Red Thunder

18

“JUBAL THINKS AMERICANS ought to be the first people to set foot on Mars,” Travis said. “I agree with him, but before a few weeks ago it was impossible. Now it is possible, with something Jubal has made, and I’m going to tell you how it can be done.”

Travis, who had been pretty much on the wagon for several weeks, had told us he had to have a shot or two… or three, before facing an audience scarier than any he had ever faced in his life: Mom, Aunt Maria, and Dak’s father. Alicia had doled the whiskey out to him, and he had walked into the lion’s den.

The three of them sat in Mom’s living room on the old sprung couch and easy chair that qualified as a “family heirloom” in my poor family. It was after midnight, the vacancy sign had been turned off and the office door locked. It was now just the six of us and the three of them. Travis was going to explain how he and Jubal proposed to build a spaceship and take their precious sons to Mars.

You couldn’t find stonier faces on Mount Rushmore.

Sitting on the coffee table along with a couple open two-liter bottles of generic cola and some Dixie cups was a pitiful torn bag of stick pretzels and a small plastic container of cold supermarket guacamole dip. I [184] swear, if Fidel Castro himself climbed out of his grave and came to visit, Aunt Maria would have at least heated up a little refried beans and salsa.

Travis sighed deeply and started in on his spiel. I squeezed Kelly’s hand and said a silent prayer to Ares, the God of War.

THE NIGHT AFTER we launched the test rocket we all pulled into the lot behind Strickland Mercedes and parked. Travis and Jubal got out of the Hummer and squeezed into the backseat of Blue Thunder. Dak beeped the horn once as he pulled out, and Kelly and I went to the back door. One of her keys opened it, and she hurried over to the security control on the wall and punched in a five-digit code.

Kelly’s dad was the kind who liked to keep a close eye on his employees, even when he was busy with other things. Therefore, he’d had his office located above and slightly behind the salespeople’s cubicles. He could look down through a glass wall onto the tops of their desks, and beyond them to the showroom floor.

“Master of all he surveys,” Kelly said as we climbed the broad spiral staircase. Another key got her into his office, and another five-digit number entered into another keypad got us secure access.

I couldn’t help feeling like a burglar, and like a goldfish in a bowl. I knew I hadn’t done anything illegal, Kelly had a perfect right to invite me in, but I also knew I was emphatically not welcome by her father. And what Kelly was going to do was illegal. I hated it that I could see right outside to the new cars parked out in front, and the road, and the I-95 freeway just beyond it. Traffic was light at three A.M.

She booted the computer and I pulled up a chair to watch an artist at work.

“Enter Daddy Dear’s security code, right out of the book… done,” she muttered. “Password… oh, my, now whatever could his password be?” She looked at me, and I shrugged.

“Let’s try something…” She typed, her fingers moving too fast for me to get any of it. In the password box ************ appeared, then the security page disappeared and a menu came up.

[185] “Pretty good,” I said. She smirked at me, and pulled out a flat wood panel above the side drawers on the big executive desk. She turned it over. Taped to the bottom was a piece of paper with the word ferraristud in ballpoint, and several numbers.

“PIN numbers,” she said.

“Dumb.”

“ ‘Ferrari-stud’ is his online handle, too. He uses that when he goes to an escort service website and has one of the girls drop by here when he’s working late. I have quite a file on him. I read all his mail. I know all his secrets, and believe me, some of them could get him ten to twenty in Raiford.”

She called up an internal database and easily changed the color of her borrowed Ferrari from “red” to “black.” She did something involving dealer plates and registrations that I didn’t really understand. Then she went to the DMV.

“Every car dealer in America has some kind of fiddle going with somebody at the DMV, if they can afford it,” she said. “The guy I’m leaving an e-mail with makes good money on the side by doing little chores for us, when the need arises.”

A patrol car was passing along the street out there. His turn indicator was on, and he was about to enter the lot. I tapped Kelly on the shoulder and pointed.

