Red Thunder

23

NORMAL SPACECRAFT DON’T have anything you could really call a keel. Our spacecraft did, in a way. Right from the initial acceptance design we’d known the upper part and the lower part would be joined at a structural member that had to be a certain size and shape to hold the seven upended tank cars above it. It was to be a circular girder; circumference of that circle was twenty times pi, sixty-two feet and almost ten inches.

This is a pretty big circle, and it had to be very strong. It had to bear the considerable tonnage of the rest of the ship sitting on it, and also the high temperatures associated with firing the engines. As such, it was to be built from the highest-quality aircraft-grade titanium alloy.

Two days before FBI Sunday we got permission from Travis to begin work on the supporting structure and the thrust ring itself. We made the supports from ordinary scaffolding. Then we laid out the diameter of the ring and began learning how to build things out of the super-high-grade steel. Parts were welded, parts were drilled and bolted.

The welding on Red Thunder’s cradle was particularly fussy because of the exotic material we were using. Caleb couldn’t trust anyone but himself for most of the work, so Travis and Jubal and Dak and I were [252] sometimes welder’s helpers, and sometimes just in the way. More often we were relegated to the job of preparing the structural members to Caleb’s exacting specs before he did the final assembly. I lost count of how many tons of steel we had to throw away and begin again. Every weld was critical. Every weld could become the source of a potentially fatal air leak or structural collapse.

Just because we were little or no help on the critical cradle construction didn’t mean Dak and I didn’t get plenty of welding done. We had enough to occupy us preparing the tanks for the final assembly. We cut the tops off all of them and welded hefty flanges in place top and bottom. When they were all standing upright on the cradle, we’d lower materials in from the top, building decks and ladders and installing the larger, heavier components from the bottom up. Five of the outside tanks would connect with the central tank at about the midpoint, where the tank caps had been. Each connector had to be fitted with a round airtight hatch, so if we lost pressure in one of the outer tanks we could close and dog that hatch and still be in business. Three feet was big enough to let any of us pass through, even Jubal, but we intended to spend most of our waking hours in the central tank with all hatches sealed.

Naturally Caleb had to pass on all our work, adding to his already impossible workload, but it never seemed to bother him. He seemed tireless. “Working offshore rigs is a bunch worse than this,” he’d laugh, when we asked him. I’m proud to say that only twice did he have to make us do a job over. We were learning fast.

There were a thousand things needing to be done, ten thousand pieces all needing to come together in the correct sequence… well, I’d rather have tried to walk to Mars than handle Kelly’s job.

She had endless lists, endless schedules. Before we could tighten a nut or grind a pipe fitting we had to check with her to see if we were out of sequence. Any time of the day we might look up to find her standing there with her electronic clipboard, asking us to clarify this or that system, what do we have to do first, what do we have to do second, and third, and fourth, and nine-hundred-and-fifty-ninth. The next day a new set of printouts would be added to the growing folders of work [253] assignments we all were carrying around, meticulously ticking off each item as it was done, then handing the completed forms to Kelly so she could mark them done in her computer files.

This in addition to compiling and writing the “owner’s manual” for Red Thunder, the specs of every piece of equipment in her, the proper way to troubleshoot a fan or a water pump or a Sears Kenmore freezer, the preflight checklists for each crew member.

This in addition to keeping the books straight and paying all the bills.

This in addition to helping Alicia with her homework every night. And in addition to massaging my shoulders at the end of a day of welding and heavy lifting, before we both fell into bed too exhausted to make love. Some nights, anyway. I began to think seriously about asking her to marry me. If I came back alive, anyway…

MORNINGS, DAK WORKED with me in the warehouse. In the afternoons he left to join his father at the garage, where they were working on our Mars surface transportation vehicle. They were being very tight-lipped about it, not showing the plans to anyone, not allowing anyone to have a look at the work in progress. Not even billing the Red Thunder Corporation for parts, much less labor.

“It’ll be my contribution to the effort,” Sam had said. “It works, or it doesn’t work. We’ll know in a month.” Travis hadn’t objected, glad to have one less piece of the puzzle to worry about. We didn’t have to have a surface transport at all, but it would be kind of a downer to get there and then be limited to trips within a mile of the ship. So we had set aside one tank to carry it, and Dak had showed us what needed to be done to the tank to accommodate the vehicle. It would be the only tank not accessible from the interior of the ship, which meant one less hatch seal to potentially go bad.

