Red Thunder (30 page)

"Mom, that man takes one drink, you won't have to withdraw your
consent," I had said. "I won't go if he drinks." And ever since, I'd
wondered if that was true.

NOW OUR HO-gauge model spaceship was sitting in the
middle of the conference table, considerably spruced up since we first
glued it together.

Inside what would be the bridge we had put a light to glow through
the windows. We had mounted radio antennas and a big dish receiver on
it. We'd built a cradle of plastic girders to set the whole thing on,
made from bits scavenged from model plane and car boxes, just like they
used to do it in Hollywood. The three landing legs and pads came from,
of all things, a model of the old Apollo Lunar Excursion Module. The
big springs we'd need had come from a radio-controlled Hummer model.
Tiny red and green flashing clearance lights gave it a more animated
appearance.

Down beneath were three globular cages built to hold
five-foot-diameter Squeezer bubbles, now represented by silver
Christmas tree ornaments. We didn't know what that part would actually
look like. That would be entirely up to Jubal.

Then we'd sent it out and had it painted high-gloss candy-apple red.
There was an American flag embossed on one side, and the bold words
RED THUNDER
on the other.

In fact, we'd spent more money on this whole presentation deal than
I had thought necessary, and I had questioned Kelly about it.

"Never skimp on the gloss and glitz," she told me. "I would never
try to sell a dirty car. We've got guys, soon as a rain shower passes
over, their job is to go out in the lot and swab all the cars down with
a chamois, so they don't dry with streaks on them."

"I agree," Alicia had said. "Guys, if Travis intends to give us a
fair hearing, we need to give the impression that we do thorough work.
For that, appearance counts."

So we made sure the plan, the ship model, and all the backup materials were as professional as possible, and hang the expense.

We rented a huge flat-wall SuperHiDef screen and spent a few hours
learning to use the Telestrator system in our shipbuilding program so
we could point and click with an electronic wand to expand, slice and
dice, rotate, swoop and swirl, pan, zoom, and dolly in or out with ease
as we explained the various features. Pretty soon we were creating
graphics as good as any television sports broadcast, in real time.

Hanging on the walls around the Telestrator screen were
three-by-four-foot color prints of some old magazine covers and Walt
Disney posters from the 1950s, for no better reason than that they
looked good... and showed some spaceships that actually looked like
Red Thunder.

We had found them during computer searches. An artist named Chesley
Bonestell had painted covers of spaceships for science fiction
magazines, the result of the best scientific thinking of the time, some
of them in space, others sitting on the Martian surface. And the Disney
organization had made some short subjects around that time, speculating
about how we might conquer space. One of the Disney ships bore a
startling resemblance to
Red Thunder,
a central cylinder surrounded by cylindrical fuel tanks, though the tanks were not as large as
Red Thunder's
tank cars. Printing and hanging them had been my idea, I admit it. I
thought that, surrounded by these lovely old renderings, my crazy idea
for a Martian ship didn't look quite so crazy. I'd downloaded them and
had them printed professionally, photo-quality.

So what was the first thing that happened when Travis walked into
the conference room with us and saw the model, sitting there in the
middle of the conference table under a baby spotlight?

He stopped and frowned for a moment, then he burst out laughing.

My face felt like it was on fire. I actually felt dizzy for a
moment. It's not an experience I'd like to repeat. It was undiluted
humiliation.

Luckily, Travis realized it in a second, and the next thing I knew he was hugging me, kissing me, calling me a genius.

FROM THERE, THE sailing was pretty smooth.

We each took our turns at the Telestrator, as we had rehearsed it.
Travis would watch, and nod or occasionally frown. When he frowned we
waited to see if he had a question. We felt... we
hoped
we
had an answer to all but a few of his possible objections, and thought
we ought to get them taken care of as quickly as possible. But he
always told us to go ahead.

And he did seem to enjoy it. He kept looking back to the model,
turning it slowly, squinting at it, so we'd stop and wait for his
attention to return.

