Red Lightning (31 page)

I pressed the little red button and set the unit on the table. A little holograph of Jubal's face grinned at me.

"Just a little lucky charm for my main man, Ray! Keep dis wit' you an' you always have good luck! See you soon, me!"

Weird, huh? It was such a pointless little bagatelle.

Then one day Travis walked in the front door, looking grim, sparing only a short hug and kiss for each of us. He looked a lot older than he had when we'd parted in Florida. His hair seemed grayer, he had more worry lines on his face.

He was carrying an ordinary plastic packing box, which he took to the newly fortified guest room and set inside. We all joined him and sat on cushions, the only things in the room. Travis got a small lamp out of his box. It was battery-powered. He set it in the center of the circle, and Dad closed the door. I noticed for the first time that there were no light fixtures left in the room. He started removing small boxes from the big boxes and handed one to each of us. They were small e-mail inputs, just keyboards and screens. We turned them on. Again, battery-powered. He took out a small black metal box and set it beside the lamp in the middle, and handed us each a patch cord. He connected his keyboard to the box and showed us that we should all do the same.

The last thing out of Travis's magic box was a small music player. He turned it on and it began to play something I wasn't familiar with. He turned the sound level up a bit. Then he looked at all of us.

"This stuff was all randomly selected, off the shelf. I'm working on the thesis that they can't bug everything on Mars. No more talking. The planet's smallest chat room is now open for business."

TRAVIS: Maybe this is all a waste of time... maybe we could sit around and quietly discuss this like free human beings.

KELLY: I think it pays to be careful.

MANNY: Agree. They told me not to talk about Jubal. I'm not going to, to anyone else. But we have to discuss it as a family. They made threats.

KELLY: They told Manny and me they would kill our children while we watched.

RAY: Ditto.

ELIZABETH: Everybody thinks I was raped. I'd almost have preferred rape to the drugs. It was mind rape.

KELLY: Ditto. Ray, did they

RAY: They wired my balls, Mom. But they didn't use it.

ELIZABETH: Ditto. My labia.

KELLY: Same here.

TRAVIS: I think we can assume we were all treated about the same.

MANNY: You, too?

TRAVIS: Oh yeah... they appeared to enjoy it... my money didn't help me... nor did my American citizenship... I don't even know where they took me... they kept me for seven days... I was sure I was a dead man...

KELLY: They need us. They expect us to lead them to Jubal.

ELIZABETH: What the fuck is happening, Travis?

TRAVIS: What is happening is... Jubal has escaped... the powers that be thought we knew where the most valuable man in the world is... maybe we should get some refreshments in here... this is going to take some time...

Escaped. Incredible.

Jubal was the most carefully guarded person on Earth. With modern surveillance techniques, the sort we were hiding from at that very moment, it was possible to keep an eye on anybody, twenty-four/seven, no matter where they went. How hard could it be to keep one strange little fat guy secured on an island a thousand miles from anywhere? If Jubal had pulled it off, and it looked like he had, then the Prisoner of Zenda and Houdini and Jean Valjean had nothing on him.

TRAVIS: Things on the Falklands are not quite what you may have thought they are... Jubal has been a virtual prisoner for 22 years... but virtual is the key word... they always know where he is, but that doesn't mean they are actually looking at him...

KELLY: What's the difference?

TRAVIS: He's not under surveillance, physically, all the time... he was at first, but we protested... it pissed me off, I thought he deserved privacy... so I made a fuss...

MANNY: How do you make a fuss with those people? We've just seen how powerful they are. I figured they just do what they want to do.

TRAVIS: Looks like they do now, whoever they are... but it was different until recently... and you're right, I've got a lot of money, I've got some power, but you don't push these guys around... what you do, you play them against each other... there's different nations with different interests, and I learned all the conflicts between them... when I needed something, I'd set India against China, or Japan against Germany, or almost anybody and everybody against the US... and I could usually get my way... as long as it wasn't something big... I kept saving that one... I thought of it as the nuclear option...

