Red Thunder

The fridge would hold cans of soda pop, and fresh fruits and vegetables. Alicia demanded we bring whole wheat flour so she could bake [270] bread. I wondered if she’d find time for it, but why not? I liked fresh-baked bread as much as she did. So we packed some cold cuts and peanut butter and jelly, too.

We had a microwave oven and a radiant-heat oven just big enough to heat a frozen pizza or bake a few loaves of bread. Beside them would sit our espresso machine.

Opposite this little galley we installed a prefab breakfast nook. We bought it at a local building supply store, and it had a ’50s diner look to it, with red vinyl padded seats and a Formica top. It would easily seat the five of us.

We carried playing cards, a Monopoly board, and dominoes. None of us but Travis and Jubal knew how to play dominoes. Travis promised to teach us, and I suspected they might be expensive lessons. I could end up back on Earth broker than when I left.

The deck below that was the one that contained the hatches to all five of the other tanks. We set up the infirmary there. At launch, and until and unless we needed it, the infirmary deck would be mostly bare. We carried enough folding cots to accommodate all of the Ares Seven if we had to. Alicia’s medical supplies and instruments were in cabinets against the infirmary walls.

The two decks below were crew quarters, two “staterooms” to a deck. The captain and Jubal had the two on the upper deck, and below were the one Dak and Alicia would share, and my own lonely bunk. The rooms were small and without many frills, though we painted them warm colors to make them feel a little less like jail cells. Each contained an air mattress on a platform with clothes storage beneath, a bedside table with lamp and alarm clock, and a simple intercom and alarm bell.

We built from the bottom up. When a deck was finished the ceiling would be lowered into the tank and welded in place, becoming the floor of the deck above. These floors were made of metal grills. This made the ventilation system simpler, since air could find its way through the floors as well as the ducts.

When a deck was finished we installed insulation on all the walls-we used ordinary Owens-Corning, the kind with the Pink Panther [271] printed on it-and covered them with big Styrofoam panels. All pipes and ducts and wires were exposed, for easier repair if that became necessary.

After two weeks we had capped one of the outer tanks and gained two days, putting us only three days behind schedule, with thirty days to M-day.

After another week we had capped two more tanks… but had had to remove the first one and tear out part of the air system, which was giving us no end of problems. We lost one of the days we had gained.

SIMPLY TO BUILD Red Thunder in sixty days would not have been a problem. But building it was not enough.

“Three parts to the problem,” Travis drilled into us. “Construction, testing, and training. Construction is the easy part. We’re not going to take off in a ship we don’t know how to operate.”

As the ship took shape we had to do exhaustive tests of each of the ship’s systems, testing right up to the point of failure, and sometimes beyond. We had that demonstrated to us vividly when an air system broke down and we were unable to fix it with the tools we would have aboard. So, tear it out, design it again, build the new system, and test that to its limits. Each item that didn’t work properly the first time and every time thereafter put us further behind schedule. Travis was uncompromising, and though we chafed at it, we knew he was right.

But training was the worst.

From the earliest Mercury days of ma

As if this weren’t enough, we also had to train in the Russian space suits.

We had the manual translated, and by the time we were done we [272] all had practically memorized it. We each had to log ten hours working in the pool with weights on our feet. That meant that another person had to be there to operate the rented crane to yank us out of the water if something went wrong.

Things did go wrong. The suits had been sitting on the shelf for a long time, which wasn’t good for them. My very first training session, when I was supposed to be learning the use of a NASA-surplus zero-gravity power wrench, I spent the first fifteen minutes shivering as the suit cooling system brought me down almost to the freezing point, and when I had that adjusted right, my left glove sprung a leak and we had to abort.

We were at one of our regular Sunday meetings. Kelly was surrounded by stacks of paper and no less than three digital assistants, spread out on the picnic table at the Rancho. Each Sunday she handed each of us a small booklet detailing our every task, every movement for the coming week.

I looked around. Dak seemed to have lost weight, which he couldn’t afford. Alicia wasn’t smiling much. We had all been daunted to find how leaky the suits were.

“One more arm, and one more leg, and I think we’ll have five completely sound space suits,” she was telling us. She looked up at Travis. It was his money.

“Go for it,” he said. But he didn’t look happy. Donating the suits was turning out to be more expensive than he’d bargained for.

We spent an hour talking. When that was done Kelly opened the big cardboard box she’d brought to the meeting. She pulled something out of it.

“Bomber jacket?” Travis asked, with a grin.

“They had a special at Banana Republic,” Kelly said. She stood up and put the jacket on. She looked great in it, but that was no surprise, she looked great in everything.

Dak and Alicia were out of their chairs, finding their jackets and putting them on. Kelly tossed one to me. I looked it over before putting it on. It looked used, but with leather jackets that was good. Somehow they stress the leather without weakening it, so it becomes supple and [273] soft. I put it on and liked the feel of it, though it was far too warm for a Florida summer day. On the front, where a soldier would wear his medals, there was a name strip: garcia. Below that was an embroidered triangular mission patch. It showed the ship blasting in orbit around Mars, with Red Thunder written along the bottom. The patch was on the back, too, but larger.

“Did you do this?” Travis asked, pointing to the logo on the back of his jacket.

“I’m not that artistic. I’ve got a friend who’s a graphic designer. Do you like it?”

We all did. Nobody had any objections to the jackets, either. They beat the hell out of NASA’s tired old blue jumpsuits.

“Who’s the friend?” I asked.

“A guy named 2Loose.”

I was delighted. “You know 2Loose, too?”

“He did a mural on the new women’s center,” Alicia said.

Henry “2Loose” La Beck was an old classmate of mine, the Tagger King of Central Florida. In his outlaw days he must have painted a thousand walls and two thousand railroad cars. He did a little time for it, but often the owner of the violated building dropped charges after studying his work for a while, he was that good. Plus, he could run very fast.

Last I’d heard of him he’d cleaned up his act, gone legit, formed his own company and was doing pretty well. A lightbulb went on inside my head.

“Hey, how about we get him to paint Red Thunder!”

All I got at first were blank looks.

“It’s already painted,” Travis said.

“Yeah, but not like 2Loose can paint it,” Dak said, with a grin. “He did some work on Blue Thunder. Just the pinstripes, I didn’t want no Sistine Chapel ceiling.”