Red Thunder (29 page)

I had a sneaking feeling that, unless we were photographed actually
standing on the Martian surface, our achievement of getting there first
simply wouldn't count. Or it would have an asterisk beside it, like
Roger Maris's sixty-one home runs. "They
went
there, but they didn't
go
there." They didn't
stand
there.

It was a real problem. Because the difficulties of building a
spaceship began to seem small beside the problem of making a space
suit. A
safe
space suit. What could we buy and then adapt, perhaps a diving suit?

"So what about the rest of our clothing?" Kelly said, bringing me back to Earth again. Dak frowned at her.

"Blue jeans and T-shirts, right?"

"Well, I don't plan on wearing any evening gowns," she said, "but if
we're going to be on television, if we're going to be famous, we
shouldn't look like slobs."

"Maybe some kind of uniform," I suggested. Kelly looked dubious.
"Not dorky stuff like Captain Picard and his crew. Something cool."

"I got a friend, she's good at clothes," Alicia said. "I'll see if she has any ideas."

"But don't tell her, 'Make me some uniforms for people going to Mars.' "

Nobody said anything. We couldn't avoid being noticed, and we had to be able to tell people
something
when they asked what we were doing. We needed a cover story.

Alicia came up with the best idea the next day.

"Say we're making a movie. Sort of a
Tom Swift Goes to Mars
thing."

Dak looked stunned, then slapped his palm on the table.

"That's exactly right, baby. That way, we can make a spaceship, but we're not making a
spaceship.
Just look at the damn thing. Is anybody going to look at that and
think, 'These kids going to Mars, by golly!' Hell no! Even if the spy
spooks come by and take a look, in two seconds they'd walk right out.
The thing don't have an
engine!
"

He was right. We were all looking at the first rough mock-up of the
ship, made from HO-gauge model railroad cars. It looked mighty silly.
My confidence in the design, which went up and down, had reached a low
ebb when we put it together. You looked at it, you had to figure
whoever thought this up was nuts.

We did adopt the cover story of being prop makers for a movie in development. We went so far as to register the title
Red Thunder
with the Writers' Guild, to announce we were in preproduction, and to
set an imaginary start date almost a year away. The only downside to
the idea was getting phone calls from agents and hopeful actors almost
every day asking when we were casting. We always told them the script
was in rewrites, and we'll call you back.

"But the movie isn't Tom Swift," Kelly pointed out. "It's
The Little Rascals Go to Mars,
right?"

"Perfect," I said. My generation loved those old "Our Gang"
black-and-white comedy shorts just like Mom's generation had, and the
generation before that. The only difference was, we had watched them on
DVD.

"I'm Stymie," Dak announced. "You figure Manny for Spanky?"

"No," Kelly said. "Manny is Alfalfa."

"
Alfalfa?
That cross-eyed freckle-face dork? No
way
I'm Alfalfa."

"I always liked Alfalfa," Alicia said. "It's true he wasn't as
handsome as Manny... but Dak is much handsomer than Stymie, too." Dak
kissed her.

"Alfalfa was the romantic one," Kelly said. "He had the most heart."
I realized she was right. So that settled it. I was Alfalfa.

"Who gets to be Darla?" Neither of the girls leaped at it. The Little Rascals were mostly boys, now that I thought of it.

"Kelly's gotta be Darla," Dak said. "Darla wasn't half bad, you
know. She could be kinda sweet. And Alfalfa was in love with her."

"No way out of it, Kelly," I said. "You're Darla."

"And that means Alicia is Buckwheat," Dak said, with a grin.

"Buckwheat?
Buckwheat?
Was Buckwheat a girl?"

"What the hell
was
Buckwheat?" None of us were sure.

"So who's Spanky?" she asked.

"Who do you figure?" I said. "Little fat kid, smartest of the bunch..." We looked at each other and said it simultaneously.

"Jubal!"

WE WERE STUMPED for a while about what to call Travis.
In the end it was so obvious we wondered how we'd missed it. Travis was
Hal Roach.

