Free Red Thunder by John Varley

he couldn't resist, I guess," I said.
    "Hey, Manny, Alicia. I'm right here, don't forget."
    "Well, Dak forgot that machine keeps a record of your location and your route...."
    "That's it, woman!" Dak exploded.
    "...it keeps that data for two weeks unless somebody remembers to erase it..."
    "Who figured I
needed
to erase it? Damn, I'm surrounded by spies."
     
    THE BIG NEWS at the NASA site that day was the departure of the American mission to Mars.
    The crew had gone up the night we almost killed Travis. The ship had
been finished when the final components were delivered two weeks before
that. Captain Aquino had used the intervening weeks to conduct as many
tests and drills as were possible in the limited time available to him
before the very tight launch window closed.
    I watched the countdown, and the totally unimpressive lighting of
the plasma torch at the rear of the long, lumpy, completely unlovely
congregate of landers, orbiters, propulsion modules, reactors, solar
panels... and doghouses and kitchen sinks, for all I knew, and its
departure for the Red Planet.
    Its very
sloooooow
departure. Proving once again that,
aside from the liftoff from Earth, space travel was not and probably
never would be a feast for the eyes. Aside from the deathly quiet,
everything I'd ever witnessed in space happened at a pace that would
make a glacier look like an avalanche. No matter that everything I was
seeing was hurtling around the planet at a speed of about sixteen
thousand miles per hour. You couldn't see anything move. You never
could.
    The plasma engine was slow but steady. It was fifteen minutes before the mission could be seen to have moved at all.
    It didn't bother me. It was beautiful.
     

8
    I GOT MY housekeeping chores done, then sat at the
computer working on my calculus lessons. I did three weeks' worth of
reading and assignments in about three hours, now that so much more of
it made sense to me. In fact, I found myself two days ahead of the
recommended syllabus, for the first time since I'd enrolled. When I
clicked the computer off, it was with a sense of satisfaction I hadn't
felt since graduation.
    Then I turned my attention to my little silver bubble.
    It had been nagging at me all day and my curiosity was killing me.
    I had put the bubble in one of my desk drawers, because it didn't
want to stay in the same place. It drifted with the tiniest air
current, like smoke. How could something so light be so tough?
    Start by defining the problem. It's light, it's tough. How light? How tough?
    The best scale I had access to was the postal scale in the office,
and I knew without having to try that I wouldn't be able to weigh the
bubble with that scale. I wouldn't even be able to get it to stay on
the platform long enough to register any weight. By extension, I
couldn't see how it would register anything on the analytical balance
at school. But it couldn't be weightless, could it?
    Now, hold on, was I getting weight confused with mass, like so many people did?
    It stood to reason that if I could get the bubble moving, it would
have some inertia, wouldn't it? If I could toss it against a scale, it
would have to register something, right? Maybe. But I couldn't test
that at home, because I didn't have any way of creating a vacuum to do
the experiment in. Air density alone seemed to be enough to bring the
bubble to a halt in midair as soon as it left my hand.
    Okay, that got me nowhere, let's move on to the next question.
    Is the bubble frictionless?
    It sure felt like it. It was very odd to hold it in my hand. I could feel the presence of its shape, but I didn't actually
feel
anything. No texture, no unevenness, no pits. It was impossible to pick
it up or hold it just between the tips of my index finger and thumb.
    It was possible to secure the bubble using two fingers and my thumb.
Not just the tips of those digits, though. Holding it with fingers
curling around it established a multitude of contact points, so that if
I held it