by Allen Steele
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 was claiming that their scientists had been working on a new form of blood anti-coagulant, it was our word against theirs that Flashback ever existed, or that it was a dangerous drug that had to be destroyed.”
“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 were 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 scheme.” 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 with 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 the 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 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 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 give 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 BioTech consistently remained unavailable for comment; he was always in a meeting and he never returned my calls. Spokespersons at BioTech 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 their 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 analysis 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 accomplish 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 was ever manufactured, could eventually lead to the marketing of a street-legal recreational drug; the FDA could be cowed if the chemicals 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 shit-hot 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 and 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 face 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 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 out the last of the drunks of his bar and gone home, someone broke into his bar and torched the joint. The combined forces 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 country fire marshal 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 BioTech 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 already 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 any more. 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?
THE DIAMONDBACK JACK QUARTET
The Flying Triangle
This is the story of The Flying Triangle and its crew. At the outset, I can promise you two things: it’s the last tale I will ever tell that has its origins in Diamondback Jack’s Bar & Grill, and it has a happy ending.
I never believed that I would ever commit this to paper, since I was sworn to secrecy by the persons involved. I’ve written other stories about Diamondback Jack’s, but the last one published got me in a lot of trouble and led to the bar being burned to the ground. When I wrote that story, I claimed that it was the third installment of a trilogy, and that there would be no others.
Well, so I lied. There was one more tale which I haven’t been able to relate until now, one which occurred before the self-alleged “final” story.
Until a few years ago, when you drove north up Route 3 on Merritt Island, about two miles before you passed the south entrance gate of the Kennedy Space Center you would see a small bar on the left side of the road. It was nothing much to look at, certainly not a place where you might consider stopping for a drink: weather-beaten pine walls, no windows, a broken Budweiser sign above a dirt parking lot splattered with oil and littered with beer cans. There were far better watering holes elsewhere on Cape Canaveral, and if you wanted a cool T-shirt to commemorate your visit to the Cape, there was Ron Jon’s Surf Shop on Route A1A. Diamondback Jack’s didn’t even have its own bumper sticker, a cardinal sin for any self-respecting bar in coastal Florida.
Diamondback Jack’s was never meant for tourists, though; in fact, it was never meant for anyone except for the people who hung out there, and they were a different breed entirely. You could see this as soon as you stepped inside. The walls were covered with framed photos of Columbia-class shuttles, delta clippers, and Big Dummy HLVs lifting off from KSC, of Olympus Station in geosynchronous orbit and SPS-1 when it was still under construction. A corkboard near the ancient Wurlitzer jukebox was filled with torn-out Space News job listings, many of which weren’t on Earth at all. Behind the oak-top bar, beneath the varnished and mounted skin of the eighteen-inch rattlesnake which gave the place its name, you would see framed photos of people you’ve probably never heard of, but whose names are legend on the Cape: Virgin Bruce, Monk Walker, Joe Mama, Dog Boy and Dog Girl, Tiny Prozini, Lisa Barnhart, Weird Frank, Sugar Saltzman, and many others.
Spacers, all of them…for Diamondback Jack’s was a spacer bar. For the most part, its regulars were either people who handled ground jobs at KSC, or those who worked from time to time either in orbit or on the Moon and came here when they were between jobs: cargo grunts and pad rats, beamjacks and shuttle jocks, gliding from paycheck to paycheck, marking time between the issuance of their union cards and mandatory retirement, doing the shit work no one really thinks about when the suits from the space companies make their Kiwanis Club speeches about leaving the cradle, taming the final frontier, reaching for the stars, and so forth.
And then there were a handful of people like me, who had no business being there but who hung out nonetheless because we’re space buffs. I was a newspaper stringer, but my presence was barely tolerated because I kept a low profile despite my unwelcome profession and because Jack Baker, the bar owner, had never found a reason to throw me out. But there were also guys like Taylor Greene, whom I encountered one slow Tuesday night when I came in for a beer. His presence wasn’t well tolerated either, despite the fact that he tried to keep an even lower profile. Yet, although there wasn’t a photo of him behind the bar at Diamondback Jack’s, Ty Greene was probably the most courageous man I ever met.
And therein lies the story.
If you spend much time at any particular bar, you get accustomed to seeing certain people again and again, even if you never actually meet them or get to learn their names. For that reason Ty Greene was a familiar face at Diamondback Jack’s long before our chance encounter late one evening.
Greene was one of three guys who used to drop by on weeknights and take over a table in the back of the room, where they would drink and talk softly amongst themselves. Greene was the one who stood out the most: very tall and muscular, with dark hair combed straight back from his forehead and the deep facial tan
that identifies someone who has spent a lot of time wearing a space helmet, he had the ruggedly handsome looks one associates with net stars or old-time movie idols, right down to the cleft in his jaw. Think Rock Hudson and you’ve got him pegged—in more ways than one.
He and his friends kept to themselves; no one else ever joined them, and they usually arrived together and slipped out the door the same way. Aside from occasional laughter from their table, the trio were the bar’s quietest and best-behaved patrons; they never harassed the college girls Baker hired as barmaids, and although Jack had trouble holding onto his girls because of the way they were often treated by some of his customers, none ever quit because one of the men at the back table fondled them.
I never paid much attention to them, though, until the night I arrived shortly before closing hour. It was a week night and the place was almost empty save for the tall dude, who was sitting at the bar instead of at his usual table. That was unusual in itself; even more odd was the fact that he wasn’t accompanied by his posse.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t alone. Occupying the adjacent stool was another regular whose face was familiar, but in a far less benign way.
Joe Humphrey, a.k.a. “the Hump,” was one of those guys who give beer joints a bad name. A big, pot-bellied cracker with a bad drinking problem and a disposition to match, the Hump had been hired and fired by every space company on the Cape, yet frequent unemployment didn’t keep him from hanging around Diamondback’s, looking for trouble and causing it if he couldn’t find any. Baker had thrown him out several times and he would stay gone for a month or two, but eventually he would reappear, full of promises that he wouldn’t pick a fight, kick the jukebox, or molest a barmaid again. And he wouldn’t…for about two weeks.
So here was the Hump, perched on the barstool next to the tall quiet gent, his shoulders hunched in such a way that made it appear as if he was deliberately crowding the other man. The holo above the bar was blasting a basketball game, so I couldn’t clearly hear what was being said, but it seemed as if the Hump was doing all the talking; the tall guy was simply staring straight ahead, saying nothing as he nursed his beer. On the other side of the bar, Baker was washing mugs and pitchers; although he didn’t appear to be paying attention to them, from the look on his face I could tell that he was tuned in.