Red Thunder

“Sixty degrees doesn’t sound so bad,” Kelly said.

“I wouldn’t bother to pack any sunscreen,” I told her. “For one thing, it’s not Martian summer right now.”

“For another thing,” Dak said, enjoying this, “the air pressure is about one hundredth what it is on Earth, and ain’t none of it oxygen. That’s way below the pressure on top of Mount Everest. Ninety-five percent of the air is carbon dioxide, which, when you freeze it, is what we call ‘dry ice.’ And it does freeze on Mars, the carbon dioxide, most every night. So in addition to some real good thermal underwear, we’re go

“ ‘If we plan to?’ If we plan to?” Alicia looked scandalized. “We couldn’t go there and never set foot on it, could we?”

Dak shrugged, but the truth was, we were worried about that. You couldn’t just run down to the Goodwill store and pick up a few used space suits. I wasn’t sure you could buy them anywhere at all, new or used… or if we could afford them if we did find some. A custom-tailored NASA suit ran right around one million dollars, and that was a great savings over what they’d have run you ten years ago. Since our whole budget was one million dollars, I figured we had a problem.

Because, when you got right down to it… would landing on Mars count if you didn’t get out of the ship?

It sounds crazy, but what were Neil Armstrong’s first words while standing on the moon? “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind,” right? Anybody who knows anything about space history or any history at all knows that.

Actually, in the only way that makes sense to me, his first words were, “Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

[216] Think about it. If I’m standing in the pickup bed of Blue Thunder, I’m standing on Planet Earth, aren’t I? If not, then I spend very little time on the planet. Most of the time I’m standing on concrete, or asphalt, or wood, or carpet or I’m on the second floor of a building or I’m sitting in a vehicle.

Yet it is universally agreed that Armstrong was not “on” the moon until his foot was planted on lunar rock. His thickly booted foot, remember, or else his foot would have suffered a severe burn, not to mention the harsh effects of vacuum.

I had a sneaking feeling that, unless we were photographed actually standing on the Martian surface, our achievement of getting there first simply wouldn’t count. Or it would have an asterisk beside it, like Roger Maris’s sixty-one home runs. “They went there, but they didn’t go there.” They didn’t stand there.

It was a real problem. Because the difficulties of building a spaceship began to seem small beside the problem of making a space suit. A safe space suit. What could we buy and then adapt, perhaps a diving suit?

“So what about the rest of our clothing?” Kelly said, bringing me back to Earth again. Dak frowned at her.

“Blue jeans and T-shirts, right?”

“Well, I don’t plan on wearing any evening gowns,” she said, “but if we’re going to be on television, if we’re going to be famous, we shouldn’t look like slobs.”

“Maybe some kind of uniform,” I suggested. Kelly looked dubious. “Not dorky stuff like Captain Picard and his crew. Something cool.”

“I got a friend, she’s good at clothes,” Alicia said. “I’ll see if she has any ideas.”

“But don’t tell her, ‘Make me some uniforms for people going to Mars.’ ”

Nobody said anything. We couldn’t avoid being noticed, and we had to be able to tell people something when they asked what we were doing. We needed a cover story.

Alicia came up with the best idea the next day.

“Say we’re making a movie. Sort of a Tom Swift Goes to Mars thing.”

Dak looked stu

[217] “That’s exactly right, baby. That way, we can make a spaceship, but we’re not making a spaceship. Just look at the damn thing. Is anybody going to look at that and think, These kids going to Mars, by golly!’ Hell no! Even if the spy spooks come by and take a look, in two seconds they’d walk right out. The thing don’t have an engine!”

He was right. We were all looking at the first rough mock-up of the ship, made from HO-gauge model railroad cars. It looked mighty silly. My confidence in the design, which went up and down, had reached a low ebb when we put it together. You looked at it, you had to figure whoever thought this up was nuts.

We did adopt the cover story of being prop makers for a movie in development. We went so far as to register the title Red Thunder with the Writers’ Guild, to a

“But the movie isn’t Tom Swift,” Kelly pointed out. “It’s The Little Rascals Go to Mars, right?”

“Perfect,” I said. My generation loved those old “Our Gang” black-and-white comedy shorts just like Mom’s generation had, and the generation before that. The only difference was, we had watched them on DVD.

“I’m Stymie,” Dak a

“No,” Kelly said. “Ma

“Alfalfa? That cross-eyed freckle-face dork? No way I’m Alfalfa.”

“I always liked Alfalfa,” Alicia said. “It’s true he wasn’t as handsome as Ma

“Alfalfa was the romantic one,” Kelly said. “He had the most heart.” I realized she was right. So that settled it. I was Alfalfa.

“Who gets to be Darla?” Neither of the girls leaped at it. The Little Rascals were mostly boys, now that I thought of it.

“Kelly’s gotta be Darla,” Dak said. “Darla wasn’t half bad, you know. She could be kinda sweet. And Alfalfa was in love with her.”

[218] “No way out of it, Kelly,” I said. “You’re Darla.”

“And that means Alicia is Buckwheat,” Dak said, with a grin.

“Buckwheat? Buckwheat? Was Buckwheat a girl?”

“What the hell was Buckwheat?” None of us were sure.

“So who’s Spanky?” she asked.

“Who do you figure?” I said. “Little fat kid, smartest of the bunch…” We looked at each other and said it simultaneously.

“Jubal!”

WE WERE STUMPED for a while about what to call Travis. In the end it was so obvious we wondered how we’d missed it. Travis was Hal Roach.

It took our minds off our other problems for a while, but eventually we had to buckle down to the pla

Never in my life had there been so many things I had to buy. Kelly set us all up with Platinum MasterCards and sent us out shopping every morning for a week. We had to rent a U-Haul truck just to cart it all back to the warehouse.

We saved money where we could. Heavy equipment we mostly rented. We got the very best welding equipment because our lives would depend on every weld in the ship. We needed pumps, to create vacuum for testing the durability of components, and to create pressure for testing the tank cars. I thought we should wait on pumps until Travis got back and either approved or shot down the entire idea of using secondhand railroad rolling stock to get to Mars. Kelly said no, we’d need the pumps one way or another, and time was passing.

We bought a standard cargo container like you see on railcars, the kind that can be loaded and off-loaded from freighters and then travel by either rail or truck. We welded it airtight, built a small air lock in its side, and started pumping the air out of it. It was going to be our vacuum testing chamber.

The pressure gauge was nowhere near the point we needed when I heard a squealing noise like a rusty hinge… and the container [219] collapsed on itself with an earsplitting clang! as if we’d dropped it from the overhead crane.