Rude Astronauts

by Allen Steele

  Details were fuzzy after that. Debris from the explosion had punctured the hull of the spacelab’s command/lab module, one of the station’s two major cylinders. Ned Hersh, Bios One’s general manager who had been on duty in the command module at the time of the accident, had managed to transmit a Mayday before radio contact was lost; he said that there was a blowout in Module One, but no other information was relayed before the downlink was severed at the source. If the garage module was destroyed and Module One was crippled, then it was assumed that communications had been lost, when the nearby telemetry mast, mounted on the portside solar wing, was totalled by the explosion.

  In fact, everything else was based upon assumption. If there were any survivors, they had to be in Module Two, the habitation cylinder mounted above Module One. And if the portside solar wing had also been damaged, then fifty percent of the spacelab’s power supply was nullified; given the proximity of the outboard oxygen tanks to the garage, it could also be assumed that much of Bios One’s life-support capability had also been nixed.

  There was one further problem. According to ground tracking by the USAF Space Command in Colorado Springs, it seemed as if Bios One’s orbit had radically shifted. It appeared that the explosion’s force had managed to nudge the spacelab out of its orbit; since there was an apparent loss of control from the station itself, Bios One’s orbit was decaying and it was being gradually hauled down the gravity well. Within a week, at the very least, the space station would begin to enter Earth’s upper atmosphere, where it would be destroyed.

  Phoenix Station, the major NASA space station which was also in equatorial orbit, had been notified of the emergency, but the crew couldn’t do anything about it; its present position was on the other side of Earth, and they didn’t have the capability to effect a long-range rescue mission since their transorbit shuttle, unluckily enough, was presently down for repairs. Mir 3, the Soviet space station, was in an entirely different orbit and inclination, all but completely out of reach; Olympus Station, Skycorp’s powersat construction station, was located in geosynchronous orbit almost twenty-two thousand miles away, and therefore useless for something like this.

  But von Braun-class shuttles were designed for quick-turnaround and launch, and since weather patterns around the Cape were forecast to remain stable for the next twelve to twenty-four hours, it was entirely possible that a rescue mission could be launched from the ground. “Sugar’s Blues was already on the pad, ready to go,” Sugar went on. “In fact, NASA had already called for fueling and a fast-cycle launch by the time Antonio had given us the call.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand. If they were asking you to perform a rescue operation …”

  “Ain’t no asking about it,” Sugar interrupted. “There’s this sub-paragraph in the federal regs, the SOS clause, which says that if an American-registered manned spacecraft is in trouble while in orbit, then NASA can use right of eminent domain to commandeer whatever resources are available to rescue the crew members. So we were drafted from the git-go.”

  “Not that we were about to refuse,” Doug said. “I mean, even if those guys were employed by someone else and had dumbfucked something easy like an OTV rendezvous, they were still spacers. You help out whenever you can. No one had to wave the rule book at us.” He shrugged. “Besides, we were the Blues Brothers, Skycorp’s all-star team, the danger boys. You think we were going to back down from something like this? I lived for this kind of action.”

  “At first sight, it looked pretty much a cut-and-dried mission,” Sugar said. “We would launch at 1800 hours, ascend to orbit, and link-up with Bios One. We’d find the survivors if there were any, loam ’em into the shuttle, and bring ’em home. It was all pretty much by the book. No problem.”

  He picked up the pitcher, pushed his neglected mug beneath it, and began to pour himself a drink. “Then this Collier character opens his pie-hole. ‘No, no, no,’ he says. ‘Spectrum-Mellencamp has considerable dollar investment in Bios One, Space Bio Tech has an important logistics module linked to it, we can’t just rescue the crew and let everything burn up.’ Yackety-yack and don’t talk back. As it turns out, he wants us to uncouple the log-mod on the station, haul it into Blues’ cargo bay, and bring it home with us.”

  “The same logistics module which is manufacturing something he wouldn’t tell us about,” McPherson said. “The way he came across made it sound as if he really didn’t give a shit for the poor bastards on his station. He wanted that fucking module brought back, first and foremost.”

