Red Thunder

13

I SETTLED JUBAL into the room next to mine with a set of our best big towels, not the little scratchy ones nobody bothers to steal from the regular rooms. The television was one of our best ones, too. I showed him how to use the remote… feeling pretty silly halfway through the demonstration when I remembered this was the guy who turned remotes into magic wands with no batteries.

He had brought a very old suitcase made out of thick cardboard, stuffed with Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts and lots of clean underwear with-I swear-JUBAL written on the elastic band in black felt tip. I wondered just how big a deal was this for Jubal, being away from Travis? Part of him was perpetually twelve, I kept reminding myself.

I helped him stow his stuff away and headed back to my room, fifteen feet away. It had been a long and eventful night. I was dead on my feet.

AN HOUR LATER I still hadn’t managed to get to sleep. I was thinking about too many things.

Jubal, and the responsibility I had assumed for him.

[124] Travis and his mysterious mission.

The Squeezer, and all it might mean.

Kelly, and why she had decided to drive home instead of spend the night.

The Triumph, what it would be like to ride it tomorrow, where to go, whether or not Travis would sell, and if he’d take payments or if I should just offer to cut off my right arm and give him that.

There was a knock on my door and I jumped out of bed. Kelly? But before I got to the door I knew who I’d find there. Sure enough.

Jubal was dressed in baggy yellow pajamas. His pillow was tucked under one arm, and he was dragging the bedspread behind him. All he needed was a teddy bear to look like one of those Norman Rockwell framed prints we used to sell in the store. He was looking down at the floor.

“Cain’t sleep, me,” he mumbled.

“Come on in, cher,” I said. Now he had me doing it.

“I’m not usual a’scared,” he said. “Not by country noises, no. But I heered people’s voices goin’ by outside, and polices and fahr engines and aranalances and what-not…”

I hadn’t heard a thing. It was a city boy, country boy thing, I guess. I’d never spent much time sleeping in the swamp. A bullfrog croaked, I’d probably wet my pants.

“Yeah, it can be a hel-… a horrible racket, can’t it? We’ll get you squared away, I’ve got a king-size in here, it won’t be a problem.”

“I kin sleep on da couch.”

“Wouldn’t hear of it. I’ll shut that street-side glass door and turn the air on low, unless you think that’d be too-”

“Nah, I be fine.” He looked at me for the first time. “Usually I sleep t’ru anyt’ing. I could fall asleep ’hind de altar, me, while de congregation be moanin’ an wailin’ an feelin’ de spirit. Wake up, fine a little ol’ rattlesnake curl up wit’ me.” He laughed, but sobered quickly. “Jus’ fo’ tonight, Manny. Jus’ fo’ tonight.”

Then he knelt beside the bed and steepled his fingers and closed his eyes and began to pray very softly.

When he was done he lay down and pulled the bedspread over him. [125] He was sound asleep in less than a minute. He didn’t snore, belch, whimper, or fart in his sleep as long as I was awake, unlike a few girls I could mention.

The sun was coming up before I finally drifted off.

THE SUN WAS high when I woke up. Too high. Way too high.

I hadn’t slept until eleven in a long time for a simple reason. At seven Mom or Maria was always pounding on my door.

I jumped up, remembered Jubal had come to my room in the night. But he wasn’t here now. He wouldn’t just wander off in a strange neighborhood, would he? I got a little angry thinking about it. He wasn’t a dog, damn it, that you had to leash or watch every minute. If he was that helpless… well, I hadn’t signed on for that. But I’d better go look.

I found Jubal high on a ladder, leaning through the service hatch of our sign. Mom and Betty were down below, holding the ladder and looking nervous. When I joined them I heard a funny sound coming from inside the sign. It took me a moment to realize it was Jubal, humming and singing. The melody had a definite bayou flavor to it, and the words sounded like Cajun French.

He eased himself out of the hole and held up a frayed length of thick electrical cable like a dead snake. He looked very happy.

