Red Thunder

27

OF COURSE NO cell phone could have reached us where we were when Kelly got her call. We told Travis about it and he theorized Mr. Strickland must have a friend at CNN, and had piggybacked the phone signal onto the signal the network was sending to us.

“Whatever else he is,” Travis said, “you gotta give him top marks for resourcefulness.”

“I knew that already, believe me,” Kelly said.

After the grand tour of the ship, things settled down a lot. We could have given nonstop interviews, since every news outlet on the planet had requested one, but we’d soon have been repeating ourselves. How many ways can you answer “What does it feel like, being out in space in a home-built contraption?” So we said we were too busy and scheduled another live report in twelve hours.

Too busy? It was a lie.

On a long trip, whether you’re headed to Mars on a spaceship or sitting in an Amtrak train from New York to Los Angeles… the main thing you experience is boredom. Actually, the trip to Mars was more tedious. On the train there would be changing scenery. While you really couldn’t beat the view from Red Thunder’s ports, it never changed.

[316] Once Earth had dwindled to a bright star and while Mars was still just another, bright reddish star, the starry background was fixed. It was hard to believe you were moving at all, much less streaking along at the fastest speed humans had ever traveled.

So what did we do? We played Monopoly and watched television.

Soon all the networks were beaming their signals to us. Dak set it up so we could monitor a dozen of them on a picture-in-picture screen, like an animated quilt, and when we saw something interesting he’d throw that image and sound onto a big screen.

The two most critical systems, navigation and air, ran automatically on computer control and we only needed to monitor them. Travis was technically always on duty while the ship was in motion, but the autopilot was proving to be perfectly reliable, so he could sleep with an alarm bell beside his bed that would sound if the computer lost the star it was fixed on. The star was never lost, and Travis slept soundly.

We did stand four-hour watches on the air system, but it didn’t interfere with the Monopoly game, since the control console could be run with a remote from the common room deck. All the lights stayed green.

Television went to work on us.

We’ve all seen it. A celebrity is murdered, or accused of murder. A powerful politician is caught in a scandal. A certain story catches the interest of the public. Suddenly ordinary people are caught in the media spotlight. Suddenly your entire life is under a microscope. The media wants to know it all, the good and the bad, but most especially the bad. Few of us are so blameless as to withstand that spotlight.

Kelly, through our new best buddy, Lou the Anchorman, tried to contact her mother, but got only a busy signal. Then her mother arrived at the Blast-Off and had to fight her way through the cameras and mikes until Mom let her into the lobby. The cameras caught them through the windows as they hugged. Then, of course, the media got to listen in as Kelly and her mom talked, briefly. Her mom was worried sick, of course, but there was no nonsense about turning the ship around.

Mr. Strickland, with the sure business sense of a barracuda, decided to jump on the Red Thunder bandwagon with both feet, both arms, and his big fat ass, all at once. When the news crews arrived at Strickland [317] Mercedes-Porsche-Ferrari, banners were already going up: HOME OF RED THUNDER CREWPERSON KELLY STRICKLAND!

When Strickland was interviewed you’d have thought he built Red Thunder single-handed. He even managed to brush away a tear when asked how he felt about his daughter going into space with this possibly crazed ex-astronaut.

“I have the highest confidence in Captain Brassard,” he said, and if I hadn’t known better I’d have believed he and Travis “Brassard” were the best of friends. “I’m sure he’ll bring my precious daughter home safe and sound.”

With a smile that wasn’t pretty at all, Kelly asked to be connected to our law firm, and told one of the shysters there that she had reason to believe Strickland Mercedes-Porsche-Ferrari was in violation of the law, displaying a trademarked term without permission. She had copyrighted and trademarked everything with the remotest connection to the Red Thunder Corporation, and at that very moment injunctions and summonses were being prepared and served on the dozens of souvenir stands and T-shirt shops and the single car dealership that were seeking to profit from our enterprise.

“We intend to sue for damages when we return,” Kelly told Lou, and soon the news was being told to an audience of about two billion, planetwide. A camera crew showed the forced removal of the banners from the car lot of Strickland MPF. The camera caught, for a moment, an unguarded expression on Strickland’s face as he hurried back into his building with Miss Iowa.

When the media is looking at you that hard, people you hardly know show up. Dak’s mother showed up at the Blast-Off.

