Red Thunder

8

I GOT MY housekeeping chores done, then sat at the computer working on my calculus lessons. I did three weeks’ worth of reading and assignments in about three hours, now that so much more of it made sense to me. In fact, I found myself two days ahead of the recommended syllabus, for the first time since I’d enrolled. When I clicked the computer off, it was with a sense of satisfaction I hadn’t felt since graduation.

Then I turned my attention to my little silver bubble.

It had been nagging at me all day and my curiosity was killing me.

I had put the bubble in one of my desk drawers, because it didn’t want to stay in the same place. It drifted with the tiniest air current, like smoke. How could something so light be so tough?

Start by defining the problem. It’s light, it’s tough. How light? How tough?

The best scale I had access to was the postal scale in the office, and I knew without having to try that I wouldn’t be able to weigh the bubble with that scale. I wouldn’t even be able to get it to stay on the platform long enough to register any weight. By extension, I couldn’t [62] see how it would register anything on the analytical balance at school. But it couldn’t be weightless, could it?

Now, hold on, was I getting weight confused with mass, like so many people did?

It stood to reason that if I could get the bubble moving, it would have some inertia, wouldn’t it? If I could toss it against a scale, it would have to register something, right? Maybe. But I couldn’t test that at home, because I didn’t have any way of creating a vacuum to do the experiment in. Air density alone seemed to be enough to bring the bubble to a halt in midair as soon as it left my hand.

Okay, that got me nowhere, let’s move on to the next question.

Is the bubble frictionless?

It sure felt like it. It was very odd to hold it in my hand. I could feel the presence of its shape, but I didn’t actually feel anything. No texture, no unevenness, no pits. It was impossible to pick it up or hold it just between the tips of my index finger and thumb.

It was possible to secure the bubble using two fingers and my thumb. Not just the tips of those digits, though. Holding it with fingers curling around it established a multitude of contact points, so that if I held it that way, loosely, it would finally behave itself. More or less. If I squeezed it too hard the bubble would still squirt away, like when you squeeze too tight on a bar of soap.

So now where was I?

Results of first round of experiments:

It seems to be weightless.

It seems to be frictionless.

I didn’t need to log on to my physics textbooks to know both of those things were impossible, in the real world. Weightlessness, frictionlessness, those ideas were useful in math, to define a pure condition the real world never attains.

Tentative conclusion: I’m probably missing something.

No weight, no friction. How tough?

I got a hammer and some nails. I cut a small hole in a piece of old linen sheet, not big enough for the bubble to go through. Then I used [63] thumbtacks to pin the cloth to the desk with the bubble trapped inside, just a piece of it showing.

I held the tip of one nail to the surface of the bubble. I tapped the nail head lightly with the hammer. The tip slid off the bubble surface. I looked at the bubble through a magnifying glass. No dent or scratch I could see. I tapped It again, this time a little harder. Again the tip slipped off. No dent, no scratch.

I withdrew to seek counsel with myself.

I know a scientist is supposed to welcome a challenge, he’s supposed to rejoice at results inexplicable and unexpected… but I’ll bet a lot of them don’t. I’ll bet a lot of them try to shrug it off, especially if it doesn’t fit their theory. If this thing was ever made public, I had a feeling a lot of theories would have to be rewritten.

The hell with it. I started whaling away at it with all my strength.

After seven or eight blows the piece of linen tore and the bubble floated up above my desk again, swirling in the eddies my swinging arm had made in the air. I caught it before it could float into a hiding place, and put it under a glass tumbler.

I put my face down close to the desk. There was a new, circular depression in the wood surface. And on the bubble… no dent, no scratch.

Answer: very tough.

I FOUND I couldn’t sleep. I went out on my little balcony and watched the cars go by. Not as boring as it may sound, many of them were full of students shouting and laughing. People in convertibles would see me up on my balcony and wave, sometimes invite me down to join them.

