant Wednesday night in the spring, one of those times that almost makes up for the heat and humidity in Florida most of the year. We were standing in a shell parking lot in Cocoa Beach. At the north end half a dozen cars clustered under the flashing neon of the Apollo Lounge. It advertised nude table dancing, pool, no-cover-no-minimum, and “World Famous Astroburgers.” We had the south end of the lot to ourselves. Before us was a sand dune, the beach, and the Atlantic Ocean. Not far behind us was the Banana River, which isn’t a river at all but a long, slender bay cut off from the sea by the barrier island that contains Indian Harbor Beach, Patrick Air Force Base, Cocoa, and Cape Canaveral, just a few miles to the north. There were places to get a little closer to the launch complex without a visitors’ pass, but none that offered us a better view of the downrange flight of most VStars.

“So, are you satisfied with the flight, Captain Garcia?” Dak asked.

“Everything looks nominal from here,” I said.

“Don’t know what those folks at NASA would do without you to help get ’em in the air every night,” Dak muttered.

“It’s not every night, it’s more like-”

“Couple times a week.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said. It was about that often, at least when I could [12] convince Dak to fire up Blue Thunder and take me out there. “Anyway, this one’s taking the crew up to the Mars ship.”

“What’s your problem, Dak?” Kelly asked.

“No problem. Just restless, I guess. Manny likes to come out here, look at ’em take off. Way I see it, it’s just one more ship taking off without me on it.” Dak looked at the horizon where the rocket had faded into the black sky. He looked hungry. At last he looked back at us.

“How about it, Manny?” he said. “Go back to the heartbreak hotel and hit the books? Or do a little off-reading first?”

“Is that one of those rhetorical questions?”

So me and Kelly piled into the back of the truck and Dak and Alicia got in the cab, and Blue Thunder roared to life. I’ve never asked just what Dak has under the hood, but I figure NASA would be amazed if they could take a look. Put wings on Blue Thunder and it could probably catch up to the VStar. Dak flipped switches on a dashboard only a little less complicated than the ones in airliners, and the lights came on in groups. There were headlights and taillights and searchlights. Yellow fog lights hung below the front bumper. Tiny running-board lights could be made to crawl around the truck, like the sign for a Miami casino. More headlights were mounted on the big chrome roll bar that Kelly and I clung to, standing up in the pickup bed. And right behind a thick Plexiglas spoiler on the hood was the truck’s crowning glory: a blue neon scrawl spelling out “Blue Thunder.” Cuban gangbangers in immaculate low-riders, not an easy group to impress, had been known to drive into ditches in amazement when Dak rocketed past. As more and more lights came on, the color became visible, a blue so rich the only place on Earth you could duplicate it was deep in the ocean, and of a transparency you could only get with dozens of coats of paint and endless hours of buffing. Blue Thunder was more a work of art than a vehicle.

Which is not to say it wasn’t a hell of a vehicle. We bounced over the dune, me and Kelly holding on to the roll bar in the back, and then all four of the big off-road tires bit into the loose sand and we were off.

I knew as well as anyone that we should have gone home and done a few hours of studying. But if we had, Dak would never have run over the ex-astronaut.