Red Thunder

32

I KNOW PEOPLE have slept in space suits before. I never expected to. But I almost did, on my last there-and-back crossing. I wished I’d had a cup of coffee first… but Cliff couldn’t wait. Not a hundred million miles from home.

I went back to the Ares Seven with a crowbar and on the third attempt, popped the air-lock manual control access hatch open. I cranked the lock around and Cliff came out. I thought he might have to carry me across, but I made it.

“I sure hate to leave Brin and Dmitri back there like that,” Cliff said.

“Can’t be helped,” Travis said over the radio. “Captain Aquino is too urgent, he’s in critical condition. Anyway, we or somebody else can come back to the ship and get them, if their families want the bodies. I doubt anybody will ever find Welles and Smith, though. Too small a target in too big a solar system. Space will have to be their graves. I wouldn’t mind that, myself, when I die.”

Once we’d broken out and set up two extra acceleration seats-just two cots with lots of foam padding-Travis got us in the right attitude and started blasting toward the Earth. We were close enough to Mars [387] when we found the Ares Seven that this return trip would take just about as long as the outward leg had.

With the acceleration back, Alicia got to work on Aquino. She had brought a collection of CDs on advanced first aid. We all watched with her as trained EMTs set the “femur” of an amazingly realistic dummy. Then Dak and Alicia went into his room and set the bone. That was fine with me. Even the video had freaked me out.

She had been right about Cliff’s arm. The X ray showed a small break of the ulna that was causing him pain and swelling, but wasn’t urgent. “I played a whole quarter with worse than this, back in my football days,” he said. She secured and protected it with an inflatable splint, gave him a shot of morphine and a sling, and discharged him, giving him a bottle of pills on his way out of the infirmary.

“Take two of these and don’t call me in the morning,” she said. “Heck, take four of ’em if you want to, whenever it hurts.”

She treated Kelly’s mild burns and taped up the small wound in her side.

Holly was still not doing so great, so Alicia calmed her down with a couple Percodans, tapered the dose down over three days until she was back to normal… or as normal as she’d ever be again. We all figured she’d never go back into space.

While this was going on Travis was beaming around at all of us, hugging us, slapping us on the back like a happy father at a Little League game.

“Y’all did a miracle,” he told us. “You gave me a lot more gray hairs, but you pulled it off. If they don’t strike some kind of special medal for y’all when we get back, I’ll kick my congressman’s ass all the way from Washington to Key West.”

Washington to Key West. It reminded me of a problem we had not completely solved yet. Where do you land an outlaw, independent spaceship, crewed by people who might be heroes, or might be subject to arrest or worse sanctions by government agencies both open and covert?

“Washington,” Dak said, at what had to be our final discussion on [388] the subject, since we were only about twelve hours from landing. “Put her down right there on the Mall. Show ’em we ain’t fooling around. Public as can be. Right?”

“Miami International Airport,” I said. “It’s public, and people can be kept back and out of danger.”

“And it’s too dang easy to seal it off completely,” Travis said. “Put out a story that we all died from poison fumes or something. Carry us away to Cheyenne Mountain in helicopters.”

“Black helicopters?” I asked. Travis ignored it.

“Lock us away behind the fifty-ton blast doors. The spooks work us over with drugs and bright lights in our eyes. When they find out we really don’t know how to build the Squeezer drive, we’re dumped in shallow graves in the piney woods.”

“You really think they’d do that?” Cliff asked.

“No. Mostly, I don’t think so. So I don’t plan to give them a chance to do it. Part of me, what I’d like to do is land her at Edwards Air Force Base, in California. Miles and miles of desert, plenty of room for error, nobody to get hurt if something goes wrong. Or the VStar landing strip on Merritt Island, right at the Kennedy Space Center. They’re all too isolated. No witnesses but the ones the government allows in.

“The other part of me wants to set her down on the pitcher’s mound at Yankee Stadium during a game. The middle of Central Park. Coney Island. Someplace with a million witnesses.”

“You land at Coney,” Dak said, “people will start lining up to ride it.”

Travis shook his head. “To a pilot, the only thing worse than falling out of the sky is to fall out of the sky and hit somebody. What we need is lots of people, but not too close. Say, half a mile for the closest people. That way, something goes wrong, I’ve got a righting chance to steer us to a crash landing where nobody’s standing.”

“What about the exhaust?” Cliff asked. “Is half a mile enough?”

“Should be. The exhaust is hot, but not toxic.” We had been filling Cliff in on the story of Red Thunder. Though NASA had not tried to hide our existence from the Ares Seven, they hadn’t exactly been full of information.

