Red Thunder

We got rid of him as soon as we could, and I hurried to Kelly’s office, knowing how badly he could affect her.

I found her on the phone, and she seemed to be doing fine.

“Who’re you calling?”

“Locksmith. I’m changing the locks on all the doors.”

Sounded good to me.

THE NEXT DAY we got another visit from the FBI, Agents Dallas and Lubbock.

I was closest to the door when the bell rang, so I went there and saw them on the television screen. My heart skipped a beat… but as I [283] turned the camera, I couldn’t see any SWAT team or uniformed Daytona police. I couldn’t see anyone at all except Dallas and Lubbock. I called Travis and told him who was here. He was at my side within a minute, and everybody else was following him. He smiled at me and opened the door just enough to slip outside. The rest of us clustered around the little television screen.

There wasn’t much to see. Travis did his loud redneck act, and the agents stood rigid as ma

Then they were getting back into their Feebmobile and driving away. Travis watched them, waved, then came back through the door. He was drenched in sweat. He pulled at his shirt, getting the cool air of the warehouse circulating.

“Man, could I use a drink.” Alicia ran to get him a cold lemonade.

“They’re pissed off, boys and girls,” he said. “They must be, to tell me about it. Whoever’s in charge of the search must be one stubborn cop, because now he’s got his agents going back over old ground.”

“They told you that?” Dak asked.

“Not in so many words. But FBI agents see themselves as an elite. They’re not supposed to have to pound the pavement like beat cops. They were hot-the air conditioner in their car broke down-and they’re tired, and they’re fed up with the FBI and the search for a flying saucer. So they said a few things they normally wouldn’t have. They’re looking into my neighbor now, the Jesus freak. He hasn’t let them in to tour his compound-and why should he? He’s no David Koresh, but he hates guv’mint men.”

“So you think we’re okay?” Kelly asked. Alicia came back with a tall glass of lemonade. Travis drank half of it at once.

“Okay? I won’t feel okay until we’re out of the atmosphere.”

M-DAY MINUS FIVE, and the four of us went up the ramp, into the lock, and sealed it behind us. For the next five days we’d eat, drink, and breathe only what was stored inside Red Thunder. We were all pumped.

[284] We didn’t stay that way too long. There were tests to run, drills to go through. Each of us had to be checked out on getting into a suit and down the ladder to the lock. Then the hours began to stretch. Soon we broke out the Monopoly board there in the systems control deck and began a game we figured would last the whole five days.

We should have known Travis wasn’t going to let us just sit and vegetate, not when there was more training he could hit us with.

At hour thirteen an alarm bell began ringing on every deck, and a voice began intoning, “Pressure breach, Module Two, this is not a drill, this is not a drill.” It was Kelly’s voice, stored in the computer. Somehow, that made it even scarier. We knocked the Monopoly board over scrambling to our assigned stations.

Tank two was my department, so when we got to the center crossroads Dak grabbed the emergency suit from a locker as I leaned in and closed and dogged the outer air-lock hatch. I could hear a whistling sound but didn’t feel any rush of wind. We’d had Red Thunder dogged down tight with an overpressure of one-quarter of an atmosphere for a full week, using the main air lock to enter and leave, and she’d been tight as a drum.

Dak had the emergency suit unzipped and held up in front of him with the zippered side to me, just as we’d practiced a dozen times. This suit was another Russian surplus item Travis had brought back from Star City, not nearly as expensive as the other suits had been. He had bought four of them. It was nothing but a clear plastic bag in the shape of a human being, one size fits all. There was a small oxygen bottle mounted on the chest. The hands were mittens instead of gloves. When you were inside one, you looked like somebody’s dry cleaning, in a plastic wrapper.

The Russians had developed these suits for space stations. The idea was that you could don one in fifteen seconds and then have about thirty minutes to deal with an emergency after you’d lost all cabin air.

Or, if there was nothing you could do about it, and if you weren’t in direct sunlight and being roasted like a chicken wrapped in tinfoil, somebody in a proper suit could carry you to a safe environment. There [285] was a handle right on top where your rescuer could grab you like a caveman dragging his wife by the hair.

I stepped into the suit legs and Dak shoved the thing over me. I turned, and he zipped it. It was unca

“Twenty-six seconds,” Dak shouted. We’d never managed the fifteen seconds the Russians claimed. Alicia was our record holder at nineteen seconds.

I twisted the valve on the oxygen bottle and the suit blew up until I looked like the Michelin Man. I put one foot into the air lock, then the other foot, and crouched, the air-lock chamber being only four feet in diameter. Dak closed the hatch behind me, and I heard him latch it tight. I slammed the cycle button with one hand, and in a moment the green light came on, signaling that pressure was equalized inside the lock and on the other side. The pressure gauge was reading about 1.20 atmospheres, when it should have been 1.25. Temperature was seventy-five Fahrenheit, exactly where it should be.

I opened the i

The hole was perfectly round. Somebody had drilled it.

A cigarette camera lens poked through the hole. Faintly, from outside the ship, I heard Travis’s voice.

“I make it three minutes and fifteen seconds,” he said. “Some of you might actually have lived.”

I shoved the camera back, heard Travis laugh. I took the patch I’d brought and peeled the backing off the sticky side. It was made of hard [286] rubber, about the same flexibility as a car tire but more resistant to heat and cold. The patch stuck in place. It was only an emergency measure, we had better patches and the tools to apply them, and I’d do that as soon as I caught my breath.

I tried to be angry at Travis, but what was the point? The systems test was the perfect time to throw real-world problems at us, things we’d drilled on using computer simulations. But no simulation could really duplicate the real world.

And did he ever throw problems at us. There were a hundred practical jokes hidden in Red Thunder now, a whoopee cushion under every seat, so to speak. Travis could activate them from outside and watch us with the cameras that covered every inch of the ship’s interior except the staterooms and heads.

So we got too hot and had to fix it, got cold enough that frost formed on the walls and we could see our breath, and we fixed that. We fixed problems, large and small, about once every three or four hours the entire time we were there. It was exhausting.

But we fixed them. We fixed every one of them.