Red Thunder (55 page)

OF ALL OF us, the aftermath of the voyage has treated
Jubal most cruelly. He lives on the Falklands. He is not a prisoner
there, but if and when he leaves he is under enormous security. He
hardly ever does leave these days.

Three months after our return, not long after Jubal came out of
hiding, an attempt was made to kidnap him. It came very close to
working, but ended up with eight dead would-be kidnappers and three
dead Navy Seals, who had been assigned to guard him at Rancho
Broussard. Travis believes the caper was planned and paid for in China,
but Travis sees ChiCom Reds under every rock. Most of the eight
criminals had Italian last names. "Chinese could have hired them,"
Travis said. Me, I thought about Squeezer bombs in the hands of the
Mafia, and shuddered. Or Irish rebels, or Palestinians, or Zionists, or
any other group of paranoid malcontents you want to name.

So Jubal doesn't tempt fate anymore. He hated the Falklands at first
for its cold, windy climate, so different from the lands where he had
spent all his life. The IPA does its best to make him happy. He has a
fine house, a wonderful laboratory. All he has to do is ask for
something and he gets it. All he's ever asked for is Krispy Kremes. A
dozen are delivered every afternoon on the daily plane.

He does a lot of rowing in the many bays of the islands, he told me,
but nowadays he's accompanied by a destroyer, part of the IPA's
protective fleet. It is such a funny picture, and so sad.

He's become a world authority on penguins, like the Birdman of
Alcatraz. Often you can find him sitting among them, completely
accepted.

I asked him once how effective he thought the elaborate IPA system would be, in the long run.

"
Long
run, don' nothing work forever," he said. "Dey say ain't no Squeezer-buster gone
ever
be develop. Dat ain't nuttin' but swamp water. Dem seven smarties over
yonder, dey done figgered out how to turn one off, oh yeah. If'n you
understan' how to
make
dem bubbles, makin' 'em go 'way ain't too hard, no. Then,
boom!

"Aside from dem smart boys and girls, somebody else apt to figger it
out, jus' like I did. I jus' hope he don' need to get whomp upside de
haid, like I did!" He laughed and rubbed the dent in his skull.

So there it is. You can't hide knowledge forever. The only
encouraging thing I can think of about that is, we've had the atomic
bomb for a long time now, and the last city we destroyed with it was in
1945. Maybe we can get by that long before somebody figures out how to
make his own Squeezer.

WE TRY TO visit Jubal at least once a year. Sometimes
it's a reunion with the whole happy family, sometimes just me and
Kelly. The flight to Stanley, the capital, makes you feel the islands
are almost as remote as Mars.

Six months after the return we got married as quietly as we could,
not wanting to deal with shouting paparazzi and circling helicopters
with long lenses. Two years later our daughter, Elizabeth, was born,
and in another two years, our son, Ramon.

Kelly became more or less a full-time mother... but, being Kelly,
still had time to handle a few projects on the side, little things like
helping run our many business interests and serving for a term in the
State Senate in Tallahassee, where she helped pass the first meaningful
land-use laws Florida had ever seen.

Her father is currently between beauty queens, though he's been seen
with a former Miss Maine on his arm. Kelly and I made up with him, as
far as it is possible to make up with a conniving, back-stabbing,
larcenous racist. We usually spend Thanksgiving with him, unless he's
been too obnoxious the previous year. Even my grandparents, both sets,
have decided that my being white, or Hispanic, doesn't matter too much
if I'm rich and famous. After they had appeared on their local
television stations crowing about how wonderful I was, they couldn't
very well ignore me. We usually spend a stiffly polite Christmas Day
with one or the other.

Travis was right. Both MIT and Cal Tech sent cordial invitations for
me to continue my education there. But who was I trying to kid? I
simply didn't have the kind of mind that would put me through either
university without the kind of covert help they usually shower only on
sports stars. And I'd be afraid that if I went, that's exactly what
they'd do, graduate me still unable to extract a cube root. So I turned
them down.

Instead, after all the fuss had died down, I went to Florida State,
where I eventually earned an M.B.A., with a major in... hotel
management.

I didn't give up my dream of going into space as a career, I just
took a closer look at it. What did I want, exactly? Well, to be a
spaceman. Wouldn't that be great?

