“In loco parentis,” Travis said, wearily. “It means I’m your legal guardian.”
News to me, but not surprising. Somebody like Jubal would have to have someone to look after his affairs.
Travis had mentioned once, before this whole scheme got started, that he and Jubal were living on the earnings from Jubal’s patents. Jubal was the creative one, he had the crazy visions and built the marvelous things. Travis was the financial side. Though he didn’t claim to be a whiz at handling money, he did it a thousand times better than Jubal ever could, and in fact, without Travis or someone like him to figure out the practical applications of Jubal’s inventions and discoveries, Jubal would have nothing at all. “We do well,” Travis had said. “Jubal’s never going to lack for anything.”
Oh, no? Well, now little Jubal wants a toy, Travis.
And now Jubal was frowning.
“You done said it was jus’ to proteck me,” he said. “From dose bad folks, take our money away, we ain’t careful.”
Travis was looking uncomfortable. I looked at Kelly, who was following with intense interest. She raised one eyebrow at me, and shook her head. Don’t interrupt.
“ ’Bout all I ever spent it on is de Krispy Kremes,” Jubal said. Alicia laughed, and patted Jubal’s hand.
“Is it my money, Travis? Is it my money?”
“It’s your money, Jubal. Well, half of it is, anyway.”
“And I gots de million dollah?”
“Yeah, you gots it. More than that. I’ll show you the books, you don’t believe me.” He looked around at all of us, and got angry. “I’ll show all [192] of you the goddamn books if you want. I’ve never cheated Jubal out of a dime. Excuse the language, Jubal.”
“Nobody ever thought you did, Travis,” Kelly said. “But have you maybe… sheltered him too much? I’m not criticizing, it’s none of my business, but Grace told me they’d like to see Jubal more. I think Jubal would like that, too.”
Travis hung his head, then nodded, still not looking at us.
“I’m a drunk, okay? I’ve spent a lot of the last five years pissed out of my mind, as bad off as I was the night you almost killed me. I went out there on the beach to watch my ex-wife take off on her way to Mars… because I was supposed to be on that ship!
“I’ve always known, since I was a child, that I was going to be the first man on Mars. I planned for it, I worked hard. I made myself into the best pilot in the space program, so they had to choose me, there would be no one else.
“And then I drank it all away.”
We were all quiet for a time. I watched a seagull that seemed to be building a nest in the top of one of the old rockets surrounding us.
“I knew I wasn’t doing right by Jubal, but mostly I was too drunk to care. Since I met you guys I’ve been sober-mostly-and I want to thank you for that.”
“It’s all up to you, Travis,” Alicia said.
“I know that.”
“I be doin’ okay, cher,” Jubal said. “I been worryin’ ’bout you, oh yes, but you done good by me, you has.”
Travis looked up and spread his hands in surrender.
“Okay. We’ll build the ship.”
None of us said anything. You could feel the excitement in the air, but there was no celebration.
Just as well.
“As soon as we get permission from your parents.”
TRAVIS WAS GOOD. I think even Mom and Aunt Maria would have agreed, though nothing in their faces and their postures would admit [193] to it. Sam Sinclair just sat, neutral, not accepting and not rejecting Travis’s words. Sam Sinclair was a cautious man.
I knew a terrible surmise was growing in my mother’s mind. Why was Travis telling them all this? There was really only one way to go with it, wasn’t there? But she was afraid to let herself acknowledge it, because then she’d have an impossible problem. How do I tell Manny he can’t go…. when I can’t tell him he can’t go?
Travis outlined the present situation in space, with the Chinese due to arrive on Mars first, and the Americans taking a new, radical, and untested technology on a different path, which could not beat the Chinese… and might get them killed.
The spiel faltered only when he tried to get Jubal to help him explain the problems Jubal had found with the “Vaseline” drive. Jubal just wasn’t up to it. His best effort so far had been calling his bubble-generating device a “Squeezer,” and even then his mangled syntax had rendered it as “Squozer.”
“Get on with it, Travis,” my mom said, eventually. “If Jubal says it’s going to blow up, I’ll believe it’s gonna blow up.”
“That’s enough for me, too,” Sam said.
So Travis moved on to Part Two. That was good. Part Two was the real crowd pleaser. In Part Two he got to put the Squeezer through its paces.
Sam Sinclair sat up alertly from the very first time Travis made a silver bubble appear in the air. Mom and Aunt Maria looked puzzled. Clearly they understood this was something out of the ordinary, but they weren’t sure why. Travis made the bubbles pop loudly both from vacuum and from compressed air. Then he fitted one into a small device Jubal had made. With Jubal operating his controller, they made compressed air leak out of a minute pinhole, what Jubal called a “dis-continual-uity,” and particle physicists would more likely call a “discontinuity.” He let them feel the air coming out, and experience the pressure the little thing exerted on their hands.
“That’s thrust. It’s the same thing that happens when all the smoke and flames come out the bottom of a VStar. You can fire all your thrust in a few minutes and get up to a very high speed and coast all the way [194] to Mars. Or you can fire continually, like the Ares Seven. You’ll speed up slowly, but eventually you could end up going faster than the Chinese ship.”
“This don’t make too much sense to me,” Aunt Maria admitted.
“I know, I know,” Travis said. “Nobody gets this stuff easily,” he went on, “not without studying physics for years. Because it goes against everything you know. Cars don’t work like that, do they?”
Mom tried a question. “But with this thing Jubal has made…” I think I was the only one who knew how much this was costing her, to ask a question that might sound like a dumb question. Mom was mortified by her lack of education, and she didn’t deal with mortification well. “With this Squeezer thing, you can fire it all the way to Mars and never run out of gas?”
“Exactly. We get the best of both worlds with the Squeezer. We can fire a powerful rocket, the equal of any rocket that’s ever been built in terms of thrust… and we can fire it all the way there!”
Short pause for everyone to think about that, me included. I still found it almost impossible to believe. Free energy. The world had never seen anything like it. And every time I thought about it, it scared me more.
Sam Sinclair, too.
“I don’t like what I’m hearing here,” he said.
“How’s that, Sam?”
“Like you said. It’s a lot of power. In my experience, power is dangerous, if you don’t handle it right.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more.”
“How big can Jubal make these things?”
Travis paused, then looked at his cousin. I think he might have prayed a little, too.
“How about it, Jubal? How big?”
Jubal had been dying inside for almost an hour now. He hated it that Mom and Maria and Sam, his friends, were acting so hostile, and he hated it even more that he was the cause of it. Or the thing he had created, which was about the same thing.
“I don’ know, me. Plenty big, oh yeah.”
[195] “How about a ballpark figure?” Sam asked.
Travis fielded it, and Jubal relaxed some.
“We can make enough power to blast at one gee all the way to Mars and back,” he said. “That’s all we need to know to build the ship.”