by Allen Steele
“Oh, ho. Convenient little accident …”
“Exactly. Hank Lutton had to request a new OTV for Skycan, since we were running three shifts to get SPS-1 finished on schedule and we needed three OTVs to get the job done. Skycorp was pissed, but they managed to get NASA to bump a science payload back a couple of weeks so we could be sent a new OTV. We got lucky. It was manifested for the Willy Ley, with launch scheduled for April 12, right on the money.”
“Hmmm. KSC doesn’t send up empty OTVs, so something must have been bumped from the manifest anyway.”
“Toilet paper, logbooks, frozen food, screwdriver heads, shit like that. Funny how easy it is to misplace that stuff in the warehouse, y’know.”
While the Free Beer conspirators were taking care of the OTV problem, though, another annoying hassle came to their attention, one much closer at hand: Lenny the Red, who had taken to spying on them.
“It wasn’t hard to figure out that Lenny was keeping tabs on us,” Bob said. “İ guess he thought he was James Bond, but he was about as subtle as an elephant fart. Fred and the Goon and I would be in the rec room, right? Maybe not even talking about this thing. And here he’d come down the ladder, kinda sauntering across the compartment to sit down real close to us, but being careful not to look our way so we wouldn’t notice him. Whistling, for Christ’s sake …”
“Inconspicuous behavior.”
Cowboy Bob sneered. “Nothing about Lenny was inconspicuous. It didn’t take a genius to see that he knew something was going on. At first we thought it was funny, ’cause if the Bill Casey Society thought smuggling beer into space was subversive …”
He shook his head in disgust and polished off his latest beer. “Anyway, they were definitely dumb to rely on a flathead like Lenny for intelligence, and that was the scary part.”
As it turned out, the Caseyites did not know that beer was being smuggled into space. Instead, the Society was once again gnawing on a favorite old bone of the right-wing fringe which had been lying around since the Soviets had launched Sputnik in 1957, that the USSR was preparing to place nuclear warheads in orbit in preparation for a sneak attack on the US from space. Apparently the group had discarded one Commie plot for another. In any case, the Society had informed Lenny to be alert for such a scheme, if there were indeed an active Communist element infiltrating Olympus Station.
So naturally Lenny Gibson, America’s vigilante in space, had discovered just such a plot. There were signs that a nuke would be ferried into orbit aboard an OTV, to be launched by the shuttle Willy Ley on April 12.
“Whoa, wait a minute,” I said. “How did you know what he was thinking?”
“Remember those coded messages he was sending to Baltimore? Lenny would write them down first in plain English, then rewrite them into code on the same page. Once he memorized the coded message, he would tear up the page and dump the scraps into the toilet in his bunkhouse. But the moron forgot to flush the pot one day.”
“So you found the scraps and put the uncoded message together.”
Cowboy Bob nodded, grinning. “Plus he talked in his sleep sometimes. Some secret agent, right?”
“Right.” I decided to take Bob’s story with a few more grains of salt. The yarn was getting a little implausible. But I wasn’t ready to call it total bullshit yet. “So now you knew that Lenny thought you guys were smuggling a bomb up there.”
“Yeah. Even though it was funny as hell, it did present another problem. If the Caseyites took Lenny’s reports seriously, they might decide to tip off somebody, like the FBI or NASA. Of course the feds might not take ’em seriously, but on the other hand NASA might not take any chances, and might make sure that security at the Shuttle Processing Center was tighter that week. So Lenny was becoming a pain in the ass and we had to take care of him.”
Pitching Lenny out the nearest airlock was briefly considered, but dismissed because nobody wanted to take a murder rap, although the idea was tempting. They also discussed tying him up and stuffing him into a suit locker for a few days, but the drawback was that he might be missed from his workshift. The conspirators thought about simply letting Gibson know what was going on, letting him in on the plan so that he would be aware that beer, not bombs, was the contraband inside the OTV scheduled to arrive on the 12th; yet a paranoid like Lenny would probably not believe the truth. Even if he did, it was always possible that he would twist it around so that the beer was being laced with mind-altering drugs by those evil Russians.
