The Thunder and Lightning Series

Praise for the Writing of John Varley

Varley is a kind of latter-day, humanist Heinlein, someone who writes science fiction with imagination and verve. —Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

The short story is to science fiction what the seven-inch single was to rock: the most perfect yet the most mercilessly demanding form. My life-experience of John Varley’s stories has been that the great majority of them are quite literally unforgettable. —William Gibson

John Varley is the best writer in America. —Tom Clancy

[Varley is] one of science fiction’s most important writers. —The Washington Post

Superior science fiction. —The Philadelphia Inquirer

Varley has earned the mantle of Heinlein. —Locus

The Thunder and Lightning Series

Red Thunder, Red Lightning, and Rolling Thunder

John Varley

Red Thunder

John Varley

Prologue

Inspiration is where you find it. You can’t force it, and you can’t predict when and where it will come. I had nothing to do with the inspiration that made our great adventure possible. But the inspiration that made it practical came to me while I was walking with my friend Dak through a railroad freight yard in my hometown of Daytona.

Dak is a string bean, well over six feet, and could hide behind a flagpole. African-American, though he doesn’t use the term, and fairly dark. Dak is short for Daktari, which is Swahili for doctor, A hell of a thing to wish on a newborn baby, he once said. He’s my age, from the same graduating class but different high schools. We often took these long walks, often on the tracks. Here we sorted out the big questions of life. Is there a God? Are we alone in the universe? Is Britney Spears too old to stay on the Top Ten Babes of All Time list? Would Al Johnson switch to Team Chevy before the next 500?

Does it look like rain?

I looked around and sniffed the air.

Sure does. Thunderheads were towering in the east, and what else is new? This was Florida, it rained every day. Today the temperature was only about eighty, but the humidity was 210 percent.

Two minutes later it started to pour.

We ran to a line of a dozen rusting black tank cars that had been parked on a siding for as long as I could remember, and ducked under one. No trains came through this part of the yard anymore, and the grass was thick where spilled oil hadn’t killed it. I wondered if the EPA had heard of this place. You probably should have had a hazmat suit and a gas mask to even come here.

There wasn’t enough room to stand under the tank car, so we sat on the gravel and listened to the rain pelting on it. I think rain is harder in Florida than anywhere else. I don’t mean it comes down harder, I mean the water is harder. We didn’t say anything for a while, just picked out suitable golfball-sized rocks and chucked them at a rusty old fifty-five-gallon drum about twenty yards away. My arm was better than Dak’s, I was getting two hits to his one.

Not the worst way in the world to waste time. But we hadn’t made any progress on the big question of the day.

So, how do we go about building a spaceship on pocket change?

That was the big one. Some question.

We had been round and round it over the last few days. We weren’t going to get any help, we had been specifically told we were on our own. Neither of us had ever designed a canoe, much less a spaceship. My experience with rocketry was limited to a few illegal broomstraw-tailed squibs on the Fourth of July. Dak’s was no better.

We had what we thought were some pretty good ideas on many aspects of the problem, all helped considerably by the fact that the central, toughest problem of space travel, propulsion, was pretty much solved. But now we had to build something, and what we kept coming back to was, Where do you begin?

Pressure, Dak said, for maybe the five hundredth time in the last few days. It’s gonna be tough to build something that can stand up to thirty psi for two months.

It really only had to stand up to 15 psi, but everything about the ship had to meet double the necessary tolerances.

We listened to the rain some more, and Dak tossed another rock, which made the drum ring like a gong.

We can’t start from square one, I said. Too much welding, and every weld we make is a place for trouble to begin.

Dak sighed. He’d heard it before.

We need components. Things we can slap together quick.

Where we gonna get them? Go to the NASA junkyard, patch up an old ship?

A pressure hull, I said. Something was tickling the edge of my awareness.

A globe, Dak said. Or a …

A cylinder. A metal cylinder.

I jumped up so fast I hit my head on the bottom of the tank car.

I ran out and stood in the downpour, looking back at the old, rust-streaked, greasy, flaky paint, birdpoop-spattered tank car.

Knock off the wheels, I said. Stand it on its end …

… and there’s your spaceship, Dak whispered.

Then we were laughing and actually dancing in the driving rain.

But of course that all came later. It started about a month earlier….

Part one

1

I always thought the VentureStar looked like a tombstone. When it was standing on end it was twice as tall as it was wide. It wasn’t very thick. It was round at the top. For a night launch it was illuminated by dozens of spotlights like an opening night in Hollywood. It could have been the grave marker for a celebrity from some race of giant aliens. The stubby wings and tail seemed tacked on.

The VentureStar didn’t spend much time flying, which was just as well, because it flew about as well as your average skateboard. Sitting on the ground it looked more like a building than an aircraft or a spaceship.

That’s okay. In about thirty seconds it would leave every airplane ever built in a wake of boiling smoke and fire.

Manny, a Greyhound bus leaves Cocoa Beach every day for Tallahassee. Why don’t we go watch that some night? We could get a lot closer.

That was my girlfriend, Kelly, trying to get my goat. Her point being that VStars left Canaveral once a day, too. Point taken.

Who wants to neck at the Greyhound terminal? I said.

Hah. The only thing you’ve necked with so far is those binocs.

I put down my binoculars and thumbed up the brightness of the little flatscreen on my lap. I got a view looking into one of the windows of the cockpit blister. The flight crew were on their backs, going through the final items on the prelaunch checklist with no wasted motion. A woman with curly red hair was sitting in the left seat. I could read the name sewed on her NASA-blue flight tunic:

WESTIN.

A younger man with a blond crewcut sat on the right.

VStars are noisier, I’ll give you that, she said. We were sitting side by side on the tailgate of Dak’s truck.

