Red Thunder

I figure that if Alicia lives as long as Mother Teresa she could win a Nobel Peace Prize, too.

[401] MOM DIDN’T SELL the Blast-Off Motel, after all.

While we were away she and Maria sold tons of Red Thunder souvenirs. They had to set up a tent in the vacant lot across the street to handle the traffic. And from the day we lifted off, there has never been a vacancy. Now it’s a good idea to reserve at least a year in advance. Except for the fantasylands of Orlando, we are the third most popular tourist attraction in central Florida, behind the 500 and the space center. Some years we even beat out Ke

Two years after our return Daytona was hit by a late-season hurricane. The Golden Manatee suffered a lot of damage, some of which exposed foundations shoddy even by Florida standards. The city engineer said the wind from a passing butterfly’s wings was apt to blow the thing over, which Mom and Maria and I wouldn’t have minded if it fell toward the beach, which was where it was leaning, but it might have blown the other way and buried us. With her new clout at City Hall Mom managed to get it condemned, and two days later they blew it up. Before the dust had even settled Mom bought the land, which we turned into a parking lot and large restaurant/souvenir stand with a pedestrian bridge to give the Blast-Off easy beach access. We added a new wing, too. All the rooms have unobstructed ocean views.

Mom wanted no part of the business other than as a part owner. It turned out Aunt Maria actually liked the motel business, just didn’t care for the physical labor. She hasn’t made a bed since Red Thunder took off. She hired Bruce Carter, formerly of the Golden Manatee, to take care of all the hard work, leaving Maria to relax in the shade with her friends, playing dominoes and making sculptures of shell people landing on Mars. The Blast-Off maids are the best paid in Florida, with medical benefits and a pension plan.

Mom suddenly had free time, something she’d had almost none of from the moment of my birth. She was at loose ends for a while, but she soon found many things to fill her day, including volunteering at one of Alicia’s dry-out academies.

She also spent several hours each week at the shooting range. Eventually she tried out for the Olympic team. She didn’t do well at skeet [402] but made it in fifty-meter rifle. Kelly and I and Dak went to Joha

THE HUGE BROUSSARD clan avoided all the publicity, except for Little Hallelujah, as the family called him, the youngest and shortest of Jubal’s brothers. Hallelujah was the only child of Avery who was still deeply religious. He had followed in his father’s footsteps, preaching in a little backwoods church. Red Thunder’s flight and his brother’s unwanted fame was just the kick in the pants his ministry needed, and today he has a cable television show where he often co

TRAVIS JUST CELEBRATED nine years of sobriety. A year of appearances and hearings knocked him off the wagon once, but Alicia was there to help.

Travis stayed in the background as much as he could during the first, frantic weeks. He was content to let the media run with the story of the four kids who built a spaceship almost by themselves, armed only with the strange machine built by Jubal-the man of mystery in the early days-Travis being nothing more than a hired driver. We all tried to correct that impression in all our interviews, but the fact was that our adventure was much the sexier story. Travis’s story concerned nothing more exciting than the possible destruction of human civilization. Can’t sell papers with that.

But eventually, when the media blaze died down a bit, people did start to think about the evil side of the new technology.

Naturally the United Nations wanted to be in charge, from discussions to resolutions to implementation. They offered their meeting halls and their huge staff to facilitate matters. Travis turned them down, [403] politely. Then he issued an invitation to all the countries of the world-except China. Travis was never going to forgive or forget that somebody in that government had ordered the destruction of Big Red and the death of her crew. The other nations were each to choose a delegation consisting of two scientists, two political leaders, and three ordinary citizens to assemble in three weeks at the Orange Bowl, in Miami, to meet with Travis and Jubal and the Red Thunder crew to determine what to do with the Squeezer drive.

A week later he invited the Chinese, too. It didn’t have anything to do with the tremendous diplomatic uproar China’s exclusion had caused. Travis really enjoyed that. He knew going in that you couldn’t exclude one-sixth of the Earth’s population. But you could slap their leaders in the face.

There were plenty of other things to howl about. Seven delegates from each country? Seven from India, and seven from Luxembourg? Does that make sense? “It does to me,” Travis said. “And until Jubal and I stand up and speak our piece and then hand it over to you, it’s our stadium, our ball, and our bat. Stay away if you don’t like it.”

Naturally, it was a zoo. The United States sent the President and the Senate leader from the other party. There had never been such an assembly of presidents, premiers, and prime ministers, and there may never be again. The Orange Bowl was surrounded with tanks and helicopter gunships.

Every imaginable pressure group was there. Some called the Squeezer drive a tool of Satan, or worse, of American Imperialism, Zionism, Racism, International Cartels, the World Trade Organization, Big Oil (which the Squeezer would soon put out of business, but nobody ever said a protester had to make sense), Communism, the United Nations, or those five space aliens who had come from Mars pretending to be human. On the streets, the Red Thunder crew was denounced for “despoiling the natural beauty” of Mars, polluting Earth’s air with radiation on takeoff (a lie, but how do you prove that?), and “encouraging the consumer culture by sweeping Earth’s garbage under the rug.” Guilty on that count, I guess. The Squeezer was a mighty big rug to sweep trash under. In less than ten years every landfill and nuclear [404] waste dump on Earth has been squeezed into a little silvery sphere and used to propel spaceships. This is bad?

They were all opposed to the newly christened International Power Administration and in favor of staying on a polluted and threatened Planet Earth, and many of them threw rocks and Molotov cocktails to prove how passionately they loved the Earth. Three cops died, and two protesters.

It bothered me, but Kelly scoffed at them. “The perpetual two percent of malcontents,” she called them. “Honestly, if God showered ma

So they assembled, a thousand official delegates on the field, twenty thousand reporters clustered around the fifty yard line, the rest of the seats taken by people who had lined up since Travis a

The first day was all Travis’s show.

He brought a large metal suitcase. He opened it to reveal about a hundred dials, switches, and trac-ball controllers. We managed not to giggle when we realized this was the Beta Model of the Squeezer Jubal had built out of scraps lying around his workshop/laboratory. Travis’s aim was to make the Squeezer look a lot more complicated than it really had to be, on the theory that it might get scientists looking in the wrong direction.