Red Thunder (54 page)

On Sam's first birthday after the return, Dak bought him a classic
Harley. I bought Travis's Triumph. Weekends when we can get together,
we drive all over Florida with Dak on
Green Thunder,
his racing bike.

Dak has even made peace with his mother. They still seldom see each
other, but now she sends him a present on his birthday, usually
something hilariously inappropriate like a train set or a bicycle. He
gives them to Toys for Tots. She isn't really a bad person, she just
has no clue about how to be a mother.

Alicia... well, Alicia is still Alicia. She puts all her money into
her own foundation, which runs drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers
all over the South. She seems sublimely happy, except for one week
every year just before her father comes up for a parole hearing.
Ironically, without booze in him he's a model prisoner, so any year now
he could get out. And start drinking again...

I figure that if Alicia lives as long as Mother Teresa she could win a Nobel Peace Prize, too.

MOM DIDN'T SELL the Blast-Off Motel, after all.

While we were away she and Maria sold tons of
Red Thunder
souvenirs. They had to set up a tent in the vacant lot across the
street to handle the traffic. And from the day we lifted off, there has
never been a vacancy. Now it's a good idea to reserve at least a year
in advance. Except for the fantasylands of Orlando, we are the third
most popular tourist attraction in central Florida, behind the 500 and
the space center. Some years we even beat out Kennedy.

Two years after our return Daytona was hit by a late-season
hurricane. The Golden Manatee suffered a lot of damage, some of which
exposed foundations shoddy even by Florida standards. The city engineer
said the wind from a passing butterfly's wings was apt to blow the
thing over, which Mom and Maria and I wouldn't have minded if it fell
toward the beach, which was where it was leaning, but it might have
blown the other way and buried us. With her new clout at City Hall Mom
managed to get it condemned, and two days later they blew it up. Before
the dust had even settled Mom bought the land, which we turned into a
parking lot and large restaurant/souvenir stand with a pedestrian
bridge to give the Blast-Off easy beach access. We added a new wing,
too. All the rooms have unobstructed ocean views.

Mom wanted no part of the business other than as a part owner. It
turned out Aunt Maria actually liked the motel business, just didn't
care for the physical labor. She hasn't made a bed since
Red Thunder
took off. She hired Bruce Carter, formerly of the Golden Manatee, to
take care of all the hard work, leaving Maria to relax in the shade
with her friends, playing dominoes and making sculptures of shell
people landing on Mars. The Blast-Off maids are the best paid in
Florida, with medical benefits and a pension plan.

Mom suddenly had free time, something she'd had almost none of from
the moment of my birth. She was at loose ends for a while, but she soon
found many things to fill her day, including volunteering at one of
Alicia's dry-out academies.

She also spent several hours each week at the shooting range.
Eventually she tried out for the Olympic team. She didn't do well at
skeet but made it in fifty-meter rifle. Kelly and I and Dak went to
Johannesburg, where she finished out of medal contention with a
respectable eighth place. When she marched into that gigantic stadium
with the American team on the first day, I thought I'd burst with pride.

THE HUGE BROUSSARD clan avoided all the publicity,
except for Little Hallelujah, as the family called him, the youngest
and shortest of Jubal's brothers. Hallelujah was the only child of
Avery who was still deeply religious. He had followed in his father's
footsteps, preaching in a little backwoods church.
Red Thunder's
flight and his brother's unwanted fame was just the kick in the pants
his ministry needed, and today he has a cable television show where he
often connects Mars and Heaven in some manner only he really seems to
understand. But he shouts, and he sweats, and he heals, and he doesn't
handle snakes, so everybody seems happy.

TRAVIS JUST CELEBRATED nine years of sobriety. A year
of appearances and hearings knocked him off the wagon once, but Alicia
was there to help.

