Red Thunder

“Astronauts working on the space stations and flying in VStars have a radiation protection we’re not going to have,” she said. “The Earth’s magnetic field captures a lot of the radiation from the sun and twists it and turns it down at the poles, where you can see the results in auroras. The level of that radiation varies with activity on the sun’s surface. Solar flares and prominences produce high-energy protons that can be harmful if you aren’t protected from them.” With a click, she brought up a series of pictures of solar flares, beautiful and potentially deadly. “That radiation can even reach down to the Earth’s surface. In 1989 a flare shorted out the power supply in Quebec. Six million people didn’t have any electricity for a while.

“But we can have a little warning about the solar radiation. We’ll have a piece of optical equipment aboard that will watch the sun and if it spots a flare, it will sound an alarm.” She brought up a graphic on the Telestrator. “The light from a flare will go faster than the dangerous protons. We would have a minute or so to get into what they call a ‘storm cellar.’ Basically, we’ll surround one room in the center of the center module with polyethylene, which will stop the protons. They use this stuff on atomic submarines to shield the crew from the reactor.”

One more point Dak and I hadn’t known, discovered through Alicia’s diligence. I glanced at Travis and saw him nodding.

“The other radiation is scarier, to me.”

“Me, too,” Travis put in, quietly.

“They call it ‘cosmic radiation.’ It comes from far out in space, from stars that blow up in a supernova. This stuff travels at almost the speed [228] of light and it’s very powerful. Even the Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t stop all of it, but exposures are higher in outer space. There’s no practical way to shield from it.”

She paused, and it didn’t seem like a good place for a pause, to me. Skim over this part, I wanted to shout. But in the end I guess it’s better to be straight and honest.

“To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t want to be on that Ares Seven ship, or the Chinese one, either. The best way to deal with cosmic radiation is to limit your exposure to it. We’ll get to Mars in somewhere between three and four days. That’s a chance we all agreed we’re willing to take.”

I thought I heard a grumble from my mother, but when I looked at her she was just glaring at the flares on the Telestrator screen, looking as if she’d like to put a lot of bullet holes in it. Somehow I had just known that the idea of radiation passing through her son’s body was not going to exactly thrill her.

It was only toward the end Alicia faltered a bit.

“I haven’t had time to work on waste management,” she admitted. “I guess we’ll need some plumbing. Toilets, some way to heat water…”

“When you go to Sears to get that freezer,” Travis said, “pick up a water heater, too. And a toilet seat.” Alicia smiled uncertainly. “I’m not kidding. Don’t worry about it, Alicia. It won’t be a problem.”

“Well, I guess that’s about it…”

Kelly was already up. She embraced Alicia and invited her to sit down. Then she began her own presentation, clean, crisp, well ordered, and comprehensive without being long-winded, just as I’d expected from her. She covered the financial situation and the procurement status, all the business side of the project.

When she sat down there was silence for almost a full minute. Who would fire the first shot? Mom, or Travis?

Travis. And of course it wasn’t a shot at all.

“Well, I’ve seen worse briefings before a liftoff. Many worse, in fact. Practically all of them.” He turned to Mom. “Betty, I’ll tell you the bad news first.”

[229] “Travis, the only news I want from you is that you can build a safe ship. These kids are going to Mars if there’s even a one in a hundred chance of getting back, I know that. I figure Ma

“Then the bad news is actually good news,” Travis said, not seeming to mind the threat. I did, though. I was getting a little bit pissed off at her.

“We’ve got a terrific start here. They’ve laid out the basics of a ship that can get there and back.”

“Then you’d let your daughters fly in it, is that what you’re saying?”

“No way. There’s a hundred things wrong with it, and until I satisfy myself that they’re all fixable, and then that we can fix them, I’m nowhere near ready to sign off on it. The thing is, I expected there’d be a thousand problems. We’re much farther along than I’d dared hope.” He turned to Sam Sinclair. “What’s your feeling, Sam?”

“I have to admit, it looks sound,” Sam said. He smiled wryly. “Given that the basic idea is flat-out nuts.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more. We’ve got a lot of work to do before it stops being nuts. Here’s where it stands, Sam, Betty… and the rest of you, too.

“The biggest hurdle facing this project is that we’re not going to be able to test the ship before we set out for Mars. If I had my way, I’d take her into orbit first, alone. Then the moon. I’d only go to Mars after that. But you know why we can’t test that way.

“So Jubal and I have been testing it every possible way but a full-scale liftoff. We spent about half our time experimenting to measure the thrust levels we can achieve. We know now how much reaction mass we’ll need for the trip. The bubbles seem to squeeze out just about the maximum power, total mass-energy conversion. So one bubble could produce thrust for years and years. Hell, for centuries.

“The rest of the time we tried to make the system fail.

“And we did have failures on the ground. Nothing to get alarmed [230] about, every research project has failures along the way, and it’s best to have them early on, on the ground, than to have them sneak up on you at the worst possible time, which is what usually happens.

“I’d confidently raise ship and put her in orbit tomorrow, for a short orbital flight, if we had a full-scale ship ready and didn’t have to worry about who would see the launch and return. Jubal has engineered a system of containment and release of the ship’s thrust that is as foolproof as anything made by imperfect humans can be.

“We told you about my fiasco in the ’Glades. That wasn’t any flaw in the bubble technology, it was caused by us not knowing how much energy would be released, and how fast, by Jubal’s… by what we’re calling the Phase Field Interrupter. The PFI. We got it calibrated now, I can release energy accurately down to one percent.

“I told you the PFI makes a pinhole in the bubbles. That’s not strictly accurate. Jubal showed me the math but it was beyond me. What it does, it puts a twist in space so the matter trapped and squeezed inside the bubble makes a little trip through another dimension-and I’m not even sure if it’s the fifth or the sixth dimension-”

“Fift’,” Jubal said. I was surprised, I’d almost forgotten he was there.

“If you say so. The energy twists through some sort of wormhole and travels a distance much shorter than the diameter of a proton, and ends up in our universe, and when it gets here it produces thrust. I know this is hard stuff, I can go back…”

“Go on,” Sam said, and my mother nodded.

“That’s just about it. We couldn’t get the bubbles to blow up, or release any energy at all, except with Jubal’s PFIs… and they’re the only ones on Earth, so far as we know. If someone else has one, they’re being as careful as we are, because there is absolutely no sign that anyone but Jubal is aware of this new branch of physics.

“What I’m saying… in a long-winded way, sorry… I consider the engine part of this rocket to be as safe as any source of power can ever be. Foolproof. Lots safer than a VStar, which is pretty safe.