Red Thunder (53 page)

We all had the same reaction when she mentioned our families: Hostages.

I'm ashamed to have harbored that thought. But the government ought
to be ashamed, too. How did it happen that most of us don't trust our
government not to trample on the Constitution, under the umbrella of
National Security?

"I presume our lawyers are aboard that plane, too, Madame
President," Travis said. One of the things he'd stressed the most to
our friends and relatives was that, until
Red Thunder
returned, your lawyer is your Siamese twin. The only way our lawyers would
not
be aboard was if our families had been arrested by force, in which case
our legal brigade would earn their outrageous hourly charges by raising
a stink in the media bigger than this media-happy country had ever seen.

"Yes, I believe they are aboard."

"It's a kind offer, ma'am," Travis said. "And please forgive me, but
Andrews is on your home grounds. It's your stadium, your ball, and your
bat. We intend to land a little closer to our home turf."

"What do you propose?" Diplomat or not, she looked a little pissed when she said it. I guess Presidents don't hear the word
no
very often, or even
no, thank you.

Travis told her, and she was shaking her head before he got very far.

"Out of the question."

"I'm sorry, I guess I didn't state my intention clearly. We are
going to land in that parking lot. I'll be in position to land in
another two hours. That should give you plenty of time to do a few
things:

"Clear that parking lot. Change the course of that government jet,
have it land at Orlando and then fly our loved ones by helicopter to
Lot B, that is the 'Bambi' lot, which is the closest point people
should be allowed to approach our ship until I broadcast the all clear.
I don't want to see any soldiers. Local police only."

"Is that all?" Her voice had a definite edge to it now.

"No, ma'am." Travis grinned. "I'd like to respectfully extend to you
an invitation to witness the landing, the return of the first men and
women to walk on Mars."

The President looked stricken when Travis said "Mars."

"Oh, my God," she whispered. "Please forgive me. In the heat of the
moment, I forgot to mention the very first thing I should have told
you. A few days ago our Mars mission, the
Ares Seven,
suffered some sort of onboard explosion. We've heard nothing from them since, and we—"

"It's not a problem, Madame President. I have some good news to
report to all Americans, and people around the globe. We found the
Ares Seven.

"There is some bad news, too, I'm afraid. Astronauts Welles, Smith,
Marston, and Vasarov died of their injuries before we could get there.

"But we rescued Holly Oakley and Cliff Raddison and Bernardo Aquino.
Aquino was badly injured, and I'm sure his life was saved by our medic,
Alicia Rogers. But he is still in critical condition. Please excuse my
abruptness, but there is a lot we need to do before the landing, in two
hours' time. Good-bye."

Travis looked happy. It must be a heady feeling to put the President
on hold, refuse an order, and hang up on her, all in the space of ten
minutes.

TRAVIS WAS TELLING another lie when he said we'd be
very busy over the next two hours. He had already plotted our landing
trajectory, a matter of five minutes of computer time, almost all of
that feeding in the data.

Dak and Cliff and I had nothing to do at all. Holly and Alicia were
standing their vigil by the still-unconscious Captain Aquino. Holly had
started doing that about twenty hours into our return, when she was
getting over the effects of her living nightmare. Was there something
going on there? Oakley and Aquino?
Ares Seven
had been in space a long time. But it wasn't my business.

Kelly was the only one of us with lots to do. She was on the phone
right up to the point we had to strap in. She visited the New York
Stock Exchange to check up on Red Thunder, Inc., which was trading up
almost 100 percent before the exchange suspended trading to let things
settle down. I hadn't even known we had stock to be traded, much less
that I owned a big chunk of it. I'd been too busy building and training.

The document presented in the Initial Public Offering was
interesting, though. As a corporate statement of purpose there were
just two things: "To construct and launch a manned vehicle to take
human beings to Mars and return them safely to the Earth" and "To
promote, publicize, and in any other manner to exploit the trademarked
and copyrighted symbols associated with the ship and its crew and its
mission, in any medium whatsoever."

