Red Thunder (35 page)

"So those are suits in the boxes?"

"You bet."

"Why ten boxes?"

"Space suits ain't like T-shirts. You need a few specialized tools.
The helmets and backpacks are in the other boxes, too." He looked out
the window and shivered.

"Georgia, Georgia, on my mind. Can't get me out of Georgia soon enough."

"What's the matter with Georgia?"

"I hate coming to Georgia. I wish Kelly had booked me through
Dulles, or even Miami. But you know Kelly. She saved me about five
hundred dollars finding that fare."

After ten minutes with his eyes closed he sat up and shook his head.
He cracked the window to let the wet breeze blow in his face.

"It was raining like this the day I set the
Montana
down at the Atlanta airport."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Didn't I tell you about that?"

"I don't think so." I was pretty sure he knew he hadn't told me. Why
he'd decided to tell me now I had no idea, but I decided to just let
him go. Which he did.

"There were warning lights from the diagnostic tests during my
preflight. They'd come on, then they'd go out. I wanted to postpone the
reentry, do an EVA, get out there and bang a few things around with a
hammer, see if I could get the lights to stay on or stay off, one way
or the other. But they sent me a 'fix,' they swore if I ran their
program everything would be fine. That's how it worked on the ground,
anyway.

"I told 'em to go stuff their fix, I wasn't pulling away from the
station till I'd eyeballed the thing. And they told me to remember
Senator So-and-so was aboard—as if I'd forget it—and he had
to be back to make an important vote on the Senate floor, and my head
would roll if he was late."

"Senator So-and-so?"

"Yeah, I forget which one he was, now. God knows I took enough of
'em up back then. Ever since Garn and Glenn went up, back in the '90s,
a U.S. senator figures he ain't no great shakes unless he's been up.
The ultimate boondoggle junket. Hell, some guys paid twenty million
dollars to go up! Senators get to go for free.

"Sure enough, halfway down one of the speed brakes deployed at about
Mach six. We flipped right over. Five times we rolled, me cussing and
fighting all the way. I stopped the roll and looked out the window for
the landing strip, and there she was. Happiest I'd been since I found
that little grass strip in Africa. I brought her in, very hard and very
fast... and about a hundred feet off the deck I spotted a 787 crossing
the runway in front of me. Must of given the captain of that 787
something to remember, because we missed by maybe ten feet.

"And when we stopped, that's when I knew I had landed in Atlanta."

He stopped for a while, sipped at the coffee he'd bought from a machine at the freight terminal. Then he shook his head.

"I'd a found and fixed that hydraulic leak if they'd a let me go
EVA. But since nobody at Hartsfield knew I was coming until I showed up
on their radar dropping like a stone and because Senator So-and-so got
a whiff of my breath, and since I was still blowing a one-point-eight
an hour later...

"We compromised, NASA and me. When the inquiry happened I wouldn't
mention the warnings they'd told me to ignore, also that the reason for
ignoring them was the senator's goddamn fault... and I'd hand in my
wings and never fly again."

There was another long silence. I listened to the hiss of the tires
on pavement and the sound of the wipers moving the red Georgia mud
around my windshield.

"Sometimes I wish I'd a just gone for it, Manny. Tell the whole
story, give the senator and those NASA turkeys what they had coming.
But I
was
drunk. I was
stinking
drunk. The breath
test was probably unconstitutional... but hell, lots of people knew I
was a drunk, a drunk who'd been pretty lucky for a long, long time, and
a bunch were ready to testify to that.

"Still, I might have... Then somebody mentioned Jubal. Didn't make a
threat, nothing like that. Didn't have to. They'd looked into my
private life enough to know about him. They could drop a hint here, a
few bucks there, and the judge takes Jubal from me and puts him in an
institution for retarded adults...."

We didn't speak for the next twenty miles. I couldn't think of anything to say.
I'm sorry?
Didn't quite cover it, did it? Then I did think of something.

"Don't tell that story to my mom, Travis, okay?"

"Deal."

Pretty soon he was asleep, and snoring,
very
loudly. Oh, brother. Better put earplugs on the packing list.