  Sugar grimaced at the memory. “I told the NASA guys that he had to be pulling my dick. I mean, making rendezvous with a station in a decaying orbit is one thing, performing a rescue operation is quite another. Okay, we can swing that. But disengaging a five-ton logistics module from the superstructure, hauling it into the Blues’ cargo bay with the RWM, and bringing it back home … I mean, didn’t they have their priorities a little bit confused here?”

  He topped off his beer and put the pitcher down, yet he didn’t pick up the mug. “But, no, they sided with Collier. Retrieving the log-mod was just as essential as rescuing the personnel. No compromise. Even Gene, who usually had more sense than that since he was once a pilot, went along with it.”

  “Mike and I pitched a bitch,” McPherson said. “Y’know, we knew what was ahead of us. We make it sound easy, but handling a fire is really a bitch, especially when your target is incommunicado and in a decaying orbit, and you’ve got to land heavy. All that seemed to fly right over Collier’s head, though. He seemed to think we were truck drivers or something. Pick up some stuff at Point A, bring it back to Point B … no goddamn idea what he was talking about.”

  “Did you accept the mission then?” I asked.

  They simultaneously nodded their heads. “Yeah, we accepted,” Sugar said. “Like we had a choice?” Then he picked up his beer and, tipping it toward me, gave me a sly wink. “But I still knew that, given a choice between rescuing the survivors and bringing home their precious log-mod, there was only one way I’d go.”

  I stopped the recorder for a few minutes while Doug visited the john; meanwhile, Sugar stepped outside for a second to ask Mike if he had seen anything. The car which the two suits had driven away from Diamondback Jack’s had not returned, but Mike didn’t want to come back inside. I was holding open the door while Sugar spoke to his former co-pilot; it was difficult to tell in the darkness, but it looked as if Green had Jack’s baseball bat with him.

  “The launch and orbital insertion was right by the numbers,” Sugar went on, once we had all returned to the booth. “Our communications was a closed-channel downlink with Huntsville SOC, which in turn had us patched in with KSC. Since we were using a military frequency, no one could eavesdrop on us. A press blackout was in force, but people knew something was going on …”

  “I remember,” I said. “I was at the press center when they finally told us about the fire.”

  Sugar nodded his head. “Yeah, and you probably bought the party line, didn’t you?” I winced and started to say something, but he just smiled. “No hard feelings, pal. At the time, I didn’t want to know the truth either.”

  The official explanation for the early launch of Sugar’s Blues had been that an unidentified manned spacecraft was having unspecified problems and that the shuttle had been launched to give assistance, but the NASA public affairs office had refused to release any details. Although no one outside Skycorp’s Operations Center in Huntsville and Firing Room Two at the Cape knew what was going on in Earth orbit, the crew of Sugar’s Blues was only too aware of the extent of the crisis. Within an hour of its launch from Pad Five-B, the shuttle rendezvoused with Bios One.

  As they made the primary approach, they could see that the spacelab was a wreck. The garage module was almost completely demolished, blown apart from the inside by the collision of the OTV. The port solar wing had been completely sheared away from the explosion—taking with it the high-gain antenna, as anticipate
d—and there were long rents in the gold Mylar which covered the outer fuselage of the adjacent command/laboratory module. However, the station’s navigational lights were still shining, indicating that Bios One had not lost all of its internal power, and Module Two looked reasonably intact. Two elongated lateral nodes connected the habitat modules; attached to Node One, just above the habitation module, was the beer-can-shaped Space Bio Tech logistics module, apparently unscratched.

  McPherson focused a 35mm camera through the dorsal observation window and shot a full disk of film while the two pilots gently maneuvered Sugar’s Blues toward the crippled station. The main docking collar, located at the bottom of Node One next to the garage, was obstructed by wreckage, but once they had wrenched open the cargo bay doors, Sugar and Mike managed to hard-dock with the undamaged auxiliary docking adapter, located on top of Node Two directly across from the logistics module. Through the flight deck windows, they could partly see through the cupola windows at the end of Module Two; although the windows were dimly illuminated by a weak amber glow from within, they could see no apparent motion. The windows of Module One’s cupola were completely dark. Altogether, Bios One appeared lifeless.