“Dis be de rascal, right here!” he boomed. “I’m real lucky dat you found me, yeah. Dis critter ’bout ready to cotch fire, you bet. Burn down de whole place, mebbe. Betty, you flick dat switch yonder, please ma’am.” He glanced over at me and smiled again. “Bonjour, monsieur sleepyhead! Sleep till de noontime, I declare!”

“Did not,” I said. “It’s only elevenish.”

Mom threw the master switch and the sign came to life better than it had been in a few years. Most everything was working except for a few burned-out bulbs that I could replace in five minutes. One of the little neon rockets was cracked.

“We get her recharge, seal her up again. Cheap. Betty, she say dere’s a place on de way over to Dak’s.”

[126] I looked at Mom, and she nodded, maybe a bit reluctantly, meaning I was excused from working my butt off to make up for all the morning work I hadn’t done. I kissed her forehead, and then me and Jubal dragged the Triumph and sidecar out of the small room where we keep janitorial supplies, my tools, a small workbench, and cases of generic soda pop for the drink machine, which we own, and boxes of stuff for the snack machine, which we don’t. Jubal had spread some tools from his own toolbox on the worktable. He’d been busy all morning, it looked like.

We got the ’sickle out of the workroom and spent about twenty minutes bolting the sidecar to the frame. Jubal had a mental checklist for that operation, and he went through it methodically, testing each bolt to be sure it was tight enough. A runaway sidecar might be a funny thing in the movies, but not in real life. Jubal was a careful man.

The great black and chrome beast rattled to life immediately when I hit the starter. It trembled beneath me, ready to go. Jubal squeezed himself down into the sidecar and put on his plain black helmet. I put my own helmet on.

“Want me one like dat, yes sir,” Jubal said. My motorcycle helmet is one of the finest things I own. Ironic for a guy who doesn’t even own a car, much less a cycle, I guess. It was painted by Henry “2Loose” La Beck, king of the Daytona taggers.

It only took me a few blocks to get the hang of handling it. With a sidecar, you have to lean differently. Jubal gave me a few pointers without making me nervous or being a side-seat driver.

I pulled into Dak’s dad’s parking lot the king of all I surveyed. Mr. Sinclair looked at the Triumph with lust in his eyes. He had been a member of a club when he was a young man. He rode a Harley back then, but he had told me how much he liked the Triumph. Most of what I knew about cycles I had learned from him.

He greeted Jubal warmly and helped pull him out of his seat. We went over the bike thoroughly and spent a few hours with toothbrushes and soapy water and wax. That spruced it up quite a bit. The frame and tank would need repainting sometime soon, but we’d have [127] to take it apart to do that, and I didn’t have the time, if I was going to get any use out of it before Travis came back.

“Think about this for the tank,” Mr. Sinclair said. “Deep, midnight blue, with a little flake in it so’s it sparkles. Five or six coats ought to do it. Come on in here, let me show you what I’m talking about.” He showed us several books in his office. It was plain that he’d love to do the work just for the cost of the paint.

IT TOOK TRAVIS the full two weeks he had mentioned as an outside estimate, and a few days beyond that. It was one of the best two and a half weeks I’d ever spent.

Jubal had the energy of ten men, and the know-how of a couple dozen. He could fix anything he could reach and take apart. Things around the Blast-Off that hadn’t worked since John Glenn was in orbit just magically started working again. I’d ask Jubal about it, and he’d say he just saw it wasn’t working and took a few minutes to fix it. He found it hard to walk past something that wasn’t working, or sometimes even something that wasn’t working as well as it should.

Dak’s dad had a name for it, sort of. He watched Jubal work on a few car engines at the garage and pronounced Jubal a “natural born grease monkey.”

“Some people got perfect pitch,” he said. “Some folks never get lost. Some got what they call a ‘green thumb.’ And some just understand engines.”