What better boost could one imagine for a singing career that had floundered for almost as long as Dak had been alive? It was as if the brother of a no-talent singer was suddenly elected President of the United States.

She didn’t try to fight her way through the crowds like Kelly’s mom had. She lingered there, with her perfect hair and makeup and teeth. She projected concern for her darling son. She was praying for Dak’s safety, and appearing nightly at the Riviera Room in Charleston, South Carolina.

[318] But by then the media had already started to grow some teeth. She had no good answer when asked why she hadn’t visited her son in twelve years, and she retreated into the Blast-Off. She emerged about fifteen minutes later, not nearly so eager to talk to reporters. But the next day she canceled her gig at the Riv and moved up to a club in Atlantic City. She never did try to talk to Dak. Must have slipped her mind… or maybe she had a pretty good idea of what Dak would say.

Much about Travis clearly had the media frustrated. Vast as his clan was, they were unable to locate a single person who would go on camera and talk. The biggest potential story there was obviously the guy with the white beard, painted on the side of the rocket ship, but no Broussard was talking about that except to say, off the record, that cousin Jubal was mildly retarded. Jubal was being kept hidden because things like this would upset him. Which was exactly what Travis had told them all to say.

But the juiciest story about Travis was that his ex-wife was one of the Ares Seven, en route to Mars in the Ares Seven.

The crew of the American ship held a press conference when we were about a day out from the Earth. They could barely conceal their irritation, though the public face they had obviously been told to put on was that if, if this ship existed, and was crewed by Americans, then we wish them the best of luck. After all, it doesn’t matter who gets there first, the important thing is that people are going to Mars.

Holly Broussard Oakley seemed baffled. It must have been nightmarish for her, a few weeks away from landing on Mars only to find that her ex-husband might be waiting for her when she arrived. We all felt sorry for her, even Travis.

But the worst for Travis was when they tried to bring his daughters into it. The question was immediately raised concerning how smart it had been to embark on a trip as hazardous as this while the mother, who had custody, was in a similar situation. A procession of talking heads discussed how traumatic it would be for the children to have both parents killed in outer space. School pictures of both children and live shots of the front door of Holly Oakley’s apartment building and the girls’ grandparents’ house were shown. Television people, [319] desperate for pictures, went so far as to pester neighbors as they came and went during the day. Being a reporter must be a very nasty job, if you have any human sympathy at all.

The story of Travis’s emergency landing in Africa was told many times, and also of his landing in Atlanta. Sources who would not be named hinted there was more to that story than met the eye, and the reporters kept digging. I hoped they wouldn’t find out, it wouldn’t help my mother’s peace of mind… but I knew by then it was best to be prepared for the worst.

The worst case was Alicia, of course. A father in prison at Raiford, for killing her mother? Terrific story. An old mug shot was dug up of a baffled-looking white man with unkempt hair and a cut lip, side by side with a picture of a smiling black woman. Court TV had covered the trial, so highlight tapes of that were shown, particularly the sentencing. About the only good news was that her dad had refused to talk to reporters.

At some point in all this TV watching I realized, with a bit of a shock, that I was the only one of us who wasn’t getting shafted in one way or the other. Of all of us, I was the only one who didn’t have “issues,” as the school counselor used to say, with one or more of my parents. The only problem I had with my dad was that he was dead.

No such luck. They dug up the story of how he had been killed, gut-shot during a drug deal gone wrong. A reporter brought it up during an interview with my mother, and it looked like they’d sandbagged her, that question coming out of left field, because she looked stunned… then shoved the offending journalist out the front door.

“Oh, Betty,” Travis moaned when he saw it. “Never attack a reporter, no matter how richly he may deserve it.”

“Mom and her temper,” I said, feeling all flushed and sweaty. Kelly took my hand and squeezed it… then rolled an eleven and landed on Dak’s New York Avenue property, with a hotel. For once, Dak didn’t whoop as he raked in his money.

“Let’s lighten up, friends,” Travis said. “We all knew this was going to happen. And not a one of you has done anything to be ashamed of. So don’t be ashamed of the dark side of your families, okay? All families [320] have dark sides. Believe me, when we get back, all will be forgiven and forgotten.”

It wasn’t all rotten. Lots of the sidebar stories made us laugh.

