Rude Astronauts (11 page)

“Here,” said a voice. “Rinse your mouth out with this.”

As I looked up, my benefactor settled in the seat on the other side of the booth. It was one of the guys who had originally been in the brawl, although you could barely tell it; he didn’t have a mark on him except for some beer splattered across the front of his cowboy shirt. Not surprising; he was a big guy with a linebacker’s build, the type of person who doesn’t start fights but always finishes them.

He also looked a bit old to be mixed up in this sort of shit: mid-fifties, with crow’s-feet around his alert blue eyes, close-cropped grey hair, country-style long sideburns framing a square jaw. A pro. An old-time spacer. Hang around the Cape long enough and you can always tell the type.

Yet he also looked vaguely familiar.

Fuck it. “Thanks,” I said as I picked up the bottle, took a long drink and swirled beer around inside my mouth. I glanced around; Jack was looking the other way for the moment, so I spit it out onto the bloody, booze-drenched floor. The place was a mess already, and it got the clotted-blood taste out of my mouth. The guy on the other side of the table smiled, but didn’t make a federal case out of my slobbish behavior. He had seen worse.

“Just wanted to tell you I’m sorry that you got hurt,” he said. His voice had a soft, southern gentleman’s lilt to it: Colonel Mississippi Cornpone crossed with Deke Slayton. “I know it wasn’t your fight and that you were trying to break things up.”

He shrugged, his face becoming more serious. “Wasn’t my fight either … at least I didn’t start it. I’m just sorry that you had to get in the way.”

I was about to reply when there was a screech of car tires peeling out of the parking lot. A few seconds later, the door banged open and two men entered from the lot. I immediately recognized them as the two other regulars who had been in the fight. One of them glanced our way. “They’re outta here, Sugar,” he said.

At first, I thought there was a woman sitting behind us, but the adjacent booth was vacant. “Sugar” isn’t the sort of nickname one normally associates with a fellow who looks tough enough to pound nails with his fists, but my friend didn’t seem to mind. “Okay, Mike,” he said, solemnly nodding his head. “I think we’ve seen the last of ’em for awhile. You and Doug go grab yourselves a cold one and take it easy.”

Jack already had a couple of tallnecks waiting for them on the bar; it was a funny way for Baker to be treating guys who had just wrecked his place, chased out his customers and his band, and caused him to close down early on a Saturday night. But instead he quietly grabbed a broom and dustpan and went to work sweeping up the debris while the two men picked up their beers.

Pretty weird shit, all things considered. If the suits weren’t on their way to the county hospital emergency room, then they were headed straight for the Merritt Island cop shop. Yet if either one of Sugar’s friends seemed to give a damn, they didn’t show it. There’s a certain untouchable look about men who’ve just beaten the crap out of someone who deserved it, but Mike and Doug weren’t northern Florida yee-haw rednecks looking for a brawl. The way they carried themselves told me that they, like Sugar, were pros …

Sugar.

There was something familiar about the nickname, matched with that face, which tickled the back of my mind. My head was stuffed with clotted blood; I couldn’t think straight. “So what was this all about, anyway?” I asked, and Sugar looked back toward me. “I mean, I got into the show late, so why did you get into a fight with these guys?”

Sugar shrugged off-handedly. “Well, y’know how it is. We just came over to have a couple of beers and they were on our case again, doing the usual surveillance routine. They kept watching us and Doug got pissed, so he went over to get them to leave and they …”

“Shut up!”

The shout came from Jack. He was kneeling on the floor next to the broken juke-box, gathering the scratched CDs which had been thrown from its shattered case. He stared at Sugar with anger in his eyes: Sugar instantly went quiet.

“Al’s a regular here,” Baker went on, more quietly now, “but he’s not a pro. He’s a reporter.” He glanced at me, sour annoyance in his face. “I let him in because he doesn’t talk too much … but he’s still with the press, so watch your mouth, okay? He’s not one of us.”

Not one of us. Christ. I sighed, wiping my nose again and dropping the paper wad on the table. My old outsider-insider status with Diamondback Jack’s had once again returned to haunt me.

