Red Thunder (33 page)

"But early on, I did a test I didn't tell y'all about. I got to
wondering what if we put a bubble over a city, like a big Bucky Fuller
geodesic dome? Could it protect that city from a nuclear bomb?"

I glanced at Dak. We'd had the same idea, a while back. But it
didn't have anything to do with the trip to Mars, so we filed it away
to ask Jubal about later. We had our hands full with just the work we
had to do, without wasting time on hypotheticals.

"So... we tried it on a rat."

Jubal came back in, carrying a battered old U-Haul box, which he set
on the coffee table in front of us. He reached in and came up with a
white rat, the kind you can buy in any pet store to feed your pet
pythons and boa constrictors. With his other hand he took out a
three-legged lab ring stand, the kind you set up over a Bunsen burner.
A piece of plywood was glued to the top. He put the stand down and put
the rat on the platform. It sniffed around, exploring all the edges.

"Travis," Alicia said, "is this going to be gross?"

"Not unless you love rats."

"Well... I don't like animal research..."

"Bunny rabbits and dogs and monkeys and stuff," Dak explained.

"...but for rats I make an exception. I killed a lot of rats, growing up."

"No sympathy for rats," Dak agreed.

"No lyin',
cher
," Jubal said, "it won't do de rat no good, no. But no blood."

"Go ahead, then." She moved closer to Dak.

Jubal reached into the box again, pulled out his new, improved
Squeezer. It was all housed in a unit the size of a shoebox. He fiddled
with it, and a basketball-sized Squeezer bubble appeared where the rat
had been. The three ring-stand legs clattered on the table, sliced off
neatly by the formation of the bubble. The bubble hung there. I didn't
think I'd ever get used to that.

"Now, what happens in there seems to happen instantaneously. There's going to be a little bang, okay? But no explosion. Jubal?"

Jubal hit a button and the bubble vanished. There was a
pop,
and a very fine gray powder swirled in the air. What looked like a
handful of iron filings fell to the table. The gray powder was so fine
it took a few moments to settle into a small heap. Travis put his
finger in the stuff and showed it to us.

"Your basic powdered rat," he said.

WE ALL FELT that called for a drink. Travis took a long swallow of the raspberry-flavored Snapple he favored these days.

"The powder is carbon, calcium, little traces of this and that,
everything that was in the rat but water. The water turned into
monatomic hydrogen and oxygen. That's what made the sound."

Dak got some on his finger, pondered it. "Powdered rat, huh? Hey, maybe what we got here is
instant
rat. Scrape it up, put it in a package, like Kool-Aid, then you just
add water, stir it up..." Alicia shoved him. Jubal thought it was
hilarious. All day long he was muttering "instant rat, instant rat,"
and laughing all over again. When Jubal found a joke he liked, like
saying Grace, he stuck with it.

"You figure out how to put the rat back together again, Dak, that'd
be something," Travis said. "Anyway, it's the same with the iron from
the stand. It's chopped up so fine it basically oxidizes in midair,
rusts before it hits the table.

"But the deal here, ladies and gents, is that chemical bonds are
broken. We don't know why. Maybe it suppresses the charge on the
electrons."

"It turn off dem little hookin' t'ings," Jubal said.

"What he means is, it does something to the valence electrons, which is what allows chemical bonds to happen."

"But if we squozes on jus' water..." Jubal said.

"He means, with just the right amount of water, and just the right amount of squeezing... show 'em, Jubal."

Two more things came out of Jubal's box of mischief. First was a
small construction of metal mesh. It was welded to a heavy metal base.
Arching around the cage were the three brass or bronze prongs, sharp
pointed, that caused the discontinuity, that let the power inside come
out in a controlled stream.

Sure enough, Jubal took a small container from his box, opened it,
and took out a marble-sized bubble. He put it in the cage, and expanded
it until it fit snugly.

"This is a Phase-1 bubble," Travis said. "There's just water inside it, squeezed just enough to... well, show them, cousin."

Jubal manipulated his control box, and we heard a high whistling
sound. The powdered remains of the rat stirred in a faint breeze.

