Red Thunder (37 page)

On that day the Chinese
Heavenly Harmony
ship arrived at
Mars and began its aerobraking maneuvers. Aerobraking had been used by
all but the earliest unmanned Mars missions. Instead of firing rockets
to achieve an orbit around Mars, a spacecraft would dip into the upper
reaches of the Martian atmosphere. Friction would slow the ship enough
that it would fall into a highly elliptical orbit; that is, one that
looped far away from Mars—to what was called
apoapsis—before curving back down to the orbital low point, the
periapsis. Once there, it would dip into the atmosphere again, slowing
more and making the orbit less elliptical. After half a dozen orbits of
decreasing size the ship would settle into a circular orbit, and
proceed to the Martian surface from there.

This all took time. The first long, looping orbit would take
Heavenly Harmony
a full six days. The next orbit would be four days, and so on. But who cared? Nobody was in a big hurry. The American
Ares Seven
was far behind.

"Maybe they'd hustle a little more if they knew we were here," Dak said, but his heart wasn't in it.

We were all watching the big television set in the warehouse,
feeling defeated. On the screen, a million Chinese had packed
Tien-an-men Square, shouting and chanting. Billions of firecrackers
were going off. Dragon dancers snaked through the crowds. Somebody was
waving a big sign, which the CNN anchorman told us translated as:

THE EAST IS RED!
CHINA IS RED!
MARS IS RED!

"I'd like to give 'em something red," Dak muttered.

We had known this would happen, but it didn't lessen the impact. The
Chinese were the first humans to reach Mars. But we kept bearing in
mind that the first humans to reach the moon were Jim Lovell and the
crew of
Apollo 8, not Apollo 11.

"Travis," I said, "are we really going to lose... because of two lousy days?"

He kept shaking his head and I thought he wasn't going to answer. But when he looked up, his face was anguished.

"Manny, I made promises. To you, to your parents, and to myself. I
think we need a full seven-day test. I can't back off from that."

"For myself," I said, "I release you from that promise. I think we
won't know anything more after seven days than we'd know after five."

"Me, too," Alicia said. "Five days is enough."

"You want my vote?" Dak said. "I'm with them."

"I don't get a vote on this," Kelly said, "but I think they're right."

"Let 'em go,
cher
," Jubal said quietly. "Two days... it don't signify."

Travis looked at him, and for a moment he seemed to be considering it. Then he looked down again and shook his head.

I caught Kelly's eye, and we got up and left the meeting.

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER I pulled into the Blast-Off
parking lot, driving Travis's Hummer. The goddamn old Blast-Off, how I
hated the place now. For weeks my home had been in the warehouse,
Red Thunder
growing out on the warehouse floor. In another week
Red Thunder
would be my home, if I had to whack Travis on the head and hijack the
ship and pilot it myself. One way or another, I was going. We'd come
too far to stop now. I vowed I'd never spend another night in room 201.

We hurried into the lobby. Mom was behind the desk. I went behind it
and flipped the switch that lit the NO in our NO VACANCY sign, and
Kelly turned the window sign over so that it showed CLOSED.

"Mom, you've got to come with us," I said.

"Manuel, are you crazy? It's... three o'clock on—"

"Please, Mom, do this for me. I wouldn't ask you to if it wasn't important."

She started to say something, but she must have seen something in my face, because she nodded, and followed me.

Mom, Maria, and Grace got in the backseat and I took off for the
Sinclair garage. I wasn't surprised to see Dak backing our rental truck
out of the driveway, Alicia in the front seat and Sam in the back. I
gave Dak the high sign, and he grinned and returned it.

Fifteen minutes later we all arrived at the warehouse. Once inside they all had to stop and stare. None of them had seen
Red Thunder
in her completed state, and she was an awesome sight to behold... unless you burst out laughing.

We herded them to the ramp and up onto the platform and then through
the outer air-lock door. I showed them how it worked, how strong it
was. Then up the ladder through the inner pressure door in the floor of
the suit room. The five suits hung there, chubby and bright red, all
with the Red Thunder logo prominent on the chest and backpack. The room
had that new car smell. It was a rich smell. It was a smell that
somehow seemed to inspire confidence. I hoped it was working on Mom and
Sam.

