by Allen Steele
“No, no,” he replied. “I mean, Frank returned.”
“Yeah. You looked up and saw him sitting in a chair. He was surrounded by this strange glow and …”
“When nobody was looking,” Marty said calmly, “Russ the Bus and Horny Harry had sneaked over to the mess deck, found the fridge where Doc had stashed the body, and carried Frank back to the party.”
“… come again?”
He smiled and took another swig from his beer. “I didn’t even see it happen. I was over at the holotable watching the Lakers game when I heard some commotion behind me. I didn’t pay any attention, but I had just gotten through telling somebody about the time Weird Frank had reset my suit comlink so that I was picking up Russian crosstalk when Russ tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Hey, Marty, why doncha tell Frank what you thought about his shit?’ I turned around to tell the Bus to get lost …”
Marty grinned and shrugged. “And there was this body bag leaned up against the wall next to the hatch ladder. Frank.”
“Jesus Christ,” I murmured.
“No, it was Frank …”
“That’s pretty ill …”
Marty’s head cocked back and forth. “Actually, it was pretty funny at the time,” he said, completely blasé about the notion. “We were all bombed, of course, and Frank wasn’t high on anyone’s list of best-loved dead people.”
“But still …”
“Hey, the party was for him, so what the fuck? Anyway, everybody got their chance to come around and give Frank their last regards or whatever.”
“That’s sick!”
“Looky. The Russians put Lenin’s stiff in a glass case for almost a whole century. That was a national symbol for them.”
Marty smiled and tipped his bottle toward me. “I mean, there’s worse ways to be remembered. If anything, showing up for his own wake was the best practical joke Frank ever pulled.”
I started to say that Weird Frank hadn’t led the Russian communist revolution, as a practical joke or otherwise, but Marty sipped his beer and went on.
“The bag was kept zipped up, because nobody wanted to really look at him, but the thought that Weird Frank had made it to his own wake … well, you had to be there. It was funny.”
The humor was lost on Doc Felapolous when he stopped by the rec room a few minutes later to see how the wake was going. Skycan’s chief physician went berserk when he discovered that the body had been stolen from the refrigerator. After chewing out everyone in sight, he picked two crewmen at random to carry Frank’s body back to the galley, and Felapolous sealed the hatch with his keycard so no one else would try the same thing again.
That should have been the end of it. It wasn’t.
While Marty visited the men’s room, I got Jack to bring us another round and a shot of tequila for myself; this was beginning to look like a story best taken with raw liquor. Marty continued his tale when he got back from the head.
“You couldn’t keep the mess deck locked at all times because everyone had most of the keycard codes for everything else,” he went on. “Even though Doc had encrypted the hatchlock, it wasn’t hard for Horny Harry to figure out that, in a hurry, Doc might use the numbers 4-15-3 on the keypad … which spells D-O-C in alphanumeric. So it was easy for someone to get in there to steal the body from the fridge.”
I nodded. There was no real need to ask why a normally sane person would resort to body-snatching for kicks. It was well known that life on Olympus Station was monotonous: sleep, eat, work, and not much else. People often compared the wild nightlife in Skycan to that of Deadhorse, Alaska. The guys who signed contracts with Skycorp to work for one or two years on the powersats didn’t do so to meet girls or to visit thrilling countries. They went up to make big fast money in a gritty, dangerous job, not to conquer the universe. Nonetheless, time tended to drag on Skycan, and bored people often do weird things to keep themselves amused. Skycan was a place where the circle jerk could easily be recognized as a team sport by the Olympics Committee. In this instance, the crew didn’t even have their jobs to keep themselves occupied. The flare had forced a construction shutdown for several days; it was too dangerous to leave Olympus Station. So what do you do, after Monopoly becomes monotonous and you’ve watched all the old movies in the rec room several times?
