Rude Astronauts (12 page)

All three men claimed innocence, and even the NASA cop who had made the bust later claimed to be skeptical despite the hard evidence; he had been following up an anonymous tip which had been posted in his company’s e-mail, and he had only made the search because of departmental policy to investigate all such allegations. Yet, within a few hours of the bust, an over-eager NASA press spokesman went public with the charges against the men, and the unskeptical space-beat reporters at the Cape eagerly aped the official line; before the end of the day, the Blues Brothers were being called the Space Junkies.

The crew of
Sugar’s Blues
immediately protested that they had been framed; they volunteered for urine and hair-root testing, but if they had hoped that the lab analyses would confirm their innocence, they were wrong. All three tests came back positive, showing that the spacers had been using pot, coke, and hash for a period of at least several months.

By the time I got back from my Australian junket, it was all over; NASA had permanently grounded Sugar Saltzman and his mates, and Skycorp had almost instantly fired them. Although the court later threw out the subsequent federal lawsuit because of legal technicalities, their careers were finished. The editorialists and media commentators vented their usual bathos, pathos, phony shock and rehearsed outrage; meanwhile, the public suffered its own private heartbreak before it forgot the whole thing.

For their own part, Sugar and his men refused to speak to the press. They went to ground, rarely seen around the Cape. As usual, the story was a ten-day sensation. By the time Skycorp shame-facedly re-rechristened
Sugar’s Blues
as the
John Young
—its voluptuous Vargas girl painted over, never to be seen on the flight-line again—Saltzman, Green, and McPherson had quickly faded from the public mindset. Bunny Chaykin-Schnienkovitch had once again flashed her boobs on TV; in the face of such monumental artistic achievement, who could remember what’s-their-names, the pothead astronauts?

And now, here they were. Up from the underground and ready to talk.

Jack cocked a finger at me, motioning for me to follow him into the tiny office behind the bar. Once we were back there, he half-closed the door. “Look, Al …” he began.

“Look, I swear it wasn’t my idea,” I said before he could go on. “But if they’ve got something on their minds that they want to tell me …”

“Okay, okay, I understand. It’s your job and all that.” He thrust a finger in my face “But you understand me. Nothing about my place gets into anything you write. You got me straight on that? I’ve let you get away with it twice before because nobody around here reads that rag you moonlight for …”

“I’ll let my editor know that. He’ll be so touched …”

“… but this time I really mean it. You guys haven’t been within a hundred miles of here, I swear to God, ’cause if you do …”

“Okay, okay. Ease down.” I put up my hands defensively. “I promise you, if I write a story, I won’t mention where it came from. I promise.”

Baker stared me straight in the eye, then slowly nodded his head. I could understand that he wasn’t crazy about having his bar used as a confessional, but I intuitively realized that there was much more to it than that. Jack knew something—bartenders run second-place only to God for knowing everything, because if you don’t do church you probably speak to your bartender instead—and it frightened him so much that he didn’t want to have anything to do with it. The only reason why he was going along with this was because of his obvious respect for Sugar Saltzman.

And Jack wasn’t the only person who was being paranoid. Although Doug volunteered to be interviewed with Sugar, Mike opted to sit outside the bar and watch for a possible return of the suits. After I went out to my car to fetch my notebook and recorder, Jack locked the doors and switched off most of the lights, signaling that Diamondback Jack’s was closed for the night. He then placed two pitchers of beer in front of us, and retired to the back office, allegedly to balance the books.

I switched on my recorder and opened my notebook as Sugar poured a beer for me. “The morning we made our last flight on the
Blues
…” he began.

“Let’s get it straight for the man, Cap,” Doug interrupted, pushing forward his own beer mug. “It was last April 12.”

“April 12, 2023. Like I could forget.” Sugar pushed the topped-off mug in front of me and reached for his former co-pilot’s glass. I noted that he left dry his own mug. “Anyway, the
Blues
was already on the pad, because we had a milk run to Olympus Station scheduled the day after tomorrow. Mission 24 for us, and I didn’t think it was going to be much different, except that after Mission 25 I was half-planning to tender my resignation to the company.”

This surprised me. “You were about to retire anyway?” I asked, and Sugar sagely nodded his head. “Was it because of a medical problem or …?”

