Red Thunder (14 page)

"I told you, I'd be a lot happier if it was just Jubal and me aware of this."

"We won't steal anything from you," Dak said.

"I trust you guys more than anybody I know."

"Because we didn't rob you on the beach?" Alicia laughed. "I'll fess
up, I told Dak he ought to take a hundred for the taxi service."

"You had a right to," Travis said.

"And you said yourself you've used up all your friends but us. Who else
is
there for you to trust, except Jubal?"

"Do you ever pull any punches, lady?"

"Not that I ever saw," Dak said, standing and stretching, too. "So what do you want from us, man? Swear us to secrecy?"

"Until we've had a chance to learn more about it from Jubal."

"I'm okay behind that. What about the rest of you, musketeers? All for one..."

"And one for all..."

IT WAS JUST starting to get a little light in the east
when Travis, Kelly, and I found Jubal out on the lake. When Jubal was
rowing at night, he hung an old kerosene lamp from a davit in the bow,
just as his father had done in the Louisiana bayous when out hunting at
night. We could see it from some distance, flickering like an orange
firefly.

Travis's boat was about what you'd expect from a guy who had been
letting a Mercedes cook in the Florida sunshine. It was low, fast, and
plush, with a tiny cabin and head up front and room to seat six or
seven in the open in back. But it was showing distress from the
indifferent care it had been getting since drinking became a full-time
occupation for Travis. Some of the seat material was cracking and there
were patches where green slime was growing on the Fiberglas.

The big Mercury outboard seemed healthy, though. It started at once,
and then burbled with quiet authority as we pulled away from the dock.

We eased up from behind. He didn't acknowledge us in any way. I was
amazed at the speed he was making in the old craft. It was easy to see
how he got the big arms.

"I'm sorry, Jubal," Travis said. "I shouldn't have snapped at you like that."

"Don't matter none, no," Jubal said. And kept rowing. Travis kept us off to Jubal's right and just behind the sweep of his oars.

"We'd all like to see those target bubbles again, Jube, see what they can do."

"Dey don' do much," he said. "Jus' go
pop!
" He giggled.

"Maybe you could show us how," Travis suggested.

"What I be out here fo'," Jubal admitted, and now his brow furrowed. "Tryin' to 'member how dey works."

"You mean you can't make any more?"

"No,
cher,
no, I can make plenty wit' de squeezy t'ing I show you. I tryin' to member how I make de
Squeezer
."

"It'll come to you,
mon ami
," Travis said.

"Mebbe yeah, mebbe no."

"Come on, Jube, let me tow you in, we'll have us some
petty dejournez
."

Kelly leaned over the side of the boat with an open cardboard box. "We got Krispy Kremes, Jubal," she said.

Jubal's steady rowing pace faltered. Kelly angled the box so he could see inside it.

"Only one lef',
cher
," he said. "I don' take you las' Krispy, no."

"More coming,
cher
," Kelly said. "Can you smell 'em?" It
was clear he could. Finally he grinned and tossed a rope to Travis, who
tied it to a cleat at the stern of his boat. Kelly and I helped Jubal
aboard, and we turned around and headed back home through the early
morning light. There was a mist on the water, and a small V of ducks
arrived, quacking loudly, and settled gently on the lake. I put my arm
around Kelly. It showed signs of becoming a good day.

SWAMP BIRDS AND other critters were greeting the day
when Travis, Jubal, Kelly, and I walked the path back from the lake,
with its crunching covering of new white shell. Dak and Alicia were
pulling up in
Blue Thunder.

It seemed that Krispy Kremes were Jubal's biggest weakness. They were Travis's last resort. If he really
had
to get Jubal's undivided attention, he offered him donuts.

"Gotta be careful, though," Travis had said. "Jubal would live on nothing but Krispys if he could drive a car to go get them."

"Like driving a spike straight into his own heart," Alicia told us.

"Would you believe Jubal was a skinny little thing when he lived on
the bayou? Not much sugar in his diet out there, lots of rice and fish,
collards and mustard greens and poke salads. He's got a sweet tooth you
wouldn't believe."

Dak had wanted to get three dozen, but Alicia held him down to two.
They also brought back supersized paper mugs of Mississippi Mud
espresso. We all gathered around the patio table and the food. All of
us were yawning.

