Red Thunder

4

IT WAS OUR interest in going into space that had brought me and Dak together. We went to different high schools but not long after getting our diplomas we came to the same realization. The Florida public schools had not prepared either of us for a career in science or engineering. It had not even prepared us to pass the entrance exam for a good college. We had a lot of catching up to do.

But a self-motivated student can earn anything up to and including a doctorate on the University of the Internet just by logging on and sitting in on virtual classes. No books, no tuition, no housing costs. Not that a dot-corn doctorate was ever likely to rival a degree from Harvard, but you couldn’t beat the price. I encountered Dak there, in a remedial math class. In a chat room after classes we found out we both had an obsession with finding a career in space, and we lived only a few miles apart. So we got together to study and soon were spending a lot of our spare time together.

I’m smart, but I’m not a genius. I found high school easy, it never challenged me much. I didn’t work very hard. It came as a big shock that I didn’t do well on the SATs.

So whose fault was it that I was now slopping out toilets and making [27] beds, trying hard to catch up, instead of looking forward to my sophomore year at Florida, or State? What was to blame here?

Well, how about poverty?

Practically anybody can plead poverty these days when it comes to higher education. There are only three types of people who get into a school like Yale: the children of the wealthy, students on full scholarship, and those willing to accept student loans that can take the rest of your life to repay.

My family-Mom, my aunt Maria, and myself-owns property near the beach, and that is supposed to be a gold mine. But that property happens to be a battered, leaky, cracked and patched motel built in 1959, and every month we’re less sure we can hang on to it for another year. After taxes and upkeep, the wages we pay ourselves put us well below the poverty line. So there’s no doubt about it. We are poor. But that had nothing to do with my not studying hard enough.

So try again. How about The System? It’s always safe to blame the system. It is politically fashionable, it makes you feel better about yourself, and it is (at least partly) true. Did it really speak well for the Department of Education that a guy like me who attended regularly, did the work, and even graduated from Gus Grissom High School in the top 5 percent… did it make sense that after twelve years I wasn’t up to entry level in the state university system?

No, it didn’t make sense. The system really sucked, no getting around it. But it sucked just as hard for some of my classmates who were now going to school at Cornell and Princeton.

If it ain’t the institution, and it ain’t the money, then it’s got to be the color of your skin or the language you speak, right? It has to be racism.

I even mentioned it to my mother one day when I was feeling particularly put-upon and sour. It must be because I’m Latino, I griped. Well, half Cuban, anyway. When she had stopped laughing, she came close to getting angry.

“I hope I didn’t raise a crybaby,” she said. “Don’t you ever blame your own shortcomings or anything else on racism… not even if it’s true. When you see you are being discriminated against, you just make [28] the best of it. You deal with it, or else you see racism every time you turn around and spend your life moaning about it. And besides, you’re hardly any more brown-skinned than I am, and my Spanish is a heck of a lot better than yours.”

Which was the simple truth. I got most of my looks from her side of the family, which was Italian. My hair is dark brown and curly. I wouldn’t look out of place wearing a yarmulke. Only around the eyes, which are dark and deep-set and sometimes rather bruised looking, like Jimmy Smits, do I resemble the pictures of my dad. Sad to say, the rest of me doesn’t look anything like Jimmy Smits, but I get by.

Like Jimmy Buffett said, it was my own damn fault.

In a mediocre system, the talented have no need to excel. I’m a fast reader, I have a good memory, and I’m quick with figures. With those qualifications, about the only way you could fail at Gus Grissom High was to never go to class.

After twelve years of that kind of schooling, both Dak and I thought we knew how to study. You go home, you read the material for tomorrow’s classes. Thirty minutes, an hour, tops. Then you’ve got the rest of the evening and all weekends to do whatever you want.

In my case, doing whatever I wanted meant working about sixty hours a week in our family business, the Blast-Off Motel. That is, it was what I wanted if I also wanted to eat and have a roof over my head.

Dak and I got together to study in the hope of improving our self-motivational skills, which were sadly lacking. Sometimes it worked. If the weather outside wasn’t just too damn gorgeous. If the surf and the wind weren’t just so perfect it would be a sin to spend the day inside when you could be riding your windboard. If the college girls from up north weren’t too plentiful and beautiful stretched out in scantily clad rows, trying to bake a Florida brown before spring break was over…

ME AND MY family had what you’d call a love-hate relationship with the Blast-Off Motel. Without it we’d all have been looking for jobs instead of working in the family business. I’ve pushed a vacuum cleaner the equivalent of twice around the Earth at the equator. I know fifty [29] things that can go wrong with a toilet and I know how to fix most of them. I could pass the test for a Ph.D. in toilets.