Then up the ladder again and through the submarine-type hatch into the central deck of the central module.

"This is our radiation shelter, too," I told them. "It's shielded by
the other modules, and by a layer of polyethylene plastic. That's what
they use on atomic submarines to shield the reactor compartment."

Down the ladder to the staterooms, which looked pretty good in the
low lamplight, as good as the accommodations on a budget cruise ship.
Then up again, to the common room, to the systems control deck, and
finally to the cockpit. I stood by and let them look out the windows,
see the pictures on the monitor screens. It all looked very
professional, very competent, I thought. If I was buying a brand-new
spaceship, would I buy this one? I asked myself. Damn straight I would.
I had had a part in every rivet, every weld. Give me time, I could take
her down to the last nut and bolt and put her back together. With my
eyes closed. Would this ship take us to Mars and back? I would bet my
life on it. I
wanted
to bet my life on it.

I looked out the window. Travis stood down there, looking up at us, his arms folded across his chest.

"I PROMISED I'D not cut corners," Travis said, when we
were all gathered at the foot of the ramp. "Shaving two days off the
systems test is cutting corners, in my book. It's as simple as that."

"You said we'd never be more than three and a half days from Earth," I pointed out. "Five days is well over that margin."

"I said seven days; I said no cutting corners. I stand by that."

Nobody said anything for a time. I didn't plead with Mom, and Dak
said nothing to Sam. What we wanted was plain enough, and both Sam and
Mom could see it.

I tried to read her face. That was never easy, but she didn't look
as stony as she had in the early days. It was clear that Maria would
vote to go ahead, if she had a vote, but she kept properly quiet about
it.

"Betty," Sam said, "I'd like to have a word with you in private, if you don't mind."

"Sure, Sam." They moved off, both looking tired. We all stood there
silently, watching their backs. At one point Sam put his arm over Mom's
shoulder, and she seemed to lean into him a little. God, how hard her
life had been, how little she had ever gotten in return for her
backbreaking labor at the motel. For a moment I wanted just to shout to
them,
I'm sorry, I give up. I can't ask you to approve of this crazy thing.
After taking them on the tour, watching them looking at the
preposterous ship standing there, I had never felt less confident of
our safe departure and return.

After five minutes they came back. Sam looked straight into Travis's eyes.

"Travis..." He had a hard time getting started, then he stiffened
his back. "Travis, we're voting with the kids. Five days, seven days...
if it works, we think you should go."

Travis returned the stare, never blinking.

"I think five days ought to be enough. I think it will work. But it
reduces our safety margin to a point that I'd be willing to risk
my
life... but not those of your children. Not unless you approve."

"You'd go?" Mom asked, staring straight into his face. "If you could run the thing yourself, you'd go?"

"I actually considered it... but I knew Manny and Dak and Alicia
would kill me. And I need them. I'm the pilot... but they're the ones
who built it, and they know how to run it better than I do."

"Okay, Travis. You do your five-day test. If it works, then y'all go
ahead with what you have to do. Me and Sam, we give you our permission."

BEFORE MOM AND Sam left, Mom took me and Dak aside.

"I thought you ought to know what your daddy said to me, Dak," she said.

"Yes, ma'am?"

"You're old enough, you can call me Betty, Dak. What he did, your
dad... he was in favor of letting y'all go. He knew he'd lose a lot of
your respect if he put the hammer down on the project, anyway."

"Never," Dak said. "He could never lose my respect."

"Of course not. I put it badly. But the two of you, you'd lose
something if he couldn't trust you to know whether this thing was safe
or not."

Dak said nothing, still looking defensive.

"What he did was, he realized that if he just stood there and said he would let you go, then the whole load drops on
my
head. Now,
I'm
the one who either screws up the whole thing, or gets pressured into a
decision I can't live with. So he told me the vote was going to be
unanimous, one way or the other. If I voted no, he'd try to talk me out
of it but if he couldn't, he'd vote no, too. If I voted yes, he was
with me. Dak, I think it took a lot of love to put it that way. I just
wanted you to know how special your daddy is."

