Red Thunder (21 page)

"Oh, yeah? Well, yo momma so ugly she stuck her head out a car window and got arrested for mooning."

"Oh, yeah? Sister, yo momma so—"

"—so fat she looks like she's smuggling a Volkswagen," Alicia said. "Now you guys cut it out."

Fine with me, too. The way Dak felt about his absent mother, you'd
think "yo momma" jokes would really bother him. But he and Kelly had
discovered they were very good at the game, they could carry on for ten
minutes and never repeat themselves.

"It's just creative dissing, Manny," Dak had once told me. "It ain't
about yo momma or my momma, it's about the words. It's street poetry,
like rap."

Which was clear as mud, because Dak had almost as little use for rap
as his father, who called it antimusic, though Sam Sinclair admitted
he'd stopped listening to new music about the time Marvin Gaye died.

A little Racism 101 footnote: "Coon-ass" doesn't mean a black
person, as many Yankees assume when they hear it. That would be "coon."
A coon-ass is a Cajun, and probably just as insulting as coon, but
Cajuns usually don't make a big deal of it.

"Dak, Manny," Kelly said, "we love you guys, but try to let me and
Alicia do most of the talking. Whatever you do, do not ask if you can
help Jubal build a spaceship and take you all to Mars. We've got to
ease him into that frame of mind."

I was more than happy to leave it to her. Who's going to out-talk a
car dealer? I figured it was in her genes, from when the Stricklands
landed on the bay they named after themselves, and started selling
buckboard wagons.

THE GIRLS WENT on ahead, whispering to each other, as
Dak and I stowed the fishing gear back where I'd found it. When we
reached the tennis court Kelly was nowhere to be seen, and Alicia came
out the barn side door, Jubal following reluctantly behind. In fact, I
was sure that if Alicia hadn't been pulling on his hand he wouldn't
have been moving at all. But he did come, looking like a Macy's
Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon beside tiny Alicia.

We went into the house and found Kelly and Travis standing there.
The colonel had his hands in his pockets and was looking at the floor.
The big baby.

"Now, you boys are going to kiss and make up," Alicia said. "Then
we're all going to sit down outside around the grill and eat the soy
burgers I'm going to make, and talk about this thing that has come
between you. Okay? Travis? Jubal?"

Kelly gave Travis a shove, and the two slowly came together. They
embraced, and Travis did kiss his cousin, and pounded him on the back.

"I'm sorry, Jubal." He was a little hoarse. "This thing has got me
behaving even worse than my normal shi— ...lousy standard.
Forgive me."

"Nothin' to fo'give,
mon cher.
I actin' stupid, me."

I was pretty sure I saw a tear in Travis's eye. But Kelly grabbed
them both, still hugging, and got them moving through the sliding doors
out on to the patio.

IT TURNED OUT Alicia did have a sense of humor. She
knew how popular soy burgers would be with this crowd so she didn't
even try. I started a fire in the kettle and she and Dak sliced huge
beefsteak tomatoes and purple onions and Kelly formed half-pound
burgers with her hands and Travis and Jubal set the picnic table and
put out the deli mustard and pickles and a big jar of sliced
jalapeños. I cooked the burgers from "almost raw" for Travis to
"black and crispy on the edges" for Dak and Jubal. We didn't have any
lettuce, so Alicia volunteered to pick some dandelion greens and show
us how good they were on burgers. We all declined, with varying degrees
of panic.

It had been Alicia's idea to do the lunch, let emotions get back
under control before we all locked horns with Travis. Sitting there,
working my way through a sheer masterpiece of a hamburger, I figured it
had been a good idea.

I wouldn't have wanted to be Travis just then.

IT TOOK A while to bring Travis up to speed on Jubal's
new calculations. From his reactions, I could see he hadn't understood
that Jubal had gone beyond being simply worried about the chances of
the Ares Seven, to feeling sure they were headed for a catastrophe. He
followed Jubal's presentation, Jubal pointing wildly at this or that
part of the hundred or so diagrams he had brought with him.

