Red Thunder

Dak was bent over the plans so he didn’t see what I saw… which was Travis glancing at the video screen just outside the dark vestibule. He stopped, stared, and then pivoted and hurried back to us. He spoke in a loud whisper.

“Cops! I want y’all to stay quiet. Very quiet!” And he hurried over to [248] a big bookcase beside the television screen. He shoved some books aside and reached behind them. He came up with a flat pint of Jack Daniels.

I was stu

… and gargled with it.

He sprayed the mouthful of whiskey into the air, breathed deeply a few times, pulled out one side of his shirttail, kicked off his shoes, and mussed his hair. All of us tiptoed to the television screen, out of sight around the corner. I heard him open the door and we saw the two men in suits standing on the porch. The air reeked of Black Jack.

“Hey, hey!” Travis bellowed. “Watch-y’all want? I can’t eat Girl Scout cookies on account of bein’ on a diet.”

One of the men took a step back. The whiskey stench coming off Travis was pretty powerful. The other said something, and all I could make out was “… Federal Bureau…” I figured I could fill in the blanks easily enough.

“Well, shit fire and save the matches,” Travis said. “What’d I do this time?”

Travis stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door almost shut behind him, and the FBI agents’ voices didn’t carry very far. But Travis’s did.

“Say, are either of you ol’ boys from Texas? Friend of mine, he says nine out of ten FBI agents are from Texas.” A pause, something mumbled by one of the agents. “Oh, yeah? Where in Texas?”

Mumble mumble “… Dallas.”

“No fooling? My wife’s got folks in Dallas. Ex-wife, that is. And you’re from Lubbock? I don’t know anybody from Lubbock. Thank God.”

Travis listened a moment, then laughed himself into a coughing fit.

“Oh, that’s great. That’s great. We got guv’mint men checking out the likes of him? You figure he’s go

He went on like that for a good long time. We could see easily enough from their body language that the agents just wanted to get out of there, as soon as possible. Which they finally did, thanking Travis, giving him bland FBI smiles.

We all hurried to the curtained front window and eased the drapes back. Travis joined us, and we all watched the car back out of the shell driveway and onto the road, and spray crushed shells all over as the wheels spun.

We dropped the drapes back and looked at each other, not knowing what to say. Then Alicia came up with something. “Travis…,” she said, and that’s all it took.

“I know, I know. It shouldn’t be in the house. There’s one more bottle, way back in the pantry under a sack of flour. You can get that one and pour it down the drain, too.”

“Did you drink any?”

“No, I haven’t, not even just now, and I can prove it.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a prescription drug bottle and tossed it to Alicia. “I’ve been taking this Antabuse stuff. And you know what? Looks like even the taste of booze is enough… You’ll have to excuse me a minute…” He was looking green, and he hurried down the hall and into the bathroom. We could all hear him vomiting.

Alicia smiled at the sound. Whatever gets you off, I guess.

“I FIGURE THEY must be getting pretty desperate to start checking out old UFO reports, don’t you?” Dak asked us all.

“Of course, there’s the other possibility,” I said. “That they’re on to us, and closing in for the… kill? Arrest?”

“Always the bright side, huh, Ma

We decided to leave it at that, but none of us got much sleep that night.

23

NORMAL SPACECRAFT DON’T have anything you could really call a keel. Our spacecraft did, in a way. Right from the initial acceptance design we’d known the upper part and the lower part would be joined at a structural member that had to be a certain size and shape to hold the seven upended tank cars above it. It was to be a circular girder; circumference of that circle was twenty times pi, sixty-two feet and almost ten inches.

This is a pretty big circle, and it had to be very strong. It had to bear the considerable to

Two days before FBI Sunday we got permission from Travis to begin work on the supporting structure and the thrust ring itself. We made the supports from ordinary scaffolding. Then we laid out the diameter of the ring and began learning how to build things out of the super-high-grade steel. Parts were welded, parts were drilled and bolted.

The welding on Red Thunder’s cradle was particularly fussy because of the exotic material we were using. Caleb couldn’t trust anyone but himself for most of the work, so Travis and Jubal and Dak and I were [252] sometimes welder’s helpers, and sometimes just in the way. More often we were relegated to the job of preparing the structural members to Caleb’s exacting specs before he did the final assembly. I lost count of how many tons of steel we had to throw away and begin again. Every weld was critical. Every weld could become the source of a potentially fatal air leak or structural collapse.

Just because we were little or no help on the critical cradle construction didn’t mean Dak and I didn’t get plenty of welding done. We had enough to occupy us preparing the tanks for the final assembly. We cut the tops off all of them and welded hefty flanges in place top and bottom. When they were all standing upright on the cradle, we’d lower materials in from the top, building decks and ladders and installing the larger, heavier components from the bottom up. Five of the outside tanks would co

Naturally Caleb had to pass on all our work, adding to his already impossible workload, but it never seemed to bother him. He seemed tireless. “Working offshore rigs is a bunch worse than this,” he’d laugh, when we asked him. I’m proud to say that only twice did he have to make us do a job over. We were learning fast.

There were a thousand things needing to be done, ten thousand pieces all needing to come together in the correct sequence… well, I’d rather have tried to walk to Mars than handle Kelly’s job.