Red Thunder

24

WE MOUNTED THE six external tanks over the next three days, and it was a perfect example of the learning curve. It took us all day to do the first one, but we did two the second day and the remaining three on the third. And there she stood, basically complete on the outside except for bolting on the tops of five of the tanks.

Tank one contained the air lock. We would enter that tank from the center, as with all the others. There was a deck there, with a hole and a ladder to climb down to the suit locker deck. There the five suits hung on simple racks. There were outlets to charge the suit batteries, and couplings to recharge the backpacks with compressed oxygen. Oxygen instead of the compressed air we’d be breathing aboard ship, because that’s how the suits were designed, and because, even if we could reengineer them, carrying compressed oxygen gave us five times the suit time that compressed air would have.

In the floor of the suit deck was an airtight hatch and another ladder down to the lock itself. When we had that deck finished we all practiced climbing up and down the ladder, fully suited, and operating the locks by ourselves, as we might have to do in an emergency. It was tough going. But we’d never have to do it in full Earth gravity.

[266] Outside the lock we built a platform large enough for four suited people to stand on, surrounded by a safety rail. Then we attached a ramp we could raise or lower with pulleys. It was ugly, but it was simple, and easy to fix if something went wrong.

Tanks two and five carried water and air. Compressed air was in ordinary pressure bottles, ten feet high and about a foot and a half across. The system was arranged so that one system could be entirely shut down without affecting the other, and either system would keep us alive for up to two months. It all fed into a system of fans and ducts and scrubbers. One of us would be awake and in charge of air control twenty-four hours a day, in four-hour shifts. We all had to practice on it until we knew what valve to turn for any possible situation.

Water was in big rubber bladders. We had debated mounting them up high, letting gravity provide our water pressure. But Travis pointed out we were going to have to bring water pumps anyway, in case we had to spend any significant amount of time in weightlessness, such as doing repairs on the ship or rescuing distressed Ares Seven astronauts. So down to the bottom they went.

The plumbing system of Red Thunder was about as basic as you could get: water bladder, pump, a T-joint and pipes that led directly to the cold water spigot over a deep sink, or to our Sears water heater and from there to the sink. The tap was the source for drinking water and bathing water. We were bringing enough clothes to change every day, but if we really felt we had to wash clothes we could do it in that sink.

Bathing would consist of running a measured amount of warm water into a bucket, then sitting on a stool in the bathing room-a prefab shower stall with a drain in the floor-and washing with soap and a washcloth. Alicia wrinkled her nose when we showed her that part of the plans, but said nothing.

But I thought she might mutiny when she saw the plans for the toilet.

“A hole and a bucket?” Alicia said, scandalized.

“We’ll have a toilet seat over the hole,” Travis pointed out.

“Oh, sure. And all the way to Mars and back, I’ll have to put the [267] damn seat down. Dak never puts it down, and I bet none of you do, either.”

Nobody denied it, though Kelly got a case of the giggles which we all caught. Eventually Alicia laughed, too.

“Keep it simple, keep it basic,” Travis said, over and over. “A flush toilet is too complicated, and it wastes water. Same with a shower.”

He was right. We’d discussed all the possibilities before settling on the “one-holer.” People who live in RVs and trailers have what they call gray-water and black-water tanks. Gray water is from the sinks and shower, and black water is from the toilet. We would have a gray-water tank, since all it needed was a pipe from the drain to the waste tank, in the bottom of tank two, and a valve that could be turned if we had to go into free fall, to prevent the water from backing up. As for the black waste…

“Down here we have an ordinary wire dirty-clothes hamper.” Dak showed us when the plans were being finalized. “You put a plastic bag into the rack, you put down the seat, you do your business. Then you take the bag and sprinkle in some of these blue crystals, twist the bag, tie it off, and drop it down the glory hole.”

“What’s this?” Alicia asked, pointing to a square shape on the plans.

“Exhaust fan,” Travis said. “Space stations smell bad. Be sure to turn on the fan when you use the toilet.”

“With a flush toilet you wouldn’t have so much of a problem,” Alicia muttered.

