Rolling Thunder (47 page)

The dress was old, the veil was new, and the flowers were violets. Close enough for jazz.

When Manny handed the ring to Jubal I practically fainted, and had to interrupt the proceedings just for a moment.

“Jubal, that rock is enormous!” I whispered. “It’s as big as the Hope Diamond.”

“It
is
the Hope Diamond,” Travis whispered, and shrugged when I gaped at him. “When the United States went bankrupt after the Big Wave, I picked up some bargains at the Smithsonian disaster sale. Had it remounted, in case I ever found the right girl.” Fat chance. Travis had had many girlfriends in the course of a long and colorful life, and they always dumped him.

“The stone don’t matter,” Jubal said. “Only the love matters. With this ring, I thee wed.”

And that was about it. We didn’t do a recessional, just started partying right there. Dad was crying, Mom was misty-eyed. Travis lit a cigar, shocking a few people, then passed out more. Luckily, the ship’s air system sucked the illegal poison away almost instantly.

Pretty silly, huh? Only the best day of my life.

IF IT HAD
a name, I never heard it. More likely it just had one of those generic asteroid names like 22 Kalliope, or a number and the name of the discoverer, or just a number. People still tend to think of the asteroid belt as choked with rocks, but the fact is it’s so diffuse you can blast right through it with barely a care. Total mass of the belt is about 4 percent of Luna. Just the biggest four—Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea—are over 50 percent of the mass of the whole belt.

Ceres is the only one big enough to be round. All the others are lumpy in one way or another. The mostly common way to describe these rocks, of which there are over three million half a mile or more in size, is “potato-shaped.” This one was a big Idaho spud, a rough ellipsoid seven miles long on one axis, about four, maybe five miles in the other, with a few lumps and a few shallow craters.

The only thing a little odd about it as we approached was that it seemed to be rotating around its long axis. No reason why it shouldn’t, but just eyeballing it, the spin seemed to be
exactly
along that axis, like somebody had aligned it that way.

Which is exactly what Travis had done, of course. Was he taking us to a bigger and better Fortress of Solitude?

We were all gathered in the main room, watching the approach on a big screen because we were decelerating, ass backwards to our target. The ship was in autodocking mode, no pilot necessary. We were getting nearer quickly and would soon go into free fall. I was holding Jubal’s hand tightly. He hates free fall. He had been weaning himself off of his tranquilizing medication—he’d been drug-free for the wedding—but had taken an extra dose today.

“But you my best trank, Poddy,” he had said, and he was proving true to his word, so far, with hardly a shiver as we neared the moment of main engine cutoff.

“Are you ready to spill the beans, Travis?” Kelly asked.

“Soon, soon,” Travis assured her.

I was focusing on something I’d spotted on the side of the big potato.

Something white and far too regular to be a natural feature. It looked like writing, and it had rotated into view several times as we neared it.

“Travis, could you give us a better view of that white patch?” I asked.

“Sure thing.”

The camera zoomed in, and I tilted my head to read the letters, which must have been a quarter of a mile high. Because of the unevenness of the surface, they were slightly askew, like the famous Hollywood sign, now long gone.

It said
ROLLING THUNDER
.

Well, it was rolling, all right, but naturally it was doing it in the total, eerie silence of space. I timed the rotation—I was beginning to have some idea of what this thing was—and gave the number to Jubal and asked him to work out what the centrifugal “gravity” would be inside it, if it was hollowed out, as I suspected.

“Have to know how much is hollow,
cher,”
he said. “Futher out you get from the axis, the more gravity you get.”

“It’s two-thirds of a gee,” Travis said.

“Then you got a hollow in there about … two miles wide,” Jubal said.

“Exactly two miles,” Travis said, sounding a little annoyed. He liked his surprises. “I hope you all have been keeping up with your exercises. You’re going to weigh a little less than twice what you do on Mars.” We’d been boosting at half a gee, which isn’t unpleasant. Two Mars gees would actually be three-quarters of an Earth gravity. Two-thirds Earth gees would be heavier than I like, but not nearly as onerous as Pismo Beach.

