by Allen Steele
Jack put a beer in front of me as I sat down two stools away and returned to the sink. There was something going on between the two men. I kept one eye on the game and one eye on the Hump and the stranger, and it was during a commercial break when I caught a snatch of the one-sided conversation.
“So what’s it like?” the Hump was asking. “I mean, y’know, I’ve always been kinda curious.” The quiet gent sipped his beer and didn’t reply. “Y’know, is it like sucking on a piece of candy, but just tastes different?” Dismissive silence. “Hey, c’mon, you can tell me…do you spit it out when you’re through, or do you swallow it and say, ‘Yummy yum yum, can I have some more?’”
“Cut it out, Joe,” Baker said. “Leave him alone.”
“Hey, I don’t mean nothing.” The Hump gave Jack the look of feigned innocence favored by schoolyard bullies who never grew up. “I mean, inquiring minds want to know…”
The tall man muttered something I didn’t hear, but which didn’t escape the Hump’s notice. “What’d you say?” Humphrey asked. “I didn’t catch that.”
“You heard me just fine.” The quiet man had a very soft voice; for him, speaking above the holo was almost like shouting.
“No, no, I don’t think so.” The Hump turned around on his stool so that his curled fists rested on his knees. “Did you just say something about my mind?”
“Chill out, Humphrey.” Jack’s hands disappeared beneath the sink, where I knew he had a Louisville slugger stashed away for emergencies. “I don’t take this shit in my place.” He glanced at the tall man. “Never mind him, Greene. Want another beer?”
Greene shook his head; it wasn’t hard to tell that this was a situation he would just as soon avoid. Although he hadn’t finished his beer, he pushed aside the half-empty mug and started to rise from his stool. “Thanks, Jack,” he said, “but it’s getting late. See you next…”
“Whoa, buddy.” The Hump grabbed the tall man’s left wrist to stop him. “Not so fast. I’m not done talking to…”
It happened so fast, I nearly missed it. One moment, the Hump had Greene’s wrist clutched in his paw; the next, he was down on the barroom floor, howling in agony as the tall man stood over him, grasping Humphrey’s right forearm in his hands and twisting it around. Just like that, the Hump had been reduced to a bawling baby.
A baby with a foul mouth. “Lemme go, cocksucker!” the Hump screamed. He tried to kick Greene’s legs, but the other man nimbly danced aside; that seemed to make Humphrey even madder. “Somebody get this fag offa me! He’s trying to rape me!”
“Rape?” Greene shook his head. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Let him go, Ty.” Baker now had the baseball bat in plain sight. “I’m warning you…let loose of his arm.”
“Hey, Jack,” I said, “the Hump was trying to pick a fight, not…”
“Stay out of this, Al.” Baker was coming around the bar, holding the bat in bunting position. “Break it up, both of you.”
“Sorry, Jack. Didn’t mean to cause trouble.” Greene waited until the barkeep was beside him, then he released the Hump’s arm and stepped back. “Okay, fella, you can…”
“You fuckin’ queer, I’m going to kill you!”
Two hundred and seventy pounds of pissed-off redneck surged off the floor and charged straight at Greene. Greene took a graceful step to one side and lifted his arms into a martial arts posture, but he didn’t get a chance to demonstrate another smooth move—somewhat to my dismay, I must admit—before Baker rushed into the gap and slammed the blunt end of the bat into Humphrey’s vast stomach.
The Hump clutched at his gut and doubled over, tears streaming from his eyes as he gasped for air. Before he lost his balance and fell down again, Jack grabbed the back of his shirt, swung him around and gave him a hard kick in the ass that propelled him toward the door.
“Get out of here!” Baker roared. “Show up here again and I’m calling the cops!”
I jumped off my stool and managed to push the door open just before the Hump collided with it. That was my contribution to the fight; without anything to stop his forward momentum, Humphrey sailed through the doorway, fell down the steps, and toppled into the dirt driveway.
Baker walked to the door and silently watched the Hump as he struggled to his feet and, with only one backward glance but with plenty of obscenities, staggered to his pickup truck. Jack waited until the Dodge’s tail lights had vanished down Route 3, then he lowered his bat and turned back to the bar. “I thought I told you to never mind him,” he murmured as he walked past Greene and resumed his place behind the counter.
“He was trying to.” I picked up my beer and went over to sit down next to Greene. “Way I saw it, he did everything he could to avoid a fight. Joe’s the guy you should blame, not him.”
Baker opened his mouth to say something, but I beat him to it. “Another round for both of us,” I added. “Put it on my tab.”
Baker’s eyes shifted from me to Greene and then back again. This was an argument he couldn’t win. Without another word, he put the bat back in its hiding place, tapped two more mugs of beer, then disappeared into the back room to cool off. “Thanks,” Greene said softly after he was gone.
“No problem. You handled yourself pretty well there. Judo?”
“Tai kwon do.”
“Really?” I sipped my beer. “Guess it makes sense to learn something like that if you’re…”
Oops. It isn’t often when I think aloud like that; when I do, I get a taste of my own foot. I clammed up and looked away, pretending to study the liquor bottles on the shelf behind the bar. “That’s okay,” Greene said. “Guess it wasn’t hard to figure out.” He took a contemplative sip from his beer. “Happens now and then to guys like us. You get used to it.”