Alicia spent all day in her EMT classes. In the evenings she joined Dak and Sam and came with them to the warehouse, where Dak and Kelly, sometimes both, helped her with her homework. Dak reported she was tops in her class, something that made Alicia fairly glow with pride. She had found her life’s work, no question.

[254] I was in charge of product testing. I did that in my vast amounts of spare time, five minutes here, ten minutes there. Even Mom and Aunt Maria and Grace got into the act on product testing, coming over one at a time to help me be sure that every seal, every bolt, every thingamajig and doodad in the whole huge stockpile of building materials and store-bought assemblies was up to the task for which it was intended.

Back in the 1950s a test on living in an enclosed environment had ended early because the floor covering, some sort of linoleum, turned out to be outgassing some really toxic stuff and everybody in the experiment got sick. We would have scrubbers to remove both carbon dioxide and most contaminants that might show up in our air, and detectors for carbon monoxide and a wide range of other poisons. But it was best if we eliminated all those potential problems on the ground.

Luckily for us, NASA had already tested a vast number of substances to assess their suitability for use in launch vehicles and space stations. So 99 percent of the stuff we used was precertified. Again, as in so many things, if that work hadn’t already been done there was no way we could have met our deadline.

But there were a few items here and there that had never been scrutinized, and if we absolutely had to have them, we tested them ourselves in a small sealed chamber.

That was one kind of testing. We spent far more time and effort seeing if this or that could stand up to heat, cold, and vacuum.

Take automobile tires.

“Tires?” I asked Dak, thinking he was kidding.

“Yeah, tires, man. Just your ordinary synthetic rubber steel-belted radials. I want to see how they stand up to cold, and vacuum.”

I knew Dak wouldn’t waste my time, and I knew he probably wouldn’t answer too many questions, so the next day we had a top-of-the-line Goodyear tire delivered.

Our vacuum-testing chamber now had a tank of liquid nitrogen, three hundred and some degrees below zero, and a pump to move the supercold stuff through a grid of pipes inside the tank. We had powerful radiant heaters for testing the other extreme.

[255] We put the tire in the chamber and cooled it down to 150 below. Through the little Plexiglas window it looked okay.

“Take her down to one eighty, one ninety or so,” Dak said, so I did. We left it that way for twelve hours, then pumped out all the air for another twelve, and turned on the heater to about 150 Fahrenheit.

When we opened the chamber Dak picked the tire up in a padded glove… and chunks of hard rubber just peeled away from the tire. Dak didn’t say anything, just carried the tire to the trash Dumpster and tossed it in.

He frowned for two days after that. I began to think that expression would imprint permanently on his face. A couple times he shouted at me for nothing much, which was not like Dak at all. Then on the third day he came in with a big smile on his face.

“Something?” I asked him.

“You’ll see, a few more weeks,” he said, so I left it at that.

The next day sixteen king-sized pink Wal-Mart electric blankets were delivered to the warehouse. The next morning they were gone. Dak had taken them to the garage.

Problem solved, I figured, and turned to other things.

AND ON THE seventh day we rested… long enough to hold the weekly meeting, and for Kelly to tell us we were five days behind schedule. “The cradle is proving to be a lot more difficult to build than we’d planned,” Kelly said.

“Sorry, Kelly,” Caleb said. “If I’d been around for the early planning I’d of told you it was gonna take a bit longer than that.”

“How many more days you figure you’ll need?”

“Another week.”

Kelly began tapping on the screen of her clipboard.

“There are a few items here and there that I can move up. But in about four days there’s not going to be much for the rest of us to do until we get the upper stage in place.”

“There’s still the matter of the space suits,” Travis said.

“I’ve trusted you on that one,” Kelly said. “If you tell me it’s going [256] to take two weeks to make them, we might as well all relax, because the race to Mars is over.”

“I’ll need three, four days, tops,” Travis said. “I have to take a trip. Now might be the best time to take it, if Dak and Manny can handle the metal fabrication work alone, under Caleb’s orders, of course.”

“I can help, too,” Kelly pointed out.

“Sure,” Caleb said. “If I can pull Dak off the rover project four or five days, have him working full-time out here, then with Kelly… then I don’t figure we’d get ’er done any faster with or without you, Trav.”

“I can do that,” Dak said, but he didn’t look happy.

“What if I helped out?” Alicia said.

“No,” Kelly and Travis said at once. Kelly gestured for Travis to go on.

