Rude Astronauts

by Allen Steele

  The essential idea was that, since the mind tends to remember tactile pain but forget short-term pleasure experiences, Flashback would crosswire the cerebral circuitry and perform the exact inverse function: it would allow the user to store away the sensory nuances of any given pleasurable act. After ingesting Flashback, a person could have a good meal, read a great novel, have sex or whatever while under its influence. The immediate, real-time perception of the given experience would be subtly heightened, yet that would not be the immediate payoff; much later, after the drug had worn off, the memory of the experience would remain firmly engraved, able to be recalled precisely as it had happened. In theory, one would remember the best tastes of a meal enjoyed at a four-star restaurant, recall favorite passages once read from a novel or short story, or relive the most orgasmic heights of lovemaking with one’s partner. It would be similar to the flashbacks experienced by habitual LSD users, yet voluntary and without any of the nasty side-effects.

  It was a risky proposition. The drug had to be completely perfect, safe, and non-habit-forming, or the FDA would never give approval. However, market analysts predicted that the company could potentially reap billions of dollars in worldwide sales, both in its clinical and recreational forms. After three years of top-secret research, Space Bio Tech had indeed theoretically developed the drug; as anticipated, though, its molecular composition was so complex and fragile that it could not be assembled within Earth-normal gravity. The final phases of R&D, therefore, would have to be in orbit, in the micro-gravity confines of Bios One, with the specially-designed laboratory performing the final synthesis. If everything worked according to plan, Bios One would become the new space-based source of Flashback; the company’s market analysts had even predicted that Flashback’s mystique of having been produced in outer space would help to push sales.

  This had been the plan, yet the final R&D phase had taken much longer than expected. The spacelab’s log-mod was a sophisticated machine, worth almost as much as the rest of the space station itself, but it couldn’t perform miracles. The wildly complex chemical matrix had stubbornly resisted molecular bonding; more tinkering had been required. Instead of two months, the space-based R&D of Flashback had stretched into a year. Six different three-person crews had to be shuttled up to Bios One over the past twelve months; the resultant cost-overruns were staggering.

  Spectrum-Mellencamp had already lost tons of money in a blood-serum anticoagulant which had failed in the marketplace, and its board of directors was beginning to suspiciously reassess the millions of dollars which had already been spent on Project Flashback. And then there was the industry rumor that a rival German biotech company was on the verge of developing their own version of Flashback. If it went on much longer, the parent company might be forced not only to dump Flashback, but Space Bio Tech as well.

  Pressure came from the top down, extending from the executive boardroom of Spectrum-Mellencamp to the basic research labs of Space Bio Tech. While they were in space, Robillard, Schwinn and Hersh suddenly found their careers on the line. If Team Six didn’t come home with something useful, then the whole thing was kaput; Spectrum-Mellencamp would dump Space Bio Tech, and since there was a recession currently in progress, there was little chance that the little company—with no orbital facilities of its own, since Bios One belonged to Spectrum-Mellencamp—would be repurchased by any other space company. Team Six had to produce or perish. And then, two days before the accident, the message was received from the powers-that-be that they were expected to board a Galileo, Inc. spaceplane which was scheduled to be launched from the Cape in less than a week to collect them from Bios One … with or without satisfactory results.

  It was time to shit or get off the pot. Fish or cut bait. The three scientists were now under an extraordinary deadline; their jobs would be forfeit if they came back from orbit with little or nothing to show for it. However, the latest batch of Flashback produced by the log-mod had looked particularly promising. They had tried it out on the spacelab’s Rhesus monkeys, and although the apes had trouble responding to external stimuli while under its influence, at least they were able to reproduce the arithmetic test which had been established to judge the drug’s effectiveness.