Travis had suggested we simply dump the waste bags over the side.

“You’d have the Greens all over us when we got back,” Dak told him.

“What for? We’re not contaminating the Earth with this sh-… this stuff.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I told him. “Believe me, Travis, my generation doesn’t think logically about pollution. They’d hate us for it.”

“That’s right,” Kelly said, and Alicia nodded.

Travis grinned. “You realize, anything we dumped overboard would be moving at solar escape velocity. Some of it will be doing three million [268] miles an hour. I gotta admit, I’m kind of tickled at the idea that the first man-made object to reach the stars could be a bag of superfast sh- superfast doo-doo.”

“Superfast doo-doo!” Jubal shouted, and slapped his knee. As usual when Jubal heard a good joke, he went around muttering it all day long.

TANKS THREE AND six held fuel and generators and batteries and fuel cells and heaters and air conditioners.

Me and Dak and Salty had debated a long time as to the best source of power. Red Thunder’s electrical needs were not enormous so carrying the means of producing that amount of power was not going to be a problem. But how to produce it?

I favored fuel cells. They are so elegant, it’s hard not to love them. You put in oxygen and hydrogen at one end, and water and power come out the other. But Salty thought they were too prone to failure.

“So just carry a bunch of them,” I suggested.

Dak liked the idea of generators.

“Talk about a proven technology,” he said. “Those things, after me and Dad go over ’em, there’s just no way they can fail.”

And in case they did fail, Dak said, we just bring two.

Salty liked nicad batteries. I thought they were too heavy. Salty said nobody’s supposed to worry about weight, like Travis said.

In the end, we took all three systems. Like everything else on Red Thunder, we wanted triple systems when possible, triple reserves when possible. Any of the three systems could have taken us to Mars and back.

Tank four was reserved for Sam and Dak’s mysterious Mars Traveler, which none of us had seen yet. Dak said all we needed to do to the tank was mount a heavy winch in the top and line it with insulation, as we were doing to all the other tanks. He and Sam promised to have something to show us in two weeks.

[269] THE CENTER TANK was living quarters.

At the very top was the bridge, Travis’s domain. There was a second chair for a copilot. All of us except Jubal trained on it for a day, but none of us kidded ourselves that if anything happened to Travis we could just step into his shoes.

For navigation we had basic optical instruments and the simplest computer program we could find. With luck, you could shoot a few stars, type in a destination, and the computer would tell you where to point and how hard to push. It even worked that way in training… most of the time. But I crashed the simulator Jubal had set up the first five times I tried to land it. And I was the best of the three of us.

“Just don’t get yourself hurt, Travis,” Kelly told him one dismal night after we’d run through the results of the training program.

“Don’t worry,” Travis said with a grin. “I contracted to bring you kids back alive, and to do that I’ve got to watch my own backside, too.”

Below the bridge were the other ships’ systems. There were thirty-five flat TV screens on the walls, larger than the ones on the bridge, one for each of the cameras we had mounted inside and outside the ship. These were good-quality cigarette cameras, smaller than your finger, cheap, and practically indestructible. A few were mounted on motors, but most delivered a static image of the state of the ship. The control consoles for each of the ship’s systems were here, and all four of our acceleration chairs. These were good, sturdy lounge chairs. The only problem I could see with them was they were so comfortable I wondered if I might nod off during an air watch.

The deck below that was the common room. One side was the galley, with a sink, an upright Amana freezer, and a refrigerator about the same size, both of them welded to the deck and fitted with strong latches. The freezer was full of high-end TV dinners from the local gourmet market, and the best brand of frozen pizza we could find. Travis told us the most frequent complaint from long-termers on space station duty was the quality of the food. We carried ice cream and Popsicles, too.

The fridge would hold cans of soda pop, and fresh fruits and vegetables. Alicia demanded we bring whole wheat flour so she could bake [270] bread. I wondered if she’d find time for it, but why not? I liked fresh-baked bread as much as she did. So we packed some cold cuts and peanut butter and jelly, too.

