Red Thunder

TEN YEARS LATER

FOR THE NEXT five years Red Thunder sat right there, where Travis had put her down. They built a geodesic dome over her with a fantastically detailed diorama and they covered the asphalt with sand, gravel, and rocks, every grain of it imported from Mars. Goofy had to find himself another parking lot.

We were all there at the opening, and I watched with a creepy feeling as the ramp lowered and four lifelike robots walked down the ramp and started to sing… not “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” The copyright holders kicked up a fuss, because we hadn’t landed in their parking lot. So they sang “When You Wish Upon a Star.” I wish we had sung that, too. And I wish we’d sung better. On the tape, we were plain awful.

After five years Red Thunder, Inc., donated the ship to the Smithsonian, who installed it under a glass pyramid right out in front of the Air and Space Museum, watched over by the Wright Flyer, The Spirit of St. Louis, Chuck Yeager’s Glamorous Glennis, Alan Shepard’s Freedom-Seven Mercury capsule, and Apollo 11. Rare company, but the magnificent old bird deserves it.

[398] IN THE EVENT, we had no trouble with the government. Is that because of the precautions we took, or do they exist only in the minds of paranoid novelists and screenwriters? The actions of some of the agencies we do know about scare me plenty.

What dealings we had with the government were open and friendly, mostly, though some voices were raised suggesting we ought to turn Jubal’s creation over to the government, if we were patriotic Americans. But the image of the American flag rising over the sand dunes of Mars, spoiling China’s moment of glory, was too firmly fixed in the American imagination for that point of view to last. When we testified before the Joint Committee of Congress there was not a breath of reproach in the air. We were honored guests invited to share our story with the world.

The first year was a whirlwind. In some ways it was more stressful than the trip to Mars, at least to someone like myself, camera shy and not fast with a quip, like Dak and Kelly and Travis. We rode in a ticker tape parade down Wall Street in New York, and in a parade I enjoyed a lot more through the town of Daytona, local kids who had made good. The parade ended at the racetrack, the Holy of Holies in Daytona, where we were given trophies with checkered flags on them. The little stock cars on top of the trophies had been unscrewed and replaced with Red Thunder models.

We could have paraded down the main street of every city and town in America if we’d accepted all the invitations.

If somebody wanted to use our images to sell something, or put us on their product, we researched them carefully… and then charged all the market would bear, which was plenty. Banana Republic sold thousands of Red Thunder leather jackets, and we got a piece of each one. We wore Adidas “Red Thunders” and ate Wheaties, though I only ate the one bowl. Nothing against Wheaties, I just don’t like cereal.

We made a lot of money. More than I ever dreamed possible. I never felt like we degraded ourselves. But it’s odd and not exactly pleasing [399] to see something that resembles your face on the muscle-bulging body of an action figure toy.

One of the things that left a bad taste in my mouth was the movie, which hit the cineplexes a year to the day after our return. It did okay, but not as well as expected. There were several reasons for that, one being that they didn’t wait until they had a good script. The twerp who played me didn’t look a bit like Jimmy Smits, but the girls loved him. The animated television series about us was much better, it ran for seven years.

Then there was the undeniable fact that, in Hollywood terms, the real story of a real pioneer trip just didn’t measure up to the likes of Star Wars, or any of hundreds of outer space adventures full of blazing ray guns and weird aliens.

And the public was just getting tired of us. I was sure getting tired of them. When your face is on magazine covers and television screens as mine was, you can’t go anywhere without being recognized. You never get a moment’s peace.

So after the first anniversary we mostly withdrew from the public eye. You can never really erase your celebrity, once you’ve gotten it or had it thrust on you, but you can stop catering to it. I’m not complaining. Celebrity is a small price to pay for freedom from financial worries.

FAIRY TALES END happily ever after. Real life never does. We came a lot closer than most. It’s just that things don’t always work out the way you had imagined. But sometimes the alternative is just as good.

Things didn’t work out as planned for Dak and Alicia. They had a falling-out and they parted company. But since Alicia remained friendly with Kelly and Dak was still my best friend, though growing more distant with each passing year, they see each other fairly frequently and they get along.

