Rude Astronauts

by Allen Steele

  I thought I was familiar with each face on the wall, but that night, for the first time, I spotted a picture which I had simply never noticed before. Jack had rearranged the bottles behind the bar, so the tall-necked vodka bottles were in a different place and no longer blocked this particular photo. I was bored, and while sitting on the bar stool and absently scanning the pictures, I happened to notice this one.

  The man in the photo had dark, curly hair and a greasy handlebar mustache; he looked like the sort of person you might imagine making obscene phone calls to a Catholic convent. He was wearing a Skycorp jumpsuit with the sleeves cut off, grinning at the camera while throttling a rubber chicken in his hairy hands. Fairly unremarkable, compared to some of the other pictures on the wall, except that someone had taped a handwritten caption to the bottom of the frame. I stood up on the rungs of my stool, leaned over the bartop, and squinted at the caption. It read:

  FRANK MCDOWELL—THE GREATEST CORPSE WHO EVER LIVED.

  Who can ignore a line like that?

  “Hey, Jack,” I called out. “Who was Frank McDowell?”

  Jack Baker was sitting at the opposite end of the bar, suffering through a newspaper crossword puzzle. He looked up, followed my gaze to the photograph, then sighed and closed his eyes. “Never mind,” he said.

  “I’m serious,” I insisted. “Who was Frank McDowell, and why was he the greatest corpse who ever lived?”

  Jack glared at me, then laid down his pencil and walked over to my end of the bar, pulling a fresh Budweiser out of the cooler on the way. “This one’s on the house if you drop the question,” he said as he placed the beer in front of me.

  It was tempting, but the worst way to shake a journalist’s curiosity is to attempt bribing him. “I’ll pay for the beer, thanks. I just want to know …”

  “Yeah, right.” He gave me a long, hard stare, saying nothing for a few moments. “This doesn’t end up in your paper, does it?” he asked quietly.

  That was a serious question, potentially endangering my good standing in the bar. In my case, being in bad standing at Diamondback Jack’s possibly meant being dragged out back and having the shit kicked out of me for no good reason at all. There are a number of different people who are not welcome in the bar: top NASA officials, executives for the major space companies, union reps, tourists, space groupies, children … and journalists. Especially journalists. Reporters are perceived around the Cape as having screwed the space pros since the Project Mercury days. Gators, leeches, and rattlesnakes are held in higher regard on the Space Coast than the press; at least their behavior is excusable because of their nature, and none of them has ever pushed a camera or a live mike into the faces of a family who has just watched a shuttle blow up nine miles downrange from the pad. With only one exception, none were tolerated in Diamondback Jack’s.

  I was the exception. I was the only writer allowed on the premises, and this was because I never opened my notebook or turned on my recorder in the bar, or repeated anything that I had heard or seen in my freelance articles for the Times. For this reason, Jack served me and the other regulars didn’t beat me up in the parking lot on general principles.

  My status was hard-won, and I was careful never to abuse the privilege. “I promise,” I said solemnly. “Just tell me what …”

  I shrugged and pointed to the photo with the mysterious caption. Jack gave me one more look of warning—“fuck with me and I’ll ram an ice-scoop down your throat”—then he raised a hand and whistled. “Hey, Marty! C’mere! Al wants to know something.”

  There was a heavy-set guy with long, dirty blond hair shooting pool by himself at the other side of the room. I had seen him in the bar before, but had never met him. He put down his cue, walked over and elbowed up against the bar next to me. Jack introduced us: his name was Marty—last names seldom matter in Diamondback Jack’s—and he had been a beamjack on Olympus Station back in ’22 and ’23, the years when SPS-3 was being built. Marty looked tough as a whore; when he reached for his beer, I noticed that he had the letters H-A-T-E tattooed across the thick knuckles of his right hand. But he was willing to talk as long as I bought the suds.

  Jack put another round in front of us, then returned to his crossword puzzle. “What do you want to know?” Marty asked.

