Red Thunder

“No power,” Jubal repeated. He took a huge Swiss Army knife from the pocket of his khaki Dockers, pulled out a thin blade. He peeled back a corner of duct tape, then popped that remote open.

You didn’t need a degree in electronics to tell the inside of the remote hadn’t looked that way when it came off the Sony assembly line. There was something in there that had started life as a printed circuit board, but pieces of it had been roughly sawed off-maybe with the saw blade of Jubal’s Swiss Army knife. There was a rubber band holding two parts together, and what might have been a big glob of Elmer’s glue. And other things. Right in the middle were two pieces of bright metal that I had to stare at for a moment before realizing they were the snipped-off barbs of fishhooks.

“Dis where de continimum get twisted,” Jubal said, pointing with a finger callused from rowing. “Dis where de six-D-space get cut down to fo’, which has to cover itself up.” Jubal laughed. “Oderwise, it be a nekkid sinfularity.”

I translated: six-dimensional space, naked singularity.

“Jubal… maybe you just ought to show us what it can do,” Travis said. “And explain what’s happening, if you can. Can you do that?”

“I can do dat.” He picked up the Squeezer, closed it back up. “To make a bubble,” he said, “all you got do is punch de little button here. De one used to say ‘Play.’ I done scratched de word ‘squeeze’ here under it, see?” He showed it around. He frowned at it. “I ain’t perzackly sure I done spell ’er right. I don’t spell so good, me. Is dis right?” He showed it to Dak.

“Jube,” Dak said, “the things this gizmo can do, I think you’ll have everybody spelling it your way.”

“A whole new verb,” Kelly agreed.

Jubal didn’t look convinced, but shrugged and pointed the Squeezer into the air. He pressed the button with his thumb, and a silver bubble the size of a baseball appeared out of thin air.

“De space done twis’ itself, see?” He looked at us, slowly realized none of us had any idea what he was talking about. “Dis button here, [106] dis lock it. Hold dat rascal in place.” He waved the Squeezer around, and the silver bubble stayed exactly three feet from the business end of the device, no matter how quickly Jubal cut it back and forth.

“She work jus’ on de ball,” Jubal explained. “Now, dis button turn de bubble back t’ru ninety degree, all on a sudden.” He pressed the button marked stop, and the bubble was gone.

“Now I make me anudder…” He pressed the SQUOZE button again, and an exact duplicate of the first bubble appeared. “Shoulda call her de twis’ button, me, but I done dis befo’ I done realyize what goin’ on.

“Okay. Now, I twis’ dis dial rat cheer, and de bubble, she squeeze down some.” The bubble shrank until it was BB sized. Jubal thumbed the control several times, turning the dial after each bubble was formed, until we had half a dozen silver BBs floating in the air above the picnic table.

“Now de fun part,” Jubal said with a big grin. He pointed at one of the BBs and fired. Kelly jumped a little as the BB vanished with a bang, about as loud as a firecracker.

Jubal gri

“De air, it be compress, see? Den when de bubble go away… Boom!” He was happy as a kid with his first air rifle, only Jubal’s BBs exploded.

“Let me see it, Jube,” Travis said. Jubal handed it over. Travis studied it, then hit the squoze button to create a bubble. He looked happy, too. He slowly turned the dial, and the bubble shrunk.

“So you can make them larger, too, right?”

“Dat right, Travis. Jus’ click dat little clicker dere de odder way, to de lef…”

Travis held the Squeezer in front of him, squinting, and he turned the wheel…

He didn’t turn it much, maybe about an inch. If an inch in the one direction had made a golf ball squeeze down to a BB, it seemed logical that an inch in the other direction would expand a golf ball to… oh, maybe a softball. None of us but Jubal knew the scale was not linear, and Travis had inadvertently moved the switch two clicks to the left instead of one…

[107] The Richter scale, for earthquakes, is logarithmic, which means an 8 is ten times the force of a 7…

Jubal’s device was not logarithmic, it was exponential. Which meant the expand/contract wheel on the Squeezer was now one hundred times more sensitive…

The weird thing is that nobody saw it for a couple of seconds. The bubble, floating three feet above the business end of the Squeezer, suddenly seemed to warp in a weird way. I felt a breeze strong enough to muss up my hair, and saw Kelly’s hair blown around, then I finally looked up.

And saw myself, looking down.

It took another second for my mind to adjust to what I was seeing. Somebody had hung a perfect mirror, three feet above us. Looking up, I saw five people with their mouths hanging open, sitting in chairs around an upside-down picnic table.

When Travis saw it, he gave an involuntary twitch… which probably saved us all from “a world a hurtin’,” as Jubal said later, because his thumb twitched on the push/pull button, and the bubble immediately rose to about fifty feet over our heads, just as I had been reaching up to touch it. The bubble had been that close.

“Jesus,” Travis whispered, still staring up.

And I saw his finger going to the off button… and I lunged toward the Squeezer in his hand as Jubal shouted, “Travis, no!”…. and Travis pushed the button.

I’ve ridden out two hurricanes… from a safe distance inland. Mom maintaining the Blast-Off wasn’t worth dying for. Neither of them were square hits, but I know what a seventy-mile-per-hour wind feels like.

This was worse.

With no warning at all, like a flash of lightning, we were swept up in a howling gale. There was a clap of thunder, too. I was lifted along with my aluminum chair. Kelly was blown into the air with me, and we managed to hold on to each other’s hands. For a second or two we were swirling around in the fu

Then, almost as quickly as it began, the storm let up. I felt myself falling, still holding on to Kelly’s hand.

I fell headfirst into the swimming pool.

I could hardly tell up from down, there was so much trash swirling around. I had lost my grip on Kelly’s hand, and that worried me. But I finally got myself oriented and kicked for the surface.

I came up looking right at Kelly, who spit out some water, brushed her wet hair out of her eyes… then pointed behind me and shrieked. I turned around and probably shouted, too, because a giant alligator was no more than five feet from me, and it seemed to be headed my way…

Goddam rubber alligator. I’d disliked it from the first time I saw it.

“Is anybody hurt? Is everybody okay?” It was Travis shouting, I could see him ru

What I didn’t see was Alicia.

We all started calling her name. Travis was looking frantically around him, in case she hadn’t been thrown into the pool. Dak immediately began diving, and I tried to, but the water was so thick with dirt and leaves she could have been two feet away and I wouldn’t have seen her.

I came to the surface about the same time Kelly did. She shook her head, looking scared, and I probably did, too. It had only been fifteen or twenty seconds, but it felt like an hour. I saw Dak surface… and then Alicia came out from under the floating picnic table. I relaxed slightly. What a relief.