Ain’t you got no poetry in your soul, woman?

I used the tip of the screen’s stylus to touch 7, then 5, then

ENTER

on the tiny flatscreen keypad. Camera 75 showed a view looking up from the massive concrete abutments that supported the VStar. Center screen were the long, pinched shapes of the six linear aerospike rocket engines that stretched across the ship’s wide tail. Wisps of ice-cold hydrogen and oxygen escaped from the pressure valves and swirled in the warm Florida night air. Down in the corner were the words "VStar III Delaware," a mission number, and a countdown clock. In less than a minute camera 75 would be toast.

In a corner of the screen the countdown clock went from twenty-five to twenty. I pressed 5, then 5, then

ENTER.

A head-on angle of the cockpit crew, slightly fish-eye from a wide-angle lens. There were no more checks to perform, no more toggles to switch. They were almost motionless, waiting for the automatic launch sequence.

I pressed 4, then 4 again: Looking down the center aisle of the passenger compartment. It was built to carry as many as eighteen, but only seven chairs were filled, all of them toward the front of the module.

I knew those seven faces as well as an earlier generation of space nuts had known the faces of Al Shepard, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Deke Slayton, Gordon Cooper, Scott Carpenter … the original Mercury astronauts. None of this seven looked particularly nervous or excited. The white-knuckle days of space travel were over, or so everyone said. Mom says they’ll never be over for her generation, who saw Challenger explode.

I don’t think they’ll ever be completely over for me, either. I mean, I didn’t expect the ship to blow up or anything, but was I the only guy on the planet who thought this VStar launch was just a little out of the ordinary? Was I the only one who noticed the Ares Seven had discarded the standard NASA-blue coveralls for bright red ones?

Mars. They’re going to Mars. The passengers in the VStar were the Ares Seven, the crew, on their way up to the Ares Seven, the ship.

Fifteen seconds.

3, then 1, then

ENTER:

The last gantry arm detached and quickly swung to the left, out of the way.

Eleven seconds.

5, then 4,

ENTER:

A view from a camera on a helicopter three miles away, vibrating slightly because of the long lens.

Nine seconds.

75

ENTER:

I was looking up at the engines. The floodgates opened and a million gallons of water streamed down, to cool the launch pad and soak up some of the thunder that would kill an unprotected man before the flames vaporized him.

Five seconds.

The candle was lit, with a huge cough of orange flame that quickly moderated to an icy blue.

Two seconds. Camera 75 melted.

45

ENTER:

A camera looking at the hold-down latches.

One second.

The latches fell away and the VentureStar immediately leaped into the night sky.

62

ENTER:

This one was perched on the top of the tower. The deep blue body of the VStar roared upward, followed by a fountain of fire. Camera 62 melted.

The sound hit me, miles away. As always, I thought I could feel it blowing my hair, like an explosion. I looked up to see the line of fire arcing in the night. I could see the VStar accelerate.

55

ENTER:

The flight crew were pressed back into their chairs, their faces distorted by an acceleration of two gees and growing. I looked up again. The ship was completing a roll maneuver, and turning downrange.

44

ENTER:

The Ares Seven were all grinning like fools. Cliff Raddison held one hand out in the aisle, palm up. That took strength at 2.4 gees. Across the aisle, Lee Welles took up the challenge, reached out and slapped Raddison’s palm. Then they got their arms back as the gee forces continued to mount.

39

ENTER:

I saw four globular objects in a line. Two were very dark, the other two a much lighter brown.

What the hell? Camera 39 was supposed to be aft-looking, mounted on the ship’s tail. It was one of my favorite angles, looking back to see light-spattered Florida shrink and vanish over the horizon….

Dak! I shouted. You bastard!

I jumped down from the high tailgate, raced around the pickup, and was just in time to see Dak and Alicia straightening and pulling up their pants. I gave Dak a shove and he was laughing so hard he simply fell over onto the sand. Dak’s laugh was a high-pitched giggle; Alicia had more of what I would call a belly laugh, and she was not in much better shape than Dak, leaning against the truck, holding her pants up with one hand. I turned away; I didn’t want Dak to see me smile.

Kelly came around to the front of the truck in time to see Alicia collapse in the sand beside Dak.

Can somebody tell me what’s going on?

I went to the front of the truck and pointed to the O in Dodge.

There’s a camera in there, I told her. It’s about the size of a postage stamp. Kelly bent to study it, but couldn’t see anything.

Television camera?

Just in case, Dak said, sitting up with tears streaming from his eyes. "Bad things can happen to a Nee-gro in the deep south. If the cops ever do a Rodney King on my nappy head, I’m not going to cross my fingers and hope somebody has a camcorder."

I still don’t get it, Kelly said.

I showed her the flatscreen, thumbed the backup button until I had the image Dak had pirated into the NASA data stream.

Yes sir! Dak shouted. "That rocket ain’t going to Mars, it’s going to the moon, baby!"

There was barely enough light for me to see the smile on Kelly’s face as she realized what she was seeing. I looked at the sky, where the VStar had now dwindled to a very bright speck to the southeast. A white vapor trail, barely visible by starlight, was twisted by the high-altitude winds.

You’ve got a big zit on your ass, Dak, Kelly said.

Huh? Let me see that.

She held it out of his reach, then tossed it back to me. Dak realized his leg was being pulled. He helped Alicia to her feet. The four of us stood together a few moments, watching the VStar’s light dwindle and vanish below the horizon.

Say hi to John Carter, swordsman of Mars, when you get there, guys, Dak said.

Or Valentine Michael Smith, I added.

Just so it isn’t those H. G. Wells Martians, Kelly said.