Dak never recovered from the humiliation he felt as the champion puker aboard Red Thunder. No one ever blamed him for it, but he punished himself. For the first year he made public appearances with the [400] rest of the crew, but when we got tired of the celebrity rat race, Dak was not. So he started touring the sports venues of America, anything from football games to tractor pulls, riding into the arena on Blue Thunder, which had been retrieved and restored to diesel power. It was quite a show. When he tired of it, he donated it to the Smithsonian, to be put in the crystal pyramid with Big Red.

He took up racing, mainly motorcycles and pickups, but he’d drive almost anything that went fast. Kelly says he’s still proving himself, over and over, and she’s probably right. But he seems happy, and that’s all I care about.

He and his father devote much of their time to their speed shop, not only building their own cars but working on and designing others. I always ask Dak if he’s ready to join the NASCAR circuit, and he always scoffs. NASCAR is “the last white good-ol’-boy club left in America,” he says, and stock cars are “the fastest billboards on the planet.”

On Sam’s first birthday after the return, Dak bought him a classic Harley. I bought Travis’s Triumph. Weekends when we can get together, we drive all over Florida with Dak on Green Thunder, his racing bike.

Dak has even made peace with his mother. They still seldom see each other, but now she sends him a present on his birthday, usually something hilariously inappropriate like a train set or a bicycle. He gives them to Toys for Tots. She isn’t really a bad person, she just has no clue about how to be a mother.

Alicia… well, Alicia is still Alicia. She puts all her money into her own foundation, which runs drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers all over the South. She seems sublimely happy, except for one week every year just before her father comes up for a parole hearing. Ironically, without booze in him he’s a model prisoner, so any year now he could get out. And start drinking again…

I figure that if Alicia lives as long as Mother Teresa she could win a Nobel Peace Prize, too.

[401] MOM DIDN’T SELL the Blast-Off Motel, after all.

While we were away she and Maria sold tons of Red Thunder souvenirs. They had to set up a tent in the vacant lot across the street to handle the traffic. And from the day we lifted off, there has never been a vacancy. Now it’s a good idea to reserve at least a year in advance. Except for the fantasylands of Orlando, we are the third most popular tourist attraction in central Florida, behind the 500 and the space center. Some years we even beat out Kennedy.

Two years after our return Daytona was hit by a late-season hurricane. The Golden Manatee suffered a lot of damage, some of which exposed foundations shoddy even by Florida standards. The city engineer said the wind from a passing butterfly’s wings was apt to blow the thing over, which Mom and Maria and I wouldn’t have minded if it fell toward the beach, which was where it was leaning, but it might have blown the other way and buried us. With her new clout at City Hall Mom managed to get it condemned, and two days later they blew it up. Before the dust had even settled Mom bought the land, which we turned into a parking lot and large restaurant/souvenir stand with a pedestrian bridge to give the Blast-Off easy beach access. We added a new wing, too. All the rooms have unobstructed ocean views.

Mom wanted no part of the business other than as a part owner. It turned out Aunt Maria actually liked the motel business, just didn’t care for the physical labor. She hasn’t made a bed since Red Thunder took off. She hired Bruce Carter, formerly of the Golden Manatee, to take care of all the hard work, leaving Maria to relax in the shade with her friends, playing dominoes and making sculptures of shell people landing on Mars. The Blast-Off maids are the best paid in Florida, with medical benefits and a pension plan.

Mom suddenly had free time, something she’d had almost none of from the moment of my birth. She was at loose ends for a while, but she soon found many things to fill her day, including volunteering at one of Alicia’s dry-out academies.

She also spent several hours each week at the shooting range. Eventually she tried out for the Olympic team. She didn’t do well at skeet [402] but made it in fifty-meter rifle. Kelly and I and Dak went to Johannesburg, where she finished out of medal contention with a respectable eighth place. When she marched into that gigantic stadium with the American team on the first day, I thought I’d burst with pride.