“Dog-Girl, bless her, came up with the answer,” Bob continued. “Pretty simple, actually. Lenny had to maintain contact with his pals in Baltimore to do any real harm, right? This meant he had to use the phone. Orbit-to-Earth phone calls were rationed items, and you were only allowed to use up so many minutes a month. So we managed to get the communications officers to adjust the phone logs in the computer just a weensy bit so that, suddenly, Lenny was overdrawn on his phone rations for April. No more phone calls, no more messages to Aunt Jane and Uncle George. No secret messages, no word of a Commie plot.”
“Nice going,” I said. “But that just took care of the Caseyites leaking word to NASA. What about Lenny himself?”
“You’re getting ahead of me, Al. I’ll get to that. Hey, Jack! Another round here?”
Around this time a few more of the regulars were wandering into Diamondback Jack’s; some were loitering around the bar watching a baseball game on TV, and a pool game was getting started at the table on the other side of the room. Bob was getting blitzed on the beers I was buying him and I was catching up, so I barely noticed the guy who had elbowed up to the bar a few feet behind Bob. He didn’t look familiar, but that was the only impression I had of him. He seemed not to be paying attention to us and Bob didn’t notice him; the next time I happened to look his way, he was gone. I didn’t think about him again until later.
Two days before the Willy Ley made its April 12 milk run, the cargo loader whom Eddie the Goon had bribed, with the help of the four other loaders he paid off, quickly placed 444 cases of beer into OTV OL-3643. The load-in took place during the first shift at the SPC, in the wee hours of the morning on April 10.
For the past week the cargo loaders had been smuggling the beer, a few cases a time, through the KSC security gates, hidden under camper caps in the backs of their trucks. The graveyard shift at the Cape was more easy-going than other shifts at the launch center; the shift supervisors tended to huddle over coffee in the cafeteria, so the loaders apparently had no trouble stashing the beer into the OTV. By the time the SPC’s shift supervisor finished his early-morning coffee break, the OTV was sealed and was being trucked out to Pad 40 to be loaded into the Ley’s cargo bay. The shift supervisor routinely checked off OL-3643 as ready to fly, not bothering to check inside.
Eddie the Goon received a telegram from his enterprising friends later that day, innocuously informing him that the party supplies were on the way. Goony grin plastered across his face, Eddie told Bob and the other principal people involved in the scam, and they put the next phase into motion by spreading word along the station grapevine: something wonderful was arriving by OTV at the docking module on April 11, at the beginning of the second shift, and a few volunteers were needed at the Docks to get it hauled from the station’s hub down to the rim modules.
“You didn’t tell them what was coming?” I asked.
Bob belched and shook his head. “Naw. We wanted it to be a surprise. We also didn’t want Hank to find out. But we got enough guys to say they’d be there. Everybody knew it was something good.”
As anticipated, Lenny the Red got the word through the grapevine. He had realized by now that his messages weren’t getting through to Paranoid Central—all part of the Commie plot, of course—so he interpreted the subterfuge as the hatching of the conspiracy. Right idea, wrong conspiracy. To the quiet satisfaction of Cowboy Bob and company, Lenny began to get jumpy. He even switched his bunk assignment again.
“We knew that Dick Tracy would be a
t the Docks when our OTV arrived, of course,” Bob said. “He was planning on something, though he didn’t know what. There weren’t any guns on Skycan that we knew of, but maybe he had managed to sneak one up in case he had to assassinate some Commies. Maybe he was planning to defuse the nuke all by himself, I dunno. But we just made sure that he was covered when he got there.”
He reached for a cigarette and almost knocked over his beer without noticing. Jack threw us a look of warning which Bob didn’t catch either. He was ripped. “So when the day came, at 1100 hours about, there were ten, fifteen guys crowded into the Docks when the OTV hard-docked with Skycan. Eddie and Fred and me and a couple of the other jacks were kinda casually floating around Lenny while Chang pressurized the airlock and undogged the hatch, so I got to see Lenny’s face when the thing was opened up.”
Cowboy Bob coughed loudly, and then began to laugh. “Jesus! Was he pissed! He was staring with this look on his face when Dog-Boy got the covers and ropes off and started pushing one case after another out into the Docks.”
