Red Lightning (45 page)

When I woke up all I remembered was that I'd had an idea.

Breakfast the next day was a bleak affair, despite Evangeline's delicious
huevos rancheros
. Jubal, usually an eater of vast enthusiasm, pushed his food around on the plate while praising it, as he'd been taught to do. Not even a loss of appetite would interfere with Jubal's manners. Travis ate in silence, and Evangeline and I didn't have a lot to say, either.

There was one bright moment. A few days before we'd released the high-tech equivalent of a message in a bottle. It was a little rocket that held a high-power radio transmitter. Evangeline and I had recorded messages to our families – nothing anyone could use, just "Hi, Mom and Dad, we're alive and well as of" and the date. We had launched it behind us, in the general direction of Mars. It accelerated for twenty-four hours, to the point where it would be impossible for anyone to trace it back to us, and then switched to transmit. With any luck, some of the ships occupying Mars might take off after it.

So as we were putting the dishes into the washer, the phone dinged and Mom's and Dad's faces appeared on the screen. Behind them were Mr. and Mrs. Redmond. Their faces were a mix of happiness and worry. Mom spoke for them all.

"We're keeping this short, Ray and Evangeline, Travis. I don't know what all it might be safe to say. But we are so, so happy to hear you're alive. I... oh, this is so frustrating, there are so many questions I want to ask, and I know you can't-answer. So I'll try to tell you the important news here.

Elizabeth is doing well. She's walking around... they had to take off her left hand, Ray, I'm sorry, they..." She broke up, and I felt I would, too. Evangeline was crying. Dad took over.

"She's in good spirits, kids. She wanted to be here, but they want to keep her another day. She's very angry, as we all are, but she doesn't seem to worry much about her injury. We've seen the new prosthetic, and it's... very good. They say it'll be just about as good as the old hand." Mom stepped forward again, having pulled herself together again.

"We'll try to broadcast with Elizabeth tomorrow at this same time, kids. Meantime, I suppose you've seen some of the news from here. Everybody is very angry, but so far no one has come up with any idea, just a lot of talk, talk, talk. You know, the sort of stuff I'm good at. But I'm losing patience with talking.

We don't know what you're up to out there, Travis, kids. If I know you, Travis, you've got some sort of scheme. All I ask you is this. Don't put the kids in danger. I've spent all the time since you all left angry at myself for sending you out there in the first place. It's not worth it. I know how you feel about Jubal, but I don't see any alternative but to take him home and let things go back to the way they were. We can work on a political solution here on Mars, and lobby for a voice back on Earth. We've picked up some support, gotten the word out about what's been happening here. There are investigations going on, and maybe something can be done. But we just don't see a solution that will allow Jubal to be free. I'm so sorry, but that's just the way it is. Travis, bring my son home to me and bring him home safe. We love you."

"Love you, son," Dad said, his voice breaking. They signed off.

Jubal was crying quietly.

"That's it," he said. "Take me home, Travis."

"You got it,
cher
. Absolutely." Travis's face might have been set in stone. He got up, walked across the bridge, and pounded his fist furiously against a bulkhead until I was worried he was going to break the bones in his hand.

"Jubal, pardon me, but God
damn
it! Here we sit, with the most powerful weapon ever made, and we can't do anything but crawl home with our tails between our legs and give it
back
to them."

"Nothing else to do, my frien'. Nothing else to do. I never should of left, me. I was just feelin' so bad. I done read me on them boys, made the atomic bomb back in that big war. They thought they was doin' the right thing, yes sir. Some of 'em, they never regretted it. But since the wave hit... I ain't had nothin' but regret."

Something was tickling at the back of my mind.

"Oppenheimer regretted it," Travis said.

"That Oppenheimer, he was plenty smarter than me."

"Atomic bomb," I said. Everybody looked at me.

"Outside the box," I said.

"Which box would that be?" Travis asked.

"Surrender," I said.

"That's what I plan to do. It twists my gut into a knot, but that's all that's left. I'm so sorry we got you kids into this, but –"

"We're not kids, Travis, and I mean we can make
them
surrender."