ELIZABETH: ?

TRAVIS: Old slang for the threat of last resort... I could always tell them that if they didn't treat Jubal well, we'd take our Tinkertoys and go home...

KELLY: You could do that?

TRAVIS: Legally, yes, anytime he wanted to, Jubal could just leave... Jubal was a voluntary exile, he's a free man, theoretically... I figured it would be fought out in the courts, unless some big nation decided to kidnap him, which could be done with, say, the American Atlantic Fleet... but plenty of people would have gone to war over that... oh, hell, it gets confusing, politically... just believe me that I had some leverage down there, and the big boys were a lot happier not fighting so long as the things I asked for weren't real important...

RAY: So what did you ask for?

TRAVIS: The main thing was privacy, like I said... first I got them to stop examining his mail, ingoing and outgoing... a small thing, but it was a major concession for them... who knows what he might have been sending out?

RAY: He sent me a lot of stuff.

TRAVIS: Like what?

RAY: Just little gadgets. I'll show them to you.

TRAVIS: See?... a lot of people were opposed to it because of just that... who knows what a "little gadget" Jubal made might do?... but I was able to convince them that if Jubal made anything important, I'd be the first one to let everybody know because I'm the one who would get rich on it... anything Jubal makes belongs to us... to US, goddam it, not to anybody's government, not to the UN, not to the Power Company... I told them we're not fucking socialists, and if they didn't like it

KELLY: You'd take your Tinkertoys and go home.

MANNY: You'd take your Tinkertoys and go home.

GRANDMA: You'd take your Tinkertoys and go home.

RAY: What's a Tinkertoy?

ELIZABETH: What's a Tinkertoy?

The next thing Travis asked for was that Jubal's labs should be off-limits to observation, like his bedroom and bathroom. Then a lot of years went by.

It is the security dilemma, according to Travis. You start out alert, whether it's just a shift guarding something or someone, or a career of guarding. But when you've been guarding something for over twenty years and nothing has happened... well, you start to assume that nothing
will
happen.

That helped Jubal's escape. Another thing that helped was even more basic. He had never shown the slightest
interest
in escaping. They figured he bought his "protected guest" status, that if he wanted to leave, he'd
ask
.

But when he decided to split, for reasons Travis either didn't know or hadn't revealed to us yet, he didn't ask anybody. He figured out how to do it himself.

He built himself a spaceship and blasted right out of his laboratory.

TRAVIS: I've made friends over the years... people have retired and moved into nice houses on what I paid them... Nobody I know on the Falklands knows the whole story, but some of them knew pieces... It seems Jubal was real upset when the wave hit... kept saying it was his fault... he tried to call me, tried to call you, Ray, but the phones were out... then he quieted down and seemed to accept his situation... what he was really doing was figuring out how to bust out of the joint... Jubal being Jubal, he seems to have taken the direct approach... he built the spaceship right there in his lab, single-handed... he must have built it strong, because he blasted right through the roof when he took off...

KELLY: Is he okay? Do they know that?

TRAVIS: They can't know... but the spaceship worked... it tore out of there at five gees... by the time they could mount a pursuit it was almost beyond radar range, heading Solar south...

MANNY: South? There's nothing down there!

TRAVIS: Part of the escape plan, apparently...

We call ourselves spacefarers, and we've been to all eight or twelve planets (depending on who is defining what a planet is) and all the major asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, and all the moons worth visiting, and have even tracked down and landed on thirty or forty Centaurs, which are large bodies found between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune... but we've only touched down on a few dozen of the comets in the Kuiper Belt, and as for the postulated trillion or so long-period comets in the Oort Cloud, we still don't even know within a hundred billion just how many are out there.

