Red Thunder

“Jesus squeezus,” Dak breathed. Alicia and Kelly came ru

I felt every ounce of confidence drain right out of me. Were we nuts?

“Well,” Alicia laughed, “like you said, we need to make all our mistakes right here on the ground, because we can’t afford any mistakes out in space.”

I didn’t point out that there were plenty of mistakes we could make right here on the ground that could kill us.

“We gotta get that thing out of here,” I said. “If my mother sees that, she’ll have a heart attack.”

We rented a flatbed and hauled the twisted hulk away, sold it for scrap metal, which was good, because Kelly had paid not much more than scrap metal prices in the first place. That same day we went ahead and bought our first tank car. I got goose bumps watching the switch engine pushing the car over our siding and into the warehouse.

This was actually going to happen!

We cut away the wheel carriages then lifted it with the overhead crane and lowered it onto a cradle we’d slapped together out of used two-by-fours and plywood-Kelly being frugal again. I was begi

The weight of the empty car was stenciled right there on its side: LT WT 72,500 LBS. Thirty-six tons, and a bit. Also the capacity weight: 190,500 LBS., or about ninety-five tons. Over two and a half times the empty weight. That was very strong, I thought.

We hauled the wheel assemblies to a public scale and weighed them, subtracted that number from thirty-six tons, for a tank weight of twenty tons. Seven tanks would weigh 140 tons. To that we would add [220] the weight of the cradle we would build that would co

No worries about keeping weight down, no fuel weight to consider, virtually unlimited thrust for a virtually unlimited time. If only Werner von Braun could see us, I thought, lifting far more weight than his Saturn 5s could, using little silver basketballs. He’d be flabbergasted!

We fitted the tank car cap with an extra-heavy-duty round hatch door, lined it with aircraft-grade silicone seals, dogged the door shut, and turned on the vacuum pump. None of us got close as the air was sucked out. It took a while, and the entire time my ear was listening for that first, awful rusty-hinge squeal.

It never came. The car held up under fifteen pounds per square inch pressure differential applied from outside. I had no doubt it would easily contain one internal atmosphere against the vacuum of space.

“We’re in business,” Dak said, as I turned the relief valve and air screeched into the tank. “You talk to Hal and Spanky today?”

“Mom did. He says to look out for them about noon tomorrow.” Travis had been calling in every day, and the calls had originated from places as distant as northern Maine and the Mojave Desert.

“Might as well hang it up for tonight, then,” he said. “We got a big day tomorrow, trying to sell this thing to him.”

“We’ll sell it,” I told him.

21

TRAVIS GRABBED MY face with both hands and kissed me on the forehead. While I was still too stu

“If they had a Nobel Prize for engineering, these guys would get it,” he a

“It was Ma

“Genius. A stroke of sheer genius,” Travis said.

We were in a room we had been using for meetings, which had become a nightly ritual where we could all be brought up to speed on what everyone else had been doing, and figure out what most urgently needed doing the next day. It was down a short hallway from the office Kelly and Alicia shared, one of half a dozen rooms on the upper level of the warehouse, most of which were empty. This one had a big conference table and a few desks and tables against the back wall, all rented. There was a big brass espresso machine sitting on one of the tables, a gift from Kelly’s mom from when she dropped by one day to see how the “movie prop” business was coming. Now I was afraid I might be spoiled forever. It would be hard to go back to cheap coffee [222] after getting used to a couple lattes every morning before getting to work.

Boxes of Krispy Kremes had been set out in anticipation of Jubal’s return. At the rate he’d been going through them I thought we might look into getting a franchise ourselves, in case this whole Mars business didn’t pan out.

We had gone to the Blast-Off to meet them when they arrived, but Kelly and I had both overslept and didn’t wake up until Aunt Maria pounded on the door and shouted, “They’re here, Manuelito!” We dressed quickly and went down to be embraced by Jubal and Travis. My guts were churning, because that afternoon we had to present our ideas to Travis and the whole project would either continue, or crash and burn, depending on his reaction. I didn’t even want to admit how much it had all come to mean to me.

Before long we all piled into our various vehicles and were on our way to the warehouse, except Maria, who had to work the front desk while Eve, the temp girl we’d hired with money we really couldn’t spare, cleaned up the rooms.

Travis had done a complete walk-around of the warehouse when we got there. The four of us kept up a constant nervous patter, handing it off from one to the next as we went, trying to anticipate any questions he might have.

For the life of me, I couldn’t tell if he was giving us an honest chance. We had all realized during the two weeks of his absence that, let’s face it, all he had to do at any time was to say, “It’s not safe,” and the whole project would be over. Was he already determined to shoot it down? Was he just humoring us-and more important, misleading and humoring his brilliant but dependent cousin-never having intended to give his okay? Were we going to get a fair shake? And would we even know if we weren’t?

THEIR VAN WAS good for some laughs. They had taken it into some places that would have been a lot easier in Travis’s Hummer. There was a dent in the left side where they’d slipped on a muddy dirt road in the [223] Oregon Cascades and banged into a tree. There were scratches from where they’d squeezed through thick brush. And there was dirt. Lots of dirt, with only the windows wiped clean.

“We were in a hurry,” Travis had explained. “No time for car washes.”

The inside was revealing, too. The front seats and floor were neat and orderly, but from there on back it could have provided some students with an interesting two-week archaeological dig. Travis’s military training apparently wouldn’t allow him to tolerate trash in his immediate vicinity, but once it was tossed over his shoulder into the backseat it was gone, as far as he was concerned. There were fast-food wrappers and boxes from all the major companies.

“Krispy Kremes hard to find, up Yankeeland way.” Jubal sounded scandalized.

There were plenty of soft drink cans and paper cups, too. I saw Alicia’s eyes sca