  Yet this still wasn’t sufficient proof. They needed stronger evidence that Flashback worked. Ned Hersh, as station manager and team leader, decided to take the ultimate risk: he would try the drug himself. Robillard had argued against it, but Schwinn had been more pragmatic. At this juncture, they were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. It was Jekyll-and-Hyde territory, completely unethical if not reckless, yet it seemed the only way to go. Team Six didn’t have the luxury of safe, protracted experimentation; if they didn’t come home with something worth showing to Spectrum-Mellencamp’s directors, they wouldn’t have a laboratory in which to experiment anyway.

  So Hersh had ingested a low concentration of the new batch, then sat back and began to read a computer maintenance manual, the most boring literature aboard the station he could find. After a few hours, Hersh reported no problems; even after he closed the book, though, he could recite from it line by line, with perfect clarity and total recall.

  So far, so good, but Schwinn had not been satisfied. He insisted upon trying a slightly higher concentration. Again, Robillard had argued against it—the Rhesus monkeys, the first test-group, had still not come out of their trance—but Schwinn impatiently believed that a real acid-test was needed. So he dosed himself with Flashback, then picked up more complex—and more interesting—reading material, the Hemingway paperback with which he had been entertaining himself over the past few months. Robillard remained undosed, as much out of revulsion at becoming a guinea pig as from the necessity of being the experiment’s control subject.

  The dual experiments had occurred at 1800 and 2000 respectively, the day before the accident. By 2300, Robillard had sensed trouble. Although Hersh had finished reading the manual, he had difficulty in concentrating on anything else; Schwinn had whipped through The Snows of Kilimanjaro and even insisted upon re-reading it, refusing to be distracted by anything else. By 0030, Schwinn was in an almost hypnotic state; he was beginning to repeat Hemingway’s prose verbatim. However, Hersh had seemed at least basically functional, although his thought processes were muddled. An OTV was scheduled for docking in only a short time; since Robillard was not trained to handle the teleoperational docking maneuver, Hersh insisted that he was capable of handling it from the command module. While Robillard confined Schwinn to his niche and stood watch over him, the station manager had gone below to bring in the cargo vessel.

  But Hersh had been too distracted by his out-of-control flashbacks of a simple computer manual to handle the complex docking procedure. In the final phases of the maneuver, while he was in direct teleoperational control of the OTV, he had lost his bearings. Helplessly stoned on Flashback, he entered the wrong set of commands into the computer guidance program, causing the OTV’s main engine to misfire.

  Robillard believed that Hersh’s distress signal had been the last cogitant thing the man had done. It was possible that, even as the module’s atmosphere was being sucked out by explosive decompression, Hersh had been unable to remember where the exit hatch was located. The elegant beauty of schematic diagrams had been too much for him; Robillard had not even heard him scream.

  The door opened just then and Mike Green stuck his head inside. “Car just cruised by twice on the highway,” he said softly as we looked up. “Went up the road, turned around, and came back again. Couldn’t see who was inside, but it looked like the one our pals were driving.”

  Sugar calmly picked up his beer. “Probably them. Think they saw you?” Mike shook his head, and Sugar shrugged nonchalantly. “Well, even if they didn’t, they must have seen our cars. Unless they’re really stupid, they know we’re in here.” He took a sip. “Time to finish up, gang. It’s last call.”

  Mike shut the door, returning to his sentry post. Sugar chugged the last of his be
er as indifferently as if we had been discussing Miami’s chances of going to the National League playoffs. Doug closed his eyes and laid his head back against the seat; he looked as if he were ready to doze off in the booth. Perhaps the Blues Brothers had become used to being shadowed by thugs in cheap suits, but just being with them was making me nervous. My house was almost ten miles away in Cocoa Beach; I had an ancient car which could barely get up to forty and a tape recorder filled with one of the most incriminating interviews I had ever done. Sugar and his crewmates could handle a pair of goons, but I was only too aware that it was a moonless night and that, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, Route 3 becomes one hell of a dark, lonesome highway.

