Rude Astronauts

by Allen Steele

  “And you know what a lawyer would ask,” Doug muttered. “Define ‘dangerous.’ Define ‘drug’ …”

  “Define existence. Define responsibility.” Sugar sighed and shook his head. “So there it was. Neither of us was willing to come out and tell the truth, so it was kind of a stalemate. We were willing to let it go at that. I was just happy that we had managed to get rid of the shit before the company figured out where they had gone wrong and tried to refine the stuff. Bios One burned up in the atmosphere, so all the current data on Project Flashback was lost when it went down for the count. That should have been the end of things.”

  “Then you guys were busted …” I said.

  “And we were grounded and lost our jobs.” Saltzman slowly nodded his head. “Yeah, it was a frame-up. The dope in the lockers, the phony drug test report, the whole schmeer.” He stretched back his arms, laying them across the back of his seat. “They must have had help on the inside to do all that, so my guess is that people within Skycorp and NASA were paid off. Again, there was nothing we could prove.”

  McPherson drank from his mug. “At first, we thought they were just trying to get revenge,” he said, “but then we started getting the phone calls. Sounded sort of like Collier, but we could never be sure. Just this voice, warning us to keep our mouths shut or things would get worse.”

  “And then we started getting followed.” Sugar picked up the pitcher, saw that it was empty, and put it back on the table with mild disappointment. “Guys in cars following our wives and kids, guys in cars parked outside our houses. That’s been going on for about the last year or so. And now tonight …”

  Doug hissed and slammed his mug down on the table. “I had had enough of these watchdogs,” he hissed angrily. “Yeah, I was a little drunk, but when I see some dudes sitting right next to me, watching me while I’m trying to have a good time … well, I got a little pissed. So I stood up and asked them to leave, and one of ’em gives me this shit-eating grin and asks me why …”

  “And you decked him,” I finished.

  McPherson smiled and belched into his hand. “No apologies on that score. It felt real fucking good.”

  “And now you know everything,” Sugar said. He clapped his hand on McPherson’s shoulder and gave his former cargo jockey a shake. “So what do you think?” he asked, looking at me. “Is this a good story for your paper or what?”

  It was a damn good story.

  We left Diamondback Jack’s right after that. Jack Baker came out of his office and locked up behind us, never saying a word to any of us. By unspoken agreement, the Blues Brothers left the parking lot before me; they piled into an old Dodge pickup truck with Sugar behind the wheel. He revved the engine and spun gravel as he tore out of the parking lot, making as much noise as possible, while I hung back in the shadows of the bar. Almost as soon as he had ripped down Route 3, a pair of headlights appeared on the road and a late-model Ford screamed down the highway behind them. I waited until the night was still and quiet again, then I got in my car, tucked my recorder and notebook beneath the seat, and took a different route home. I was scared shitless until I pulled into my driveway.

  Sunday was spent transcribing the interview tape and collating my notes; by Monday morning I was on the phone, attempting to confirm the allegations. I spent the next four days bird-dogging the story. Sugar Saltzman and Doug McPherson were on the record, but I wasn’t surprised that no one else spoke with equal candor.

  Edward Collier at Space Bio Tech consistently remained unavailable for comment; he was always in a meeting and he never returned my calls. Spokespersons at Space Bio Tech and Spectrum-Mellencamp gave bland, PR-robot responses to my questions; they had never heard of Project Flashback and had never been involved in memory enhancement experiments. Some of them claimed never to have heard of Bios One. Attempting to contact higher officials in the company was futile, except when I got an executive vice president from Spectrum-Mellencamp who hogged a solid twenty minutes of tape telling me about his company’s fine accomplishments in agriculture and famine relief, then hung up before I asked my first solid question. Skycorp told me that it didn’t discuss the records of its current and former employees. NASA, as usual, lived up to the rep which long ago had earned the press corps interpretation of its initials: Never A Straight Answer.

  Eventually, though, I learned three things.