In the days after the launch, they must have interviewed every student and teacher in every school any of us ever went to. Our peers were behind us, 1,000 percent. It started getting embarrassing, hearing them all say how smart we were, how nice we were, how we were always ready to help out anyone who needed help, and how good a friend we had been, to a lot of people who we barely remembered at all. It was like a berserko school shooting-”He always did seem a little weird, he had no friends, hell yes, we all figured he’d shoot up the school one day!”-only in reverse.

We all cheered when they got around to interviewing 2Loose. The dude was good. He instinctively knew how to manage the news, and he was perfectly willing to spend all day in front of a blowup of his artwork on Red Thunder, explaining it to all the viewing audience. And he conducted interviews only in his studio, where people could get a load of all his other work… which was for sale.

BUT THERE WAS more news than just the tabloid-style fluff. It reminded us that what we were up to here had serious consequences, was a lot more than just a jolly jaunt to another planet.

Agents Dallas and Lubbock showed up at the Blast-Off about four hours after we lifted off, along with four or five other agents and a few local cops. The cops didn’t look too happy, I felt they were strongly on our side. They were all admitted into the living room, which was already crowded with our friends… and a small, quiet man with a briefcase who had been sitting by himself in some of the previous shots. What followed might have been funny if we all didn’t have such a stake in the outcome.

The agents clearly didn’t like the presence of the television cameras, and liked it even less when the man in the suit identified himself as George Whipple, from our law firm, representing the Broussards, Garcias, and Sinclairs.

[321] “We’d like you to answer a few questions for us,” Agent Dallas or Lubbock said.

“Sure,” Mom said.

“That is… down at headquarters,” Dallas or Lubbock said.

“Are my clients under arrest?” Whipple asked.

“Er… no, but it might be easier if-”

“My clients will answer any questions you have right here,” Whipple said. Right here, in front of two billion people. “If you arrest them, I will of course wish to accompany them. I advise them to answer no questions unless I am present.”

The incident was basically over right there, though Dallas or Lubbock didn’t give up immediately. But what were they going to do? Handcuff two men and three women and drag them away… charged with what? They couldn’t mention any “national security” baloney. We’d stolen nothing, revealed no secrets to any foreign power. Whipple told us that he had found us in violation of only three laws. One, we had operated an experimental aircraft not registered with the FAA. Two, we had taken off without clearance from Daytona airport or anyone else. And three, we had set off fireworks without a permit. The people at the Blast-Off could only be charged with conspiracy to commit those crimes, “as shaky a legal house of cards as I’ve ever seen,” Whipple said. “If I can’t get all of you off for going to Mars and becoming national heroes, I’ll never practice law again.”

The agents and cops left the motel fifteen minutes after they arrived. The cops were grinning. Lubbock and Dallas were posted to the FBI office in Butte, Montana.

There was no comic element to the other big story, though. We had known China would not be happy to be beaten in the race to Mars. They had invested too much money and national prestige. Their loss of face would be gigantic, if we were to beat them there.

So the official line in China was, It’s a hoax.

We watched the head of the Chinese space program go on television to denounce the whole story. He sounded angry, though I’ll admit that people speaking Chinese or Japanese always sound a little pissed off to me, the way they spit out their words.

[322] “That’s our biggest problem right now,” Travis told us. “We have to prove to the world, even to the Chinese, that we’re not sitting in a television studio in Washington, making all this up.”

“How we going to do that?” Dak asked.

“I’ve got a few ideas,” Travis said, with a grin.

The grin died when we saw the rally of one million angry Chinese in Tien-an-men Square, burning American flags. A good many of those people marched to the American embassy and began throwing stones and firebombs. A Marine guard was killed before the Chinese Army pushed the crowd back. I thought Travis would climb through the screen and start killing rioters himself when that news came in, and we were all ready to go with him.

After that we turned the television off for a while.

IT HAD BEEN hard for me to imagine sleeping while hurtling through space at an insane speed. I hadn’t counted on just how boring boosting through deep space at a constant one gee could be. It was exactly like the five-day drill, except then Travis was throwing emergencies at us.

Dak whipped us all at Monopoly, and nobody felt like starting another game. He was on air watch at the time, and when his watch ended it would be Alicia’s turn.

Kelly yawned and got up from the table.