  “We couldn’t raise anyone on the comlink, but that wasn’t surprising since the communications center was located in Module One,” Sugar said. “I decided to go down and take a look-see. The airlock indicator told me that there was pressure within the node, but I didn’t want to take any chances with a shortout in the sensor circuits, so I suited up before I went into the airlock.”

  “Mike stayed on the flight deck,” McPherson said, “while I went back to the mid-deck to power-up the RWM and get ready to bring the log-mod aboard.” He smiled a little as he picked up his beer. “The boss here, as always, wanted to hog all the glory.”

  “Yeah,” Sugar replied, “like I really had to arm wrestle you for the privilege.” Doug grinned, but there seemed to be little humor within his expression. “Anyway, so there I went … through the airlock and down the access tunnel ’til I reached the Module Two hatch. The pressure light was green, so I undogged it and pushed myself inside.”

  Up until now his delivery had been methodical and concise, an almost monotonous just-the-facts-mister retelling of the key points of the mission. Now Sugar’s voice dropped slightly as he clasped his hands together and gazed down at them.

  “It was so weird,” he murmured. “Remember what it was like when you were a kid and you snuck into some old house that everyone said was haunted? It was like that. Only the emergency lights were on, so everything was colored red. Nothing and nobody was moving. The galley table was folded down and there was a food tray attached to it, but nobody was sitting there eating. Through my helmet, though, I could hear someone talking …”

  “The monkeys,” McPherson prodded. “Tell him about the monkeys.”

  Saltzman quickly nodded his head. “Yeah, right. The monkeys.” He took a deep breath, still staring at his hands. “Next to the hatch there were two little cages in the wall, and in each one a Rhesus monkey was floating around. Now, y’know, caged animals usually go berserk when someone gets near ’em, but these little guys hardly noticed me, even when the light from my helmet lamp touched ’em. At first I couldn’t figure it out … they were alive, because I could see them move and there was steam coming from their noses …”

  “It was cold in the station?” I asked.

  “Yeah, it was cold,” Sugar said impatiently. “The heat was turned down. It was cold …” He paused to collect his thoughts again.

  “Anyway, so I look in and I see that each of the monkeys has its own little computer terminal in there. Little screen, big oversized keys, a little food-pellet dispenser rigged up next to the computer. Typical stimulus-response experiment … whenever they gave some right answer, another pellet would be shot down the tube to the monkey. But since the tube was transparent, I could see it was empty.”

  He rubbed a hand across his forehead. “I peer into the cages, and I can see that the monkeys are tapping the same keys over and over again, and the same equipment keeps appearing on the screens. Two plus two minus one equals three … two plus two minus one equals three … same thing, over and over. And each time that happens, I saw a blue light appear on the screens and I could hear a little beep from the computers, and the food slots would open but nothing would come out. But the monkeys didn’t care. They weren’t even looking at the tubes. They were completely transfixed by the screens. All response, no stimulus.”

  He let out his breath. “No one has cleaned their cages for awhile, so the poor little bastards had monkey shit floating all around them. They were practically swimming in their own crap. It was plastered to their fur, but they didn’t care. All they could do was enter the same first-grade equation into that stupid computer, again and again and …”

  Sugar picked up his beer and took a long drink. Talking about the Rhesus monkeys had hit a nerve. I had seen it before; people get upset when they see cruelty to animals. It’s a little bizarre, sometimes, the priorities we can make. This was a man who had once dropped bombs on a densely-populated Iraqi city, possibly killing scores of helpless civilians, and he was unsettled by the memory of two monkeys who had been …

  Hypnotized? Brainwashed? I didn’t think it was possible to mesmerize a simian. I shot a look at McPherson. He was silent, his arms folded across his chest.

  “What about the crew?” I asked softly.

  Sugar had been taking it easy on the liquor until now. He paused to go to the bar, pour himself a shot of George Dickel, and pump it back before he returned to the booth. “I had just managed to get off my helmet,” he said, “when the curtain of one of the sleep niches slid open and this guy pushes himself out. I found out later that he was one of the scientists, name of Robillard, George Robillard.”