Bob drunkenly hobbled off his bar stool. “Man! One case after another! Fred screaming ‘Free beer! Free beer!’ And all the guys howling, cracking up, grabbing the cases. Someone opened a can—and you can imagine how shook up that stuff was, after sitting through a rocket launch—and beer started spewing all over the place, making these big yellow bubbles that flew all around, splattering everywhere, and more guys started appearing, hauling the cases out of the Docks, down the ladders through the spokes to the rim. A fucking riot, Al … and in the middle of all this, Lenny, mouth working like a fish, can’t believe what’s going on, shouts …”
Bob shot his arm out wide and yelled, getting the attention of everyone in the bar: “This is un-American! Where’s the goddamn bomb?”
“Hey, Cowboy!” Jack snarled from the other end of the bar. “Cool it or I’ll cut you off!”
Bob was doubled over the bar, cracking up and breathless with the memory of the scene. He got control of himself after a few moments. Clambering back on his stool and reaching for his beer, he said, “And that’s when we dropped the blanket over him.”
Jack Baker gave us one last round of beers and then shut us both off, after first making me walk a straight line to see if I were halfway capable of driving both Bob and myself home. While Cowboy Bob sucked down his last beer he finished the story.
Once Bob, Eddie, and Fred had grabbed Lenny in the blanket and trussed him with nylon cords, they shoved him into an empty suit locker in the Docks and locked it shut. By then the party was beginning to roll down into the rim modules; most of the second-shift beamjacks were logging in sick, and the third shift was looking for excuses. Once it became obvious that a surprise party was in progress and that trying to shut it down would only incite general mutiny, Hank Lutton grudgingly called the day off, halting construction work for the next twenty-four hours before heading down to the rim himself. He later told the honchos at Skycorp and NASA that a spread of stomach virus had caused the stop-work. No big deal, in the long run; the party only delayed the low-power tests by a day.
Sometime during the celebration, Bob and Eddie and Dog-Girl slipped to the Docks, hauling behind them two garbage bags filled with empty beer cans. Dog-Girl had already sneaked into the vacant medical bay and swiped one of Doc Felapolous’ sedative guns. The three of them opened the suit locker and Dog-Girl tranked Lenny with a shot to the neck, and once Lenny was in a stupor they untied him and stuffed him into a hardsuit, making certain that he had two full airtanks in his life-support pack.
“We then threw him in the OTV, emptied the bags in there so that there were dozens of empty cans floating around with him, and closed the hatch,” Bob said. “Dog-Girl and the Goon reset the nav computer so it would rendezvous with Columbus Station in LEO, and then we fired the sunnuvabitch back to Earth. Never saw him again.”
“That was all?” I asked.
Bob, smiling and slumped over the bar, looked at me and shook his head slowly. “Well … not quite. See, I taped a note on the back of Lenny’s suit, where he couldn’t see it or take it off. It said, ‘To the Bill Casey Society … take your drunk stool pigeon and shove him!’ I didn’t sign it, but I think Lenny let ’em know who the author was, and I don’t think they appreciated my sense of humor.”
Neither did Skycorp, which was how Cowboy Bob lost his contract bonus and got nailed with a couple of fines which deflated his payroll. He ended up on the “unhirable” list with the major space companies as a result of the Free Beer Conspiracy. When the hammer inevitably came down, he alone took the pounding.
“But y’know what, Al?” he said as I half-carried him towards the door. “I don’t give a shit. Y’gotta have a sense of humor. Flatheads like the Casey jerks … they don’t have a sense of humor, goddamn fanatics. Following me, telling me I gotta keep my mouth shut. I pissed on them from a considerable height, and I’d do it again if I could …”
Bob threw up in the bushes behind the bar, then passed out in the shotgun seat of my car after mumbling directions to his house. I concentrated on keeping my vision straight as I carefully drove down Route 3 towards Cocoa Beach. It was a quarter past midnight when I drove over the Banana River causeway onto Route A1A, cruising through the beachfront commercial strip of Cocoa Beach. The night was black as space, wet and humid like the inside of a dog’s mouth, neon-glittering like the old visions of the high frontier.
