Rude Astronauts (7 page)

Once Bob, Eddie, and Fred had grabbed Lenny in the blanket and trussed him with nylon cords, they shoved him into an empty suit locker in the Docks and locked it shut. By then the party was beginning to roll down into the rim modules; most of the second-shift beamjacks were logging in sick, and the third shift was looking for excuses. Once it became obvious that a surprise party was in progress and that trying to shut it down would only incite general mutiny, Hank Lutton grudgingly called the day off, halting construction work for the next twenty-four hours before heading down to the rim himself. He later told the honchos at Skycorp and NASA that a spread of stomach virus had caused the stop-work. No big deal, in the long run; the party only delayed the low-power tests by a day.

Sometime during the celebration, Bob and Eddie and Dog-Girl slipped to the Docks, hauling behind them two garbage bags filled with empty beer cans. Dog-Girl had already sneaked into the vacant medical bay and swiped one of Doc Felapolous’ sedative guns. The three of them opened the suit locker and Dog-Girl tranked Lenny with a shot to the neck, and once Lenny was in a stupor they untied him and stuffed him into a hardsuit, making certain that he had two full airtanks in his life-support pack.

“We then threw him in the OTV, emptied the bags in there so that there were dozens of empty cans floating around with him, and closed the hatch,” Bob said. “Dog-Girl and the Goon reset the nav computer so it would rendezvous with Columbus Station in LEO, and then we fired the sunnuvabitch back to Earth. Never saw him again.”

“That was all?” I asked.

Bob, smiling and slumped over the bar, looked at me and shook his head slowly. “Well … not quite. See, I taped a note on the back of Lenny’s suit, where he couldn’t see it or take it off. It said, ‘To the Bill Casey Society … take your drunk stool pigeon and shove him!’ I didn’t sign it, but I think Lenny let ’em know who the author was, and I don’t think they appreciated my sense of humor.”

Neither did Skycorp, which was how Cowboy Bob lost his contract bonus and got nailed with a couple of fines which deflated his payroll. He ended up on the “unhirable” list with the major space companies as a result of the Free Beer Conspiracy. When the hammer inevitably came down, he alone took the pounding.

“But y’know what, Al?” he said as I half-carried him towards the door. “I don’t give a shit. Y’gotta have a sense of humor. Flatheads like the Casey jerks … they don’t have a sense of humor, goddamn fanatics. Following me, telling me I gotta keep my mouth shut. I pissed on them from a considerable height, and I’d do it again if I could …”

Bob threw up in the bushes behind the bar, then passed out in the shotgun seat of my car after mumbling directions to his house. I concentrated on keeping my vision straight as I carefully drove down Route 3 towards Cocoa Beach. It was a quarter past midnight when I drove over the Banana River causeway onto Route A1A, cruising through the beachfront commercial strip of Cocoa Beach. The night was black as space, wet and humid like the inside of a dog’s mouth, neon-glittering like the old visions of the high frontier.

A couple of units, a pump and a ladder, from the Cocoa Beach Fire Department screamed past us in the left lane as I passed the old Satellite Motel. Bob, snoring in the depths of his drunken sleep, paid no attention, nor did I until we passed the commercial zone and headed into the residential part of town. Then the stranger, the guy who had lingered in Jack’s near Bob and me while he was telling me the story, oddly came to mind, for no particular reason. Remembering him, I also recalled something Bob had told me about Lenny Gibson, how he used to hang around in the Skycan rec room, attempting to eavesdrop on conversations. I began to feel uneasy. For no particular reason.

As I turned the corner onto the residential street where Bob told me he lived, I spotted the fire trucks again, parked in the street in front of a small white Florida-style stucco house, practically identical to all the other white stucco houses lining the road. The house was ablaze with fire shooting through a collapsing roof and the firemen directing streams of water through broken front windows, while people stood around beyond the piles of hoses, watching the blaze. I slowed to a stop behind the trucks and shook Bob awake.

“Hey, Bob,” I said. “One of your neighbors has his house on fire.”

Bob’s eyes cracked open, and he stared through the windshield at the burning house. He didn’t say anything for a few moments, just stared.

“It
is
one of your neighbors’, isn’t it?” I asked, feeling an unseasonal chill.

Cowboy Bob didn’t look at me, nor did he laugh, but his mouth twisted into a sad, angry sort of smile. “What did I tell you?” he whispered at last. “Fanatics. No goddamn sense of humor.”