She stood and waved. The officer riding shotgun spotted her and waved, said something to his partner, and they sped off.

“Safer up here,” she pointed out. “The cops are used to me working late.”

When she shut the computer down we went to her office, where a printer was chattering. She pulled the paper out. It was a dealer’s window sticker listing equipment and options and price. She pointed to where it now listed the color as black. She said it was listed that way in all the documentation at the dealership, and in the morning it would be listed that way at the DMV, too.

“They’d have to go all the way back to Italy to hear any different,” she said. “We don’t have any red Ferraris in inventory. They’ll have to look elsewhere.”

[186] “The one problem I see with that,” I pointed out, “the car actually is still red.”

“Not for long.”

Out back, a guy was sitting in the car scraping the old dealer sticker off the window with a razor blade. Another, younger man was standing by the car. The older guy smiled at Kelly.

“Midnight black, right?” he asked.

“As soon as possible.” She held up two key rings.

“Let my boy drive the Hummer. This is my son, Josh.” Kelly tossed him the Hummer keys. “What color you want it?”

“Whatever’s most ordinary.”

“That would be Desert Storm beige. Most of the right-wing militia generals in Florida drive around in Desert Storm camouflage Hummers.”

They drove off, and Kelly told me that by this time tomorrow Travis’s flamboyant red-and-black super-jeep would look like a Gulf War veteran.

“Sounds expensive,” I said.

“Bob owes us some favors. He almost got himself in trouble a few years back, some pesky business about changing engine block numbers and paint on some cars whose ownership was… not quite crystal clear, let’s say.”

“Stolen.”

“We car dealers don’t like that term much. Misplaced.” She grinned at me, and I realized Kelly was more of a pirate than I’d ever suspected.

I didn’t have a problem with that.

THAT MORNING I caught up on some chores, got a few minutes’ sleep in the afternoon, and then spent the evening and night in Kelly’s little apartment on the beach south of town. We swam, lay on the beach and talked until it was dark, bought a pizza and took it to her place.

Kelly talked a lot about making a final break with her father but she hadn’t done it yet. The fact was, she still kept a lot of her stuff in the huge, gated, fake-Greek pile of stone where her father lived with his [187] second wife. She spent some nights there, some with her mother in Ormond Beach, some with me, and some at her own place. She didn’t really live anywhere, in the way that most of us do.

The fact is, she didn’t make enough money to afford the payments on her Porsche if she’d had to buy it herself.

She had money. I didn’t know how much, but I figured it was substantial. It was in a trust her father had set up so she couldn’t use any of it until she was twenty-five. Until then, she had to get by on the wages her father paid her-which even she and I, who loathed him, had to admit were fair for the work she did. He knew her value, and intended to keep her under his thumb as long as he could.

“I could quit and find another job pretty easy,” she said. “I would probably take a small cut in pay, but it might be worth it not to have to deal with him every day. But I’d be just as bored as I am now. What I know is the car business. And I hate the car business. But what I do like is business, and I think I’d be good at it.”

So she vacillated, and we talked. She never laughed at my plans to find a career in space, and she helped me with my studies. And we never talked about getting married.

THE NEXT DAY Travis and Jubal picked us up, very early, in a five-year-old Ford van with enough seats for the six of us. Before getting in Kelly looked it over quickly and asked Travis what he’d paid for it. When he told her she winced.

“You should have talked to me, Trav,” she said.

“Just get in, Ms. Strickland Mercedes, okay?”

We picked up Dak and Alicia and hit the road, destination unknown. Boxes of Krispy Kremes and cups of strong coffee were passed around.

We took the A1A exit and crossed Merritt Island and entered the Kennedy Space Center grounds through an entrance I’d never used before. Travis showed a special pass to the gate guard, so I guess he still had a little pull around there.