"Coming out of the top of the bubble is hydrogen and oxygen," Travis
said. "We've adjusted the load inside so it doesn't fully collapse,
like a neutron star. No radiation is produced. Now look." He struck a
match and moved it over the bubble.

With a whoosh, it ignited in a fine, hard, bright yellow flame that
went two or three feet into the air. It continued to burn while we all
watched. After a full minute it was still firing, and Travis signaled
Jubal to turn off the gas. The flame died.

"Clean power," Travis told us with a satisfied smile. "Hydrogen plus
oxygen plus ignition, equals power, and water. Just like the VStar,
only they burn liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Not an
environmentalist in the world could complain."

"There's enough to get us to Mars and back?" I asked.

"No. Well, not in any reasonable time. Lots of power, but not
that
much power. We'll use these to get up above the atmosphere." He
unrolled a printout and pointed to the schematic drawing of the power
cradle we were about to start building.

"Phase-1 bubbles here, here, and here, under tanks one, three, and five. Phase-2, what I'm calling
Super
Squeezer
bubbles, under two, four, and six. These bubbles will have enough power
to get us to Alpha-Centauri and back, if we were foolish enough to try
that. Plenty of power for Mars and return. And when we come back, we
use the Phase-1 bubbles again to land."

The doorbell rang. Travis frowned—he didn't get a lot of
visitors out at the ranch—and he excused himself to go answer it.

Dak was bent over the plans so he didn't see what I saw... which was
Travis glancing at the video screen just outside the dark vestibule. He
stopped, stared, and then pivoted and hurried back to us. He spoke in a
loud whisper.

"
Cops!
I want y'all to stay quiet.
Very quiet!
"
And he hurried over to a big bookcase beside the television screen. He
shoved some books aside and reached behind them. He came up with a flat
pint of Jack Daniels.

I was stunned.
Travis, no!
But he twisted off the metal cap, raised the bottle to his lips, took a drink...

...and gargled with it.

He sprayed the mouthful of whiskey into the air, breathed deeply a
few times, pulled out one side of his shirttail, kicked off his shoes,
and mussed his hair. All of us tiptoed to the television screen, out of
sight around the corner. I heard him open the door and we saw the two
men in suits standing on the porch. The air
reeked
of Black Jack.

"Hey, hey!" Travis bellowed. "Watch-y'all want? I can't eat Girl Scout cookies on account of bein' on a diet."

One of the men took a step back. The whiskey stench coming off
Travis was pretty powerful. The other said something, and all I could
make out was "...Federal Bureau..." I figured I could fill in the
blanks easily enough.

"Well, shit fire and save the matches," Travis said. "What'd I do this time?"

Travis stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door almost shut
behind him, and the FBI agents' voices didn't carry very far. But
Travis's did.

"Say, are either of you ol' boys from Texas? Friend of mine, he says
nine out of ten FBI agents are from Texas." A pause, something mumbled
by one of the agents. "Oh, yeah? Where in Texas?"

Mumble mumble "...Dallas."

"No fooling? My wife's got folks in Dallas. Ex-wife, that is. And
you're from Lubbock? I don't know anybody from Lubbock. Thank God."

Travis listened a moment, then laughed himself into a coughing fit.

"Oh, that's great. That's great. We got guv'mint men checking out
the likes of him? You figure he's gonna be another Waco or something?
Let me tell you gents, I don't know what that ol' boy saw that brought
y'all out here, but he don't do nothing but paint, paint, paint road
signs and hold all-day prayer meetin's on Sunday where they shout
hallelujah
all the goddamn day long. I swear, you look in the dictionary under
'eyesore,' you're gonna find a picture of ol' Roscoe's place. Unless
you look under 'damn fool religious nut,' 'cause he's there, too."

He went on like that for a good long time. We could see easily
enough from their body language that the agents just wanted to get out
of there, as soon as possible. Which they finally did, thanking Travis,
giving him bland FBI smiles.

We all hurried to the curtained front window and eased the drapes
back. Travis joined us, and we all watched the car back out of the
shell driveway and onto the road, and spray crushed shells all over as
the wheels spun.