It was a pleasant Wednesday night in the spring, one of those times that almost makes up for the heat and humidity in Florida most of the year. We were standing in a shell parking lot in Cocoa Beach. At the north end half a dozen cars clustered under the flashing neon of the Apollo Lounge. It advertised nude table dancing, pool, no-cover-no-minimum, and World Famous Astroburgers. We had the south end of the lot to ourselves. Before us was a sand dune, the beach, and the Atlantic Ocean. Not far behind us was the Banana River, which isn’t a river at all but a long, slender bay cut off from the sea by the barrier island that contains Indian Harbor Beach, Patrick Air Force Base, Cocoa, and Cape Canaveral, just a few miles to the north. There were places to get a little closer to the launch complex without a visitors’ pass, but none that offered us a better view of the downrange flight of most VStars.

So, are you satisfied with the flight, Captain Garcia? Dak asked.

Everything looks nominal from here, I said.

Don’t know what those folks at NASA would do without you to help get ’em in the air every night, Dak muttered.

It’s not every night, it’s more like—

Couple times a week.

Yeah, okay, I said. It was about that often, at least when I could convince Dak to fire up Blue Thunder and take me out there. Anyway, this one’s taking the crew up to the Mars ship.

What’s your problem, Dak? Kelly asked.

No problem. Just restless, I guess. Manny likes to come out here, look at ’em take off. Way I see it, it’s just one more ship taking off without me on it. Dak looked at the horizon where the rocket had faded into the black sky. He looked hungry. At last he looked back at us.

How about it, Manny? he said. Go back to the heart-break hotel and hit the books? Or do a little off-roading first?

Is that one of those rhetorical questions?

So me and Kelly piled into the back of the truck and Dak and Alicia got in the cab, and Blue Thunder roared to life. I’ve never asked just what Dak has under the hood, but I figure NASA would be amazed if they could take a look. Put wings on Blue Thunder and it could probably catch up to the VStar. Dak flipped switches on a dashboard only a little less complicated than the ones in airliners, and the lights came on in groups. There were headlights and taillights and search-lights. Yellow fog lights hung below the front bumper. Tiny running-board lights could be made to crawl around the truck, like the sign for a Miami casino. More headlights were mounted on the big chrome roll bar that Kelly and I clung to, standing up in the pickup bed. And right behind a thick Plexiglas spoiler on the hood was the truck’s crowning glory: a blue neon scrawl spelling out Blue Thunder. Cuban gangbangers in immaculate low-riders, not an easy group to impress, had been known to drive into ditches in amazement when Dak rocketed past. As more and more lights came on, the color became visible, a blue so rich the only place on Earth you could duplicate it was deep in the ocean, and of a transparency you could only get with dozens of coats of paint and endless hours of buffing. Blue Thunder was more a work of art than a vehicle.

Which is not to say it wasn’t a hell of a vehicle. We bounced over the dune, me and Kelly holding on to the roll bar in the back, and then all four of the big off-road tires bit into the loose sand and we were off.

I knew as well as anyone that we should have gone home and done a few hours of studying. But if we had, Dak would never have run over the ex-astronaut.

2

It’s not strictly legal to drive on the beach in Florida.

Okay, it’s against the law. Would you believe they used to have car races right out on the sand, not very far north of where we were that night, until they built the big track at Daytona? It’s true, I’ve seen the video. Now they worry about every quart of oil that might make its way into the Atlantic. I’m not saying that’s a bad idea, but if anyone thought Blue Thunder would leave so much as a drop on the clean sands of Cocoa Beach they didn’t know Dak very well. You could cook and eat your dinner right off the engine block, assuming Dak would ever let you do such a messy thing to his baby.

Dak would be spending hours tomorrow hosing off the worst of the salty sand. He would remove wheels and brakes and shocks to clean them with a toothbrush. If you think I’m kidding, you don’t know Dak.

Kelly and I hung on tight as Dak steered through the packed sand and foam, and every time he hit a wavelet spreading across the beach we’d get a fine salt spray in our faces. Looking down through the open moon roof I could hear the throbbing drums of some new South African group Alicia had discovered. I could see the dash lights, including the fuzzbuster unit I’d helped him install. It was supposed to alert us if there was a cop transmitting anywhere within two miles. We knew the cops had seen us out there, we’d heard them talking about us. They were even pretty sure of who we were, and so far hadn’t been able to do a damn thing about it. They had to catch us first, and there wasn’t a police vehicle in the whole state of Florida that could keep up with Blue Thunder in the sand.

Kelly had one arm around my waist and one hand on the roll bar, and that felt great. I had my arm around her, too. The wind and the spray blew through her hair and she looked great in the moonlight. Dak was staying close to the water and far from the dunes, because the soft, rolling sands were where nighttime lovers liked to spread their blankets.

Life seemed just about perfect. And that’s when we ran over the guy.

He looked like a piece of driftwood when I first saw him. He was lying on his back looking up at the stars, or what few stars you could see with all the lights of Cocoa Beach behind us. I saw him turn his head and squint against the bright headlights.

Kelly saw him the same time I did, and she shouted something and started pounding on the roof. I looked down.

Alicia straightened up—

Dak glanced up at me—

Kelly hit the roof even harder—

Dak looked forward … mouthed an obscenity … slammed on the brakes.

Blue Thunder’s wheels locked and we began to skid sideways. Dak corrected. He had us straightened out again when we ran over the man’s legs.

We came to a stop. The truck’s engine died and for a moment there was only the sound of the surf. Then everyone started shouting at once.

I don’t remember what anyone said. It wasn’t anything terribly smart, I know that. We were scared.

Kelly and I jumped out of the pickup bed and hurried around to the side of the truck. Dak had his door open, but that seemed to be as far as he could go. He had his arms over the steering wheel and his head buried in his arms. He was shaking.