We got there in time to witness something I’d never seen before: the raising of the world’s largest garage doors to reveal the retired Shuttle [188] Atlantis and the old Saturn 5, newly restored after many years of sitting in the Florida sunshine and rain, now standing proudly and awesomely erect in one of the bays of the old Vehicle Assembly Building. All done to music, of course… Also Sprach Zarathustra, which was probably always going to be the anthem of space exploration, thanks to Stanley Kubrick.

“I want y’all to just look at that Saturn 5 for a moment, kiddies,” Travis said. “I want you to look at it, and I want you to consider the concept of hubris.”

“And dat be… what?” Jubal asked.

“That’s what the ancient Greeks said when somebody was getting too big for his britches… or whatever Greeks wore under their togas. Excessive pride. Arrogance. I want you to look at that rocket and ask yourself… ‘Are we biting off more than we can chew?’ The builders of that thing are gods, in my book. And the Greeks warned mortals not to try to act like gods.”

“It’s not the same, Travis,” I protested.

“No. We’ve got a few advantages over the guys who built and launched these things. Chiefly, unlimited fuel. Ninety-nine percent of that rocket was fuel, liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, which are very tricky to handle, very dangerous in themselves, even if you don’t burn them in those huge engines. We don’t have to worry about that.

“But we have to worry about just about everything else. Do you know how many million parts were in that thing, fully loaded, on its way to the moon?”

“No, how many?” Alicia asked.

“Well… I don’t know, but it’s a bunch. Somebody here can tell us. My point, though, is one faulty transistor could bring this behemoth down in flames. One screwup in space, and we’d be dead. Can we build that well?”

“Sure,” Dak said, but it was impossible to stand in the shadow of that thing and say “sure” with any confidence. So I backed him up, and so did Alicia and Kelly. That left Jubal, and we all turned to him, the only guy whose vote really counted.

[189] “I t’ink we can, ma fren’s. But I promise you dis. De firs’ minute I t’ink we cain’t do it, I tell you right off.”

It didn’t bring a smile to Travis’s face, but eventually he nodded his head.

“Let’s go see the museum,” he said.

KELLY AND ALICIA had never seen it. Isn’t that always the way? I think our visit to Kennedy that morning fascinated them, gave them a glimpse of the fire that burned in Dak’s and my guts. And if you were even vaguely considering something as screwy as going to Mars in a home-built spaceship… well, you couldn’t help wanting to know more about the ones who had gone before you and the hazards they faced. The hazards you might soon be facing.

We ate our picnic lunch at a table in the shade near the rocket park, where many of the early missiles launched from Cape Canaveral made a metal forest of white trunks. It was hot, there weren’t many tourists around. I had a funny thought. If we do this, and get famous, when they made a movie about us the director would want to shoot right here, where it all was decided.

“Have you given any thought to how much all this will cost?” Travis asked.

We all looked at each other. I’d certainly thought about it, but I didn’t have a clue. The one thing I could say with absolute certainty was that it would take far, far more money than I had. Another thing I was pretty sure of was that if Travis didn’t have enough money to do it, then it just wouldn’t get done.

“One million dollah,” Jubal said.

We all looked at him. Travis was frowning.

“Where did you get that number, beloved cousin of mine?”

“I pick it outta de air,” Jubal admitted, and we all laughed. “But it oughta be plenty enough, I t’ink.”

“I t’ink so, too,” Kelly said, and Jubal patted her on the back.

“Okay, where did you get that figure?” Travis wanted to know.

[190] “It’s what I have in the bank, more or less,” she said quietly.

Stunned silence.

“But I thought-” I started, then felt the daggers she was staring at me. Well, of course. The night before last I had watched her turn a red car into a black one. She had the computers, she had the security codes, the passwords, the bank account numbers, the PIN numbers. She could probably steal her old man blind, if she wanted to.

But that wasn’t something we had to share with everyone.