Still, it’s better than working for somebody else. I think.

Mom’s grandparents built the motel and called it the Seabreeze. Cape Canaveral was just a missile testing base then. Locals had been enjoying the fireworks since the end of the Second World War, but nobody else knew it was there, except race fans coming for Daytona 500, and they ignored it.

Then Project Mercury brought a lot of attention to this sandy little corner of Florida. There was a housing shortage, and many of the workers and engineers who moved to the Merritt Island area were happy to find a room of any kind. And back then the Seabreeze was a pretty good place.

They renamed it the Blast-Off in honor of John Glenn’s flight. Grandpa didn’t realize that real Canaveral people always called it “liftoff,” and by the time he did the big, expensive sign out front was already installed. The little red neon rocket on the sign has been taking off, practically nonstop, for over fifty years now.

When Mom’s parents died in a car wreck she inherited a business already halfway to bankruptcy. For the last twenty years she and Aunt Maria, and me when I got old enough, have been trying to make a living at it. Now it was probably too late.

The Blast-Off had been built so that all the rooms had an ocean view. Technically they all still did. But we never had the gall to actually claim that. If you looked far to the north or far to the south from your Blast-Off balcony, you could see a bit of water and sand. But straight ahead was the Golden Manatee resort, twenty stories of New Florida opulence, directly across the four-lane highway from us.

Mom can hardly look at the Golden Manatee without spitting. Her father used to own the land the resort now sits on.

“He was dead set against ‘building on sand,’ ” Mom would tell anyone who would listen. “He always felt this building was too close to the sea. He spent most of his life terrified a hurricane would wash it away. So he never built over there. He sold the land.”

Now the Manatee wants to buy our land to use as a parking lot. But [30] they don’t need it bad enough to offer us a decent price. We’d get just about enough money to pay off our mortgage, and the next day we could start looking for work in the exciting tourist service industry. That is, as maids and waiters in somebody else’s business. “Well, they can just kiss my manatee,” Mom said.

AFTER WE DELIVERED Travis Broussard to his odd little friend, Dak dropped me off, alone, a little after midnight in the quiet Blast-Off parking lot. Kelly had early appointments the next day, and spending the night with me would have added to her driving time, so Dak was taking her to her apartment. I wish she’d mentioned it before we got to my place. Maybe I wouldn’t have fooled around so much under the blanket in the pickup bed. As it was, the first order of business was a cold shower.

I live in room 201 at the Blast-Off. The way we’re set up, the owner’s apartment is behind the office on the ground floor: living room and kitchen downstairs, two bedrooms upstairs. One of those used to be mine until Aunt Maria moved in to help. I moved into 201, which has the Toilet From Hell. I had worked on that damn thing a hundred times over the years and never could stop it from screwing up about once a week. Finally we decided we just wouldn’t rent it anymore, as well as room 101, which had a collapsed ceiling from all the overflowing water above. It’s not as if we ever had to turn guests away for the lack of those two rooms.

The sink and tub/shower still worked. When I needed the toilet I used the one in room 101. I took out the twin beds and put in a king-sized, brought in a big desk and a table and chairs and a sofa I got for a few dollars at the Salvation Army thrift store.

The arrangement suited me. That is, I knew I could do a lot worse. It took some of the sting out of still living with my family at age twenty. I had my own door and could play music and come and go as I pleased. If only I could take a leak without going outside and downstairs I’d be content.

[31] ONCE OUT OF the shower I turned on my computer, a ten-year-old Dell laptop I’d picked up for twenty dollars. I went to the NASA public website, selected “Hall of Astronauts,” and typed in a search for Travis Broussard.

“We’re sorry, the search produced no results. Do you wish to try another search?”

“Damn right,” I grumbled, and shut off the speech function.

I searched the whole site, and found numerous references to Colonel Broussard. His flight record was there, beginning fifteen years ago when he entered the astronaut corps as a rookie pilot trainee. He made six flights sitting in the right-hand seat before becoming a full-time senior pilot. Sounded pretty quick to me. I did an info scan and found it was the fastest anyone had ever made the transition. Twelve years ago Travis was NASA’s fair-haired boy. I would have been eight years old then.

His name was blue-lined, as were all astronaut names at the site. Maybe this was a route to the bio. I clicked on the link, and got a screen saying, “This page currently under construction.” I clicked on another name at random and was shown to an elaborate biography page, with eight screens of text and a hundred NASA pics and snapshots of the astronaut’s professional and home life. I requested John Glenn’s site, and it was gigantic, thousands of stories going all the way back to Life magazine, albums of pictures, hours and hours and hours of video and film clips, whole movies from The Right Stuff to the Glenn bio-pic aired only last year.

