Red Thunder

She had endless lists, endless schedules. Before we could tighten a nut or grind a pipe fitting we had to check with her to see if we were out of sequence. Any time of the day we might look up to find her standing there with her electronic clipboard, asking us to clarify this or that system, what do we have to do first, what do we have to do second, and third, and fourth, and nine-hundred-and-fifty-ninth. The next day a new set of printouts would be added to the growing folders of work [253] assignments we all were carrying around, meticulously ticking off each item as it was done, then handing the completed forms to Kelly so she could mark them done in her computer files.

This in addition to compiling and writing the “owner’s manual” for Red Thunder, the specs of every piece of equipment in her, the proper way to troubleshoot a fan or a water pump or a Sears Kenmore freezer, the preflight checklists for each crew member.

This in addition to keeping the books straight and paying all the bills.

This in addition to helping Alicia with her homework every night. And in addition to massaging my shoulders at the end of a day of welding and heavy lifting, before we both fell into bed too exhausted to make love. Some nights, anyway. I began to think seriously about asking her to marry me. If I came back alive, anyway…

MORNINGS, DAK WORKED with me in the warehouse. In the afternoons he left to join his father at the garage, where they were working on our Mars surface transportation vehicle. They were being very tight-lipped about it, not showing the plans to anyone, not allowing anyone to have a look at the work in progress. Not even billing the Red Thunder Corporation for parts, much less labor.

“It’ll be my contribution to the effort,” Sam had said. “It works, or it doesn’t work. We’ll know in a month.” Travis hadn’t objected, glad to have one less piece of the puzzle to worry about. We didn’t have to have a surface transport at all, but it would be kind of a downer to get there and then be limited to trips within a mile of the ship. So we had set aside one tank to carry it, and Dak had showed us what needed to be done to the tank to accommodate the vehicle. It would be the only tank not accessible from the interior of the ship, which meant one less hatch seal to potentially go bad.

Alicia spent all day in her EMT classes. In the evenings she joined Dak and Sam and came with them to the warehouse, where Dak and Kelly, sometimes both, helped her with her homework. Dak reported she was tops in her class, something that made Alicia fairly glow with pride. She had found her life’s work, no question.

[254] I was in charge of product testing. I did that in my vast amounts of spare time, five minutes here, ten minutes there. Even Mom and Aunt Maria and Grace got into the act on product testing, coming over one at a time to help me be sure that every seal, every bolt, every thingamajig and doodad in the whole huge stockpile of building materials and store-bought assemblies was up to the task for which it was intended.

Back in the 1950s a test on living in an enclosed environment had ended early because the floor covering, some sort of linoleum, turned out to be outgassing some really toxic stuff and everybody in the experiment got sick. We would have scrubbers to remove both carbon dioxide and most contaminants that might show up in our air, and detectors for carbon monoxide and a wide range of other poisons. But it was best if we eliminated all those potential problems on the ground.

Luckily for us, NASA had already tested a vast number of substances to assess their suitability for use in launch vehicles and space stations. So 99 percent of the stuff we used was precertified. Again, as in so many things, if that work hadn’t already been done there was no way we could have met our deadline.

But there were a few items here and there that had never been scrutinized, and if we absolutely had to have them, we tested them ourselves in a small sealed chamber.

That was one kind of testing. We spent far more time and effort seeing if this or that could stand up to heat, cold, and vacuum.

Take automobile tires.

“Tires?” I asked Dak, thinking he was kidding.

“Yeah, tires, man. Just your ordinary synthetic rubber steel-belted radials. I want to see how they stand up to cold, and vacuum.”

I knew Dak wouldn’t waste my time, and I knew he probably wouldn’t answer too many questions, so the next day we had a top-of-the-line Goodyear tire delivered.

Our vacuum-testing chamber now had a tank of liquid nitrogen, three hundred and some degrees below zero, and a pump to move the supercold stuff through a grid of pipes inside the tank. We had powerful radiant heaters for testing the other extreme.

[255] We put the tire in the chamber and cooled it down to 150 below. Through the little Plexiglas window it looked okay.

“Take her down to one eighty, one ninety or so,” Dak said, so I did. We left it that way for twelve hours, then pumped out all the air for another twelve, and turned on the heater to about 150 Fahrenheit.

When we opened the chamber Dak picked the tire up in a padded glove… and chunks of hard rubber just peeled away from the tire. Dak didn’t say anything, just carried the tire to the trash Dumpster and tossed it in.

He frowned for two days after that. I began to think that expression would imprint permanently on his face. A couple times he shouted at me for nothing much, which was not like Dak at all. Then on the third day he came in with a big smile on his face.

“Something?” I asked him.

“You’ll see, a few more weeks,” he said, so I left it at that.

The next day sixteen king-sized pink Wal-Mart electric blankets were delivered to the warehouse. The next morning they were gone. Dak had taken them to the garage.

Problem solved, I figured, and turned to other things.

AND ON THE seventh day we rested… long enough to hold the weekly meeting, and for Kelly to tell us we were five days behind schedule. “The cradle is proving to be a lot more difficult to build than we’d pla

“Sorry, Kelly,” Caleb said. “If I’d been around for the early pla

“How many more days you figure you’ll need?”

“Another week.”

Kelly began tapping on the screen of her clipboard.

“There are a few items here and there that I can move up. But in about four days there’s not going to be much for the rest of us to do until we get the upper stage in place.”

“There’s still the matter of the space suits,” Travis said.

“I’ve trusted you on that one,” Kelly said. “If you tell me it’s going [256] to take two weeks to make them, we might as well all relax, because the race to Mars is over.”

“I’ll need three, four days, tops,” Travis said. “I have to take a trip. Now might be the best time to take it, if Dak and Ma

“I can help, too,” Kelly pointed out.

“Sure,” Caleb said. “If I can pull Dak off the rover project four or five days, have him working full-time out here, then with Kelly… then I don’t figure we’d get ’er done any faster with or without you, Trav.”

“I can do that,” Dak said, but he didn’t look happy.

“What if I helped out?” Alicia said.

“No,” Kelly and Travis said at once. Kelly gestured for Travis to go on.

“You getting an EMT rating is one of the necessary factors made me agree to get involved at all. We’ve got to have somebody aboard who can handle a bigger medical problem than a hangnail, which is about all I’m qualified to do.”

“You make me nervous, Travis,” Alicia said. “If you figure I’ll be able to do a heart transplant when I’m done, you’re wrong. Why not take a doctor along?”