We had a microwave oven and a radiant-heat oven just big enough to heat a frozen pizza or bake a few loaves of bread. Beside them would sit our espresso machine.

Opposite this little galley we installed a prefab breakfast nook. We bought it at a local building supply store, and it had a ’50s diner look to it, with red vinyl padded seats and a Formica top. It would easily seat the five of us.

We carried playing cards, a Monopoly board, and dominoes. None of us but Travis and Jubal knew how to play dominoes. Travis promised to teach us, and I suspected they might be expensive lessons. I could end up back on Earth broker than when I left.

The deck below that was the one that contained the hatches to all five of the other tanks. We set up the infirmary there. At launch, and until and unless we needed it, the infirmary deck would be mostly bare. We carried enough folding cots to accommodate all of the Ares Seven if we had to. Alicia’s medical supplies and instruments were in cabinets against the infirmary walls.

The two decks below were crew quarters, two “staterooms” to a deck. The captain and Jubal had the two on the upper deck, and below were the one Dak and Alicia would share, and my own lonely bunk. The rooms were small and without many frills, though we painted them warm colors to make them feel a little less like jail cells. Each contained an air mattress on a platform with clothes storage beneath, a bedside table with lamp and alarm clock, and a simple intercom and alarm bell.

We built from the bottom up. When a deck was finished the ceiling would be lowered into the tank and welded in place, becoming the floor of the deck above. These floors were made of metal grills. This made the ventilation system simpler, since air could find its way through the floors as well as the ducts.

When a deck was finished we installed insulation on all the walls-we used ordinary Owens-Corning, the kind with the Pink Panther [271] printed on it-and covered them with big Styrofoam panels. All pipes and ducts and wires were exposed, for easier repair if that became necessary.

After two weeks we had capped one of the outer tanks and gained two days, putting us only three days behind schedule, with thirty days to M-day.

After another week we had capped two more tanks… but had had to remove the first one and tear out part of the air system, which was giving us no end of problems. We lost one of the days we had gained.

SIMPLY TO BUILD Red Thunder in sixty days would not have been a problem. But building it was not enough.

“Three parts to the problem,” Travis drilled into us. “Construction, testing, and training. Construction is the easy part. We’re not going to take off in a ship we don’t know how to operate.”

As the ship took shape we had to do exhaustive tests of each of the ship’s systems, testing right up to the point of failure, and sometimes beyond. We had that demonstrated to us vividly when an air system broke down and we were unable to fix it with the tools we would have aboard. So, tear it out, design it again, build the new system, and test that to its limits. Each item that didn’t work properly the first time and every time thereafter put us further behind schedule. Travis was uncompromising, and though we chafed at it, we knew he was right.

But training was the worst.

From the earliest Mercury days of manned space flight, training had been more extensive and more rigorous than almost any field of human endeavor. The idea being that, if you trained hard enough, you would know almost instinctively what to do in any given situation. Your response would become automatic, and you would remain calm because you’d been there before. It was proven, it was time-tested… and I just didn’t think we had time for all the training Travis insisted on.

As if this weren’t enough, we also had to train in the Russian space suits.

We had the manual translated, and by the time we were done we [272] all had practically memorized it. We each had to log ten hours working in the pool with weights on our feet. That meant that another person had to be there to operate the rented crane to yank us out of the water if something went wrong.

Things did go wrong. The suits had been sitting on the shelf for a long time, which wasn’t good for them. My very first training session, when I was supposed to be learning the use of a NASA-surplus zero-gravity power wrench, I spent the first fifteen minutes shivering as the suit cooling system brought me down almost to the freezing point, and when I had that adjusted right, my left glove sprung a leak and we had to abort.

We were at one of our regular Sunday meetings. Kelly was surrounded by stacks of paper and no less than three digital assistants, spread out on the picnic table at the Rancho. Each Sunday she handed each of us a small booklet detailing our every task, every movement for the coming week.

I looked around. Dak seemed to have lost weight, which he couldn’t afford. Alicia wasn’t smiling much. We had all been daunted to find how leaky the suits were.