  First, a lab analyst for the small Tampa-based biotech firm which had handled the drug tests which had been given to the Blues Brothers admitted—on the record, but without attribution—that it was possible that the results of the hair and urine samples which had been submitted by Saltzman, Green, and McPherson could have been doctored. The lab wasn’t completely secure and the vials could have been switched, or someone could have tampered with the computer analysis of the valid tests. It had been done before in that selfsame lab; indeed, all that would have been necessary to get the most damning evidence would have been the switching of labels on a few test tubes.

  Second, a biotechnology market analyst from a Wall Street brokerage told me that one of the hottest targets for the biotech industry was the development of a memory enhancement drug, and that Spectrum-Mellencamp was indeed a contender in the race. She also said it was conceivable that such a pharmaceutical, if it were ever manufactured, could eventually lead to the marketing of a street-legal recreational drug; the FDA could be cowed if the clinicals turned out correctly. The notion unsettled her as much as it did me.

  Third, after contacting a leading aerospace contractor, I found that Spectrum-Mellencamp was spending several hundred million dollars for the construction of Bios Two, the replacement of the spacelab they had lost: One of the principal components of the new station was to be a logistics module, dedicated to the space-based refinement of pharmaceuticals. Skycorp had been subcontracted by Spectrum-Mellencamp to place the new station in orbit sometime within the next two fiscal years.

  By Friday, I had enough solid info to use in the story. It would be one hot-shit work of investigative journalism: the secret development of a dangerous drug, the resultant deaths of two scientists who had been directly involved in the project, the insanity of another, the cover-up which had annihilated the careers of a living legend and his crew. All the denials and greed and lies. The sort of story a working journalist spends his life dreaming about, the stuff from which Pulitzers are made. In a breathless plunge, I spent the full day writing the final draft and faxed it straight to the paper. A senior editor immediately called to play Twenty Questions; satisfied, he hung up after telling me that I had just made his day.

  Everything I knew went into the article … including its principal source, Diamondback Jack’s.

  In my headlong rush to double-check everything, I had completely forgotten my vow to Jack Baker. In the third and fifth paragraphs of the story, I mentioned that the interviews with Sugar Saltzman and Doug McPherson had taken place in the bar, following a violent fight with a couple of corporate henchmen who had been shadowing them for the past year. I called Diamondback Jack’s by its name, even mentioned its exact location on Merritt Island.

  Substantiation of fact is the operative term in the news business. Breaking a promise is what they call it in real life.

  My article appeared on the front page of the Sunday edition of the Times, in a center box above the fold. I didn’t go down to the bar that night; when I saw the article and realized what I had done, I swore to myself that, sometime in the next week, I would drop by and try to make my peace with Jack Baker. That, or give him a chance to give me his best swing with that Louisville Slugger he kept beneath the counter. Sometime in the next week, or the next month, after the heat had blown over.

  But the heat didn’t blow over. I had shed light, so naturally there was combustion to go with it.

  They didn’t retaliate against me. Only amateurs and religious fanatics try to take revenge upon reporters, because you have to kill ’em to make sure that they won’t write about you again … and even
then, there’s no guarantee that the guy at the next desk won’t be assigned to pick up where the first one left off. And they couldn’t try any more shit with the Blues Brothers; after the story was published, if Sugar had even stubbed his toe, it would have been blamed on Spectrum-Mellencamp. No, when they decided to strike back, they had to pick another target.

  The night my article was published in the Times, in the early Monday morning hours shortly after Jack had chased the last of the drunks out of his bar and went home, someone broke into his bar and torched the joint. The combined force of old timber, alcohol, grease and vile rumors caused the place to burn to the foundations before the first trucks arrived on the scene. The county fire marshall later confirmed that it was arson; with three separate points of origin, it sure as hell wasn’t caused by a cigarette.

