Red Thunder

“I considered it,” Travis admitted. “I expect you to be able to treat most types of trauma, from a ski

“I guess I can handle that,” Alicia sighed.

“You still making that list of stuff?” Dak asked her. Alicia dug in the pocket of her jeans and came up with a rumpled piece of paper which she passed over to Kelly.

“I’ve bought a lot of stuff already,” Kelly said, “We’re going to have a well-equipped infirmary for diagnosis and treatment. We’ve already [257] got just about all the instruments, from a sphygmomanometer to a little rubber hammer.”

“A spigomo…” Jubal looked delighted. A new long word!

“Measures your blood pressure,” Alicia told him.

“I won’t buy plasma and whole blood until we’re ready to leave,” Kelly said. “I’ve got a list of drugs, and only about half can be bought over the counter.”

“I can probably handle that,” Salty said. We all looked at him. Salty was a man of few words, he seldom had anything to say at the Sunday meetings. “I know somebody in Mexico. He can buy most of them over the counter down there, and anything he can’t buy legally, well…”

The obvious question hung in the air, but nobody asked it. His business, I figured.

Salty shrugged, and answered it anyway.

“He’s my co

It was clear that Caleb and Grace had known this, but Travis and Jubal looked shocked. Jubal looked ready to cry.

“It’s fairly well under control, don’t worry,” Salty said. “The doctors kept undermedicating her, so we took things into our own hands.”

“Naturally.”

“Sure thing.”

“Sorry to hear it, Salty.”

We all offered sympathy and Salty looked uncomfortable, so Alicia brought us back to the subject.

“Morphine’s on my list,” she said.

“I’ll get it for you.”

There were a few more items of business, dealt with in about half an hour. Then, I was ready to head back to the warehouse, but Travis insisted we go out on the lake and fish for a while. “And there will be no talking the project,” he declared.

It was hard to do that for the first hour. But then I landed a big bass, and took the fishing seriously for the next several hours.

[258] Travis was right, I think. You have to take a break every now and then. But when we got back we all went to work with even more determination.

That night Kelly told me where Travis was going.

“I just booked him Daytona, Atlanta, Moscow, Star City, and back,” she said.

“Star City? Star City?” I have to admit, the Russians’ name for their main space base beat the heck out of our old Cape Canaveral. I sure would have loved to go see for myself. “Maybe I could go along, help him carry his bags.”

“Want me to book you?”

“First class, or tourist?”

“First class, naturally. But he’s paying for the ticket himself. ‘This is a below-the-line cost,’ is what he said. It’s what they say in Hollywood for items not on the regular budget. Like the star’s thirty-million-dollar salary.”

“What do you figure he’s go

“Well, I’ve had a few hours to think it over. Unless he’s selling us out to the dirty Tsarist Russkis, he knows where he can get a deal on some used space suits.”

“Huh!” I was remembering my earlier thought, that there was no thrift store where you could pick up half a dozen used space suits. But there was, of course. Ever since the collapse of Communism, Russia had been one big thrift store, selling out to the bare walls. Crazy Boris Says, “Everything Must Go!” Spacesuits ought to be easy enough to find over there, with Travis’s co

WHEN KELLY WAS notified about Travis’s return flight, we flipped coins and I got to be the one who drove the U-Haul to Atlanta to pick him up. It rained all the way there and back, but I didn’t mind. It was nice to get out on the highway for a day.

Travis was waiting at a freight terminal with ten wooden crates covered with stenciled Russian instructions and warnings. Five of them were four-foot cubes, but the other five were pretty much the size and [259] shape of coffins. I asked him how the trip was. He seemed tired, but too wired to relax much.

“Mostly flying,” he said. “I don’t know if I’d a made it back in tourist class. I’m not as young as I was. I won’t lie to you, Ma

“Congratulations. We’re all proud of you.”

I figured he had more to talk about than the drinking, but he wasn’t through yet.

“Over there, I’m still something of a hero, Ma

“Anyway, I got friends over there, friends I never got a chance to alienate. All it takes is a little cash to grease the wheels, then a little more for whatever it is you’re buying… and pretty soon you’ve got what you want, at a tenth of the cost.”

“So those are suits in the boxes?”

“You bet.”

“Why ten boxes?”

“Space suits ain’t like T-shirts. You need a few specialized tools. The helmets and backpacks are in the other boxes, too.” He looked out the window and shivered.

“Georgia, Georgia, on my mind. Can’t get me out of Georgia soon enough.”

“What’s the matter with Georgia?”

“I hate coming to Georgia. I wish Kelly had booked me through Dulles, or even Miami. But you know Kelly. She saved me about five hundred dollars finding that fare.”

After ten minutes with his eyes closed he sat up and shook his head. He cracked the window to let the wet breeze blow in his face.

[260] “It was raining like this the day I set the Montana down at the Atlanta airport.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Didn’t I tell you about that?”

“I don’t think so.” I was pretty sure he knew he hadn’t told me. Why he’d decided to tell me now I had no idea, but I decided to just let him go. Which he did.

“There were warning lights from the diagnostic tests during my pre-flight. They’d come on, then they’d go out. I wanted to postpone the reentry, do an EVA, get out there and bang a few things around with a hammer, see if I could get the lights to stay on or stay off, one way or the other. But they sent me a ‘fix,’ they swore if I ran their program everything would be fine. That’s how it worked on the ground, anyway.

“I told ’em to go stuff their fix, I wasn’t pulling away from the station till I’d eyeballed the thing. And they told me to remember Senator So-and-so was aboard-as if I’d forget it-and he had to be back to make an important vote on the Senate floor, and my head would roll if he was late.”

“Senator So-and-so?”

“Yeah, I forget which one he was, now. God knows I took enough of ’em up back then. Ever since Garn and Gle