Alicia hadn’t been able to get out over Dak, so she came around the front. Dak’s running-board lights dazzled our eyes so we couldn’t see in the darkness beneath them. Alicia shined her flashlight down at the sand, then made a little squeaking sound and backed up a few paces.

We cut off his legs, she whispered. Kelly turned around and made a gagging sound, then turned back. I knelt close to where Alicia was shining the flashlight beam.

I could see that the man’s legs ended a lot sooner than they should have. Blue Thunder had thrown up some big ridges of wet, heavy sand. I couldn’t see where his legs ended because the sand covered most of them below the knees.

But I saw his shoes easy enough. They were a good five feet away from his kneecaps and three feet away from the truck.

Dak stepped out of the cab, took one look at the disembodied feet, staggered into the surf and vomited.

I felt like doing the same … and then I realized what had happened. I went over to them and prodded one with my own shoe. It rolled over. There, was no foot inside.

Alicia knelt and shined the light under the truck. Kelly knelt beside her and worked her hand down into loose sand.

She pulled up a bare foot, holding it by the little piggy that stayed home, or maybe the one who had roast beef. A leg came up with it, perfectly well attached to the foot. There weren’t even any tread marks on it.

First you feel a wave of relief. Then you get angry. I wanted to kick him. What sort of jerk lies in the surf line in the dark?

But I could almost hear my mother’s voice. Oh, yeah? What kind of jerk goes joyriding on the beach in the dark? Okay, Mom. You’re right, as usual.

Let’s get him out of there, I said, and grabbed a foot. Dak took the other and we slid him out, where he squinted up into Alicia’s light.

This salt water ain’t doing your undercarriage any good, hon, he said.

"It’s my undercarriage," Dak said.

Whatever, the guy said, and belched. Then he sort of passed out.

I say sort of because he never went to sleep. He passed into an alcoholic fog where he wasn’t really connecting with what was happening. He was docile as a baby, and in the morning he wouldn’t remember a thing. Right now he’d blow a perfect ten on the lush-o-meter.

There’s a good chance we saved his life. The tide could have easily taken him out to sea where he’d drown without ever waking up.

What’s your name, dude? Dak was asking him.

This dude is down for the count, my friend, I said. We’d better get him out of here before the crabs eat him.

Drag him back in the dunes? Alicia suggested.

Worse than crabs back in the dunes, Dak said. Passed-out guy could get raped back there in the dunes.

He’d never know it, Alicia said.

Maybe a certain soreness in the morning … Dak rubbed his ass, and we all laughed. Okay, so it wasn’t so funny. I felt a little silly with relief. You think about it, you realize how your whole life can change in two seconds. We could have been gathered around a dead or dying man.

Kelly might almost have been reading my thoughts.

We nearly killed him, don’t you think we ought to try to take him home?

And have him blow chunks all over my upholstery? Let him fight off the fairies his own self.

Gin doesn’t come in chunks, Alicia said. She showed us an empty bottle of Tanqueray she had stumbled over.

Yeah? Say he ate one of those World Famous Astroburgers an hour ago. Dak nodded toward the bar in the distance.

Pretty good gin for a wino.

He’s not a wino. He hasn’t been sleeping in back alleys. Look at his clothes.

It was true, the sneakers sold for well over a hundred dollars a pair, and they looked new. The shirt and pants were expensive labels, too.

And he don’t drink wine, either, Dak said. "So what’s that make him? A gin-o? Whatever, it don’t make his vomit any sweeter."

So, we gonna take him home or not?

Where’s home? Kelly asked.

We all looked down at him again. He was still smiling, humming something I didn’t recognize. A wavelet hit him and eddied around our feet, then sucked a little deeper hole under him as it ran back out. That must have been how his legs got buried. An hour from now he’d be under the sand, somebody else’s problem. But none of us wanted that.

So I reached down and grabbed the side of his pants and pulled him up a bit, then fished his wallet out of his hip pocket.

It was hand-tooled leather and fairly thick. The first thing I saw was the corner of a hundred-dollar bill sticking out. I opened it and pulled out a wad of cash. I thrust it out to Dak, who looked startled and took it. He counted it.

Eight hundred big ones, he said.

So take out a taxi fee and let’s get him home.

He handed the cash back to me. What’s eating you, anyway?

I didn’t really know. Part of it was that I sure could have used the money. Who would know? Certainly not this whacked-out jerk, lying there pissed out of his mind.

You’d know, Manuel, Mom said. She had this annoying habit of speaking just as loudly when she wasn’t there as when she was.

We’ll just dump him in the back, I said. I’ll ride with him. He barfs, I’ll clean it up. Dak waved it away, and I looked at the wallet again. Visa, MasterCard, American Express, all platinum, all made out to one Travis Broussard.

Cajun, Kelly said, peering over my shoulder.

Huh?

The name, she explained. There’s some Cajun families from the Florida panhandle, I think. I didn’t know what difference that made, unless he lived in the panhandle. That would be too far to drive him. I found the driver’s license, and as I pulled it from its pocket another card fell to the sand. Alicia picked it up. I pointed out the address on the license to Dak and Kelly.

Is that far from here?

Forty-five minutes, maybe half an hour this time of night. Out in the boonies, though. Don’t look at me that way. I’ll take the dude. Won’t even charge him for my gasoline.

Alicia whistled under her breath. Look at this, she said. The guy’s an astronaut.

Let me see that, Dak said, and grabbed the card. Then Alicia played keep-away with her flashlight for a moment until Dak and I overpowered her.

This expired three years ago, Dak said. But before that it had been a gate pass to the Kennedy Space Center, and identified Broussard as a colonel and a chief pilot in the NASA VentureStar program.

