Rolling Thunder Read Free Page A

exchanging Earth horror stories. When they found out I was going Up and Out … going home! … they tried their best to conceal their envy—after all, it was compassionate leave, someone in my family was in trouble—but couldn’t quite do it. We traded horror stories about Earthies until the train pulled in at the port. Then we went our separate ways, and I never saw any of them again.
    I found my way to the departure gate for the connector bus to the Martian Navy base ten miles away from the port. I was the only one waiting at the boarding gate, and when the bus came, I was the only one to board. Five minutes later I was zipping through the Nevada desert, stretched out across two hard seats. I watched a landscape roll past that most Earthies would probably call barren, desolate. Hell, I could see hundreds of yucca trees, sagebrush, a dozen kinds of cactus, even some tiny little flowers hugging the ground. A jackrabbit darted for cover as the bus cruised by. Barren? The place was a tropical rain forest, teeming with life, compared to my home planet.
    Marsport 6 was just a big flat place in the desert, with half a dozen prefab metal buildings lined up along the edge. Functional, unadorned, Navy red. A Martian flag hung listlessly in the still air. Nothing moved. Nobody with any sense would be outdoors with the rattlesnakes and the tarantulas and the blistering heat. Most work around here was done at night, when the temperature sometimes dropped as low as ninety.
    As the bus pulled up to the headquarters building I counted three bucket ships sitting in the distance, also painted Navy red, but not recently. They were pink and patchy, like they had a skin disease.
    The bus stopped and I got out, ready to hurry into the main building, but I was stopped by a loud roar. I looked behind me and saw one of the buckets rising on a pillar of white smoke. I’d missed the last bucket of the day by five minutes.
    Why do they call them bucket ships? They looked sort of like buckets. Just squat cylinders, wider than they were tall, with two rows of windows in a circle showing where the two decks were. A dome on top for the pilot to sit in, a metal cat’s cradle underneath to hold the bubble drive. Three landing legs, nonretractable.
    With the ship dwindling at the end of a long vapor trail, the only sound now was the thrumming of the big air-conditioning units sitting by the prefabs. I realized I was dripping sweat, standing out in the desert with no sunscreen and a fractured ozone layer high above me. I hurried into the main building.
    The staff confirmed that there would be no more departures until 0800 hours tomorrow, when I had a chance of making the 1200 sailing of the MNS Rodger Young.
    I asked if there were any rooms in the Motel 6 and they said take your pick, so I trudged down a hallway to the first open door, room 101. I didn’t even have the strength to toss my bag on the dresser. I let it drop to the floor and collapsed on the bed. I just wanted to sleep for a few hours, but I knew there was something I had to do first.
    I had three messages from Mars in my call-waiting queue. None of them were flagged red, which may sound odd given the emergency nature of my trip, but why should they be red-flagged? You don’t have a conversation with people on Mars, you have a correspondence. Right then, as I was lying there, my home was 190 million miles … thataway. Ahead of the Earth, which was catching up. That meant that any phone call I made wouldn’t arrive at home for seventeen minutes, and there could be no reply for another seventeen. Still, I felt a little guilty at not even having looked at the messages. So I clicked the first one. It was from Mom. She started right in.
    “We hated to just drop this whole mess on you so suddenly, Poddy, but there really is no time to lose. Gran is very sick. The doctors think she can hold out until you get here, but it might be a close thing. So … I know there’s no way to hurry a ship,