Well, when there’s the dead body of a practical joker no one particularly liked …
“The Bus got it next, which was appropriate since he was the one who had the idea of springing Frank from the fridge in the first place.” Marty grinned and shook his head. “He was in the rec room playing poker when someone behind him slipped and fell against him with a cup of coffee. Accidentally, of course.”
“Of course.”
“So that meant he had to go back to his bunk in Module 28 to get a clean shirt, right? He opened his locker and … boom, Frank falls out!”
“Terrific. Amazingly humorous.”
Marty snickered. “Four or five of us were waiting up on the catwalk outside the module. We thought he would scream his head off, but there was just this long silence. Then he climbs up the ladder, sticks his head through the hatch, and said, ‘Very goddamn funny.’”
“Hmm. Kind of anti-climactic.” I sipped my beer as a thought occurred to me. “By the way, shouldn’t Frank have been getting a little whiffy, shall we say?”
Marty shook his head. “Naw. For one thing, we were keeping him in the body-bag. And he was in the fridge between appearances, so he was staying … fresh, y’know? Rigor mortis had set in, though, so we couldn’t bend his arms or legs without breaking ’em. One of the guys in the Weird Frank Fan Club …”
“The what?”
“That’s what we started calling ourselves. The Bus, Harry, myself, a few other guys. Anyway, one of us, Gene, had been an intern with an Army medic unit in Nicaragua before he signed up with Skycorp, so he knew something about the care and feeding of corpses. As long as Frank was kept on ice between his guest appearances and they were kept pretty brief, we didn’t have to worry much about decomposition.”
Marty took another hit from his beer. “In any case, the stunt with Russ’s locker had been a little unsatisfactory, so we had to come up with something better. Something Frank would have appreciated. After thinking about it for awhile, we came up with it. For his next mission, though, Frank had to come out of the bag.”
Later that same day, the fan club raided the fridge again and smuggled Frank to the data processing center in Module Six. Lonnie, the data processing chief, had often complained about the daily updates he had to make to Skycorp’s Operations Center in Huntsville. The verbal status reports sometimes took more than a half-hour and were boring reiterations of everything which was already on the data downlink, and Lonnie was never certain if he were being heard by a human or just another AI mainframe. That afternoon, with Lonnie’s blessing, the Weird Frank Fan Club put the system to a test; they unzipped Weird Frank from his body bag, propped him in a seat facing the camera, and while Lonnie crouched below the camera with a mike and hard-copy of his update, they called Huntsville SOC.
“And y’know what?” Marty asked. “Nobody down there noticed. They had a dead man on their screens for twenty fucking minutes and no one in Huntsville even mentioned that his lips didn’t move or his eyes were shut. Lonnie had a hard time keeping from cracking up. As for us …” He shrugged. “Well, it just confirmed that the front office people were even more dead from the neck up than Frank. But it wasn’t much fun.”
“So?” It was all beginning to sound just a bit juvenile. “What were you expecting?”
Marty looked at me askance. “When you were a kid, didn’t you ever put a rubber rat in your mother’s bed just to watch her scream? Something like that. We wanted to see someone lose their shit, but good. I mean, hauling a dead person around ain’t fun unless someone pays attention.”
“I get what you mean.” I knew the general idea, although the most I had ever done with it was sending a roadkilled squirrel to an editor
who had stiffed me on a check. I played with my empty bottle, holding the narrow neck between my thumb and forefinger and rolling the wide bottom back and forth across the bartop. “Did you ever …?”
“Uh-huh. But by then, we had taken the joke a little too far.”
Weird Frank fell out of two more lockers and made another visit to the rec room, but the joke was quickly becoming stale. Then somebody—Marty would not tell me who, but the disturbed twinkle in his eyes gave me a strong hint—came up with the ultimate gag.