“You getting an EMT rating is one of the necessary factors made me agree to get involved at all. We’ve got to have somebody aboard who can handle a bigger medical problem than a hangnail, which is about all I’m qualified to do.”

“You make me nervous, Travis,” Alicia said. “If you figure I’ll be able to do a heart transplant when I’m done, you’re wrong. Why not take a doctor along?”

“I considered it,” Travis admitted. “I expect you to be able to treat most types of trauma, from a skinned knee to third-degree burns to sawing off a leg. What we’re going to have to deal with, if we have anything at all, is physical injury, pretty much like a bad car wreck. If there’s any hip bones that need to be rebuilt, or plastic surgery, or skin transplants, the patient will have to wait till we get back to Earth. I just want you to have a good shot at keeping trauma victims alive for a three-day ambulance ride.”

“I guess I can handle that,” Alicia sighed.

“You still making that list of stuff?” Dak asked her. Alicia dug in the pocket of her jeans and came up with a rumpled piece of paper which she passed over to Kelly.

“I’ve bought a lot of stuff already,” Kelly said, “We’re going to have a well-equipped infirmary for diagnosis and treatment. We’ve already [257] got just about all the instruments, from a sphygmomanometer to a little rubber hammer.”

“A spigomo…” Jubal looked delighted. A new long word!

“Measures your blood pressure,” Alicia told him.

“I won’t buy plasma and whole blood until we’re ready to leave,” Kelly said. “I’ve got a list of drugs, and only about half can be bought over the counter.”

“I can probably handle that,” Salty said. We all looked at him. Salty was a man of few words, he seldom had anything to say at the Sunday meetings. “I know somebody in Mexico. He can buy most of them over the counter down there, and anything he can’t buy legally, well…”

The obvious question hung in the air, but nobody asked it. His business, I figured.

Salty shrugged, and answered it anyway.

“He’s my connection. I’m not a user, what I buy from him is marijuana, sometimes codeine and morphine. My wife’s got rheumatoid arthritis, and the weed is the best thing she’s found for the day-to-day pain. On her worst days she takes the pills.”

It was clear that Caleb and Grace had known this, but Travis and Jubal looked shocked. Jubal looked ready to cry.

“It’s fairly well under control, don’t worry,” Salty said. “The doctors kept undermedicating her, so we took things into our own hands.”

“Naturally.”

“Sure thing.”

“Sorry to hear it, Salty.”

We all offered sympathy and Salty looked uncomfortable, so Alicia brought us back to the subject.

“Morphine’s on my list,” she said.

“I’ll get it for you.”

There were a few more items of business, dealt with in about half an hour. Then, I was ready to head back to the warehouse, but Travis insisted we go out on the lake and fish for a while. “And there will be no talking the project,” he declared.

It was hard to do that for the first hour. But then I landed a big bass, and took the fishing seriously for the next several hours.

[258] Travis was right, I think. You have to take a break every now and then. But when we got back we all went to work with even more determination.

That night Kelly told me where Travis was going.

“I just booked him Daytona, Atlanta, Moscow, Star City, and back,” she said.

“Star City? Star City?” I have to admit, the Russians’ name for their main space base beat the heck out of our old Cape Canaveral. I sure would have loved to go see for myself. “Maybe I could go along, help him carry his bags.”

“Want me to book you?”

“First class, or tourist?”

“First class, naturally. But he’s paying for the ticket himself. ‘This is a below-the-line cost,’ is what he said. It’s what they say in Hollywood for items not on the regular budget. Like the star’s thirty-million-dollar salary.”

“What do you figure he’s gonna do in Russia?”

“Well, I’ve had a few hours to think it over. Unless he’s selling us out to the dirty Tsarist Russkis, he knows where he can get a deal on some used space suits.”

“Huh!” I was remembering my earlier thought, that there was no thrift store where you could pick up half a dozen used space suits. But there was, of course. Ever since the collapse of Communism, Russia had been one big thrift store, selling out to the bare walls. Crazy Boris Says, “Everything Must Go!” Spacesuits ought to be easy enough to find over there, with Travis’s connections.

WHEN KELLY WAS notified about Travis’s return flight, we flipped coins and I got to be the one who drove the U-Haul to Atlanta to pick him up. It rained all the way there and back, but I didn’t mind. It was nice to get out on the highway for a day.

