Red Thunder

The one area where you are freer than you are on Earth is your freedom from gravity. Free fall. Weightlessness. Flying like a bird, bouncing around like a rubber ball. You can’t possibly read about it, or see it, without wishing you could be that free.

Ironically, Red Thunder took that away. Not that I’m complaining. Months and months of weightlessness, or three days of one-gee acceleration and deceleration? I think anybody would opt for the three days.

[325] But then there was turnover.

It was possible to turn the ship without turning off the drive, but it had never really been done before, and Travis, like all good pilots, was a staunch conservative. He would turn off the drive before turning around, and he would do it slowly, taking between ten and fifteen minutes. So for that amount of time, we would get to have fun in free fall.

We spent the last hour before turnaround tidying up the ship, since anything that wasn’t tied down would immediately float when the drive went off. That could really be a

The last thing that happened before turnaround was that Travis handed out plastic garbage bags. We laughed, and he just gave us a small smile.

Two minutes after engine shutdown, I was sick as a dog.

My only consolation was that Dak was blowing chunks, too. We each filled our plastic bags, and asked miserably for another. Ten minutes into turnaround I was cursing Travis, Can’t you get this over with faster? By then I was into the stage where you’ve brought up everything you have, and still can’t stop. The dry heaves.

How could it possibly be worse? Oh, please. The thing that made it infinitely worse was… Alicia and Kelly were having the time of their lives.

They loved free fall. They bounced off the walls, did midair aerobatics that would have made the Red Baron proud. From time to time they stopped laughing enough to apologize… and then the ridiculousness of the situation hit them again. I doubted I’d ever forgive them.

“Almost there, guys,” Travis called from above us. “Don’t get discouraged. Over fifty percent of people experience nausea on their first flight.”

“Did you get sick?” Dak asked. I said nothing. I was at the point where simply hearing the word “nausea” was enough to send me into a fresh fit of barfing.

“Well, no. Luck of the draw, I guess. Okay. Everybody strapped in? [326] Now, look at the space over your heads. If there’s anything floating in that space, it’s go

We reported we were clear. Travis eased the throttles up… and I felt myself settling down into the foam of my acceleration chair. There was a g-meter in my line of sight, just a needle attached to a spring, and I watched it creep toward that magic number of one gee…

And the whole ship shuddered, there was a huge thump! from somewhere aft, and Travis eased up on the throttles so fast we all would have been thrown from our couches if we hadn’t been held in place with lap belts.

Instantly I was too scared to be sick. We all looked around, knuckles pale as we gripped the air rests.

“No alarm,” Dak whispered. He was right. No bells clanged, no recording of Kelly told us This is not a drill! How could that be?

“No pressure breach,” I said, sca

“The ante

“We lost the ante

“What did it hit?” I asked.

“It hit a strut,” Travis said. “Ma

I unbuckled, my queasiness returning, and floated up to the bridge. Travis was out of his command chair, leaning close to a side window for a look at the strut.

“I don’t see any damage from up here,” he said, “but I’ll have to go out and take a look.” He lowered his voice, without actually whispering. “If something happens to me, you are in charge. What will you do?”

Throw up, crap in my pants, and have a nervous breakdown, not necessarily in that order, I thought. But I said, “Kill our velocity.”

“That’s locked into the computer,” he said. “Just do what we’d [327] already pla

“Plot a course back to Earth,” I said.

“Never hurry,” Travis said. “Take your time. You’ll have plenty of time. The tutorials for the navigation program are good. But before you do that, while your speed is low, send somebody out, Kelly or Alicia, to check the strut if I haven’t been able to get a report back to you. You and Dak, you aren’t rated for free-falling suit work until you’ve put in eight hours weightless without throwing up. Sorry, that’s the way it has to be. You can not throw up in a suit. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Go on.”

“Reduce speed to a few hundred miles per hour, relative to the Earth… enter the atmosphere tail first, engines firing… and burn up in the atmosphere, most likely.”

“A negative attitude’s not going to help you. If Kelly or Alicia reports the strut is damaged, land in the ocean. She should float.”

“Blow the emergency hatch, deploy the rubber raft, and get the hell out of here,” I said. The emergency hatch was the top of Module One. It was held on with explosive bolts. A standard airline inflatable raft would deploy automatically when the bolts were blown, and it would be up to us to abandon the sinking ship.

“You might consider a water landing even if the strut’s okay, if you don’t have confidence about easing her down on land.”

“I don’t have that confidence.”

“Do what you have to do. Anyway, this is all just standard procedure, this briefing, you know that. I’ll be back here in twenty minutes.” He gri

Alicia poked her head through the hatch.

“Travis, we’ve been talking, we figure me or Kelly ought to go out and check the strut. You’re the captain, you shouldn’t leave the ship.”

Travis sighed.

“There’s wisdom in what you say. But the suits and the lock haven’t been tested, and as captain I won’t send any of you out in them at this [328] point. I have more suit time than the rest of you put together. End of discussion.”

Alicia looked like she was going to say something else, but remembered what she had agreed to. Dak joined her, and he had a suspicious look.

“How do you flip a coin in free fall. Captain?”

Travis took a quarter from his pocket and set it spi

I WATCHED ON a TV screen as Dak and Alicia helped Travis into his suit. I was glad we’d practiced it. When we began it had taken us the better part of an hour to get into one. After a lot of drilling, we could do it in ten minutes, with another five for systems check. Travis did even better, naturally. Kelly joined me on the bridge and we watched through more cameras as Travis entered the lock and cycled it. I saw the pressure gauge drop to zero, then the door opened.

We switched back and forth between a rear-looking stationary camera and the one mounted on Travis’s helmet. Travis handled himself well, securing his safety line, then swinging out and over the strut, where he commenced his inspection. Pretty soon he located the impact area.