  “The picture,” I replied, pointing again to the photo of Frank McDowell. “What’s with the caption on that picture? ‘The Greatest …’”

  “‘The Greatest Corpse Who Ever Lived,’” Marty finished, nodding his head. “Uh-huh. I wrote that.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  Marty smiled and looked down at the scratched bartop, idly tracing his finger around the wet ring left by a bottle. “Do you know it’s Halloween?”

  “It is? I forgot … yeah, I guess so. Why?”

  He laughed and picked up his beer. “Are you in the mood for a Halloween story?” He took a sip and peered at me over the neck of his bottle. “I mean, a true story? None of this shit about the Hook, stuff like that?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Right.” He looked at the picture on the wall for a moment. “Okay … so long as you don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  When Marty had been employed by Skycorp in 2022 as one of the high-orbit construction workers who were building the first powersats, there had been another beamjack aboard Olympus Station named Frank McDowell. It’s a well-known fact that many of the men and women who worked as beamjacks aboard Skycan were deranged. Sanity was not a necessary prerequisite for working in space, at least not with the private American space companies. The big buffalo went to work in space, and only the toughest and craziest of the herd were hired for the obligatory one-year contracts on Olympus. Weird Frank, though, was one of the most fucked of a fucked-up crowd.

  Weird Frank was a practical joker without a decent sense of humor. He was the type of person who is compelled to play pranks, but doesn’t have a good handle on what is funny and what is not. Weird Frank liked to put fresh turds in people’s bunks or line the crotch of their hardsuits with Ben-Gay. Weird Frank would find out that someone had a dead sister, then would tell another guy that the poor girl had a great body and he should ask about getting a date once they got back to Earth. Weird Frank, while some guy was floating next to him in the EVA ready-room, suiting up for work on the next shift, would surreptitiously drain his air supply from his life-support pack; when that person got out on tether, he would find that he only had about ten minutes of oxygen in the tank, just enough time to get into an emergency airlock. Weird Frank would borrow your water squeezebulb during a break and spit down the tube, then crack up when you put it to your mouth: “Heeeeey, Phil! I just spit in your water …”

  “Weird Frank was a sick kinda dude,” Marty said. “I don’t know why we put up with him as long as we did.”

  “So why did you?” I asked.

  Marty swigged his beer. “He was a nice guy somehow. He got under your skin, sure, but nothing he did was much worse than any of the weird bullshit anyone else did up there. And there wasn’t anything really malicious about what he did … it was just the way he did it. Every now and then someone would grab him by the neck and get ready to pound the fuck out of him, and his eyes would go wide and he’d put up his hands. ‘Hey, man, I didn’t mean it, I swear!’”

  I nodded. I knew a jerk like Weird Frank, during my teenage exile to a boarding school in Tennessee. That guy, though, was too huge to be pounded and his daddy was too wealthy for the school to afford to expel him, which explained how he got away with his pranks. After twenty years, though, I would still like to get him alone in a dark alley. “Nobody ever got serious with him?”

  “Not really. Frank wanted to be a pal, that’s all. He just didn’t know what a good joke was … except when he told one accidentally, then we all laughed.” He shrugged. “But that wasn’t very often. The guy was a freak. We were looking for some way to get him off Skycan when he got killed.” Something in my chest went cold. “Marty,” I asked tentativ
ely, “did somebody …?”

  He shook his head. “Uh-uh. Nothing like that. We only were trying to find a way to get his contract cancelled. What happened was an accident, believe me.”

  In March, 2022, a wicked series of solar flares occurred on the surface of the Sun. Solar flares are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to predict. The only way astronomers can tell that they’re coming is by gauging the eleven-year cycle of increased sunspot activity and watching for an increase in solar luminosity preceding a major flux … a dicey proposition at best, considering that these flares occur with the swift, random violence of a serial killer deciding it was time to take to the streets again.