While I was loafing through my last few hours in space, Kelly was
determining what kind of sneakers I'd be wearing for the next year. She
had Nike and Adidas in a bidding war. While the ship was still
building, Kelly had made the acquaintance of the publicity and
promotions departments of dozens of companies who relied heavily on
advertising to sell their stuff... and who doesn't? She had pitched it
as a motion picture tie-in, naturally, and had to be careful not to get
anybody
too
interested in our phantom flick. Then, the day before launch, she had e-mailed all those people...
you may recall our conversation of August 9
... telling them to watch the skies the next morning.

After launch—a thousand years ago, it seemed, and in a
previous lifetime—she had worked the telephone until we lost the
dish. She even inked a few deals by fax, all subject to our safe
return, of course.

We were all going to be on the Wheaties box, if we lived....

TRAVIS BROUGHT US almost to rest ten miles above
Orlando, and began our descent at a speed not much greater than the
express elevators at the Empire State Building.

"I've never eaten a single flake of Wheaties in my life," I told Kelly.

"You'll eat a whole bowl of it in a few days," she assured me.

We watched on the screens as the grid of lines below us resolved
into streets, and buildings. Then we could see the maze of freeways
snaking their way through America's theme park heaven. They were all
gridlocked, no one moving an inch anywhere. But they didn't seem to
mind. They stood on their cars, beside the road, or behind yellow
police tape, facing an almost solid line of squad cars from every
community close enough to get there in two hours. A dozen helicopters
were parked in Bambi Lot, one of them
Marine One.
Dozens more hovered at a safe distance, their telescopic lenses sending the picture back to networks all over the world.

Travis brought
Red Thunder
in like he did it every day.

"Touchdown on strut one!" Dak called out. "Touchdown three! Touchdown two! We're down, Captain."

"Shutting down engines," Travis called back.

But the engine noise did not die out.
Red Thunder
was still shaking.

"Manny, Kelly," Travis said. "Get down there and see what the problem is. And
hurry slowly!
"

We did, and Alicia and Dak joined us. We entered the lock, overrode
it by pulling the big red, recessed handle, and the outer door opened.
We smelled the fresh air of Earth again... the fresh,
hot
air of Earth. The ship had heated the landing zone, buckled some of the asphalt. We lowered the ramp and looked out.

The roaring sound got louder. It was the crowd, half a mile away, a
million people who had bought a ticket to a fantasy and got a glimpse
of a dream come true instead.

We were home.

FOR THE NEXT five years
Red Thunder
sat right
there, where Travis had put her down. They built a geodesic dome over
her with a fantastically detailed diorama and they covered the asphalt
with sand, gravel, and rocks, every grain of it imported from Mars.
Goofy had to find himself another parking lot.

We were all there at the opening, and I watched with a creepy
feeling as the ramp lowered and four lifelike robots walked down the
ramp and started to sing... not "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." The
copyright holders kicked up a fuss, because we hadn't landed in
their
parking lot. So they sang "When You Wish Upon a Star." I wish we had
sung that, too. And I wish we'd sung better. On the tape, we were plain
awful.

After five years Red Thunder, Inc., donated the ship to the
Smithsonian, who installed it under a glass pyramid right out in front
of the Air and Space Museum, watched over by the
Wright Flyer, The Spirit of St. Louis,
Chuck Yeager's
Glamorous Glennis,
Alan Shepard's
Freedom Seven
Mercury capsule, and
Apollo 11.
Rare company, but the magnificent old bird deserves it.

IN ANY EVENT, we had no trouble with the government.
Is that because of the precautions we took, or do they exist only in
the minds of paranoid novelists and screenwriters? The actions of some
of the agencies we
do
know about scare me plenty.

