Red Thunder

So we took a few pictures, or Kelly did, with her camera in a plastic box usually used for underwater photography. Then we went down to deploy our surface vehicle.

We had loaded it into Module Four. It was hard to believe that, a few months before, it had been Dak’s pride and joy, Blue Thunder. All that was left of it was the pickup bed and body. Sort of like those “stock cars” they drive at Daytona, called Fords or Chevys, actually nothing but car-shaped Fiberglas shells surrounding an engine and chassis, built from the ground up.

Module Four had been pressurized and heated during our flight. Now Dak climbed up a ladder and found a control that released the 15 psi atmosphere inside. When that was done the simple plug-type door was pulled in and up by an ordinary garage-door opener. He stepped inside and handed out six metal tracks, which me and Kelly and Alicia fitted together into two corrugated metal ramps. We lifted one end of each track so Dak could fit them into slots on the module, then carefully aligned them.

Dak operated an electric winch and slowly, slowly, Blue Thunder came down toward us. When it reached the ramp Dak shoved it until its wheels were in the tracks, then we lowered it the rest of the way.

Its undercarriage had been greatly modified. A framework of steel and giant shock absorbers supported the truck body a full three feet above its wheels. But those wheels were just for getting it down the ramp. When we’d rolled the vehicle away from the ramp Dak operated a second winch, and the real wheels came down, like four pink donuts on a spike. They were earthmover tires, a bit over seven feet high.

But… pink?

[338] “The only color they had in stock,” Dak had said. “They’ll do the job.”

The job they had to do was to protect the rubber of the gigantic tires from freezing and flaking away, like his experimental tire had done. It turned out sixteen was how many electric blankets they needed, modified with zippers around the edges, to cover the tires. Each nestled in its own pink cocoon, like weird, flattened Easter eggs.

We got the wheels down and unwrapped, then jacked Blue Thunder up to the proper height, removed the regular tires and replaced them with the big ones. Each wheel weighed eight hundred pounds on Earth, but just three hundred on Mars. We could horse them around without too much trouble.

They call it a Bigfoot, at monster truck rallies. They are all descendents of the original Big Foot, made by some maniac a long time ago. They have only one use: to bounce recklessly over lines of junk car bodies as quickly as possible, preferably without killing the driver by turning over on him.

Only one use, until we took one to Mars, that is.

“It’s perfect,” Dak had said, when Dak and Sam first revealed their creation to us, back at the warehouse. “You’ve seen the pictures, Mars is scattered with rocks, lots and lots of rocks, any size you want. This baby will crawl right over any rock smaller than a Buick. Bigger than a Buick, I figure we’ll drive around it.”

“Isn’t the center of gravity kind of high?” Travis had asked. “I’ve seen them turn over, on television.”

“That’s in a race,” Dak had said. “Fools be driving those rigs way too fast. Keep it down to five, ten miles an hour, it’ll climb over most anything.”

“Yeah, but who’ll be driving at five, ten miles an hour?”

“You’re lookin’ at him. I don’t always drive like I did that night I almost run you over. Right, Ma

“Dak can be an extremely careful driver, when he wants to be,” I said.

“And he damn sure will be, won’t you, son?” Sam had glared at his son.

[339] It took about two hours, Travis barking in our radios if he thought we weren’t being careful enough, to reassemble Blue Thunder. I was glad we’d put in all that suit time at the bottom of Travis’s pool. You don’t dare get careless in a suit, not when there’s nothing outside it but extremely cold, thin, poisonous gas.

Travis wanted us to come in for the night, but it was still several hours away so we talked him into allowing just a short jaunt. After all, we had to see if it worked as well on Mars as it had in the warehouse where we’d first seen it, didn’t we?

So Dak climbed up into the cab, which had been completely stripped of doors, windshield, seats, roof, and most of its instrument panel. Dak had new instruments to look at, and simple plastic seats. He still had a steering wheel, but because space-suit boots were not very flexible he and Sam had substituted a hand control for the foot pedals. Push it forward to go, pull back to stop.

Alicia pulled herself into the shotgun seat, and that was all the seats there were, except a backward-facing bench in the bed. Kelly and I climbed up there and secured our safety lines to a pipe that ran just below the roll bar. Standing up was by far the best way to ride, and Dak had promised to take it slow.

Dak deliberately picked out some fair-sized rocks to climb and Blue Thunder performed perfectly… all in an eerie silence that was partly because of the thin air and partly because of the most important modification that had been made. Under the hood, where you’d expect to find an engine, there was now only two big tanks, one for oxygen and the other for hydrogen. The engine was sitting on the floor of Sam’s garage, and Blue Thunder was now powered by four electric motors, one for each wheel. Beneath my feet, under the truck bed, were six fuel cells. Blue Thunder could operate with only two of them online, but today, as the Martian evening progressed, I could see a line of six green lights on Dak’s dashboard.

“One mile, tops,” Travis said over our radios.

“Gotcha, Captain,” Dak said.

There was a computer screen on the dash in front of Alicia. It showed a map of our landing area, part of the extremely detailed map we had [340] downloaded, free, from NASA. Alicia’s job was to try to match the terrain with the real-time map Blue Thunder’s navigational computer was generating. That information was being fed constantly by our inertial tracker, which was accurate down to about one inch.

The shallow gully we had landed in was curving off to the west as Dak drove down it, and we tried several gullies on the map, sort of like moving a transparent overlay map over a more detailed topographic map. Alicia moved the cursor into a place that might be right, but the computer didn’t like it. Again, same result. But on the third try the computer signaled we’d hit the jackpot.

“I’ve got our position now, Travis,” Alicia said. “Uh… Dak, why don’t you turn right here… I mean, west. Go up that slope, and there should be a crater, about forty feet wide, on the other side.

“West it is, hon,” Dak said, and Kelly and I held on, though the safety lines held us securely, as Dak powered up a slope of about 20 percent.

“Just like four-wheelin’ in the hills!” Dak chortled. He was having the time of his life. How many NASCAR drivers got to hot-rod around on another planet?

We got to the top of the ridge, a bit higher than the one we’d walked up, earlier, and down there at the bottom was exactly the crater Alicia had described.

“We’ll call it Alicia Crater,” Dak suggested.

“The hell we will,” she said. “We get to name stuff? If we do, you better name something a lot more impressive than that after me.”

“Okay, baby.” Dak sounded so contrite that we all laughed, Travis, too.

He drove us along the ridge for a while, but Travis’s voice came again, like a leash on a frisky dog. “I make you one point one miles from the ship right now, Dak. Time to turn around.”

“Yassuh, boss,” Dak said. “Ma

We’d been headed toward the Valles Marineris; the map showed it only 3.4 miles ahead…