We dug in like wild javelinas, Alicia watching in horror and
volunteering to make some oatmeal if anybody wanted it. But it wasn't
an oatmeal morning, and eventually even she admitted it and ate two
donuts. I don't even want to know how many sit-ups she did that day to
make up for it.

At last we all sat back, and I watched Jubal cleaning up the donut
boxes like a kid licking the cake icing out of a bowl. He saw me
looking at him, and we grinned.

Travis had brought the Squeezer out and set it on the table. Jubal
eyed it unhappily, but finally settled back and laced his fingers over
his big belly.

"Jube," Travis said, "I'd like to ask you some questions about this thing, what it does, how it does it... and so forth. I'm
not
angry,
mon cher,
and I'm not going to get angry later. We're just trying to find out, okay?"

"Fire away, Travis," Jubal said. "Mebbe you get lucky, you." And he laughed.

"So, what's in the bubbles, Jubal?"

"In dese bubbles? Jus' air. Nuttin' but air."

"So you... you make this silvery stuff..."

"A force field," Jubal said. "Like in de comics books."

"A force field. You've lost me already."

"Los' me, too, mos'ly. It don' really ack like nuthin' else I know from de books."

"From your physics textbooks."

"From
any
my books." He frowned, then looked surprised. "It
don' take no power, no. No power to make de bubbles, no power to move
'em roun'."

"You've lost me," Dak said. Travis nodded.

"No power. Lookee here." He popped open the battery chamber of the
Squeezer. The two AA batteries that would normally be there were
missing. Wires had been soldered to the two little springs that
normally would have touched the bottom part of the battery cylinders.
The wires went through two holes that seemed to have been burned with a
soldering iron.

"Dis gizmo here, dis be de part initiate de bubbles. Dis part, it take de... de... it take de framework an it
twis'
it, ninety degrees from ever'thin' else, so it ain't really here in
dis... dis... space-time condominimum." When he mangled that last word,
Jubal's almost impenetrable Cajun accent was nearly gone. I could tell
that talking about science was hard for him. His basic vocabulary was
limited to the words he learned growing up, and everything he had
learned since then was the result of incredibly hard work. Clearly, the
idea of a space-time continuum was not one that got a lot of discussion
down on the Broussard bayou.

"No power," Jubal repeated. He took a huge Swiss Army knife from the
pocket of his khaki Dockers, pulled out a thin blade. He peeled back a
corner of duct tape, then popped that remote open.

You didn't need a degree in electronics to tell the inside of the
remote hadn't looked that way when it came off the Sony assembly line.
There was something in there that had started life as a printed circuit
board, but pieces of it had been roughly sawed off—maybe with the
saw blade of Jubal's Swiss Army knife. There was a rubber band holding
two parts together, and what might have been a big glob of Elmer's
glue. And other things. Right in the middle were two pieces of bright
metal that I had to stare at for a moment before realizing they were
the snipped-off barbs of fishhooks.

"Dis where de continimum get twisted," Jubal said, pointing with a
finger callused from rowing. "Dis where de six-D-space get cut down to
fo', which has to cover itself up." Jubal laughed. "Oderwise, it be a
nekkid sinfularity."

I translated: six-dimensional space, naked singularity.

"Jubal... maybe you just ought to show us what it can do," Travis
said. "And explain what's happening, if you can. Can you do that?"

"I can do dat." He picked up the Squeezer, closed it back up. "To
make a bubble," he said, "all you got do is punch de little button
here. De one used to say 'Play.' I done scrotched de word 'squeeze'
here under it, see?" He showed it around. He frowned at it. "I ain't
perzackly sure I done spell 'er right. I don't spell so good, me. Is
dis right?" He showed it to Dak.

"Jube," Dak said, "the things this gizmo can do, I think you'll have everybody spelling it your way."

"A whole new verb," Kelly agreed.

Jubal didn't look convinced, but shrugged and pointed the Squeezer
into the air. He pressed the button with his thumb, and a silver bubble
the size of a baseball appeared out of thin air.

"De space done
twis'
itself, see?" He looked at us, slowly
realized none of us had any idea what he was talking about. "Dis button
here, dis lock it. Hold dat rascal in place." He waved the Squeezer
around, and the silver bubble stayed exactly three feet from the
business end of the device, no matter how quickly Jubal cut it back and
forth.