If I expected everybody to stand up and cheer, I'd have been severely disappointed by their actual reaction. Which was pretty much no reaction at all except for Evangeline frowning as if to say this was no time for silly jokes. I kept waiting for somebody to say "How?" I mean, the idea was so crazy, I wanted a
little
bit of encouragement to even get it out. Nobody did.

"I was thinking about it last night as I was falling asleep," I said, jumping in with both feet. "When Jubal talked about the atomic bombs I thought about where they were first used, in Japan."

"Ain't gonna hurt nobody," Jubal said.

"I don't think we have to. Not even any 'collateral damage.' What we need to do is give them a warning. Fire a shot across their bows that is so convincing, so scary, that they'll let us alone. We can figure out what to do later, after they're off our backs."

"What kind of warning would that be?" Travis asked.

"Listen, in history class we were talking about Hiroshima. Somebody advised the President of the U.S... ah..."

"Truman."

"Right, Henry Truman. Some of his generals wanted to drop the bomb on Kyoto, the old Imperial City. Somebody else talked them out of it because of its historical value. Somebody else said drop it on the Emperor's Palace in Tokyo. Somebody – MacArthur? – said that would make the Japanese hate Americans forever. Then another idea was floated. Explode the bomb high over Tokyo harbor. A warning shot. Tokyo harbor is big, and there were a lot of people who lived there, they'd –"

"Would have killed a lot of people," Travis said.

"Sure, but not nearly as many as died in Hiroshima. Conventional bombing had already killed over a hundred thousand people in Tokyo earlier that year, 1945, right?" Travis nodded. "So, eighty thousand were killed in Hiroshima, not quite that many in Nagasaki. Wouldn't killing five or ten thousand around Tokyo have been better than that? And a lot of Japanese would have seen it, heard it, felt it, and survived to talk about it, including the Emperor. It always struck me as a better solution, or at least a better first try. If it didn't work,
then
you decide what to do next."

"Don't want to kill
nobody
," Jubal said, forcefully.

"Neither do I, and if we can't figure out how to make this work, then I vote for going home."

"You don't get a vote," Travis said, not unkindly. "Neither do you, Jubal and Evangeline. This is not a democratic ship. So, until you convince me you know how to scare the bejesus – sorry, Jubal – out of the most powerful people on Earth, without hurting anybody... well, then we're on our way to Mars to get y'all back to your folks."

I turned to Jubal.

"You said you could make a Squeezer bubble just about any size, didn't you, Jubal?"

He shrugged, clearly not interested in this discussion. Mentally, he was already pacing the limits of his exquisite prison again.

"Any size,
cher
. Big, little, turn a big one into a little one, a little one into a big one... it don't matter, since it ain't really in this universe anyway, and it don't use what we think of as energy, and the mass inside ain't really inside, not the way we think of inside... it's complicated..."

"So here's what I know about bubbles," I said, and began to tick points off on my fingers. "They can be any size. Whatever's inside comes apart. Whatever's inside can be squeezed, and the energy let out gradually." I paused. "And they are perfectly reflective."

And I laid it out for them. After about an hour that started out with shouting and ended with dawning realization, we shaped course for Earth.

We were able to go slow getting there. The trick I had in mind could be done at any time, but would be most effective within a week of the vernal or autumnal equinox, and the latter was not far away, September 22. Jubal spent some of that time working on his gizmos, but it wasn't all that complicated. Meantime we all discussed the plan, every possible detail of it, trying to think outside of the box, trying to come up with flaws, trying to think of every
possible
thing we might have forgotten. You never can, of course, so it was an edgy time.

Early on we sent out another bottle rocket with another message, this one frankly designed to mislead. We told the folks on Mars – and anybody else who might be listening in – that we were on our way home. We expected to arrive back at the dear old Red Planet in two weeks. With any luck, a great part of the fleets of the various invaders would be waiting for us there, to take Jubal back into custody, or at least fight for the right to do so.

That was fine with us, because it was a fight we intended to miss. With the right luck, it would be a fight that would never happen.