We had divided the presentation into four parts. I got to go first
because I'd been named chief design officer. Sure, I thought, until
Travis gets back, and I pray for that day. I was terrified that, once
he saw the details, he'd be laughing again.

But he didn't laugh again. Most of the time he was nodding, some of
the time he was even smiling. I got my part over in about twenty
minutes, giving the broad general outlines of our thinking, showing
everything we had on the screen. Then I handed the control wand to Dak
and sat down, wishing I had a towel for the sweat that was drenching me
in spite of the powerful air conditioning.

Dak was wearing two hats on the project. First, he was systems
engineer. He had been hard at work learning what communications we
needed to keep in contact with planet Earth. He was also struggling to
design the ship's internal power systems, and it was becoming a
problem. He didn't exactly gloss over it but he didn't spend a lot of
time on it, either. I knew a mental note had been taken.

The second hat was surface transportation, and Dak hadn't been
around the warehouse much in the last few days as he and Sam got
started on that.

Then it was Alicia's turn, and the rest of us crossed our fingers.
We had named her environmental control officer. Yes, we were all
officers. Why not?

Alicia labored under a triple inferiority complex. The first part
was math and science anxiety, which most girls I've known have. It
seems to come with the territory. Second, she had never finished high
school. Given her life story, I thought it was a miracle she had
attended school at all, and learned anything at all. But Alicia felt
outclassed by her three honor student friends.

Third, she felt that Dak was much, much smarter than she was, and
she was afraid she would never be able to keep him because of that.

Some of that was obvious to anybody who was watching, and some of it
I learned lying on my pillow with my arm around Kelly, who was doing
everything she could—as Dak and I were, too—to convince
Alicia she was wrong to worry about all three points. Which was the
simple truth. Alicia might not know how to extract a cube root, but she
had tons of smarts, in areas that really mattered. Come to think of it,
I can't extract a cube root, either, without a calculator.

But, my lord, how that girl had been working.

Her desk in the other office was piled high with printouts. Dak had
gotten her started, showing her which sites to go to for the
information she needed. Most of them were government sites, many of
those part of the NASAWEB. It's amazing how much stuff you can get free
from the government if you know where to look.

She spoke for about twenty minutes, using the clicker to highlight
the air tanks and fans and ventilation ducts we'd designed. As she went
on, her confidence grew. She talked knowledgeably about carbon dioxide
scrubbers, carbon monoxide and smoke detectors, about the heating and
cooling systems, and our biggest bugaboo, radiation.

She had learned more about it than Dak and I had known.

"Astronauts working on the space stations and flying in VStars have
a radiation protection we're not going to have," she said. "The Earth's
magnetic field captures a lot of the radiation from the sun and twists
it and turns it down at the poles, where you can see the results in
auroras. The level of that radiation varies with activity on the sun's
surface. Solar flares and prominences produce high-energy protons that
can be harmful if you aren't protected from them." With a click, she
brought up a series of pictures of solar flares, beautiful and
potentially deadly. "That radiation can even reach down to the Earth's
surface. In 1989 a flare shorted out the power supply in Quebec. Six
million people didn't have any electricity for a while.

"But we can have a little warning about the solar radiation. We'll
have a piece of optical equipment aboard that will watch the sun and if
it spots a flare, it will sound an alarm." She brought up a graphic on
the Telestrator. "The light from a flare will go faster than the
dangerous protons. We would have a minute or so to get into what they
call a 'storm cellar.' Basically, we'll surround one room in the center
of the center module with polyethylene, which will stop the protons.
They use this stuff on atomic submarines to shield the crew from the
reactor."

One more point Dak and I hadn't known, discovered through Alicia's diligence. I glanced at Travis and saw him nodding.

"The other radiation is scarier, to me."

"Me, too," Travis put in, quietly.

"They call it 'cosmic radiation.' It comes from far out in space,
from stars that blow up in a supernova. This stuff travels at almost
the speed of light and it's very powerful. Even the Earth's atmosphere
doesn't stop all of it, but exposures are higher in outer space.
There's no practical way to shield from it."

