by Allen Steele
“So we got off to a good start,” Greene said. “We were earning enough to keep the creditors happy, we were our own bosses, and it beat hell out of powersat construction. Carl was the Triangle’s pilot, Stan the first officer, and I worked the pod. Every flight was an adventure…we were like big kids playing Star Trek.”
“Sounds like fun. You must have been raking in the cash.”
Greene frowned and shook his head. “Not quite. Like I said, we had a pretty large capital debt to pay off, and the operating overhead was enough to give our accountant migraines. We soon realized that, unless we started showing a higher profit margin pretty soon, we might have to get out of the business.”
“I don’t get it. How come?”
He shrugged. “Well, it’s something we hadn’t really anticipated either. We were living in zero-gee on a full-time basis. We could only stay up there so long before each of us would suffer permanent bone-calcium loss…and we didn’t want to return home in maglev chairs.”
He had a good point there. The major benefit of living on Skycan was that its centripetal rotation provided a healthy, human-friendly environment. Alpha Station, on the other hand, existed in freefall; if people living there didn’t return to Earth at least once a year, then long-term effects of weightlessness could be quite harmful.
Yet Ty, Carl, and Stan were so busy trying to keep their company going, they didn’t have time to take the recuperative vacations groundside that they had originally planned to make. After fourteen months of weightlessness, the med team were giving them the warning lights.
“We finally had to start looking for a sideline to the retrieval missions,” Greene went on, “and that meant finding dead sats that nobody wanted and claiming them as salvage. Not as much money as the commercial contracts, but at least we could sell them for spare parts. So Stan and I began studying the satellite charts, and pretty soon we located several junkers that looked promising.”
He paused to make sure Jack was still watching the holo. “That’s when we got into trouble,” he said softly.
The first two derelicts the company salvaged from low Earth orbit were an old NASA solar observatory and a comsat that China had launched in the late ’90s; those were successfully resold, but for not as much as they would have liked. Then, three weeks after the Great Wall 56 retrieval, The Flying Triangle set out to grab a satellite Stan had located in equatorial orbit 260 nautical miles up, a dead American weather sat listed on the charts as Stormking 11, launched from Vandenberg three years earlier and listed as out of service less than ten months later due to onboard guidance failure.
Snagging Stormking 11 meant that the company had to work in a gray area, legally speaking. Before it retrieved the NASA solar observatory, Flying Triangle tried to get advance approval from the U.S. government; they were successful in getting permission, but it had caused the company to wade through so much bureaucratic red tape that, when they decided to pick up Stormking, the three men opted to retrieve first, notify later. After all, it was a dead satellite, of no conceivable use to anyone; if the government wanted to bitch about it, Flying Triangle could always claim maritime common law allowed them to salvage a possible navigational hazard. So they went after the weather sat without telling anyone what they planned to do.
So The Flying Triangle spent eight hours chasing Stormking 11 around the limb of the earth, gradually edging closer and closer, until they finally coasted up behind the sat as it passed over the Indian Ocean. As soon as the Triangle had matched orbits with Stormking, Ty climbed into his pod, dubbed the Greene Magic, and went out to haul it aboard.
“It was a big sucker,” Greene said. “These things look small when you see them in photos, but then you get up close to one and see that they’re the size of a bus. I never have any problems hauling them aboard, though, once I collapsed the solar wings, but as soon as we got close to Stormking I knew this one was a little weird.”
“How so?”
“It wasn’t tumbling, for starters.” Greene twirled his forefingers around each other. “Dead sats start tumbling end over end when their RCRs go kaput, but this one was just gliding along, smooth as silk. And when I got a little closer, I noticed that there was long, semi-conical bulge on its underside.”
Still imitating the satellite with his hands, he pointed a forefinger beneath the palm of his other hand. “So I slid the pod under the thing until my hatch porthole was just a few feet away, and I switched my spots and was just beginning to get a close look at that bulge when Stan comes over the comlink and says, ‘Ty, you better listen to this. I think we’ve got a problem.’