The four of us non-mathematical-genius types watched, at first
trying to follow it all but by the end just sitting there in Travis's
comfortable patio chairs. I don't think sulking would be the right
word, but we were all a bit chastened to see just how peripheral we
really were to Jubal's project. What the hell had we been thinking?
There had to be many thousands of people who could understand all the
stuff Jubal was explaining, who would now be nodding grimly as the
flaws of the Vaseline drive came to light. Thousands of people, I could
now see, much more qualified to ship out to space with Jubal and Travis
than we were.

As it turned out, more qualified than Travis, too. He sat back in
his chair and rubbed his eyes. Jubal got him a bottle of aspirin
without having to be asked. Travis swallowed four of them.

"I don't understand a lot of what Jubal just said," Travis said.

"Oh, wonderful," Alicia breathed. "I was feeling so
dumb!
"

"Join the club," Dak said. "Jubal, can I have one of those aspirins?"

"So what's it going to do, Jubal?" I asked. "Will it blow up?"

"Might could," Jubal said, gnawing at a piece of his beard. "Dey
didn' do 'nuff long-term testin', I figure. More likely, de engine she
jus' shut off and dat de end a dat. Won't start no mo', no."

Alicia frowned at him.

"Well, what's the big deal, then?" she asked. "I thought it was gonna blow up. Didn't you say it was gonna blow up, Manny?"

"All I know for sure was that Jubal said they were in trouble," I
said. "But Alicia, if their main engine won't fire... they'll get to
Mars still going... what, Jubal?"

"Real fas'," he said, shaking his head. "Too dad-gum fas'."

We were all momentarily stunned by Jubal's use of what was, to him, a swearword. We'd never heard it before.

"Like he said, too fast," I told Alicia. "They'll go right on past
Mars and nobody can do a thing about it. They can't slow down, nobody's
got the juice to catch up with them. They'll head on out to the stars
and get there in about ten thousand years."

"Nobody kin stop 'em but us'n," Jubal said. "We got de juice to git us dere." He looked at Travis. "Now we gotta git de
ship
to git us dere."

Travis had his face in his hands. Now he looked up. Not a happy man.

"History repeats itself," he said. "This country has never really had a 'space program.' What we've had is a series of races.
Sputnik One
went up in 1957 and scared the be— ...the dickens out of us. Up
to then the biggest part of our space program was something called
Project Vanguard. Run by the Navy, of all things. In the '30s the Navy
ran the airship program, too. I don't know why."

"To keep it out of the hands of the fly-boys, that's why," Dak said.

"See there?" He pointed at Dak. "Your dad was a swabbo, wasn't he?"

"Watch yo mouf', white boy. My dad was a chief petty officer.
Probably still would be, but he got kicked out during a force
reduction. And I'll give you Army and thirteen points right here and
now." Dak slapped a twenty on the table.

"You're faded," Travis said. "And the Navy wrecked every airship they had, the
Akron,
the
Macon,
the
Shenandoah...
"

"Prob'ly had Army pilots. Naval carrier aviation is the best—"

"Boys," Kelly said. "Can we get back to the subject?"

"There was a subject?" Alicia wondered.

"Yeah," Travis said. "Going off too soon, half-cocked. The Navy never
did
get a Vanguard off the ground. So
Sputnik One
goes up and goes, 'beep, beep, beep,' and every citizen of America sees
the Russkis own outer space, and they are asking their leaders what
they're going to do about it.

"What they did was hand it to Werner von Braun, the top Nazi Kraut
we captured at the end of the war. He takes a Jupiter rocket, modifies
it a little, and ninety days later there's an American satellite in
orbit.

"And we were off to the races. President Kennedy said we were going
to the moon by 1969. Everybody knew it was not enough time, there was
no way to get there that fast... safely. That's the key word.

"There's two ways we could have got to the moon. The way everybody
assumed it would be done in the '40s and '50s was the piece-by-piece
approach. Develop a ship something like the VentureStar, an SSTO,
single-stage-to-orbit vehicle. Start putting hardware and people into
orbit. Build a space station. It could be
huge
by now if we'd
started in 1958. Then build your moonship in orbit. Make it a ship like
the Lunar Excursion Module, in that it will never land on Earth, but
not
like the Lunar Excursion Module in that you don't throw it away after
you've used it once. It returns to Earth's orbit, refuels, and goes
right back to the moon with more people.
More
people, because right there, right from the
very first flight,
we would have been on the moon to
stay.
Put up some shelters on the first landing, stay there a week or so.
Your moonships start regular trips back and forth. In a couple years
you've got a decent colony, a few hundred people. By about 1990 you're
sending people to Mars, by 2000 you've got ships on the way to
Jupiter's and Saturn's moons.