[389] “If they actually end up making a movie about you guys,” he said, laughing, “you can bet they’d build a mock-up of your ship and turn it into a ride at Orlando.”

“That’s it!” Kelly shouted. We all looked at her. “We land at Orlando!”

I got it, and grinned at her. Then Dak got it, and Cliff, and finally Travis.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe.”

TRAVIS SLIPPED US into a fairly low orbit around the Earth.

Dak didn’t get sick. He had done okay at turnover, too. It cheered him up, but only a little. We were all aching to get down, Alicia most of all. She had stabilized Aquino, but he was still in critical condition. She had little patience with Travis’s decision not to land immediately.

“I don’t believe in those spooks you talk about, and this man needs better care than I can give him. Now!”

We managed to cajole her for a while. Travis promised we wouldn’t remain in orbit more than six hours, tops. Then he’d set Red Thunder down, one way or another.

Suddenly we were busy again. This close to Earth we didn’t need the lost dish to transmit a signal the people on Earth could pick up. Calls were coming in from all channels, wondering if we were Red Thunder. At first we just let the phone ring.

Kelly logged on to her ISP and went to the websites of the various theme parks south of Orlando. In five minutes she had a map that showed what she wanted.

“Lot G,” she said, pointing to the map. “The ‘Goofy’ lot. It’s the biggest parking lot in all the parks. Look at the scale, it’s almost a mile across.”

“Almost,” Travis said, still dubious. “And that monorail runs right through the middle of it. What time is it? Eastern Daylight.”

“Almost noon,” Dak said.

“We give them two hours,” Kelly said. “Make up your mind, Travis. You wanted a big, empty space with lots of people to witness the [390] landing. And I hate to put it this way, but if we crash on top of people, we’ll all be dead and not have to worry.”

“Are you an atheist, Kelly?”

“I’m an ex-Baptist, that’s all I’ll say.”

Travis thought about it for a moment, then nodded.

“Best we’re going to do, I guess. Now all I have to do is get the President of the United States on the phone.”

“Already did, Travis,” Dak said, beaming. “I’ve got her on hold. Don’t look at me that way. She called us, okay?”

“Okay, Dak. Now put this signal out to everybody. Everybody.” He sat in Dak’s chair and took a deep breath.

“Good morning, Madam President,” he said.

“It’s just afternoon where I am, Captain Broussard.”

“And where is that, Madam President?”

“I’m aboard Marine One.” The picture came on, and we could see her sitting next to a window in a helicopter. “I hate flying in these things. I don’t know how you people would dare to fly all the way to Mars. I congratulate you all. Captain, is this line secure?”

“No, ma’am, it is not. We don’t have scrambling capability, never figured we’d need it.” Actually, there were scrambling programs in many of our computers; the White House or one of their spook agencies was bound to have a compatible program. The President must have known that, but ignored the lie, like the former diplomat she was.

“Very well. I’m on my way to Andrews Air Force Base, should arrive in five minutes. Many members of your families and other loved ones are already en route to Andrews in a gover-… in a chartered jet. I would like you to land your ship there. We intend to hold a ‘welcome back’ ceremony.”

We all had the same reaction when she mentioned our families: Hostages.

I’m ashamed to have harbored that thought. But the government ought to be ashamed, too. How did it happen that most of us don’t trust our government not to trample on the Constitution, under the umbrella of National Security?

“I presume our lawyers are aboard that plane, too, Madame [391] President,” Travis said. One of the things he’d stressed the most to our friends and relatives was that, until Red Thunder returned, your lawyer is your Siamese twin. The only way our lawyers would not be aboard was if our families had been arrested by force, in which case our legal brigade would earn their outrageous hourly charges by raising a stink in the media bigger than this media-happy country had ever seen.

“Yes, I believe they are aboard.”

“It’s a kind offer, ma’am,” Travis said. “And please forgive me, but Andrews is on your home grounds. It’s your stadium, your ball, and your bat. We intend to land a little closer to our home turf.”

“What do you propose?” Diplomat or not, she looked a little pissed when she said it. I guess Presidents don’t hear the word no very often, or even no, thank you.

Travis told her, and she was shaking her head before he got very far.

“Out of the question.”

“I’m sorry, I guess I didn’t state my intention clearly. We are going to land in that parking lot. I’ll be in position to land in another two hours. That should give you plenty of time to do a few things:

“Clear that parking lot. Change the course of that government jet, have it land at Orlando and then fly our loved ones by helicopter to Lot B, that is the ‘Bambi’ lot, which is the closest point people should be allowed to approach our ship until I broadcast the all clear. I don’t want to see any soldiers. Local police only.”

“Is that all?” Her voice had a definite edge to it now.

