Rude Astronauts

by Allen Steele

  So Bob spent his nights in Diamondback Jack’s, swilling beer, talking shop with the techs and other unemployed space grunts, making sour-breathed passes at the college cuties who slummed in Jack’s during spring break, keeping his feelers out for job leads, shooting the bull with anyone who would buy the next round. That’s how he told me the story, that Wednesday night when the place was dead, about the Skycan beer scam.

  He was already drunk when I sat down next to him at the bar. I signaled to Jack to bring me a Bud, and the first thing Bob said to me was the sort of thing one would expect from an inebriated wreck. Cocking his head toward the door, he asked, “You just came in, didn’t ya, Al?”

  I nodded.

  “Did you see any cars parked out there?” he asked.

  “Sure, Bob. Yours. Mine. Jack’s. Whose car are you looking for?”

  He cast me a look suggesting that I had become stupid since the last time he had seen me. “Brown Toyota-GM Cutlass. One or two men sitting inside.” He paused and added, “William Casey Society sticker on the rear window. Remember what I told you last Saturday?”

  I shook my head as Jack pushed a tallneck in front of me. “I wasn’t here last Saturday, Bob.”

  (Of course, I didn’t say where I had been last Saturday. There’s nothing wrong with attending a routine press conference at KSC, unless you’re a patron at Jack’s. Spacers and reporters have an acrimonious relationship going back to the days when Project Apollo press pool reporters gave NASA a new definition—Never A Straight Answer. Jack used to keep a bag of Morton’s salt underneath the counter for the novice journalists who wandered into the bar looking for sources, to dump on their heads as soon as they pulled out their notebooks “so the bloodsucking leeches will wither up and die.” My presence was tolerated only because I was lowkey about my profession and because I never brought my work into Jack’s. So the less said about my stringer work for the Times, the better.)

  “Huh,” Bob said, wearing the vaguely puzzled expression of a heavy drinker facing short-term memory lapses. “Maybe I didn’t tell you about it.” He looked towards the door again. “Well, is there a car like that out there?”

  “I didn’t see one. But I don’t think I’d recognize a Casey Society sticker if I saw one.”

  Now Cowboy Bob had my curiosity worked up. Perhaps that was his intent all along; get me involved in a conversation and cadge drinks off me all night. I decided to play along. It was a slow, humid summer night, and I was in the mood for a tall tale.

  I got Jack to bring Cowboy Bob another Miller’s and I pulled out my cigarettes. Bob took a long hit off his beer, tilted the frayed rim of his hat back a half inch, and leaned a little closer to me. “Did I ever tell you about how we got 444 cases of beer up to Skycan? Well …”

  Ten years ago (Cowboy Bob told me) his crew was doing the final work on SPS-1, the first large-scale solar power satellite to be built by Skycorp. Almost five years and the labor of nearly three hundred men and women had gone into the project, not to mention over $10 billion in corporate investments and government loans. The result was the 21st century equivalent to the Golden Gate Bridge, a landmark achievement in space construction. All that remained to be done before the beginning of the low-power tests was the final installment of the microwave dish antennas at both ends of the thirteen-mile span of the powersat.

  “So we were pretty proud of what we had done there,” Bob recalled. “There would be other powersats, of course, but this was the first big one, and we were the crew that was putting on the finishing touches. That called for some kind of celebration, right? So one night a few guys from the second shift got together in one of the rec rooms and started talking about what we wanted to do. As it turned out, everyone wanted a beer bust.”

  The problem with that, of course, was that both Skycorp and NASA had stringent regulations against alcoholic beverages in space being made available to space work crews. The rules were tightly enforced; NASA inspectors searched all outbound orbital and lunar crews for booze, and Skycorp’s security cops on Olympus Station had already found and torn out two stills aboard the space station. Skycorp had tried to compromise with the beamjacks’ thirst by providing in the rec rooms nonalcoholic near-beer—a weak, watery brew which tasted like chilled boar whizz.

  “That just wasn’t good enough,” Bob said. “I mean, we’d been gagging on that stuff for the past eighteen months. We wanted real beer. Budweiser, Miller’s, Busch, Rolling Rock, Black Label … anything!”