“One more arm, and one more leg, and I think we’ll have five completely sound space suits,” she was telling us. She looked up at Travis. It was his money.

“Go for it,” he said. But he didn’t look happy. Donating the suits was turning out to be more expensive than he’d bargained for.

We spent an hour talking. When that was done Kelly opened the big cardboard box she’d brought to the meeting. She pulled something out of it.

“Bomber jacket?” Travis asked, with a grin.

“They had a special at Banana Republic,” Kelly said. She stood up and put the jacket on. She looked great in it, but that was no surprise, she looked great in everything.

Dak and Alicia were out of their chairs, finding their jackets and putting them on. Kelly tossed one to me. I looked it over before putting it on. It looked used, but with leather jackets that was good. Somehow they stress the leather without weakening it, so it becomes supple and [273] soft. I put it on and liked the feel of it, though it was far too warm for a Florida summer day. On the front, where a soldier would wear his medals, there was a name strip: garcia. Below that was an embroidered triangular mission patch. It showed the ship blasting in orbit around Mars, with Red Thunder written along the bottom. The patch was on the back, too, but larger.

“Did you do this?” Travis asked, pointing to the logo on the back of his jacket.

“I’m not that artistic. I’ve got a friend who’s a graphic designer. Do you like it?”

We all did. Nobody had any objections to the jackets, either. They beat the hell out of NASA’s tired old blue jumpsuits.

“Who’s the friend?” I asked.

“A guy named 2Loose.”

I was delighted. “You know 2Loose, too?”

“He did a mural on the new women’s center,” Alicia said.

Henry “2Loose” La Beck was an old classmate of mine, the Tagger King of Central Florida. In his outlaw days he must have painted a thousand walls and two thousand railroad cars. He did a little time for it, but often the owner of the violated building dropped charges after studying his work for a while, he was that good. Plus, he could run very fast.

Last I’d heard of him he’d cleaned up his act, gone legit, formed his own company and was doing pretty well. A lightbulb went on inside my head.

“Hey, how about we get him to paint Red Thunder!”

All I got at first were blank looks.

“It’s already painted,” Travis said.

“Yeah, but not like 2Loose can paint it,” Dak said, with a grin. “He did some work on Blue Thunder. Just the pinstripes, I didn’t want no Sistine Chapel ceiling.”

“But he could do the Sistine Chapel,” I said, “if you didn’t mind God driving around in a low-rider and Jesus with spiky hair and tattoos.”

“I like it,” Alicia said.

“Me, too,” Kelly laughed. “Let’s ask him.”

[274] “Hey, wait a minute,” Travis said. But we voted him down and, true to his word, this was still a democracy until we took off. So we decided to offer 2Loose the commission.

ANOTHER WEEK OF hard work, and we gained another day on the timetable.

It was becoming clear that the sticking point would be in the last week. Travis had scheduled a full-blown systems test for that week. For seven days, all of us but Travis and Jubal would be sealed into the ship, totally isolated from the outside environment. We would drink the stored water, breathe the canned air, and eat the frozen food, all the while we were training, training, training.

He was adamant that it had to be seven days.

“Seven days is already a compromise,” he told us. “I’d be a lot happier taking a full month. The only reason I’m settling for seven is that Red Thunder is so powerful and so fast that we’ll never be more than three and a half days away from Earth. I figure most things can be patched up well enough to last three and a half days.”

WE GAINED ANOTHER day by cutting out hours of sleep. With three days until M-day minus seven, the day we had to begin the long-duration systems tests, we bolted down the top of tank seven, the central module, and Red Thunder was complete… from the outside. But we still had five days of work that had to be done before the test could begin.

On that day the Chinese Heavenly Harmony ship arrived at Mars and began its aerobraking maneuvers. Aerobraking had been used by all but the earliest unmanned Mars missions. Instead of firing rockets to achieve an orbit around Mars, a spacecraft would dip into the upper reaches of the Martian atmosphere. Friction would slow the ship enough that it would fall into a highly elliptical orbit; that is, one that looped far away from Mars-to what was called apoapsis-before curving back down to the orbital low point, the periapsis. Once there, it [275] would dip into the atmosphere again, slowing more and making the orbit less elliptical. After half a dozen orbits of decreasing size the ship would settle into a circular orbit, and proceed to the Martian surface from there.