Travis stayed in the background as much as he could during the
first, frantic weeks. He was content to let the media run with the
story of the four kids who built a spaceship almost by themselves,
armed only with the strange machine built by Jubal—the man of
mystery in the early days—Travis being nothing more than a hired
driver. We all tried to correct that impression in all our interviews,
but the fact was that our adventure was much the sexier story. Travis's
story concerned nothing more exciting than the possible destruction of
human civilization. Can't sell papers with that.

But eventually, when the media blaze died down a bit, people did start to think about the evil side of the new technology.

Naturally the United Nations wanted to be in charge, from
discussions to resolutions to implementation. They offered their
meeting halls and their huge staff to facilitate matters. Travis turned
them down, politely. Then he issued an invitation to all the countries
of the world—except China. Travis was never going to forgive or
forget that
somebody
in that government had ordered the
destruction of Big Red and the death of her crew. The other nations
were each to choose a delegation consisting of two scientists, two
political leaders, and three ordinary citizens to assemble in three
weeks at the Orange Bowl, in Miami, to meet with Travis and Jubal and
the
Red Thunder
crew to determine what to do with the Squeezer drive.

A week later he invited the Chinese, too. It didn't have anything to
do with the tremendous diplomatic uproar China's exclusion had caused.
Travis really enjoyed that. He knew going in that you couldn't exclude
one-sixth of the Earth's population. But you
could
slap their leaders in the face.

There were plenty of other things to howl about. Seven delegates
from each country? Seven from India, and seven from Luxembourg? Does
that make sense? "It does to me," Travis said. "And until Jubal and I
stand up and speak our piece and then hand it over to you, it's our
stadium, our ball, and our bat. Stay away if you don't like it."

Naturally, it was a zoo. The United States sent the President and
the Senate leader from the other party. There had never been such an
assembly of presidents, premiers, and prime ministers, and there may
never be again. The Orange Bowl was surrounded with tanks and
helicopter gunships.

Every imaginable pressure group was there. Some called the Squeezer
drive a tool of Satan, or worse, of American Imperialism, Zionism,
Racism, International Cartels, the World Trade Organization, Big Oil
(which the Squeezer would soon put out of business, but nobody ever
said a protester had to make sense), Communism, the United Nations, or
those five space aliens who had come from Mars pretending to be human.
On the streets, the
Red Thunder
crew was denounced for
"despoiling the natural beauty" of Mars, polluting Earth's air with
radiation on takeoff (a lie, but how do you prove that?), and
"encouraging the consumer culture by sweeping Earth's garbage under the
rug." Guilty on that count, I guess. The Squeezer was a mighty big rug
to sweep trash under. In less than ten years every landfill and nuclear
waste dump on Earth has been squeezed into a little silvery sphere and
used to propel spaceships. This is bad?

They were all opposed to the newly christened International Power
Administration and in favor of staying on a polluted and threatened
Planet Earth, and many of them threw rocks and Molotov cocktails to
prove how passionately they loved the Earth. Three cops died, and two
protesters.

It bothered me, but Kelly scoffed at them. "The perpetual two
percent of malcontents," she called them. "Honestly, if God showered
manna from heaven on that bunch, they'd want to know if He used
pesticides on it, or added any preservatives." I didn't point out that
Alicia might be one asking those questions.

So they assembled, a thousand official delegates on the field,
twenty thousand reporters clustered around the fifty yard line, the
rest of the seats taken by people who had lined up since Travis
announced the public was invited, first come, first served.

The first day was all Travis's show.

He brought a large metal suitcase. He opened it to reveal about a
hundred dials, switches, and trac-ball controllers. We managed not to
giggle when we realized this was the Beta Model of the Squeezer Jubal
had built out of scraps lying around his workshop/laboratory. Travis's
aim was to make the Squeezer look a lot more complicated than it really
had to be, on the theory that it might get scientists looking in the
wrong direction.

He put the Squeezer through its paces for the assembled delegates, expanding the bubbles, contracting them, making them go
boom!,
which they did with a mighty reverberation in that big arena with its
brand new dome. He fitted a bubble into a toy rocket and flew it up to
the dome, then brought it back and set it down.