  He hefted his latest bottle of beer to show what real beer looked like. “At this point, y’know, nobody gave a damn about Skycorp’s rules. The job was done, our money was in the bank. Once the last array of cells was laid down and the antennas were installed, we’d all be shipped home and it would be the end of a long tour of duty. So we were willing to take some risks, break some regs. Who cared? We were entitled to a good blowout, man.”

  Getting beer onto Skycan entailed a smuggling operation, of course. In the past, Skycan workers had managed to bribe KSC ground crews into packing off-limits personal items into the orbital transfer vehicles which resupplied Olympus Station on a weekly basis. A network of reliable connections at the Cape, therefore, was already in place. But the stuff which had been stashed into the OTVs before they were loaded into the cargo bays of the shuttles—tape players, cassettes, comic books, Monopoly games, and even the occasional fifth of whiskey or vodka—had taken up little room in the OTVs and could be easily hidden from NASA inspectors. The more the conspiring beamjacks thought about it, the more they realized that, in order to get enough beer into space for a proper party, this operation demanded smuggling an unprecedented volume of contraband into orbit.

  “Dog-Boy pulled out a calculator and figured it out,” Bob continued. “A Mark II shuttle’s OTV had a cargo capacity of 65,000 pounds, which translated to about a thousand gallons, water or beer. That was about 444 cases of twelve-ounce cans.”

  He paused and gazed at his empty bottle: I gave Jack the high sign to bring us another round. It looked as if I were going to have to pump a thousand gallons of beer into Cowboy Bob to get the story, which was probably what Bob wanted me to do. But the yarn was getting good and I wasn’t about to start being cheap. Jack silently put another round in front of us—he had already deprived Bob of the keys to his Jeep—and the former beamjack continued his story.

  “Of course, Dog-Boy made that calculation just to give us an idea of what could be done. ‘Of course that’s absurd,’ he said. But once he told us it could be done …” He laughed, shaking his head.

  “You only had about a hundred people up there,” I said. “Ten gallons of beer for every crew member was a little overkill, don’t you think?”

  “You’re missing the point, Al!” Bob slapped his hands down on the bartop. “It wasn’t a matter of whether everyone had a six-pack or a hundred gallons. We had just gotten through building a nineteen square mile structure in space. There was nothing we couldn’t do! We were the best space construction crew there had ever been! So it was … it was like …”

  “A matter of pride.”

  “Hell, yeah! It wasn’t having the beer that mattered. It was getting the beer, that was the point. The challenge was the thing.” He shrugged and picked up his beer. “So what the fuck? We decided to do it.”

  So the handful of beamjacks involved in the discussion—Bob, Dog-Boy and Dog-Girl, Eddie the Gentle Goon, Suffering Fred, a few others—got to work in plotting the Free Beer conspiracy, as it came to be called. There were quite a few obstacles which had to be crossed, the largest of which was circumnavigating NASA and Skycorp. But the obstacle which they didn’t foresee was the William Casey Society, personified aboard Skycan by one Leonard Gibson, sometimes known as Lenny the Red.

  The William Casey Society, of course, was the extreme right-wing group which had taken up in the new century where the fanatics of the 20th century—the John Birch Society, the LaRouchians, the American Nazi Party—had left off. Named after an ol
d CIA chief who had died during one of those White House scandals ’way back when, the Bill Casey Society had become the cause of choice for disenfranchised Communist-haters of every stripe, from conspiracy mavens to shellshocked vets of Gulf War II to survivalists disappointed that a global thermonuclear war had not occurred. Fueled by a distrust of the new cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union—particularly in space, as typified by the joint exploration of Mars—and led by a minor presidential candidate named George White, the Caseyites compensated for a lack of political clout with fervor, paranoia, and a few well-placed connections.

  Space industrialization had become a favorite target of the Bill Casey Society—in particular, Skycorp’s powersat project. It was George White’s contention that the building of SPS-1 was the first stage in a Communist-backed secret operation to control the world. Skycorp was being backed by the Soviet Union, White claimed, and the SPS networks were being established not for use as orbital power stations but as microwave beam weapons. Once three powersats were established over the United States and two were built in geostationary orbit above Great Britain and Japan, Soviet moles in Skycorp and NASA would take control of the SPS system, turn the microwave transmitters against American, British, and Japanese armed forces—namely, hypersonic bombers and submarines—and fry them, thus paving the way for Soviet global conquest.