Travis was waiting at a freight terminal with ten wooden crates covered with stenciled Russian instructions and warnings. Five of them were four-foot cubes, but the other five were pretty much the size and [259] shape of coffins. I asked him how the trip was. He seemed tired, but too wired to relax much.

“Mostly flying,” he said. “I don’t know if I’d a made it back in tourist class. I’m not as young as I was. I won’t lie to you, Manny, without the Antabuse I don’t know if I’d a made it. Free drinks all the way there and back. And everywhere you go, it’s ‘Let’s drink to this!’ and ‘Let’s drink to that!’ ” But then he grinned at me. “But I did it, boy-o. Clean and sober, there and back.”

“Congratulations. We’re all proud of you.”

I figured he had more to talk about than the drinking, but he wasn’t through yet.

“Over there, I’m still something of a hero, Manny. Not like here, where I’m washed up and most of my old friends have left. But the Russians… there was a Russian aboard that flight I had to set down in Africa, and they’ve never forgotten. That I was drunk doesn’t matter. In fact, there’s something in the Russian soul that makes them respect me more because I was drunk when I did it.

“Anyway, I got friends over there, friends I never got a chance to alienate. All it takes is a little cash to grease the wheels, then a little more for whatever it is you’re buying… and pretty soon you’ve got what you want, at a tenth of the cost.”

“So those are suits in the boxes?”

“You bet.”

“Why ten boxes?”

“Space suits ain’t like T-shirts. You need a few specialized tools. The helmets and backpacks are in the other boxes, too.” He looked out the window and shivered.

“Georgia, Georgia, on my mind. Can’t get me out of Georgia soon enough.”

“What’s the matter with Georgia?”

“I hate coming to Georgia. I wish Kelly had booked me through Dulles, or even Miami. But you know Kelly. She saved me about five hundred dollars finding that fare.”

After ten minutes with his eyes closed he sat up and shook his head. He cracked the window to let the wet breeze blow in his face.

[260] “It was raining like this the day I set the Montana down at the Atlanta airport.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Didn’t I tell you about that?”

“I don’t think so.” I was pretty sure he knew he hadn’t told me. Why he’d decided to tell me now I had no idea, but I decided to just let him go. Which he did.

“There were warning lights from the diagnostic tests during my pre-flight. They’d come on, then they’d go out. I wanted to postpone the reentry, do an EVA, get out there and bang a few things around with a hammer, see if I could get the lights to stay on or stay off, one way or the other. But they sent me a ‘fix,’ they swore if I ran their program everything would be fine. That’s how it worked on the ground, anyway.

“I told ’em to go stuff their fix, I wasn’t pulling away from the station till I’d eyeballed the thing. And they told me to remember Senator So-and-so was aboard-as if I’d forget it-and he had to be back to make an important vote on the Senate floor, and my head would roll if he was late.”

“Senator So-and-so?”

“Yeah, I forget which one he was, now. God knows I took enough of ’em up back then. Ever since Garn and Glenn went up, back in the ’90s, a U.S. senator figures he ain’t no great shakes unless he’s been up. The ultimate boondoggle junket. Hell, some guys paid twenty million dollars to go up! Senators get to go for free.

“Sure enough, halfway down one of the speed brakes deployed at about Mach six. We flipped right over. Five times we rolled, me cussing and fighting all the way. I stopped the roll and looked out the window for the landing strip, and there she was. Happiest I’d been since I found that little grass strip in Africa. I brought her in, very hard and very fast… and about a hundred feet off the deck I spotted a 787 crossing the runway in front of me. Must of given the captain of that 787 something to remember, because we missed by maybe ten feet.

“And when we stopped, that’s when I knew I had landed in Atlanta.”

[261] He stopped for a while, sipped at the coffee he’d bought from a machine at the freight terminal. Then he-shook his head.

“I’d a found and fixed that hydraulic leak if they’d a let me go EVA. But since nobody at Hartsfield knew I was coming until I showed up on their radar dropping like a stone and because Senator So-and-so got a whiff of my breath, and since I was still blowing a one-point-eight an hour later…

“We compromised, NASA and me. When the inquiry happened I wouldn’t mention the warnings they’d told me to ignore, also that the reason for ignoring them was the senator’s goddamn fault… and I’d hand in my wings and never fly again.”

There was another long silence. I listened to the hiss of the tires on pavement and the sound of the wipers moving the red Georgia mud around my windshield.

