Red Thunder

32

I KNOW PEOPLE have slept in space suits before. I never expected to. But I almost did, on my last there-and-back crossing. I wished I’d had a cup of coffee first… but Cliff couldn’t wait. Not a hundred million miles from home.

I went back to the Ares Seven with a crowbar and on the third attempt, popped the air-lock manual control access hatch open. I cranked the lock around and Cliff came out. I thought he might have to carry me across, but I made it.

“I sure hate to leave Brin and Dmitri back there like that,” Cliff said.

“Can’t be helped,” Travis said over the radio. “Captain Aquino is too urgent, he’s in critical condition. Anyway, we or somebody else can come back to the ship and get them, if their families want the bodies. I doubt anybody will ever find Welles and Smith, though. Too small a target in too big a solar system. Space will have to be their graves. I wouldn’t mind that, myself, when I die.”

Once we’d broken out and set up two extra acceleration seats-just two cots with lots of foam padding-Travis got us in the right attitude and started blasting toward the Earth. We were close enough to Mars [387] when we found the Ares Seven that this return trip would take just about as long as the outward leg had.

With the acceleration back, Alicia got to work on Aquino. She had brought a collection of CDs on advanced first aid. We all watched with her as trained EMTs set the “femur” of an amazingly realistic dummy. Then Dak and Alicia went into his room and set the bone. That was fine with me. Even the video had freaked me out.

She had been right about Cliff’s arm. The X ray showed a small break of the ulna that was causing him pain and swelling, but wasn’t urgent. “I played a whole quarter with worse than this, back in my football days,” he said. She secured and protected it with an inflatable splint, gave him a shot of morphine and a sling, and discharged him, giving him a bottle of pills on his way out of the infirmary.

“Take two of these and don’t call me in the morning,” she said. “Heck, take four of ’em if you want to, whenever it hurts.”

She treated Kelly’s mild burns and taped up the small wound in her side.

Holly was still not doing so great, so Alicia calmed her down with a couple Percodans, tapered the dose down over three days until she was back to normal… or as normal as she’d ever be again. We all figured she’d never go back into space.

While this was going on Travis was beaming around at all of us, hugging us, slapping us on the back like a happy father at a Little League game.

“Y’all did a miracle,” he told us. “You gave me a lot more gray hairs, but you pulled it off. If they don’t strike some kind of special medal for y’all when we get back, I’ll kick my congressman’s ass all the way from Washington to Key West.”

Washington to Key West. It reminded me of a problem we had not completely solved yet. Where do you land an outlaw, independent spaceship, crewed by people who might be heroes, or might be subject to arrest or worse sanctions by government agencies both open and covert?

“Washington,” Dak said, at what had to be our final discussion on [388] the subject, since we were only about twelve hours from landing. “Put her down right there on the Mall. Show ’em we ain’t fooling around. Public as can be. Right?”

“Miami International Airport,” I said. “It’s public, and people can be kept back and out of danger.”

“And it’s too dang easy to seal it off completely,” Travis said. “Put out a story that we all died from poison fumes or something. Carry us away to Cheye

“Black helicopters?” I asked. Travis ignored it.

“Lock us away behind the fifty-ton blast doors. The spooks work us over with drugs and bright lights in our eyes. When they find out we really don’t know how to build the Squeezer drive, we’re dumped in shallow graves in the piney woods.”

“You really think they’d do that?” Cliff asked.

“No. Mostly, I don’t think so. So I don’t plan to give them a chance to do it. Part of me, what I’d like to do is land her at Edwards Air Force Base, in California. Miles and miles of desert, plenty of room for error, nobody to get hurt if something goes wrong. Or the VStar landing strip on Merritt Island, right at the Ke

“The other part of me wants to set her down on the pitcher’s mound at Yankee Stadium during a game. The middle of Central Park. Coney Island. Someplace with a million witnesses.”

“You land at Coney,” Dak said, “people will start lining up to ride it.”

Travis shook his head. “To a pilot, the only thing worse than falling out of the sky is to fall out of the sky and hit somebody. What we need is lots of people, but not too close. Say, half a mile for the closest people. That way, something goes wrong, I’ve got a righting chance to steer us to a crash landing where nobody’s standing.”

“What about the exhaust?” Cliff asked. “Is half a mile enough?”

“Should be. The exhaust is hot, but not toxic.” We had been filling Cliff in on the story of Red Thunder. Though NASA had not tried to hide our existence from the Ares Seven, they hadn’t exactly been full of information.

[389] “If they actually end up making a movie about you guys,” he said, laughing, “you can bet they’d build a mock-up of your ship and turn it into a ride at Orlando.”

“That’s it!” Kelly shouted. We all looked at her. “We land at Orlando!”

I got it, and gri

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe.”

TRAVIS SLIPPED US into a fairly low orbit around the Earth.

Dak didn’t get sick. He had done okay at turnover, too. It cheered him up, but only a little. We were all aching to get down, Alicia most of all. She had stabilized Aquino, but he was still in critical condition. She had little patience with Travis’s decision not to land immediately.

“I don’t believe in those spooks you talk about, and this man needs better care than I can give him. Now!”

We managed to cajole her for a while. Travis promised we wouldn’t remain in orbit more than six hours, tops. Then he’d set Red Thunder down, one way or another.

Suddenly we were busy again. This close to Earth we didn’t need the lost dish to transmit a signal the people on Earth could pick up. Calls were coming in from all cha

Kelly logged on to her ISP and went to the websites of the various theme parks south of Orlando. In five minutes she had a map that showed what she wanted.

“Lot G,” she said, pointing to the map. “The ‘Goofy’ lot. It’s the biggest parking lot in all the parks. Look at the scale, it’s almost a mile across.”

“Almost,” Travis said, still dubious. “And that monorail runs right through the middle of it. What time is it? Eastern Daylight.”

“Almost noon,” Dak said.

“We give them two hours,” Kelly said. “Make up your mind, Travis. You wanted a big, empty space with lots of people to witness the [390] landing. And I hate to put it this way, but if we crash on top of people, we’ll all be dead and not have to worry.”

“Are you an atheist, Kelly?”

“I’m an ex-Baptist, that’s all I’ll say.”

Travis thought about it for a moment, then nodded.

“Best we’re going to do, I guess. Now all I have to do is get the President of the United States on the phone.”

“Already did, Travis,” Dak said, beaming. “I’ve got her on hold. Don’t look at me that way. She called us, okay?”

“Okay, Dak. Now put this signal out to everybody. Everybody.” He sat in Dak’s chair and took a deep breath.