  Never mind that SPS microwave beams, designed to relay energy from space to ground-based rectennas with as little environmental damage as possible, barely had the power to blister the paint job on a bomber or a sub. Never mind that the Soviets were building their own SPS system in orbit above the USSR, or that the Kremlin had better fish to fry—so to speak—than whacky schemes for global domination. But this kind of paralogia always finds the audience, and it keeps the tax-free contributions rolling in.

  The Caseyites, to their credit, realized that the SPS construction crews on Olympus Station—the latest generation of high-risk, blue-collar, All American hardhats—were unlikely to be Communist sympathizers, but were guilty only of ignorance. This was obviously the soft belly of the Commie plot. So the Caseyites went so far as to plant their own agent on Skycan, picking a member from their ranks to go to work on Olympus Station in an effort to convince the beamjacks that there was a plot afoot and to convert them to the Caseyite cause.

  That person was Leonard Gibson, a thin and somewhat wild-eyed former arc welder for Martin Marietta, who managed to get a job as a beamjack on Skycan.

  “We already had Lenny’s number by this time, of course,” Bob said, “and we tended to leave him alone.”

  “What do you mean, you had his number?”

  Bob sipped his beer. “He came aboard Skycan, from day one, passing out Caseyite leaflets, trying to make converts out of his bunkmates, claiming that certain members of the command crew were Russian sleepers. Lenny used to get into these brain-damaged rants in the rec room about how we were all Commie dupes, that sort of thing. He even insisted on changing his bunk assignment regularly, saying that he was being bugged or something.”

  I shrugged. “There were a lot of weird cases on Skycan. He should have fit right in.”

  Bob shook his head. “Yeah, but not hostile weird like that. Even Virgin Bruce wasn’t that twisted. Even the religious fanatics got the hint to shut up. Lenny the Red thought he was on a vital mission to save the world.” He grinned. “We used to have some fun with him, like the time Suffering Fred casually pulled out a copy of Das Kapital in the rec room and started reading it aloud. Blew Lenny’s mind. That’s one thing about fanatics, Al. No sense of humor whatsoever.”

  So Lenny the Red found himself ostracized. That made the situation even worse. Now Lenny Gibson began to suspect that the situation was even worse than George White had predicted; somehow, most of the Skycan beamjacks had been brainwashed, had become willing Commie dupes. How else could he explain this complete rejection of his claims?

  So Lenny the Red changed tactics. Instead of seeking converts, he began to make careful observations of the behavior of his fellow beamjacks, watchful for indications that a conspiracy was afoot. Lenny the preacher became Lenny the spy, the guy who sat quietly in the corner, listening, watching, waiting.

  “And sending coded messages,” Bob added. “The communications officers who worked in Command, y’know, handled the phone calls which crewmembers made to the folks back home. They sometimes listened in for kicks, and they used to tell us about these bizarre calls Lenny would make to some number in Baltimore. ‘Tell Aunt Jane to water the begonias. Repeat, tell Aunt Jane to water the begonias. The moon is red. How is Uncle George?’” Cowboy Bob chuckled “God knows what that shit meant, but it was obviously reports to the Casey Society.”

  “You didn’t get bothered by this?”

  “Naw. He was basically harmless.” Bob paused and sighed, his eyes rolling up toward the ceiling. “Until he caught the rumors about the Free Beer Conspiracy, though.”

  “Let me guess …”

  “Right. Commie plot.”

  There was little which could be kept secret for long aboard Olympus Station. The space station was enormous, but it was only so large; rumors and hearsay tended to spread quickly among the hundred-plus men and women living in the big wheel, sometimes but not always missing the attention of the security team or the station supervisor. In this instance, word seeped out that something special was being sent up to celebrate the completions of SPS-1. Yet only a small handful of people knew the details. If Phil Bigthorn, the US federal marshal who headed station security, or Hank Lutton, the station supervisor, had known what was going on, the jig would have been up; but apparently they didn’t, so the conspiracy continued to build itself.