‘Time to hit the sack, don’t you think, Manny?”

“Go on, y’all,” Alicia said, with a wink.

I followed Kelly down to our stateroom, and once inside she closed and bolted the door and leaned back against it.

“You’ve heard of the Mile High Club?” she asked.

“Everybody’s heard of the Mile High Club.”

“Well, my darling, we are about to join the Million Mile High Club. We may even be the first members.” She joined me on the bed.

First members? Probably not, though nobody on the Heavenly Harmony or the Ares Seven would have copped to it. Both China and my beloved home country managed the news too strictly for that.

Even if we weren’t the first, it was a night to remember. I think I [323] got an hour of sleep, and then Alicia was knocking on our door because I was on air watch.

So a trip to Mars doesn’t have to be boring.

ABOUT TWO HOURS from turnaround the whole ship rang like a giant bell. I was instantly on my feet, and we all heard the alarm sounding and Kelly’s recorded voice.

“Pressure loss from Module One. Pressure loss in Module One. This is not a drill. This is not a drill.”

I was the first to the crossroads deck, and I leaned in and pushed the inner air-lock door shut, and by the time I’d done that Kelly was there to help me into my short-term survival suit, as we had drilled. I had it on in seconds, and stepped into the lock. Kelly shut it behind me, and I heard her slap the metal to tell me it had been secured.

The pressure gauge in the lock was reading normal, and so was the one for the module… wait a moment, I saw it go down just a hair. It was enough that the inner door could not be opened unless I hit the emergency override switch, there in the lock.

Procedure was to activate my suit if the pressure was 10 psi or less. It was still a long way from that, and if it did begin to fall rapidly, if whatever puncture had been made suddenly grew, I could activate the suit in two seconds flat. So I overrode, and opened the inner hatch. I swung out onto the ladder and took two of the round patches stored there and a smoke generator, which I broke to activate, then held still to see which way the smoke drifted. It went up, so I followed the smoke up the ladder.

At the very top of the module the air was swirling a lot more violently than it had midship. But the pressure was still good, as the automated air system released more air to make up for what was being lost, something it would continue to do unless the losses reached a much higher level. I could see the smoke being sucked away into a tiny hole. Sprayed-on insulation had exploded inward like glass hit by a BB.

“We hit something,” I said over the radio. “There’s a breach, smaller than a BB. You think we hit a BB?”

[324] “If we hit something that big, at this speed,” Travis said, “it would have torn us apart. A speck of dust, or a very small grain of sand. Don’t put the patch on until-”

“I’ve got the situation in hand, Travis. Sorry, I meant Captain.”

“You’re doing fine, Manny.”

The thing cooled fast. I didn’t risk touching it, but I put a patch over it and it held. The smoke stopped swirling. When I was sure it was securely in place I went back down the ladder, then up again with a silicone sealer gun, and caulked around the edge of the patch. Once, twice, three times for good measure. Vacuum did not suck the thick, gooey stuff in around the edges of the patch. Mission accomplished.

“Let’s save this story until we get back,” I suggested when I’d climbed back into the central module and as Kelly was helping me remove and fold the suit.

“Suits me,” Travis said. “Kelly, make a note, would you? When we’re building Red Thunder Two, we add an extra layer of steel outside the nose of the ship, with a foot or so of space between it and the hull. Then something like this hits us, all its energy will be soaked up by the shield.”

“Red Thunder Two?” Kelly asked. Travis grinned.

“Sure. You didn’t think this trip was going to be the end of it, did you?”

“Tell the truth, I hadn’t thought that far ahead at all.”

To say that Dak and I were eagerly looking forward to turnaround would be quite an understatement. What’s the biggest attraction about space travel? When you think about it, much of a life in space has to do with restrictions, on just about everything. Your living space is more constricted than a submarine.

The one area where you are freer than you are on Earth is your freedom from gravity. Free fall. Weightlessness. Flying like a bird, bouncing around like a rubber ball. You can’t possibly read about it, or see it, without wishing you could be that free.

Ironically, Red Thunder took that away. Not that I’m complaining. Months and months of weightlessness, or three days of one-gee acceleration and deceleration? I think anybody would opt for the three days.

[325] But then there was turnover.