Mom says that when I was seven she found an old telescope in a
thrift store and bought it. Instantly, I decided I wanted to be an
astronomer. Then I discovered that real astronomers hardly every
actually
looked
through their telescopes. They took pictures
with long exposures, they ran data through computers. Where's the fun
in that? I went back to wanting to be a fireman.

Before
Red Thunder
there were basically four types of
people who went into space: pilots, scientists/payload specialists,
United States senators, and the occasional rich person willing to spend
a million dollars or more for a week in space.

After
Red Thunder
...
everybody
could go into space. There
may have been things that changed human civilization as radically as
the Squeezer drive—fire, agriculture, the Industrial Revolution,
the automobile, the computer—but nothing else changed it so
fast.
Suddenly, you could just buy a ticket and
go.
For a while there were even trips you could take to be the "first." One
expedition took two hundred tourists to Uranus and those folks became
the first to set foot on a dozen small moons. It was as if Lewis and
Clark had pulled a Greyhound bus after them, full of folks in loud
shirts, snapping pictures all the way to the Columbia River.

So managing a hotel made perfect sense for me... if it was a hotel
on Mars. The Marineris Hyatt is about three months from completion on a
site within an easy Bigfoot drive of
Red Thunder's
first landing. I have been hired to manage it, and that's a job I can do well. After that...

Just as soon as it became possible to buy Squeezer bubbles to
install in your homemade spaceship, there was an explosion of
crazies—they seemed crazy to me, anyway—headed outward.
Dozens of them, bound for all the nearest stars. The ones who aimed for
Alpha Centauri should start arriving back at Sol System soon, those who
lived, anyway. They will be only about a year older because most of the
trip they will have traveled at nearly the speed of light. They will
have the satisfaction of being the first to fly to another star and
return, but progress has already overtaken them. They went hoping to
find habitable planets, and we know Alpha Centauri has none. Gigantic
telescopes on the far side of the moon have told us that. They have
also discovered dozens of Earth-sized planets at the proper distance
from the right kind of star, planets that show the signature of water
in the spectrograph, all within thirty light-years.

Thirty light-years is an easy journey with a Squeezer drive.
Any
distance is easy, they all take about a year when you're going so fast time virtually stops.

Several very large starships are now being built. The one closest to
completion will be ready to shove off in about five years. It is owned
by Red Thunder, Inc., so Kelly and I have a reserved berth, if we want
it.

If we go, I won't be driving the thing. I won't be in charge of the
engines, I won't be in the landing party when we get there. But on the
way, I can handle the human needs of the voyage very well. A starship
is just a very large, very fast hotel, isn't it?

Kelly isn't sure yet. For that matter, neither am I. Elizabeth would
be thirteen, Ramon would be eleven. Do we want to bring them up in a
pioneer society with an alien sun in the sky, or on nice, safe,
familiar Mars? There's plenty of time to decide.

Sometimes I think back, and I'm impressed how much of our lives are determined by chance.

What if we'd run over and killed Travis, that night on the beach?
Our lives would have been very different. What if we'd missed seeing
him entirely, just drove off into the night and the tide took him or he
woke up in a sand dune with a hangover? I'm sure that every day
opportunities pass us by and we never even know they were there.

Then again, we can see a chance, take it, and watch it all go sour.
My father saw a chance, took it, and ended up with a bullet in his gut.

We of the
Red Thunder
had incredible luck, but we worked
very hard to take advantage of it. Did we "deserve" to be the first on
Mars? I'm sure there were worthier people, but the chance fell to us.

MY GOODNESS, THE stories we'll have to tell. I see
Kelly and me, 110 years old, sitting in rocking chairs on a planet with
two suns during the day and six moons at night, telling our
great-great-grandchildren stories they probably won't believe.

How perilous it was to go just to Mars in those days.

How alien this new planet thirty light-years from home looked to us.

Alien? they will say.
This
is home, it's not alien. What's
perilous about traveling to another star? And here they go again, about
how they were the first. So what?

Yes, I know, it doesn't really mean anything. But the fact remains...

We were the first!

v1.1 - converted to html and proofed by billbo196 - August 2006