What dealings we had with the government were open and friendly,
mostly, though some voices were raised suggesting we ought to turn
Jubal's creation over to the government, if we were patriotic
Americans. But the image of the American flag rising over the sand
dunes of Mars, spoiling China's moment of glory, was too firmly fixed
in the American imagination for that point of view to last. When we
testified before the Joint Committee of Congress there was not a breath
of reproach in the air. We were honored guests invited to share our
story with the world.

The first year was a whirlwind. In some ways it was more stressful
than the trip to Mars, at least to someone like myself, camera shy and
not fast with a quip, like Dak and Kelly and Travis. We rode in a
ticker tape parade down Wall Street in New York, and in a parade I
enjoyed a lot more through the town of Daytona, local kids who had made
good. The parade ended at the racetrack, the Holy of Holies in Daytona,
where we were given trophies with checkered flags on them. The little
stock cars on top of the trophies had been unscrewed and replaced with
Red Thunder
models.

We could have paraded down the main street of every city and town in America if we'd accepted all the invitations.

If somebody wanted to use our images to sell something, or put us on
their product, we researched them carefully... and then charged all the
market would bear, which was
plenty.
Banana Republic sold thousands of
Red Thunder
leather jackets, and we got a piece of each one. We wore Adidas "Red
Thunders" and ate Wheaties, though I only ate the one bowl. Nothing
against Wheaties, I just don't like cereal.

We made a lot of money. More than I ever dreamed possible. I never
felt like we degraded ourselves. But it's odd and not exactly pleasing
to see something that resembles your face on the muscle-bulging body of
an action figure toy.

One of the things that left a bad taste in my mouth was the movie,
which hit the cineplexes a year to the day after our return. It did
okay, but not as well as expected. There were several reasons for that,
one being that they didn't wait until they had a good script. The twerp
who played me didn't look a bit like Jimmy Smits, but the girls loved
him. The animated television series about us was
much
better, it ran for seven years.

Then there was the undeniable fact that, in Hollywood terms, the
real
story of a
real
pioneer trip just didn't measure up to the likes of
Star Wars,
or any of hundreds of outer space adventures full of blazing ray guns and weird aliens.

And the public was just getting tired of us. I was sure getting tired of
them.
When your face is on magazine covers and television screens as mine
was, you can't go anywhere without being recognized. You never get a
moment's peace.

So after the first anniversary we mostly withdrew from the public
eye. You can never really erase your celebrity, once you've gotten it
or had it thrust on you, but you can stop catering to it. I'm not
complaining. Celebrity is a small price to pay for freedom from
financial worries.

FAIRY TALES END happily ever after. Real life never
does. We came a lot closer than most. It's just that things don't
always work out the way you had imagined. But sometimes the alternative
is just as good.

Things didn't work out as planned for Dak and Alicia. They had a
falling-out and they parted company. But since Alicia remained friendly
with Kelly and Dak was still my best friend, though growing more
distant with each passing year, they see each other fairly frequently
and they get along.

Dak never recovered from the humiliation he felt as the champion puker aboard
Red Thunder.
No one ever blamed him for it, but he punished himself. For the first
year he made public appearances with the rest of the crew, but when we
got tired of the celebrity rat race, Dak was not. So he started touring
the sports venues of America, anything from football games to tractor
pulls, riding into the arena on
Blue Thunder,
which had been
retrieved and restored to diesel power. It was quite a show. When he
tired of it, he donated it to the Smithsonian, to be put in the crystal
pyramid with Big Red.

He took up racing, mainly motorcycles and pickups, but he'd drive
almost anything that went fast. Kelly says he's still proving himself,
over and over, and she's probably right. But he seems happy, and that's
all I care about.

He and his father devote much of their time to their speed shop, not
only building their own cars but working on and designing others. I
always ask Dak if he's ready to join the NASCAR circuit, and he always
scoffs. NASCAR is "the last white good-ol'-boy club left in America,"
he says, and stock cars are "the fastest billboards on the planet."