Or, if there was nothing you could do about it, and if you weren’t in direct sunlight and being roasted like a chicken wrapped in tinfoil, somebody in a proper suit could carry you to a safe environment. There [285] was a handle right on top where your rescuer could grab you like a caveman dragging his wife by the hair.
I stepped into the suit legs and Dak shoved the thing over me. I turned, and he zipped it. It was uncanny, I knew we were in no danger, we were still right on the ground in Florida, but my imagination was running away with me. My heart was pounding.
“Twenty-six seconds,” Dak shouted. We’d never managed the fifteen seconds the Russians claimed. Alicia was our record holder at nineteen seconds.
I twisted the valve on the oxygen bottle and the suit blew up until I looked like the Michelin Man. I put one foot into the air lock, then the other foot, and crouched, the air-lock chamber being only four feet in diameter. Dak closed the hatch behind me, and I heard him latch it tight. I slammed the cycle button with one hand, and in a moment the green light came on, signaling that pressure was equalized inside the lock and on the other side. The pressure gauge was reading about 1.20 atmospheres, when it should have been 1.25. Temperature was seventy-five Fahrenheit, exactly where it should be.
I opened the inner lock, swung out onto the ladder. There was a locker there, and I opened it and got a pack of sticky patches and a smoke generator. I broke the generator and held it steady. The smoke drifted down, slowly, so down the ladder I went. I followed the smoke all the way to the bottom of the tank, the whistling getting louder as I descended past the big tanks of pressurized air. I reached the water bladder and stood on the bottom deck. Beneath was our gray-water tank. The smoke was moving more rapidly now, swirling around until it found the breach. I got on my knees.
The hole was perfectly round. Somebody had drilled it.
A cigarette camera lens poked through the hole. Faintly, from outside the ship, I heard Travis’s voice.
“I make it three minutes and fifteen seconds,” he said. “Some of you might actually have lived.”
I shoved the camera back, heard Travis laugh. I took the patch I’d brought and peeled the backing off the sticky side. It was made of hard [286] rubber, about the same flexibility as a car tire but more resistant to heat and cold. The patch stuck in place. It was only an emergency measure, we had better patches and the tools to apply them, and I’d do that as soon as I caught my breath.
I tried to be angry at Travis, but what was the point? The systems test was the perfect time to throw real-world problems at us, things we’d drilled on using computer simulations. But no simulation could really duplicate the real world.
And did he ever throw problems at us. There were a hundred practical jokes hidden in Red Thunder now, a whoopee cushion under every seat, so to speak. Travis could activate them from outside and watch us with the cameras that covered every inch of the ship’s interior except the staterooms and heads.
So we got too hot and had to fix it, got cold enough that frost formed on the walls and we could see our breath, and we fixed that. We fixed problems, large and small, about once every three or four hours the entire time we were there. It was exhausting.
But we fixed them. We fixed every one of them.
THEN, ON THE fourth day of the test, twenty-four hours to go, trouble came at us from an entirely unexpected direction. “Like it always does,” as Travis never tired of reminding us.
The phone rang. I picked it up, and it was Travis.
“Y’all have to come out now,” he said. “I just got a call from your mother-”
“My… what’s wrong? Is she-”
“She’s fine, Manny. But we got trouble. We all need to be together to talk it over. Come on out, leave all systems running, we should handle this in an hour or so.”
We met Travis at the bottom of the ramp. He wouldn’t discuss the problem, just told us all to pile into the Hummer, and he took off for the motel.
Everybody was gathered in room 101 when we got there. Mom, Maria, Caleb, Salty, Grace, Billy… and somebody I’d never seen [287] before, sitting on a chair at the far end of the room. He was short and chubby, red-faced, mostly bald. He wore a wrinkled Hawaiian shirt and it was soaking. He was smoking a cigarette and he didn’t look happy.
“You!” Kelly shouted as soon as she saw him.
“In the flesh, Kitten,” the guy said, with a mean smile.
Mom had handed Travis a business card when we arrived. It said:
SEAMUS LAWRENCE
“Seamus the Shamus”
Private Detective
There were phone, fax, and e-mail numbers in the lower left corner.
“He’s a private detective,” Kelly told us. “My father has had him tailing me, off and on, since I was fourteen. Goddamn you, Lawrence!”
“Is that any way to talk to an old friend?” He was trying to be glib, but he had to be intimidated by the hostile faces pressing in on him. He took a puff on his cigarette and looked around for an ashtray, shrugged, knocked the ash off onto the floor. I moved over closer to Mom. She was holding her.22 target pistol at her side.
“Is that a bullet hole in his shirt?” I asked her. He must have heard me.
“She shot at me!” he said, and he couldn’t quite keep the fear out of his voice.
“If I’d shot at you, Mister Private Dick, I’d of hit you. I shot at that parrot’s eye. I can put a round through your eye, too, if you give me any more trouble.”
He looked down and sure enough, the bullet had gone through a loose fold of cloth, precisely through the eye of a red and blue macaw. This evidence of her accuracy didn’t seem to reassure him… and it shouldn’t have. Mom was capable of putting a real, nonlethal but very painful hurtin’ on him with that little popgun.
“He came in an hour ago,” she told us, “handed me that silly card, and said we had to talk about some people was planning to go into outer space.”
“Unbelievable!” Travis said.
[288] “Said to get Kelly here, pronto. Said for a hundred grand-that’s what he said, ‘a hundred grand’-somebody’s daddy didn’t have to find out about it.”
“After all these years, you’d sell out my father?” Kelly sounded scandalized.
“He’s sort of pissed,” Lawrence said, defensively. “On account of I ain’t been able to dig up dirt on your sp-… on your boyfriend there.”
“It was real smart of you not to finish that word, Mr. Lawrence,” Mom said, and you could feel the tension in her trigger finger when she said it. Lawrence sure felt it; he couldn’t take his eyes off the gun, slapping dangerously against Mom’s thigh.
“Unbelievable,” Travis said again.
“What do you mean, Travis?” Alicia asked.
“Unbelievable anybody could be so stupid!” He looked around at us. “Don’t you see it? Your dad got a tour of Red Thunder just a few days ago, and the thought never entered his mind that it could fly. Because your dad is smart, whatever else he is. He knows a spaceship has to have a big, big engine to take off. Anybody with any sense takes a look at Red Thunder, they know instantly it couldn’t be a real spaceship. Hell, I could have given those FBI agents the tour, and they’d never have guessed, either.”
“But it can fly,” Dak pointed out.
“Exactly! But to believe it can fly, you have to either postulate an entirely new technology, or be so stupid, be so totally clueless as to how things work… it’s beautiful when you think of it. He’s so dumb he stumbled onto the truth.”
“Hey,” Lawrence said, but it was halfhearted.
“I got a rule,” Travis said. “I’ve never had to use it so far in my life, but I think it’s a good rule. Never pay ransoms or blackmail.”