Red Thunder

“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, Ma

“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.”

[59] “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, Ma

“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 [60] 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.

8

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 [62] 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 uneve

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 [63] 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.