THE HUGE BROUSSARD clan avoided all the publicity, except for Little Hallelujah, as the family called him, the youngest and shortest of Jubal’s brothers. Hallelujah was the only child of Avery who was still deeply religious. He had followed in his father’s footsteps, preaching in a little backwoods church. Red Thunder’s flight and his brother’s unwanted fame was just the kick in the pants his ministry needed, and today he has a cable television show where he often connects Mars and Heaven in some manner only he really seems to understand. But he shouts, and he sweats, and he heals, and he doesn’t handle snakes, so everybody seems happy.

TRAVIS JUST CELEBRATED nine years of sobriety. A year of appearances and hearings knocked him off the wagon once, but Alicia was there to help.

Travis stayed in the background as much as he could during the first, frantic weeks. He was content to let the media run with the story of the four kids who built a spaceship almost by themselves, armed only with the strange machine built by Jubal-the man of mystery in the early days-Travis being nothing more than a hired driver. We all tried to correct that impression in all our interviews, but the fact was that our adventure was much the sexier story. Travis’s story concerned nothing more exciting than the possible destruction of human civilization. Can’t sell papers with that.

But eventually, when the media blaze died down a bit, people did start to think about the evil side of the new technology.

Naturally the United Nations wanted to be in charge, from discussions to resolutions to implementation. They offered their meeting halls and their huge staff to facilitate matters. Travis turned them down, [403] politely. Then he issued an invitation to all the countries of the world-except China. Travis was never going to forgive or forget that somebody in that government had ordered the destruction of Big Red and the death of her crew. The other nations were each to choose a delegation consisting of two scientists, two political leaders, and three ordinary citizens to assemble in three weeks at the Orange Bowl, in Miami, to meet with Travis and Jubal and the Red Thunder crew to determine what to do with the Squeezer drive.

A week later he invited the Chinese, too. It didn’t have anything to do with the tremendous diplomatic uproar China’s exclusion had caused. Travis really enjoyed that. He knew going in that you couldn’t exclude one-sixth of the Earth’s population. But you could slap their leaders in the face.

There were plenty of other things to howl about. Seven delegates from each country? Seven from India, and seven from Luxembourg? Does that make sense? “It does to me,” Travis said. “And until Jubal and I stand up and speak our piece and then hand it over to you, it’s our stadium, our ball, and our bat. Stay away if you don’t like it.”

Naturally, it was a zoo. The United States sent the President and the Senate leader from the other party. There had never been such an assembly of presidents, premiers, and prime ministers, and there may never be again. The Orange Bowl was surrounded with tanks and helicopter gunships.

Every imaginable pressure group was there. Some called the Squeezer drive a tool of Satan, or worse, of American Imperialism, Zionism, Racism, International Cartels, the World Trade Organization, Big Oil (which the Squeezer would soon put out of business, but nobody ever said a protester had to make sense), Communism, the United Nations, or those five space aliens who had come from Mars pretending to be human. On the streets, the Red Thunder crew was denounced for “despoiling the natural beauty” of Mars, polluting Earth’s air with radiation on takeoff (a lie, but how do you prove that?), and “encouraging the consumer culture by sweeping Earth’s garbage under the rug.” Guilty on that count, I guess. The Squeezer was a mighty big rug to sweep trash under. In less than ten years every landfill and nuclear [404] waste dump on Earth has been squeezed into a little silvery sphere and used to propel spaceships. This is bad?

They were all opposed to the newly christened International Power Administration and in favor of staying on a polluted and threatened Planet Earth, and many of them threw rocks and Molotov cocktails to prove how passionately they loved the Earth. Three cops died, and two protesters.

It bothered me, but Kelly scoffed at them. “The perpetual two percent of malcontents,” she called them. “Honestly, if God showered manna from heaven on that bunch, they’d want to know if He used pesticides on it, or added any preservatives.” I didn’t point out that Alicia might be one asking those questions.

So they assembled, a thousand official delegates on the field, twenty thousand reporters clustered around the fifty yard line, the rest of the seats taken by people who had lined up since Travis announced the public was invited, first come, first served.

The first day was all Travis’s show.