Okay, it seemed that Broussard was the only one of several thousand current and former and even dead spacers without a spot in the Hall of Astronauts. How come?

Back to his flight record. He was listed as chief pilot for seventy launches. There was a blue link after the date of his last mission, and once again, clicking it took me nowhere. More links, on Flights 67, 60, and 53, all leading nowhere. Another dead end on a link way back on [32] Flight 21. But there was mention of a commendation. I noted the date of his twenty-first flight and opened a window for the Miami Herald.

I had the newspaper search that day and came up with a six-paragraph story on page three, complete with a picture of a smiling Travis Broussard, quite a bit younger, shaking hands with… my, oh my, that was the President of the United States.

The story read, in part:

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP) In a brief ceremony in the west wing of the White House, President Ventura awarded Astronaut Chief Pilot Travis Broussard with the Alan Shepard Medal of Valor for his actions on the third of this month in guiding a crippled VStar Mark II to an emergency landing at a backup airfield in Africa, saving the lives of the crew of three and seven passengers.

Broussard had been promoted to the rank of Astronaut Colonel the previous day at the Pentagon.

I was getting frustrated. A big hero like Travis, and at the NASA site he was the little astronaut who wasn’t there. Absolutely nothing to be learned beyond the fact that yes, he had been an astronaut, had flown the VStar, and yes, he won a medal.

So I went to SpaceScuttlebutt.com, where a lot of spaceheads hang out, found a room with a few familiar handles in it, and posted:

Broussard, Travis…?

Pretty soon this bounced back:

No such FUBAR. Un-person. Shame on you.

FUBAR meant Fouled Up Beyond All Repair. I sent:

Y no bio?

I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.

Funny guy. I was about to come back when he posted another line:

Spacemanny? Dat you?

Unfortunately, it was. I’d made that my web handle years ago, before it started sounding so dorky. Now it would be too much bother to change it.

Y.

[33] A three-by-three window opened and I saw the head and shoulders of a very, very fat man about my mother’s age. He had to weigh in at five hundred pounds. SpaceScuttlebutt.com was as close as he’d ever get to space and he knew it. He lived his spacegoing fantasies online, and his knowledge was encyclopedic. I had no idea where he lived or what his real name was, but his handle was Piginspace. A man with no illusions. I was lucky to have run into him.

“Broussard-san heap big bad medicine, Spacemanny,” he said through the tiny built-in speaker on my antique laptop. “Bad juju. Say his name at Kennedy, you must leave the room, spin around twice, and spit.”

He talked like that sometimes. He enjoyed having information someone else was looking for, and sometimes made you jump through hoops to get it. But not this time.

“I see he got a medal for an emergency landing. What do you know about that?”

“Everything, my lad, the Pig knows everything. Knows all, tells… well, whatever he feels young minds can safely handle. Short version… it was early days in the second generation of the VStar program. The Mark II had just received its spaceworthiness certificate from NASA. Some of the jockeys felt there were a few bugs still to be worked out, but the mandarins decreed it should be pressed into service most tickety-boo.”

The VStar II California was less than an hour away from its de-orbit burn when there was an explosion followed by a fire. The cabin began to fill with smoke. Much of the cockpit electronics went down.

Travis, working from what NASA called “hard copies”-tech manuals and maps-and with only minimal help from his crashing computers, fired the de-orbit engines within three minutes of the explosion.

There were three airfields designated by NASA as “trans-Atlantic abort” sites, at Moron, Spain; Banjul, The Gambia; and Ben Guenir, Morocco. None of them had ever been used, and in fact there was nothing to recommend them other than a runway long enough for the old Shuttle’s landing rollout. For that purpose, Cairo would have been [34] a better choice, and Travis looked at it briefly, but it was too far north of his path.

Moron, Banjul, and Ben Guenir were already almost beneath him. Impossible to turn and glide back with the VStar’s steep angle of descent.

Johannesburg was too far south. Nairobi was too far east.

He came out of the fireball hoping to make Entebbe in Uganda… but he couldn’t see anything. The ship was filled with dense smoke. They all would have been unconscious or dead without the emergency oxygen masks. He had to find a way to clear the smoke from the cabin.

“He brought it down to about forty thousand and had another problem. How do you make a hole to the outside, when the whole vehicle is designed to prevent that? Can’t open the door against the cabin pressure. Can’t even use the emergency explosive hatch bolts without disarming a safety system, which was no longer disarmable because of all four computers going down.