  I can’t honestly say that I miss the place. It was one of the seediest low-rent dives I’ve ever hung out in. Nonetheless, it was a part of the Cape’s history, a place where both the best and the worst of the high frontier found common ground, if only in complaining about the foul bathrooms and the seldom-swept floors. Its demise is symbolic of the passing of an era; we’re entering a dangerous new age in this so-called conquest of space, and even the old familiar hangouts of washed-up astronauts and deadbeat reporters are possible targets.

  Bios Two will not be built; Spectrum-Mellencamp and Space Bio Tech are now under criminal investigation by a federal grand jury, and it’s possible that some people will go to prison. Sugar Saltzman’s good name has been restored: although he’s in retirement, I’ve lately heard that Green’s and McPherson’s flight status has been reinstated by NASA. Sometimes the good guys win, after all.

  But no one ever tells me secrets anymore. I still go to the press conferences, pick up the news releases and rewrite them as news stories for the Times, but my usefulness as a reporter has been shot. When a journalist fucks over his sources, his career is effectively over. He’s untrustworthy, a bad risk, and everyone knows it. And that’s why I now drink alone.

  But, like I said, truth is a dangerous business. The public has a right to know. Right?

  Live from the Mars Hotel

  RACHEL KEATON; PROGRAM DIRECTOR, WBXL-FM, Boston:

  I first heard the Mars Hotel while I was working as a jock at KMCY in St. Louis. At the time ’MCY—“Mighty Mickey, the rock sound of St. Louis”—had a progressive contemporary format, and the playlist represented much of the progressive music that was coming out at the time: the experimental groups from the Far East, the latest British invasion, and of course the acoustic revival. This was the early ’20s, y’know, and there was some interesting stuff coming out even before the Mars Hotel appeared, so the timing was right for their first single.

  Looking back on it, I think I was one of the first jocks in the country to play it, and that was a matter of being in the right place at the right time. About six months earlier the DJ who handled the Sunday afternoon acoustic show, Ben Grady, had left ’MCY to become music director at a Los Angeles AOR station. The acoustic revival was just getting started and I had developed a taste for it, the work that was coming out of Nashville and Austin and Muscle Shoals, so I managed to bug Heidi Schlossberg, who was the program director at the time, into letting me take over Ben’s show.

  It was a lot of fun, because many of these artists were recording on obscure labels, so finding stuff to play was a little like, y’know, exploring new territory. But I kept discovering guys who had skipped back forty, fifty years and were reviving David Bromberg or Johnny Cash or the Earl Scruggs Revue. It was a neat time to be in the music business, since it was finally dredging itself out of the glitzy Hollywood punk scene where it had been stuck for …

  I’m sorry. (Laughs.) I’m getting off the subject. Where was I?

  Right. Well, I got Ben’s old show and renamed it “The Wireless Hour,” and one Sunday afternoon in—I guess it was ’22, maybe ’23—Heidi walked into the air studio with a single in her hand. She had been in that day doing some extra work left over from last week, which included opening all those boxes of records that radio stations get swamped with all week. Well, she had this one single she had just taken out of a box, and the moment I spotted it in her hand, I knew it had to be two things. One, because it wasn’t a CD and was pressed on old-fashioned vinyl instead, it had to be from some small, destitute label. Second, it had to be good, because she had obviously listened to it in Studio B and thought it was so hot that she had not bothered to master it onto a cart yet.

  “Put this on,” she says, handing me the disc. “You’ll love it!”

  I took it out of her hand, saw that it was on a label I had seen a couple of times before, Centennial Park Records, a little Nashville company which had started up a couple of years earlier and hadn’t put out anything special. The “A” side was an old Bob Dylan, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” The “B” side was “Sea Cruise,” the Leiber and Stoller classic. The band was something called the Mars Hotel.

  I gave Heidi this look, y’know, that Hiroshima was God’s gift to pop music. “Trust me,” she says. “You’ll eat it up.” So I cued up the Dylan song and segued it in after the next couple of ad spots. I didn’t expect anything special, right?