He brought a large metal suitcase. He opened it to reveal about a hundred dials, switches, and trac-ball controllers. We managed not to giggle when we realized this was the Beta Model of the Squeezer Jubal had built out of scraps lying around his workshop/laboratory. Travis’s aim was to make the Squeezer look a lot more complicated than it really had to be, on the theory that it might get scientists looking in the wrong direction.

He put the Squeezer through its paces for the assembled delegates, expanding the bubbles, contracting them, making them go boom!, which they did with a mighty reverberation in that big arena with its brand new dome. He fitted a bubble into a toy rocket and flew it up to the dome, then brought it back and set it down.

Then he asked Kelly to try her hand at it. We five were the only ones who knew what would happen next. The giant Squeezer melted into slag in a chemical reaction too brilliant to look at.

“It didn’t like the pattern of her retinas,” Travis said. “The machine used a laser scanner to identify an authorized user. I was the only [405] authorized one. If any of you had tried to use it, the same thing would have happened.

“You folks are going to have to figure out something like that. We are going to have to have more than one Squeezer to handle the demand, and we’ll have to have people other than my cousin Jubal who know how to make more of them. But they cannot be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. These bubbles can be made as powerful as thermonuclear bombs, but the thing about H-bombs is that they’re hard to make. The Squeezer is cheap.

“You’ve all got a terrible task ahead of you. I said, ‘the wrong hands.’ But who has the right hands? Who do we trust with that much responsibility? How do we identify someone who can be trusted not to steal the secret, sell the secret, or hand it over to his or her native country? I don’t envy you, but now I gladly hand the burden over to you. Thank you for giving me this opportunity, and please, please, be wise.”

And he walked out. The stunned delegates didn’t know whether to applaud him or tackle him and start pulling out his fingernails.

SO THE IPA proposed and debated and approved and rejected and discussed and shouted at each other and got into fistfights, and in about a year produced a course of action. It didn’t satisfy anybody, but was probably the best they could do. Some problems don’t have easy or obvious solutions. Some have no solution at all.

The IPA could impose levies on its member nations, so it did, and bought the Falkland Islands, which contained 2,945 people, 700,000 sheep, and millions of Rockhopper, Magellanic, Gentoo, King, and Macaroni penguins. They moved the now-wealthy shepherds and their sheep to milder climates. The penguins they let stay. And there they built the most secure facility on Earth, the one place on Earth for the manufacture of the machines that produced Squeezer bubbles.

The manufacturing plants there on the cold, windy Falklands built Squeezer machines that would initiate, expand, or contract Squeezer [406] bubbles. They didn’t build many of them. These machines were sent to governments under strict handling rules, and with what Travis called “a million exploding cigars” built into them. Tamper with them, and you die. Every year some jerk thinks he’s figured them out, and is burned alive.

THE TOUGHEST QUESTION facing the assembly in the Orange Bowl was this: Jubal can build machines that will create, expand, contract, and produce thrust from Squeezer bubbles-but not turn them off, that was forbidden-but Jubal won’t live forever. Who will pick up the torch of unlimited power once Jubal is gone?

What the IPA eventually came up with was a lot like a priesthood, and a lot like a guild. The trade secrets or magical arcana of Squeezing would be conserved, used, and passed down by means of an elite scientist class. To be in this elite you had to be capable of understanding the physics and mathematics. This eliminated me, and Dak, and Travis. In fact, it narrowed the field to about one in a hundred million.

So beginning with this small pool, the IPA set up the most rigorous tests and examinations it could conceive, and started sifting. Before they were done, a candidate was pulled apart and put back together again. You could be eliminated for being too chauvinistic or patriotic, too wedded to one political or religious doctrine, too egotistical, or too just plain crazy. It was amazing how many physics Ph.D.’s fell into that category.

The popular press immediately dubbed these seven men and women the High Priests of Squeeze. They served for life, because even if they retired they had to be watched for the rest of their lives. They were not precisely confined to the Falkland Islands, but if they went anywhere they were constantly guarded, both from kidnapping and from passing the Squeezer secrets to somebody else.

These were the people who actually built the Prime Squeezers. These were the self-sacrificing saints who were let in on the whole secret of the Squeezer phenomenon, who agreed not to reveal it to anyone under pain of death, the wise ones who would chance partaking of the [407] fruit of the Tree of Power. These were the poor schmucks who assumed the burden that had fallen on Jubal the day we lifted off in Red Thunder.