“No, ma’am.” Travis grinned. “I’d like to respectfully extend to you an invitation to witness the landing, the return of the first men and women to walk on Mars.”

The President looked stricken when Travis said “Mars.”

“Oh, my God,” she whispered. “Please forgive me. In the heat of the moment, I forgot to mention the very first thing I should have told you. A few days ago our Mars mission, the Ares Seven, suffered some sort of onboard explosion. We’ve heard nothing from them since, and we-”

“It’s not a problem, Madame President. I have some good news to report to all Americans, and people around the globe. We found the Ares Seven.

[392] “There is some bad news, too, I’m afraid. Astronauts Welles, Smith, Marston, and Vasarov died of their injuries before we could get there.

“But we rescued Holly Oakley and Cliff Raddison and Bernardo Aquino. Aquino was badly injured, and I’m sure his life was saved by our medic, Alicia Rogers. But he is still in critical condition. Please excuse my abruptness, but there is a lot we need to do before the landing, in two hours’ time. Good-bye.”

Travis looked happy. It must be a heady feeling to put the President on hold, refuse an order, and hang up on her, all in the space of ten minutes.

TRAVIS WAS TELLING another lie when he said we’d be very busy over the next two hours. He had already plotted our landing trajectory, a matter of five minutes of computer time, almost all of that feeding in the data.

Dak and Cliff and I had nothing to do at all. Holly and Alicia were standing their vigil by the still-unconscious Captain Aquino. Holly had started doing that about twenty hours into our return, when she was getting over the effects of her living nightmare. Was there something going on there? Oakley and Aquino? Ares Seven had been in space a long time. But it wasn’t my business.

Kelly was the only one of us with lots to do. She was on the phone right up to the point we had to strap in. She visited the New York Stock Exchange to check up on Red Thunder, Inc., which was trading up almost 100 percent before the exchange suspended trading to let things settle down. I hadn’t even known we had stock to be traded, much less that I owned a big chunk of it. I’d been too busy building and training.

The document presented in the Initial Public Offering was interesting, though. As a corporate statement of purpose there were just two things: “To construct and launch a manned vehicle to take human beings to Mars and return them safely to the Earth” and “To promote, publicize, and in any other manner to exploit the trademarked and copyrighted symbols associated with the ship and its crew and its mission, in any medium whatsoever.”

[393] While I was loafing through my last few hours in space, Kelly was determining what kind of sneakers I’d be wearing for the next year. She had Nike and Adidas in a bidding war. While the ship was still building, Kelly had made the acquaintance of the publicity and promotions departments of dozens of companies who relied heavily on advertising to sell their stuff… and who doesn’t? She had pitched it as a motion picture tie-in, naturally, and had to be careful not to get anybody too interested in our phantom flick. Then, the day before launch, she had e-mailed all those people… you may recall our conversation of August 9… telling them to watch the skies the next morning.

After launch-a thousand years ago, it seemed, and in a previous lifetime-she had worked the telephone until we lost the dish. She even inked a few deals by fax, all subject to our safe return, of course.

We were all going to be on the Wheaties box, if we lived…

TRAVIS BROUGHT US almost to rest ten miles above Orlando, and began our descent at a speed not much greater than the express elevators at the Empire State Building.

“I’ve never eaten a single flake of Wheaties in my life,” I told Kelly.

“You’ll eat a whole bowl of it in a few days,” she assured me.

We watched on the screens as the grid of lines below us resolved into streets, and buildings. Then we could see the maze of freeways snaking their way through America’s theme park heaven. They were all gridlocked, no one moving an inch anywhere. But they didn’t seem to mind. They stood on their cars, beside the road, or behind yellow police tape, facing an almost solid line of squad cars from every community close enough to get there in two hours. A dozen helicopters were parked in Bambi Lot, one of them Marine One. Dozens more hovered at a safe distance, their telescopic lenses sending the picture back to networks all over the world.

Travis brought Red Thunder in like he did it every day.

“Touchdown on strut one!” Dak called out. “Touchdown three! Touchdown two! We’re down, Captain.”

“Shutting down engines,” Travis called back.

[394] But the engine noise did not die out. Red Thunder was still shaking.

“Manny, Kelly,” Travis said. “Get down there and see what the problem is. And hurry slowly!”

We did, and Alicia and Dak joined us. We entered the lock, overrode it by pulling the big red, recessed handle, and the outer door opened. We smelled the fresh air of Earth again… the fresh, hot air of Earth. The ship had heated the landing zone, buckled some of the asphalt. We lowered the ramp and looked out.

The roaring sound got louder. It was the crowd, half a mile away, a million people who had bought a ticket to a fantasy and got a glimpse of a dream come true instead.

We were home.