Space is vast. We only travel in a tiny slice of it. Forget about galactic clusters 14 billion light years away, forget about even our near galactic neighbors. Don't even think about stars on the other side of our own galaxy, or even in the next spiral arm over. In fact, aside from the exploratory ships that have gone out toward stars within a thirty-light-year radius of our sun, we don't even know what's to be found within half a light-year of us.

And even there, except for a few scientific expeditions, we know only the plane of space where all the planets lie, what we call the ecliptic. A million miles above the Solar South Pole there is... nothing. No rocks, no planets, no human presence at all. Ten million miles, same deal. Keep going, and the next thing you'll hit will be another star system. There's just no reason to go there.

Bring it in even closer. In the space around the Earth, the plane of the ecliptic where both the Earth and the moon spend all their time, space is fairly crowded. Near-Earth space is swarming... but only out to about a thousand miles. Ninety-nine percent of all orbital activity is equatorial. GPS, weather, and photographic satellites are in polar orbits, but all those benefit from being close in. Go out twenty thousand miles above either pole, and you'll find practically nothing man-made, and nothing at all that's natural. The geosynchronous circle, twenty-two thousand miles above the equator, is another swarming point, thousands of satellites, but still plenty of room for more. There are multiple habitats at the Lagrange points, before and after the moon in its orbit. And that's about it.

Head to the north or the south, and you're in
very
empty space. No one would expect a spaceship to go there. Why would it? It's like some nasty Earthie once said about Mars: There's no
there
there!

TRAVIS: The only stuff that's prepared to accelerate like that is military, and that's mostly on Earth, in close-Earth orbit, or on the moon... A few interceptors gave chase, I think, but it was fifteen, twenty minutes before they scrambled... By then Jubal was already out of reach and... when they lost him on radar he was still accelerating, still going in a straight line... bottom line, there's just too much space out there to search... so... take your pick.

ELIZABETH: Pick from what?

TRAVIS: Worst case, the ship came apart... best case, he shut it down himself and he's coasting, he figures to get well out of range before he decelerates... how long he could wait would depend on how much air and water and food he brought along.........

GRANDMA: Okay, break this long silence. You look like you've thought of a third possibility, Travis.

TRAVIS: Yeah... maybe he just intends to... keep going...

We had several other meetings in the safe room, but basically, that was all we learned. Jubal had busted out, and nobody, not even Travis, knew where he was.

There was one huge problem with the idea of Jubal leaving the Falklands in a spaceship, though.

Jubal doesn't fly.

Not on spaceships, not on airplanes. When they took him to the Falklands, he went on a military ship. In fact. Jubal's list of phobias could probably be used as a reference for a diagnostic manual. Of the most common ones about the only ones he misses are arachnophobia and herpetophobia. Jubal likes all animals except people. He doesn't like heights, or small spaces, or crowds, or cities, or strangers. Basically, what he likes are solitude in the outdoors, preferably a swamp or river or lake; boats; inventing things; his family, and my family.

We were all having a hard time imagining him getting into the sort of small spaceship he could build secretly in his lab, much less taking off in it. We tossed around other ideas, but none of them made any sense. Stowing away on a supply boat? Getting on it would have been impossible in the first place, and he would have been missed in twenty-four hours, and how far could a ship go in that time?

Submarine? No way it could sneak into those protected waters. No way he could build one, launch it, and get far enough away to not get recaptured. Besides, a submarine is claustrophobic.

Disguise? Pretend to be someone else? Don't make me laugh.

Travis came up with the only other possible explanation, and it wouldn't have made sense for anyone but Jubal.

TRAVIS: Maybe he invented a teleporter and beamed himself up to join Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

RAY: Who's Captain Kirk?

Things gradually got back to normal. It's amazing how quickly you sort of adapt to living in a police state.

Not that we didn't resent it. Nobody likes to see troops in black uniforms with giant guns posted at every intersection. Once we knew for sure that they had orders not to shoot unless physically attacked, it became fashionable to spit toward their boots every time you walked past one. At the end of a shift you didn't want to walk too near them. Slippery.