True story.

T
HIS IS A WARNING
, the only one you’ll get, so don’t take it lightly: this is a truly bizarre and ugly story. In all probability it is a lie since it was told to me second-hand in a seedy Florida barroom, the last place one should ever expect to hear the truth about anything; if it isn’t a lie, then human affairs are even more depraved than you may have imagined.

If you’re searching for a nice, soothing yarn which will make you sleep easier tonight, snug and secure in the knowledge that people are essentially decent and that, even in the frontier of space, there are certain codes of human behavior by which all men and women abide, then it is strongly suggested that you skip this story. This tale is a rabid dog with a mouthful of foam and an attitude.

This is the story of Weird Frank and the terrible things which were done to his stinking corpse, and if you’re not ready for some unsettling weirdness, it’s time to go away before things get messy.

You have been warned.

By sheer coincidence, it was on a Halloween night when I first noticed the photo of Weird Frank on the wall behind the bar at Diamondback Jack’s. I wasn’t thinking of ghosts, zombies, or the so-called things which go bump in the night. In fact, I had even forgotten that it was Halloween. It was a dull evening and I had dropped by the roadhouse to have a couple of beers before heading home to my place in Cocoa Beach.

Diamondback Jack’s is a scruffy little beer joint located on Route 3 on Merritt Island, about two miles down the highway from the west gate of Kennedy Space Center. It is very much a blue-collar kind of place, and not even a nice one at that; don’t seek it out unless you know how to handle yourself in a fight with a mean drunk who has murder on his mind because you happened to bump into his cue while he was laying up a two-corner shot on the pool table. The ambiance is Late American Redneck: sticky floors, battered cheap furniture, bad lighting, and a juke box filled mainly with country-western CDs. No windows, a sand parking lot splattered with oil, vomit and piss, and a men’s room in which you don’t want to spend much time. The varnished hide of a four-foot rattler is mounted above the bar; it either came from the hide of a snake which the owner, Jack Baker, claimed to have killed while on a fishing trip in the Everglades, or from one of the regulars who bounced a check on him.

Diamondback Jack’s is a hangout for space pros, the men and women at the Cape who do the hands-on dirty work of the high frontier: shuttle jocks, pad rats, cargo dips, software weenies, firing room honchos, Vacuum Suckers, itinerant beamjacks and moondogs who hang out there between off-Earth jobs—and it shows. Framed photos of space scenes are on all the walls: shuttle liftoffs, shots of the lunar base at Descartes, the big wheel of Olympus Station under construction, the assembly of the first SPS powersat. Behind the long oak bar where the owner, Jack Baker, holds court every night are more pictures: vets of the final frontier, living and dead, famous and infamous. Some of the faces belong to regular customers; most, though, are legends, if only among the fraternity of pros. No one else knows their names.

I thought I was familiar with each face on the wall, but that night, for the first time, I spotted a picture which I had simply never noticed before. Jack had rearranged the bottles behind the bar, so the tall-necked vodka bottles were in a different place and no longer blocked this particular photo. I was bored, and while sitting on the bar stool and absently scanning the pictures, I happened to notice this one.

The man in the photo had dark, curly hair and a greasy handlebar mustache; he looked like the sort of person you might imagine making obscene phone calls to a Catholic convent. He was wearing a Skycorp jumpsuit with the sleeves cut off, grinning at the camera while throttling a rubber chicken in his hairy hands. Fairly unremarkable, compared to some of the other pictures on the wall, except that someone had taped a handwritten caption to the bottom of the frame. I stood up on the rungs of my stool, leaned over the bartop, and squinted at the caption. It read:

FRANK MCDOWELL—THE GREATEST CORPSE WHO EVER LIVED.

Who can ignore a line like that?

“Hey, Jack,” I called out. “Who was Frank McDowell?”

Jack Baker was sitting at the opposite end of the bar, suffering through a newspaper crossword puzzle. He looked up, followed my gaze to the photograph, then sighed and closed his eyes. “Never mind,” he said.

“I’m serious,” I insisted. “Who was Frank McDowell, and why was he the greatest corpse who ever lived?”

Jack glared at me, then laid down his pencil and walked over to my end of the bar, pulling a fresh Budweiser out of the cooler on the way. “This one’s on the house if you drop the question,” he said as he placed the beer in front of me.

