Red Thunder (8 page)

By the time all the lawsuits were settled Travis's friend was
bankrupt and all that was left of their investment was the gator. So he
and Travis took the
very
realistic critter to the home of the
president of Free the Animals and... but Travis said the statute of
limitations hasn't expired on that one yet, so he'd better be quiet
about it.

"Not that the prick would likely press charges," Travis said.
"They've all been keeping a much lower profile since the Gatorland
fiasco."

I could have listened far into the night, but after a while Travis
looked at his watch, drained and crushed his beer can, and told us to
go get our computers.

You're kidding, I thought. But he was not.

So we set them up out there on the patio, plugged into his ground line, and signed on to the Infinite Classroom.

IT WAS ONE of the better ideas Dak ever had. Travis
knew this stuff, he'd worked with numbers all his professional career.
There were basic concepts in calculus that had been giving me hell, I'd
started to wonder if I'd ever make the breakthrough, ever really make
the grade. Maybe I ought to get a job selling shoes. It would be better
than shining them, like my great-grandfather used to do in Havana.

"There's just things it's real hard to learn out of a book," Travis said at one point, not long after getting me to
finally
see a point I'd been struggling with for a whole month. "Math's one of
them. I don't think I'd ever have got it if I didn't have a good
teacher to help me over the rough spots.

"Don't get me wrong, I think this Internet U is a great thing... up
to a point. But in pretty much any subject you get to a point where
words and pictures on a screen aren't enough. You either have to get
some hands-on experience, or get somebody to walk you through it, one
on one."

"SO AM I going to hear how this all came about, or is that a secret?"

Dak looked over and grinned at me from under his helmet.

"Just dropped by a few days ago to see how the poor bastard was
doing," he said. "Cousin Jubal had told him all about that night and
Travis wanted to say thanks. I think he was pretty impressed we didn't
take him for everything but the lint in his drawers. He's a man who has
some experience in these matters."

"I'll bet," I laughed.

"Oh, yes," Alicia said. "Travis has been mugged before."

She was puttering along in her little 1965 VW Bug, ahead of us on
the bikes. Dak had been helping her restore it. In fact, that little
Bug was how they met in the first place. The outside was coated with
primer except for the two front fenders, which were "screamin' yellow
and hollerin' orange," according to my mom. Alicia hadn't yet decided
what color to go with.

"We cracked a few brews, sat around shooting the breeze, making that rubber crocodile walk around on the bottom of the pool."

"And he offered to do our homework for us?"

"Not at first," Dak admitted. "He said, any little thing he could do
for us, all we gotta do is ask. The dude may be a drunk, but he knows a
lot of people, and I think a fair number of them still like him. These
are the kind of people who can drop a hint, call in a favor from the
right person at the right time, I figured. We got a long ways to go
between here and the moon, Manny my man. We need to use every leg up we
can get."

"No argument, pal," I said. "I just wish you'd let me in a little sooner. I felt like I was crashing somebody else's party."

"Sorry about that, man."

There was a momentary silence in our earphones.

"He was a hero, once," I said.

"No fooling?"

So I told them the story Pig had given me about saving the
California's
crew and passengers. Dak loved it about as much as I had.

"Damn!" he said. "I'd pay to see that. Let's hop a plane to Africa, Alicia."

"Happy to, soon as you can pay for it."

"Yeah... how come I couldn't find any of that, Manny? I went to the NASA site, same as you. Didn't find diddly."

"For some reason, NASA wants to pretend Colonel Broussard never
existed. They can't, but they sure did minimize him. I don't know why,
Pig wouldn't say."

"Are we invited over again?"

"If you don't mind sirloin for breakfast."

"One more thing I'd like to know."

"Shoot."

"Alicia, how
did
you find out Dak had been coming out here?"

"Because I'm nosy," she laughed.

"You can say that again," Dak said. "Raiding the man's pantry."

"He ate three helpings of the salad."

"Salad? That what that was, salad?"