  “So, anyway, we bundled Robillard, Schwinn and the two monkeys into Blues’ mid-deck,” Sugar continued, “then I put on my helmet and repressurized my suit and went down to Module One to retrieve Hersh’s body.” His face went grim as he spoke. “I’ve seen my share of death, son, but what happened to that man was the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen …”

  I quickly nodded my head and held up my hand. I knew all about the effects of sudden decompression upon the human body. More than once drunken beamjacks and moondogs had entertained me with their favorite real-life horror stories, and I didn’t need to hear one more detailed account of exploded entrails and frozen blood. There are journalists who thrive on that sort of thing, but I’ve never been one to rush to gruesome traffic accidents or weird murder scenes. I sleep better that way.

  Thankfully, Sugar noticed the expression on my face and spared me the gory part. “Well, once I got Hersh into a body bag and Sir Douglas loaded him into a locker in the mid-deck, it was time for me to EVA.”

  Doug cleared his throat and half-opened his eyes. “We were hearing from the Cape again,” he murmured. “Mike couldn’t keep up the come-in-Tokyo shit any longer by then. Ed Collier sounded so genuinely relieved that we had managed to rescue two of his people, he almost forgot to tell us for the fiftieth time that they wanted the log-mod brought home.” He closed his eyes again. “Fucking asshole.”

  “We had done this sort of thing on the RWM before,” Sugar said, “so Doug and I didn’t need a rehearsal. Once I got outside the station, I got on the cherry-picker, he raised me up and swung me around until I was above and behind the logistics module. It took me only a half-hour to unbolt the sucker from its node … after that, I would hang onto it while Doug hauled us both back into Blues’ cargo bay, where I would tuck it down in the payload cradle for the ride home. Easy job. We’ve done it a dozen times.”

  “We were on an open comlink again,” Doug said, “so we couldn’t talk freely, and CapCom had insisted that I switch on the cargo bay TV camera and turn it toward the boss so they could see what he was doing out there.”

  Sugar barely paid attention to him. His eyes wandered toward the ceiling as he spoke, as if he were again gazing into an abyss which only a relative handful of men and women had seen. “But thirty minutes is a long time, y’know, when you’re out there by your lonesome. Lot of time for a man to start wondering about things. While I was unbolting the module, I kept looking down at fat ol’ mother Earth, and I started thinking …”

  He sighed. “Well, about people. Nobody in particular, just people in general. Kids, mainly. I’ve got one myself … Ted Jr., a freshman in college now. And I thought, y’know, one of these days something like Flashback might be out there on the streets. I mean, acid was first made in a lab with all the best intentions, and look what happened there. And then there was crack and ecstasy and bizarro and all that other shit that has fucked people up. How long would it be before Flashback squirmed out of this company’s labs? Even if it didn’t become legal, how long would it be before it got out there? Who would be the first dumb kid to buy a hit on a basketball court? Hell, what if Ted gets hold of something like this? Is he going to become another basket case like poor Schwinn?”

  Sugar looked down from the ceiling, his gaze returning to me. “Well, there I was, hanging onto a big tin can filled with this evil shit. All there is in the world, right there in my hands. Everything they needed to know about how to make more was in the thing. The basic data had been in the Module One computers, but even if it hadn’t been fried during the accident, we hadn’t downloaded any of it. Bios One was going to burn up in the atmosphere in just a few days, anyway. No wonder Collier was so hot on getting this thing brought home. Since Robillard had told me Spectrum-Mellencamp had taken a beating from developing Flashback in the first place, they weren’t likely to finance another expensive round of R&D. Everything they needed was right there in my hands …”

  I could already tell what was coming next. “What about your career?” I asked.

  Sugar shrugged his shoulders. “If they knew about what had happened, sure, I was in trouble … but I had the module between me and the TV camera, so they couldn’t see exactly what I was doing, right?”

  He lifted his arms above his head. “So, as soon as I had it unbolted and I had told Doug here to bring me in, I held onto it for a few seconds longer …”

  Sugar grinned, then thrust his arms straight up. “Then I pushed the fucker away as hard as I could.”

  McPherson burped and nodded his head. “God bless you, Sir Isaac Newton.”

