Red Thunder (36 page)

"That's right," Kelly said, and Alicia nodded.

Travis grinned. "You realize, anything we dumped overboard would be
moving at solar escape velocity. Some of it will be doing three million
miles an hour. I gotta admit, I'm kind of tickled at the idea that the
first man-made object to reach the stars could be a bag of superfast
sh— ...superfast doo-doo."

"Superfast doo-doo!" Jubal shouted, and slapped his knee. As usual
when Jubal heard a good joke, he went around muttering it all day long.

TANKS THREE AND six held fuel and generators and batteries and fuel cells and heaters and air conditioners.

Me and Dak and Salty had debated a long time as to the best source of power.
Red Thunder's
electrical needs were not enormous so carrying the means of producing
that amount of power was not going to be a problem. But how to produce
it?

I favored fuel cells. They are so elegant, it's hard not to love
them. You put in oxygen and hydrogen at one end, and water and power
come out the other. But Salty thought they were too prone to failure.

"So just carry a bunch of them," I suggested.

Dak liked the idea of generators.

"Talk about a proven technology," he said. "Those things, after me and Dad go over 'em, there's just no way they can fail."

And in case they did fail, Dak said, we just bring two.

Salty liked nicad batteries. I thought they were too heavy. Salty
said nobody's supposed to worry about weight, like Travis said.

In the end, we took all three systems. Like everything else on
Red Thunder,
we wanted triple systems when possible, triple reserves when possible.
Any of the three systems could have taken us to Mars and back.

Tank four was reserved for Sam and Dak's mysterious Mars Traveler,
which none of us had seen yet. Dak said all we needed to do to the tank
was mount a heavy winch in the top and line it with insulation, as we
were doing to all the other tanks. He and Sam promised to have
something to show us in two weeks.

THE CENTER TANK was living quarters.

At the very top was the bridge, Travis's domain. There was a second
chair for a copilot. All of us except Jubal trained on it for a day,
but none of us kidded ourselves that if anything happened to Travis we
could just step into his shoes.

For navigation we had basic optical instruments and the simplest
computer program we could find. With luck, you could shoot a few stars,
type in a destination, and the computer would tell you where to point
and how hard to push. It even worked that way in training... most of
the time. But I crashed the simulator Jubal had set up the first five
times I tried to land it. And I was the best of the three of us.

"Just don't get yourself hurt, Travis," Kelly told him one dismal
night after we'd run through the results of the training program.

"Don't worry," Travis said with a grin. "I contracted to bring you
kids back alive, and to do that I've got to watch my own backside, too."

Below the bridge were the other ships' systems. There were
thirty-five flat TV screens on the walls, larger than the ones on the
bridge, one for each of the cameras we had mounted inside and outside
the ship. These were good-quality cigarette cameras, smaller than your
finger, cheap, and practically indestructible. A few were mounted on
motors, but most delivered a static image of the state of the ship. The
control consoles for each of the ship's systems were here, and all four
of our acceleration chairs. These were good, sturdy lounge chairs. The
only problem I could see with them was they were so comfortable I
wondered if I might nod off during an air watch.

The deck below that was the common room. One side was the galley,
with a sink, an upright Amana freezer, and a refrigerator about the
same size, both of them welded to the deck and fitted with strong
latches. The freezer was full of high-end TV dinners from the local
gourmet market, and the best brand of frozen pizza we could find.
Travis told us the most frequent complaint from long-termers on space
station duty was the quality of the food. We carried ice cream and
Popsicles, too.

The fridge would hold cans of soda pop, and fresh fruits and
vegetables. Alicia demanded we bring whole wheat flour so she could
bake bread. I wondered if she'd find time for it, but why not? I liked
fresh-baked bread as much as she did. So we packed some cold cuts and
peanut butter and jelly, too.

We had a microwave oven and a radiant-heat oven just big enough to
heat a frozen pizza or bake a few loaves of bread. Beside them would
sit our espresso machine.