“I say, ‘Yeah, what?’ and Stan relays a transmission coming in on the KU-band, and here’s this macho voice in my headset.” Greene dropped his own voice an octave. “‘Unidentified spacecraft at such-and-such coordinates, this is Space Operations Defense Center, United States Space Command. Identify yourself at once, over.’ Well, I know at once what has happened. We’ve been picked up by SPADATS radar.”
SPADATS is the Space Detection and Tracking System, a global network of ground-based radar and telescopes operated by SPADOC in Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. “After all, they can track everything in Earth orbit the size of a bolt on up,” Greene went on, “and when we moved in on this dead weather sat, they decided to give us a yell on the common frequency and find out what we’re up to. So I get Stan to patch me in, and I tell them who were are and explain what we’re doing.”
“Did you think you were in trouble?”
Greene shrugged. “Sort of, but not really. After all, this was a dead sat, right? They might bitch because we were salvaging it without government permission, but since it was floating garbage, I kind of thought that they might thank us for getting it out harm’s way.”
He shook his head. “Should have known better, because a second later SPADOC comes back and tells us that we’re trespassing on United States Government Property and we’re to remove ourselves from this orbit immediately or else face federal prosecution.”
“That’s weird.”
“No kidding. So Carl gets on the line and begins to argue with them, reading them the letter of the law, and while he’s doing that, I’m guiding the pod a little closer to the sat and taking a look at that bulge I had spotted earlier…”
He paused. “And that’s when I spot a red nuclear radiation symbol painted on a hatch in the middle of the bulge, and a little sign below it that reads ‘Payload Access.’”
“‘Payload Access.’” I shook my head. “I don’t…”
And then I got it.
Again, Greene seemed to have read my mind. “Yeah, right,” he whispered, slowly nodding his head. “We’d just found something that wasn’t supposed to be up there.”
“I’ll be damned…and they had disguised it as a dead sat.”
“You got it.” Greene picked up his mug and took a sip. “Dead weather satellite with a footprint over most of the Balkans, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia…sneaky little way of getting around the U.N. space treaty.”
There had been several United Nations space treaties, but I knew the one Greene was talking about. The first one, signed in 1967, that unilaterally outlawed weapons of mass destruction in outer space. I didn’t have to glance in the bar mirror to see that my face had lost its color.
So Ty switched to a private frequency and told Carl to stop arguing and tell SPADOC that they were leaving the alleged weather satellite alone, then he flew the pod away from the sat as quickly as possible. He didn’t let Carl and Stan in on the secret until after the Greene Magic was docked with the Triangle and he had climbed through the hatch. By then, on Greene’s insistence, Carl had moved the OTV away from Stormking 11. SPADOC ceased communication once the Triangle was a hundred miles away from the satellite.
The three men spent the long journey back to Alpha Station quarreling over what to do next. Greene wanted to go public at once; the United States had deliberately violated one of the key principles of international
space law, and Stormking 11 posed a clear and present danger to the entire world. If the satellite’s covert payload was ever used, he argued, it might possibly be against a foreign city; even if it was against a military target, it could very well escalate a local conflict into a thermonuclear war…perhaps even nuclear holocaust on a global scale.
Fleisher and Weinberg agreed with Greene on principal, but they didn’t want to be the ones who blew the whistle on Stormking 11. At first, their counter argument centered on the notion that no would believe them. Since they had no photo evidence to back up their allegation, all they had was Ty’s observations, and the fact that SPADOC had insisted upon them leaving the premises.
Then they protested that this could endanger the company. Flying Triangle was renting space aboard a space station owned and operated by the United States government, and that same government could easily cancel their lease and put the company out of business long before its debts had been paid off.
In the end, though, it all came down to one thing: if Flying Triangle attempted to expose Stormking 11, the press would focus in on the men behind the allegation. Without a doubt, that would lead to public disclosure of their sexual identities. The pink triangle in the company logo might have fooled some people some of the time, but it wouldn’t fool all the people all the time…and certainly there were enough people who had worked with them aboard Skycan, and later on Freedom Station, who would be only too willing to confirm certain suspicions. Even if Ty wasn’t personally worried about public discovering that he was gay, Carl and Stan didn’t want their families finding that their sons were queer from watching the evening news.