Outsider, because I was a stringer for the
Times
and journalists are traditionally unwelcome among the pros at the Cape. Conventional wisdom says that since we ask dumb questions at press conferences and never get the facts straight, stick our noses (bloody or otherwise) into places where they don’t belong, always blab secrets better left untold, and are generally pains in everyone’s collective ass, we are untrustworthy as a collective whole. Journalists rank with sand fleas at the Cape; barely tolerated, never welcome. Insider, because I was a regular at Diamondback Jack’s. I normally went there to drink, not to play reporter. My notebook and recorder stayed in the car where they belonged; if someone told me a story, it was with everyone’s explicit permission … and under no circumstances would it appear in my paper (okay, so I cheated a little by writing the stories I heard as thinly-disguised fiction). Most of the time, the gossip and rumors never left the walls of the bar.

It was a hard-fought status, being the token blabbermouth in good old boy territory; for this reason alone, though, my presence was tolerated. Jack Baker was one of the very few people who were aware of my profession, and it was only because I had demonstrated the ability to keep secrets that I was allowed in his bar in the first place. I was always careful never to cross the line.

This time, though, it looked as if I had stepped over it. Mike and Doug put down their beers and were studying me with expressions which suggested that I was the next person to make a visit to the parking lot. For a few moments I wondered if Jack Baker would be tacking my hide to the wall alongside that of the rattlesnake he had allegedly killed during a fishing trip in the Everglades. There was—as purveyors of purple prose are permanently predestined to pontificate—a pregnant silence, and I thought I was going to have a baby.

“Reporter. Well now …” Sugar folded his hands together on the tabletop and gazed at me with speculative amusement. “You’re not trying to wrangle a story out of this, now are you?”

I quickly shook my head and started to say that it had only been a curious question, but Sugar nodded his head. “No,” he continued, “I don’t think so. But if ol’ Jack here says you can be trusted, then I’ll believe you.”

He looked toward his companions, who had eased off a little but still hadn’t relaxed their guard. “In fact, perhaps we should take our case to the press. They keep trying to pick a fight with us, so maybe it’s time we fought back. What do you say, gentlemen?”

Doug looked suspicious, but he slowly nodded his head. “I dunno,” Mike murmured. “They’re pissed at us enough already. If we go spilling our guts …”

“What are they going to do that they haven’t done already?” Sugar spread open his hands. “We’re grounded, we’re broke, we’re unemployed, our names are dirt in the industry. They call us on the phone in the middle of the night, they follow our wives and kids all the time … hell, we can’t even step out for a beer without having a couple of them tagging along. Maybe we should have gone public eleven months ago.” He gestured toward me. “I don’t know this guy, but he’s press and he’s already seen part of it. Perhaps we should just go ahead and come clean. How can it get much worse than it is already?”

I already didn’t like the sound of this. Contrary to popular myth, most journalists don’t go looking for trouble; it finds them, whether they invite it or not. Many years ago, when I had been a staff writer on a muckraking weekly paper, I had done a story about a junkyard which was using its lot as an illegal hazardous-waste disposal site, taking toxic chemicals from local manufacturers and burying them in the back acre. Nearby community residents had tipped me off, and the story which I wrote caused the state’s environmental agency to investigate and finally shut the place down. The junkyard owner was pissed off at me; for several weeks, thugs made frequent visits to the newspaper office in search of yours truly until the circuit court passed verdict on the junkyard and the chap in charge was sent off to prison. Even then, it had been several months before I stopped checking over my shoulder whenever I walked the streets.

It was beginning to look like a replay of that incident. I started measuring the distance to the door. Then my friend stuck out his hand. “Name’s Ted Saltzman,” he said. “My friends call me Sugar.”

Sugar Saltzman. All at once, the connection became clear. I felt stupid for having missed it before.

Yes. I had heard of him. Everyone at the Cape had heard of Sugar Saltzman. And at the moment I finally linked the face to the name, I knew I wasn’t going to leave the bar until I had heard his story.

If you haven’t heard of Sugar Saltzman, you don’t read newspapers or watch TV. He was not only a legend in the space industry, but one of very few spacers whose name ever became known outside the insular community of the Cape. He was the last of the old-school astronauts, and his rise to fame was matched in velocity only by his descent into infamy.