“I know, it’s awful,” she said. “One person having so much, others having not anything. I can’t help it. It’s not easy, having money when your three best friends don’t, and they won’t let you give them some help here and there, when it’s needed. It hurts me to see Manny’s family struggling so hard… but none of them have ever asked me for a thing, and they haven’t held my money against me.

“So, yeah, I’ve got money. About a million dollars. And I’ve been drifting since high school. I’ve been looking for something to do with my life. I’ve tried a lot of things. I met Alicia while I was volunteering at the battered women’s shelter.”

“She did more than that,” Alicia said. “She put her money where her mouth was a couple times, saved the place from closing down once.”

“It didn’t take much,” Kelly said. “And that kind of work is not for me, I found out. I’d get too depressed at the hopelessness of it all if I tried to make it my life’s work.

“Today I learned about people who wanted to go to the moon, and they did it. It hasn’t been my dream, and it may never be, but it’s a place to start.” She looked at Travis. “So how about it, Mr. Ex-Astronaut? Do you want to go to Mars, or will you let the chance pass you by? I’ll bet you a million dollars we can do it.”

Travis shook his head and smiled, slowly.

“I won’t take that bet. Because if we do this thing, I’ll jump in with both feet. So I’d be betting against myself.”

“You faded, Kelly,” Jubal said.

“What’s that?” Travis asked.

“I say, I bet her one million dollah we cain’t build us no ship and get [191] to Mars. Dat way, I win, I kin give her back de money she waste jus’ on account a believin’ in me. She win, we go to Mars and she get my one million dollah.”

“Jubal, I hate to remind you of this-”

“I know. You my loco parent. I always figgered dat one loco parent was plenty enough, yes.” He smiled, and I tried to smile back, but it was tough, thinking of Avery Broussard and what he’d done to his brilliant son.

“In loco parentis,” Travis said, wearily. “It means I’m your legal guardian.”

News to me, but not surprising. Somebody like Jubal would have to have someone to look after his affairs.

Travis had mentioned once, before this whole scheme got started, that he and Jubal were living on the earnings from Jubal’s patents. Jubal was the creative one, he had the crazy visions and built the marvelous things. Travis was the financial side. Though he didn’t claim to be a whiz at handling money, he did it a thousand times better than Jubal ever could, and in fact, without Travis or someone like him to figure out the practical applications of Jubal’s inventions and discoveries, Jubal would have nothing at all. “We do well,” Travis had said. “Jubal’s never going to lack for anything.”

Oh, no? Well, now little Jubal wants a toy, Travis.

And now Jubal was frowning.

“You done said it was jus’ to proteck me,” he said. “From dose bad folks, take our money away, we ain’t careful.”

Travis was looking uncomfortable. I looked at Kelly, who was following with intense interest. She raised one eyebrow at me, and shook her head. Don’t interrupt.

“ ’Bout all I ever spent it on is de Krispy Kremes,” Jubal said. Alicia laughed, and patted Jubal’s hand.

“Is it my money, Travis? Is it my money?”

“It’s your money, Jubal. Well, half of it is, anyway.”

“And I gots de million dollah?”

“Yeah, you gots it. More than that. I’ll show you the books, you don’t believe me.” He looked around at all of us, and got angry. “I’ll show all [192] of you the goddamn books if you want. I’ve never cheated Jubal out of a dime. Excuse the language, Jubal.”

“Nobody ever thought you did, Travis,” Kelly said. “But have you maybe… sheltered him too much? I’m not criticizing, it’s none of my business, but Grace told me they’d like to see Jubal more. I think Jubal would like that, too.”

Travis hung his head, then nodded, still not looking at us.

“I’m a drunk, okay? I’ve spent a lot of the last five years pissed out of my mind, as bad off as I was the night you almost killed me. I went out there on the beach to watch my ex-wife take off on her way to Mars… because I was supposed to be on that ship!

“I’ve always known, since I was a child, that I was going to be the first man on Mars. I planned for it, I worked hard. I made myself into the best pilot in the space program, so they had to choose me, there would be no one else.