Sugar chuckled. “Yeah, you could say that, if you want to call getting old a medical problem. Hell, I’m pushing sixty. Counting the missions I did for NASA before I joined Skycorp, I would have gone up thirty times. That’s enough. All I wanted to do was hand over the wheel to Sir Douglas here, buy me an old crop-duster or something and spend my golden years farting around Cocoa Beach.”

He laughed again, but it sounded forced this time. “That was the plan, at any rate. But then, two days before we were supposed to go up, I get a call at three in the morning from Gene Antonio, the chief of Skycorp’s astronaut office, telling me there’s been a fire.”

“A fire up there,” McPherson added, cocking his thumb toward the ceiling. “Y’know what he means?”

I knew. In this context, “fire” was a code-word for a life-threatening emergency in orbit. NASA, Skycorp and the other space companies started using it groundside to mask serious situations, in order to obfuscate the press who might overhear cellular phone conversations. Just such a thing had happened during the Phoenix Station accident, when half of the Cape press corps learned that there was trouble in low orbit because of an uncoded conversation between two NASA techs on their car-phones. Saying that’s there been a garbage can fire is much more innocuous than saying that the life-support system of a spacecraft has gone kaput and that a rescue mission is necessary.

Green and McPherson were also awakened by the astronaut chief, but it wasn’t until a half-hour later, when the Blues Brothers were convened in the green room of Skycorp’s Operations and Checkout Building, that they learned the exact nature of the emergency. Attending the meeting were NASA flight director Joe Marx, Skycorp’s astronaut chief Eugene Antonio, and NASA press liaison Margaret Jacobi; also present, to their surprise, was a person named Edward Collier, who was introduced as being a corporate rep from a pharmaceutical firm called Space Bio Tech, itself a subsidiary of a much larger multinational biotech company, Spectrum-Mellencamp, Inc.

“We got the skinny while we were having our coffee and doughnuts,” Sugar said. “Spectrum-Mellencamp owned a small spacelab in low-equatorial orbit, about three hundred miles up, called Bios One. They operated it as a microgravity R&D facility to whip up stuff like fertilizers, human growth hormones, junk like that. Collier told us that, for the past year or so, Space Bio Tech had been using it to develop a new pharmaceutical.”

“That sounds rather vague.”

“Yeah, it was,” McPherson said, “and he was real elusive about it. I tried to ask him exactly what he meant, but he said that he couldn’t tell us much more because of the firm’s proprietary interests.” He sipped his beer. “That’s when I first got a bad feeling about the whole deal.”

“Yeah,” Sugar agreed. “So did I, but there was too much else going on, so we didn’t push him on it. Since there were three lives on the line, I didn’t feel like we needed to know everything.”

At 0100, an unmanned orbital transfer vehicle, which had been launched by a Big Dummy from the Cape the previous evening, had attempted to dock in the garage module of Bios One. It was a routine bi-weekly resupply mission, but in the last few seconds of the maneuver, something had gone seriously wrong; the OTV’s main engine had misfired while the spacecraft was under remote control from Bios One. The exact cause of the misfire was still unknown, although NASA troubleshooters suspected human error by the controller on the little space station. Whatever the reason, the OTV had rammed the garage. The crash had punctured the cargo craft’s LOX tank and the vehicle had exploded.

Details were fuzzy after that. Debris from the explosion had punctured the hull of the spacelab’s command/lab module, one of the station’s two major cylinders. Ned Hersh, Bios One’s general manager who had been on duty in the command module at the time of the accident, had managed to transmit a Mayday before radio contact was lost; he said that there was a blowout in Module One, but no other information was relayed before the downlink was severed at the source. If the garage module was destroyed and Module One was crippled, then it was assumed that communications had been lost, when the nearby telemetry mast, mounted on the portside solar wing, was totalled by the explosion.

In fact, everything else was based upon assumption. If there were any survivors, they had to be in Module Two, the habitation cylinder mounted above Module One. And if the portside solar wing had also been damaged, then fifty percent of the spacelab’s power supply was nullified; given the proximity of the outboard oxygen tanks to the garage, it could also be assumed that much of Bios One’s life-support capability had also been nixed.