Nobody said much as the main engines cut off. Jubal was holding my hand tightly, barf bag in the other hand. He looked a little green for a few minutes, but came through it okay. Then there were little pushes and shoves as the ship’s computer eased us into a vast docking bay and pressure doors closed behind us. A passenger tube extended itself and locked on to us, and Travis led the way out. I tugged Jubal along like a toy balloon.

Travis led us down a few corridors and into a big chamber with seats in concentric circles. He instructed us to strap in, and when we did, the room started to move.

We gradually built up weight, and not in a pleasant way. Something seemed to be pulling me to one side. I realized it was the … googling … Coriolis force. We were going down, but also in a circle. Even I, with what I thought of as good space legs, felt a little queasy. Jubal quietly filled the barf bag, looked sheepishly at me, and patted my knee.

“I be okay now.”

We were soon at the bottom of the elevator shaft. I started to get up, and fell back in my seat. Whew! Point six six gees took a little getting used to. Jubal gave me his hand and hoisted me to my feet.

The elevator doors yawned wide, and we were in a semicircular tunnel about fifty feet wide and twenty-five feet high. The floor was flat, the ceiling arched over us. And right before us was … a choo-choo train.

I’m not using the word lightly. It looked like it had been assembled by a child with no sense of history at all. Up front was a simply massive black locomotive, with polished chrome work, pipes running all over the place, and wheels as tall as I am. There were painted highlights of red and orange. Every surface gleamed.

“Is that a steam engine, Travis?” Granddaddy Manny asked.

“Used to be. Southern Pacific Number 4449. Runs on bubble power now. This is more of the stuff I picked up at the United States disaster sale. Cheap.”

Hooked behind it was a long silver observation car with a glass bubble on top. It was clearly from another era. After that was an even older car, made mostly of wood. And at the end was … what else? A cheerful little red caboose.

I looked down the tracks behind the train and saw that the rails split and entered a larger area, where I could see other cars. Travis had always liked to collect things. After he became a multibillionaire, his toys just got larger. I had a feeling we were standing inside the largest toy of all.

Travis produced a train conductor’s hat from somewhere and put it on his head, then ushered everyone into the passenger car. Up ahead, I could see a man leaning out of the cab of the locomotive. I wondered who he might be.

When we were all seated under the dome, the train blew its whistle and slowly pulled forward. We passed under hanging strip lights, and then through a pressure door. I could see it close behind us. In a quarter mile or so, another set of doors opened. We passed through three sets of doors, then through the last one, which took us into the interior of the
Rolling Thunder.

I knew places like this existed, though there weren’t many of them and this may have been the largest. I had never been inside one. No stereo hi-rez video can even begin to prepare you for it.

“Six miles long,” Travis was saying. “Two miles in diameter. Six and a quarter miles around the cylinder, thirty-seven and a half square miles of land area. That’s twenty-four thousand acres, almost ten thousand hectares. Volume is twenty cubic miles of air.”

Picture being inside a cylinder six miles long and two miles in diameter. It’s rotating around the central axis fast enough to produce .66 gee, but there is no sense of spinning. Wherever you are, down is directly below you, though you can see the ground curving gently upward in two directions; call them east and west. Look due north and south along the spin axis, the ground is flat right in front of you, but curves upward at the sides until it meets overhead. That is, I know it
did
meet, but I couldn’t see it because a long light source ran right down the center of the cylinder, where it was weightless. I guess that was what was going to pass for the sun in here.

The ends of the cylinder were rounded, like a tank for holding high-pressure gas, like propane or maybe liquid oxygen. That was because this giant cavern was made by squeezer machines taking big round bites out of the surrounding rock and compressing it down to whatever size you wanted it to be. You could dig out this entire space in an afternoon.

Filling it with stuff would be another matter.

It took me a while to notice, because at first we were all gawking at how the ground curved up, around, and over, but from time to time we passed groups of people working. The engineer would toot his whistle, and the work crews would look up and wave to us. Some were driving bulldozers and other heavy equipment. Some were building structures out of metal, stone, or wood. I saw one group stringing barbed-wire fences, and another herding cattle, if you can believe it. I saw goats and sheep, I saw ducks swimming in a pond. We passed through a “forest” where all the trees were about ten feet tall, tied to stakes. For a while a dog ran alongside the train, barking happily.