  He picked up the beer pitcher and poured a chaser into his mug. “But by then, I could hear this voice speaking from the other end of the module. I had been hearing it through my helmet when I had first come into the station, but now I could make it out distinctly. At first I thought someone was reciting a poem, but then I realized that someone was reading aloud. At least, that was what I thought it was.”

  He shrugged. “Then out comes this George Robillard, who tells me he was asleep when the Blues docked and didn’t know I was there. Then he tells me that he and another guy, named Eric Schwinn, are the only two left alive. Ned Hersh, the team leader, had been down in Module Two when the accident had happened. There had been a blowout, but he stayed in there to transmit a Mayday before the emergency hatches had auto-sealed and locked him inside.”

  “Hersh was dead?” I asked.

  Stupid question, but I had to be sure. Sugar didn’t notice. “As a doornail. Robillard and Schwinn had been holding out for a rescue attempt. He was kinda surprised that it was from the Cape, though, ’cause he thought someone from Phoenix Station would be on their way.”

  Doug cleared his throat and Sugar looked toward him. “Mike and I had been monitoring all this through the comlink,” McPherson said, “but Mike had shut down the feed to the Cape and Huntsville as soon as the boss had started talking about the monkeys. He dicked around with the radio and caused some fuzz before he told CapCom that we were losing our telemetry with the comsats, but it was really because we were beginning to smell a rat. So the boys back home didn’t hear everything that was going on up there.”

  “Right,” Sugar said. “Anyway, so I say to Robillard, ‘Well, the cab’s here and we’ve got the meter running, so you can get your friend Eric to stop reading aloud to pass the time.’ It was supposed to be a joke, but he doesn’t see it that way. ‘Maybe you ought to see this,’ he says to me, then he leads me down the passageway to another niche, where the voice is coming from. He pushes back the curtain and …”

  Sugar paused. He clenched his hands together again, not looking at me as he continued. “Jesus Christ,” he whispered, almost too inaudibly for my recorder to pick up, “I’ll neve
r forget that moment.”

  I waited until he was ready to speak again. When Sugar returned from the depths of his memory, his voice was hollow and flat. “Schwinn was zipped into his sleep restraint, all the way up to his neck,” he said. “The only light in the niche came from a little reading lamp above his head and there was a paperback book floating in midair nearby, but he wasn’t reading it. The book was The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway, but it wasn’t in his hands and he wasn’t reading from it. He was …”

  His voice trailed off again. “What was he doing?” I asked.

  “He was reciting it,” Sugar said. “Aloud. Every line, as perfect as if he had spent months memorizing the whole blamed thing. And the look on his face, it was …”

  He sucked in his breath, visibly trying to steady himself. “He looked like the monkeys in the cages, but worse. His eyes were glazed, his head was lolling forward. His face was completely dead. Just staring straight ahead like a zombie, there were these words coming out of his mouth. He didn’t notice me or the other guy, not even when I clapped my hands and shouted his name. I pushed myself right in front of him and stuck a penlight in his eyes, and though the pupils contracted normally, he barely responded. It was as if he had been lobotomized or something.”

  He picked up his beer and took a sip. I noticed that his hands were trembling ever so slightly. “So I turn around to Robillard and I say, ‘What’s going on with this guy? Is he on drugs or something? Make him stop talking, for God’s sake.’ And that’s when Robillard breaks down and tells me … tells us, since Mike and Doug can hear us through the comlink … the whole thing.”

  Sugar put down his beer and looked at me. “That’s when we first heard about Project Flashback.”

  While Saltzman and Robillard unzipped Schwinn from his cocoon and began to haul the scientist toward the node hatch, Robillard explained what had happened to Schwinn and Hersh.

  For the past several years, Space Bio Tech had been developing a drug which would enhance short-term memory. The principal objective had been to produce a pharmaceutical substance which would provide a clinical antidote for Alzheimer’s Disease, but there was also hope within the biotech firm and its parent company that they could spin off a nonprescription derivative—already called Flashback—which would be an over-the-counter recreational drug. Although the clinical-issue drug would be more beneficial to medical science, Spectrum-Mellencamp believed that the real money would come from Flashback, and the project had swung in that direction.