Before Saltzman joined NASA, he had been an Air Force fighter-pilot. When he was still in his twenties, he had flown F-117s out of Saudi Arabia for sorties over Baghdad during Gulf War I. Not long after the war, he quit the USAF to enlist in the NASA astronaut corps. He flew numerous orbital missions on the second-generation shuttles before NASA was reorganized into a regulatory agency and space industrialization was privatized. He was Skycorp’s first-draft pick among the old NASA shuttle jockeys; the story goes that Rock Chapman himself had recruited Saltzman, on the basis of a brief exchange the two old flyboys had at a burger joint on Route A1A. “Why do they call you Sugar?” Rock had asked, and Sugar had replied, “Because everything I do comes out sweet.”

Indeed. Sugar Saltzman was an ace among aces and a pro among pros, a genuine hot-shit shuttle jockey; even the best of old-guard NASA astronauts from the last century couldn’t match his record. While working for Skycorp, he amassed more flight-hours than any other pilot in history, sometimes under conditions which pushed the proverbial envelope. When his shuttle lost power to its APUs just prior to re-entry, he suited up and went EVA to fix a shorted-out conduit in the aft engine section, relying on talk-through from the ground and his own memory of the complex wiring system; another pilot might have curled into a rescue ball and waited for someone else to save his ass, but Saltzman had taken care of the situation himself, and brought his vessel and crew safely home. And when Phoenix Station had suffered an electrical fire and lost life-support, giving its crew less than two days of oxygen before they asphyxiated, Sugar had taken a rescue team into low orbit even as a killer hurricane was bearing down on the Cape from the Bahamas.

If there was any pilot who typified the mysterious, grace-under-pressure quality which Tom Wolfe had once called the “Right Stuff,” it was Sugar Saltzman. Skycorp had been only too happy to capitalize on his local fame; they needed a 21st-century hero to match the Scott Crossfields and Chuck Yeagers of the past, if only to enhance their corporate self-image. The public was tired of actors and politicians and self-made celebrities; they wanted someone they could genuinely admire, that larger-than-life person whom every man could emulate. Sugar Saltzman fit the bill and Skycorp was only too willing to oblige. Since Saltzman regularly flew one particular shuttle—then called the
John Young
, itself named after one of NASA’s legendary astronauts—Skycorp rechristened it, allowing Sugar to choose the new name. The pilot picked the name of an old RAF Lancaster which had flown bombing missions over Germany during World War II; an artist had repainted the Lanc’s topless Vargas girl on the shuttle’s forward port fuselage, along with the shared name of the two craft. The
John Young
thereby became known as
Sugar’s Blues
.

Sugar did talk-shows and interviews, modeled T-shirts and did cola commercials and all the rest, but he never stopped flying; he remained on Skycorp’s active-duty roster and didn’t sell out to become a full-time celebrity, and more so for the better. For the next few years, both the shuttle and its commander were legends in their own time. Skycorp allowed him to select his own regular crew; his picks were Mike Green as his co-pilot and Doug McPherson as his cargo specialist, both of whom were already seasoned shuttle honchos. The heavy-breathing magazine writers who profiled Skycorp’s star team inevitably referred to them as the “Blues Brothers.”

For a brief time, they were the ace kids on the block. Nobody could touch ’em, either for real flying skill or artificial hubris. But it didn’t last for very long.

Shortly after Saltzman’s twenty-fourth orbital mission, the pilot and his crewmates were accused of being “habitual drug offenders” … junkies, once you get away from mediaspeak.

When the hammer came down, I wasn’t around to be part of the public trashing. The
Times
had dispatched me to Sydney to cover an international space-tech conference, so I wasn’t in town when Sugar Saltzman and his crew were busted. I’m glad I wasn’t involved; it was an ugly situation.

In short, Saltzman, Green and McPherson had been at the Cape for a pre-flight mission briefing when a security officer from NASA’s Law Enforcement Division requested that they open their ready-room lockers for what seemed to be a routine inspection. It happened all the time—NASA had firm rules against alcohol being allowed within KSC, and everyone was used to spot-checks—so the Blues Brothers had complied with the request, yet when the lockers were searched, each man was found to be in possession of various drugs. A shaving kit in Saltzman’s locker contained a quarter-ounce of marijuana and a small vial of cocaine; Green’s jumpsuit pocket held a few joints, and a tinfoil packet concealed in one of McPherson’s boots contained a couple of grams of hashish, plus a small pipe which had been recently smoked.