Red Thunder

16

NOTHING FURTHER WAS said the night of Travis’s return about Jubal’s plan to build him his own spaceship, him. Travis helped him bundle up his belongings, which now included a nice selection of original shell people by Aunt Maria. We stood together and waved good-bye as Travis drove out of the parking lot.

“I’m going to miss that Jubal,” Mom said.

Little did she know how soon she would change her mind about that.

A FEW DAYS went by. After all the togetherness while Jubal was staying with us, we four who were in on the big secret stayed apart, maybe taking a breather from each other. I only spoke to Kelly twice in that time, over the phone.

On the fourth day Travis called me.

“Jubal wants to talk to you,” he said. “He hates talking on the telephone, won’t do it unless it’s an emergency. Could you come over sometime this afternoon?”

[150] “Sure,” I said. “Things are running more smoothly here since he fixed things up. I can be there in two, three hours.”

“Good enough. Thanks, Manny.”

I hurried through the rest of my chores and hopped on the Triumph. I figured it would be my last ride on the grand old masterpiece, so I opened it up a little, as much as I dared with the damned empty sidecar cramping my style.

TRAVIS WAS WAITING for me by the pool. He had a big pitcher of iced tea, and he poured me a glass without asking if I wanted one. I took a big drink, then sat down.

“Thanks for coming, Manny,” he said.

“Sure. What’s the problem?”

“Jubal and his pipe dreams is the problem.”

“He said an American should be the first man on Mars.”

“He meant just what he said. And if those Ares Seven clowns aren’t up to the task, he’ll just go there himself.”

“Sounds nuts.”

He rubbed his unshaven chin with one hand.

“No, the nutty thing is, it might actually be possible. Outrageous, goofy beyond belief… but I can’t actually say it’s impossible. In fact, we’re going out tomorrow to the ’Glades to do a little testing on the Broussard drive, see just how possible it is.”

“Broussard drive?”

He grinned. “Got to call it something. But there’s things I need to know, now that Jubal says he can release the energy slowly. Like, just what comes out after you’ve squeezed a cubic acre of seawater to the size of a tennis ball? Protons? Atomic nuclei? Gamma rays? I haven’t tried to do the math on it because it makes my head hurt.”

“Has Jubal done the math?”

“I don’t know. Jubal and me… well, we’re hardly speaking, Manny.”

I didn’t like the sound of that at all.

[151] “Manny… I know this isn’t fair. I know it’s a lot to ask. But… could you take a shot at talking Jubal out of this?”

“Travis, I…”

“He says you’re his best friend, Manny. He’ll listen to you. I don’t know if you realize just_y how much of an impression you and your family made in his life. All he talks about, except about building a spaceship and flying it to Mars, is you and your friends. His friends. All I ask is you take a shot. Will you do that for me, Manny?”

I FOUND JUBAL where Travis had said he would be, deep in the darkness of his laboratory in the prefab barn. He had made a big, primitive desk with sawhorses and a four-by-eight sheet of plywood. He was surrounded by stacks of downloaded books, printed out, two-hole punched, and bound together with string. It made me think of a child’s fortress, made of bricks of compacted snow, though I’d never had a chance to build such a thing. His high-speed printer was spitting out another book at about ten pages per second.

I saw his face before he saw me, and the expression there was one I’d never seen before. Jubal was mighty worried. Then he looked up, and the frown wrinkles vanished as he recognized me. He used a number two pencil with the eraser chewed off to mark his place in one of the Big Chief elementary school pads he used to take notes.

“Manuel Garcia, my fren’! I am so glad dat you see me! Entrez, entrez, come on in, chile, you wanna Popsicle?” He hurried to a small freezer in the shadows and came back with a grape Popsicle, which he knew was my favorite.

The next little while was taken up with the social pleasantries Jubal would no more think of dispensing with than he would eat a meal without saying a prayer. I told him we were all doing fine, that the business was running better than it ever had, thanks largely to him. He asked about several people in the neighborhood, many of whom I’d never met until he brought his infectious enthusiasm into our lives. People like Mr. Ortega the grocer, who I had dealt with since I was old [152] enough to cross the street by myself, but who I had never really talked to until Jubal and I bought a bag of fresh oranges from him and spent the next twenty minutes learning about fruit.