  I dunno. What can I say that hasn’t been said before? It was fantastic. I could tell that the band, whoever they were, were only three guys: a vocalist on guitar, a bass player, and somebody on synth doing piano, percussion, and pedal steel. There’s been a million bands like that and a million people have done Dylan, most of them badly. But these guys made “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” sound like they had just written it. Very fresh, stripped-down. Unpretentious. They played like they meant it, you know what I mean?

  So I look up and say, “Who are these guys?” Heidi just grins at me and asks, “Where do you think they’re from?” I glance at the label again and say, “Well, they’re obviously from Nashville.” She just shook her head. “No, they’re from Mars.”

  Alan Gass; former station supervisor, Skycorp/Ucho-Hiko Arsia Base, Mars:

  Well, it’s no secret that life at Arsia base was rough. Always will be rough, or at least until someone gets around to terraforming Mars, which is wild-eyed fantasy if you ask me. But even if you disregard the sandstorms and scarcity of water, the extremes of heat and cold and … well, just the utter barrenness of that world, it’s still a hell of a place to live for any extended period of time.

  I guess the worst part was the isolation. When I was station manager we had about fifty men and women living in close quarters in a cluster of fifteen habitats modules, buried just under the ground. Most of these folks either worked for Skycorp or the Japanese firm Uchu-Hiko, manufacturing propellant from Martian hydrocarbons in the soil which was later boosted up to the Deimos fuel depot, or were conducting basic research for NASA or NASDA. The minority of us were support personnel, like myself, keeping the place operational.

  A lot of us had signed on for Mars work for the chance to explore another planet, but once you got there you found yourself spending most of your time doing stuff that was not much different than if you had volunteered to live underground in Death Valley for two years. For the men working the electrolysis plant, it was a particularly hard, dirty job—working ten- or twelve-hour shifts, coming back to the base to eat and collapse, then getting up to do it all over again. The researchers didn’t have it much easier because their sponsoring companies or governments had gone to considerable expense to send them to Mars and they had to produce a lifetime’s worth of work during their two years or risk losing their jobs and reputations.

  The base was located in a visually stunning area, the Tharsis region, just south of the equator near the western flank of Arsia Mons. When you went outside there was this giant, dead volcano looming over you, and on a clear day you could just make out the summit of Olympus Mons way off to the northeast. But after a few weeks the novelty would wear off. You’d become used to red rocks and pink skies, and after that what would you
have? There was never any time for sightseeing. After awhile you started looking forward to the next big sandstorm, just to watch this giant swirling red curtain coming toward you like the wrath of God. (Laughs.) You wouldn’t spend much time watching because the wind could shred your suit in a minute, but at least it was exciting.

  Anyway, one night I had just come off my shift in the command module and I was walking back to my bunkhouse through the connecting tunnel, which was called Broadway. I was beat, and I didn’t feel like going to the wardroom because I wasn’t hungry—not that the food was particularly appetizing anyway—but the way to Module Five took me past the wardroom, Module Three, which we called the Mars Hotel. I had just walked past Three when I heard a guitar being played and someone singing.

  I really didn’t notice it at first, because I figured it was coming from a tape, but then I heard another guitar joining in and someone else beginning to sing, and then there was an electronic piano chiming in. But the second guy couldn’t sing and the piano was a little off-key, and suddenly I realized that I wasn’t hearing a tape.

  That stopped me in my tracks. I don’t know if I can describe that feeling of puzzlement and wonder. It was like a rare bird had just flown down Broadway. I mean, which was stranger? Seeing a rare species, or just seeing a bird in the first place? I backed up a couple of steps, wondering if I was hallucinating, and looked through the open hatch.

  Partial transcript of an interview with the Mars Hotel, originally broadcast on NBC’s The Today Show, July 27, 2022 (Note: this interview was taped and edited in advance in order to contract the time differential during Earth-Mars transmissions):

  Judith King, host: “So how did you come up with the name for your group?”