But mostly it was the people I noticed. They were about equally divided between men and women, and there were even a few children. One woman carried a baby on her back, papoose style.

Who were these people?

THE TRAIN FOLLOWED
a corkscrew path. Looking ahead, it seemed like you were about to take a ride on a roller coaster, but when you got there, of course, it was perfectly level. We went over bridges that crossed dry streambeds with rocks at the bottom. We clattered over switch points where other tracks crossed our line. There were grade crossings where various vehicles waited for us to pass.

The land we traveled through was oddly formed. Every quarter mile to half mile we ran along a low trestle that took us up to a ridge, from fifty to maybe a hundred feet high, where the land
seemed
to begin to slope gently down again. It was hard to be sure because being inside the giant cylinder distorted my perceptions. But I could see that the interior was lined by these ridges, sort of like the ribs of a really huge whale. They curved away on each side and met overhead, a series of rings, one after the other, stretching from one end of the cylinder to the other. I thought it might be some sort of artifact of the squeezing process, as successive bites were taken out of the solid rock and metal. Turns out it was something different. I’ll get to that later.

We went through two villages, and I could see more up the sides and overhead. They were completely different, architecturally. I recognized the styles, since Martian architecture, at least in the tourist places, was modeled on various Earth fantasies; many of the casinos and hotels were themed to one region or another, but nicely Disneyfied. The first village was Merrie Olde England, with half-timbered homes and shops with thatched roofs, a few horse-drawn vehicles, and a partially completed stone church. All around the church were more stones, carefully numbered, and some tall stained-glass windows, and masons were putting more stones in place as we watched. It looked like Travis had bought an entire village and took it apart, for reassembly here.

The second village was Japanese. Paper walls, enclosed gardens, a Shinto temple, cherry trees.

In the distance I could see what looked like a riverside town built on stilts on the edge of a dry riverbed. The houses had corrugated tin roofs. Cajun? South American? Indonesian? I couldn’t tell without a closer look.

After a while we pulled into a station that might have been built in the early part of the twentieth century. It was made of wood planks, painted yellow with white trim. Travis told us this was our destination, and we all got out and gawked some more. The curving effect was even more impressive—and disorienting—when you were standing outside. And there was another funny thing that made it even worse. The station platform was not quite level. I had thought the train listed a little to the right, too, but I couldn’t be sure. Now the tilt was obvious. Everyone around me seemed to be standing at a slight angle, as if bending into wind. It probably wasn’t more than five degrees, and it was always toward the back of the cylinder, against the direction we had been traveling.

“Come this way, friends,” Travis said. “And watch your step. Until you get your ship legs, this tilt can trip you up.”

I was already feeling too heavy, and the tilt didn’t help. Jubal didn’t appear to like it much, either. I held his hand and we made our way behind Travis.

We crossed a cobblestone street and entered Anytown, U.S.A.

That’s just what I called it, but it wasn’t, not really. It wasn’t a California town, nor would it have fit well in Heartland America. I did a search and match, and found this was a darn good replica of a New England town. Vermont, maybe, or New Hampshire.

Travis led us along a street filled with the sounds of nail guns and power saws and the sweet smell of sawdust and the sharper smell of paint. People waved to us as we passed, but no one joined us.

We emerged onto a green town square. There was a finished white church with a tall steeple, a hulking granite bank, two-story buildings still being erected. The square was edged by towering trees that must have been dug up entire and transplanted. I thought they might be maples, though all I knew for sure is they weren’t pines. That’s about the extent of my knowledge of trees.

There was a cannon, probably from the American Civil War, and a flagpole with an American flag hanging limp. In the center was a bandstand draped with red, white, and blue bunting, and sitting there were two dozen men and women in bright blue coats with gold braid and white pants and shoes. The conductor on his podium tapped his music stand, and the band started playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”