Travis looked at him, and for a moment he seemed to be considering it. Then he looked down again and shook his head.
I caught Kelly’s eye, and we got up and left the meeting.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER I pulled into the Blast-Off parking lot, driving Travis’s Hummer. The goddamn old Blast-Off, how I hated the place now. For weeks my home had been in the warehouse, Red Thunder growing out on the warehouse floor. In another week Red Thunder would be my home, if I had to whack Travis on the head and hijack the ship and pilot it myself. One way or another, I was going. We’d come too far to stop now. I vowed I’d never spend another night in room 201.
We hurried into the lobby. Mom was behind the desk. I went behind it and flipped the switch that lit the NO in our NO VACANCY sign, and Kelly turned the window sign over so that it showed CLOSED.
“Mom, you’ve got to come with us,” I said.
“Manuel, are you crazy? It’s… three o’clock on-”
“Please, Mom, do this for me. I wouldn’t ask you to if it wasn’t important.”
She started to say something, but she must have seen something in my face, because she nodded, and followed me.
Mom, Maria, and Grace got in the backseat and I took off for the Sinclair garage. I wasn’t surprised to see Dak backing our rental truck out of the driveway, Alicia in the front seat and Sam in the back. I gave Dak the high sign, and he grinned and returned it.
Fifteen minutes later we all arrived at the warehouse. Once inside they all had to stop and stare. None of them had seen Red Thunder in her completed state, and she was an awesome sight to behold… unless you burst out laughing.
We herded them to the ramp and up onto the platform and then through the outer air-lock door. I showed them how it worked, how [277] strong it was. Then up the ladder through the inner pressure door in the floor of the suit room. The five suits hung there, chubby and bright red, all with the Red Thunder logo prominent on the chest and backpack. The room had that new car smell. It was a rich smell. It was a smell that somehow seemed to inspire confidence. I hoped it was working on Mom and Sam.
Then up the ladder again and through the submarine-type hatch into the central deck of the central module.
“This is our radiation shelter, too,” I told them. “It’s shielded by the other modules, and by a layer of polyethylene plastic. That’s what they use on atomic submarines to shield the reactor compartment.”
Down the ladder to the staterooms, which looked pretty good in the low lamplight, as good as the accommodations on a budget cruise ship. Then up again, to the common room, to the systems control deck, and finally to the cockpit. I stood by and let them look out the windows, see the pictures on the monitor screens. It all looked very professional, very competent, I thought. If I was buying a brand-new spaceship, would I buy this one? I asked myself. Damn straight I would. I had had a part in every rivet, every weld. Give me time, I could take her down to the last nut and bolt and put her back together. With my eyes closed. Would this ship take us to Mars and back? I would bet my life on it. I wanted to bet my life on it.
I looked out the window. Travis stood down there, looking up at us, his arms folded across his chest.
“I PROMISED I’D not cut corners,” Travis said, when we were all gathered at the foot of the ramp. “Shaving two days off the systems test is cutting corners, in my book. It’s as simple as that.”
“You said we’d never be more than three and a half days from Earth,” I pointed out. “Five days is well over that margin.”
“I said seven days; I said no cutting corners. I stand by that.”
Nobody said anything for a time. I didn’t plead with Mom, and Dak said nothing to Sam. What we wanted was plain enough, and both Sam and Mom could see it.
[278] I tried to read her face. That was never easy, but she didn’t look as stony as she had in the early days. It was clear that Maria would vote to go ahead, if she had a vote, but she kept properly quiet about it.
“Betty,” Sam said, “I’d like to have a word with you in private, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure, Sam.” They moved off, both looking tired. We all stood there silently, watching their backs. At one point Sam put his arm over Mom’s shoulder, and she seemed to lean into him a little. God, how hard her life had been, how little she had ever gotten in return for her backbreaking labor at the motel. For a moment I wanted just to shout to them, I’m sorry, I give up. I can’t ask you to approve of this crazy thing. After taking them on the tour, watching them looking at the preposterous ship standing there, I had never felt less confident of our safe departure and return.
After five minutes they came back. Sam looked straight into Travis’s eyes.
“Travis…” He had a hard time getting started, then he stiffened his back. “Travis, we’re voting with the kids. Five days, seven days… if it works, we think you should go.”
Travis returned the stare, never blinking.
“I think five days ought to be enough. I think it will work. But it reduces our safety margin to a point that I’d be willing to risk my life… but not those of your children. Not unless you approve.”
“You’d go?” Mom asked, staring straight into his face. “If you could run the thing yourself, you’d go?”
“I actually considered it… but I knew Manny and Dak and Alicia would kill me. And I need them. I’m the pilot… but they’re the ones who built it, and they know how to run it better than I do.”
“Okay, Travis. You do your five-day test. If it works, then y’all go ahead with what you have to do. Me and Sam, we give you our permission.”
BEFORE MOM AND Sam left, Mom took me and Dak aside.
“I thought you ought to know what your daddy said to me, Dak,” she said.
[279] “Yes, ma’am?”
“You’re old enough, you can call me Betty, Dak. What he did, your dad… he was in favor of letting y’all go. He knew he’d lose a lot of your respect if he put the hammer down on the project, anyway.”
“Never,” Dak said. “He could never lose my respect.”
“Of course not. I put it badly. But the two of you, you’d lose something if he couldn’t trust you to know whether this thing was safe or not.”
Dak said nothing, still looking defensive.
“What he did was, he realized that if he just stood there and said he would let you go, then the whole load drops on my head. Now, I’m the one who either screws up the whole thing, or gets pressured into a decision I can’t live with. So he told me the vote was going to be unanimous, one way or the other. If I voted no, he’d try to talk me out of it but if he couldn’t, he’d vote no, too. If I voted yes, he was with me. Dak, I think it took a lot of love to put it that way. I just wanted you to know how special your daddy is.”
“Yes, ma’am. He is.”
Mom hugged me, then hugged Dak. We watched them pull out and down the road until they turned the corner out of sight. Then Dak and I turned to each other. He grinned, and I did, too. He held out a palm and I slapped it.
Red Thunder was still alive.
25
2LOOSE LA BECK was a little squirt, barely over five feet tall. He still looked and dressed like a gangbanger, something he never really was, but now he drove a two-year-old Mercedes, possibly the only bright orange Mercedes low-rider in Florida… or the universe, for that matter. There were elaborate murals on the hood and the trunk. The car had a sound system that could peel the paint off a house at one hundred yards.
Now he stood with his hands in his back pockets and looked up at Red Thunder. I’d have to say he looked more than a little dubious.
“I don’t know, dude,” he said. “I ain’t supposed to paint no railroad cars.”
“These aren’t railroad cars now,” I told him. “We cut off the wheels.”