“Still got dat rifle I tell Ralph Shabazz I fix,” Jubal admitted. “You tell him Jubal been mighty busy dis week, hah?”

“I’ll do dat t’ing.” He laughed like he always did when I spoke a little Jubalese. He knew I wasn’t mocking him. He knew his accent was sometimes almost impossible for strangers to understand. He said he’d tried to shake it, speak like the people on the television, “Spit de crawdads outta my mouth an comb de swamp moss outta my hair,” as he put it. No luck.

“Travis is worried about you, Jubal.”

“I know dat, me. He t’ink I’m crazy.” He touched the depression in his head, the awful wound given him by his father.

“I don’t think you’re crazy.”

“Tanks, mon cher. T’ank you fo’ dat. But he worried, Travis. He plenty worried.”

“About what?”

He sprang to his feet and hurried to the plywood desk. He swept papers aside until he came to the notebook he wanted. I could see him writing his home-school lessons in a book just like that one.

Looking over his shoulder, there was very little I saw that I could relate to. I knew it was math, but it was Greek to me. Actually, a lot of it was Greek. I recognized the letter pi, and theta. I didn’t think it meant he was pledging fraternities. I saw a few equals signs. A square root radical. That was about it. Nothing else was familiar.

“What is this?” I asked, without much hope.

“Dis de Vaseline drive.” Vaseline? Oh, right. VASIMR. The ion drive the Ares Seven were currently using to get to Mars.

“Slow, but steady, right?” I asked.

“Should be, oughta be. But is it slow enough, hah?”

“What do you mean?”

“Dey in a big hurry, yes dey are. Dey aimin’ to get dere, get back to home fus’, steal some glory, oh yes.”

He looked into my eyes with an intensity I’d never seen before. This [153] was Jubal the genius. This was Jubal zipping, flashing, flying through regions I knew I’d never even crawl through. This was a Jubal to stand in awe of, and believe me, I did, from that moment on.

“Look, rah cheer,” he said, and pointed at his notebook, talking so fast that even if he spoke fluent Floridian I’d probably never have understood. That notebook led to another. Stacks of printouts toppled as he bored through them, hunting for the diagrams he wanted. I tried signaling him that I was in way over my head, but he was off in his own world. So I stood there and tried to soak up at least an idea of why he felt the American Ares Seven was doomed.

IT TOOK HIM half an hour to make his presentation to what was, for all practical purposes, an absent audience. Absent, as in the space between my poor ears. I mean, I wasn’t even fit to pound the erasers in Jubal’s classroom.

“You see, Manny? You see why it so important?”

Anyone but Jubal, I’d be wondering if he was just rubbing it in. Because I didn’t see, might never see… and my appraisal of my own prospects for an education in science had never been lower.

On the other hand, how many people get tutoring from Albert Einstein’s smarter brother, and how many could keep up?

“I see that you think there’s something to worry about, Jubal,” I said.

He nodded, absently chewing on the end of another pencil. The eraser broke off and he took it out of his mouth and frowned at it, as if wondering how it got there.

“Travis, he t’ink dis idea of us all buildin’ us a spaceship an goin’ to Mars, he t’ink dat a stupid idea.”

Us? First I’d heard of it. All of us?

“I dunno. Travis, he know a fis’ful more ’bout de ‘impractical amplications’ of t’ings dan I can do, oh yes.” He tapped his head, shrugged fatalistically. “Maybe getting’ dere fust, maybe dat ain’t important. But dem Ares Seven folks, dey gonna be in a heap a trouble. An dat means de mother a his two sweet little girls, yes. We gotta go out dere, Manny. We be de onliest one’s what can be dere to help out, de time comes.”

[154] “I’m convinced, Jubal.” All of us? When do we start?

“But not Travis! Manny, I…” he trailed off, muttering to himself.