“The Sex Monster was a beamjack who had been up there for seven months,” Marty explained, “and had already frightened half the guys in the station. She was the horniest woman in Skycan …”
“That should have made her popular,” I said drily. It was no secret that most men who worked on the station went through involuntary celibacy … blueballs is the operative term. Skycan was a small, closed environment, and the company frowned on sexual congress in space (“insurance problems” was the catch-all phrase, as it was for almost everything else which was fun). So if a male got attracted to any given female among the crew, she was probably either happily married or formally engaged to some dork on the ground. And, even if a guy got lucky by finding a good woman who didn’t care about her fiance in Great Falls tonight and was ready for a little sleazy sex, there was damn little privacy for making whoopie. Unless, of course, you didn’t mind being interrupted by the comments of half a dozen spectators standing right outside your bunk, many of whom had placed bets upon who would achieve orgasm first.
But the Sex Monster was a different case altogether; she was the subject of nobody’s wet dream. She was six-four, weighed close to two hundred pounds, and had arms and legs like a gold medal Ironman Triathlon runner; those who had seen her in the buff said that she resembled a sumo wrestler. This was a woman who practiced sex as a form of unarmed combat, a bull-nympho who could probably take on the entire starting lineup of the San Francisco 49ers and leave them in traction until the Superbowl. The Marquis de Sade would have hidden in a closet.
The Sex Monster had a temper, her sex drive was insatiable, and the combination spelled terror for every man in Olympus Station. A dozen guys would be in the rec room watching TV when a pair of heavy boots would come clomping down the stairs and a deep, not-at-all-feminine voice would howl …
“I wanna get fucked!”
And every man would hold his breath and stand still like a rabbit …
“I said, I wanna get FUCKED!”
Then the entire room would be squirming uncomfortably, cowering against the bulkheads, and faking chest-colds until she had selected today’s lover and dragged him, whimpering pitifully, up the ladder back to her lair in Module 34, a bunkhouse which all the other women who had shared it had abandoned rather than witness any more of her depravity. God forgive the putz who couldn’t get it up for her.
“But Frank didn’t have that problem,” Marty said with an evil giggle.
The Fan Club noticed that Weird Frank’s corpse had undergone a strange, morbidly funny change. In the cold confines of the refrigerator, propped up in a vertical position, all his blood had gradually drained down to the lower half of his body, a phenomenon not unknown to morticians. This had produced for Frank a formidable erection that would have put a porn-movie star to shame, a permanent hard-on which simply could not go limp. The stiff was stiff, one could say.
The opportunity was too good to miss.
By now I was shaking my head. “Oh, no,” I was saying. “Don’t tell me you did. Please don’t tell me you did. Please don’t tell me you did …”
“Yes,” he said softly, “we did.” Marty took a long draw from his beer. “When the Monster returned to her bunk after her shift, there was a man waiting for her in bed. And, needless to say, the lights were out …”
“God, that’s vile …!”
“We were waiting outside the hatch, but we couldn’t hear anything for the first couple of minutes. I think she might have actually started to go down on him when she noticed that he was rather cold and unresponsive …” The leer on his face was hideous. “Mainly cold.”
“You’re EVIL!” I yelled. I started to grab the neck of my beer bottle, preparing to bash in his skull. Baker, who had been listening from the other end of the bar, made a grab for the Louisville Slugger he kept under the cash register for salesmen and lawyers; judging from the look on his face, though, he might have been getting ready to help me.
Marty went on relentlessly, oblivious to both of us. “Then, all of a sudden, there was a screech you could hear halfway across the station. Pure fucking terror …”
“I can’t blame her …”
“Then we heard her scream again. This time, she was nothing except pissed off, because she had been in the rec room during Frank’s wake. ‘Goddammitalltohell,’ she yelled, ‘I’m sick of this fucking shit!’ We jumped back from the hatch and suddenly the Monster comes up the ladder, hauling Frank behind her, wrapped in a blanket.”
Wearing only a bathrobe and with a homicidal look in her eyes which made even the Bus scurry away, the Sex Monster hauled the body up the ladder. As everyone dove for cover behind each other, she began dragging the swathed corpse down the upward-curving central passageway. It was understandable why she was less than respectful to the condition of the body, but it didn’t make the situation less macabre. A couple of Frank’s mortified fingers broke loose and lay on the green industrial carpet in her wake.