There was one further problem. According to ground tracking by the USAF Space Command in Colorado Springs, it seemed as if Bios One’s orbit had radically shifted. It appeared that the explosion’s force had managed to nudge the spacelab out of its orbit; since there was an apparent loss of control from the station itself, Bios One’s orbit was decaying and it was being gradually hauled down the gravity well. Within a week, at the very least, the space station would begin to enter Earth’s upper atmosphere, where it would be destroyed.

Phoenix Station, the major NASA space station which was also in equatorial orbit, had been notified of the emergency, but the crew couldn’t do anything about it; its present position was on the other side of Earth, and they didn’t have the capability to effect a long-range rescue mission since their transorbit shuttle, unluckily enough, was presently down for repairs. Mir 3, the Soviet space station, was in an entirely different orbit and inclination, all but completely out of reach; Olympus Station, Skycorp’s powersat construction station, was located in geosynchronous orbit almost twenty-two thousand miles away, and therefore useless for something like this.

But von Braun-class shuttles were designed for quick-turnaround and launch, and since weather patterns around the Cape were forecast to remain stable for the next twelve to twenty-four hours, it was entirely possible that a rescue mission could be launched from the ground. “
Sugar’s Blues
was already on the pad, ready to go,” Sugar went on. “In fact, NASA had already called for fueling and a fast-cycle launch by the time Antonio had given us the call.”

I shook my head. “I don’t understand. If they were asking you to perform a rescue operation …”

“Ain’t no asking about it,” Sugar interrupted. “There’s this sub-paragraph in the federal regs, the SOS clause, which says that if an American-registered manned spacecraft is in trouble while in orbit, then NASA can use right of eminent domain to commandeer whatever resources are available to rescue the crew members. So we were drafted from the git-go.”

“Not that we were about to refuse,” Doug said. “I mean, even if those guys were employed by someone else and had dumbfucked something easy like an OTV rendezvous, they were still spacers. You help out whenever you can. No one had to wave the rule book at us.” He shrugged. “Besides, we were the Blues Brothers, Skycorp’s all-star team, the danger boys. You think we were going to back down from something like this? I lived for this kind of action.”

“At first sight, it looked pretty much a cut-and-dried mission,” Sugar said. “We would launch at 1800 hours, ascend to orbit, and link-up with Bios One. We’d find the survivors if there were any, loam ’em into the shuttle, and bring ’em home. It was all pretty much by the book. No problem.”

He picked up the pitcher, pushed his neglected mug beneath it, and began to pour himself a drink. “Then this Collier character opens his pie-hole. ‘No, no, no,’ he says. ‘Spectrum-Mellencamp has considerable dollar investment in Bios One, Space Bio Tech has an important logistics module linked to it, we can’t just rescue the crew and let everything burn up.’ Yackety-yack and don’t talk back. As it turns out, he wants us to uncouple the log-mod on the station, haul it into
Blues’
cargo bay, and bring it home with us.”

“The same logistics module which is manufacturing something he wouldn’t tell us about,” McPherson said. “The way he came across made it sound as if he really didn’t give a shit for the poor bastards on his station. He wanted that fucking module brought back, first and foremost.”

Sugar grimaced at the memory. “I told the NASA guys that he had to be pulling my dick. I mean, making rendezvous with a station in a decaying orbit is one thing, performing a rescue operation is quite another. Okay, we can swing that. But disengaging a five-ton logistics module from the superstructure, hauling it into the
Blues’
cargo bay with the RWM, and bringing it back home … I mean, didn’t they have their priorities a little bit confused here?”

He topped off his beer and put the pitcher down, yet he didn’t pick up the mug. “But, no, they sided with Collier. Retrieving the log-mod was just as essential as rescuing the personnel. No compromise. Even Gene, who usually had more sense than that since he was once a pilot, went along with it.”

“Mike and I pitched a bitch,” McPherson said. “Y’know, we knew what was ahead of us. We make it sound easy, but handling a fire is really a bitch, especially when your target is incommunicado and in a decaying orbit, and you’ve got to land heavy. All that seemed to fly right over Collier’s head, though. He seemed to think we were truck drivers or something. Pick up some stuff at Point A, bring it back to Point B … no goddamn idea what he was talking about.”