by Allen Steele
Outsider, because I was a stringer for the Times and journalists are traditionally unwelcome among the pros at the Cape. Conventional wisdom says that since we ask dumb questions at press conferences and never get the facts straight, stick our noses (bloody or otherwise) into places where they don’t belong, always blab secrets better left untold, and are generally pains in everyone’s collective ass, we are untrustworthy as a collective whole. Journalists rank with sand fleas at the Cape; barely tolerated, never welcome. Insider, because I was a regular at Diamondback Jack’s. I normally went there to drink, not to play reporter. My notebook and recorder stayed in the car where they belonged; if someone told me a story, it was with everyone’s explicit permission … and under no circumstances would it appear in my paper (okay, so I cheated a little by writing the stories I heard as thinly-disguised fiction). Most of the time, the gossip and rumors never left the walls of the bar.
It was a hard-fought status, being the token blabbermouth in good old boy territory; for this reason alone, though, my presence was tolerated. Jack Baker was one of the very few people who were aware of my profession, and it was only because I had demonstrated the ability to keep secrets that I was allowed in his bar in the first place. I was always careful never to cross the line.
This time, though, it looked as if I had stepped over it. Mike and Doug put down their beers and were studying me with expressions which suggested that I was the next person to make a visit to the parking lot. For a few moments I wondered if Jack Baker would be tacking my hide to the wall alongside that of the rattlesnake he had allegedly killed during a fishing trip in the Everglades. There was—as purveyors of purple prose are permanently predestined to pontificate—a pregnant silence, and I thought I was going to have a baby.
“Reporter. Well now …” Sugar folded his hands together on the tabletop and gazed at me with speculative amusement. “You’re not trying to wrangle a story out of this, now are you?”
I quickly shook my head and started to say that it had only been a curious question, but Sugar nodded his head. “No,” he continued, “I don’t think so. But if ol’ Jack here says you can be trusted, then I’ll believe you.”
He looked toward his companions, who had eased off a little but still hadn’t relaxed their guard. “In fact, perhaps we should take our case to the press. They keep trying to pick a fight with us, so maybe it’s time we fought back. What do you say, gentlemen?”
Doug looked suspicious, but he slowly nodded his head. “I dunno,” Mike murmured. “They’re pissed at us enough already. If we go spilling our guts …”
“What are they going to do that they haven’t done already?” Sugar spread open his hands. “We’re grounded, we’re broke, we’re unemployed, our names are dirt in the industry. They call us on the phone in the middle of the night, they follow our wives and kids all the time … hell, we can’t even step out for a beer without having a couple of them tagging along. Maybe we should have gone public eleven months ago.” He gestured toward me. “I don’t know this guy, but he’s press and he’s already seen part of it. Perhaps we should just go ahead and come clean. How can it get much worse than it is already?”
I already didn’t like the sound of this. Contrary to popular myth, most journalists don’t go looking for trouble; it finds them, whether they invite it or not. Many years ago, when I had been a staff writer on a muckraking weekly paper, I had done a story about a junkyard which was using its lot as an illegal hazardous-waste disposal site, taking toxic chemicals from local manufacturers and burying them in the back acre. Nearby community residents had tipped me off, and the story which I wrote caused the state’s environmental agency to investigate and finally shut the place down. The junkyard owner was pissed off at me; for several weeks, thugs made frequent visits to the newspaper office in search of yours truly until the circuit court passed verdict on the junkyard and the chap in charge was sent off to prison. Even then, it had been several months before I stopped checking over my shoulder whenever I walked the streets.
It was beginning to look like a replay of that incident. I started measuring the distance to the door. Then my friend stuck out his hand. “Name’s Ted Saltzman,” he said. “My friends call me Sugar.”
Sugar Saltzman. All at once, the connection became clear. I felt stupid for having missed it before.
Yes. I had heard of him. Everyone at the Cape had heard of Sugar Saltzman. And at the moment I finally linked the face to the name, I knew I wasn’t going to leave the bar until I had heard his story.
