Rude Astronauts (6 page)

The date for delivery of 444 cases of beer was to be on or before April 15, the day that final work on SPS-1 was scheduled to be completed. Dog-Boy and Dog-Girl, who had both worked previously as ground crew at the Cape, worked out the rough framework of the plan. They figured that, once the beer was packed into an OTV and the transfer vehicle was loaded into a shuttle’s cargo bay in the KSC Shuttle Processing Center, it would be smooth sailing. Under standard procedures, the OTV would not be reopened for inspection once the shuttle was mated with its flyback booster and moved to the launch pad. Once the shuttle reached orbit, the flight crew would routinely deploy the OTV from the cargo bay and fire its engine, sending it towards Olympus Station as if it were any other resupply mission.

So the hard part was to get all that beer into an OTV, a difficulty compounded by NASA regulations forbidding all alcoholic beverages at Kennedy Space Center. There was no way a beer truck could simply drive past the checkpoints and offload over four hundred cases of beer at the SPC. Not without attracting the wrath of KSC’s security cops, infamous for their lack of humor.

Eddie relayed these concerns to the bribed cargo loader at the Cape. The cargo loader’s reply, in effect, was: don’t sweat the details, we’ve got it covered. Eddie was also asked if he and his buddies wanted a hundred pounds of beer nuts, cheap.

The cargo loader did his job well. First, he purchased 444 cases from a liquor wholesaler in Titusville, apparently explaining that he was planning a little get-together for a few friends. The wholesaler, not asking too many difficult questions, delivered the beer to the loader’s house in Cocoa Beach, where the cases were stacked in his garage.

Then the cargo loader approached a few touchable cronies who also worked at KSC, and, bribing them for $500 each, managed to enlist their help. He was careful to select Skycorp employees who worked at the SPC, were less than completely honest, and who owned pickup trucks. He found four guys who met that description.

“The big hangup,” Bob continued, “was getting an OTV. The cargo manifests for the weekly shuttle flights were scheduled well in advance and were pretty tight at that point. With SPS-1 soon going on-line, the low-orbit factory stations wanted to stock up their supplies. This guy wouldn’t and couldn’t bump any life-critical cargo, and he couldn’t slide any military or scientific pallets off the board without attracting a lot of attention. So for awhile there we were stuck. We had the beer, we had the plan, and we had the people, but we didn’t have the OTV.”

“The Mark III shuttle was in operation then,” I pointed out. “It could have gone direct to Skycan, and you wouldn’t need to use OTVs at all.”

Bob shook his head. “
The Columbia II
and the
Shepard
were big-ticket birds then. Too high-profile for smuggling stuff, and their cargo bays could be opened anytime, even if you could get something bumped from their cargo manifests. We had to use a Mark II like the
Ley
or the
Sally Ride
, which were doing milk runs with no big fanfare. But, y’know, they had LEO ceilings, which meant we had to find an OTV.

“Anyway, Dog-Boy came up with the solution, but Fred and I did the actual engineering. Three OTVs were permanently docked at Skycan, mainly used to ferry stuff over to the construction shack. Fred and I, when nobody was looking, climbed into one of the things, accessed the guidance computer, and plugged in some new co-ordinates that Dog-Boy figured out. Next time the OTV was sent out to the shack, the engine misfired.” Grinning, Cowboy Bob sipped his beer. “It ended up in an elliptic polar orbit over the Moon. It was a real bitch to retrieve the thing.”

“Oh, ho. Convenient little accident …”

“Exactly. Hank Lutton had to request a new OTV for Skycan, since we were running three shifts to get SPS-1 finished on schedule and we needed three OTVs to get the job done. Skycorp was pissed, but they managed to get NASA to bump a science payload back a couple of weeks so we could be sent a new OTV. We got lucky. It was manifested for the
Willy Ley
, with launch scheduled for April 12, right on the money.”

“Hmmm. KSC doesn’t send up empty OTVs, so something must have been bumped from the manifest anyway.”

“Toilet paper, logbooks, frozen food, screwdriver heads, shit like that. Funny how easy it is to misplace that stuff in the warehouse, y’know.”

While the Free Beer conspirators were taking care of the OTV problem, though, another annoying hassle came to their attention, one much closer at hand: Lenny the Red, who had taken to spying on them.