“But he did punch a hole in a window, and the smoke got sucked out. So there he was, twenty thousand feet over the jungles of central Africa. Nothing but green, far as the eye could see. No hope of making it to Entebbe. Very little maneuverability in the VStar, even when things are going right. There were enough hydraulics surviving to steer the beast, a little, and that was about all he had going to him.

“So he rocked it to the left, looked out the window, and put the damn thing through a three-sixty roll, which no one had ever tested in a wind tunnel but anybody in his right mind would have said couldn’t be done. While he was upside down he spotted a line of red earth through the trees, almost directly below him. Might be a runway, might not. He put the ship into a turn twice as tight as the manufacturer recommended, pulled about seventeen gees for a few seconds, blacked out along with everybody else… and when he came to, lined the ship up toward the red line.

“Turns out it was a runway, bulldozed out of the jungle and used by bush doctors, ivory smugglers, and such. And about half the length needed for a VStar rollout.

“Reconstructing it, later, the tire marks began just about ten feet [35] from one end of the runway. There were branches and leaves stuck in the landing gear. The chutes and the brakes stopped the ship with its nose gear twenty feet past the other end of the runway. Hitting a water buffalo with the nose gear probably slowed it down a bit, too.”

Travis had brought the California down at dusk. There were no lights at the field, so the first Americans didn’t get there until the next morning. It was the ambassador to Congo and some of his staff, and a small contingent of U.S. Marine embassy guards. There had been no radio contact, so no one knew what to expect.

“The ambassador stepped out of his helicopter and into the remains of a fine African barbecue. The crew had raised enough money among them to pay for the water buffalo, and they had cooked it and danced and drank long into the night. The farmers and herdsmen from the area all had souvenirs of some kind. Space suits, crew seat cushions, packets of Tang, bits and pieces of the instrument panel…

“So they killed another water buffalo, and the embassy staff, the marines, the California crew and passengers feasted all day and toasted everything they could think of in buffalo blood mixed with vodka. And she sits there still.”

“You’re kidding.”

“You doubt the Pig?”

“No. But I don’t get it. NASA gave him a medal… but they made a much bigger deal out of other ships that almost crashed.”

“Going all the way back to Apollo 13,” Pig confirmed. “Not much they can do if the mission really goes balls-up. Three astronauts burned to death on the pad in Apollo One. Challenger blew up on live television. No way to soft-pedal those.

“The California wasn’t much of a news story for a lot of reasons. It was over before the media even heard of it. It was remote. Nothing to show but that big old whale sitting in the dirt. NASA found the image embarrassing. Everybody was okay, so what’s the big deal? Give him a medal and move on. Nobody’s career would be advanced by making a big deal, except Broussard’s… and nobody quite knew what to do about him.”

“Why not? He sounds like a hero to me.”

[36] “Oh, he was. Maybe the biggest hero NASA ever had. One hell of a bit of flying, and they still drink toasts to him in astronaut bars… quietly.

“You didn’t ask me how he made the hole in the spacecraft. The one that sucked the smoke out and let him see. The hole that saved the California and crew.”

“I was going to.”

“It was hushed up. No one on the crew wanted to talk about it, and neither did anyone higher up in the bureaucracy. But these things leak. The Pig learned of it years ago, and because of his great respect for Colonel Broussard, seldom tells it. But I sense you mean Broussard no harm.”

“Of course not. None of my business.”

“Quite so. Broussard made the hole with a nonstandard piece of astronaut equipment known as a Colt.45 automatic.”

We both just let that one hang there for a minute. A pistol? For what, protection from space aliens?

“He might have got away with it if he hadn’t told the inquiry board himself. Not one of the passengers or crew said a word about it in their debriefing. They knew they were alive because of the gun and Broussard’s piloting skills.

“I have it from one of the inquiry board members that Broussard told the debriefers he just ‘felt naked’ without a piece of some sort. So he’d carried the weapon on all his previous flights.”

Travis became the sort of problem bureaucrats hate. There were those who wanted to kick his redneck ass out of the astronaut corps, a few who would like to send him a bill for the California. But he had saved a lot of lives, and those he saved promised a really ugly fight in the media if Broussard was punished in any way.

“So they did what the military customarily does when a man screws up so badly he ends up being a hero,” Pig said. “They gave him a medal and a promotion, and swept the dirty details under the rug.”

“Okay,” I said. “But that doesn’t really explain-”

“Why he’s an un-person? No, of course not.”

“So why is he?”

[37] Pig grinned, and shook his head.

“I said I’d tell you about the medal, Spacemanny,” he said. “Wild horses could not tear the rest of the story out of me. I have too much respect for Broussard, a real ‘Right Stuff’ dude if ever there was one.” He waved, and was gone.

I guess that was enough to think about for one night, anyway.