Not too many people on the sidewalks. There used to be a few hookers who staked out corners within sight of the Blast-Off. Then the Golden Manatee moved in, and the cops ran them all off. Now, the preferred way to buy sex in this neighborhood is to get a room in the Manatee and call one of the escort services. I imagine you’ll get a [64] better class of hooker, but be sure to bring a lot of cash. You’ll pay more tipping the bell captain to bring your escort in the back way than you would have paid for a whole night with one of the chased-away streetwalkers.

One girl seemed not to have got the message. She came strolling down the sidewalk, bold as brass, on three-inch cork platform shoes. She wore a silvery blouse tied up between her breasts and a hollerin’ orange miniskirt. Lots of lipstick, lots of piled-up blonde hair, and big, dark, pink-rimmed sunglasses at one in the morning. She looked up at me and grinned.

“How about it, cowboy? Should I come up?”

Cowboy? I thought it over.

“Not sure I can afford it,” I said.

“Sure you can, sweetie.”

“Oh… well, all right.”

“That’s what I love. Enthusiasm. What’s your room number?”

I told her, and in a minute I could hear the clunking sound of her huge cork soles. She knocked on the door and I turned off the lights and opened it.

“Twenty dollars gets you all night,” she said.

“All night? Hell, it’s already one-thirty.”

“C’mon, stud.” She put her hand in my groin. “I can tell you’re glad to see me.”

“That’s a banana for my pet monkey. And all I have is ten dollars.”

“That’ll have to do, I guess.” She came into the room and closed the door. I jumped her as she turned around. I pressed her back against the door.

“Lipstick! Watch the lipstick, you wild man!”

“Forget the lipstick,” I said. Or tried to say, between kisses.

I was tearing at her skirt and she found my zipper. I wasn’t surprised to see she was wearing no underwear. I took her right there against the door, then on the floor, and finally with her knees on the floor and her body bent over the bed. In about half an hour we both collapsed at the foot of the bed, leaning back against the sheets and blankets we’d torn up.

[65] She still had on her silver lame blouse and big clunky shoes. My pants were over by the door somewhere. I picked up the skirt and held it up to the blue light from the streetlight outside. It was even ghastlier that way.

“Where the hell did you get this?” I asked.

“Thrift shop,” Kelly said.

“Which one? Whores ‘R’ Us?”

“Yeah, I think that was the one.” She pulled off the blonde fright wig and tossed it toward my garbage can.

“Did you have a permit to shoot that?” I asked.

She kissed my cheek, then bounced to her feet and headed for the bathroom. The high shoes made her bare bottom do things even more interesting than usual. She went in, flicked on the light, then the blouse came sailing out the door followed, one by one, by the shoes. In a minute I got up and joined her.

Kelly wears a green stone in her navel. It’s big enough to fill the entire belly button and I’m pretty sure it’s a real emerald, but I wasn’t going to ask her, or take her to a jeweler to have her assayed. She was looking down, fiddling with the tiny gold rings that held it in. She looked up at me.

“Something wrong?”

“What could be wrong?” And really, what could? The emerald set off her greenish eyes nicely. Her skin was smooth and flawless, except for some tiny moles scattered around, what the upper classes used to call beauty spots and put on deliberately. She had lots of blond hair which she was unpinning. Everything else was where it ought to be, in ample amounts. Let’s just say that picking out a bikini or a thong didn’t give her anxiety attacks.

She was laying out mysterious female stuff from her crowded purse. I was far from through for the night, but first I had to answer a call of nature, and wasn’t about to dress and go downstairs, so I used the sink. Kelly glanced at me.

“Boys,” she said, disdainfully.

“Hey, it all goes down the same pipes.”

“You rinse that out real good.”

[66] “You’re telling me you aren’t going to use it as soon as I’m through?” I reached for her arm, but she shook me off.

“Down, boy. Later. First, I need you to go down to my car and get the small suitcase in the trunk. I’m not going down there again as Sally Streetwalker.” She tossed me her car keys.

“Did you have any trouble?”

“The doorman at the Manatee gave me a funny look. I parked in their lot, all the way over toward the beach.”

“What’s in the suitcase? Can you stay over?”

“Yes, if you bring me the decent clothes that are in the suitcase. I’m not walking out of here tomorrow and let your mother see that outfit.”