It took our minds off our other problems for a while, but eventually we had to buckle down to the planning again.

Never in my life had there been so many things I had to buy. Kelly
set us all up with Platinum MasterCards and sent us out shopping every
morning for a week. We had to rent a U-Haul truck just to cart it all
back to the warehouse.

We saved money where we could. Heavy equipment we mostly rented. We
got the very best welding equipment because our lives would depend on
every weld in the ship. We needed pumps, to create vacuum for testing
the durability of components, and to create pressure for testing the
tank cars. I thought we should wait on pumps until Travis got back and
either approved or shot down the entire idea of using secondhand
railroad rolling stock to get to Mars. Kelly said no, we'd need the
pumps one way or another, and time was passing.

We bought a standard cargo container like you see on railcars, the
kind that can be loaded and off-loaded from freighters and then travel
by either rail or truck. We welded it airtight, built a small air lock
in its side, and started pumping the air out of it. It was going to be
our vacuum testing chamber.

The pressure gauge was nowhere near the point we needed when I heard
a squealing noise like a rusty hinge... and the container collapsed on
itself with an earsplitting
clang!
as if we'd dropped it from the overhead crane.

"Jesus squeezus," Dak breathed. Alicia and Kelly came running down
the stairs from the office, and we all stood together and stared at
what had once been a rectangular container, like a huge box of
Velveeta. Stomping on an empty aluminum Coke can, you could hardly have
smashed it as flat as that container.

I felt every ounce of confidence drain right out of me. Were we nuts?

"Well," Alicia laughed, "like you said, we need to make all our
mistakes right here on the ground, because we can't afford any mistakes
out in space."

I didn't point out that there were plenty of mistakes we could make right here on the ground that could
kill
us.

"We gotta get that thing out of here," I said. "If my mother sees that, she'll have a heart attack."

We rented a flatbed and hauled the twisted hulk away, sold it for
scrap metal, which was good, because Kelly had paid not much more than
scrap metal prices in the first place. That same day we went ahead and
bought our first tank car. I got goose bumps watching the switch engine
pushing the car over our siding and into the warehouse.

This was actually going to happen!

We cut away the wheel carriages then lifted it with the overhead
crane and lowered it onto a cradle we'd slapped together out of used
two-by-fours and plywood—Kelly being frugal again. I was
beginning to see just how her family had got rich and stayed that way.
She never spent an unnecessary penny. But she never scrimped when only
the best and newest would ensure safety.

The weight of the empty car was stenciled right there on its side:
LT WT 72,500 LBS. Thirty-six tons, and a bit. Also the capacity weight:
190,500 LBS., or about ninety-five tons. Over two and a half times the
empty weight. That was very strong, I thought.

We hauled the wheel assemblies to a public scale and weighed them,
subtracted that number from thirty-six tons, for a tank weight of
twenty tons. Seven tanks would weigh 140 tons. To that we would add the
weight of the cradle we would build that would connect the thrusting
engines to the main body of the craft, plus the landing legs, plus
everything we added inside, including the Sears Kenmore freezer and six
people. We guessed we could bring it in under two hundred tons.

No worries about keeping weight down, no fuel weight to consider,
virtually unlimited thrust for a virtually unlimited time. If only
Werner von Braun could see us, I thought, lifting far more weight than
his
Saturn 5s
could, using little silver basketballs. He'd be flabbergasted!

We fitted the tank car cap with an extra-heavy-duty round hatch
door, lined it with aircraft-grade silicone seals, dogged the door
shut, and turned on the vacuum pump. None of us got close as the air
was sucked out. It took a while, and the entire time my ear was
listening for that first, awful rusty-hinge squeal.

It never came. The car held up under fifteen pounds per square inch
pressure differential applied from outside. I had no doubt it would
easily contain one internal atmosphere against the vacuum of space.

"We're in business," Dak said, as I turned the relief valve and air screeched into the tank. "You talk to Hal and Spanky today?"

"Mom did. He says to look out for them about noon tomorrow." Travis
had been calling in every day, and the calls had originated from places
as distant as northern Maine and the Mojave Desert.

