Red Thunder

“That man takes one drink,” she had said, “that man takes one drop of liquor, Manuel, and I withdraw my consent. Then you can go or stay, which you’ll do anyway, but it will be without my permission.”

“Mom, that man takes one drink, you won’t have to withdraw your consent,” I had said. “I won’t go if he drinks.” And ever since, I’d wondered if that was true.

NOW OUR HO-gauge model spaceship was sitting in the middle of the conference table, considerably spruced up since we first glued it together.

Inside what would be the bridge we had put a light to glow through the windows. We had mounted radio ante

Down beneath were three globular cages built to hold five-foot-diameter Squeezer bubbles, now represented by silver Christmas tree ornaments. We didn’t know what that part would actually look like. That would be entirely up to Jubal.

Then we’d sent it out and had it painted high-gloss candy-apple red. There was an American flag embossed on one side, and the bold words RED THUNDER on the other.

In fact, we’d spent more money on this whole presentation deal than I had thought necessary, and I had questioned Kelly about it.

“Never skimp on the gloss and glitz,” she told me. “I would never try to sell a dirty car. We’ve got guys, soon as a rain shower passes over, their job is to go out in the lot and swab all the cars down with a chamois, so they don’t dry with streaks on them.”

“I agree,” Alicia had said. “Guys, if Travis intends to give us a fair hearing, we need to give the impression that we do thorough work. For that, appearance counts.”

So we made sure the plan, the ship model, and all the backup materials were as professional as possible, and hang the expense.

We rented a huge flat-wall SuperHiDef screen and spent a few hours learning to use the Telestrator system in our shipbuilding program so we could point and click with an electronic wand to expand, slice and dice, rotate, swoop and swirl, pan, zoom, and dolly in or out with ease as we explained the various features. Pretty soon we were creating graphics as good as any television sports broadcast, in real time.

Hanging on the walls around the Telestrator screen were three-by-four-foot color prints of some old magazine covers and Walt Disney posters from the 1950s, for no better reason than that they looked good… and showed some spaceships that actually looked like Red Thunder.

We had found them during computer searches. An artist named [225] Chesley Bonestell had painted covers of spaceships for science fiction magazines, the result of the best scientific thinking of the time, some of them in space, others sitting on the Martian surface. And the Disney organization had made some short subjects around that time, speculating about how we might conquer space. One of the Disney ships bore a startling resemblance to Red Thunder, a central cylinder surrounded by cylindrical fuel tanks, though the tanks were not as large as Red Thunder’s tank cars. Printing and hanging them had been my idea, I admit it. I thought that, surrounded by these lovely old renderings, my crazy idea for a Martian ship didn’t look quite so crazy. I’d downloaded them and had them printed professionally, photo-quality.

So what was the first thing that happened when Travis walked into the conference room with us and saw the model, sitting there in the middle of the conference table under a baby spotlight?

He stopped and frowned for a moment, then he burst out laughing.

My face felt like it was on fire. I actually felt dizzy for a moment. It’s not an experience I’d like to repeat. It was undiluted humiliation.

Luckily, Travis realized it in a second, and the next thing I knew he was hugging me, kissing me, calling me a genius.

FROM THERE. THE sailing was pretty smooth.

We each took our turns at the Telestrator, as we had rehearsed it. Travis would watch, and nod or occasionally frown. When he frowned we waited to see if he had a question. We felt… we hoped we had an answer to all but a few of his possible objections, and thought we ought to get them taken care of as quickly as possible. But he always told us to go ahead.

And he did seem to enjoy it. He kept looking back to the model, turning it slowly, squinting at it, so we’d stop and wait for his attention to return.

We had divided the presentation into four parts. I got to go first because I’d been named chief design officer. Sure, I thought, until Travis gets back, and I pray for that day. I was terrified that, once he saw the details, he’d be laughing again.

[226] But he didn’t laugh again. Most of the time he was nodding, some of the time he was even smiling. I got my part over in about twenty minutes, giving the broad general outlines of our thinking, showing everything we had on the screen. Then I handed the control wand to Dak and sat down, wishing I had a towel for the sweat that was drenching me in spite of the powerful air conditioning.

Dak was wearing two hats on the project. First, he was systems engineer. He had been hard at work learning what communications we needed to keep in contact with planet Earth. He was also struggling to design the ship’s internal power systems, and it was becoming a problem. He didn’t exactly gloss over it but he didn’t spend a lot of time on it, either. I knew a mental note had been taken.

The second hat was surface transportation, and Dak hadn’t been around the warehouse much in the last few days as he and Sam got started on that.

Then it was Alicia’s turn, and the rest of us crossed our fingers. We had named her environmental control officer. Yes, we were all officers. Why not?

Alicia labored under a triple inferiority complex. The first part was math and science anxiety, which most girls I’ve known have. It seems to come with the territory. Second, she had never finished high school. Given her life story, I thought it was a miracle she had attended school at all; and learned anything at all. But Alicia felt outclassed by her three honor student friends.

Third, she felt that Dak was much, much smarter than she was, and she was afraid she would never be able to keep him because of that.

Some of that was obvious to anybody who was watching, and some of it I learned lying on my pillow with my arm around Kelly, who was doing everything she could-as Dak and I were, too-to convince Alicia she was wrong to worry about all three points. Which was the simple truth. Alicia might not know how to extract a cube root, but she had tons of smarts, in areas that really mattered. Come to think of it, I can’t extract a cube root, either, without a calculator.

But, my lord, how that girl had been working.

Her desk in the other office was piled high with printouts. Dak had [227] gotten her started, showing her which sites to go to for the information she needed. Most of them were government sites, many of those part of the NASAWEB. It’s amazing how much stuff you can get free from the government if you know where to look.

She spoke for about twenty minutes, using the clicker to highlight the air tanks and fans arid ventilation ducts we’d designed. As she went on, her confidence grew. She talked knowledgeably about carbon dioxide scrubbers, carbon monoxide and smoke detectors, about the heating and cooling systems, and our biggest bugaboo, radiation.

She had learned more about it than Dak and I had known.