Red Lightning-Thunder and Lightning 2 by John Varley

Author:John Varley [Varley, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction / Science Fiction / Adventure
ISBN: 9781440624797
Google: atr3Uze_XpwC
Amazon: 0441014887
Barnesnoble: 0441014887
Goodreads: 9478172
Publisher: Ace
Published: 2006-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

One more thing I like about Mars that you can't get on Earth: We are allowed to use bubble drives on our personal vehicles.

On Earth, you can't power a car or truck or even a train with a Squeezer drive. For one thing, it would be impractical. It makes more sense to use the Squeezer bubbles at big central power stations and transmit the electricity. Plus, everybody's paranoid about bubbles in private hands. Sure, it's happened, no security system is perfect, but it stands to reason that the fewer bubbles people have to experiment on, the less chance anybody else will discover the secret of how to make them and then be able to hold the world hostage. Or blow it up.

So the bubbles mostly go to power plants, where they can be guarded more easily. The only place where they're used the way Jubal first used them, as direct power for a spaceship, is in space itself.

But Mars is a spacegoing society. So are the settlements on the moon. Part of the covenant Travis and his lawyers worked out during the Orange Bowl Accord guaranteed that we could have our own bubble-manufacturing plant. Travis was thinking ahead, he didn't want just one society – the Earth, or America, or whatever world government might be formed in the future – to have complete control of all the power in the world. So Jubal himself made just a few Squeezer machines. There are nine, total. Two on Mars, two on the moon, three immobile ones on the Falklands, and two mobile ones on the Earth for heavy excavation and such. Nine Squeezers for all of humanity.

Some people say that's at least four too many. That's the Earthies.

Some say that's nine too many.

Whatever they say, we have our two, and we're not about to give them up. It sure makes life a lot easier. It also makes it more fun. Without personal Squeezer engines we couldn't airboard.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.