But being a grease monkey doesn’t begin to describe Jubal’s skills. He fixed three annoying glitches in my old computer that I’d been working around for months, and did it in fifteen minutes. He fixed plumbing and wiring. He fixed small appliances, and three televisions sitting in a storage room because I’d been too lazy to throw them out. He even fixed the toilet in room 201.

I watched him working on the televisions, and I can’t say how he did it. It was eerie, like watching a faith healer. Jubal would take it apart, stare at it, trace pathways in the air with his fingers, all the time [128] humming music that I later figured out were hymns. He touched his tester wires here and there, and next thing I knew he was snipping a transistor off a circuit board. Then he whipped out his pocket computer-the absolute most up-to-the-minute model, thousands of times bigger and smarter than mine-and pretty soon he’d located a place in Kansas or Oregon or South Africa where you could get that transistor for a few pennies plus postage. A few days later it would arrive, and he would solder it in place… and the television worked.

TRAVIS HAD EMPHASIZED Jubal’s social anxieties, and it was true, when Jubal was around people he didn’t know he muttered, hung back, never made eye contact, and just generally seemed to want to be somewhere else. But after he’d had a little time to take your measure he could loosen up quite a bit, and when he regarded you as “family,” which could take as little as a microsecond with Alicia to a couple of days with me and Dak… then all bets were off. With his family Jubal liked to laugh, and sing and dance and generally have what he called a “fais do-do,” which is Cajun for party, I think.

He changed my family a lot in two weeks.

For the first few days we kept the television on during dinner. But everyone was laughing and talking so much that by the third day we just forgot about watching or listening to it. Kelly, Dak, and Alicia started eating the evening meal with us as often as not, and we even got Sam Sinclair, Dak’s Dad, to join us a couple of times.

After, there was no telling what we might do. I took Jubal to Rancho Broussard to pick up his record collection, which was about fifty vinyl 33-1/3, and his old turntable. All of it was Cajun dance tunes, music from way back in the bayou. Jubal loved to dance to this music, and to sing along. He was a good singer and an enthusiastic dancer, alternating between his “four young ladies,” or just dancing by himself.

Or sometimes we got the Monopoly board out. Jubal had never played but he told us how he’d learned to do his “numberin’ ” using that kind of money. He picked it up easily enough, and he loved it. He was ruthless, and won more often than not. He took the little racing [129] car from the very first, and I never told him that was traditionally my piece. And Mom says I’ve got a lot of maturing to do. I wanted the little racing car, that car was mine, but I let our guest have it. Is that mature, or what?

I remember at the first game, when Kelly was putting a hotel on Pacific Avenue, he asked, “Why the Blas’-Off Hotel ain’t on dis board, hah?” He suggested we rename Park Place or Boardwalk.

“Park Place is more like the Golden Manatee across the street, cher,” Mom said. “The Blast-Off, when they built it, might have been on one of the red properties, Illinois Avenue maybe, or New York at the worst. Now we’re a lot closer to ‘Go.’ ”

Then we started arguing about what space the Blast-Off should be on.

“Oriental,” I said. “One step above the roach motel on Baltic.”

“Hel-… uh, pooh!” Dak said. “Baltic, that’s a SRO, a ‘single room occupancy’ joint, bathroom down the hall. Oriental, that’s where the desk clerk sits in a booth behind bulletproof glass. The ol’ B-O Motel, I figure we’re on Saint Charles Avenue. Which, incidentally, give me two houses on Saint Charles. Next time around, Manny, those houses gonna wipe you out!”

Probably. I didn’t tell Dak that we’d seriously considered installing one of those Plexiglas booths. After the second time you’re held up by some wild-eyed angel duster I think anyone would. We’d been robbed four times since I’ve been old enough to remember. Mom shot the first one, right in the gun hand, just like in an old cowboy movie. After that, the police and me persuaded her to just hand over the money. It wasn’t enough to die for, or even to kill for. Nobody ever ran out of our office rich.

