Red Thunder

As it turned out, more qualified than Travis, too. He sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. Jubal got him a bottle of aspirin without having to be asked. Travis swallowed four of them.

“I don’t understand a lot of what Jubal just said,” Travis said. “Oh, wonderful,” Alicia breathed. “I was feeling so dumb!” “Join the club,” Dak said. “Jubal, can I have one of those aspirins?” “So what’s it going to do, Jubal?” I asked. “Will it blow up?” “Might could,” Jubal said, gnawing at a piece of his beard. “Dey didn’ do ’nuff long-term testin’, I figure. More likely, de engine she jus’ shut off and dat de end a dat. Won’t start no mo’, no.” Alicia frowned at him.

“Well, what’s the big deal, then?” she asked. “I thought it was go

[161] “All I know for sure was that Jubal said they were in trouble,” I said. “But Alicia, if their main engine won’t fire… they’ll get to Mars still going… what, Jubal?”

“Real fas’,” he said, shaking his head. “Too dad-gum fas’.”

We were all momentarily stu

“Like he said, too fast,” I told Alicia. “They’ll go right on past Mars and nobody can do a thing about it. They can’t slow down, nobody’s got the juice to catch up with them. They’ll head on out to the stars and get there in about ten thousand years.”

“Nobody kin stop ’em but us’n,” Jubal said. “We got de juice to git us dere.” He looked at Travis. “Now we gotta git de ship to git us dere.”

Travis had his face in his hands. Now he looked up. Not a happy man.

“History repeats itself,” he said. “This country has never really had a ‘space program.’ What we’ve had is a series of races. Sputnik One went up in 1957 and scared the be-… the dickens out of us. Up to then the biggest part of our space program was something called Project Vanguard. Run by the Navy, of all things. In the ’30s the Navy ran the airship program, too. I don’t know why.”

“To keep it out of the hands of the fly-boys, that’s why,” Dak said.

“See there?” He pointed at Dak. “Your dad was a swabbo, wasn’t he?”

“Watch yo mouf’, white boy. My dad was a chief petty officer. Probably still would be, but he got kicked out during a force reduction. And I’ll give you Army and thirteen points right here and now.” Dak slapped a twenty on the table.

“You’re faded,” Travis said. “And the Navy wrecked every airship they had, the Akron, the Macon, the Shenandoah …”

“Prob’ly had Army pilots. Naval carrier aviation is the best-”

“Boys,” Kelly said. “Can we get back to the subject?”

“There was a subject?” Alicia wondered.

“Yeah,” Travis said. “Going off too soon, half-cocked. The Navy never did get a Vanguard off the ground. So Sputnik One goes up and goes, ‘beep, beep, beep,’ and every citizen of America sees the Russkis own [162] outer space, and they are asking their leaders what they’re going to do about it.

“What they did was hand it to Werner von Braun, the top Nazi Kraut we captured at the end of the war. He takes a Jupiter rocket, modifies it a little, and ninety days later there’s an American satellite in orbit.

“And we were off to the races. President Ke

“There’s two ways we could have got to the moon. The way everybody assumed it would be done in the ’40s and ’50s was the piece-by-piece approach. Develop a ship something like the VentureStar, an SSTO, single-stage-to-orbit vehicle. Start putting hardware and people into orbit. Build a space station. It could be huge by now if we’d started in 1958. Then build your moonship in orbit. Make it a ship like the Lunar Excursion Module, in that it will never land on Earth, but not like the Lunar Excursion Module in that you don’t throw it away after you’ve used it once. It returns to Earth’s orbit, refuels, and goes right back to the moon with more people. More people, because right there, right from the very first flight, we would have been on the moon to stay. Put up some shelters on the first landing, stay there a week or so. Your moonships start regular trips back and forth. In a couple years you’ve got a decent colony, a few hundred people. By about 1990 you’re sending people to Mars, by 2000 you’ve got ships on the way to Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons.

“That’s the way everybody figured it in engineering circles in 1958.”

Travis was up and pacing now, and he paused, getting his second wind. Obviously he had been angry about this for a long time.

“But there was another way to get to the moon. You’ve heard of ‘fast, cheap, and dirty?’ Call this the von Braun plan, fast, very expensive, and very dirty. But it was the only way to get there by December thirty-first, 1969.

“Say Columbus took the Apollo route to the New World. He starts off with three ships. Along about the Canary Islands he sinks the first ship, just throws it away, deliberately. And it’s his biggest ship. Come [163] to the Bahamas, he throws away the second ship. He reaches the New World… but his third ship can’t land there. He lowers a lifeboat, sinks his third ship, and rows ashore. He picks up a few rocks on the beach and rows right back out to sea, across the Atlantic… and at the Strait of Gibraltar he sinks the lifeboat and swims back to Spain with an i

“If that’s what it took to cross the Atlantic, this part of the world would still belong to the Seminoles.”

“Would that be so bad?” Dak asked.

“Not for the Seminoles,” Kelly said.

“The Apollo program was possibly the stupidest way of getting somewhere the human mind has yet achieved… but it was the only way to win the ‘race.’

“And the race took a toll beyond the money it squandered. It cost three astronauts their lives. They burned to death in a pure oxygen environment that was loaded with combustible material. Strapped in, the hatch bolted, those guys burned to death because there hadn’t been time to do the slow, methodical testing that should have been at the heart of the Apollo program.

“Don’t get me wrong. I am in awe of the pioneers who flew in those things, and the people who built them. Nobody will ever see a Saturn 5 launch again, but believe me, it was an incredible sight.

“The whole thing, from Sputnik to Neil Armstrong, was done using methods we usually only see in wartime. It wasn’t so much a race as a war. Look at the Manhattan Project. Time is critical, money is no object. We need the bomb now. So, if there’s six different ways to refine uranium 235 out of ore, which way do we try first? Answer: Try all six, all at once.

“It worked. We got the bomb.

“The Apollo managers got all the money they needed because we were at war with Russia. Never got to shooting at each other, luckily, but it was war.

“Then, suddenly, we’ve made it to the moon… and what do we do for Act Two? Why… nothing. Nothing much, anyway. The public found the whole show boring. The funding dried up. We launched five [164] more… and those guys were incredibly lucky, because the LEM functioned perfectly every time, something we had no right to expect. Even so, we almost lost Apollo 13.

“So when we were building a space plane, the next logical step, what happens? There’s not enough money to build the ship we should have built, a very big, piloted, first stage that flies back to the Cape after the launch, mated to something that would have looked a lot like the original Shuttle. Instead, we give the Shuttle a pair of solid fuel boosters that fall in the ocean. It’s madness to put a solid fuel booster on a ma