The messages from the families came back pretty quickly, reassuring us we were doing the right thing, the better part of valor, sometimes you just can't win, etc. Elizabeth was the only dissenter.

"You must be crazy," she said. "If I was out there with you, I'd fight!... but you go ahead and do what you think is best." She showed us her new hand, and it was a marvel. She was already picking up things with the thumb and forefinger. Honest, you could hardly tell it wasn't flesh.

We eased back into the normal traffic patterns of the ecliptic so as not to attract a lot of notice from the wrong people, sort of lost ourselves in the stream of spaceships that now plied the spaces between planets.

Then... there we were, hovering about four thousand miles above the North Pole, where there was very little but GPS and spy satellites in close orbits and no inhabited structures at all, and feeling very alone and conspicuous.

Travis suggested that I should make the broadcast, since I was the one who had come up with the idea. The very idea completely terrified me. Luckily, I never had to admit to that. Evangeline scoffed right away.

"Yeah, right. You keep calling us kids, so you think an ultimatum from either one of us would carry a lot of weight? It's your ship, and your cousin, and you are the guys who started all this. Plus, whoever does this is going to piss off a lot of people. Ray doesn't deserve that. And anyway, everybody on Earth pretty much hates you already, so what's the difference if they hate you a little more?"

Travis thought this over, then grinned, and it was clear that the idea that everybody on Earth hated him had a certain appeal.

So we all sat down at the control seats on the bridge, and he aimed the camera at himself and started to speak.

"Hello, y'all, it's me again, Travis Broussard. How are y'all doing? I'm here with my cousin, Jubal, and first I want to tell you that our hearts go out to all of you who have lost loved ones and property in the tsunami. Your leaders haven't told you what caused it, so I guess I'd better."

He summed up the one certainty we had, and mentioned a few ways it might have happened. I was watching the radar screens.

"Five ships have started to move from low-equatorial orbit and look like they're headed our way," I said, quietly.

"Your leaders have just sent ships out to take us prisoner," Travis said. "But we still have a little time to tell you the truth.

Some of you will blame us for the tsunami. That's okay. That's fair. We tried our best to give you this crazy source of power without making it possible for some pissant maniac to blow all of y'all to Hell, and it worked for a while, but we just plain never imagined the depth of human cussedness. The only thing I can say in our defense is that nobody else thought of it either."

I was still watching the screens. "Projected arrival of the first ship in... twenty minutes," I told Travis.

"Something else they haven't told you is how Jubal escaped from the Falkland Islands prison... and yeah, they'd turned it into a prison, believe me... and why he did, and what they've been doing since then. They haven't told you the truth about the recent events on Mars, and what they're all about. In fact, even
we
don't know the whole story. All I can tell you is, there are economic and political forces jockeying for the most valuable thing in the solar system: my cousin Jubal's brain.

You're going to have to ask them about that. All I have time to tell you right now is, Jubal is a human being, not a commodity, and he wants his life back. In a few minutes your leaders, or the people who have bought and paid for your leaders, are going to try to take us captive or, if they can't do that, kill us. They'd rather nobody have the secrets of the Squeezer than let their rivals have it."

"Five more ships headed our way," Evangeline said. "No missiles so far." Travis nodded, and went on.

"So far I've been talking to all the people of the Earth. Now I'm going to talk just to the people who own the warships that are heading our way, but I want all the people of the Earth to listen in, so if the worst happens, you'll know whose fault it all was.

None of y'all have ever really grasped just how powerful the Squeezer is. I can forgive you for that, a little bit, because until recently I didn't understand it all, either. If I had, we might never have used it to go to Mars, and we'd all still be stumbling around trying to make our oil supplies last another decade or so. We might just have buried the damn thing, never told anyone, and a lot of lives would have been saved. I still think I did the right thing, but I'm a lot less sure than I used to be, and I know I'll go to my grave with that question hanging over my head. Even now, I'm tempted to just head out for the stars with my cousin and let y'all hash it out for yourselves without Squeezer power. I expect you'd muddle through... but I believe human beings should go to the stars, no matter what the risk, and I don't know of any other way to do it but with the Squeezer.