“Go ahead, Jubal. Say it. We’re friends, you can ask me anything.”

He studied me. Jubal had never completely trusted anyone but Travis, which was why he was finding it so hard to go against him.

“Travis, he ain’t talkin’ to me, Manny.”

I thought it was Jubal who wasn’t talking to… Well, I knew the same story often looked entirely different to two different people.

And I knew that was exactly the sort of problem you didn’t want to get in the middle of. Never in a million years. No way, Jose! Include me out.

“Would you go talk to Travis, Manny?”

“Sure, Jubal. Sure I will.”

SURE I WILL. Jubal. Sure.

I got as far as the tennis court and stopped. I looked back. I looked forward. I was about halfway between Travis’s house and Jubal’s barn and I had no idea where to go from here.

I’d parked the Triumph on the tennis court. I got the cell phone out of the sidecar and dialed Kelly’s work number.

“Strickland Mercedes-Porsche-Ferrari. How may I direct your call?” At least it wasn’t a mechanized phone menu. But it was supposed to be Kelly’s direct line.

“I’ll take two Boxsters and a Testarossa, to go.”

“You want fries with that?”

“Put me through to Kelly, please, Lisa.”

“Manny, I was told-”

“Lisa, you know how pissed she’s going to be if you don’t put me through. And you know we won’t tell on you.”

There was a silence. I didn’t envy her, stuck between the boss and the boss’s daughter, neither of them being the type of person you wanted to mess with. She sighed, and I heard Kelly’s phone ring.

“Jubal?” she answered, sounding worried.

[155] “Me, Kelly. My call didn’t go through.”

She sighed.

“Oh, don’t worry about it. Just my dad being an asshole again.”

“Yeah, but your caller ID thought this was Jubal calling. It’s his phone. The one in the sidecar that he never uses. So he’s blocking calls from Jubal, too.” Not that Jubal would ever call, but Mr. Strickland probably didn’t know that.

I could almost hear her simmer.

“Yeah, when I get home I’m gonna rip him a new… Can you believe that? He must have his spies working again, and now he’s messing with the computers. My computers. Oh, Manny, he’s going to be one sorry, racist mother-”

“I’m out at the ranch,” I said. Don’t want to let Kelly get started on her father, she could damage the phone.

“Some problem?”

“Yeah… you could say I’ve got a problem. I don’t know what to do.”

“Start at the beginning.”

I did, and I didn’t get very far before she cut me off.

“Don’t do anything. I’ll be right over.”

I FIGURED NOT doing anything didn’t apply to fishing. If you’re seriously doing something when you’re fishing, you’re missing the whole point.

I walked down the dock. The boathouse door wasn’t locked. I found a rod and reel in there, and borrowed a trowel. At a likely looking spot of ground, I turned over a few scoops of soil and immediately had half a dozen red wigglers.

That’s where I was an hour later when I heard footsteps. I turned and saw Kelly, dressed in a smart blue suit and blouse that looked uncomfortable out here in the blinding sunshine. She kicked off her medium-heeled shiny black shoes, then hiked up her skirt and quickly peeled down her pink panties and taupe pantyhose. It was over almost [156] before I knew she was doing it. She stuffed the frillies in her purse and sat beside me on the end of the pier and dangled her feet in the cool water, just like I was doing.

“Catching anything, Huck?”

“Could I have an instant slo-mo replay of that? I think I missed some of the finer points.” I lifted the stringer almost out of the water. Two big bass flopped on the end of it. I grabbed the other end of the string and unthreaded it from their gills. They floated there a moment, not quite sure they were free, then swam off. I never would have kept them at all except that, the one time me and Kelly went fishing together, I couldn’t even land a scrawny little perch. I had to show her I could catch fish. Manny, the mighty hunter, bringing the mammoth meat home to the cave.

“So, start at the beginning, okay?” she said.

“Well, Travis called me and… and he… you have no idea how distracting it is, you sitting there and me knowing you’re not wearing any panties.”

She looked at me dubiously, and snorted.