"Yes, ma'am. He is."

Mom hugged me, then hugged Dak. We watched them pull out and down
the road until they turned the corner out of sight. Then Dak and I
turned to each other. He grinned, and I did, too. He held out a palm
and I slapped it.

Red Thunder was still alive.

2LOOSE LA BECK was a little squirt, barely over five
feet tall. He still looked and dressed like a gangbanger, something he
never really was, but now he drove a two-year-old Mercedes, possibly
the only bright orange Mercedes low-rider in Florida... or the
universe, for that matter. There were elaborate murals on the hood and
the trunk. The car had a sound system that could peel the paint off a
house at one hundred yards.

Now he stood with his hands in his back pockets and looked up at
Red Thunder.
I'd have to say he looked more than a little dubious.

"I don't know, dude," he said. "I ain't supposed to paint no railroad cars."

"These aren't railroad cars now," I told him. "We cut off the wheels."

"I don't know," he said again. "I painted plenty of railroad cars in
my taggin' days. But I ain't never painted one standing on end, dig? It
changes everything. Screws up the proportions."

"You can handle it, 2Loose," Kelly said. "We'll pay you ten thousand dollars."

2Loose didn't quite sneer.

"I couldn't touch it for no less than twenty grand, friends. 2Loose
has come up in the world. Everybody callin' me an artist now, not a
stinkin' tagger. They put some of my stuff in a museum show, can you
dig it?"

"Yeah," I said, "but how many people see it there? A few thousand? 2Loose, this thing is going to be seen by millions."

"That don't matter, I don't care how many people see it. The boxcars
I used to paint, they'd paint 'em over before hardly anybody seen 'em.
I don't care, man. I seen 'em, even in the dark." He paused a moment,
still looking up at the ship. "How you figure millions of people? What
is
the damn thing, anyway?"

So we fed him the cover story of how this would be a prop in a major
motion picture. He was pretty good, acting nonchalant about it, but I
could see the hunger growing in his eyes.
Hollywood!

"Fifteen thousand," Kelly said. "My final offer."

"You got it. When do I start?"

HE AGREED TO come back the day four of us would climb
into the contraption and see if it could keep us alive for five days.
It was a scary five days.

Who should show up that very evening but Mr. Strickland, old
"ferraristud" himself. He came barging into the building like he owned
it... well, come to think of it, he
did
own it, but a
landlord's supposed to knock. He came with his entourage of three,
Strickland being the kind of man who hates to be alone. One was his
secretary, a former Miss Montana, one was his accountant, and I never
did catch what the other one was, except Strickland shouted at him
twice while he was there.

There's no love lost between the two of us, but he's not the kind
who will flat out admit he hates you. No, he stretched out his arm with
his big salesman's grin, and I reluctantly shook his hand, trying to
forget all the nasty lies he had told Kelly about me, trying to break
us up. When he patted my back I always felt I ought to check to see if
he'd left a knife there.

"What are you doing here, Father?" Kelly snarled. "I told you not to come here."

"Don't I get a hug and a kiss, Kitten?" Oh, lord, how Kelly hated that nickname.

"Is it your birthday? Is it Christmas? I told you, you get two hugs
per year, and after this I'm going to rethink the one on your birthday."

Strickland laughed, but I think she hurt him a little. I think it's
likely that he did love her, in his way, which was to dominate her
life, to make her an extension of himself. But fate had dealt him the
wrong daughter. Kelly would never stand for that.

She went back to her office, walking with her back stiff and
straight. It fell to me and Dak to give him the grand tour, which was
the only way we'd get rid of him.

We just showed him the center section and the air lock, which we
couldn't avoid. The others were full of water bags and air equipment,
all of it working, which could raise awkward questions. Another dead
giveaway, if anyone noticed, was that a spaceship set would have walls
that could be moved so a camera could shoot from farther back.