“It wasn’t hard to figure out that Lenny was keeping tabs on us,” Bob said. “İ guess he thought he was James Bond, but he was about as subtle as an elephant fart. Fred and the Goon and I would be in the rec room, right? Maybe not even talking about this thing. And here he’d come down the ladder, kinda sauntering across the compartment to sit down real close to us, but being careful not to look our way so we wouldn’t notice him. Whistling, for Christ’s sake …”

“Inconspicuous behavior.”

Cowboy Bob sneered. “Nothing about Lenny was inconspicuous. It didn’t take a genius to see that he knew something was going on. At first we thought it was funny, ’cause if the Bill Casey Society thought smuggling beer into space was subversive …”

He shook his head in disgust and polished off his latest beer. “Anyway, they were definitely dumb to rely on a flathead like Lenny for intelligence, and that was the scary part.”

As it turned out, the Caseyites did not know that beer was being smuggled into space. Instead, the Society was once again gnawing on a favorite old bone of the right-wing fringe which had been lying around since the Soviets had launched Sputnik in 1957, that the USSR was preparing to place nuclear warheads in orbit in preparation for a sneak attack on the US from space. Apparently the group had discarded one Commie plot for another. In any case, the Society had informed Lenny to be alert for such a scheme, if there were indeed an active Communist element infiltrating Olympus Station.

So naturally Lenny Gibson, America’s vigilante in space, had discovered just such a plot. There were signs that a nuke would be ferried into orbit aboard an OTV, to be launched by the shuttle
Willy Ley
on April 12.

“Whoa, wait a minute,” I said. “How did you know what he was thinking?”

“Remember those coded messages he was sending to Baltimore? Lenny would write them down first in plain English, then rewrite them into code on the same page. Once he memorized the coded message, he would tear up the page and dump the scraps into the toilet in his bunkhouse. But the moron forgot to flush the pot one day.”

“So you found the scraps and put the uncoded message together.”

Cowboy Bob nodded, grinning. “Plus he talked in his sleep sometimes. Some secret agent, right?”

“Right.” I decided to take Bob’s story with a few more grains of salt. The yarn was getting a little implausible. But I wasn’t ready to call it total bullshit yet. “So now you knew that Lenny thought you guys were smuggling a bomb up there.”

“Yeah. Even though it was funny as hell, it did present another problem. If the Caseyites took Lenny’s reports seriously, they might decide to tip off somebody, like the FBI or NASA. Of course the feds might not take ’em seriously, but on the other hand NASA might not take any chances, and might make sure that security at the Shuttle Processing Center was tighter that week. So Lenny was becoming a pain in the ass and we had to take care of him.”

Pitching Lenny out the nearest airlock was briefly considered, but dismissed because nobody wanted to take a murder rap, although the idea was tempting. They also discussed tying him up and stuffing him into a suit locker for a few days, but the drawback was that he might be missed from his workshift. The conspirators thought about simply letting Gibson know what was going on, letting him in on the plan so that he would be aware that beer, not bombs, was the contraband inside the OTV scheduled to arrive on the 12th; yet a paranoid like Lenny would probably not believe the truth. Even if he did, it was always possible that he would twist it around so that the beer was being laced with mind-altering drugs by those evil Russians.

“Dog-Girl, bless her, came up with the answer,” Bob continued. “Pretty simple, actually. Lenny had to maintain contact with his pals in Baltimore to do any real harm, right? This meant he had to use the phone. Orbit-to-Earth phone calls were rationed items, and you were only allowed to use up so many minutes a month. So we managed to get the communications officers to adjust the phone logs in the computer just a weensy bit so that, suddenly, Lenny was overdrawn on his phone rations for April. No more phone calls, no more messages to Aunt Jane and Uncle George. No secret messages, no word of a Commie plot.”

“Nice going,” I said. “But that just took care of the Caseyites leaking word to NASA. What about Lenny himself?”

“You’re getting ahead of me, Al. I’ll get to that. Hey, Jack! Another round here?”

Around this time a few more of the regulars were wandering into Diamondback Jack’s; some were loitering around the bar watching a baseball game on TV, and a pool game was getting started at the table on the other side of the room. Bob was getting blitzed on the beers I was buying him and I was catching up, so I barely noticed the guy who had elbowed up to the bar a few feet behind Bob. He didn’t look familiar, but that was the only impression I had of him. He seemed not to be paying attention to us and Bob didn’t notice him; the next time I happened to look his way, he was gone. I didn’t think about him again until later.