"She work jus' on de ball," Jubal explained. "Now, dis button turn
de bubble back t'ru ninety degree, all on a sudden." He pressed the
button marked STOP, and the bubble was gone.

"Now I make me anudder..." He pressed the SQUOZE button again, and
an exact duplicate of the first bubble appeared. "Shoulda call her de
TWIS' button, me, but I done dis befo' I done realyize what goin' on.

"Okay. Now, I twis' dis dial rat cheer, and de bubble, she squeeze
down some." The bubble shrank until it was BB sized. Jubal thumbed the
control several times, turning the dial after each bubble was formed,
until we had half a dozen silver BBs floating in the air above the
picnic table.

"Now de fun part," Jubal said with a big grin. He pointed at one of
the BBs and fired. Kelly jumped a little as the BB vanished with a
bang, about as loud as a firecracker.

Jubal grinned wider as he aimed and shot at the rest of the BBs.

"De air, it be compress, see? Den when de bubble go away...
Boom!
" He was happy as a kid with his first air rifle, only Jubal's BBs exploded.

"Let me see it, Jube," Travis said. Jubal handed it over. Travis
studied it, then hit the SQUOZE button to create a bubble. He looked
happy, too. He slowly turned the dial, and the bubble shrunk.

"So you can make them larger, too, right?"

"Dat right, Travis. Jus' click dat little clicker dere de odder way, to de lef'..."

Travis held the Squeezer in front of him, squinting, and he turned the wheel...

He didn't turn it much, maybe about an inch. If an inch in the one
direction had made a golf ball squeeze down to a BB, it seemed logical
that an inch in the other direction would expand a golf ball to... oh,
maybe a softball. None of us but Jubal knew the scale was not linear,
and Travis had inadvertently moved the switch two clicks to the left
instead of one....

The Richter scale, for earthquakes, is logarithmic, which means an 8 is
ten times
the force of a 7....

Jubal's device was not logarithmic, it was
exponential.
Which meant the expand/contract wheel on the Squeezer was now
one hundred times
more sensitive...

The weird thing is that nobody saw it for a couple of seconds. The
bubble, floating three feet above the business end of the Squeezer,
suddenly seemed to warp in a weird way. I felt a breeze strong enough
to muss up my hair, and saw Kelly's hair blown around, then I finally
looked up.

And saw myself, looking down.

It took another second for my mind to adjust to what I was seeing.
Somebody had hung a perfect mirror, three feet above us. Looking up, I
saw five people with their mouths hanging open, sitting in chairs
around an upside-down picnic table.

When Travis saw it, he gave an involuntary twitch... which probably
saved us all from "a world a hurtin'," as Jubal said later, because his
thumb twitched on the PUSH/PULL button, and the bubble immediately rose
to about fifty feet over our heads, just as I had been reaching up to
touch it. The bubble had been
that
close.

"Jesus," Travis whispered, still staring up.

And I saw his finger going to the OFF button... and I lunged toward the Squeezer in his hand as Jubal shouted,
"Travis, no!"
...and Travis pushed the button.

I've ridden out two hurricanes... from a safe distance inland, Mom
maintaining the Blast-Off wasn't worth dying for. Neither of them were
square hits, but I know what a seventy-mile-per-hour wind feels like.

This was worse.

With no warning at all, like a flash of lightning, we were swept up
in a howling gale. There was a clap of thunder, too. I was lifted along
with my aluminum chair. Kelly was blown into the air with me, and we
managed to hold on to each other's hands. For a second or two we were
swirling around in the funnel of a tornado, like Dorothy Gale, only she
had a house all around her when she took off for Oz. Something bumped
me in the side, hard. It was the picnic table. Leaves and dirt sprayed
over us. I realized we were both in the air, maybe ten feet off the
ground.

Then, almost as quickly as it began, the storm let up. I felt myself falling, still holding on to Kelly's hand.

I fell headfirst into the swimming pool.

I could hardly tell up from down, there was so much trash swirling
around. I had lost my grip on Kelly's hand, and that worried me. But I
finally got myself oriented and kicked for the surface.