If you haven’t heard of Sugar Saltzman, you don’t read newspapers or watch TV. He was not only a legend in the space industry, but one of very few spacers whose name ever became known outside the insular community of the Cape. He was the last of the old-school astronauts, and his rise to fame was matched in velocity only by his descent into infamy.
Before Saltzman joined NASA, he had been an Air Force fighter-pilot. When he was still in his twenties, he had flown F-117s out of Saudi Arabia for sorties over Baghdad during Gulf War I. Not long after the war, he quit the USAF to enlist in the NASA astronaut corps. He flew numerous orbital missions on the second-generation shuttles before NASA was reorganized into a regulatory agency and space industrialization was privatized. He was Skycorp’s first-draft pick among the old NASA shuttle jockeys; the story goes that Rock Chapman himself had recruited Saltzman, on the basis of a brief exchange the two old flyboys had at a burger joint on Route A1A. “Why do they call you Sugar?” Rock had asked, and Sugar had replied, “Because everything I do comes out sweet.”
Indeed. Sugar Saltzman was an ace among aces and a pro among pros, a genuine hot-shit shuttle jockey; even the best of old-guard NASA astronauts from the last century couldn’t match his record. While working for Skycorp, he amassed more flight-hours than any other pilot in history, sometimes under conditions which pushed the proverbial envelope. When his shuttle lost power to its APUs just prior to re-entry, he suited up and went EVA to fix a shorted-out conduit in the aft engine section, relying on talk-through from the ground and his own memory of the complex wiring system; another pilot might have curled into a rescue ball and waited for someone else to save his ass, but Saltzman had taken care of the situation himself, and brought his vessel and crew safely home. And when Phoenix Station had suffered an electrical fire and lost life-support, giving its crew less than two days of oxygen before they asphyxiated, Sugar had taken a rescue team into low orbit even as a killer hurricane was bearing down on the Cape from the Bahamas.
If there was any pilot who typified the mysterious, grace-under-pressure quality which Tom Wolfe had once called the “Right Stuff,” it was Sugar Saltzman. Skycorp had been only too happy to capitalize on his local fame; they needed a 21st-century hero to match the Scott Crossfields and Chuck Yeagers of the past, if only to enhance their corporate self-image. The public was tired of actors and politicians and self-made celebrities; they wanted someone they could genuinely admire, that larger-than-life person whom every man could emulate. Sugar Saltzman fit the bill and Skycorp was only too willing to oblige. Since Saltzman regularly flew one particular shuttle—then called the John Young, itself named after one of NASA’s legendary astronauts—Skycorp rechristened it, allowing Sugar to choose the new name. The pilot picked the name of an old RAF Lancaster which had flown bombing missions over Germany during World War II; an artist had repainted the Lanc’s topless Vargas girl on the shuttle’s forward port fuselage, along with the shared name of the two craft. The John Young thereby became known as Sugar’s Blues.
Sugar did talk-shows and interviews, modeled T-shirts and did cola commercials and all the rest, but he never stopped flying; he remained on Skycorp’s active-duty roster and didn’t sell out to become a full-time celebrity, and more so for the better. For the next few years, both the shuttle and its commander were legends in their own time. Skycorp allowed him to select his own regular crew; his picks were Mike Green as his co-pilot and Doug McPherson as his cargo specialist, b
oth of whom were already seasoned shuttle honchos. The heavy-breathing magazine writers who profiled Skycorp’s star team inevitably referred to them as the “Blues Brothers.”
For a brief time, they were the ace kids on the block. Nobody could touch ’em, either for real flying skill or artificial hubris. But it didn’t last for very long.
Shortly after Saltzman’s twenty-fourth orbital mission, the pilot and his crewmates were accused of being “habitual drug offenders” … junkies, once you get away from mediaspeak.
When the hammer came down, I wasn’t around to be part of the public trashing. The Times had dispatched me to Sydney to cover an international space-tech conference, so I wasn’t in town when Sugar Saltzman and his crew were busted. I’m glad I wasn’t involved; it was an ugly situation.