Opposite this little galley we installed a prefab breakfast nook. We
bought it at a local building supply store, and it had a '50s diner
look to it, with red vinyl padded seats and a Formica top. It would
easily seat the five of us.

We carried playing cards, a Monopoly board, and dominoes. None of us
but Travis and Jubal knew how to play dominoes. Travis promised to
teach us, and I suspected they might be expensive lessons. I could end
up back on Earth broker than when I left.

The deck below that was the one that contained the hatches to all
five of the other tanks. We set up the infirmary there. At launch, and
until and unless we needed it, the infirmary deck would be mostly bare.
We carried enough folding cots to accommodate all of the Ares Seven if
we had to. Alicia's medical supplies and instruments were in cabinets
against the infirmary walls.

The two decks below were crew quarters, two "staterooms" to a deck.
The captain and Jubal had the two on the upper deck, and below were the
one Dak and Alicia would share, and my own lonely bunk. The rooms were
small and without many frills, though we painted them warm colors to
make them feel a little less like jail cells. Each contained an air
mattress on a platform with clothes storage beneath, a bedside table
with lamp and alarm clock, and a simple intercom and alarm bell.

We built from the bottom up. When a deck was finished the ceiling
would be lowered into the tank and welded in place, becoming the floor
of the deck above. These floors were made of metal grills. This made
the ventilation system simpler, since air could find its way through
the floors as well as the ducts.

When a deck was finished we installed insulation on all the
walls—we used ordinary Owens-Corning, the kind with the Pink
Panther printed on it—and covered them with big Styrofoam panels.
All pipes and ducts and wires were exposed, for easier repair if that
became necessary.

After two weeks we had capped one of the outer tanks and gained two
days, putting us only three days behind schedule, with thirty days to
M-day.

After another week we had capped two more tanks... but had had to
remove the first one and tear out part of the air system, which was
giving us no end of problems. We lost one of the days we had gained.

SIMPLY TO BUILD
Red Thunder
in sixty days would not have been a problem. But building it was not enough.

"Three parts to the problem," Travis drilled into us. "Construction, testing, and training. Construction is the
easy
part. We're not going to take off in a ship we don't know how to operate."

As the ship took shape we had to do exhaustive tests of each of the
ship's systems, testing right up to the point of failure, and sometimes
beyond. We had that demonstrated to us vividly when an air system broke
down and we were unable to fix it with the tools we would have aboard.
So, tear it out, design it again, build the new system, and test that
to its limits. Each item that didn't work properly the first time and
every time thereafter put us further behind schedule. Travis was
uncompromising, and though we chafed at it, we knew he was right.

But training was the worst.

From the earliest Mercury days of manned space flight, training had
been more extensive and more rigorous than almost any field of human
endeavor. The idea being that, if you trained hard enough, you would
know almost instinctively what to do in any given situation. Your
response would become automatic, and you would remain calm because
you'd been there before. It was proven, it was time-tested... and I
just didn't think we had time for all the training Travis insisted on.

As if this weren't enough, we also had to train in the Russian space suits.

We had the manual translated, and by the time we were done we all
had practically memorized it. We each had to log ten hours working in
the pool with weights on our feet. That meant that another person had
to be there to operate the rented crane to yank us out of the water if
something went wrong.

Things did go wrong. The suits had been sitting on the shelf for a
long time, which wasn't good for them. My very first training session,
when I was supposed to be learning the use of a NASA-surplus
zero-gravity power wrench, I spent the first fifteen minutes shivering
as the suit cooling system brought me down almost to the freezing
point, and when I had that adjusted right, my left glove sprung a leak
and we had to abort.

We were at one of our regular Sunday meetings. Kelly was surrounded
by stacks of paper and no less than three digital assistants, spread
out on the picnic table at the Rancho. Each Sunday she handed each of
us a small booklet detailing our every task, every movement for the
coming week.