We dropped the drapes back and looked at each other, not knowing
what to say. Then Alicia came up with something. "Travis...," she said,
and that's all it took.

"I know, I know. It shouldn't be in the house. There's one more
bottle, way back in the pantry under a sack of flour. You can get that
one and pour it down the drain, too."

"Did you drink any?"

"No, I haven't, not even just now, and I can prove it." He reached
into a pocket and pulled out a prescription drug bottle and tossed it
to Alicia. "I've been taking this Antabuse stuff. And you know what?
Looks like even the taste of booze is enough... You'll have to excuse
me a minute..." He was looking green, and he hurried down the hall and
into the bathroom. We could all hear him vomiting.

Alicia smiled at the sound. Whatever gets you off, I guess.

"I FIGURE THEY must be getting pretty desperate to start checking out old UFO reports, don't you?" Dak asked us all.

"Of course, there's the other possibility," I said. "That they're on to us, and closing in for the... kill? Arrest?"

"Always the bright side, huh, Manny?" Travis laughed. He still
looked rough. It had taken quite a while to get his system back under
control and he was sipping his raspberry iced tea very carefully.
"Nothing we can do about it either way. Might as well operate as if
they're following a cold, cold trail, looking for a revolutionary new
technology in the backyard of a Jesus nut or a pathetic drunk. Checking
out leads like that, they
got
to be desperate. Right?"

We decided to leave it at that, but none of us got much sleep that night.

NORMAL SPACECRAFT DON'T have anything you could really
call a keel. Our spacecraft did, in a way. Right from the initial
acceptance design we'd known the upper part and the lower part would be
joined at a structural member that had to be a certain size and shape
to hold the seven upended tank cars above it. It was to be a circular
girder; circumference of that circle was twenty times pi, sixty-two
feet and almost ten inches.

This is a pretty big circle, and it had to be very strong. It had to
bear the considerable tonnage of the rest of the ship sitting on it,
and also the high temperatures associated with firing the engines. As
such, it was to be built from the highest-quality aircraft-grade
titanium alloy.

Two days before FBI Sunday we got permission from Travis to begin
work on the supporting structure and the thrust ring itself. We made
the supports from ordinary scaffolding. Then we laid out the diameter
of the ring and began learning how to build things out of the
super-high-grade steel. Parts were welded, parts were drilled and
bolted.

The welding on
Red Thunder's
cradle was particularly fussy
because of the exotic material we were using. Caleb couldn't trust
anyone but himself for most of the work, so Travis and Jubal and Dak
and I were sometimes welder's helpers, and sometimes just in the way.
More often we were relegated to the job of preparing the structural
members to Caleb's exacting specs before he did the final assembly. I
lost count of how many tons of steel we had to throw away and begin
again. Every weld was critical. Every weld could become the source of a
potentially fatal air leak or structural collapse.

Just because we were little or no help on the critical cradle
construction didn't mean Dak and I didn't get plenty of welding done.
We had enough to occupy us preparing the tanks for the final assembly.
We cut the tops off all of them and welded hefty flanges in place top
and bottom. When they were all standing upright on the cradle, we'd
lower materials in from the top, building decks and ladders and
installing the larger, heavier components from the bottom up. Five of
the outside tanks would connect with the central tank at about the
midpoint, where the tank caps had been. Each connector had to be fitted
with a round airtight hatch, so if we lost pressure in one of the outer
tanks we could close and dog that hatch and still be in business. Three
feet was big enough to let any of us pass through, even Jubal, but we
intended to spend most of our waking hours in the central tank with all
hatches sealed.

Naturally Caleb had to pass on all our work, adding to his already
impossible workload, but it never seemed to bother him. He seemed
tireless. "Working offshore rigs is a bunch worse than this," he'd
laugh, when we asked him. I'm proud to say that only twice did he have
to make us do a job over. We were learning fast.

There were a thousand things needing to be done, ten thousand pieces
all needing to come together in the correct sequence... well, I'd
rather have tried to
walk
to Mars than handle Kelly's job.