It was possible to turn the ship without turning off the drive, but it had never really been done before, and Travis, like all good pilots, was a staunch conservative. He would turn off the drive before turning around, and he would do it slowly, taking between ten and fifteen minutes. So for that amount of time, we would get to have fun in free fall.

We spent the last hour before turnaround tidying up the ship, since anything that wasn’t tied down would immediately float when the drive went off. That could really be annoying since, according to Travis, “It is axiomatic that, in weightlessness, everything you will soon need will seek out and find the absolute worst hiding place possible, sure as bread falls butter side down.”

The last thing that happened before turnaround was that Travis handed out plastic garbage bags. We laughed, and he just gave us a small smile.

Two minutes after engine shutdown, I was sick as a dog.

My only consolation was that Dak was blowing chunks, too. We each filled our plastic bags, and asked miserably for another. Ten minutes into turnaround I was cursing Travis, Can’t you get this over with faster? By then I was into the stage where you’ve brought up everything you have, and still can’t stop. The dry heaves.

How could it possibly be worse? Oh, please. The thing that made it infinitely worse was… Alicia and Kelly were having the time of their lives.

They loved free fall. They bounced off the walls, did midair aerobatics that would have made the Red Baron proud. From time to time they stopped laughing enough to apologize… and then the ridiculousness of the situation hit them again. I doubted I’d ever forgive them.

“Almost there, guys,” Travis called from above us. “Don’t get discouraged. Over fifty percent of people experience nausea on their first flight.”

“Did you get sick?” Dak asked. I said nothing. I was at the point where simply hearing the word “nausea” was enough to send me into a fresh fit of barfing.

“Well, no. Luck of the draw, I guess. Okay. Everybody strapped in? [326] Now, look at the space over your heads. If there’s anything floating in that space, it’s gonna come crashing down on you in about ten seconds. Are you all clear?”

We reported we were clear. Travis eased the throttles up… and I felt myself settling down into the foam of my acceleration chair. There was a g-meter in my line of sight, just a needle attached to a spring, and I watched it creep toward that magic number of one gee…

And the whole ship shuddered, there was a huge thump! from somewhere aft, and Travis eased up on the throttles so fast we all would have been thrown from our couches if we hadn’t been held in place with lap belts.

Instantly I was too scared to be sick. We all looked around, knuckles pale as we gripped the air rests.

“No alarm,” Dak whispered. He was right. No bells clanged, no recording of Kelly told us This is not a drill! How could that be?

“No pressure breach,” I said, scanning my boards for an indication of the problem. All my lights were green. So were everybody else’s… then Dak noticed his signal-strength indicators for the various channels he had been picking up from Earth. All the meters were zeroed.

“The antenna,” Alicia guessed.

“We lost the antenna,” Travis called out from above us. “Has to be. I’m unbuckling now, take a look… yes, it’s gone.”

“What did it hit?” I asked.

“It hit a strut,” Travis said. “Manny, I just flipped a coin and you’re it. Come to the bridge, you are acting pilot for a while.”

I unbuckled, my queasiness returning, and floated up to the bridge. Travis was out of his command chair, leaning close to a side window for a look at the strut.

“I don’t see any damage from up here,” he said, “but I’ll have to go out and take a look.” He lowered his voice, without actually whispering. “If something happens to me, you are in charge. What will you do?”

Throw up, crap in my pants, and have a nervous breakdown, not necessarily in that order, I thought. But I said, “Kill our velocity.”

“That’s locked into the computer,” he said. “Just do what we’d [327] already planned to do. That will bring you to a stop about a hundred thousand miles from Mars.”

“Plot a course back to Earth,” I said.

“Never hurry,” Travis said. “Take your time. You’ll have plenty of time. The tutorials for the navigation program are good. But before you do that, while your speed is low, send somebody out, Kelly or Alicia, to check the strut if I haven’t been able to get a report back to you. You and Dak, you aren’t rated for free-falling suit work until you’ve put in eight hours weightless without throwing up. Sorry, that’s the way it has to be. You can not throw up in a suit. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Go on.”

“Reduce speed to a few hundred miles per hour, relative to the Earth… enter the atmosphere tail first, engines firing… and burn up in the atmosphere, most likely.”

“A negative attitude’s not going to help you. If Kelly or Alicia reports the strut is damaged, land in the ocean. She should float.”