“And then I drank it all away.”

We were all quiet for a time. I watched a seagull that seemed to be building a nest in the top of one of the old rockets surrounding us.

“I knew I wasn’t doing right by Jubal, but mostly I was too drunk to care. Since I met you guys I’ve been sober-mostly-and I want to thank you for that.”

“It’s all up to you, Travis,” Alicia said.

“I know that.”

“I be doin’ okay, cher,” Jubal said. “I been worryin’ ’bout you, oh yes, but you done good by me, you has.”

Travis looked up and spread his hands in surrender.

“Okay. We’ll build the ship.”

None of us said anything. You could feel the excitement in the air, but there was no celebration.

Just as well.

“As soon as we get permission from your parents.”

TRAVIS WAS GOOD. I think even Mom and Aunt Maria would have agreed, though nothing in their faces and their postures would admit [193] to it. Sam Sinclair just sat, neutral, not accepting and not rejecting Travis’s words. Sam Sinclair was a cautious man.

I knew a terrible surmise was growing in my mother’s mind. Why was Travis telling them all this? There was really only one way to go with it, wasn’t there? But she was afraid to let herself acknowledge it, because then she’d have an impossible problem. How do I tell Manny he can’t go…. when I can’t tell him he can’t go?

Travis outlined the present situation in space, with the Chinese due to arrive on Mars first, and the Americans taking a new, radical, and untested technology on a different path, which could not beat the Chinese… and might get them killed.

The spiel faltered only when he tried to get Jubal to help him explain the problems Jubal had found with the “Vaseline” drive. Jubal just wasn’t up to it. His best effort so far had been calling his bubble-generating device a “Squeezer,” and even then his mangled syntax had rendered it as “Squozer.”

“Get on with it, Travis,” my mom said, eventually. “If Jubal says it’s going to blow up, I’ll believe it’s gonna blow up.”

“That’s enough for me, too,” Sam said.

So Travis moved on to Part Two. That was good. Part Two was the real crowd pleaser. In Part Two he got to put the Squeezer through its paces.

Sam Sinclair sat up alertly from the very first time Travis made a silver bubble appear in the air. Mom and Aunt Maria looked puzzled. Clearly they understood this was something out of the ordinary, but they weren’t sure why. Travis made the bubbles pop loudly both from vacuum and from compressed air. Then he fitted one into a small device Jubal had made. With Jubal operating his controller, they made compressed air leak out of a minute pinhole, what Jubal called a “dis-continual-uity,” and particle physicists would more likely call a “discontinuity.” He let them feel the air coming out, and experience the pressure the little thing exerted on their hands.

“That’s thrust. It’s the same thing that happens when all the smoke and flames come out the bottom of a VStar. You can fire all your thrust in a few minutes and get up to a very high speed and coast all the way [194] to Mars. Or you can fire continually, like the Ares Seven. You’ll speed up slowly, but eventually you could end up going faster than the Chinese ship.”

“This don’t make too much sense to me,” Aunt Maria admitted.

“I know, I know,” Travis said. “Nobody gets this stuff easily,” he went on, “not without studying physics for years. Because it goes against everything you know. Cars don’t work like that, do they?”

Mom tried a question. “But with this thing Jubal has made…” I think I was the only one who knew how much this was costing her, to ask a question that might sound like a dumb question. Mom was mortified by her lack of education, and she didn’t deal with mortification well. “With this Squeezer thing, you can fire it all the way to Mars and never run out of gas?”

“Exactly. We get the best of both worlds with the Squeezer. We can fire a powerful rocket, the equal of any rocket that’s ever been built in terms of thrust… and we can fire it all the way there!”

Short pause for everyone to think about that, me included. I still found it almost impossible to believe. Free energy. The world had never seen anything like it. And every time I thought about it, it scared me more.

Sam Sinclair, too.

“I don’t like what I’m hearing here,” he said.

