“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.”

“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.