Red Thunder-Thunder and Lightning 1 by John Varley

Author:John Varley [Varley, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction / Science Fiction / Adventure
ISBN: 9781101656051
Google: VV4C3IQgwBIC
Amazon: B00AFXGSRG
Goodreads: 2374666
Publisher: Ace
Published: 2003-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

WE WERE STUMPED for a while about what to call Travis. In the end it was so obvious we wondered how we'd missed it. Travis was Hal Roach.

It took our minds off our other problems for a while, but eventually we had to buckle down to the planning again.

Never in my life had there been so many things I had to buy. Kelly set us all up with Platinum MasterCards and sent us out shopping every morning for a week. We had to rent a U-Haul truck just to cart it all back to the warehouse.

We saved money where we could. Heavy equipment we mostly rented. We got the very best welding equipment because our lives would depend on every weld in the ship. We needed pumps, to create vacuum for testing the durability of components, and to create pressure for testing the tank cars. I thought we should wait on pumps until Travis got back and either approved or shot down the entire idea of using secondhand railroad rolling stock to get to Mars. Kelly said no, we'd need the pumps one way or another, and time was passing.

We bought a standard cargo container like you see on railcars, the kind that can be loaded and off-loaded from freighters and then travel by either rail or truck. We welded it airtight, built a small air lock in its side, and started pumping the air out of it. It was going to be our vacuum testing chamber.

The pressure gauge was nowhere near the point we needed when I heard a squealing noise like a rusty hinge... and the container collapsed on itself with an earsplitting clang! as if we'd dropped it from the overhead crane.

"Jesus squeezus," Dak breathed. Alicia and Kelly came running down the stairs from the office, and we all stood together and stared at what had once been a rectangular container, like a huge box of Velveeta. Stomping on an empty aluminum Coke can, you could hardly have smashed it as flat as that container.

I felt every ounce of confidence drain right out of me. Were we nuts?

"Well," Alicia laughed, "like you said, we need to make all our mistakes right here on the ground, because we can't afford any mistakes out in space."

I didn't point out that there were plenty of mistakes we could make right here on the ground that could kill us.

"We gotta get that thing out of here," I said. "If my mother sees that, she'll have a heart attack."

We rented a flatbed and hauled the twisted hulk away, sold it for scrap metal, which was good, because Kelly had paid not much more than scrap metal prices in the first place. That same day we went ahead and bought our first tank car. I got goose bumps watching the switch engine pushing the car over our siding and into the warehouse.

This was actually going to happen!

We cut away the wheel carriages then lifted it with the overhead crane and lowered it onto a cradle we'd slapped together out of used two-by-fours and plywood—Kelly being frugal again.

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.