“How’s that, Sam?”

“Like you said. It’s a lot of power. In my experience, power is dangerous, if you don’t handle it right.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more.”

“How big can Jubal make these things?”

Travis paused, then looked at his cousin. I think he might have prayed a little, too.

“How about it, Jubal? How big?”

Jubal had been dying inside for almost an hour now. He hated it that Mom and Maria and Sam, his friends, were acting so hostile, and he hated it even more that he was the cause of it. Or the thing he had created, which was about the same thing.

“I don’ know, me. Plenty big, oh yeah.”

[195] “How about a ballpark figure?” Sam asked.

Travis fielded it, and Jubal relaxed some.

“We can make enough power to blast at one gee all the way to Mars and back,” he said. “That’s all we need to know to build the ship.”

“Yeah. But there’s power, and then there’s power. You know what I’m saying?”

“I think I do.”

“Why you? Why should you and Jubal control all that power? Shouldn’t it go to… I don’t know. The people in charge?”

Dak was looking at his father with admiration in his eyes… and panic everywhere else. Proud of the old man for seeing to the core of the issue, the part we’d hardly discussed, worried that the cat was coming out of the bag.

“Do you trust your government that far, Sam?”

“I’m an American.”

“So am I, and God bless her, forever. But that’s not what I asked you.”

Sam said nothing, but nodded slightly, allowing Travis the point.

“Why me?” Travis said. “Better ask why us? Because it’s on us now. Not just me and Jubal, and not just your sons and Kelly and Alicia. You, too, the three of you. We nine people are now the only people on the planet who know about this… and if there had been any way to keep your children out of it, I would have. But for better or worse, Jubal discovered it, and he didn’t know what he had… sorry, Jubal…”

“It’s okay, cher. I ain’t got no practicals about me, no.”

“He means he never sees the practical side of something he makes. That’s my job. Anyway, Manny found out about it, and that makes all of us responsible for it.”

He sighed and shook his head.

“I started out here asking you all to keep this matter private, to never tell anyone about it. I see now I can’t hold you to your promises about that. It’s too much. Sam, Maria, Betty, if any of you think the thing to do here is to turn it over to the government, say the word, and I’m on the phone to Washington.”

[196] I hope I concealed my horror a little better than Dak did. He looked like he’d been stuck with a hot poker. Alicia looked worried, too, but patted his knee. Kelly was imperturbable. Don’t let anybody know your business, she had once told me, and in this case it meant not showing your feelings openly.

“I’ll reserve that decision for now,” Sam said.

Mom and Maria looked at each other, then at Travis.

“Go on,” Mom said.

“Thank you. I promise you this. If we give this thing to anybody, it will be the United States.”

“If? What’s the alternative?” Mom asked. She was leaning forward now, a lot more interested in practical questions than blue-sky engineering. “I presume you mean sell it, not give it away. Or do you mean you might just hold on to it?”

“Forever? That might be an option if only me and Jubal knew about it. I’m not dissing anybody here, but secrets always leak, if more than one person knows the secret. I assume there are people who are looking for us. Some of them might resort to some pretty strenuous methods to get the secret. But I don’t think I’d try to hold on to it even if I was the only one who knew. Because someday someone else will discover this and… well, I can think of a lot of possibilities, none of them very good.”

“What do you think we should do, then?” Sam asked.

“For now… just hold on to it.” He sat back in his seat, let his breath out slowly. “I haven’t discussed this part yet with anyone. Not the kids, not Jubal.

“This is a powerful technology, and a lot of good can come from it. No more energy crisis, energy is now free. Tear down all the dams, shut down all the nukes, stop mining coal, oil, and gas. Think of the environmental benefits of that alone. We can even solve the garbage problem. No more landfills, no more burning, just squeeze it all down to the density of a neutron star, and let the energy out a little at a time.”

He saw he had lost them with the neutron star business, and leaned forward again.