3

The quickest way from the beach to Rancho Broussard involved twenty miles or so on the Florida Autopike. Dak eased Blue Thunder onto the ramp and allowed the Pike computer to interrogate his precious baby. There are several things about the Autopike that just rub Dak the wrong way. The most basic is simply that he hates to surrender control of his rig. You go driving, you should have at least one hand on the wheel, like God intended.

I didn’t argue with him on that one. There was still something profoundly creepy about cars that steered themselves, at least to folks like me and my mother. We could barely afford the thirty-year-old Mercury that Dak and I were always rescuing from a one-way trip to the junkyard. That Merk was not Pike-adaptable without spending about ten times what the old wreck was worth. Poor folks like us ride the Autopike about as often as we take the ballistic Orient Express to Tokyo.

The other thing Dak hates about the Pike is … well, let’s face it, nobody likes to get passed, right? Nobody our age, anyway, and for sure nobody driving a rig as gaudy as Blue Thunder. But ol’ Blue was built for power, not for speed. We were banished into the D lane, the outer one for vehicles that cruise at about eighty-five or ninety. What we call the blue hair lane, for all the old ladies in their well-preserved Caddies and Buicks. Now you can see them by the thousands in the D lane, going places they were too timid to drive to before the Pike opened. It’s a drag to be tucked in among them while you watch the soccer moms in their minivans pass you in the fast lanes.

Dak pulled into one of the brightly lit authorization booths. Kelly and I scrambled out of the bed and set Colonel Broussard on his feet. He needed support, but he could stand. We shoved him into the narrow backseat as the Pike computer checked some eighty or ninety roadworthiness items every time you entered, from airbag sensors to tire pressure. We hopped in behind him.

Is this my car? Broussard asked.

Just take it easy, sir, Kelly said. We’ll have you home soon.

Okay.

If he barfs in my car, man …

Please state your destination, the computer said. Dak told it the exit number, and the computer told him what the fare would be.

Do not attempt to leave the vehicle while it is in motion. I heard the doors click as the computer locked them.

Do not attempt to steer the vehicle until you are told it is safe. I could see Dak idly spinning the disconnected steering wheel.

"Do not unbuckle your safety belts at any time. The next rest wayside is thirty minutes away, so if you need to use the facilities, press the

REST

button on your Autopike Control Console now."

I’ll just piss in a Mason jar, Dak said.

Don’t miss, said the computer. You’re due for an oil change in five hundred miles. Your left front tire is showing some uneven wear. And all that salt and sand isn’t doing your undercarriage any good.

That’s what I said! Colonel Broussard shouted.

Bon voyage, Blue, said the voice, which I now suspected was not the Pike computer. Blue Thunder pulled quickly away from the booth as Dak muttered something about Big Brother. I looked over at the supervisor’s tower and saw a guy waving at us.

The only time I was on the Pike the scariest part was the initial merge. The computer tucked us in between two semis with about three inches clearance fore and aft, and did it at eighty miles per hour. During rush hour they use every square inch of road available and the door handles and bumpers almost touch. Some people can’t bear to use the Pike at all because of that. It’s contrary to all your driving instincts.

No problem like that tonight. Traffic was light in all lanes. Over in the A lane there would be no traffic at all for a minute or two, then a dozen cars would zip by bumper to bumper to take advantage of drafting, like racing cars. They say in a few more years you’ll be able to travel from Miami to Maine like this, but as of now the Florida part of the Pike only goes from Brevard to Jacksonville, by way of Orlando.

We’d hardly got up to Pike speed when it was time to get off again. The computer eased us to the required dead stop at the booths, and Dak engaged the manual controls. We rolled off the Pike and onto a main east-west highway.

We were on that for about fifteen minutes and then turned off on a smaller road. Then we took a shell road, deserted at this time of night. Dak watched the Global Positioning Satellite screen, where a red line was showing him the route over a maze of farm roads and hunting trails. This was about as far off the beaten track as you could get in this part of the world.

Off to our right we saw lights, the first ones in a while. When we got there we saw it was one of those little five-pew Baptist churches that dot the back roads from South Carolina to Texas. This one was a double-wide trailer sitting on concrete blocks. There was another double-wide sitting a bit back in the trees. It was probably the parsonage. You could tell which one was the church because somebody had built a big steeple over it and taped some colored cellophane over the windows. Somebody in there liked to paint. There were dozens of big plywood signs with biblical verses and end-of-the-world warnings lettered on them, and a lot of renderings of Bible stories done in flaking house paint. It was all lit up with floods and strung with colored Christmas lights. The whole place was surrounded by a high chain-link fence and the grounds were littered with the usual number of rusted-out cars and junked refrigerators and busted toilets you found this deep into redneck country.

Kelly was tugging at my sleeve. Look at that one, she said, laughing. I figured she meant the one that read

YOU THINK GOD

IS JUST SOME BAGGY-ASS

OLD PECKERWOOD

IN A DIRTY SHEET?

THINK AGAIN, SINNER!

Dak took the next right and we rattled over a cattle guard and down a long potholed driveway that took a few gentle curves through the piney woods before it ended … in a basketball court.

There were lights on poles, but only one of them was working. There were cracks in the concrete with grass growing in them. Neither of the goals had a net.

Let’s shoot some hoops, friends! Dak called out. I had to laugh. We all knew Dak’s attitude about basketball. If you’re black and you’re tall, he once told me, you better not learn to play b-ball unless you’re the next Michael Jordan. If they see you can shoot they’ll never bother to educate you. Dak pretended to be the most fumble-fingered jerk since the game was invented, somewhere deep in Africa. Don’t believe those white boys who say it came from here. How many white boys you see playing NBA ball? I rest my case. Actually, the only time I got him to play a little one-on-one at a deserted playground he wasn’t all that bad. My speed made up for his reach, so we were pretty evenly matched. But I didn’t make the first team at school.

