“I don’t know,” he said again. “I painted plenty of railroad cars in my taggin’ days. But I ain’t never painted one standing on end, dig? It changes everything. Screws up the proportions.”
“You can handle it, 2Loose,” Kelly said. “We’ll pay you ten thousand dollars.”
2Loose didn’t quite sneer.
“I couldn’t touch it for no less than twenty grand, friends. 2Loose [281] has come up in the world. Everybody callin’ me an artist now, not a stinkin’ tagger. They put some of my stuff in a museum show, can you dig it?”
“Yeah,” I said, “but how many people see it there? A few thousand? 2Loose, this thing is going to be seen by millions.”
“That don’t matter, I don’t care how many people see it. The boxcars I used to paint, they’d paint ’em over before hardly anybody seen ’em. I don’t care, man. I seen ’em, even in the dark.” He paused a moment, still looking up at the ship. “How you figure millions of people? What is the damn thing, anyway?”
So we fed him the cover story of how this would be a prop in a major motion picture. He was pretty good, acting nonchalant about it, but I could see the hunger growing in his eyes. Hollywood!
“Fifteen thousand,” Kelly said. “My final offer.”
“You got it. When do I start?”
HE AGREED TO come back the day four of us would climb into the contraption and see if it could keep us alive for five days. It was a scary five days.
Who should show up that very evening but Mr. Strickland, old “ferraristud” himself. He came barging into the building like he owned it… well, come to think of it, he did own it, but a landlord’s supposed to knock. He came with his entourage of three, Strickland being the kind of man who hates to be alone. One was his secretary, a former Miss Montana, one was his accountant, and I never did catch what the other one was, except Strickland shouted at him twice while he was there.
There’s no love lost between the two of us, but he’s not the kind who will flat out admit he hates you. No, he stretched out his arm with his big salesman’s grin, and I reluctantly shook his hand, trying to forget all the nasty lies he had told Kelly about me, trying to break us up. When he patted my back I always felt I ought to check to see if he’d left a knife there.
[282] “What are you doing here, Father?” Kelly snarled. “I told you not to come here.”
“Don’t I get a hug and a kiss, Kitten?” Oh, lord, how Kelly hated that nickname.
“Is it your birthday? Is it Christmas? I told you, you get two hugs per year, and after this I’m going to rethink the one on your birthday.”
Strickland laughed, but I think she hurt him a little. I think it’s likely that he did love her, in his way, which was to dominate her life, to make her an extension of himself. But fate had dealt him the wrong daughter. Kelly would never stand for that.
She went back to her office, walking with her back stiff and straight. It fell to me and Dak to give him the grand tour, which was the only way we’d get rid of him.
We just showed him the center section and the air lock, which we couldn’t avoid. The others were full of water bags and air equipment, all of it working, which could raise awkward questions. Another dead giveaway, if anyone noticed, was that a spaceship set would have walls that could be moved so a camera could shoot from farther back.
Strickland didn’t notice, and I breathed a little easier when I could be sure he had swallowed our cover story. Our biggest advantage in preserving our secret was that no sensible person could look at Red Thunder and deduce we were going to fly in it. She was too big, too awkward, and she had no engine.
We got rid of him as soon as we could, and I hurried to Kelly’s office, knowing how badly he could affect her.
I found her on the phone, and she seemed to be doing fine.
“Who’re you calling?”
“Locksmith. I’m changing the locks on all the doors.”
Sounded good to me.
THE NEXT DAY we got another visit from the FBI, Agents Dallas and Lubbock.
I was closest to the door when the bell rang, so I went there and saw them on the television screen. My heart skipped a beat… but as I [283] turned the camera, I couldn’t see any SWAT team or uniformed Daytona police. I couldn’t see anyone at all except Dallas and Lubbock. I called Travis and told him who was here. He was at my side within a minute, and everybody else was following him. He smiled at me and opened the door just enough to slip outside. The rest of us clustered around the little television screen.
There wasn’t much to see. Travis did his loud redneck act, and the agents stood rigid as mannequins. Their lips barely moved when they talked.
Then they were getting back into their Feebmobile and driving away. Travis watched them, waved, then came back through the door. He was drenched in sweat. He pulled at his shirt, getting the cool air of the warehouse circulating.
“Man, could I use a drink.” Alicia ran to get him a cold lemonade.
“They’re pissed off, boys and girls,” he said. “They must be, to tell me about it. Whoever’s in charge of the search must be one stubborn cop, because now he’s got his agents going back over old ground.”
“They told you that?” Dak asked.
“Not in so many words. But FBI agents see themselves as an elite. They’re not supposed to have to pound the pavement like beat cops. They were hot-the air conditioner in their car broke down-and they’re tired, and they’re fed up with the FBI and the search for a flying saucer. So they said a few things they normally wouldn’t have. They’re looking into my neighbor now, the Jesus freak. He hasn’t let them in to tour his compound-and why should he? He’s no David Koresh, but he hates guv’mint men.”
“So you think we’re okay?” Kelly asked. Alicia came back with a tall glass of lemonade. Travis drank half of it at once.
“Okay? I won’t feel okay until we’re out of the atmosphere.”
M-DAY MINUS FIVE, and the four of us went up the ramp, into the lock, and sealed it behind us. For the next five days we’d eat, drink, and breathe only what was stored inside Red Thunder. We were all pumped.
[284] We didn’t stay that way too long. There were tests to run, drills to go through. Each of us had to be checked out on getting into a suit and down the ladder to the lock. Then the hours began to stretch. Soon we broke out the Monopoly board there in the systems control deck and began a game we figured would last the whole five days.
We should have known Travis wasn’t going to let us just sit and vegetate, not when there was more training he could hit us with.
At hour thirteen an alarm bell began ringing on every deck, and a voice began intoning, “Pressure breach, Module Two, this is not a drill, this is not a drill.” It was Kelly’s voice, stored in the computer. Somehow, that made it even scarier. We knocked the Monopoly board over scrambling to our assigned stations.
Tank two was my department, so when we got to the center crossroads Dak grabbed the emergency suit from a locker as I leaned in and closed and dogged the outer air-lock hatch. I could hear a whistling sound but didn’t feel any rush of wind. We’d had Red Thunder dogged down tight with an overpressure of one-quarter of an atmosphere for a full week, using the main air lock to enter and leave, and she’d been tight as a drum.
Dak had the emergency suit unzipped and held up in front of him with the zippered side to me, just as we’d practiced a dozen times. This suit was another Russian surplus item Travis had brought back from Star City, not nearly as expensive as the other suits had been. He had bought four of them. It was nothing but a clear plastic bag in the shape of a human being, one size fits all. There was a small oxygen bottle mounted on the chest. The hands were mittens instead of gloves. When you were inside one, you looked like somebody’s dry cleaning, in a plastic wrapper.
The Russians had developed these suits for space stations. The idea was that you could don one in fifteen seconds and then have about thirty minutes to deal with an emergency after you’d lost all cabin air.