It was tempting, but the worst way to shake a journalist’s curiosity is to attempt bribing him. “I’ll pay for the beer, thanks. I just want to know …”

“Yeah, right.” He gave me a long, hard stare, saying nothing for a few moments. “This doesn’t end up in your paper, does it?” he asked quietly.

That was a serious question, potentially endangering my good standing in the bar. In my case, being in bad standing at Diamondback Jack’s possibly meant being dragged out back and having the shit kicked out of me for no good reason at all. There are a number of different people who are not welcome in the bar: top NASA officials, executives for the major space companies, union reps, tourists, space groupies, children … and journalists. Especially journalists. Reporters are perceived around the Cape as having screwed the space pros since the Project Mercury days. Gators, leeches, and rattlesnakes are held in higher regard on the Space Coast than the press; at least their behavior is excusable because of their nature, and none of them has ever pushed a camera or a live mike into the faces of a family who has just watched a shuttle blow up nine miles downrange from the pad. With only one exception, none were tolerated in Diamondback Jack’s.

I was the exception. I was the only writer allowed on the premises, and this was because I never opened my notebook or turned on my recorder in the bar, or repeated anything that I had heard or seen in my freelance articles for the
Times
. For this reason, Jack served me and the other regulars didn’t beat me up in the parking lot on general principles.

My status was hard-won, and I was careful never to abuse the privilege. “I promise,” I said solemnly. “Just tell me what …”

I shrugged and pointed to the photo with the mysterious caption. Jack gave me one more look of warning—“fuck with me and I’ll ram an ice-scoop down your throat”—then he raised a hand and whistled. “Hey, Marty! C’mere! Al wants to know something.”

There was a heavy-set guy with long, dirty blond hair shooting pool by himself at the other side of the room. I had seen him in the bar before, but had never met him. He put down his cue, walked over and elbowed up against the bar next to me. Jack introduced us: his name was Marty—last names seldom matter in Diamondback Jack’s—and he had been a beamjack on Olympus Station back in ’22 and ’23, the years when SPS-3 was being built. Marty looked tough as a whore; when he reached for his beer, I noticed that he had the letters H-A-T-E tattooed across the thick knuckles of his right hand. But he was willing to talk as long as I bought the suds.

Jack put another round in front of us, then returned to his crossword puzzle. “What do you want to know?” Marty asked.

“The picture,” I replied, pointing again to the photo of Frank McDowell. “What’s with the caption on that picture? ‘The Greatest …’”

“‘The Greatest Corpse Who Ever Lived,’” Marty finished, nodding his head. “Uh-huh. I wrote that.”

“What’s it mean?”

Marty smiled and looked down at the scratched bartop, idly tracing his finger around the wet ring left by a bottle. “Do you know it’s Halloween?”

“It is? I forgot … yeah, I guess so. Why?”

He laughed and picked up his beer. “Are you in the mood for a Halloween story?” He took a sip and peered at me over the neck of his bottle. “I mean, a true story? None of this shit about the Hook, stuff like that?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Right.” He looked at the picture on the wall for a moment. “Okay … so long as you don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

When Marty had been employed by Skycorp in 2022 as one of the high-orbit construction workers who were building the first powersats, there had been another beamjack aboard Olympus Station named Frank McDowell. It’s a well-known fact that many of the men and women who worked as beamjacks aboard Skycan were deranged. Sanity was not a necessary prerequisite for working in space, at least not with the private American space companies. The big buffalo went to work in space, and only the toughest and craziest of the herd were hired for the obligatory one-year contracts on Olympus. Weird Frank, though, was one of the most fucked of a fucked-up crowd.

Weird Frank was a practical joker without a decent sense of humor. He was the type of person who is compelled to play pranks, but doesn’t have a good handle on what is funny and what is not. Weird Frank liked to put fresh turds in people’s bunks or line the crotch of their hardsuits with Ben-Gay. Weird Frank would find out that someone had a dead sister, then would tell another guy that the poor girl had a great body and he should ask about getting a date once they got back to Earth. Weird Frank, while some guy was floating next to him in the EVA ready-room, suiting up for work on the next shift, would surreptitiously drain his air supply from his life-support pack; when that person got out on tether, he would find that he only had about ten minutes of oxygen in the tank, just enough time to get into an emergency airlock. Weird Frank would borrow your water squeezebulb during a break and spit down the tube, then crack up when you put it to your mouth: “Heeeeey, Phil! I just spit in your water …”