Kelly became more or less a full-time mother… but, being Kelly, still had time to handle a few projects on the side, little things like helping run our many business interests and serving for a term in the State Senate in Tallahassee, where she helped pass the first meaningful land-use laws Florida had ever seen.

Her father is currently between beauty queens, though he’s been seen with a former Miss Maine on his arm. Kelly and I made up with him, as far as it is possible to make up with a conniving, back-stabbing, larcenous racist. We usually spend Thanksgiving with him, unless he’s been too obnoxious the previous year. Even my grandparents, both sets, have decided that my being white, or Hispanic, doesn’t matter too much if I’m rich and famous. After they had appeared on their local television stations crowing about how wonderful I was, they couldn’t very well ignore me. We usually spend a stiffly polite Christmas Day with one or the other.

[409] Travis was right. Both MIT and Gal Tech sent cordial invitations for me to continue my education there. But who was I trying to kid? I simply didn’t have the kind of mind that would put me through either university without the kind of covert help they usually shower only on sports stars. And I’d be afraid that if I went, that’s exactly what they’d do, graduate me still unable to extract a cube root. So I turned them down.

Instead, after all the fuss had died down, I went to Florida State, where I eventually earned an M.B.A., with a major in… hotel management.

I didn’t give up my dream of going into space as a career, I just took a closer look at it. What did I want, exactly? Well, to be a spaceman. Wouldn’t that be great?

Mom says that when I was seven she found an old telescope in a thrift store and bought it. Instantly, I decided I wanted to be an astronomer. Then I discovered that real astronomers hardly every actually looked through their telescopes. They took pictures with long exposures, they ran data through computers. Where’s the fun in that? I went back to wanting to be a fireman.

Before Red Thunder there were basically four types of people who went into space: pilots, scientists/payload specialists, United States senators, and the occasional rich person willing to spend a million dollars or more for a week in space.

After Red Thunder…. everybody could go into space. There may have been things that changed human civilization as radically as the Squeezer drive-fire, agriculture, the Industrial Revolution, the automobile, the computer-but nothing else changed it so fast. Suddenly, you could just buy a ticket and go. For a while there were even trips you could take to be the “first.” One expedition took two hundred tourists to Uranus and those folks became the first to set foot on a dozen small moons. It was as if Lewis and Clark had pulled a Greyhound bus after them, full of folks in loud shirts, snapping pictures all the way to the Columbia River.

So managing a hotel made perfect sense for me… if it was a hotel on Mars. The Marineris Hyatt is about three months from completion [410] on a site within an easy Bigfoot drive of Red Thunder’s first landing. I have been hired to manage it, and that’s a job I can do well. After that…

Just as soon as it became possible to buy Squeezer bubbles to install in your homemade spaceship, there was an explosion of crazies-they seemed crazy to me, anyway-headed outward. Dozens of them, bound for all the nearest stars. The ones who aimed for Alpha Centauri should start arriving back at Sol System soon, those who lived, anyway. They will be only about a year older because most of the trip they will have traveled at nearly the speed of light. They will have the satisfaction of being the first to fly to another star and return, but progress has already overtaken them. They went hoping to find habitable planets, and we know Alpha Centauri has none. Gigantic telescopes on the far side of the moon have told us that. They have also discovered dozens of Earth-sized planets at the proper distance from the right kind of star, planets that show the signature of water in the spectrograph, all within thirty light-years.

Thirty light-years is an easy journey with a Squeezer drive. Any distance is easy, they all take about a year when you’re going so fast time virtually stops.

Several very large starships are now being built. The one closest to completion will be ready to shove off in about five years. It is owned by Red Thunder, Inc., so Kelly and I have a reserved berth, if we want it.

If we go, I won’t be driving the thing. I won’t be in charge of the engines, I won’t be in the landing party when we get there. But on the way, I can handle the human needs of the voyage very well. A starship is just a very large, very fast hotel, isn’t it?

Kelly isn’t sure yet. For that matter, neither am I. Elizabeth would be thirteen, Ramon would be eleven. Do we want to bring them up in a pioneer society with an alien sun in the sky, or on nice, safe, familiar Mars? There’s plenty of time to decide.

Sometimes I think back, and I’m impressed how much of our lives are determined by chance.

What if we’d run over and killed Travis, that night on the beach? Our lives would have been very different. What if we’d missed seeing [411] him entirely, just drove off into the night and the tide took him or he woke up in a sand dune with a hangover? I’m sure that every day opportunities pass us by and we never even know they were there.

Then again, we can see a chance, take it, and watch it all go sour. My father saw a chance, took it, and ended up with a bullet in his gut.

We of the Red Thunder had incredible luck, but we worked very hard to take advantage of it. Did we “deserve” to be the first on Mars? I’m sure there were worthier people, but the chance fell to us.

MY GOODNESS. THE stories we’ll have to tell. I see Kelly and me, 110 years old, sitting in rocking chairs on a planet with two suns during the day and six moons at night, telling our great-great-grandchildren stories they probably won’t believe.

How perilous it was to go just to Mars in those days.

How alien this new planet thirty light-years from home looked to us.

Alien? they will say. This is home, it’s not alien. What’s perilous about traveling to another star? And here they go again, about how they were the first. So what?

Yes, I know, it doesn’t really mean anything. But the fact remains…

We were the first!