“Oh, yeah? Well, yo momma so ugly she stuck her head out a car window and got arrested for mooning.”
“Oh, yeah? Sister, yo momma so-”
“-so fat she looks like she’s smuggling a Volkswagen,” Alicia said. “Now you guys cut it out.”
Fine with me, too. The way Dak felt about his absent mother, you’d think “yo momma” jokes would really bother him. But he and Kelly had discovered they were very good at the game, they could carry on for ten minutes and never repeat themselves.
“It’s just creative dissing, Manny,” Dak had once told me. “It ain’t about yo momma or my momma, it’s about the words. It’s street poetry, like rap.”
Which was clear as mud, because Dak had almost as little use for rap as his father, who called it antimusic, though Sam Sinclair admitted he’d stopped listening to new music about the time Marvin Gaye died.
A little Racism 101 footnote: “Coon-ass” doesn’t mean a black person, as many Yankees assume when they hear it. That would be “coon.” A coon-ass is a Cajun, and probably just as insulting as coon, but Cajuns usually don’t make a big deal of it.
“Dak, Manny,” Kelly said, “we love you guys, but try to let me and Alicia do most of the talking. Whatever you do, do not ask if you can help Jubal build a spaceship and take you all to Mars. We’ve got to ease him into that frame of mind.”
I was more than happy to leave it to her. Who’s going to out-talk a car dealer? I figured it was in her genes, from when the Stricklands landed on the bay they named after themselves, and started selling buckboard wagons.
THE GIRLS WENT on ahead, whispering to each other, as Dak and I stowed the fishing gear back where I’d found it. When we reached the tennis court Kelly was nowhere to be seen, and Alicia came out the [159] barn side door, Jubal following reluctantly behind. In fact, I was sure that if Alicia hadn’t been pulling on his hand he wouldn’t have been moving at all. But he did come, looking like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon beside tiny Alicia.
We went into the house and found Kelly and Travis standing there. The colonel had his hands in his pockets and was looking at the floor. The big baby.
“Now, you boys are going to kiss and make up,” Alicia said. “Then we’re all going to sit down outside around the grill and eat the soy burgers I’m going to make, and talk about this thing that has come between you. Okay? Travis? Jubal?”
Kelly gave Travis a shove, and the two slowly came together. They embraced, and Travis did kiss his cousin, and pounded him on the back.
“I’m sorry, Jubal.” He was a little hoarse. “This thing has got me behaving even worse than my normal shi-… lousy standard. Forgive me.”
“Nothin’ to fo’give, mon cher. I actin’ stupid, me.”
I was pretty sure I saw a tear in Travis’s eye. But Kelly grabbed them both, still hugging, and got them moving through the sliding doors out on to the patio.
IT TURNED OUT Alicia did have a sense of humor. She knew how popular soy burgers would be with this crowd so she didn’t even try. I started a fire in the kettle and she and Dak sliced huge beefsteak tomatoes and purple onions and Kelly formed half-pound burgers with her hands and Travis and Jubal set the picnic table and put out the deli mustard and pickles and a big jar of sliced jalapenos. I cooked the burgers from “almost raw” for Travis to “black and crispy on the edges” for Dak and Jubal. We didn’t have any lettuce, so Alicia volunteered to pick some dandelion greens and show us how good they were on burgers. We all declined, with varying degrees of panic.
It had been Alicia’s idea to do the lunch, let emotions get back under control before we all locked horns with Travis. Sitting there, working [160] my way through a sheer masterpiece of a hamburger, I figured it had been a good idea.
I wouldn’t have wanted to be Travis just then.
IT TOOK A while to bring Travis up to speed on Jubal’s new calculations. From his reactions, I could see he hadn’t understood that Jubal had gone beyond being simply worried about the chances of the Ares Seven, to feeling sure they were headed for a catastrophe. He followed Jubal’s presentation, Jubal pointing wildly at this or that part of the hundred or so diagrams he had brought with him.
The four of us non-mathematical-genius types watched, at first trying to follow it all but by the end just sitting there in Travis’s comfortable patio chairs. I don’t think sulking would be the right word, but we were all a bit chastened to see just how peripheral we really were to Jubal’s project. What the hell had we been thinking? There had to be many thousands of people who could understand all the stuff Jubal was explaining, who would now be nodding grimly as the flaws of the Vaseline drive came to light. Thousands of people, I could now see, much more qualified to ship out to space with Jubal and Travis than we were.
As it turned out, more qualified than Travis, too. He sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. Jubal got him a bottle of aspirin without having to be asked. Travis swallowed four of them.
“I don’t understand a lot of what Jubal just said,” Travis said. “Oh, wonderful,” Alicia breathed. “I was feeling so dumb!” “Join the club,” Dak said. “Jubal, can I have one of those aspirins?” “So what’s it going to do, Jubal?” I asked. “Will it blow up?” “Might could,” Jubal said, gnawing at a piece of his beard. “Dey didn’ do ’nuff long-term testin’, I figure. More likely, de engine she jus’ shut off and dat de end a dat. Won’t start no mo’, no.” Alicia frowned at him.
“Well, what’s the big deal, then?” she asked. “I thought it was gonna blow up. Didn’t you say it was gonna blow up, Manny?”
[161] “All I know for sure was that Jubal said they were in trouble,” I said. “But Alicia, if their main engine won’t fire… they’ll get to Mars still going… what, Jubal?”
“Real fas’,” he said, shaking his head. “Too dad-gum fas’.”
We were all momentarily stunned by Jubal’s use of what was, to him, a swearword. We’d never heard it before.
“Like he said, too fast,” I told Alicia. “They’ll go right on past Mars and nobody can do a thing about it. They can’t slow down, nobody’s got the juice to catch up with them. They’ll head on out to the stars and get there in about ten thousand years.”
“Nobody kin stop ’em but us’n,” Jubal said. “We got de juice to git us dere.” He looked at Travis. “Now we gotta git de ship to git us dere.”
Travis had his face in his hands. Now he looked up. Not a happy man.
“History repeats itself,” he said. “This country has never really had a ‘space program.’ What we’ve had is a series of races. Sputnik One went up in 1957 and scared the be-… the dickens out of us. Up to then the biggest part of our space program was something called Project Vanguard. Run by the Navy, of all things. In the ’30s the Navy ran the airship program, too. I don’t know why.”
“To keep it out of the hands of the fly-boys, that’s why,” Dak said.
“See there?” He pointed at Dak. “Your dad was a swabbo, wasn’t he?”
“Watch yo mouf’, white boy. My dad was a chief petty officer. Probably still would be, but he got kicked out during a force reduction. And I’ll give you Army and thirteen points right here and now.” Dak slapped a twenty on the table.
“You’re faded,” Travis said. “And the Navy wrecked every airship they had, the Akron, the Macon, the Shenandoah …”
“Prob’ly had Army pilots. Naval carrier aviation is the best-”
“Boys,” Kelly said. “Can we get back to the subject?”
“There was a subject?” Alicia wondered.
“Yeah,” Travis said. “Going off too soon, half-cocked. The Navy never did get a Vanguard off the ground. So Sputnik One goes up and goes, ‘beep, beep, beep,’ and every citizen of America sees the Russkis own [162] outer space, and they are asking their leaders what they’re going to do about it.
“What they did was hand it to Werner von Braun, the top Nazi Kraut we captured at the end of the war. He takes a Jupiter rocket, modifies it a little, and ninety days later there’s an American satellite in orbit.