Then he asked Kelly to try her hand at it. We five were the only
ones who knew what would happen next. The giant Squeezer melted into
slag in a chemical reaction too brilliant to look at.

"It didn't like the pattern of her retinas," Travis said. "The
machine used a laser scanner to identify an authorized user. I was the
only authorized one. If any of you had tried to use it, the same thing
would have happened.

"You folks are going to have to figure out something like that. We
are going to have to have more than one Squeezer to handle the demand,
and we'll have to have people other than my cousin Jubal who know how
to make more of them. But they
cannot
be allowed to fall into
the wrong hands. These bubbles can be made as powerful as thermonuclear
bombs, but the thing about H-bombs is that they're hard to make. The
Squeezer is cheap.

"You've all got a terrible task ahead of you. I said, 'the wrong hands.' But who has the
right
hands? Who do we trust with that much responsibility? How do we
identify someone who can be trusted not to steal the secret, sell the
secret, or hand it over to his or her native country? I don't envy you,
but now I gladly hand the burden over to you. Thank you for giving me
this opportunity, and please, please, be wise."

And he walked out. The stunned delegates didn't know whether to applaud him or tackle him and start pulling out his fingernails.

SO THE IPA proposed and debated and approved and
rejected and discussed and shouted at each other and got into
fistfights, and in about a year produced a course of action. It didn't
satisfy anybody, but was probably the best they could do. Some problems
don't have easy or obvious solutions. Some have no solution at all.

The IPA could impose levies on its member nations, so it did, and
bought the Falkland Islands, which contained 2,945 people, 700,000
sheep, and millions of Rockhopper, Magellanic, Gentoo, King, and
Macaroni penguins. They moved the now-wealthy shepherds and their sheep
to milder climates. The penguins they let stay. And there they built
the most secure facility on Earth, the one place on Earth for the
manufacture of the machines that produced Squeezer bubbles.

The manufacturing plants there on the cold, windy Falklands built
Squeezer machines that would initiate, expand, or contract Squeezer
bubbles. They didn't build many of them. These machines were sent to
governments under strict handling rules, and with what Travis called "a
million exploding cigars" built into them. Tamper with them, and you
die. Every year some jerk thinks he's figured them out, and is burned
alive.

THE TOUGHEST QUESTION facing the assembly in the
Orange Bowl was this: Jubal can build machines that will create,
expand, contract, and produce thrust from Squeezer bubbles—but
not turn them off, that was forbidden—but Jubal won't live
forever. Who will pick up the torch of unlimited power once Jubal is
gone?

What the IPA eventually came up with was a lot like a priesthood,
and a lot like a guild. The trade secrets or magical arcana of
Squeezing would be conserved, used, and passed down by means of an
elite scientist class. To be in this elite you had to be capable of
understanding the physics and mathematics. This eliminated me, and Dak,
and Travis. In fact, it narrowed the field to about one in a hundred
million.

So beginning with this small pool, the IPA set up the most rigorous
tests and examinations it could conceive, and started sifting. Before
they were done, a candidate was pulled apart and put back together
again. You could be eliminated for being too chauvinistic or patriotic,
too wedded to one political or religious doctrine, too egotistical, or
too just plain crazy. It was amazing how many physics Ph.D.'s fell into
that category.

The popular press immediately dubbed these seven men and women the
High Priests of Squeeze. They served for life, because even if they
retired they had to be watched for the rest of their lives. They were
not precisely
confined
to the Falkland Islands, but if they
went anywhere they were constantly guarded, both from kidnapping and
from passing the Squeezer secrets to somebody else.

These were the people who actually built the Prime Squeezers. These
were the self-sacrificing saints who were let in on the whole secret of
the Squeezer phenomenon, who agreed not to reveal it to anyone under
pain of death, the wise ones who would chance partaking of the fruit of
the Tree of Power. These were the poor schmucks who assumed the burden
that had fallen on Jubal the day we lifted off in
Red Thunder.