“Boys. Can’t educate ’em, can’t understand ’em, can’t do without ’em. Or so I’ve been told. I can’t dangle my feet in the water wearing pantyhose, Huckleberry. It wasn’t about you at all.” But I could tell by the glint in her eyes that it had been, at least partly. And I knew she was filing the fact that it turned me on, and one day soon I’d be treated to some little scenario she had worked out involving not wearing any underwear.

Life is so tough sometimes, ain’t it?

AS IT TURNED out, I didn’t tell my story then. Kelly had called Alicia, who had called Dak, and they were due out at the ranch soon. They arrived a few minutes later, and both kicked off their shoes and rolled up their pants legs and sat beside us. Not nearly as interesting to watch as Kelly.

When I finished telling them what I’d heard in the last couple hours [157] they were all quiet for a while. Then Dak turned to me with a dubious but hopeful expression.

“It’s that ‘all of us’ interests me the most,” he said. “You’re sure that’s what he said? All of us? You and me? Not America, not NASA?”

“All of us.” Kelly pressed down hard on the first word. “As in me, you, Manny, Alicia, Jubal, and Travis. Okay?”

“What would you want to go to Mars for, Kelly?” Dak looked honestly puzzled. I was, too, but I knew better than to show it. “Sell BMWs to the Martians?”

“I’d want to go because it’s an adventure,” Kelly responded quietly, not taking offense. “You don’t get a shot like this twice in one lifetime. Plus, I have to watch over Manny.” She smiled at me, making me feel great, and a bit worried at the same time.

“Me, too,” Alicia chimed in. “Hell… heck, I rode every ride at Disney World, Universal, and Florida Adventure. This couldn’t be any scarier than that.”

Dak looked us over one at a time, then nodded. “This is what I was looking for from Travis from day one, only I was thinking more along the lines of a foot in the door at a good school.”

“It’s going to take some careful pushing and shoving,” Kelly said. I could already see the gears turning in the fabulous head. This was the sort of thing Kelly thrived on. “If it works out right, he won’t know what hit him, just one day he’ll wake up and realize he’s agreed to fly us all to Mars.”

“Don’t worry, hon,” Alicia said with a sniff. “The day I can’t push a coon-ass peckerwood in the direction I want him to go… that’ll be a cold day in heck!”

“I don’t think Jubal-” I began.

“Not Jubal, Huckleberry,” Alicia said. Did I really look like that much of a hayseed with my pants cuffs rolled up? “I’m talking about Travis, the Big Coon-Ass Peckerwood himself. Pardon my pejorative.”

“No problem, hon,” Dak said. “Ain’t nobody here but us darkies, the spic, and the white chick.”

“White chick? White chick?” Kelly said. “Yo momma.”

[158] “ ‘My mamma?’ Gal, yo momma so dumb she tripped over a cordless phone.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, yo momma so ugly she stuck her head out a car window and got arrested for mooning.”

“Oh, yeah? Sister, yo momma so-”

“-so fat she looks like she’s smuggling a Volkswagen,” Alicia said. “Now you guys cut it out.”

Fine with me, too. The way Dak felt about his absent mother, you’d think “yo momma” jokes would really bother him. But he and Kelly had discovered they were very good at the game, they could carry on for ten minutes and never repeat themselves.

“It’s just creative dissing, Manny,” Dak had once told me. “It ain’t about yo momma or my momma, it’s about the words. It’s street poetry, like rap.”

Which was clear as mud, because Dak had almost as little use for rap as his father, who called it antimusic, though Sam Sinclair admitted he’d stopped listening to new music about the time Marvin Gaye died.

A little Racism 101 footnote: “Coon-ass” doesn’t mean a black person, as many Yankees assume when they hear it. That would be “coon.” A coon-ass is a Cajun, and probably just as insulting as coon, but Cajuns usually don’t make a big deal of it.

“Dak, Manny,” Kelly said, “we love you guys, but try to let me and Alicia do most of the talking. Whatever you do, do not ask if you can help Jubal build a spaceship and take you all to Mars. We’ve got to ease him into that frame of mind.”