“Don’t worry about that. You’re solid with my mother.”

“Whatever.”

“I guess I should bring the car over to our lot. Those bastards might tow it.”

“Good idea.”

“Are you sure you want me going out alone at this hour? I could get mugged.”

“Hey, it was you called me up, remember?”

She was filling a plastic douche bottle so I pulled on my pants and left.

KELLY DRIVES A green Porsche 921, this year’s model, that cost more than our income at the Blast-Off for two or three years. When your daddy is the biggest luxury car dealer in northeast Florida having a rad ride is something you just naturally expect.

Not that she lacked for anything else, either.

Kelly.

Every once in a while something drops into your life that makes you think that, in spite of all evidence you’ve seen so far, somebody up there really does like you. Meeting Kelly is the first time it’s happened to me.

We went to different schools. She can’t help being born rich any more than I can help being poor, at least until I get a better shot at [67] carving out my own destiny instead of just settling into the level I’d been born into.

But I think we were both a little insecure about it. All sorts of awkward questions came up. Is he just after me for my money? Is she just trying to stick it to her asshole of a racist father by dating a half-Cuban? Does he secretly think I’m a dumb rich bitch? Is she enjoying slumming when she comes down here and dresses as a whore?

No, can’t make that one stick on her. We both enjoyed sexual games, surprises, role playing, and she had gone to a lot of trouble for her little trick-or-treat tonight. Slumming? If volunteering two evenings a week at a battered women’s shelter was slumming, then I think we need more slummers.

That’s where Kelly met Alicia and since Dak and Alicia had been together for about a year, it was inevitable that Kelly and I would meet. It was also inevitable that I’d be greatly impressed by her. There’s a lot of impressive things about Kelly, and her body is only one of them.

I couldn’t see a thing she had to gain by being my girl other than the pleasure of my company and some damn good sex, so it must be love, right? She said it was, and Kelly always knows her own mind.

But did I love her? Jerk that I am, I was still trying to figure that out.

So far Kelly had never even hinted at matrimony… which made me even more nervous, because she was an incredible catch and I liked her boundlessly, I was pretty sure I loved her, if I could put aside the marriage anxiety. But… what if, by the time I was ready, she had found someone else? What if she didn’t wait for me? I might be throwing away my only chance at happiness by not grabbing her now, when she seemed to like me so much.

It sure wouldn’t be hard for her to find another lover more in keeping with her social position. Kelly worked as chief bookkeeper at her father’s dealership. Guys her age were always coming in to trade up from last year’s model, and plenty of them didn’t need financing, they just wrote a check.

I don’t know why it never occurred to me that a family and kids would get in the way of her goals just as much as it would screw up my college aspirations.

[68] I found her car parked where she said it would be. I always worried a little when I saw it. It stood for all the things I couldn’t give her for another decade, if ever.

I put the top down and slid in on the leather seat. The engine growled at me and I wheeled around the lot and out onto the road. It would get up to sixty in about four seconds, I knew because I’d tried it. No chance to unleash the beast in the spring break traffic, though. I crawled down the highway, getting some very interested looks from some of the snow bunnies, parked in our lot, put the top up, grabbed the indoor silent car alarm, and carried her small suitcase up the stairs and into my room.

LATER THAT NIGHT, just before we finally got to sleep, I took out the silver bubble and showed it to her. I put it through its paces, showed her its tricks. I’d been a little worried that her reaction would be, more or less, So what?

But it impressed her even faster than it had fascinated me.

“It’s light as a soap bubble, and harder than a ball bearing,” she summed it up. “I don’t know of anything like that. You’re the science student, do you?”

“Nothing even close,” I told her.

She held it in her hand and frowned at it.

“Manny,” she said at last, “you know I’m not the type to worry about nothing or get premonitions. But there’s something frightening about this. Do you get a sense of great power from it?”

I had felt exactly that, but couldn’t put my finger on it.

“I think it has a lot of power, and it might mean a lot of money.”

“Really? Why?”

“Well, something new, something really new, it just turns the world upside down. Think of what the world was like before electricity. Or television, or cars.”

“That big?”

“Maybe bigger.”