It was a long flight back to Alpha Station. They worked out their differences before they hard-docked with the hangar.
“So?” I asked.
“So, well…” Ty finished his beer in a single gulp. “So it came down to company policy. Everything nice and democratic, as we had always done everything, and since it was two against one, after all…”
His mug came down on the bar with a hard slam. “So we didn’t say a word. Not a goddamn thing.”
And thus their gentlemen’s agreement remained in effect for the next three years.
Flying Triangle stayed in business for another seven months. The company managed to pay off its debts and even make a modest profit, but its major contracts dried up after the Stormking 11 debacle. For some reason, the major space firms became disinterested in hiring their services. The partners had strong suspicions of what had caused this to happen, but there was nothing that they could prove. When their lease on Alpha Station came up for renewal and NASA raised the rent above their means, it was only the coup de grace; the company was dying already.
So they liquidated their assets, sold The Flying Triangle and the Greene Magic to another group of ex-Skycorp beamjacks who wanted to take a shot at the satellite retrieval business, and boarded the next clipper back to the Cape.
“It wasn’t a total loss,” Greene said, picking up one of the beers Jack had brought to us after ringing the last-call bell. “We had lots of cash in the bank and we had all managed to land ground down here. It wasn’t the same as working up there, but…well…”
“It had gone sour on you.”
“Uh-huh. Probably for the better, though. I had to hobble around on crutches for two months before my legs were strong enough again. The doctors told me that if I had stayed up much longer, I might have been in a maglev chair for the rest of my life.”
He sipped his beer. “We continued to see each other regularly, since we were all working on the Cape. Carl and Stan broke up several months ago and they’re seeing other people now, but we’re all still friends. There’s not any good gay bars in these parts, so we get together here from time to time, mainly to talk about old times…”
“Like the Stormking mission?”
Again he hesitated, leaving a long moment of silence. The basketball game was long over; Jack had switched off the holo and was now moving through the barroom, putting up chairs and sweeping under tables. “So far as I know, it’s still up there,” he said quietly. “I’ve tried talking the other guys into going public with what we know, but they won’t do it. They’re still afraid of…well, y’know…”
Greene sighed. “In hindsight,” he went on, speaking very slowly as he played with the mug’s glass handle, “I think we created the problem ourselves. We set up Flying Triangle as an all-gay enterprise, which was well and good, but it also got us into an us-against-them mindset. We started thinking of our gay identity as the nucleus of everything that we did, but when we ran into something that made all that pale in comparison and we couldn’t handle it, we…”
His voice trailed off. “Copped out?” I asked.
His face hardened. For an instant there was a cold look in his eyes, then it vanished as he slowly nodded his head. “Yeah, I guess you say that. Sometimes, y’know…sometimes you’ve got to stop thinking only about yourself, of just what is good for you personally, and maybe do something for the good of everyone else…even the people who hate you.”
“Maybe so,” I said. “The question is, can you accept that responsibility?”
“I dunno.” His voice was very low now. “I know what has to be done, but I just don’t know if I can do it.”
Greene took a last slug of his beer, then eased himself off the barstool. “Thanks for letting me come clean,” he said, avoiding my gaze as he headed for the door. “I’ll let you know if you can print what I’ve told you.”
And then he was gone.
I saw Taylor Greene again in Diamondback Jack’s several times before the place burned down, either sitting alone at the bar nursing a beer or at a back table talking with Carl Fleisher and Stan Weinberg. At first I would nod to him or give him a little wave, but he never acknowledged me; it was much as if I had been a stranger he had never met. On one occasion, Joe Humphrey swaggered in when Greene was by himself; the Hump caught one glimpse of the quiet man sitting at the bar, then turned around and headed out the door again. Jack Baker and I traded a look and a smile, but if Greene noticed the Hump’s flyby maneuver, he gave no indication. Finally I stopped seeing him altogether; although Fleisher and Weinberg still showed up from time to time, the third leg of the triangle had vanished.