In short, Saltzman, Green and McPherson had been at the Cape for a pre-flight mission briefing when a security officer from NASA’s Law Enforcement Division requested that they open their ready-room lockers for what seemed to be a routine inspection. It happened all the time—NASA had firm rules against alcohol being allowed within KSC, and everyone was used to spot-checks—so the Blues Brothers had complied with the request, yet when the lockers were searched, each man was found to be in possession of various drugs. A shaving kit in Saltzman’s locker contained a quarter-ounce of marijuana and a small vial of cocaine; Green’s jumpsuit pocket held a few joints, and a tinfoil packet concealed in one of McPherson’s boots contained a couple of grams of hashish, plus a small pipe which had been recently smoked.
All three men claimed innocence, and even the NASA cop who had made the bust later claimed to be skeptical despite the hard evidence; he had been following up an anonymous tip which had been posted in his company’s e-mail, and he had only made the search because of departmental policy to investigate all such allegations. Yet, within a few hours of the bust, an over-eager NASA press spokesman went public with the charges against the men, and the unskeptical space-beat reporters at the Cape eagerly aped the official line; before the end of the day, the Blues Brothers were being called the Space Junkies.
The crew of Sugar’s Blues immediately protested that they had been framed; they volunteered for urine and hair-root testing, but if they had hoped that the lab analyses would confirm their innocence, they were wrong. All three tests came back positive, showing that the spacers had been using pot, coke, and hash for a period of at least several months.
By the time I got back from my Australian junket, it was all over; NASA had permanently grounded Sugar Saltzman and his mates, and Skycorp had almost instantly fired them. Although the court later threw out the subsequent federal lawsuit because of legal technicalities, their careers were finished. The editorialists and media commentators vented their usual bathos, pathos, phony shock and rehearsed outrage; meanwhile, the public suffered its own private heartbreak before it forgot the whole thing.
For their own part, Sugar and his men refused to speak to the press. They went to ground, rarely seen around the Cape. As usual, the story was a ten-day sensation. By the time Skycorp shame-facedly re-rechristened Sugar’s Blues as the John Young—its voluptuous Vargas girl painted over, never to be seen on the flight-line again—Saltzman, Green, and McPherson had quickly faded from the public mindset. Bunny Chaykin-Schnienkovitch had once again flashed her boobs on TV; in the face of such monumental artistic achievement, who could remember what’s-their-names, the pothead astronauts?
And now, here they were. Up from the underground and ready to talk.
Jack cocked a finger at me, motioning for me to follow him into the tiny office behind the bar. Once we were back there, he half-closed the door. “Look, Al …” he began.
“Look, I swear it wasn’t my idea,” I said before he could go on. “But if they’ve got something on their minds that they want to tell me …”
“Okay, okay, I understand. It’s your job and all that.” He thrust a finger in my face “But you understand me. Nothing about my place gets into anything you write. You got me straight on that? I’ve let you get away with it twice before because nobody around here reads that rag you moonlight for …”
“I’ll let my editor know that. He’ll be so touched …”
“… but this time I really mean it. You guys haven’t been within a hundred miles of here, I swear to God, ’cause if you do …”
“Okay, okay. Ease down.” I put up my hands defensively. “I promise you, if I write a story, I won’t mention where it came from. I promise.”
Baker stared me straight in the eye, then slowly nodded his head. I could understand that he wasn’t crazy about having his bar used as a confessional, but I intuitively realized that there was much more to it than that. Jack knew something—bartenders run second-place only to God for knowing everything, because if you don’t do church you probably speak to your bartender instead—and it frightened him so much that he didn’t want to have anything to do with it. The only reason why he was going along with this was because of his obvious respect for Sugar Saltzman.
And Jack wasn’t the only person who was being paranoid. Although Doug volunteered to be interviewed with Sugar, Mike opted to sit outside the bar and watch for a possible return of the suits. After I went out to my car to fetch my notebook and recorder, Jack locked the doors and switched off most of the lights, signaling that Diamondback Jack’s was closed for the night. He then placed two pitchers of beer in front of us, and retired to the back office, allegedly to balance the books.