The rest of the place hid in the darkness. On one side of the clearing was a sprawling ranch-style house. It looked like the plantings around it had gone wild, and in Florida that can mean very wild indeed. Dak drove toward the house, but before we reached it we came to a big, empty swimming pool.

Dak drove close and cut the engine. We listened to the crickets for a while, then we all got out of the truck. Me and Kelly followed Alicia to the edge of the pool. She shined the light down into it, then jumped in surprise and gave a little squeak. Down there in the deep end, sitting on a lot of dead leaves and empty cans, was an eight-foot alligator. He turned his head, opened his mouth, and hissed at us.

Whoever lives here, they’re crazy, Kelly said. Isn’t it illegal, keeping an alligator like that?

Might be, but what’s that? Alicia said, and shined her light on a thick electrical cord that went from under the gator and up the side of the pool. I think this is just one of those audio-whatsit things, like at Disney World.

Go down and check it out, will you, babe? Dak said. We’ll wait up here.

And get electrocuted, right? I see some water down there.

She shined her light over the house and patio. I let my eyes follow the beam as it picked out a low diving board and groupings of lawn or pool furniture, including a big umbrella and table thing that had blown over.

The light traveled a little more, to one of those bolt-it-yourself sheet metal buildings you can buy at Sears and put up in a few days, if you have a concrete pad to set it on. There were four wide garage doors, closed, and each of them had a light fixture over it but only one was working. It was a large building, I’ll bet you could put an ice hockey rink in it. Several rusting vehicles sat off to one side, some almost vanishing into the blackberry brambles. One of them was up on blocks, and it looked like a Rolls-Royce except the back half was gone and a pickup bed had been welded there.

I don’t think anybody’s home, Kelly said. I didn’t think so, either. We heard nothing suggesting a human was near. The mosquitoes had found us. We were all slapping at them, and I knew we couldn’t just leave him in one of those pool chairs over there. He’d be one big skeeter bite in the morning.

Where we gonna put the dude, then? Dak asked.

Alicia reached in the open truck door and leaned on the horn, hard, for a good fifteen or twenty seconds.

Dak was about to honk again when a light came on above a door on the side of the aluminum barn. The door opened, and a short, tubby figure stepped out onto a small porch and stood there with his hands in his pockets.

You know a Travis Broussard? Alicia shouted at him.

His shoulders sagged. He ran a hand over a partly bald head.

Y’all know where he be? he hollered back.

He be in my truck, Dak yelled. "He be passed out in my truck. He maybe be about to barf in my truck when he wakes up. You want him?"

I want him, me. Y’ all wait a minute.

He closed the door and then one of the garage doors rolled about halfway up. The guy came through it, pushing a wheel-barrow.

By the time he reached us, I think we were all grinning, at least a little.

He wasn’t much over five feet tall and plump, a right jolly old elf. Trying to place him, I realized he looked a lot like a popular postcard we sell in the office, mostly in December. It shows Santa Claus stretched out poolside between two Hooters girls. He’s wearing a loud aloha shirt and tacky cut-off jeans and huaraches and holding a margarita and it says, "Deliver your own goddamn gifts this year!"

When he got to us he set the wheelbarrow down. His forearms were huge, like Popeye’s. He was smiling, which made the creases in his face deeper. You could tell he smiled a lot. He made odd little bowing movements toward us, didn’t see it when Dak started to offer his hand. He was twisting the hem of his tentlike shirt so hard I wondered why the hula-hula girls weren’t screaming. From all the wrinkles I could see he twisted that shirt a lot.

He looked into the pickup. He stroked his snow-white beard for a bit, then reached in and grabbed Colonel Broussard’s arm and was about to swing him up in a fireman’s carry when Dak stepped up beside him.

Here, man, we’ll give you a hand, Dak said. The little guy looked confused, then did a few more bows in our direction. So Dak and I each grabbed a leg and we carried him. We arranged the limp carcass with his arms and legs hanging out of the wheelbarrow. He was still sleeping peacefully.

The elf stood there a moment, twisting the shirt again. I noticed he seldom looked into our eyes, but then his eyes hardly ever settled on anything.

T’ank y’all, he said. I owes y’all one, me.

Dak started some sort of aw-shucks routine, but it was wasted. The guy grabbed the handles of the barrow and almost trotted away from us. Broussard’s arms and legs bumped up and down.

We all looked at each other, and Alicia had her fist at her mouth, biting hard on the knuckles. She held it as long as she could, till the guy was almost to the barn door, then she exploded in laughter.

What a weird little man, Kelly said, and she started laughing, too. It didn’t take long for me to join in. Dak looked at all of us and shook his head.

Yeah, right. ‘I owes y’all one, me.’ Like we’ll ever see him again.

Did you notice there was no dirt or anything in the wheelbarrow? Like it never had anything in it.

Colonel Broussard’s personal rickshaw, Kelly said.

Yeah, every Saturday night he gets a ride home in the barrow.

Huh! More than every Saturday night, Alicia assured us. The guy looked like a stone alcoholic to me. Alicia would know, I figured.

Let’s get the hell out of here, Kelly suggested.

So we all climbed back in Blue Thunder and bounced back to the highway, retracing our route except for the part on the Autopike. Dak didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get home, and neither was I. There’s an amazing number of things two people can do under a blanket in the back of a truck, and Kelly and I tried most of them. I didn’t think of Broussard or his odd little friend all the way back home, and after a few days I’d almost forgotten about them.

4

It was our interest in going into space that had brought me and Dak together. We went to different high schools but not long after getting our diplomas we came to the same realization. The Florida public schools had not prepared either of us for a career in science or engineering. It had not even prepared us to pass the entrance exam for a good college. We had a lot of catching up to do.

