Red Thunder (52 page)

"Hatch cover is jammed," I said. "I'll try it—"

"Never mind, no time. I'm out of the lock now. Cranking it around..."

The empty hatch window rotated away from me, and in about a minute
the inner door appeared, and the instant it was open enough I reached
in and grabbed one of the shoulder straps the Russians had put there
for exactly that purpose, hauling a wayward, disabled, or dead
cosmonaut without damaging the suit.

...You leave the goose, then row back and pick up the sack of grain.

A fine mist was coming from a small tear in the fabric of her suit,
freezing almost instantly. Now I saw some blood mixed in with it.

"I'm cold," Kelly whispered. "I'm real cold."

How much air was she losing? In the time I had to get her across she
would not freeze to death. But she could die very quickly with no air.
I looked at the system lights on the forearm of her suit. Oxygen
pressure was green, but for how long?

There was what seemed like several miles of rope between us and
Red Thunder's
air lock. Actually, it was three ropes. Twenty feet along the wreck
from the lock to the crossing line. The line was a hundred yards long.
Then there was the line from
Red Thunder's
cockpit to the air lock aft, about fifty feet. Too long.

Sometimes you can't hurry slowly, you just have to act. I worked it
all out in seconds, then I planted my feet against the hull by the lock
and
jumped.

At first I thought Kelly's weight on my right arm had pulled me off
course. My target was the titanium thrust ring Caleb had worked so hard
on, so long ago. The last of the three ropes was tied to it. If I could
snag the ring or the rope, I'd have saved two, maybe three minutes. If
I'd aimed badly, I had killed Kelly. If we both soared off into space,
Travis would come get us. I'd be alive, but Kelly would certainly be
dead. I had plenty of time to work that out as we flew between the two
ships.

Though it was the fastest crossing I ever made, it felt like the
longest. How fast were we going? Fifteen miles per hour? Thirty?
Probably not. But there was a threshold speed, beyond which my hand
would not be able to stay closed when I grabbed the ring.

If I was even close enough to grab it.

Then I saw I would be close enough. I reached out.

"Try to hook your elbow through the ring," Travis said.

Elbow... I was going to be close enough. I held out my free arm and
let the ring hit me, instantly curling my arm. It was almost pulled out
of its socket as my body and then Kelly's pulled at me, swinging around
the ring.

My arm was forced straight out and I lost contact with the ring.
I've missed. I've killed her

Then I opened my eyes and saw I was floating motionless relative to
Red Thunder
I shoved my feet against the thrust ring and swung us both into the air lock.

"I think I'm burned," Kelly said, even fainter than before. "It hurts."

"Almost there." I slammed the emergency button and air flooded the
lock, silently at first, then becoming a scream, louder and louder.

I realized it was Kelly screaming, incoherent at first, holding her hands to the sides of her helmet.

"Ow, ow, ow! Hurts, hurts, it hurts, Manny!"

Alicia pulled herself headfirst down the ladder leading to the suit room. We both helped Kelly out of her helmet, then her suit.

The worst pain was coming from her ears. There had been very little
pressure when I pulled her into the air lock. Getting so quickly to 15
psi hadn't done her eardrums any good. But it got better quickly,
though Kelly continued to yawn for the next hour.

She had first-degree burns on her right leg and arm, the parts most exposed to sunlight during our crossing. The sun is
that
hot out there, heating a suit with lost coolant in only seconds. Her
only other injury was a gash in her side, from whatever piece of junk
had slammed into her and holed her suit.

"Not much more of a hole and you'd never have made it," Travis told her after he'd examined her suit. "You were lucky."

"Lucky to have found Manny," she said. "Smart to have kept him." She
kissed me. I suppose I should have said something like, "Aw, shucks, it
weren't nothing." But I was pumped up with emotion, fear, joy, and love
all swirling around in my heart. And it
had
been one amazing feat, if I say so myself.

I was so full of myself that it was a full ten minutes before I
gasped and said, "What about Cliff?" But at least I remembered. Alicia
was too busy getting Aquino settled in the bed that would have been
Jubal's, but the others didn't have any excuse.