"It doesn't have to have lettuce, Dak."

"In my house it does. And tomatoes."

"Alicia, you never did answer my question," I said.

"Oh, that. You know Dak installed that inertial tracker—and I never knew why, since he already had the NavStar unit."

"Just another gadget he couldn't resist, I guess," I said.

"Hey, Manny, Alicia. I'm right here, don't forget."

"Well, Dak forgot that machine keeps a record of your location and your route...."

"That's it, woman!" Dak exploded.

"...it keeps that data for two weeks unless somebody remembers to erase it..."

"Who figured I
needed
to erase it? Damn, I'm surrounded by spies."

THE BIG NEWS at the NASA site that day was the departure of the American mission to Mars.

The crew had gone up the night we almost killed Travis. The ship had
been finished when the final components were delivered two weeks before
that. Captain Aquino had used the intervening weeks to conduct as many
tests and drills as were possible in the limited time available to him
before the very tight launch window closed.

I watched the countdown, and the totally unimpressive lighting of
the plasma torch at the rear of the long, lumpy, completely unlovely
congregate of landers, orbiters, propulsion modules, reactors, solar
panels... and doghouses and kitchen sinks, for all I knew, and its
departure for the Red Planet.

Its very
sloooooow
departure. Proving once again that,
aside from the liftoff from Earth, space travel was not and probably
never would be a feast for the eyes. Aside from the deathly quiet,
everything I'd ever witnessed in space happened at a pace that would
make a glacier look like an avalanche. No matter that everything I was
seeing was hurtling around the planet at a speed of about sixteen
thousand miles per hour. You couldn't see anything move. You never
could.

The plasma engine was slow but steady. It was fifteen minutes before the mission could be seen to have moved at all.

It didn't bother me. It was beautiful.

I GOT MY housekeeping chores done, then sat at the
computer working on my calculus lessons. I did three weeks' worth of
reading and assignments in about three hours, now that so much more of
it made sense to me. In fact, I found myself two days ahead of the
recommended syllabus, for the first time since I'd enrolled. When I
clicked the computer off, it was with a sense of satisfaction I hadn't
felt since graduation.

Then I turned my attention to my little silver bubble.

It had been nagging at me all day and my curiosity was killing me.

I had put the bubble in one of my desk drawers, because it didn't
want to stay in the same place. It drifted with the tiniest air
current, like smoke. How could something so light be so tough?

Start by defining the problem. It's light, it's tough. How light? How tough?

The best scale I had access to was the postal scale in the office,
and I knew without having to try that I wouldn't be able to weigh the
bubble with that scale. I wouldn't even be able to get it to stay on
the platform long enough to register any weight. By extension, I
couldn't see how it would register anything on the analytical balance
at school. But it couldn't be weightless, could it?

Now, hold on, was I getting weight confused with mass, like so many people did?

It stood to reason that if I could get the bubble moving, it would
have some inertia, wouldn't it? If I could toss it against a scale, it
would have to register something, right? Maybe. But I couldn't test
that at home, because I didn't have any way of creating a vacuum to do
the experiment in. Air density alone seemed to be enough to bring the
bubble to a halt in midair as soon as it left my hand.

Okay, that got me nowhere, let's move on to the next question.

Is the bubble frictionless?

It sure felt like it. It was very odd to hold it in my hand. I could feel the presence of its shape, but I didn't actually
feel
anything. No texture, no unevenness, no pits. It was impossible to pick
it up or hold it just between the tips of my index finger and thumb.

It was possible to secure the bubble using two fingers and my thumb.
Not just the tips of those digits, though. Holding it with fingers
curling around it established a multitude of contact points, so that if
I held it that way, loosely, it would finally behave itself. More or
less. If I squeezed it too hard the bubble would still squirt away,
like when you squeeze too tight on a bar of soap.

So
now
where was I?

Results of first round of experiments:

It seems to be weightless.

It seems to be frictionless.