This all took time. The first long, looping orbit would take Heavenly Harmony a full six days. The next orbit would be four days, and so on. But who cared? Nobody was in a big hurry. The American Ares Seven was far behind.

“Maybe they’d hustle a little more if they knew we were here,” Dak said, but his heart wasn’t in it.

We were all watching the big television set in the warehouse, feeling defeated. On the screen, a million Chinese had packed Tien-an-men Square, shouting and chanting. Billions of firecrackers were going off. Dragon dancers snaked through the crowds. Somebody was waving a big sign, which the CNN anchorman told us translated as

THE EAST IS RED!

CHINA IS RED!

MARS IS RED!

“I’d like to give ’em something red,” Dak muttered.

We had known this would happen, but it didn’t lessen the impact. The Chinese were the first humans to reach Mars. But we kept bearing in mind that the first humans to reach the moon were Jim Lovell and the crew of Apollo 8, not Apollo 11.

“Travis,” I said, “are we really going to lose… because of two lousy days?”

He kept shaking his head and I thought he wasn’t going to answer. But when he looked up, his face was anguished.

“Manny, I made promises. To you, to your parents, and to myself. I think we need a full seven-day test. I can’t back off from that.”

“For myself,” I said, “I release you from that promise. I think we won’t know anything more after seven days than we’d know after five.”

“Me, too,” Alicia said. “Five days is enough.”

[276] “You want my vote?” Dak said. “I’m with them.”

“I don’t get a vote on this,” Kelly said, “but I think they’re right.”

“Let ’em go, cher,” Jubal said quietly. “Two days… it don’t signify.”

Travis looked at him, and for a moment he seemed to be considering it. Then he looked down again and shook his head.

I caught Kelly’s eye, and we got up and left the meeting.

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER I pulled into the Blast-Off parking lot, driving Travis’s Hummer. The goddamn old Blast-Off, how I hated the place now. For weeks my home had been in the warehouse, Red Thunder growing out on the warehouse floor. In another week Red Thunder would be my home, if I had to whack Travis on the head and hijack the ship and pilot it myself. One way or another, I was going. We’d come too far to stop now. I vowed I’d never spend another night in room 201.

We hurried into the lobby. Mom was behind the desk. I went behind it and flipped the switch that lit the NO in our NO VACANCY sign, and Kelly turned the window sign over so that it showed CLOSED.

“Mom, you’ve got to come with us,” I said.

“Manuel, are you crazy? It’s… three o’clock on-”

“Please, Mom, do this for me. I wouldn’t ask you to if it wasn’t important.”

She started to say something, but she must have seen something in my face, because she nodded, and followed me.

Mom, Maria, and Grace got in the backseat and I took off for the Sinclair garage. I wasn’t surprised to see Dak backing our rental truck out of the driveway, Alicia in the front seat and Sam in the back. I gave Dak the high sign, and he grinned and returned it.

Fifteen minutes later we all arrived at the warehouse. Once inside they all had to stop and stare. None of them had seen Red Thunder in her completed state, and she was an awesome sight to behold… unless you burst out laughing.

We herded them to the ramp and up onto the platform and then through the outer air-lock door. I showed them how it worked, how [277] strong it was. Then up the ladder through the inner pressure door in the floor of the suit room. The five suits hung there, chubby and bright red, all with the Red Thunder logo prominent on the chest and backpack. The room had that new car smell. It was a rich smell. It was a smell that somehow seemed to inspire confidence. I hoped it was working on Mom and Sam.

Then up the ladder again and through the submarine-type hatch into the central deck of the central module.

“This is our radiation shelter, too,” I told them. “It’s shielded by the other modules, and by a layer of polyethylene plastic. That’s what they use on atomic submarines to shield the reactor compartment.”