I was more than happy to leave it to her. Who’s going to out-talk a car dealer? I figured it was in her genes, from when the Stricklands landed on the bay they named after themselves, and started selling buckboard wagons.

THE GIRLS WENT on ahead, whispering to each other, as Dak and I stowed the fishing gear back where I’d found it. When we reached the tennis court Kelly was nowhere to be seen, and Alicia came out the [159] barn side door, Jubal following reluctantly behind. In fact, I was sure that if Alicia hadn’t been pulling on his hand he wouldn’t have been moving at all. But he did come, looking like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon beside tiny Alicia.

We went into the house and found Kelly and Travis standing there. The colonel had his hands in his pockets and was looking at the floor. The big baby.

“Now, you boys are going to kiss and make up,” Alicia said. “Then we’re all going to sit down outside around the grill and eat the soy burgers I’m going to make, and talk about this thing that has come between you. Okay? Travis? Jubal?”

Kelly gave Travis a shove, and the two slowly came together. They embraced, and Travis did kiss his cousin, and pounded him on the back.

“I’m sorry, Jubal.” He was a little hoarse. “This thing has got me behaving even worse than my normal shi-… lousy standard. Forgive me.”

“Nothin’ to fo’give, mon cher. I actin’ stupid, me.”

I was pretty sure I saw a tear in Travis’s eye. But Kelly grabbed them both, still hugging, and got them moving through the sliding doors out on to the patio.

IT TURNED OUT Alicia did have a sense of humor. She knew how popular soy burgers would be with this crowd so she didn’t even try. I started a fire in the kettle and she and Dak sliced huge beefsteak tomatoes and purple onions and Kelly formed half-pound burgers with her hands and Travis and Jubal set the picnic table and put out the deli mustard and pickles and a big jar of sliced jalapenos. I cooked the burgers from “almost raw” for Travis to “black and crispy on the edges” for Dak and Jubal. We didn’t have any lettuce, so Alicia volunteered to pick some dandelion greens and show us how good they were on burgers. We all declined, with varying degrees of panic.

It had been Alicia’s idea to do the lunch, let emotions get back under control before we all locked horns with Travis. Sitting there, working [160] my way through a sheer masterpiece of a hamburger, I figured it had been a good idea.

I wouldn’t have wanted to be Travis just then.

IT TOOK A while to bring Travis up to speed on Jubal’s new calculations. From his reactions, I could see he hadn’t understood that Jubal had gone beyond being simply worried about the chances of the Ares Seven, to feeling sure they were headed for a catastrophe. He followed Jubal’s presentation, Jubal pointing wildly at this or that part of the hundred or so diagrams he had brought with him.

The four of us non-mathematical-genius types watched, at first trying to follow it all but by the end just sitting there in Travis’s comfortable patio chairs. I don’t think sulking would be the right word, but we were all a bit chastened to see just how peripheral we really were to Jubal’s project. What the hell had we been thinking? There had to be many thousands of people who could understand all the stuff Jubal was explaining, who would now be nodding grimly as the flaws of the Vaseline drive came to light. Thousands of people, I could now see, much more qualified to ship out to space with Jubal and Travis than we were.

As it turned out, more qualified than Travis, too. He sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. Jubal got him a bottle of aspirin without having to be asked. Travis swallowed four of them.

“I don’t understand a lot of what Jubal just said,” Travis said. “Oh, wonderful,” Alicia breathed. “I was feeling so dumb!” “Join the club,” Dak said. “Jubal, can I have one of those aspirins?” “So what’s it going to do, Jubal?” I asked. “Will it blow up?” “Might could,” Jubal said, gnawing at a piece of his beard. “Dey didn’ do ’nuff long-term testin’, I figure. More likely, de engine she jus’ shut off and dat de end a dat. Won’t start no mo’, no.” Alicia frowned at him.

“Well, what’s the big deal, then?” she asked. “I thought it was gonna blow up. Didn’t you say it was gonna blow up, Manny?”