"That's the way everybody figured it in engineering circles in 1958."

Travis was up and pacing now, and he paused, getting his second wind. Obviously he had been angry about this for a long time.

"But there was another way to get to the moon. You've heard of 'fast, cheap, and dirty?' Call this the von Braun plan, fast,
very
expensive, and very dirty. But it was the only way to get there by December thirty-first, 1969.

"Say Columbus took the Apollo route to the New World. He starts off
with three ships. Along about the Canary Islands he sinks the first
ship, just throws it away, deliberately. And it's his biggest ship.
Come to the Bahamas, he throws away the second ship. He reaches the New
World... but his third ship can't land there. He lowers a lifeboat,
sinks his third ship, and rows ashore. He picks up a few rocks on the
beach and rows right back out to sea, across the Atlantic... and at the
Strait of Gibraltar he sinks the lifeboat and swims back to Spain with
an inner tube around his shoulders.

"If that's what it took to cross the Atlantic, this part of the world would still belong to the Seminoles."

"Would that be so bad?" Dak asked.

"Not for the Seminoles," Kelly said.

"The Apollo program was possibly the stupidest way of getting
somewhere the human mind has yet achieved... but it was the only way to
win the 'race.'

"And the race took a toll beyond the money it squandered. It cost
three astronauts their lives. They burned to death in a pure oxygen
environment that was
loaded
with combustible material.
Strapped in, the hatch bolted, those guys burned to death because there
hadn't been time to do the slow, methodical testing that should have
been at the heart of the Apollo program.

"Don't get me wrong. I am in awe of the pioneers who flew in those
things, and the people who built them. Nobody will ever see a Saturn 5
launch again, but believe me, it was an incredible sight.

"The whole thing, from Sputnik to Neil Armstrong, was done using
methods we usually only see in wartime. It wasn't so much a race as a
war. Look at the Manhattan Project. Time is critical, money is no
object. We need the bomb
now.
So, if there's six different
ways to refine uranium 235 out of ore, which way do we try first?
Answer: Try all six, all at once.

"It worked. We got the bomb.

"The Apollo managers got all the money they needed because we were
at war with Russia. Never got to shooting at each other, luckily, but
it was war.

"Then, suddenly, we've made it to the moon... and what do we do for
Act Two? Why... nothing. Nothing much, anyway. The public found the
whole show boring. The funding dried up. We launched five more... and
those guys were incredibly lucky, because the LEM functioned perfectly
every time, something we had no right to expect. Even so, we almost
lost Apollo 13.

"So when we were building a space plane, the next logical step, what happens? There's not enough money to build the ship we
should
have built, a very big,
piloted,
first stage that flies back to the Cape after the launch, mated to
something that would have looked a lot like the original Shuttle.
Instead, we give the Shuttle a pair of solid fuel boosters that fall in
the ocean. It's madness to put a solid fuel booster on a manned craft.
Once you light a solid booster you can't turn it off if something goes
wrong.

"So something went wrong—with the
booster,
notice—seventy seconds into
Challenger's
last flight, and seven more people die.

"Hurry-up is death, when you're dealing with rockets. So is under-funding."

"An' now," Jubal said, "now it happening all over 'gain."

Travis threw himself down into his seat, puffed out his cheeks.

"It appears so. The powers that be decided we needed to go to Mars,
if the Chinese were going. And soon. Hang the cost. Hang the
engineering quibbles." He looked dubiously at his cousin.

"Tell me this, Jubal. You say we can build us a spaceship, we can go
out there and get them home if they get into trouble. And we can do it
all in five months. Isn't this another space race? Aren't we likely to
build something that will blow up in our faces?"

"Not my Squeezer machine," Jubal said. "It won't blow up, I guar-on-
tee!
"