  Eddie the Gentle Goon managed to make covert contact with one of the usual sources for goodies at the Cape, a cargo loader who for years had fattened his bank account by smuggling personal-request items into the OTVs bound for Skycan. (Cowboy Bob wouldn’t tell me his name, saying that the same person was still working for Skycan at KSC.) The cargo loader was willing to take the risk, which was considerable, but he also put a large fee on the job—fifty grand up front, overhead costs included. Eddie dickered with him and managed to get the price down to $30,000 through a combination of sweet talk and menace for which the Goon was renowned, and authorized a transfer of thirty grand from Eddie’s bank account to the loader’s. The price was still steep, but the co-conspirators grudgingly agreed to reimburse the Goon for the expense.

  The date for delivery of 444 cases of beer was to be on or before April 15, the day that final work on SPS-1 was scheduled to be completed. Dog-Boy and Dog-Girl, who had both worked previously as ground crew at the Cape, worked out the rough framework of the plan. They figured that, once the beer was packed into an OTV and the transfer vehicle was loaded into a shuttle’s cargo bay in the KSC Shuttle Processing Center, it would be smooth sailing. Under standard procedures, the OTV would not be reopened for inspection once the shuttle was mated with its flyback booster and moved to the launch pad. Once the shuttle reached orbit, the flight crew would routinely deploy the OTV from the cargo bay and fire its engine, sending it towards Olympus Station as if it were any other resupply mission.

  So the hard part was to get all that beer into an OTV, a difficulty compounded by NASA regulations forbidding all alcoholic beverages at Kennedy Space Center. There was no way a beer truck could simply drive past the checkpoints and offload over four hundred cases of beer at the SPC. Not without attracting the wrath of KSC’s security cops, infamous for their lack of humor.

  Eddie relayed these concerns to the bribed cargo loader at the Cape. The cargo loader’s reply, in effect, was: don’t sweat the details, we’ve got it covered. Eddie was also asked if he and his buddies wanted a hundred pounds of beer nuts, cheap.

  The cargo loader did his job well. First, he purchased 444 cases from a liquor wholesaler in Titusville, apparently explaining that he was planning a little get-together for a few friends. The wholesaler,
not asking too many difficult questions, delivered the beer to the loader’s house in Cocoa Beach, where the cases were stacked in his garage.

  Then the cargo loader approached a few touchable cronies who also worked at KSC, and, bribing them for $500 each, managed to enlist their help. He was careful to select Skycorp employees who worked at the SPC, were less than completely honest, and who owned pickup trucks. He found four guys who met that description.

  “The big hangup,” Bob continued, “was getting an OTV. The cargo manifests for the weekly shuttle flights were scheduled well in advance and were pretty tight at that point. With SPS-1 soon going on-line, the low-orbit factory stations wanted to stock up their supplies. This guy wouldn’t and couldn’t bump any life-critical cargo, and he couldn’t slide any military or scientific pallets off the board without attracting a lot of attention. So for awhile there we were stuck. We had the beer, we had the plan, and we had the people, but we didn’t have the OTV.”

  “The Mark III shuttle was in operation then,” I pointed out. “It could have gone direct to Skycan, and you wouldn’t need to use OTVs at all.”

  Bob shook his head. “The Columbia II and the Shepard were big-ticket birds then. Too high-profile for smuggling stuff, and their cargo bays could be opened anytime, even if you could get something bumped from their cargo manifests. We had to use a Mark II like the Ley or the Sally Ride, which were doing milk runs with no big fanfare. But, y’know, they had LEO ceilings, which meant we had to find an OTV.

  “Anyway, Dog-Boy came up with the solution, but Fred and I did the actual engineering. Three OTVs were permanently docked at Skycan, mainly used to ferry stuff over to the construction shack. Fred and I, when nobody was looking, climbed into one of the things, accessed the guidance computer, and plugged in some new co-ordinates that Dog-Boy figured out. Next time the OTV was sent out to the shack, the engine misfired.” Grinning, Cowboy Bob sipped his beer. “It ended up in an elliptic polar orbit over the Moon. It was a real bitch to retrieve the thing.”