One amazing thing was that, with Jubal around, we all had more free time. It got to where there sometimes wasn’t anything really urgent to do by the afternoon, so Jubal and I would go for a ride. Mostly we went up and down the beach, because Jubal loved the ocean. We got to be a regular sight. Many a tourist snapped our picture as we roared by, Jubal in his loud shirts and dark sunglasses and white beard and sunburned nose smiling and waving to everyone we passed.

[130] Other afternoons, with Jubal around to help out, Mom and Maria got to go out together for some fun. Mom said she’d pretty much forgotten how.

Mom hit the roof when I gave her the money Travis had pressed on me.

“I told him his credit was good with us, but he gave me his plastic anyway,” she hissed at me after I gave her the roll of hundreds. Mom doesn’t like shouting, but she can make a hiss carry a city block. “You know Jubal’s room won’t come to anything like this much. He could stay four months on this.”

“Travis said it was for food, too.”

She drew herself up and glared at me.

“We don’t run a restaurant here, Manuel. Jubal is a friend. He’s welcome at our table at any time. You don’t charge your friends for food.”

I knew that. I could only shrug.

“It’s just crazy,” she muttered. “The way that man works. We should be paying him. In fact, I offered to, but he wouldn’t take it. Unlike my spineless son.”

I wasn’t going to sit still for that, but she relented and apologized to me. Then she went away muttering about how she’d stuff it up… well, she’d be sure he took it. I decided to make myself scarce for that little scene.

I’m not so sure about the food business, it just seems like common courtesy to pay for your suppers if you’re staying a while. But Mom’s biggest fear was to be thought of as common. She had that prickly pride some chronically poor folks get… actually, far too few of them, in my experience, but some. She was quick to take offense at any suggestion she couldn’t get by on her own, or pull her own weight, and never, never ask for a handout, nor accept charity.

Jubal just started cleaning out our little kidney-shaped pool one day. What are you going to do, just stand there and watch him? Dak and I joined in-after our regular studies, Jubal would not allow us to shirk that-and soon the bottom had been caulked and painted, the pump and filter refurbished, and the pool was filled with water for the first [131] time in three years. We held a pool party to celebrate and I saw my mother and aunt in bathing suits for the first time I could remember. Owners of neighboring businesses came and ate Aunt Maria’s fabulous cupcakes and cookies and sipped Alicia’s tofu punch before tossing it to the potted palms and grabbing a beer. They complimented us on how great the old joint looked and spoke of their own plans to renovate, refurbish, and upgrade, often glancing up nervously at the looming concrete of the Golden Manatee. They knew they were in trouble and were looking for a way out. Half our neighbors had already sold to the Manatee’s parent corporation, Pillock and Burke. More would sell soon, you could lay money on it.

We sent an invitation to the Manatee, as a joke. To everyone’s surprise the manager showed up. His name was Bruce Carter. He was courteous to Mom and Maria and spoke briefly to most of the business owners there. He even talked to me for a bit. He told me how much he admired the Triumph. He’d seen me and Jubal going by. He said he’d owned one, once, so we talked motorcycles for a while. Then he went back to work, leaving me depressed. I think it’s easier if your enemy is a genuine prick. This guy didn’t seem to enjoy what was happening to us. He never gloated. But he knew as well as we did that the days of the Blast-Off were numbered. If Pillock and Burke didn’t drive us out, somebody else would.

ON THE TENTH, maybe the eleventh night of his stay with us we were deep in a Monopoly game and I was about to be driven to the poorhouse, as usual. It was my night on desk duty, so I was listening for the doorbell with one ear.

Suddenly Jubal stood up and shouted, “Holly!” We all looked at him and he was pointing at the television screen. I looked, and it was one of those group portraits NASA is so fond of, with the seven Mars astronauts hovering chipmunk-cheeked and bushy-haired in their weightless wardroom. One of the women, Holly Oakley, was holding the mike and answering a question.

“It’s Holly,” Jubal said, a bit more calmly.