I looked around. Dak seemed to have lost weight, which he couldn't
afford. Alicia wasn't smiling much. We had all been daunted to find how
leaky the suits were.

"One more arm, and one more leg, and I think we'll have five
completely sound space suits," she was telling us. She looked up at
Travis. It was his money.

"Go for it," he said. But he didn't look happy. Donating the suits was turning out to be more expensive than he'd bargained for.

We spent an hour talking. When that was done Kelly opened the big
cardboard box she'd brought to the meeting. She pulled something out of
it.

"Bomber jacket?" Travis asked, with a grin.

"They had a special at Banana Republic," Kelly said. She stood up
and put the jacket on. She looked great in it, but that was no
surprise, she looked great in everything.

Dak and Alicia were out of their chairs, finding their jackets and
putting them on. Kelly tossed one to me. I looked it over before
putting it on. It looked used, but with leather jackets that was good.
Somehow they stress the leather without weakening it, so it becomes
supple and soft. I put it on and liked the feel of it, though it was
far too warm for a Florida summer day. On the front, where a soldier
would wear his medals, there was a name strip: GARCIA. Below that was
an embroidered triangular mission patch. It showed the ship blasting in
orbit around Mars, with
Red Thunder
written along the bottom. The patch was on the back, too, but larger.

"Did you do this?" Travis asked, pointing to the logo on the back of his jacket.

"I'm not that artistic. I've got a friend who's a graphic designer. Do you like it?"

We all did. Nobody had any objections to the jackets, either. They beat the hell out of NASA's tired old blue jumpsuits.

"Who's the friend?" I asked.

"A guy named 2Loose."

I was delighted. "You know 2Loose, too?"

"He did a mural on the new women's center," Alicia said.

Henry "2Loose" La Beck was an old classmate of mine, the Tagger King
of Central Florida. In his outlaw days he must have painted a thousand
walls and two thousand railroad cars. He did a little time for it, but
often the owner of the violated building dropped charges after studying
his work for a while, he was that good. Plus, he could run very fast.

Last I'd heard of him he'd cleaned up his act, gone legit, formed
his own company and was doing pretty well. A lightbulb went on inside
my head.

"Hey, how about we get him to paint
Red Thunder?
"

All I got at first were blank looks.

"It's already painted," Travis said.

"Yeah, but not like 2Loose can paint it," Dak said, with a grin. "He did some work on
Blue Thunder.
Just the pinstripes, I didn't want no Sistine Chapel ceiling."

"But he could
do
the Sistine Chapel," I said, "if you didn't mind God driving around in a low-rider and Jesus with spiky hair and tattoos."

"I like it," Alicia said.

"Me, too," Kelly laughed. "Let's ask him."

"Hey, wait a minute," Travis said. But we voted him down and, true
to his word, this was still a democracy until we took off. So we
decided to offer 2Loose the commission.

ANOTHER WEEK OF hard work, and we gained another day on the timetable.

It was becoming clear that the sticking point would be in the last
week. Travis had scheduled a full-blown systems test for that week. For
seven days, all of us but Travis and Jubal would be sealed into the
ship, totally isolated from the outside environment. We would drink the
stored water, breathe the canned air, and eat the frozen food, all the
while we were training, training, training.

He was adamant that it had to be seven days.

"Seven days is already a compromise," he told us. "I'd be a lot
happier taking a full month. The only reason I'm settling for seven is
that
Red Thunder
is so powerful and so fast that we'll never
be more than three and a half days away from Earth. I figure most
things can be patched up well enough to last three and a half days."

WE GAINED ANOTHER day by cutting out hours of sleep.
With three days until M-day minus seven, the day we had to begin the
long-duration systems tests, we bolted down the top of tank seven, the
central module, and
Red Thunder
was complete... from the outside. But we still had five days of work that
had
to be done before the test could begin.