“But it can also be worse than the hydrogen bomb. The only good [197] thing I know about atomic bombs is that they are hard to make, and expensive. What if everybody could make something just as powerful? What if that crazy kid shot up his junior high school last month got his hands on a Squeezer?”

“Sounds like the best thing to do is just shoot you and Jubal,” Alicia said.

Travis didn’t smile.

“Don’t think that wouldn’t occur to some people,” he said. “Only they wouldn’t stop with us. I hate this like hell, Sam, Betty, but your children know too much for their own good.”

I couldn’t hold back anymore.

“It’s my fault,” I choked out. “I never should have picked the damn thing up.” To my horror, I felt tears running down my cheeks.

Mom looked stricken, and started to get up. I waved her away. What more to make my humiliation complete but to have Mommy come rushing? I guess she figured that out, because she sat back down, reluctantly. Kelly put her arm around me.

“Not you, Manny,” Jubal said. “Me. Me and dis… dis t’ing I gots, cain’t leave nothin’ alone where it oughta be, no.”

“Not either of you, Manny,” Travis said, quietly. “You can blame me. If I’d been paying attention I’d have been with Jubal when he learned how to do this.”

“There’s no point trying to point a finger,” Sam said. “What’s done is done.”

“I don’t mind pointing a finger,” Mom said, through clenched teeth.

“Let’s hear what he wants to do, Betty,” Sam suggested.

“Thanks, Sam. I thought about just handing it over. We can still do that, at any time, unless they find us and take it from us first. The alternative is to go to Mars.”

“That’s stupid,” Mom said.

“No, Betty, stupid would be going to Mars to get there before the Chinese. I know that’s what started us down this crazy road, but even Jubal agrees it’s not enough reason to go. A better reason is to be there to help if what Jubal says is likely to happen, happens. To save lives. But it’s not enough, and Jubal can’t say it’s a certainty.

[198] “I need a platform. Something to stand on while I shout the news to the world. Right now, what am I? A disgraced astronaut, and a drunk. What is Jubal? A tinkerer, and a man with a communication problem that people are going to interpret as retardation. Nobody’s going to listen to kids, and nobody’s going to listen to any of you.

“But the first people on Mars… them they’ll listen to.”

He paused to take a drink of his soda pop. Aunt Maria got up and went into the kitchen and I could see her gathering tortillas and beans and pulled pork from the fridge for making carnitas. Maria, at least, had decided this gringo was worth listening to, thus worthy of being fed. But before starting she poured some of the cheap sangria she enjoyed one glass of most nights, and carried it to Travis.

“Go on, everybody, I can listen from in here,” she said. Travis sipped the wine and smiled like it was the finest French vintage.

“One glass,” Alicia said, primly. Travis saluted her.

“The only hope I can see for this thing,” Travis resumed, “is to get it out in the open. The fact that it exists, and its dangers and its possibilities-that we have to make public, in a big, gaudy way so the news media will cover it and people will listen. I don’t think one country, or more likely, a small group of powerful people in one country, should control it, because they will classify this Ultra Top Secret. I don’t think one country should control it.”

He sat back, drained the rest of his wine, and folded his arms.

“God damn you to hell, Travis Broussard,” my mother said, quietly.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How stupid do you think I am? You come here, you talk about needing my son’s help to build this crazy machine. You talk about how you need to go to Mars… to Mars, for heaven’s sake! It’s you this and you that, and did you think I’m just some redneck bimbo runs a worthless mo-tel and I’d be easy to fool?

“Don’t you think we know you plan on taking these children with you?”

“Is that true, Travis?” Sam asked.

“All I’m here to do tonight is tell you they want to help build the ship, which has to be done quietly.”

[199] “Don’t you lie to me,” Mom said. “Did you tell them they can go with you?”

“Only with their parents’ permission,” Travis said, quietly.

“God damn you to hell.”

“I wish I was there now,” Travis admitted.