“Blow the emergency hatch, deploy the rubber raft, and get the hell out of here,” I said. The emergency hatch was the top of Module One. It was held on with explosive bolts. A standard airline inflatable raft would deploy automatically when the bolts were blown, and it would be up to us to abandon the sinking ship.

“You might consider a water landing even if the strut’s okay, if you don’t have confidence about easing her down on land.”

“I don’t have that confidence.”

“Do what you have to do. Anyway, this is all just standard procedure, this briefing, you know that. I’ll be back here in twenty minutes.” He grinned.

Alicia poked her head through the hatch.

“Travis, we’ve been talking, we figure me or Kelly ought to go out and check the strut. You’re the captain, you shouldn’t leave the ship.”

Travis sighed.

“There’s wisdom in what you say. But the suits and the lock haven’t been tested, and as captain I won’t send any of you out in them at this [328] point. I have more suit time than the rest of you put together. End of discussion.”

Alicia looked like she was going to say something else, but remembered what she had agreed to. Dak joined her, and he had a suspicious look.

“How do you flip a coin in free fall. Captain?”

Travis took a quarter from his pocket and set it spinning in the air. We all watched it for a moment, then Travis clapped his hands together, trapping the coin. He moved his hands apart and the coin floated there, the “heads” side facing him.

I WATCHED ON a TV screen as Dak and Alicia helped Travis into his suit. I was glad we’d practiced it. When we began it had taken us the better part of an hour to get into one. After a lot of drilling, we could do it in ten minutes, with another five for systems check. Travis did even better, naturally. Kelly joined me on the bridge and we watched through more cameras as Travis entered the lock and cycled it. I saw the pressure gauge drop to zero, then the door opened.

We switched back and forth between a rear-looking stationary camera and the one mounted on Travis’s helmet. Travis handled himself well, securing his safety line, then swinging out and over the strut, where he commenced his inspection. Pretty soon he located the impact area.

“That dish is headed for the stars, at about three million miles an hour,” Travis said over the radio. “How long before it gets to Alpha Centauri?”

“Is this question going to be on the final exam?” I asked.

“Extra credit.”

“A thousand years,” Kelly said, and when I looked at her, she shrugged. “Just a guess,” she whispered to me.

“Did you give her the answer, Manny?” Travis said with a laugh.

I hadn’t even figured it out myself. But light travels 186,000 miles per second, which would be… eleven million and some miles per minute, 670 million miles per hour, a light-year was 5.8 trillion miles, [329] Alpha Centauri was about four and a half light-years away… the answer I kept getting was 1,004 years. How about that?

“Trick question,” Travis said. “The answer is, never. We’re not aimed at Alpha Centauri.”

Travis moved along the strut quickly. I had another episode of the dry heaves before he got to the most critical area, the welds connecting the strut to the thrust cradle, and from there to the rest of the ship.

It was half an hour before Travis pronounced it good. Another twenty minutes to get inside and up to the cockpit. Five more minutes before he was satisfied we were ready to apply thrust again. And just a bit over an hour after the emergency began, that blessed, blessed thrust settled down on my abused stomach again. I felt like I’d gone ten rounds with the heavyweight champion of the world.

Travis got the ship stabilized on her new thrust vector, and then joined us in the common room.

“Aren’t we going to miss Mars now?” Alicia asked. “I mean, we traveled more than three million miles while you were outside, if I understand right.”

“You understand right. If I stuck to our original flight times we’d go way past Mars and have to come back. But I can compensate by applying just a bit more thrust. I haven’t figured exactly what that thrust should be-that’s one of the nice things about Red Thunder, she’s very forgiving, you basically just have to aim at where you’re going and blast, not calculate complicated orbits. If you go too far, you can just thrust your way back. But it’ll be about one point oh three or maybe one point oh five gees from here to Mars, to bring us stationary a thousand or so miles above the atmosphere. You won’t even feel it. In fact, it’s one point oh five now. Do you feel heavy?”

I did, a little, now that he mentioned it, but it was only a few pounds, and that heavy feel could be just my abused stomach bitching at me.

It wasn’t until then I had time to think about the consequences of what had befallen us with the antenna. We couldn’t transmit or receive signals from the Earth anymore. We were out of contact, and would stay that way.

Suddenly outer space felt pretty lonely.