But a self-motivated student can earn anything up to and including a doctorate on the University of the Internet just by logging on and sitting in on virtual classes. No books, no tuition, no housing costs. Not that a dot-com doctorate was ever likely to rival a degree from Harvard, but you couldn’t beat the price. I encountered Dak there, in a remedial math class. In a chat room after classes we found out we both had an obsession with finding a career in space, and we lived only a few miles apart. So we got together to study and soon were spending a lot of our spare time together.

I’m smart, but I’m not a genius. I found high school easy, it never challenged me much. I didn’t work very hard. It came as a big shock that I didn’t do well on the SATs.

So whose fault was it that I was now slopping out toilets and making beds, trying hard to catch up, instead of looking forward to my sophomore year at Florida, or State? What was to blame here?

Well, how about poverty?

Practically anybody can plead poverty these days when it comes to higher education. There are only three types of people who get into a school like Yale: the children of the wealthy, students on full scholarship, and those willing to accept student loans that can take the rest of your life to repay.

My family—Mom, my aunt Maria, and myself—owns property near the beach, and that is supposed to be a gold mine. But that property happens to be a battered, leaky, cracked and patched motel built in 1959, and every month we’re less sure we can hang on to it for another year. After taxes and upkeep, the wages we pay ourselves put us well below the poverty line. So there’s no doubt about it. We are poor. But that had nothing to do with my not studying hard enough.

So try again. How about The System? It’s always safe to blame the system. It is politically fashionable, it makes you feel better about yourself, and it is (at least partly) true. Did it really speak well for the Department of Education that a guy like me who attended regularly, did the work, and even graduated from Gus Grissom High School in the top 5 percent … did it make sense that after twelve years I wasn’t up to entry level in the state university system?

No, it didn’t make sense. The system really sucked, no getting around it. But it sucked just as hard for some of my classmates who were now going to school at Cornell and Princeton.

If it ain’t the institution, and it ain’t the money, then it’s got to be the color of your skin or the language you speak, right? It has to be racism.

I even mentioned it to my mother one day when I was feeling particularly put-upon and sour. It must be because I’m Latino, I griped. Well, half Cuban, anyway. When she had stopped laughing, she came close to getting angry.

I hope I didn’t raise a crybaby, she said. "Don’t you ever blame your own shortcomings or anything else on racism … not even if it’s true. When you see you are being discriminated against, you just make the best of it. You deal with it, or else you see racism every time you turn around and spend your life moaning about it. And besides, you’re hardly any more brown-skinned than I am, and my Spanish is a heck of a lot better than yours."

Which was the simple truth. I got most of my looks from her side of the family, which was Italian. My hair is dark brown and curly. I wouldn’t look out of place wearing a yarmulke. Only around the eyes, which are dark and deep-set and sometimes rather bruised looking, like Jimmy Smits, do I resemble the pictures of my dad. Sad to say, the rest of me doesn’t look anything like Jimmy Smits, but I get by.

Like Jimmy Buffett said, it was my own damn fault.

In a mediocre system, the talented have no need to excel. I’m a fast reader, I have a good memory, and I’m quick with figures. With those qualifications, about the only way you could fail at Gus Grissom High was to never go to class.

After twelve years of that kind of schooling, both Dak and I thought we knew how to study. You go home, you read the material for tomorrow’s classes. Thirty minutes, an hour, tops. Then you’ve got the rest of the evening and all weekends to do whatever you want.

In my case, doing whatever I wanted meant working about sixty hours a week in our family business, the Blast-Off Motel. That is, it was what I wanted if I also wanted to eat and have a roof over my head.

Dak and I got together to study in the hope of improving our self-motivational skills, which were sadly lacking. Sometimes it worked. If the weather outside wasn’t just too damn gorgeous. If the surf and the wind weren’t just so perfect it would be a sin to spend the day inside when you could be riding your windboard. If the college girls from up north weren’t too plentiful and beautiful stretched out in scantily clad rows, trying to bake a Florida brown before spring break was over …

Me and my family had what you’d call a love-hate relationship with the Blast-Off Motel. Without it we’d all have been looking for jobs instead of working in the family business. I’ve pushed a vacuum cleaner the equivalent of twice around the Earth at the equator. I know fifty things that can go wrong with a toilet and I know how to fix most of them. I could pass the test for a Ph.D. in toilets.

Still, it’s better than working for somebody else. I think.

Mom’s grandparents built the motel and called it the Seabreeze. Cape Canaveral was just a missile testing base then. Locals had been enjoying the fireworks since the end of the Second World War, but nobody else knew it was there, except race fans coming for Daytona 500, and they ignored it.

Then Project Mercury brought a lot of attention to this sandy little corner of Florida. There was a housing shortage, and many of the workers and engineers who moved to the Merritt Island area were happy to find a room of any kind. And back then the Seabreeze was a pretty good place.

They renamed it the Blast-Off in honor of John Glenn’s flight. Grandpa didn’t realize that real Canaveral people always called it liftoff, and by the time he did the big, expensive sign out front was already installed. The little red neon rocket on the sign has been taking off, practically non-stop, for over fifty years now.

When Mom’s parents died in a car wreck she inherited a business already halfway to bankruptcy. For the last twenty years she and Aunt Maria, and me when I got old enough, have been trying to make a living at it. Now it was probably too late.

The Blast-Off had been built so that all the rooms had an ocean view. Technically they all still did. But we never had the gall to actually claim that. If you looked far to the north or far to the south from your Blast-Off balcony, you could see a bit of water and sand. But straight ahead was the Golden Manatee resort, twenty stories of New Florida opulence, directly across the four-lane highway from us.

Mom can hardly look at the Golden Manatee without spitting. Her father used to own the land the resort now sits on.