“Maybe so, but you shouldn’t have to.”
He gave me a sidelong glance. “How nice of you to say so,” he murmured into his beer. “I’m so glad you’ve come along to remind me of my rights.”
I didn’t get it, but neither did I want to force the issue. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to…”
“Never mind.” He shrugged, then extended his hand. “Taylor Greene. My friends call me Ty.” I introduced myself and he nodded as we shook. “Seen you here before. We’re the bar tokens.”
“Bar tokens?”
“The token journalist and the token queer,” he said, smiling a little. “One of them, at least.”
“One of…? Oh, you mean…”
“My friends, yeah.” Greene must have read the expression on my face as everything suddenly clicked into place. “The crew of The Flying Triangle, that’s us,” he added, with no small pride.
“A spacecraft?” I asked, and he nodded again. “Sorry, man. Never heard of it.”
His face changed. “No reason why you should,” he replied, then turned away and was silent for so long that I wondered if I had said the wrong thing again.
Try to understand what I mean when I say that, although I’ve had many gay friends, I haven’t been friendly with many gays. I suppose I’m like most other heterosexual males these days; although you come to meet gay men and accept them by overlooking or ignoring their difference, there is always a certain barrier that is difficult, if not impossible, to cross. It isn’t just a matter of appearances, like a sibilant lisp or a too-perfect handsomeness, or even the knowledge that their ideas of having a good time in bed are not the same as your own. It’s also the fact they live in a world parallel to your own, but which is closed to you. Congress may have passed laws ensuring equal rights to gays and lesbians, but that only means that the gateways between the barriers are clean and well-lighted; the walls themselves are still in place, and can’t be legislated out of existence.
Perhaps I should have let the matter drop. Had a couple of beers, watched the game, made small talk, gone home when Jack closed up in another hour or so. My curiosity had been aroused, though, so I drank my beer in silence and waited to see if he wanted to talk.
“Yeah, there’s a reason for that,” Greene said at last, turning to look at me again. “In fact, it’s a pretty interesting story. Might be something you’d like to write about.”
I shrugged. “Maybe. I haven’t heard it yet, though.”
“So I’ll tell you…” He hesitated, then added: “So long as you’ll agree to one condition.”
I asked him what it was and he told me. It was a difficult promise to make, especially considering that he had yet to inform me exactly why he was putting me on my honor to keep my word. Yet if he was willing to trust me, I had little choice but to trust him as well.
So we shook on it, and he proceeded to tell me about The Flying Triangle.
It started back in ’23, when Ty Greene was working for Skycorp as a beamjack on its powersat construction operations in geosynchronous orbit. Along with a hundred-plus other men and women employed on the same project, he spent a year on Olympus Station, the giant wheel-shaped space station which served as home for the beamjacks and their support crew. Greene was a pod driver, one of the guys who flew the bug-like construction pods which did much of the heavy work on the island-size solar power satellites, and it wasn’t long before he met an OTV pilot by name of Carl Fleisher and a communications specialist named Stan Weinberg.
It was hardly coincidental that these three would meet and become close comrades, for all three were gay. In fact, unless there were others who managed to keep their sexual orientations a secret, they were the only “out of the airlock” gays aboard Skycan. Although Greene didn’t advertise his homosexuality, neither did he deny it; Carl and Stan hadn’t come out yet back home—indeed, both were mortally afraid of their families and friends discovering the truth—but after they had become lovers three months earlier, it had been only a matter of time before the rest of the crew found them out. As many heterosexual couples before them had already discovered, privacy was nearly impossible within Olympus’s cramped modules, and gossip was one of the few distractions from the routine.
It wasn’t easy being queer aboard Skycan. Most of the guys who worked there were blue-collar working stiffs one generation removed from the Rust Belt factories and Midwestern farms where their parents and grandparents had made their livelihoods; many had been brought up believing that gays were sinister homos who would attack you in the toilet, or at least were fair game for harassment. Not all the beamjacks on Olympus were like that, to be sure, but Stan was just effeminate enough to draw unwanted attention to himself, and although Carl and Ty were butch, they received their share of insults and snubs, if not outright hostility. Back home, the Gay Rights Act may prevent one from being harassed or beaten up in the workplace, but it’s bit more difficult to enforce civil-rights statutes 22,300 miles from the nearest EEOC district office.
“Things finally got bad enough that we decided to move in together, if only for the sake of mutual protection,” Greene said. “There was a half-empty bunkhouse located next to the waste reclamation module…half-empty because the odor was something godawful…and we arranged to trade bunks with the three guys living there already.”
He grimaced as he picked up his beer. “The day we moved in someone painted ‘Fag Shack’ on the hatch. Just to make us feel at home.”
“Cute,” I murmured.
Greene shrugged as he polished off his beer. Baker had returned from the back room by now. “It wasn’t so bad,” Ty said as he motioned Jack to bring us another round. “After that, we were largely left alone. I guess everyone believed the three of us were engaged in some sort of ménage a trois, even though I could have told them that I had a steady boyfriend back home. We rigged up a curtain to give Stan and Carl some privacy, but I usually left when they wanted to…”
“Okay, right.” I didn’t want to hear the details.