She paused, and it didn't seem like a good place for a pause, to me.
Skim over this part,
I wanted to shout. But in the end I guess it's better to be straight and honest.

"To tell you the truth, I wouldn't want to be on that
Ares Seven
ship, or the Chinese one, either. The best way to deal with cosmic
radiation is to limit your exposure to it. We'll get to Mars in
somewhere between three and four days. That's a chance we all agreed
we're willing to take."

I thought I heard a grumble from my mother, but when I looked at her
she was just glaring at the flares on the Telestrator screen, looking
as if she'd like to put a lot of bullet holes in it. Somehow I had just
known that the idea of radiation passing through her son's body was not
going to exactly thrill her.

It was only toward the end Alicia faltered a bit.

"I haven't had time to work on waste management," she admitted. "I
guess we'll need some plumbing. Toilets, some way to heat water..."

"When you go to Sears to get that freezer," Travis said, "pick up a
water heater, too. And a toilet seat." Alicia smiled uncertainly. "I'm
not kidding. Don't worry about it, Alicia. It won't be a problem."

"Well, I guess that's about it...."

Kelly was already up. She embraced Alicia and invited her to sit
down. Then she began her own presentation, clean, crisp, well ordered,
and comprehensive without being long-winded, just as I'd expected from
her. She covered the financial situation and the procurement status,
all the business side of the project.

When she sat down there was silence for almost a full minute. Who would fire the first shot? Mom, or Travis?

Travis. And of course it wasn't a shot at all.

"Well, I've seen worse briefings before a liftoff. Many worse, in
fact. Practically all of them." He turned to Mom. "Betty, I'll tell you
the bad news first."

"Travis, the only news I want from you is that you can build a safe
ship. These kids are going to Mars if there's even a one in a hundred
chance of getting back, I know that. I figure Manny'd go if he had to
pedal a bicycle and hold his breath. They'd lie to me if that's what it
takes; I would have, when I was their age. But from you, I expect the
truth, or I'll find a way to make you pay."

"Then the bad news is actually good news," Travis said, not seeming
to mind the threat. I did, though. I was getting a little bit pissed
off at her.

"We've got a terrific start here. They've laid out the basics of a ship that can get there and back."

"Then you'd let your daughters fly in it, is that what you're saying?"

"No way. There's a hundred things wrong with it, and until I satisfy myself that they're all fixable, and then that
we
can fix them, I'm nowhere near ready to sign off on it. The thing is, I expected there'd be a
thousand
problems. We're much farther along than I'd dared hope." He turned to Sam Sinclair. "What's your feeling, Sam?"

"I have to admit, it looks sound," Sam said. He smiled wryly. "Given that the basic idea is flat-out nuts."

"I couldn't agree with you more. We've got a lot of work to do
before it stops being nuts. Here's where it stands, Sam, Betty... and
the rest of you, too.

"The biggest hurdle facing this project is that we're not going to
be able to test the ship before we set out for Mars. If I had my way,
I'd take her into orbit first, alone. Then the moon. I'd only go to
Mars after that. But you know why we can't test that way.

"So Jubal and I have been testing it every possible way
but
a full-scale liftoff. We spent about half our time experimenting to
measure the thrust levels we can achieve. We know now how much reaction
mass we'll need for the trip. The bubbles seem to squeeze out just
about the maximum power, total mass-energy conversion. So one bubble
could produce thrust for years and years. Hell, for centuries.

"The rest of the time we tried to make the system fail.

"And we
did
have failures on the ground. Nothing to get
alarmed about, every research project has failures along the way, and
it's best to have them early on, on the ground, than to have them sneak
up on you at the worst possible time, which is what usually happens.

"I'd confidently raise ship and put her in orbit tomorrow, for a
short orbital flight, if we had a full-scale ship ready and didn't have
to worry about who would see the launch and return. Jubal has
engineered a system of containment and release of the ship's thrust
that is as foolproof as anything made by imperfect humans can be.