"That's right," Kelly said. "There's no manual crank inside the lock."

"I'd call that a design flaw," Travis said.

"Whatever, I've got to go back and get him out," I said, suddenly
more tired than I'd ever been before. But there it was. Travis couldn't
go. Alicia had to tend to her patients. Kelly's suit was ruined, and
Cliff was wearing Dak's....
Leave the grain with the fox, row back and pick up the goose.

I had to cross once more.

I KNOW PEOPLE have slept in space suits before. I
never expected to. But I almost did, on my last there-and-back
crossing. I wished I'd had a cup of coffee first... but Cliff couldn't
wait. Not a hundred million miles from home.

I went back to the
Ares Seven
with a crowbar and on the
third attempt, popped the air-lock manual control access hatch open. I
cranked the lock around and Cliff came out. I thought he might have to
carry me across, but I made it.

"I sure hate to leave Brin and Dmitri back there like that," Cliff said.

"Can't be helped," Travis said over the radio. "Captain Aquino is
too urgent, he's in critical condition. Anyway, we or somebody else can
come back to the ship and get them, if their families want the bodies.
I doubt anybody will ever find Welles and Smith, though. Too small a
target in too big a solar system. Space will have to be their graves. I
wouldn't mind that, myself, when I die."

Once we'd broken out and set up two extra acceleration
seats—just two cots with lots of foam padding—Travis got us
in the right attitude and started blasting toward the Earth. We were
close enough to Mars when we found the
Ares Seven
that this return trip would take just about as long as the outward leg had.

With the acceleration back, Alicia got to work on Aquino. She had
brought a collection of CDs on advanced first aid. We all watched with
her as trained EMTs set the "femur" of an amazingly realistic dummy.
Then Dak and Alicia went into his room and set the bone. That was fine
with me. Even the video had freaked me out.

She had been right about Cliff's arm. The X ray showed a small break
of the ulna that was causing him pain and swelling, but wasn't urgent.
"I played a whole quarter with worse than this, back in my football
days," he said. She secured and protected it with an inflatable splint,
gave him a shot of morphine and a sling, and discharged him, giving him
a bottle of pills on his way out of the infirmary.

"Take two of these and don't call me in the morning," she said. "Heck, take four of 'em if you want to, whenever it hurts."

She treated Kelly's mild burns and taped up the small wound in her side.

Holly was still not doing so great, so Alicia calmed her down with a
couple Percodans, tapered the dose down over three days until she was
back to normal... or as normal as she'd ever be again. We all figured
she'd never go back into space.

While this was going on Travis was beaming around at all of us,
hugging us, slapping us on the back like a happy father at a Little
League game.

"Y'all did a miracle," he told us. "You gave me a lot more gray
hairs, but you pulled it off. If they don't strike some kind of special
medal for y'all when we get back, I'll kick my congressman's ass all
the way from Washington to Key West."

Washington to Key West. It reminded me of a problem we had not
completely solved yet. Where do you land an outlaw, independent
spaceship, crewed by people who might be heroes, or might be subject to
arrest or worse sanctions by government agencies both open and covert?

"Washington," Dak said, at what
had
to be our final
discussion on the subject, since we were only about twelve hours from
landing. "Put her down right there on the Mall. Show 'em we ain't
fooling around. Public as can be. Right?"

"Miami International Airport," I said. "It's public, and people can be kept back and out of danger."

"And it's too dang easy to seal it off completely," Travis said.
"Put out a story that we all died from poison fumes or something. Carry
us away to Cheyenne Mountain in helicopters."

"Black helicopters?" I asked. Travis ignored it.

"Lock us away behind the fifty-ton blast doors. The spooks work us
over with drugs and bright lights in our eyes. When they find out we
really don't know how to build the Squeezer drive, we're dumped in
shallow graves in the piney woods."

"You really think they'd do that?" Cliff asked.

"No. Mostly, I don't think so. So I don't plan to give them a
chance
to do it. Part of me, what I'd like to do is land her at Edwards Air
Force Base, in California. Miles and miles of desert, plenty of room
for error, nobody to get hurt if something goes wrong. Or the VStar
landing strip on Merritt Island, right at the Kennedy Space Center.
They're all too isolated. No witnesses but the ones the government
allows in.