"Might as well hang it up for tonight, then," he said. "We got a big day tomorrow, trying to sell this thing to him."

"We'll sell it," I told him.

TRAVIS GRABBED MY face with both hands and kissed me
on the forehead. While I was still too stunned to speak, he turned to
everyone else, his arm around my shoulder.

"If they had a Nobel Prize for engineering, these guys would get
it," he announced. He let me go and moved toward Dak, who backed away
cautiously.

"It was Manny thought it up," he said. "I don't need no kissing."

"Genius. A stroke of sheer genius," Travis said.

We were in a room we had been using for meetings, which had become a
nightly ritual where we could all be brought up to speed on what
everyone else had been doing, and figure out what most urgently needed
doing the next day. It was down a short hallway from the office Kelly
and Alicia shared, one of half a dozen rooms on the upper level of the
warehouse, most of which were empty. This one had a big conference
table and a few desks and tables against the back wall, all rented.
There was a big brass espresso machine sitting on one of the tables, a
gift from Kelly's mom from when she dropped by one day to see how the
"movie prop" business was coming. Now I was afraid I might be spoiled
forever. It would be hard to go back to cheap coffee after getting used
to a couple lattes every morning before getting to work.

Boxes of Krispy Kremes had been set out in anticipation of Jubal's
return. At the rate he'd been going through them I thought we might
look into getting a franchise ourselves, in case this whole Mars
business didn't pan out.

We had gone to the Blast-Off to meet them when they arrived, but
Kelly and I had both overslept and didn't wake up until Aunt Maria
pounded on the door and shouted, "They're here, Manuelito!" We dressed
quickly and went down to be embraced by Jubal and Travis. My guts were
churning, because that afternoon we had to present our ideas to Travis
and the whole project would either continue, or crash and burn,
depending on his reaction. I didn't even want to admit how much it had
all come to mean to me.

Before long we all piled into our various vehicles and were on our
way to the warehouse, except Maria, who had to work the front desk
while Eve, the temp girl we'd hired with money we really couldn't
spare, cleaned up the rooms.

Travis had done a complete walk-around of the warehouse when we got
there. The four of us kept up a constant nervous patter, handing it off
from one to the next as we went, trying to anticipate any questions he
might have.

For the life of me, I couldn't tell if he was giving us an honest
chance. We had all realized during the two weeks of his absence that,
let's face it, all he had to do at any time was to say, "It's not
safe," and the whole project would be over. Was he already determined
to shoot it down? Was he just humoring us—and more important,
misleading and humoring his brilliant but dependent cousin—never
having intended to give his okay? Were we going to get a fair shake?
And would we even know if we weren't?

THEIR VAN WAS good for some laughs. They had taken it
into some places that would have been a lot easier in Travis's Hummer.
There was a dent in the left side where they'd slipped on a muddy dirt
road in the Oregon Cascades and banged into a tree. There were
scratches from where they'd squeezed through thick brush. And there was
dirt. Lots of dirt, with only the windows wiped clean.

"We were in a hurry," Travis had explained. "No time for car washes."

The inside was revealing, too. The front seats and floor were neat
and orderly, but from there on back it could have provided some
students with an interesting two-week archaeological dig. Travis's
military training apparently wouldn't allow him to tolerate trash in
his immediate vicinity, but once it was tossed over his shoulder into
the backseat it was gone, as far as he was concerned. There were
fast-food wrappers and boxes from all the major companies.

"Krispy Kremes hard to find, up Yankeeland way." Jubal sounded scandalized.

There were plenty of soft drink cans and paper cups, too. I saw
Alicia's eyes scanning the litter, eyes that could spot a can of Bud in
a mountain of empties a hundred yards away. She didn't find a beer can.
Which was a big relief to me, because the one time Mom and I had talked
about this whole thing while they were gone, it was because Mom brought
up Travis's drinking.

"That man takes one drink," she had said, "that man takes one
drop
of liquor, Manuel, and I withdraw my consent. Then you can go or stay,
which you'll do anyway, but it will be without my permission."