There was a scowl on Jack’s face as he placed two fresh mugs in front of us; he moved to the opposite end of the bar and turned up volume on the basketball game. Ty gave me a cold look as well, although for different reasons. “Anyway, what we were really doing during our off-shift,” he continued, “was coming up with a scheme to get rich.”
He tasted his beer, then went on. “Besides being gay, the three of us had other things in common. First, we were all lifelong space buffs who had wanted to be astronauts since childhood. Second, since Skycorp had trained us for our jobs, we had marketable skills. And third, we all wanted to retire as wealthy old queens.”
I laughed out loud when I heard that. “We had already learned that there was no way we could move up Skycorp’s corporate ladder because of our persuasion,” Greene went on. “We hit a glass ceiling, so we would have to go into business for ourselves if we wanted to get anywhere.”
“Doing something that wouldn’t get you busted for being…”
I stumbled on an unspoken word, and Greene noticed. “Gay,” he finished, giving me a sour look. “It’s just a word, y’know.”
“I know that,” I shot back, feeling my face grow warm. “I just wish you’d stop blaming me for being straight.”
Ty said nothing for a moment. “I’m not blaming you for anything,” he said at last. “Not personally, at any rate. But straights like you make the rules, and straights like you break them whenever they want. If you treat every queer you meet like an alien from space, then don’t be so goddamn shocked if we turn around and do the same thing to you. I’m queer, okay? Get used to it.”
Again, the barriers…and the gateways, so broad before, now seemed a little more narrow when viewed from the other side.
“Okay,” I murmured. “Fair enough.”
Ty nodded, and let it pass. “Anyway,” he went on, “so all we had to do was identify a viable market and exploit it. Well, okay…we spent the rest of our tour figuring how we could do this, and in the meantime socking away our paychecks, and eventually it paid off.”
He smiled and tapped the bar top with his fingertip. “On the day our Skycorp contracts ran out, we formed Flying Triangle, Inc. A trip back to Earth to line up our pigeons, and two months later, we were back in space and open for business.”
The business was salvaging dead satellites.
By 2023 there were over fifteen thousand radar-detectable items of space junk located in various orbits above Earth, ranging from paint chips and palm-size fragments of expendable rocket stages all the way up to multi-ton satellites that had long since gone dark, either because of malfunctioned electronics or because they had outlived their usefulness and had been shut down by ground controllers. The former comprised a navigation hazard that was being cleaned up by robotic sweepers, but the latter was a potential goldmine; a satellite that had suffered an onboard failure shortly after launch might yet be useful if it could be retrieved and repaired. Even an obsolete weather or communications sat could be still cannibalized for spare parts; since most of its hardware was still in pristine condition that could be used on other spacecraft—RCR modules, computer chips, semiconductors, Mylar insulation blankets, and so forth—it could be resold to other in-orbit space companies which wanted to cut the costs of having brand-new replacements shipped up from Earth.
That was where Flying Triangle, Inc. came in. The way Ty, Carl, and Stan had it figured, they could either contract their services to companies that wished to retrieve their snafu’d hardware, or else locate dead sats that no one wanted anymore and resell them as salvage. Although the former was already being done by spacecraft crews operating on a work-for-hire basis, there wasn’t a company that specialized in retrieving space junk…and the latter had never considered a viable market since the salvage costs appeared prohibitive.
Pooling their savings, Greene and his cohorts made down-payments to Skycorp for a second-hand orbital transfer vehicle and a construction pod. The OTV was then retrofitted with an uprated engine, a pair of outrigger cradles for cargo, and a docking collar for the pod; the spacecraft was christened The Flying Triangle and painted with the company logo—an inverted pink triangle wearing a pair of angel wings.
> “You’d be surprised how many people didn’t understand the allusion,” Greene said. “When Stan and Carl told their families about the name, they explained it was because the company was operated by three partners.”
Flying Triangle, Inc. also rented a personnel module on Alpha Station’s new “free enterprise” arm, which served both as the company office and as their living quarters. The terms of the lease with NASA included air, water, electrical power, telemetry link and two meals a day in the station wardroom in exchange for forty-five percent of the company’s net income; for fifteen percent more, The Flying Triangle was hangared and serviced at the station’s docking arm. With sixty percent of the company’s net being swallowed by overhead costs, it meant that Flying Triangle would need to have an outstanding first year in order to pay off its capital debts.
As it turned out, the company’s first four quarters exceeded the most optimistic projections the partners had made. Almost as soon as it opened shop on Alpha Station, Flying Triangle began receiving faxes from various firms on Earth; it seemed as if nearly everyone in the commercial space business had lost a satellite at one time or another, and even if they no longer wished to have their hardware returned to them, the insurance companies underwriting them wanted the sats back. Since the price for a low-orbit retrieval mission started at a hundred grand and went up from there—still cheap, considering that some of those satellites had cost tens of millions of dollars to build and launch—each flight the Triangle made added six more figures to the company’s bank account in Houston.