[132] “That’s right,” I said. “Do you know her?” Not too tough to believe, what with his cousin Travis having been an astronaut.

“Where she at? She at de station?”

“No, like it says there at the bottom, she’s aboard the Ares Seven.”

“What dis Ares Seven?”

“The Mars ship, Jubal,” I said. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it.”

“Don’ watch TV, me,” he said, with a frown. Jubal didn’t follow current events at all, if he could help it. He turned up the volume.

“-and we’d like to thank all of you for giving us so much of your valuable time. Captain Bernardo Aquino, First Officer Katisha Smith, Brin Marston, M.D., and mission specialists Doctors Holly Oakley, Cliff Raddison, Lee Welles, and Dmitri Vasarov. America’s Ares Seven astronauts. Good luck, and Godspeed, all of you!”

There was a pause of fifteen full seconds as the astronauts hung there stupidly, smiles frozen on their faces, while the radio signal went out to the Ares Seven and came back at the speed of light. Television stations had taken to adding a countdown clock in a corner window so people didn’t become too impatient, but it didn’t help much. This was going to be the last live interview. From then on reporters would ask their questions all at once and the astronauts would answer them the same way, and it would be turned into a standard Q amp;A by tape editing.

… 0.03… 0.02… 0.01… “It was our pleasure, and thank you,” Captain Aquino answered, and the seven of them waved for a few seconds before we were returned to the show, which was 60 Minutes, I think.

“So, you know that woman, Jubal?” Aunt Maria asked him.

“Oh, my, used to know her real good, me. She de mother a Travis’s two sweet daughters. She Travis’s ex-wife, she is.”

THAT WAS THE end of Monopoly for that night.

I think we were all amazed and delighted to have a connection to the Mars mission, however tenuous. We wanted to know more about her, but we didn’t get much. It was too painful for Jubal, for he was [133] endlessly loyal to Travis and yet liked Holly and the children enormously.

Jubal wanted to know everything there was to know about the Mars mission. That mostly fell to Dak and me, as our girlfriends and parents were not nearly so interested or informed on the subject as we were.

But where to begin? It was as much a political story as a scientific one, just like Apollo, and Project Mercury before that. Back then it was the Russians.

“Today it’s the Chinese we wanted to beat,” I said.

“Good luck,” Dak snorted.

THE CHINESE HAD been developing a space exploration program for the last decade. Russia’s once grand space program had been reduced from lack of money to a few station components here and there, and those arrived late and underfunded, often as not. In addition to the U.S. and Russia, a few other nations were in the lucrative satellite-launching business, including Japan, France, Brazil, and Indonesia. Analysts assumed China would find its place in that group.

They had developed a type of vehicle known in the space business as a Big Dumb Booster, something NASA critics had been advocating for forty years or more. The Russians had had a BDB practically from the start, the Energia. The idea behind the BDB was easy to state: Make it big, and make it simple. It was much cheaper to put heavy payloads into orbit with a BDB than with a manned space vehicle like the old Shuttle or the VStar. Manned vehicles had to devote a huge amount of mass to life support facilities. The level of safety required for a manned launch was an order of magnitude higher than for an unmanned one, and all that was costly.

The Chinese BDB did put big satellites in orbit. Then, in a surprise that did not quite rival the launch of Sputnik One in the 1950s, the Chinese lofted a small space station and a crew of three.

Not too long after that, they sent out three Mars probes. Two of them landed safely on Mars. They were “pathfinder” ships, carrying the supplies needed for a long stay on Mars. Then came the Heavenly Harmony, [134] a manned ship taking the minimum-fuel Hohmann orbit path to Mars, and once more Americans went nuts.

THERE ARE A thousand paths to Mars, but they all must take into account some inconvenient facts.

First, all ways to Mars start off in the same direction. Before you even fire up your rocket, you are already traveling at 66,700 miles per hour, Earth’s orbital speed. To go in the other direction you would first have to kill that speed. So rule number one is: You go with the flow.