[161] “All I know for sure was that Jubal said they were in trouble,” I said. “But Alicia, if their main engine won’t fire… they’ll get to Mars still going… what, Jubal?”

“Real fas’,” he said, shaking his head. “Too dad-gum fas’.”

We were all momentarily stunned by Jubal’s use of what was, to him, a swearword. We’d never heard it before.

“Like he said, too fast,” I told Alicia. “They’ll go right on past Mars and nobody can do a thing about it. They can’t slow down, nobody’s got the juice to catch up with them. They’ll head on out to the stars and get there in about ten thousand years.”

“Nobody kin stop ’em but us’n,” Jubal said. “We got de juice to git us dere.” He looked at Travis. “Now we gotta git de ship to git us dere.”

Travis had his face in his hands. Now he looked up. Not a happy man.

“History repeats itself,” he said. “This country has never really had a ‘space program.’ What we’ve had is a series of races. Sputnik One went up in 1957 and scared the be-… the dickens out of us. Up to then the biggest part of our space program was something called Project Vanguard. Run by the Navy, of all things. In the ’30s the Navy ran the airship program, too. I don’t know why.”

“To keep it out of the hands of the fly-boys, that’s why,” Dak said.

“See there?” He pointed at Dak. “Your dad was a swabbo, wasn’t he?”

“Watch yo mouf’, white boy. My dad was a chief petty officer. Probably still would be, but he got kicked out during a force reduction. And I’ll give you Army and thirteen points right here and now.” Dak slapped a twenty on the table.

“You’re faded,” Travis said. “And the Navy wrecked every airship they had, the Akron, the Macon, the Shenandoah …”

“Prob’ly had Army pilots. Naval carrier aviation is the best-”

“Boys,” Kelly said. “Can we get back to the subject?”

“There was a subject?” Alicia wondered.

“Yeah,” Travis said. “Going off too soon, half-cocked. The Navy never did get a Vanguard off the ground. So Sputnik One goes up and goes, ‘beep, beep, beep,’ and every citizen of America sees the Russkis own [162] outer space, and they are asking their leaders what they’re going to do about it.

“What they did was hand it to Werner von Braun, the top Nazi Kraut we captured at the end of the war. He takes a Jupiter rocket, modifies it a little, and ninety days later there’s an American satellite in orbit.

“And we were off to the races. President Kennedy said we were going to the moon by 1969. Everybody knew it was not enough time, there was no way to get there that fast… safely. That’s the key word.

“There’s two ways we could have got to the moon. The way everybody assumed it would be done in the ’40s and ’50s was the piece-by-piece approach. Develop a ship something like the VentureStar, an SSTO, single-stage-to-orbit vehicle. Start putting hardware and people into orbit. Build a space station. It could be huge by now if we’d started in 1958. Then build your moonship in orbit. Make it a ship like the Lunar Excursion Module, in that it will never land on Earth, but not like the Lunar Excursion Module in that you don’t throw it away after you’ve used it once. It returns to Earth’s orbit, refuels, and goes right back to the moon with more people. More people, because right there, right from the very first flight, we would have been on the moon to stay. Put up some shelters on the first landing, stay there a week or so. Your moonships start regular trips back and forth. In a couple years you’ve got a decent colony, a few hundred people. By about 1990 you’re sending people to Mars, by 2000 you’ve got ships on the way to Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons.

“That’s the way everybody figured it in engineering circles in 1958.”

Travis was up and pacing now, and he paused, getting his second wind. Obviously he had been angry about this for a long time.

“But there was another way to get to the moon. You’ve heard of ‘fast, cheap, and dirty?’ Call this the von Braun plan, fast, very expensive, and very dirty. But it was the only way to get there by December thirty-first, 1969.