  That should have been the end of the story. The logistics module, propelled away from the spacelab’s already-unstable orbit, tumbled down Earth’s gravity well, picking up velocity with each passing minute. Retrieval by the Sugar’s Blues was impossible; by the time Saltzman came back aboard and the shuttle undocked from Bios One, the log-mod was already beyond reach. Although Collier was screaming bloody murder at the apparent snafu, the ground controllers at KSC agreed that pursuing the falling module couldn’t be done without considerable risk to the spacecraft and its crew and passengers. And besides, hadn’t the most important part of the rescue mission been accomplished? By the time Sugar’s Blues made the deorbit burn for the return to the Cape, the module had entered the upper atmosphere above New Zealand and had been destroyed.

  That should have been the end of the story, but it wasn’t.

  “When we had landed back at the Cape, there was an ambulance waiting to take Robillard and Schwinn away,” Sugar said. “That was the last I ever saw of either of them. I saw some guys from Space Bio Tech unloading the cages with the monkeys, but when I asked about them later, I was told that the apes had died of natural causes shortly after landing. Cardiovascular stress or something like that. But by then, we already knew we were in trouble.”

  McPherson picked up the pitcher and poured the last of the warm beer into his mug. “Spectrum-Mellencamp smelled a rat and Collier demanded a NASA review board hearing,” he said, “but there was nothing anyone could prove. Losing the log-mod was an unfortunate accident and the boss got an official reprimand.” He grinned and reached over to slap the back of Sugar’s wrist. “Shame on you! Losing a precious module like that! You’ve been a bad boy! Bad, bad, bad!”

  Sugar smiled slightly, but otherwise his face remained serious. “Spectrum-Mellencamp’s lawyers produced transcripts of our flight-recorder logs to show that there had been an unexplained comlink blackout during the mission, along with the film of the pictures Doug had taken during our primary approach to the station, but they couldn’t prove anything. They didn’t come right out and say it, but they tried to claim that we had conspired to destroy the logistics module.”

  “Well, they were right, weren’t they?” I asked.

  Sugar pursed his lips and shook his head. “No, not really. Mike and Doug weren’t in on it until I told them while we were on the flight deck during the LOS.” LOS meant loss-of-signal; spacecraft always experience it during re-entry through Earth’s ionosphere. Nature has its convenient moments. “It was my decision to chuck the log-mod, but it was their option whether to come clean or to support my story that the module had slipped out of my hands while the cherry-picker was in motion.”

  He folded his arms across his chest. �
�They stuck with me, though, and we kept our stories straight during the hearing. Nobody could pin anything on us. Even though Spectrum-Mellencamp knew we had a bogus cover-story, they couldn’t come right out and say why we would have wanted to get rid of a valuable log-mod. That would have meant admitting the existence of Flashback.”

  “But what did Robillard have to say?” I asked. “And what happened to Schwinn?”

  If there was any trace of smugness about Sugar Saltzman, it vanished immediately. He looked down at the table, his mouth tightening.

  “So far as anyone knows, Schwinn is still in a mental institute,” McPherson said quietly. “The company line was that he had suffered a complete nervous breakdown when Hersh had been killed. Bullshit about how they had been gay lovers up there and so forth. There was written testimony from Robillard supporting that claim, but he never appeared himself during the hearing.” He raised an eyebrow. “About a week later, he suffered a massive stroke and died. Kind of coincidental, right?”

  I felt myself getting cold.

  “Of course, we couldn’t tell anyone the truth about Flashback, either,” Sugar said. He looked back up at me, propping his elbows on the table and clasping his hands together in an almost prayer-like gesture. “If we had, then we would have been admitting our own guilt. Disregarding NASA regs, deliberately destroying valuable hardware …” He shrugged and lightly clapped his hands. “And since Spectrum-Mellencamp claimed that their scientists had been working on a new form of blood anticoagulant, it was our word against theirs that Flashback even existed, or that it was a dangerous drug that had to be destroyed.”