He was dead set against ‘building on sand,’ Mom would tell anyone who would listen. "He always felt this building was too close to the sea. He spent most of his life terrified a hurricane would wash it away. So he never built over there. He sold the land."

Now the Manatee wants to buy our land to use as a parking lot. But they don’t need it bad enough to offer us a decent price. We’d get just about enough money to pay off our mortgage, and the next day we could start looking for work in the exciting tourist service industry. That is, as maids and waiters in somebody else’s business.

Well, they can just kiss my manatee, Mom said.

After we delivered Travis Broussard to his odd little friend, Dak dropped me off, alone, a little after midnight in the quiet Blast-Off parking lot. Kelly had early appointments the next day, and spending the night with me would have added to her driving time, so Dak was taking her to her apartment. I wish she’d mentioned it before we got to my place. Maybe I wouldn’t have fooled around so much under the blanket in the pickup bed. As it was, the first order of business was a cold shower.

I live in room 201 at the Blast-Off. The way we’re set up, the owner’s apartment is behind the office on the ground floor: living room and kitchen downstairs, two bedrooms upstairs. One of those used to be mine until Aunt Maria moved in to help. I moved into 201, which has the Toilet From Hell. I had worked on that damn thing a hundred times over the years and never could stop it from screwing up about once a week. Finally we decided we just wouldn’t rent it anymore, as well as room 101, which had a collapsed ceiling from all the overflowing water above. It’s not as if we ever had to turn guests away for the lack of those two rooms.

The sink and tub/shower still worked. When I needed the toilet I used the one in room 101. I took out the twin beds and put in a king-sized, brought in a big desk and a table and chairs and a sofa I got for a few dollars at the Salvation Army thrift store.

The arrangement suited me. That is, I knew I could do a lot worse. It took some of the sting out of still living with my family at age twenty. I had my own door and could play music and come and go as I pleased. If only I could take a leak without going outside and downstairs I’d be content.

Once out of the shower I turned on my computer, a ten-year-old Dell laptop I’d picked up for twenty dollars. I went to the NASA public website, selected Hall of Astronauts, and typed in a search for Travis Broussard.

We’re sorry, the search produced no results. Do you wish to try another search?

Damn right, I grumbled, and shut off the speech function.

I searched the whole site, and found numerous references to Colonel Broussard. His flight record was there, beginning fifteen years ago when he entered the astronaut corps as a rookie pilot trainee. He made six flights sitting in the right-hand seat before becoming a full-time senior pilot. Sounded pretty quick to me. I did an info scan and found it was the fastest anyone had ever made the transition. Twelve years ago Travis was NASA’s fair-haired boy. I would have been eight years old then.

His name was blue-lined, as were all astronaut names at the site. Maybe this was a route to the bio. I clicked on the link, and got a screen saying, This page currently under construction. I clicked on another name at random and was shown to an elaborate biography page, with eight screens of text and a hundred NASA pics and snapshots of the astronaut’s professional and home life. I requested John Glenn’s site, and it was gigantic, thousands of stories going all the way back to Life magazine, albums of pictures, hours and hours and hours of video and film clips, whole movies from The Right Stuff to the Glenn bio-pic aired only last year.

Okay, it seemed that Broussard was the only one of several thousand current and former and even dead spacers without a spot in the Hall of Astronauts. How come?

Back to his flight record. He was listed as chief pilot for seventy launches. There was a blue link after the date of his last mission, and once again, clicking it took me nowhere. More links, on Flights 67, 60, and 53, all leading nowhere. Another dead end on a link way back on Flight 21. But there was mention of a commendation. I noted the date of his twenty-first flight and opened a window for the Miami Herald.

I had the newspaper search that day and came up with a six-paragraph story on page three, complete with a picture of a smiling Travis Broussard, quite a bit younger, shaking hands with … my, oh my, that was the President of the United States.

The story read, in part:

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP) In a brief ceremony in the west wing of the White House, President Ventura awarded Astronaut Chief Pilot Travis Broussard with the Alan Shepard Medal of Valor for his actions on the third of this month in guiding a crippled VStar Mark II to an emergency landing at a backup airfield in Africa, saving the lives of the crew of three and seven passengers.

Broussard had been promoted to the rank of Astronaut Colonel the previous day at the Pentagon.

I was getting frustrated. A big hero like Travis, and at the NASA site he was the little astronaut who wasn’t there. Absolutely nothing to be learned beyond the fact that yes, he had been an astronaut, had flown the VStar, and yes, he won a medal.

So I went to SpaceScuttlebutt.com, where a lot of space-heads hang out, found a room with a few familiar handles in it, and posted:

Broussard, Travis …?

Pretty soon this bounced back:

No such FUBAR. Un-person. Shame on you.

FUBAR meant Fouled Up Beyond All Repair. I sent:

Y no bio?

I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.

Funny guy. I was about to come back when he posted another line:

Spacemanny? Dat you?

Unfortunately, it was. I’d made that my web handle years ago, before it started sounding so dorky. Now it would be too much bother to change it.

Y.

A three-by-three window opened and I saw the head and shoulders of a very, very fat man about my mother’s age. He had to weigh in at five hundred pounds. SpaceScuttlebutt.com was as close as he’d ever get to space and he knew it. He lived his spacegoing fantasies online, and his knowledge was encyclopedic. I had no idea where he lived or what his real name was, but his handle was Piginspace. A man with no illusions. I was lucky to have run into him.

Broussard-san heap big bad medicine, Spacemanny, he said through the tiny built-in speaker on my antique laptop. Bad juju. Say his name at Kennedy, you must leave the room, spin around twice, and spit.

He talked like that sometimes. He enjoyed having information someone else was looking for, and sometimes made you jump through hoops to get