  The protons were potentially lethal to the work crews on the powersats, since they were on EVA outside the shielded environments of Olympus Station or the construction shack, Vulcan Station. On the other hand, everyone had to play things very close. The construction schedule for SPS-3 was such that Skycorp couldn’t order an indefinite stop-work just because someone thought a solar flare might occur soon. Crying wolf could result in several days of labor being lost for nothing, and even the beamjacks didn’t want to sit around in the bunkhouse modules, wasting time for little reason. Not when their bonuses depended upon completing each stage of construction on time. So flare alerts were done at the last minute, when it was absolutely certain that serious storms were kicking up on the Sun’s corona and that everyone had better dive for cover. In general, there was a nine-minute leeway between the time the flares reached lethal proportions and the time their radiation reached Earth orbit. When the alerts happened, beamjacks on EVA abandoned whatever they were doing, untethered from the powersat and split for the Vulcan Station, mucho pronto.

  On the day that a flare alert was called, Weird Frank was on EVA, but not on the powersat, where he could have seen everyone heading for shelter in the construction shack. He was outside Olympus Station, performing one of the routine jobs that, once each week, someone draws from the duty roster: “hole patrol,” checking the outer hulls of the rim modules for micrometeorite damage and filling the little holes with “Silly Putty,” the goop used to repair small punctures. When the alert was called, Frank McDowell apparently did not hear, nor did he respond.

  “Why didn’t he hear the alert?” I asked.

  Marty finished his beer, belched and signaled Jack to bring us another round. “The stupid sumbitch had stuck a micro-CD in his chest unit, where you usually put talk-through tutorials for new guys. He had put in Led Zeppelin and cranked it to the max, so he couldn’t hear anything coming over his comlink. When Command was trying to warn him to get inside, all he was hearing was Led Zep. Drowned out everything else.” He shrugged. “Can’t knock his taste, though. Led Zep was classic shit for spacewalking …”

  “But he never got inside?”

  “Oh, he finally got in. Not until the CD ended, though, or until he started feeling dizzy. They had been yelling for him to get inside for ten minutes after the storm hit us before he cycled through the hub airlock and told Dave Chang he felt sick. Then he collapsed, right there in the Docks. Chang got his suit off and called Doc Felapolous, but by the time Doc got up there, Frank was comatose. The radiation had gone right through his suit. Bone marrow, lymph glands, guts and nuts …”

  Marty winced and snapped his fingers. “Boom. He was a dead man before he even got to the airlock. The only good thing was that he was unconscious when he kicked off. Poor bastard died hard. It’s a shitty way to go.”

  “Hmmm.” I took another hit off my beer and gazed at the photo of Weird Frank, grinning and strangling a rubber bird. “That’s it?”

  Marty chuckled morosely and looked at the picture himself. “Nope. That was just the beginning. Weird Frank wasn’t about to let go that easy. The fucker couldn’t leave without playing another practical joke.”

  “But he was dead …”

  “That’s what I said.” Marty took another chug from his beer, oblivious to his own rhyme. “The problem was, we couldn’t get rid of the body.”

  In the old science fiction movies, the cliche was that the dearly departed was given a burial in space, much like the traditional burial at sea practiced by sailors, except that in the films the shroud-wrapped corpse was ejected from the spacecraft, presumably to float through the cosmos forever. Stirring music, bagpipes, grim comrades, Matthew 7 read by the captain … yeah, you know the bit.

  The truth, however, is that nobody is ever buried in space. For one thing, the families and friends of the deceased usually want to bury them at home. For another, NASA pathologists back at the Cape perform autopsies as standard operating procedure, at least to settle life insurance requirements, not to mention making sure the space companies aren’t overlooking government regulations. Besides, the way people die out there is still a seldom-documented aspect of space medicine, since it doesn’t occur all that often. Every stiff is an education, you might say; the more you learn from one chap’s demise, the more it may help to save the next guy who knocks on heaven’s door.

  Because people do get killed in space, though, there are a number of contingency plans. Black, heavy-duty plastic body bags were stowed in Skycan’s sickbay; once Frank was pronounced dead, Doc Felapolous zipped his corpse into one of them. Yet it was more difficult than usual to inter Frank’s body until it could be returned to Earth.