OF ALL OF us, the aftermath of the voyage has treated Jubal most cruelly. He lives on the Falklands. He is not a prisoner there, but if and when he leaves he is under enormous security. He hardly ever does leave these days.

Three months after our return, not long after Jubal came out of hiding, an attempt was made to kidnap him. It came very close to working, but ended up with eight dead would-be kidnappers and three dead Navy Seals, who had been assigned to guard him at Rancho Broussard. Travis believes the caper was planned and paid for in China, but Travis sees ChiCom Reds under every rock. Most of the eight criminals had Italian last names. “Chinese could have hired them,” Travis said. Me, I thought about Squeezer bombs in the hands of the Mafia, and shuddered. Or Irish rebels, or Palestinians, or Zionists, or any other group of paranoid malcontents you want to name.

So Jubal doesn’t tempt fate anymore. He hated the Falklands at first for its cold, windy climate, so different from the lands where he had spent all his life. The IPA does its best to make him happy. He has a fine house, a wonderful laboratory. All he has to do is ask for something and he gets it. All he’s ever asked for is Krispy Kremes. A dozen are delivered every afternoon on the daily plane.

He does a lot of rowing in the many bays of the islands, he told me, but nowadays he’s accompanied by a destroyer, part of the IPA’s protective fleet. It is such a funny picture, and so sad.

He’s become a world authority on penguins, like the Birdman of Alcatraz. Often you can find him sitting among them, completely accepted.

I asked him once how effective he thought the elaborate IPA system would be, in the long run.

“Long run, don’ nothing work forever,” he said. “Dey say ain’t no Squeezer-buster gone ever be develop. Dat ain’t nuttin’ but swamp water. Dem seven smarties over yonder, dey done figgered out how to [408] turn one off, oh yeah. If’n you understan’ how to make dem bubbles, makin’ ’em go ’way ain’t too hard, no. Then, boom!

“Aside from dem smart boys and girls, somebody else apt to figger it out, jus’ like I did. I jus’ hope he don’ need to get whomp upside de haid, like I did!” He laughed and rubbed the dent in his skull.

So there it is. You can’t hide knowledge forever. The only encouraging thing I can think of about that is, we’ve had the atomic bomb for a long time now, and the last city we destroyed with it was in 1945. Maybe we can get by that long before somebody figures out how to make his own Squeezer.

WE TRY TO visit Jubal at least once a year. Sometimes it’s a reunion with the whole happy family, sometimes just me and Kelly. The flight to Stanley, the capital, makes you feel the islands are almost as remote as Mars.

Six months after the return we got married as quietly as we could, not wanting to deal with shouting paparazzi and circling helicopters with long lenses. Two years later our daughter, Elizabeth, was born, and in another two years, our son, Ramon.

Kelly became more or less a full-time mother… but, being Kelly, still had time to handle a few projects on the side, little things like helping run our many business interests and serving for a term in the State Senate in Tallahassee, where she helped pass the first meaningful land-use laws Florida had ever seen.

Her father is currently between beauty queens, though he’s been seen with a former Miss Maine on his arm. Kelly and I made up with him, as far as it is possible to make up with a conniving, back-stabbing, larcenous racist. We usually spend Thanksgiving with him, unless he’s been too obnoxious the previous year. Even my grandparents, both sets, have decided that my being white, or Hispanic, doesn’t matter too much if I’m rich and famous. After they had appeared on their local television stations crowing about how wonderful I was, they couldn’t very well ignore me. We usually spend a stiffly polite Christmas Day with one or the other.

[409] Travis was right. Both MIT and Gal Tech sent cordial invitations for me to continue my education there. But who was I trying to kid? I simply didn’t have the kind of mind that would put me through either university without the kind of covert help they usually shower only on sports stars. And I’d be afraid that if I went, that’s exactly what they’d do, graduate me still unable to extract a cube root. So I turned them down.

Instead, after all the fuss had died down, I went to Florida State, where I eventually earned an M.B.A., with a major in… hotel management.