Then, about two years after the night Diamondback Jack’s was torched, I came home to find a Federal Express packet on my front doorstep. The return address on the packing slip said that it was from Flying Triangle Inc., with an address in New York City that, when I investigated later, turned out to an apartment house in Greenwich Village.
Within the packet was a twenty-two-page account of the Flying Triangle’s attempted retrieval of Stormking 11, essentially disclosing the same story as I’ve just written here. The packet also contained photocopies of various Department of Defense documents that had been ferreted out of the Pentagon by unknown parties. Ty Greene had apparently been keeping himself busy upon moving to New York, and the Greenwich Village gay community has a reputation for political activity.
I wasn’t the only journalist to receive this packet. Within a matter of days, several newspapers, two cable news networks, and all the major on-line services were reporting the story of a “sleeper” satellite in low Earth orbit that contained a one-megaton nuclear warhead. As I write this, full-scale congressional hearings have been scheduled to publicly investigate the matter, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has announced his formal resignation. Stormking 11, needless to say, has been removed from low Earth orbit, and the United Nations Security Council is looking into other possible violations of the 1967 space treaty.
No promises, but I think the world will be soon a safer place.
In most reports I’ve seen, Taylor Greene is prominently mentioned as the man who single-handedly exposed Stormking 11. His homosexuality is sometimes mentioned, but even then only incidentally; what he saw and did are more important than what he is, and no one seems any more interested in his sexual orient
ation than in his former business partners. Risking nothing, they gained nothing in return; their names are lost to obscurity, but Ty’s face is on the front cover of this week’s issue of Time. I’m sure they’re nice people, but history will never remember their names.
In the end, Taylor Greene became the space hero I think he always wanted to be. If I ever run into him again, I owe him a beer…both for what he did, and because I don’t have trouble saying the g-word any more. And in this way, we knock a few more bricks out of the wall.
Didn’t I say that this story would have a happy ending?
The Zoo Team
We were somewhere over Australia, about a quarter of the way to Mars, when Miguel flipped out. Ron and I had a lot to do with his breakdown, and when it was all over we were quite proud of ourselves.
A good, full-blown mental collapse takes time and effort, of course, and we’d spent the last few weeks laying the groundwork. Ron-Jon had a tendency to snore, so we picked that as the starting point; he and I shifted our schedules so that he’d sack out at the same time as Miguel, giving him the full benefit of Ron’s nasal performances. Truth to be told, Miguel could probably sleep through a train wreck, but he pretended restlessness, twisting around in his bag while Ron made like Branford Marsalis with a broken reed. After a couple of weeks, Miguel was appropriately twitchy; he griped and complained, and made such a show of being surly that it was hard to tell whether he meant it or not.
By then, I’d started up the paddle-ball. I smuggled one up to the Mess in my flight bag, not really intending it to be part of the act, but because fooling around with it always helped me relax. So I’d float around the station—pardon me, the Mars Expedition Simulator—bouncing that little red ball on its elastic string, making sure that I was always in the same compartment with Miguel when I was the most active. It got on his nerves, and after awhile he had something else to bitch about.
The most cunning bit, though, were the chess games. The fold-down table in the personnel module had a built-in chess board, its surface and the bottom of the pieces fitted with Velcro to prevent anything from floating away. Miguel was a hell of a player—I knew that for a fact, because he’d outfoxed me time and again when we were training together in Alabama—but over the course of several weeks he deliberately threw games to both me and Ron, signaling us that he was about to make a bad move by prodding us beneath the table. So I’d take his queen or Ron-Jon would knock off a knight, and Miguel would snarl something obscene before pushing himself away from the table and through the module hatch. And every time he lost, Miguel would make sure that his anger was just a little worse; no full-blown tantrums, just indications that, day by day, he was losing his shit.