I didn't need to log on to my physics textbooks to know both of
those things were impossible, in the real world. Weightlessness,
frictionlessness, those ideas were useful in math, to define a pure
condition the real world never attains.

Tentative conclusion: I'm probably missing something.

No weight, no friction. How tough?

I got a hammer and some nails. I cut a small hole in a piece of old
linen sheet, not big enough for the bubble to go through. Then I used
thumbtacks to pin the cloth to the desk with the bubble trapped inside,
just a piece of it showing.

I held the tip of one nail to the surface of the bubble. I tapped
the nail head lightly with the hammer. The tip slid off the bubble
surface. I looked at the bubble through a magnifying glass. No dent or
scratch I could see. I tapped it again, this time a little harder.
Again the tip slipped off. No dent, no scratch.

I withdrew to seek counsel with myself.

I know a scientist is supposed to welcome a challenge, he's supposed
to rejoice at results inexplicable and unexpected... but I'll bet a lot
of them don't. I'll bet a lot of them try to shrug it off, especially
if it doesn't fit their theory. If this thing was ever made public, I
had a feeling a
lot
of theories would have to be rewritten.

The hell with it. I started whaling away at it with all my strength.

After seven or eight blows the piece of linen tore and the bubble
floated up above my desk again, swirling in the eddies my swinging arm
had made in the air. I caught it before it could float into a hiding
place, and put it under a glass tumbler.

I put my face down close to the desk. There was a new, circular
depression in the wood surface. And on the bubble... no dent, no
scratch.

Answer:
very
tough.

I FOUND I couldn't sleep. I went out on my little
balcony and watched the cars go by. Not as boring as it may sound, many
of them were full of students shouting and laughing. People in
convertibles would see me up on my balcony and wave, sometimes invite
me down to join them.

Not too many people on the sidewalks. There used to be a few hookers
who staked out corners within sight of the Blast-Off. Then the Golden
Manatee moved in, and the cops ran them all off. Now, the preferred way
to buy sex in this neighborhood is to get a room in the Manatee and
call one of the escort services. I imagine you'll get a better class of
hooker, but be sure to bring a lot of cash. You'll pay more tipping the
bell captain to bring your escort in the back way than you would have
paid for a whole night with one of the chased-away streetwalkers.

One girl seemed not to have got the message. She came strolling down
the sidewalk, bold as brass, on three-inch cork platform shoes. She
wore a silvery blouse tied up between her breasts and a hollerin'
orange miniskirt. Lots of lipstick, lots of piled-up blonde hair, and
big, dark, pink-rimmed sunglasses at one in the morning. She looked up
at me and grinned.

"How about it, cowboy? Should I come up?"

Cowboy? I thought it over.

"Not sure I can afford it," I said.

"Sure you can, sweetie."

"Oh... well, all right."

"That's what I love. Enthusiasm. What's your room number?"

I told her, and in a minute I could hear the clunking sound of her
huge cork soles. She knocked on the door and I turned off the lights
and opened it.

"Twenty dollars gets you all night," she said.

"All night? Hell, it's already one-thirty."

"C'mon, stud." She put her hand in my groin. "I can tell you're glad to see me."

"That's a banana for my pet monkey. And all I have is ten dollars."

"That'll have to do, I guess." She came into the room and closed the
door. I jumped her as she turned around. I pressed her back against the
door.

"Lipstick! Watch the lipstick, you wild man!"

"Forget the lipstick," I said. Or tried to say, between kisses.

I was tearing at her skirt and she found my zipper. I wasn't
surprised to see she was wearing no underwear. I took her right there
against the door, then on the floor, and finally with her knees on the
floor and her body bent over the bed. In about half an hour we both
collapsed at the foot of the bed, leaning back against the sheets and
blankets we'd torn up.

She still had on her silver lame blouse and big clunky shoes. My
pants were over by the door somewhere. I picked up the skirt and held
it up to the blue light from the streetlight outside. It was even
ghastlier that way.