"THESE ARE ALL fifteen-year-old suits," Travis said.
"Only two of them have actually been in space. They've all been sitting
in a warehouse for a long time."

We were all gathered at the ranch, beside the pool. The coffin boxes
had been pried open. The space suits, a bright color Travis had called
"Commie red," were packed in a substance Sam had called "excelsior,"
that looked like dried brown grass. Didn't the Russians have Styrofoam
peanuts? Travis pulled one suit out of its box and brushed it off.

"Isn't fifteen years kind of old?" Kelly asked.

"Yes, and no." He didn't explain, and Kelly went on.

"And why weren't they ever used?"

"Obsolescence."

"Is that good?" Alicia asked. "I mean, are they—"

"Okay? They should be as good as new ones, mostly. I couldn't afford
to buy the new model, chilluns. These'll have to do." He removed a
helmet from one of the other boxes and twisted it into place. He stood
and admired his work.

"What you should know about Russian engineering, crew, is that it
often doesn't have the bells and whistles Americans usually design into
their stuff. But it
works.
This kind of suit protected many a Russki behind during many a lonely man-hour. I'd stack 'em up against NASA suits any day."

I picked up what looked like an instruction manual from the scattered debris. Naturally, it was printed in Russian.

"Do you read Russian, Travis?"

"Passably well. We'll get one translated, and I'll check you out on all the Russian labels that are actually on the suit."

We helped him tie weights to the arms and legs of the suit and he
snapped a fitting from the suit into an air compressor hose. Then we
tossed it in the pool and started pumping it full of air.

Pretty soon the surface of the pool was boiling with foam, like we'd
dropped in a giant Alka-Seltzer. Kelly turned away, grimacing. I think
I may have groaned. I heard the freight train of history pulling away
without me.
Good-bye, trip to Mars....

Travis kicked off his shoes and put his wallet on the patio table.
He picked up a swim mask and put it over his head, then jumped in the
pool. He was down only a short time, then came to the surface and
clambered out, sopping wet but grinning.

"All the leaks are coming from the connector gaskets," he announced.

"This is good news?" Dak wondered.

"All according to plan, Dak. You know, the Smithsonian has dozens,
maybe hundreds of space suits in the attic. They're mostly falling
apart, there's no good way to preserve them. The plasticizers in these
suit gaskets are simply going to bleed out eventually. All we have to
do is change the gaskets and we're in business."

"Can you get them off the shelf?" Sam asked.

"No, they'll have to be custom-made, but it shouldn't be hard. I
know an outfit in Miami can do it. Alicia, I'd like to put you in
charge of—"

"Alicia's classes are too important," Kelly said. "Let me take it
over, Travis. I'm beginning to have a little spare time, plus it'd be
nice to do something with my hands other than type and move a mouse."

Jubal, Sam, Dak, and I loaded the empty coffins back in the U-Haul,
and I took them to the dump, glad Mom had not seen them or the
leak-like-a-sieve space suits.

AT THE END of the day we all took Travis to the warehouse to see
Red Thunder.
His reaction was gratifying: his jaw dropped as his neck craned up.

The cradle was finished, and the central tank had been upended,
lowered into place, and braced, awaiting the six other tanks which
would provide it with more support.

It looked weird, sticking up like that. The top was off so we could
install the flanges and the openings which would soon hold the five
Plexiglas windows of the cockpit, as Travis called it, or the bridge,
as Caleb and Sam did.

And all of it painted a bright Chinese red.

Travis took it all in, then grinned at us.

"Ladies and gents," he said, "for the first time, I feel like we're going to Mars."

WE MOUNTED THE six external tanks over the next three
days, and it was a perfect example of the learning curve. It took us
all day to do the first one, but we did two the second day and the
remaining three on the third. And there she stood, basically complete
on the outside except for bolting on the tops of five of the tanks.