  Standard practice, albeit seldom mentioned beyond the pages of the NASA manual, dictates that the body-bagged corpse should be taken outside the pressure vessel and tied to the outer hull with cables. When people had died before on Olympus Station, their bodies were lashed to the station’s hub to await pickup by the next OTV to dock with Skycan. The stiffs were then taken down-orbit to Freedom Station where they were loaded into a shuttle for the last leg of their final journey to Earth.

  In Frank McDowell’s case, however, this couldn’t be done. The solar flares which had killed him were still raging, and were likely to continue for several days. Anyone attempting an EVA to tie the body to the station hub would have suffered the same fate Weird Frank had met. To make matters worse, all OTV flights to geosynchronous orbit were halted until the storm was over, since solar flares tended to screw up their internal guidance systems and cause them to head for the Moon and points beyond. A retrieval of the corpse any time soon was out of the question, and even to load Frank’s body into one of Skycan’s own OTVs was inadvisable, since the hub airlock was the least shielded of the station’s modules.

  “So you were stuck with a dead body,” I said. “What did you do with him?” Marty belched into his fist. “’Scuse me. Doc took the only option that was available. He had one of the big refrigerators in the galley emptied out and the racks removed, and we stored him in there.

  “Oh, jeez! The cooks must have loved that.”

  “They weren’t crazy about it, no, but Doc made sure all the food was removed so that there wasn’t a chance of contamination.” He absently picked at the label on his beer bottle. “It wasn’t a bad idea, considering the circumstances. At least then no one had to look at him. The fridge had a temperature of 37 degrees Fahrenheit, so Frank remained … well, fresh.”

  “Fresh meat. Sure.”

  “Yeah, right. Anyway, he was put in an upright position and sealed in a black body bag. Doc hung a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door, so …”

  I started to laugh. Marty gave me a dubious look. “If you think that’s funny,” he said, “you’re gonna love the rest.”

  Death didn’t occur often aboard Skycan, but when it did there was tradition to be observed, even when the deceased was a geek like Frank McDowell. His passage from the mortal coil was marked by an Irish wake in the rec room.

  This is swell for scholars and saints, but by then there were already signs that Weird Frank was not going to be honored in a manner befitting scholars and saints. At dinnertime, someone had altered the chalkboard menu in the mess module to announce that tonight’s entrees would include Soup du Frank, Frankloaf, and Frank-eyed peas
, with Frozen Frank Pudding for dessert … and it didn’t help that the real main course was liver. But it was not until the wake that everyone’s true feelings emerged in regards to their fallen comrade.

  There was plenty of beer to go around, since Skycorp had finally relaxed its in-orbit alcohol standards after the smuggling incident with the Free Beer conspiracy. For this mournful occasion, one of the weekends-only kegs was released from storage; since no one was working any EVA shifts because of the flare and wasn’t likely to do so within the next couple of days, almost everyone took the opportunity to get loaded.

  During the first couple of rounds, most people were sincerely regretful about Weird Frank’s death: “Christ, man, what a way to buy the farm.” By the third round, though, many former victims of Frank’s bad practical jokes were recalling their experiences (“Hey, remember the story he told about your sister?”) and the rest were expressing the opinion that it was better that Frank’s number had been called instead of their own (“I was supposed to be on hole patrol tomorrow, d’ya’know that?”). By the fourth round, a few folks were quietly saying that the asshole deserved it (“Like, y’know, you get what’s coming to you in this life, right?”) and by the sixth, the opinion was unanimous (“Fuck him and good riddance”).

  “That was when Frank made his first appearance,” Marty said.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “A picture fell from the wall, or a cup mysteriously moved from one side of a table to another.” I couldn’t help it. Marty had promised me a Halloween story, and I had heard enough ghost stories from allegedly reliable sources to think I recognized a punchline when it was coming. Okay, here comes another bullshit yarn about the Haunted Space Station …