Down the ladder to the staterooms, which looked pretty good in the low lamplight, as good as the accommodations on a budget cruise ship. Then up again, to the common room, to the systems control deck, and finally to the cockpit. I stood by and let them look out the windows, see the pictures on the monitor screens. It all looked very professional, very competent, I thought. If I was buying a brand-new spaceship, would I buy this one? I asked myself. Damn straight I would. I had had a part in every rivet, every weld. Give me time, I could take her down to the last nut and bolt and put her back together. With my eyes closed. Would this ship take us to Mars and back? I would bet my life on it. I wanted to bet my life on it.

I looked out the window. Travis stood down there, looking up at us, his arms folded across his chest.

“I PROMISED I’D not cut corners,” Travis said, when we were all gathered at the foot of the ramp. “Shaving two days off the systems test is cutting corners, in my book. It’s as simple as that.”

“You said we’d never be more than three and a half days from Earth,” I pointed out. “Five days is well over that margin.”

“I said seven days; I said no cutting corners. I stand by that.”

Nobody said anything for a time. I didn’t plead with Mom, and Dak said nothing to Sam. What we wanted was plain enough, and both Sam and Mom could see it.

[278] I tried to read her face. That was never easy, but she didn’t look as stony as she had in the early days. It was clear that Maria would vote to go ahead, if she had a vote, but she kept properly quiet about it.

“Betty,” Sam said, “I’d like to have a word with you in private, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure, Sam.” They moved off, both looking tired. We all stood there silently, watching their backs. At one point Sam put his arm over Mom’s shoulder, and she seemed to lean into him a little. God, how hard her life had been, how little she had ever gotten in return for her backbreaking labor at the motel. For a moment I wanted just to shout to them, I’m sorry, I give up. I can’t ask you to approve of this crazy thing. After taking them on the tour, watching them looking at the preposterous ship standing there, I had never felt less confident of our safe departure and return.

After five minutes they came back. Sam looked straight into Travis’s eyes.

“Travis…” He had a hard time getting started, then he stiffened his back. “Travis, we’re voting with the kids. Five days, seven days… if it works, we think you should go.”

Travis returned the stare, never blinking.

“I think five days ought to be enough. I think it will work. But it reduces our safety margin to a point that I’d be willing to risk my life… but not those of your children. Not unless you approve.”

“You’d go?” Mom asked, staring straight into his face. “If you could run the thing yourself, you’d go?”

“I actually considered it… but I knew Manny and Dak and Alicia would kill me. And I need them. I’m the pilot… but they’re the ones who built it, and they know how to run it better than I do.”

“Okay, Travis. You do your five-day test. If it works, then y’all go ahead with what you have to do. Me and Sam, we give you our permission.”

BEFORE MOM AND Sam left, Mom took me and Dak aside.

“I thought you ought to know what your daddy said to me, Dak,” she said.

[279] “Yes, ma’am?”

“You’re old enough, you can call me Betty, Dak. What he did, your dad… he was in favor of letting y’all go. He knew he’d lose a lot of your respect if he put the hammer down on the project, anyway.”

“Never,” Dak said. “He could never lose my respect.”

“Of course not. I put it badly. But the two of you, you’d lose something if he couldn’t trust you to know whether this thing was safe or not.”

Dak said nothing, still looking defensive.

“What he did was, he realized that if he just stood there and said he would let you go, then the whole load drops on my head. Now, I’m the one who either screws up the whole thing, or gets pressured into a decision I can’t live with. So he told me the vote was going to be unanimous, one way or the other. If I voted no, he’d try to talk me out of it but if he couldn’t, he’d vote no, too. If I voted yes, he was with me. Dak, I think it took a lot of love to put it that way. I just wanted you to know how special your daddy is.”

“Yes, ma’am. He is.”

Mom hugged me, then hugged Dak. We watched them pull out and down the road until they turned the corner out of sight. Then Dak and I turned to each other. He grinned, and I did, too. He held out a palm and I slapped it.

Red Thunder was still alive.