“Say Columbus took the Apollo route to the New World. He starts off with three ships. Along about the Canary Islands he sinks the first ship, just throws it away, deliberately. And it’s his biggest ship. Come [163] to the Bahamas, he throws away the second ship. He reaches the New World… but his third ship can’t land there. He lowers a lifeboat, sinks his third ship, and rows ashore. He picks up a few rocks on the beach and rows right back out to sea, across the Atlantic… and at the Strait of Gibraltar he sinks the lifeboat and swims back to Spain with an inner tube around his shoulders.

“If that’s what it took to cross the Atlantic, this part of the world would still belong to the Seminoles.”

“Would that be so bad?” Dak asked.

“Not for the Seminoles,” Kelly said.

“The Apollo program was possibly the stupidest way of getting somewhere the human mind has yet achieved… but it was the only way to win the ‘race.’

“And the race took a toll beyond the money it squandered. It cost three astronauts their lives. They burned to death in a pure oxygen environment that was loaded with combustible material. Strapped in, the hatch bolted, those guys burned to death because there hadn’t been time to do the slow, methodical testing that should have been at the heart of the Apollo program.

“Don’t get me wrong. I am in awe of the pioneers who flew in those things, and the people who built them. Nobody will ever see a Saturn 5 launch again, but believe me, it was an incredible sight.

“The whole thing, from Sputnik to Neil Armstrong, was done using methods we usually only see in wartime. It wasn’t so much a race as a war. Look at the Manhattan Project. Time is critical, money is no object. We need the bomb now. So, if there’s six different ways to refine uranium 235 out of ore, which way do we try first? Answer: Try all six, all at once.

“It worked. We got the bomb.

“The Apollo managers got all the money they needed because we were at war with Russia. Never got to shooting at each other, luckily, but it was war.

“Then, suddenly, we’ve made it to the moon… and what do we do for Act Two? Why… nothing. Nothing much, anyway. The public found the whole show boring. The funding dried up. We launched five [164] more… and those guys were incredibly lucky, because the LEM functioned perfectly every time, something we had no right to expect. Even so, we almost lost Apollo 13.

“So when we were building a space plane, the next logical step, what happens? There’s not enough money to build the ship we should have built, a very big, piloted, first stage that flies back to the Cape after the launch, mated to something that would have looked a lot like the original Shuttle. Instead, we give the Shuttle a pair of solid fuel boosters that fall in the ocean. It’s madness to put a solid fuel booster on a manned craft. Once you light a solid booster you can’t turn it off if something goes wrong.

“So something went wrong-with the booster, notice-seventy seconds into Challenger’s last flight, and seven more people die.

“Hurry-up is death, when you’re dealing with rockets. So is under-funding.”

“An’ now,” Jubal said, “now it happening all over ’gain.”

Travis threw himself down into his seat, puffed out his cheeks.

“It appears so. The powers that be decided we needed to go to Mars, if the Chinese were going. And soon. Hang the cost. Hang the engineering quibbles.” He looked dubiously at his cousin.

“Tell me this, Jubal. You say we can build us a spaceship, we can go out there and get them home if they get into trouble. And we can do it all-in five months. Isn’t this another space race? Aren’t we likely to build something that will blow up in our faces?”

“Not my Squeezer machine,” Jubal said. “It won’t blow up, I guar-on-tee!”

“Okay, I believe you. But what about all the other things we’d have to do? You really think we have time?”

“Don’ know. Maybe not.”

“This race is a little different, Travis,” Kelly said. “This time there’s no choice as to whether we take it slow and careful. Lives are at stake if we don’t build the rocket.”

“We can try it a step at a time,” I said, and Kelly looked sharply at me. “We can go test the rocket tomorrow, like you said. If it blows up, well, that’s that. But we tried.” Kelly gave me a short, relieved nod.

[165] “Makes sense,” Dak said. Alicia grabbed his hand.

“We do that t’ing tomorrow, Travis,” Jubal said. “Jus’ de test.”

Travis looked at each of us in turn, and sighed.

“Just the test,” he agreed. “Come on, I want to start in an hour.”

IT TOOK AN hour and a half, but we got rolling by that afternoon. I called home and told them I’d be out all night. Mom said things were going smoothly, not to worry.

By nightfall we were passing through Miami.