Two days before the
Willy Ley
made its April 12 milk run, the cargo loader whom Eddie the Goon had bribed, with the help of the four other loaders he paid off, quickly placed 444 cases of beer into OTV OL-3643. The load-in took place during the first shift at the SPC, in the wee hours of the morning on April 10.

For the past week the cargo loaders had been smuggling the beer, a few cases a time, through the KSC security gates, hidden under camper caps in the backs of their trucks. The graveyard shift at the Cape was more easy-going than other shifts at the launch center; the shift supervisors tended to huddle over coffee in the cafeteria, so the loaders apparently had no trouble stashing the beer into the OTV. By the time the SPC’s shift supervisor finished his early-morning coffee break, the OTV was sealed and was being trucked out to Pad 40 to be loaded into the
Ley
’s cargo bay. The shift supervisor routinely checked off OL-3643 as ready to fly, not bothering to check inside.

Eddie the Goon received a telegram from his enterprising friends later that day, innocuously informing him that the party supplies were on the way. Goony grin plastered across his face, Eddie told Bob and the other principal people involved in the scam, and they put the next phase into motion by spreading word along the station grapevine: something wonderful was arriving by OTV at the docking module on April 11, at the beginning of the second shift, and a few volunteers were needed at the Docks to get it hauled from the station’s hub down to the rim modules.

“You didn’t tell them what was coming?” I asked.

Bob belched and shook his head. “Naw. We wanted it to be a surprise. We also didn’t want Hank to find out. But we got enough guys to say they’d be there. Everybody knew it was something good.”

As anticipated, Lenny the Red got the word through the grapevine. He had realized by now that his messages weren’t getting through to Paranoid Central—all part of the Commie plot, of course—so he interpreted the subterfuge as the hatching of the conspiracy. Right idea, wrong conspiracy. To the quiet satisfaction of Cowboy Bob and company, Lenny began to get jumpy. He even switched his bunk assignment again.

“We knew that Dick Tracy would be at the Docks when our OTV arrived, of course,” Bob said. “He was planning on something, though he didn’t know what. There weren’t any guns on Skycan that we knew of, but maybe he had managed to sneak one up in case he had to assassinate some Commies. Maybe he was planning to defuse the nuke all by himself, I dunno. But we just made sure that he was covered when he got there.”

He reached for a cigarette and almost knocked over his beer without noticing. Jack threw us a look of warning which Bob didn’t catch either. He was ripped. “So when the day came, at 1100 hours about, there were ten, fifteen guys crowded into the Docks when the OTV hard-docked with Skycan. Eddie and Fred and me and a couple of the other jacks were kinda casually floating around Lenny while Chang pressurized the airlock and undogged the hatch, so I got to see Lenny’s face when the thing was opened up.”

Cowboy Bob coughed loudly, and then began to laugh. “Jesus! Was he pissed! He was staring with this look on his face when Dog-Boy got the covers and ropes off and started pushing one case after another out into the Docks.”

Bob drunkenly hobbled off his bar stool. “Man! One case after another! Fred screaming ‘Free beer! Free beer!’ And all the guys howling, cracking up, grabbing the cases. Someone opened a can—and you can imagine how shook up that stuff was, after sitting through a rocket launch—and beer started spewing all over the place, making these big yellow bubbles that flew all around, splattering everywhere, and more guys started appearing, hauling the cases out of the Docks, down the ladders through the spokes to the rim. A fucking riot, Al … and in the middle of all this, Lenny, mouth working like a fish, can’t believe what’s going on, shouts …”

Bob shot his arm out wide and yelled, getting the attention of everyone in the bar: “This is un-American! Where’s the goddamn bomb?”

“Hey, Cowboy!” Jack snarled from the other end of the bar. “Cool it or I’ll cut you off!”

Bob was doubled over the bar, cracking up and breathless with the memory of the scene. He got control of himself after a few moments. Clambering back on his stool and reaching for his beer, he said, “And that’s when we dropped the blanket over him.”

Jack Baker gave us one last round of beers and then shut us both off, after first making me walk a straight line to see if I were halfway capable of driving both Bob and myself home. While Cowboy Bob sucked down his last beer he finished the story.