“Sometimes I wish I’d a just gone for it, Manny. Tell the whole story, give the senator and those NASA turkeys what they had coming. But I was drunk. I was stinking drunk. The breath test was probably unconstitutional… but hell, lots of people knew I was a drunk, a drunk who’d been pretty lucky for a long, long time, and a bunch were ready to testify to that.

“Still, I might have… Then somebody mentioned Jubal. Didn’t make a threat, nothing like that. Didn’t have to. They’d looked into my private life enough to know about him. They could drop a hint here, a few bucks there, and the judge takes Jubal from me and puts him in an institution for retarded adults…”

We didn’t speak for the next twenty miles. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I’m sorry? Didn’t quite cover it, did it? Then I did think of something.

“Don’t tell that story to my mom, Travis, okay?”

“Deal.”

Pretty soon he was asleep, and snoring, very loudly. Oh, brother. Better put earplugs on the packing list.

[262] “THESE ARE ALL fifteen-year-old suits,” Travis said. “Only two of them have actually been in space. They’ve all been sitting in a warehouse for a long time.”

We were all gathered at the ranch, beside the pool. The coffin boxes had been pried open. The space suits, a bright color Travis had called “Commie red,” were packed in a substance Sam had called “excelsior,” that looked like dried brown grass. Didn’t the Russians have Styrofoam peanuts? Travis pulled one suit out of its box and brushed it off.

“Isn’t fifteen years kind of old?” Kelly asked.

“Yes, and no.” He didn’t explain, and Kelly went on.

“And why weren’t they ever used?”

“Obsolescence.”

“Is that good?” Alicia asked. “I mean, are they-”

“Okay? They should be as good as new ones, mostly. I couldn’t afford to buy the new model, chilluns. These’ll have to do.” He removed a helmet from one of the other boxes and twisted it into place. He stood and admired his work.

“What you should know about Russian engineering, crew, is that it often doesn’t have the bells and whistles Americans usually design into their stuff. But it works. This kind of suit protected many a Russki behind during many a lonely man-hour. I’d stack ’em up against NASA suits any day.”

I picked up what looked like an instruction manual from the scattered debris. Naturally, it was printed in Russian.

“Do you read Russian, Travis?”

“Passably well. We’ll get one translated, and I’ll check you out on all the Russian labels that are actually on the suit.”

We helped him tie weights to the arms and legs of the suit and he snapped a fitting from the suit into an air compressor hose. Then we tossed it in the pool and started pumping it full of air.

Pretty soon the surface of the pool was boiling with foam, like we’d dropped in a giant Alka-Seltzer. Kelly turned away, grimacing. I think I may have groaned. I heard the freight train of history pulling away without me. Good-bye, trip to Mars. …

[263] Travis kicked off his shoes and put his wallet on the patio table. He picked up a swim mask and put it over his head, then jumped in the pool. He was down only a short time, then came to the surface and clambered out, sopping wet but grinning.

“All the leaks are coming from the connector gaskets,” he announced.

“This is good news?” Dak wondered.

“All according to plan, Dak. You know, the Smithsonian has dozens, maybe hundreds of space suits in the attic. They’re mostly falling apart, there’s no good way to preserve them. The plasticizers in these suit gaskets are simply going to bleed out eventually. All we have to do is change the gaskets and we’re in business.”

“Can you get them off the shelf?” Sam asked.

“No, they’ll have to be custom-made, but it shouldn’t be hard. I know an outfit in Miami can do it. Alicia, I’d like to put you in charge of-”

“Alicia’s classes are too important,” Kelly said. “Let me take it over, Travis. I’m beginning to have a little spare time, plus it’d be nice to do something with my hands other than type and move a mouse.”

Jubal, Sam, Dak, and I loaded the empty coffins back in the U-Haul, and I took them to the dump, glad Mom had not seen them or the leak-like-a-sieve space suits.

AT THE END of the day we all took Travis to the warehouse to see Red Thunder. His reaction was gratifying: his jaw dropped as his neck craned up.

The cradle was finished, and the central tank had been upended, lowered into place, and braced, awaiting the six other tanks which would provide it with more support.

It looked weird, sticking up like that. The top was off so we could install the flanges and the openings which would soon hold the five Plexiglas windows of the cockpit, as Travis called it, or the bridge, as Caleb and Sam did.

[264] And all of it painted a bright Chinese red.

Travis took it all in, then grinned at us.

“Ladies and gents,” he said, “for the first time, I feel like we’re going to Mars.”