Red Lightning Read Free Page B

wouldn't it have been swell if it had? In about three years we'll have one.
    We already had part of it. The first fifteen miles were complete, almost half a mile wide, straight as a stick, full of water and frozen solid. It continued inside to meet the Grand Concourse, where it was actual warm water suitable for swimming, lined with exotic plastic "Martian" plants and architecture from a 1930s science fiction magazine cover. It was already very popular.
    Then there were the Martels, and for once Mom and Dad agreed on something. I could see them sprawling out to the north, into the less desirable real estate beyond the city, like a bad case of acne with multicolored pimples. Dad would give anything to pop them.
    The big travel companies finally realized there is a great hunger for off-Earth travel among the middle classes who can't afford the Red Thunder, and who find Luna too black, too underground, and too boring. A few years back somebody built the first of what have come to be called Martels, just glorified tents, really. You can have them up and running in a week.
    And there goes the neighborhood.
    Sure, they look sort of okay now, from the ground, with none of them more than three years old. Your typical Martel room has a queen-sized bed and a dresser and a stereo and a little curtained area where you can shower and brush your teeth and not much else. Sort of like Boy Scout camp, only you don't have to work for merit badges in suit maintenance and knot-tying. All they are is triple-insulated domes of heavy-duty plastic held up by air pressure and crossed fingers, mass-produced in Ghana or Ecuador and shipped out here by the thousands to sprout on the red dirt like psychedelic mushrooms – they come in twenty-four loud color combinations – whose main purpose seems to be to make Mom hiss and spit every time she sees them.
    They're all freestanding units, like teepees for Martian Indians, which some Earth motels actually used to be – teepees, I mean – like I've seen in Dad's collection of postcards of old motels. Their one luxury is a big triple-paned Lucite picture window offering a great view of red dirt, in the calm season, or of red dust when it blows, which is frequently. Oh, yeah, and a view of pink sky when it's calm. When it's blowing you lose even the pink sky, since during a good howler visibility is reduced to about a centimeter. And the howlers can last for... well, for a lot longer than your honeymoon vacation package deal. Yeah, Mom and Dad, we spent five days and four nights on the goddam rock hall and didn't even see the goddam pink sky .
    The last thing worth mentioning in the rooms other than the tacky lithograph glued to the curving wall is a staircase leading down to your front door, which takes you to the tunnel corridor that can stretch up to half a mile of no-pile insulated carpet until it gets to the big central dome – the Vacation Fun Center! in Martel-speak – which consists of a bored clerk working his way through Marineris U., the No Lifeguard On Duty! Olympic-size pool (if there was a ten-meter freestyle event in the Olympics), and a TV/game room where your kids will spend all their time between bouts of whining Can we go home yet? Oh, yeah, and in the mornings, the "Complimentary 'Ancient Martian' Breakfast." Until the Martels arrived none of us new Martians knew that the ancient Martians liked to start the day with weak coffee and stale muffins. In fact no one had ever discovered the slightest trace of any ancient Martians at all , so you can't say the arrival of the Martels hasn't done some good. Who knew?
    "Yeah, but just wait until those cheap plastic toilets start to overflow," Dad says when the subject comes up. "Wait till the duct tape springs a leak some night when it's 125 below. Wait till one whole wing blows out entirely and fifty or a hundred guests try to breathe the air. In five minutes we could have a big disaster on our hands, a whole lot of frozen bodies to ship back