“She headed straight for Module 30, the waste reclamation center, screaming obscenities all the way,” Marty continued. “We didn’t know what was she was planning until she opened the hatch and started to shove Frank down, and even then there was nothing we could do about it. I mean, she had completely flipped …!”
The station’s main airlocks were in the hub, but there was a small, exit-only airlock in Module 30 which was used by the life-support engineers for the disposal of solid waste which could not be recycled. Before anyone could stop the Sex Monster, she had shoved Weird Frank into the tube, slammed the hatch closed, and hit the jettison button.
She didn’t even bother to decompress the airlock first; Frank went in one end of the tube and was shot out of Skycan through the other. There was no reading from Matthew.
“And that was the last you saw of Weird Frank,” I finished.
Marty shook his head; the grin had disappeared from his face. “No,” he said slowly, “it was not.”
The main reason why dead astronauts are not given burials in space has to do with physics: if they were simply let loose from an airlock, without sufficient forward motion, their bodies would establish their own miniature orbits around the spacecraft or station. But, in the case of the Sex Monster ejecting Weird Frank from Skycan, two different things happened. She had not bothered to decompress the airlock, thus the sudden opening of the outer hatch blew the corpse completely clear of the station.
Frank’s remains went into their own eccentric orbit, all right … but in a geosynchronous orbit around Earth, not around either Skycan or Vulcan Station.
“Once we realized what had happened,” Marty continued, “someone ran up to the command center and explained things to one of the traffic control officers. We thought that, if we could pinpoint Frank’s location on radar, we could send out a work pod to retrieve him from space.”
He leveled his hands in a shrug. “But the TRAFCO couldn’t find anything on his screen, so we figured that, just maybe, the station’s rotation had been such that Module 30 was pointed toward Earth and …”
“Frank’s trajectory would take him to burnup in the upper atmosphere,” I finished. “Okay. Reasonable assumption. What did you do about it?”
Marty shrugged and picked up the fresh beer which Jack Baker had placed in front of him. “Nothing, really. What was done, was done. Doc Felapolous was pissed off and we lost a week’s salary in company fines when Skycorp got the story out from him, but Doc explained to Frank’s relatives that we had opted for bu
rial in space …”
“They didn’t know better?”
“Naw, they didn’t know better … and how would you explain it if you wanted to tell the truth? Anyway, we figured that was the end of it. The next day the flares died and the alert ended, so we all went back to work on SPS-3.”
And that still was not the end of the grim affair.
Two days later, during the second work-shift on the power-sat, a beamjack who was welding trusses at the far end of the platform was informed by the foreman in Vulcan’s command center that a mass of small objects was headed in his direction. This was unusual, but not unlikely; space junk tended to float through the construction zone from time to time. It only meant that anyone on EVA had to take cover until it passed, then a robot sweeper would be sent out to gather up the garbage before it posed a hazard to anyone else.
“I was on tether on the other side of the powersat,” Marty explained, “and even though I was hearing everything over the crosstalk channel, I wasn’t really paying much attention. So here was this poor slob, who had taken cover within the trusswork and waiting for what he thought was old third-stage rocket debris or some lost bolts from the Russian powersat, something like that, to pass by … and suddenly we all hear him gagging and screaming, ‘Frank! Frank! Frank …!’”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand. If they were small objects, then how could they be Frank’s body …?”
Then it hit me, and the last few beers I had enjoyed began to roil in my stomach. It had been Weird Frank’s body, all right … but it had no longer been in one piece.
Take a dead body. Allow it to attain rigor mortis, put it in a refrigerator and freeze it until it becomes so stiff that, if you were to drag it down a corridor its fingers would begin to fall off like a leper’s extremities, then brutally eject it from an airlock at a velocity akin to that of a Kansas tornado at ground-zero …