Tank one contained the air lock. We would enter that tank from the
center, as with all the others. There was a deck there, with a hole and
a ladder to climb down to the suit locker deck. There the five suits
hung on simple racks. There were outlets to charge the suit batteries,
and couplings to recharge the backpacks with compressed oxygen. Oxygen
instead of the compressed air we'd be breathing aboard ship, because
that's how the suits were designed, and because, even if we could
reengineer them, carrying compressed oxygen gave us five times the suit
time that compressed air would have.

In the floor of the suit deck was an airtight hatch and another
ladder down to the lock itself. When we had that deck finished we all
practiced climbing up and down the ladder, fully suited, and operating
the locks by ourselves, as we might have to do in an emergency. It was
tough going. But we'd never have to do it in full Earth gravity.

Outside the lock we built a platform large enough for four suited
people to stand on, surrounded by a safety rail. Then we attached a
ramp we could raise or lower with pulleys. It was ugly, but it was
simple, and easy to fix if something went wrong.

Tanks two and five carried water and air. Compressed air was in
ordinary pressure bottles, ten feet high and about a foot and a half
across. The system was arranged so that one system could be entirely
shut down without affecting the other, and either system would keep us
alive for up to two months. It all fed into a system of fans and ducts
and scrubbers. One of us would be awake and in charge of air control
twenty-four hours a day, in four-hour shifts. We all had to practice on
it until we knew what valve to turn for any possible situation.

Water was in big rubber bladders. We had debated mounting them up
high, letting gravity provide our water pressure. But Travis pointed
out we were going to have to bring water pumps anyway, in case we had
to spend any significant amount of time in weightlessness, such as
doing repairs on the ship or rescuing distressed
Ares Seven
astronauts. So down to the bottom they went.

The plumbing system of
Red Thunder
was about as basic as
you could get: water bladder, pump, a T-joint and pipes that led
directly to the cold water spigot over a deep sink, or to our Sears
water heater and from there to the sink. The tap was the source for
drinking water and bathing water. We were bringing enough clothes to
change every day, but if we really felt we had to wash clothes we could
do it in that sink.

Bathing would consist of running a measured amount of warm water
into a bucket, then sitting on a stool in the bathing room—a
prefab shower stall with a drain in the floor—and washing with
soap and a washcloth. Alicia wrinkled her nose when we showed her that
part of the plans, but said nothing.

But I thought she might mutiny when she saw the plans for the toilet.

"A hole and a bucket?" Alicia said, scandalized.

"We'll have a toilet seat over the hole," Travis pointed out.

"Oh, sure. And all the way to Mars and back, I'll have to put the damn seat down. Dak
never
puts it down, and I bet none of you do, either."

Nobody denied it, though Kelly got a case of the giggles which we all caught. Eventually Alicia laughed, too.

"Keep it simple, keep it basic," Travis said, over and over. "A
flush toilet is too complicated, and it wastes water. Same with a
shower."

He was right. We'd discussed all the possibilities before settling
on the "one-holer." People who live in RVs and trailers have what they
call gray-water and black-water tanks. Gray water is from the sinks and
shower, and black water is from the toilet. We would have a gray-water
tank, since all it needed was a pipe from the drain to the waste tank,
in the bottom of tank two, and a valve that could be turned if we had
to go into free fall, to prevent the water from backing up. As for the
black waste...

"Down here we have an ordinary wire dirty-clothes hamper." Dak
showed us when the plans were being finalized. "You put a plastic bag
into the rack, you put down the seat, you do your business. Then you
take the bag and sprinkle in some of these blue crystals, twist the
bag, tie it off, and drop it down the glory hole."

"What's this?" Alicia asked, pointing to a square shape on the plans.

"Exhaust fan," Travis said. "Space stations smell bad. Be
sure
to turn on the fan when you use the toilet."

"With a flush toilet you wouldn't have so much of a problem," Alicia muttered.

Travis had suggested we simply dump the waste bags over the side.

"You'd have the Greens all over us when we got back," Dak told him.

"What for? We're not contaminating the Earth with this sh— ...this stuff."

"Doesn't matter," I told him. "Believe me, Travis, my generation
doesn't think logically about pollution. They'd hate us for it."