I didn’t give up my dream of going into space as a career, I just took a closer look at it. What did I want, exactly? Well, to be a spaceman. Wouldn’t that be great?

Mom says that when I was seven she found an old telescope in a thrift store and bought it. Instantly, I decided I wanted to be an astronomer. Then I discovered that real astronomers hardly every actually looked through their telescopes. They took pictures with long exposures, they ran data through computers. Where’s the fun in that? I went back to wanting to be a fireman.

Before Red Thunder there were basically four types of people who went into space: pilots, scientists/payload specialists, United States senators, and the occasional rich person willing to spend a million dollars or more for a week in space.

After Red Thunder…. everybody could go into space. There may have been things that changed human civilization as radically as the Squeezer drive-fire, agriculture, the Industrial Revolution, the automobile, the computer-but nothing else changed it so fast. Suddenly, you could just buy a ticket and go. For a while there were even trips you could take to be the “first.” One expedition took two hundred tourists to Uranus and those folks became the first to set foot on a dozen small moons. It was as if Lewis and Clark had pulled a Greyhound bus after them, full of folks in loud shirts, snapping pictures all the way to the Columbia River.

So managing a hotel made perfect sense for me… if it was a hotel on Mars. The Marineris Hyatt is about three months from completion [410] on a site within an easy Bigfoot drive of Red Thunder’s first landing. I have been hired to manage it, and that’s a job I can do well. After that…

Just as soon as it became possible to buy Squeezer bubbles to install in your homemade spaceship, there was an explosion of crazies-they seemed crazy to me, anyway-headed outward. Dozens of them, bound for all the nearest stars. The ones who aimed for Alpha Centauri should start arriving back at Sol System soon, those who lived, anyway. They will be only about a year older because most of the trip they will have traveled at nearly the speed of light. They will have the satisfaction of being the first to fly to another star and return, but progress has already overtaken them. They went hoping to find habitable planets, and we know Alpha Centauri has none. Gigantic telescopes on the far side of the moon have told us that. They have also discovered dozens of Earth-sized planets at the proper distance from the right kind of star, planets that show the signature of water in the spectrograph, all within thirty light-years.

Thirty light-years is an easy journey with a Squeezer drive. Any distance is easy, they all take about a year when you’re going so fast time virtually stops.

Several very large starships are now being built. The one closest to completion will be ready to shove off in about five years. It is owned by Red Thunder, Inc., so Kelly and I have a reserved berth, if we want it.

If we go, I won’t be driving the thing. I won’t be in charge of the engines, I won’t be in the landing party when we get there. But on the way, I can handle the human needs of the voyage very well. A starship is just a very large, very fast hotel, isn’t it?

Kelly isn’t sure yet. For that matter, neither am I. Elizabeth would be thirteen, Ramon would be eleven. Do we want to bring them up in a pioneer society with an alien sun in the sky, or on nice, safe, familiar Mars? There’s plenty of time to decide.

Sometimes I think back, and I’m impressed how much of our lives are determined by chance.

What if we’d run over and killed Travis, that night on the beach? Our lives would have been very different. What if we’d missed seeing [411] him entirely, just drove off into the night and the tide took him or he woke up in a sand dune with a hangover? I’m sure that every day opportunities pass us by and we never even know they were there.

Then again, we can see a chance, take it, and watch it all go sour. My father saw a chance, took it, and ended up with a bullet in his gut.

We of the Red Thunder had incredible luck, but we worked very hard to take advantage of it. Did we “deserve” to be the first on Mars? I’m sure there were worthier people, but the chance fell to us.

MY GOODNESS. THE stories we’ll have to tell. I see Kelly and me, 110 years old, sitting in rocking chairs on a planet with two suns during the day and six moons at night, telling our great-great-grandchildren stories they probably won’t believe.

How perilous it was to go just to Mars in those days.

How alien this new planet thirty light-years from home looked to us.

Alien? they will say. This is home, it’s not alien. What’s perilous about traveling to another star? And here they go again, about how they were the first. So what?

Yes, I know, it doesn’t really mean anything. But the fact remains…

We were the first!