You must always bear in mind that Mars and Earth move at different speeds in their orbits, and Mars is farther away from the sun. You must accelerate out of Earth’s orbit, and then bear in mind that every second of the way the sun’s gravity will be slowing you down.

The third thing to remember is that you can’t aim at Mars when you fire your rockets. You have to aim at where Mars will be when you get there. It’s like a hunter leading a bird when he pulls the trigger.

Then there comes the toughest of all the tough things about going to Mars. You can’t just set down on the Red Planet, scoop up some rocks, snap a few pictures, and then take off and head for home the next day. Because of fuel limitations and the movements of the two planets, all proposed trips to Mars involve a waiting period while the planets move back into a position where a flight between them is economically possible. With the Hohmann orbit the Chinese supply ships had used, the wait was over a year.

A human needs three pounds of food, seven pounds of water, and two pounds of oxygen every day. All round trips to Mars that we can currently envision take well over a year. A crew of seven would consume thirty thousand pounds of food, water, and oxygen in a year, and that doesn’t include water for bathing and brushing your teeth. All that weight must be put into Earth orbit, and then accelerated to a speed sufficient to reach the orbit of Mars. It takes a lot of fuel.

On your way to Mars, you had better be prepared to fix any broken thing with what you’ve got, because Triple-A won’t be along any time soon to give you a jump start.

Out there, you’re on your own.

[135] “THE CHINESE TOOK what most folks believe is the most sensible route to Mars,” Dak said. “You send unmanned ships first, by the slow but cheap path. Takes a year to get there. You send your astronauts along with just enough food, water, and air to get there. Then they use the stuff that went ahead of them. They figure to make their own fuel from the carbon dioxide in the Martian air. The Chinese are well on their way now. How long is it, Manny? Six months?”

“About that.”

“But what ’bout de Americans?” Jubal asked. “Dey be gonna get dere fust?”

Dak snorted.

“No way. People think if our guys just step on the gas pedal a little harder we could pass the commie ba-… bad guys, but it don’t work that way. The Chinese will hit Mars in six months, and either make a real big crater or come down soft. Our guys and gals will get there about two weeks later. End of story. The first foot on Mars will be a Chinese foot, dead or alive. Dammit.”

Dak looked like he wanted to bite his tongue, but Jubal took no notice of the swearing. He was staring off into space, his mind occupied with calculations I doubted I’d ever be able to follow. Then he focused again.

“De Americans, dey swingin’ by Venus, no?”

“Yes,” I said. Wondering how he deduced that. “They swing by Venus and get a free boost from the gravity well there. They get to Mars, and then they only have to wait about a month before they can launch and return the ship to Earth. Our guys will be back before the Chinese.”

Jubal brooded again, then looked at me.

“ ’Merican ship, it don’ use reg’lar rockets, hah? Somethin’ else, I figger.”

“It’s called VASIMR,” I said. “Variable Specific Impulse Magneto-plasma Rocket. It’s a plasma drive, very high specific impulse, very low acceleration. But you can keep thrusting through the whole mission. It adds up.”

[136] “I’m afraid you lost me,” Kelly said.

“Those astronauts a while ago,” I said. “They looked like they were weightless, but they weren’t, not quite. Their engine is firing, but it’s only putting out a fraction of one gee. Not enough to hold you in your seat. The VASIMR is slow, but it’s steady.”

“The tortoise and the hare,” Alicia suggested.

“… Sort of,” Dak said. “But this time, the bunny wins.”

Jubal was still pondering. At last he looked at me.

“Manuel, mon cher, I need to know all I kin fine out ’bout this VASIMR.”

“Sure, Jubal,” I said. “I can show you some websites that will get you started.”

“Good ’nuff,” he said, and slapped his knees and headed for the door. I heard him mutter as he walked ahead of me to my room.

“Fus’ people on Mars got to be Americans,” he said.

If anybody could make it so, I would have bet on Jubal.