“Sure enough, halfway down one of the speed brakes deployed at about Mach six. We flipped right over. Five times we rolled, me cussing and fighting all the way. I stopped the roll and looked out the window for the landing strip, and there she was. Happiest I’d been since I found that little grass strip in Africa. I brought her in, very hard and very fast… and about a hundred feet off the deck I spotted a 787 crossing the runway in front of me. Must of given the captain of that 787 something to remember, because we missed by maybe ten feet.

“And when we stopped, that’s when I knew I had landed in Atlanta.”

[261] He stopped for a while, sipped at the coffee he’d bought from a machine at the freight terminal. Then he-shook his head.

“I’d a found and fixed that hydraulic leak if they’d a let me go EVA. But since nobody at Hartsfield knew I was coming until I showed up on their radar dropping like a stone and because Senator So-and-so got a whiff of my breath, and since I was still blowing a one-point-eight an hour later…

“We compromised, NASA and me. When the inquiry happened I wouldn’t mention the warnings they’d told me to ignore, also that the reason for ignoring them was the senator’s goddamn fault… and I’d hand in my wings and never fly again.”

There was another long silence. I listened to the hiss of the tires on pavement and the sound of the wipers moving the red Georgia mud around my windshield.

“Sometimes I wish I’d a just gone for it, Manny. Tell the whole story, give the senator and those NASA turkeys what they had coming. But I was drunk. I was stinking drunk. The breath test was probably unconstitutional… but hell, lots of people knew I was a drunk, a drunk who’d been pretty lucky for a long, long time, and a bunch were ready to testify to that.

“Still, I might have… Then somebody mentioned Jubal. Didn’t make a threat, nothing like that. Didn’t have to. They’d looked into my private life enough to know about him. They could drop a hint here, a few bucks there, and the judge takes Jubal from me and puts him in an institution for retarded adults…”

We didn’t speak for the next twenty miles. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I’m sorry? Didn’t quite cover it, did it? Then I did think of something.

“Don’t tell that story to my mom, Travis, okay?”

“Deal.”

Pretty soon he was asleep, and snoring, very loudly. Oh, brother. Better put earplugs on the packing list.

[262] “THESE ARE ALL fifteen-year-old suits,” Travis said. “Only two of them have actually been in space. They’ve all been sitting in a warehouse for a long time.”

We were all gathered at the ranch, beside the pool. The coffin boxes had been pried open. The space suits, a bright color Travis had called “Commie red,” were packed in a substance Sam had called “excelsior,” that looked like dried brown grass. Didn’t the Russians have Styrofoam peanuts? Travis pulled one suit out of its box and brushed it off.

“Isn’t fifteen years kind of old?” Kelly asked.

“Yes, and no.” He didn’t explain, and Kelly went on.

“And why weren’t they ever used?”

“Obsolescence.”

“Is that good?” Alicia asked. “I mean, are they-”

“Okay? They should be as good as new ones, mostly. I couldn’t afford to buy the new model, chilluns. These’ll have to do.” He removed a helmet from one of the other boxes and twisted it into place. He stood and admired his work.

“What you should know about Russian engineering, crew, is that it often doesn’t have the bells and whistles Americans usually design into their stuff. But it works. This kind of suit protected many a Russki behind during many a lonely man-hour. I’d stack ’em up against NASA suits any day.”

I picked up what looked like an instruction manual from the scattered debris. Naturally, it was printed in Russian.

“Do you read Russian, Travis?”

“Passably well. We’ll get one translated, and I’ll check you out on all the Russian labels that are actually on the suit.”

We helped him tie weights to the arms and legs of the suit and he snapped a fitting from the suit into an air compressor hose. Then we tossed it in the pool and started pumping it full of air.

Pretty soon the surface of the pool was boiling with foam, like we’d dropped in a giant Alka-Seltzer. Kelly turned away, grimacing. I think I may have groaned. I heard the freight train of history pulling away without me. Good-bye, trip to Mars. …

[263] Travis kicked off his shoes and put his wallet on the patio table. He picked up a swim mask and put it over his head, then jumped in the pool. He was down only a short time, then came to the surface and clambered out, sopping wet but grinning.

“All the leaks are coming from the connector gaskets,” he announced.

“This is good news?” Dak wondered.

“All according to plan, Dak. You know, the Smithsonian has dozens, maybe hundreds of space suits in the attic. They’re mostly falling apart, there’s no good way to preserve them. The plasticizers in these suit gaskets are simply going to bleed out eventually. All we have to do is change the gaskets and we’re in business.”

“Can you get them off the shelf?” Sam asked.

“No, they’ll have to be custom-made, but it shouldn’t be hard. I know an outfit in Miami can do it. Alicia, I’d like to put you in charge of-”

“Alicia’s classes are too important,” Kelly said. “Let me take it over, Travis. I’m beginning to have a little spare time, plus it’d be nice to do something with my hands other than type and move a mouse.”

Jubal, Sam, Dak, and I loaded the empty coffins back in the U-Haul, and I took them to the dump, glad Mom had not seen them or the leak-like-a-sieve space suits.

AT THE END of the day we all took Travis to the warehouse to see Red Thunder. His reaction was gratifying: his jaw dropped as his neck craned up.

The cradle was finished, and the central tank had been upended, lowered into place, and braced, awaiting the six other tanks which would provide it with more support.

It looked weird, sticking up like that. The top was off so we could install the flanges and the openings which would soon hold the five Plexiglas windows of the cockpit, as Travis called it, or the bridge, as Caleb and Sam did.

[264] And all of it painted a bright Chinese red.

Travis took it all in, then grinned at us.

“Ladies and gents,” he said, “for the first time, I feel like we’re going to Mars.”

24

WE MOUNTED THE six external tanks over the next three days, and it was a perfect example of the learning curve. It took us all day to do the first one, but we did two the second day and the remaining three on the third. And there she stood, basically complete on the outside except for bolting on the tops of five of the tanks.

Tank one contained the air lock. We would enter that tank from the center, as with all the others. There was a deck there, with a hole and a ladder to climb down to the suit locker deck. There the five suits hung on simple racks. There were outlets to charge the suit batteries, and couplings to recharge the backpacks with compressed oxygen. Oxygen instead of the compressed air we’d be breathing aboard ship, because that’s how the suits were designed, and because, even if we could reengineer them, carrying compressed oxygen gave us five times the suit time that compressed air would have.

In the floor of the suit deck was an airtight hatch and another ladder down to the lock itself. When we had that deck finished we all practiced climbing up and down the ladder, fully suited, and operating the locks by ourselves, as we might have to do in an emergency. It was tough going. But we’d never have to do it in full Earth gravity.