"The other part of me wants to set her down on the pitcher's mound
at Yankee Stadium during a game. The middle of Central Park. Coney
Island. Someplace with a million witnesses."

"You land at Coney," Dak said, "people will start lining up to ride it."

Travis shook his head. "To a pilot, the only thing worse than falling out of the sky is to fall out of the sky and
hit
somebody. What we need is lots of people, but not too close. Say, half
a mile for the closest people. That way, something goes wrong, I've got
a fighting chance to steer us to a crash landing where nobody's
standing."

"What about the exhaust?" Cliff asked. "Is half a mile enough?"

"Should be. The exhaust is hot, but not toxic." We had been filling Cliff in on the story of
Red Thunder.
Though NASA had not tried to hide our existence from the Ares Seven, they hadn't exactly been full of information.

"If they actually end up making a movie about you guys," he said,
laughing, "you can bet they'd build a mock-up of your ship and turn it
into a ride at Orlando."

"That's it!" Kelly shouted. We all looked at her. "We land at Orlando!"

I got it, and grinned at her. Then Dak got it, and Cliff, and finally Travis.

"Maybe," he said. "Maybe."

TRAVIS SLIPPED US into a fairly low orbit around the Earth.

Dak didn't get sick. He had done okay at turnover, too. It cheered
him up, but only a little. We were all aching to get down, Alicia most
of all. She had stabilized Aquino, but he was still in critical
condition. She had little patience with Travis's decision not to land
immediately.

"I don't believe in those spooks you talk about, and this man needs better care than I can give him.
Now!
"

We managed to cajole her for a while. Travis promised we wouldn't remain in orbit more than six hours, tops. Then he'd set
Red Thunder
down, one way or another.

Suddenly we were busy again. This close to Earth we didn't need the
lost dish to transmit a signal the people on Earth could pick up. Calls
were coming in from all channels, wondering if we were
Red Thunder.
At first we just let the phone ring.

Kelly logged on to her ISP and went to the websites of the various
theme parks south of Orlando. In five minutes she had a map that showed
what she wanted.

"Lot G," she said, pointing to the map. "The 'Goofy' lot. It's the
biggest parking lot in all the parks. Look at the scale, it's almost a
mile across."

"Almost," Travis said, still dubious. "And that monorail runs right
through the middle of it. What time is it? Eastern Daylight."

"Almost noon," Dak said.

"We give them two hours," Kelly said. "Make up your mind, Travis.
You wanted a big, empty space with lots of people to witness the
landing. And I hate to put it this way, but if we crash on top of
people, we'll all be dead and not have to worry."

"Are you an atheist, Kelly?"

"I'm an ex-Baptist, that's all I'll say."

Travis thought about it for a moment, then nodded.

"Best we're going to do, I guess. Now all I have to do is get the President of the United States on the phone."

"Already did, Travis," Dak said, beaming. "I've got her on hold. Don't look at me that way. She called
us,
okay?"

"Okay, Dak. Now put this signal out to everybody.
Everybody
." He sat in Dak's chair and took a deep breath.

"Good morning, Madam President," he said.

"It's just afternoon where I am, Captain Broussard."

"And where is that, Madam President?"

"I'm aboard
Marine One."
The picture came on, and we could
see her sitting next to a window in a helicopter. "I hate flying in
these things. I don't know how you people would dare to fly all the way
to Mars. I congratulate you all. Captain, is this line secure?"

"No, ma'am, it is not. We don't have scrambling capability, never
figured we'd need it." Actually, there were scrambling programs in many
of our computers; the White House or one of their spook agencies was
bound to have a compatible program. The President must have known that,
but ignored the lie, like the former diplomat she was.

"Very well. I'm on my way to Andrews Air Force Base, should arrive
in five minutes. Many members of your families and other loved ones are
already en route to Andrews in a gover— ...in a chartered jet. I
would like you to land your ship there. We intend to hold a 'welcome
back' ceremony."