I switched on my recorder and opened my notebook as Sugar poured a beer for me. “The morning we made our last flight on the Blues …” he began.
“Let’s get it straight for the man, Cap,” Doug interrupted, pushing forward his own beer mug. “It was last April 12.”
“April 12, 2023. Like I could forget.” Sugar pushed the topped-off mug in front of me and reached for his former co-pilot’s glass. I noted that he left dry his own mug. “Anyway, the Blues was already on the pad, because we had a milk run to Olympus Station scheduled the day after tomorrow. Mission 24 for us, and I didn’t think it was going to be much different, except that after Mission 25 I was half-planning to tender my resignation to the company.”
This surprised me. “You were about to retire anyway?” I asked, and Sugar sagely nodded his head. “Was it because of a medical problem or …?”
Sugar chuckled. “Yeah, you could say that, if you want to call getting old a medical problem. Hell, I’m pushing sixty. Counting the missions I did for NASA before I joined Skycorp, I would have gone up thirty times. That’s enough. All I wanted to do was hand over the wheel to Sir Douglas here, buy me an old crop-duster or something and spend my golden years farting around Cocoa Beach.”
He laughed again, but it sounded forced this time. “That was the plan, at any rate. But then, two days before we were supposed to go up, I get a call at three in the morning from Gene Antonio, the chief of Skycorp’s astronaut office, telling me there’s been a fire.”
“A fire up there,” McPherson added, cocking his thumb toward the ceiling. “Y’know what he means?”
I knew. In this context, “fire” was a code-word for a life-threatening emergency in orbit. NASA, Skycorp and the other space companies started using it groundside to mask serious situations, in order to obfuscate the press who might overhear cellular phone conversations. Just such a thing had happened during the Phoenix Station accident, when half of the Cape press corps learned that there was trouble in low orbit because of an uncoded conversation between two NASA techs on their car-phones. Saying that’s there been a garbage can fire is much more innocuous than saying that the life-support system of a spacecraft has gone kaput and that a rescue mission is necessary.
Green and McPherson were also awakened by the astronaut chief, but it wasn’t until a half-hour later, when the Blues Brothers were convened in the green room of Skycorp’s Operations and Checkout Building, that they learned the exact nature of the emergency. Attending the meeting were NASA flight
director Joe Marx, Skycorp’s astronaut chief Eugene Antonio, and NASA press liaison Margaret Jacobi; also present, to their surprise, was a person named Edward Collier, who was introduced as being a corporate rep from a pharmaceutical firm called Space Bio Tech, itself a subsidiary of a much larger multinational biotech company, Spectrum-Mellencamp, Inc.
“We got the skinny while we were having our coffee and doughnuts,” Sugar said. “Spectrum-Mellencamp owned a small spacelab in low-equatorial orbit, about three hundred miles up, called Bios One. They operated it as a microgravity R&D facility to whip up stuff like fertilizers, human growth hormones, junk like that. Collier told us that, for the past year or so, Space Bio Tech had been using it to develop a new pharmaceutical.”
“That sounds rather vague.”
“Yeah, it was,” McPherson said, “and he was real elusive about it. I tried to ask him exactly what he meant, but he said that he couldn’t tell us much more because of the firm’s proprietary interests.” He sipped his beer. “That’s when I first got a bad feeling about the whole deal.”
“Yeah,” Sugar agreed. “So did I, but there was too much else going on, so we didn’t push him on it. Since there were three lives on the line, I didn’t feel like we needed to know everything.”
At 0100, an unmanned orbital transfer vehicle, which had been launched by a Big Dummy from the Cape the previous evening, had attempted to dock in the garage module of Bios One. It was a routine bi-weekly resupply mission, but in the last few seconds of the maneuver, something had gone seriously wrong; the OTV’s main engine had misfired while the spacecraft was under remote control from Bios One. The exact cause of the misfire was still unknown, although NASA troubleshooters suspected human error by the controller on the little space station. Whatever the reason, the OTV had rammed the garage. The crash had punctured the cargo craft’s LOX tank and the vehicle had exploded.