On the fourth day Travis called me.
“Jubal wants to talk to you,” he said. “He hates talking on the telephone, won’t do it unless it’s an emergency. Could you come over sometime this afternoon?”
[150] “Sure,” I said. “Things are running more smoothly here since he fixed things up. I can be there in two, three hours.”
“Good enough. Thanks, Manny.”
I hurried through the rest of my chores and hopped on the Triumph. I figured it would be my last ride on the grand old masterpiece, so I opened it up a little, as much as I dared with the damned empty sidecar cramping my style.
TRAVIS WAS WAITING for me by the pool. He had a big pitcher of iced tea, and he poured me a glass without asking if I wanted one. I took a big drink, then sat down.
“Thanks for coming, Manny,” he said.
“Sure. What’s the problem?”
“Jubal and his pipe dreams is the problem.”
“He said an American should be the first man on Mars.”
“He meant just what he said. And if those Ares Seven clowns aren’t up to the task, he’ll just go there himself.”
“Sounds nuts.”
He rubbed his unshaven chin with one hand.
“No, the nutty thing is, it might actually be possible. Outrageous, goofy beyond belief… but I can’t actually say it’s impossible. In fact, we’re going out tomorrow to the ’Glades to do a little testing on the Broussard drive, see just how possible it is.”
“Broussard drive?”
He grinned. “Got to call it something. But there’s things I need to know, now that Jubal says he can release the energy slowly. Like, just what comes out after you’ve squeezed a cubic acre of seawater to the size of a tennis ball? Protons? Atomic nuclei? Gamma rays? I haven’t tried to do the math on it because it makes my head hurt.”
“Has Jubal done the math?”
“I don’t know. Jubal and me… well, we’re hardly speaking, Manny.”
I didn’t like the sound of that at all.
[151] “Manny… I know this isn’t fair. I know it’s a lot to ask. But… could you take a shot at talking Jubal out of this?”
“Travis, I…”
“He says you’re his best friend, Manny. He’ll listen to you. I don’t know if you realize justy how much of an impression you and your family made in his life. All he talks about, except about building a spaceship and flying it to Mars, is you and your friends. His friends. All I ask is you take a shot. Will you do that for me, Manny?”
I FOUND JUBAL where Travis had said he would be, deep in the darkness of his laboratory in the prefab barn. He had made a big, primitive desk with sawhorses and a four-by-eight sheet of plywood. He was surrounded by stacks of downloaded books, printed out, two-hole punched, and bound together with string. It made me think of a child’s fortress, made of bricks of compacted snow, though I’d never had a chance to build such a thing. His high-speed printer was spitting out another book at about ten pages per second.
I saw his face before he saw me, and the expression there was one I’d never seen before. Jubal was mighty worried. Then he looked up, and the frown wrinkles vanished as he recognized me. He used a number two pencil with the eraser chewed off to mark his place in one of the Big Chief elementary school pads he used to take notes.
“Manuel Garcia, my fren’! I am so glad dat you see me! Entrez, entrez, come on in, chile, you wanna Popsicle?” He hurried to a small freezer in the shadows and came back with a grape Popsicle, which he knew was my favorite.
The next little while was taken up with the social pleasantries Jubal would no more think of dispensing with than he would eat a meal without saying a prayer. I told him we were all doing fine, that the business was running better than it ever had, thanks largely to him. He asked about several people in the neighborhood, many of whom I’d never met until he brought his infectious enthusiasm into our lives. People like Mr. Ortega the grocer, who I had dealt with since I was old [152] enough to cross the street by myself, but who I had never really talked to until Jubal and I bought a bag of fresh oranges from him and spent the next twenty minutes learning about fruit.
“Still got dat rifle I tell Ralph Shabazz I fix,” Jubal admitted. “You tell him Jubal been mighty busy dis week, hah?”
“I’ll do dat t’ing.” He laughed like he always did when I spoke a little Jubalese. He knew I wasn’t mocking him. He knew his accent was sometimes almost impossible for strangers to understand. He said he’d tried to shake it, speak like the people on the television, “Spit de crawdads outta my mouth an comb de swamp moss outta my hair,” as he put it. No luck.
“Travis is worried about you, Jubal.”
“I know dat, me. He t’ink I’m crazy.” He touched the depression in his head, the awful wound given him by his father.
“I don’t think you’re crazy.”
“Tanks, mon cher. T’ank you fo’ dat. But he worried, Travis. He plenty worried.”
“About what?”
He sprang to his feet and hurried to the plywood desk. He swept papers aside until he came to the notebook he wanted. I could see him writing his home-school lessons in a book just like that one.
Looking over his shoulder, there was very little I saw that I could relate to. I knew it was math, but it was Greek to me. Actually, a lot of it was Greek. I recognized the letter pi, and theta. I didn’t think it meant he was pledging fraternities. I saw a few equals signs. A square root radical. That was about it. Nothing else was familiar.
“What is this?” I asked, without much hope.
“Dis de Vaseline drive.” Vaseline? Oh, right. VASIMR. The ion drive the Ares Seven were currently using to get to Mars.
“Slow, but steady, right?” I asked.
“Should be, oughta be. But is it slow enough, hah?”
“What do you mean?”
“Dey in a big hurry, yes dey are. Dey aimin’ to get dere, get back to home fus’, steal some glory, oh yes.”
He looked into my eyes with an intensity I’d never seen before. This [153] was Jubal the genius. This was Jubal zipping, flashing, flying through regions I knew I’d never even crawl through. This was a Jubal to stand in awe of, and believe me, I did, from that moment on.
“Look, rah cheer,” he said, and pointed at his notebook, talking so fast that even if he spoke fluent Floridian I’d probably never have understood. That notebook led to another. Stacks of printouts toppled as he bored through them, hunting for the diagrams he wanted. I tried signaling him that I was in way over my head, but he was off in his own world. So I stood there and tried to soak up at least an idea of why he felt the American Ares Seven was doomed.
IT TOOK HIM half an hour to make his presentation to what was, for all practical purposes, an absent audience. Absent, as in the space between my poor ears. I mean, I wasn’t even fit to pound the erasers in Jubal’s classroom.
“You see, Manny? You see why it so important?”
Anyone but Jubal, I’d be wondering if he was just rubbing it in. Because I didn’t see, might never see… and my appraisal of my own prospects for an education in science had never been lower.
On the other hand, how many people get tutoring from Albert Einstein’s smarter brother, and how many could keep up?
“I see that you think there’s something to worry about, Jubal,” I said.
He nodded, absently chewing on the end of another pencil. The eraser broke off and he took it out of his mouth and frowned at it, as if wondering how it got there.
“Travis, he t’ink dis idea of us all buildin’ us a spaceship an goin’ to Mars, he t’ink dat a stupid idea.”
Us? First I’d heard of it. All of us?