A couple of units, a pump and a ladder, from the Cocoa Beach Fire Department screamed past us in the left lane as I passed the old Satellite Motel. Bob, snoring in the depths of his drunken sleep, paid no attention, nor did I until we passed the commercial zone and headed into the residential part of town. Then the stranger, the guy who had lingered in Jack’s near Bob and me while he was telling me the story, oddly came to mind, for no particular reason. Remembering him, I also recalled something Bob had told me about Lenny Gibson, how he used to hang around in the Skycan rec room, attempting to eavesdrop on conversations. I began to feel uneasy. For no particular reason.
As I turned the corner onto the residential street where Bob told me he lived, I spotted the fire trucks again, parked in the street in front of a small white Florida-style stucco house, practically identical to all the other white stucco houses lining the road. The house was ablaze with fire shooting through a collapsing roof and the firemen directing streams of water through broken front windows, while people stood around beyond the piles of hoses, watching the blaze. I slowed to a stop behind the trucks and shook Bob awake.
“Hey, Bob,” I said. “One of your neighbors has his house on fire.”
Bob’s eyes cracked open, and he stared through the windshield at the burning house. He didn’t say anything for a few moments, just stared.
“It is one of your neighbors’, isn’t it?” I asked, feeling an unseasonal chill.
Cowboy Bob didn’t look at me, nor did he laugh, but his mouth twisted into a sad, angry sort of smile. “What did I tell you?” he whispered at last. “Fanatics. No goddamn sense of humor.”
True story.
The Return of Weird Frank
THIS IS A WARNING, the only one you’ll get, so don’t take it lightly: this is a truly bizarre and ugly story. In all probability it is a lie since it was told to me second-hand in a seedy Florida barroom, the last place one should ever expect to hear the truth about anything; if it isn’t a lie, then human affairs are even more depraved than you may have imagined.
If you’re searching for a nice, soothing yarn which will make you sleep easier tonight, snug and secure in the knowledge that people are essentially decent and that, even in the frontier of space, there are certain codes of human behavior by which all men and women abide, then it is strongly suggested that you skip this story. This tale is a rabid dog with a mouthful of foam and an attitude.
This is the story of Weird Frank and the terrible things which were done to his stinking corpse, and if you’re not ready for some unsettling weirdness, it’s time to go
away before things get messy.
You have been warned.
By sheer coincidence, it was on a Halloween night when I first noticed the photo of Weird Frank on the wall behind the bar at Diamondback Jack’s. I wasn’t thinking of ghosts, zombies, or the so-called things which go bump in the night. In fact, I had even forgotten that it was Halloween. It was a dull evening and I had dropped by the roadhouse to have a couple of beers before heading home to my place in Cocoa Beach.
Diamondback Jack’s is a scruffy little beer joint located on Route 3 on Merritt Island, about two miles down the highway from the west gate of Kennedy Space Center. It is very much a blue-collar kind of place, and not even a nice one at that; don’t seek it out unless you know how to handle yourself in a fight with a mean drunk who has murder on his mind because you happened to bump into his cue while he was laying up a two-corner shot on the pool table. The ambiance is Late American Redneck: sticky floors, battered cheap furniture, bad lighting, and a juke box filled mainly with country-western CDs. No windows, a sand parking lot splattered with oil, vomit and piss, and a men’s room in which you don’t want to spend much time. The varnished hide of a four-foot rattler is mounted above the bar; it either came from the hide of a snake which the owner, Jack Baker, claimed to have killed while on a fishing trip in the Everglades, or from one of the regulars who bounced a check on him.
Diamondback Jack’s is a hangout for space pros, the men and women at the Cape who do the hands-on dirty work of the high frontier: shuttle jocks, pad rats, cargo dips, software weenies, firing room honchos, Vacuum Suckers, itinerant beamjacks and moondogs who hang out there between off-Earth jobs—and it shows. Framed photos of space scenes are on all the walls: shuttle liftoffs, shots of the lunar base at Descartes, the big wheel of Olympus Station under construction, the assembly of the first SPS powersat. Behind the long oak bar where the owner, Jack Baker, holds court every night are more pictures: vets of the final frontier, living and dead, famous and infamous. Some of the faces belong to regular customers; most, though, are legends, if only among the fraternity of pros. No one else knows their names.