Rude Astronauts (8 page)

“Weird Frank was a sick kinda dude,” Marty said. “I don’t know why we put up with him as long as we did.”

“So why did you?” I asked.

Marty swigged his beer. “He was a nice guy somehow. He got under your skin, sure, but nothing he did was much worse than any of the weird bullshit anyone else did up there. And there wasn’t anything really malicious about what he did … it was just the way he did it. Every now and then someone would grab him by the neck and get ready to pound the fuck out of him, and his eyes would go wide and he’d put up his hands. ‘Hey, man, I didn’t mean it, I swear!’”

I nodded. I knew a jerk like Weird Frank, during my teenage exile to a boarding school in Tennessee. That guy, though, was too huge to be pounded and his daddy was too wealthy for the school to afford to expel him, which explained how he got away with his pranks. After twenty years, though, I would still like to get him alone in a dark alley. “Nobody ever got serious with him?”

“Not really. Frank wanted to be a pal, that’s all. He just didn’t know what a good joke was … except when he told one accidentally, then we all laughed.” He shrugged. “But that wasn’t very often. The guy was a freak. We were looking for some way to get him off Skycan when he got killed.” Something in my chest went cold. “Marty,” I asked tentatively, “did somebody …?”

He shook his head. “Uh-uh. Nothing like that. We only were trying to find a way to get his contract cancelled. What happened was an accident, believe me.”

In March, 2022, a wicked series of solar flares occurred on the surface of the Sun. Solar flares are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to predict. The only way astronomers can tell that they’re coming is by gauging the eleven-year cycle of increased sunspot activity and watching for an increase in solar luminosity preceding a major flux … a dicey proposition at best, considering that these flares occur with the swift, random violence of a serial killer deciding it was time to take to the streets again.

The protons were potentially lethal to the work crews on the powersats, since they were on EVA outside the shielded environments of Olympus Station or the construction shack, Vulcan Station. On the other hand, everyone had to play things very close. The construction schedule for SPS-3 was such that Skycorp couldn’t order an indefinite stop-work just because someone thought a solar flare might occur soon. Crying wolf could result in several days of labor being lost for nothing, and even the beamjacks didn’t want to sit around in the bunkhouse modules, wasting time for little reason. Not when their bonuses depended upon completing each stage of construction on time. So flare alerts were done at the last minute, when it was absolutely certain that serious storms were kicking up on the Sun’s corona and that everyone had better dive for cover. In general, there was a nine-minute leeway between the time the flares reached lethal proportions and the time their radiation reached Earth orbit. When the alerts happened, beamjacks on EVA abandoned whatever they were doing, untethered from the powersat and split for the Vulcan Station, mucho pronto.

On the day that a flare alert was called, Weird Frank was on EVA, but not on the powersat, where he could have seen everyone heading for shelter in the construction shack. He was outside Olympus Station, performing one of the routine jobs that, once each week, someone draws from the duty roster: “hole patrol,” checking the outer hulls of the rim modules for micrometeorite damage and filling the little holes with “Silly Putty,” the goop used to repair small punctures. When the alert was called, Frank McDowell apparently did not hear, nor did he respond.

“Why didn’t he hear the alert?” I asked.

Marty finished his beer, belched and signaled Jack to bring us another round. “The stupid sumbitch had stuck a micro-CD in his chest unit, where you usually put talk-through tutorials for new guys. He had put in Led Zeppelin and cranked it to the max, so he couldn’t hear anything coming over his comlink. When Command was trying to warn him to get inside, all he was hearing was Led Zep. Drowned out everything else.” He shrugged. “Can’t knock his taste, though. Led Zep was classic shit for spacewalking …”

“But he never got inside?”

“Oh, he finally got in. Not until the CD ended, though, or until he started feeling dizzy. They had been yelling for him to get inside for ten minutes after the storm hit us before he cycled through the hub airlock and told Dave Chang he felt sick. Then he collapsed, right there in the Docks. Chang got his suit off and called Doc Felapolous, but by the time Doc got up there, Frank was comatose. The radiation had gone right through his suit. Bone marrow, lymph glands, guts and nuts …”

Marty winced and snapped his fingers. “Boom. He was a dead man before he even got to the airlock. The only good thing was that he was unconscious when he kicked off. Poor bastard died hard. It’s a shitty way to go.”

“Hmmm.” I took another hit off my beer and gazed at the photo of Weird Frank, grinning and strangling a rubber bird. “That’s it?”

Marty chuckled morosely and looked at the picture himself. “Nope. That was just the beginning. Weird Frank wasn’t about to let go that easy. The fucker couldn’t leave without playing another practical joke.”

“But he was dead …”

“That’s what I said.” Marty took another chug from his beer, oblivious to his own rhyme. “The problem was, we couldn’t get rid of the body.”

In the old science fiction movies, the cliche was that the dearly departed was given a burial in space, much like the traditional burial at sea practiced by sailors, except that in the films the shroud-wrapped corpse was ejected from the spacecraft, presumably to float through the cosmos forever. Stirring music, bagpipes, grim comrades, Matthew 7 read by the captain … yeah, you know the bit.

The truth, however, is that nobody is ever buried in space. For one thing, the families and friends of the deceased usually want to bury them at home. For another, NASA pathologists back at the Cape perform autopsies as standard operating procedure, at least to settle life insurance requirements, not to mention making sure the space companies aren’t overlooking government regulations. Besides, the way people die out there is still a seldom-documented aspect of space medicine, since it doesn’t occur all that often. Every stiff is an education, you might say; the more you learn from one chap’s demise, the more it may help to save the next guy who knocks on heaven’s door.

Because people do get killed in space, though, there are a number of contingency plans. Black, heavy-duty plastic body bags were stowed in Skycan’s sickbay; once Frank was pronounced dead, Doc Felapolous zipped his corpse into one of them. Yet it was more difficult than usual to inter Frank’s body until it could be returned to Earth.

Standard practice, albeit seldom mentioned beyond the pages of the NASA manual, dictates that the body-bagged corpse should be taken outside the pressure vessel and tied to the outer hull with cables. When people had died before on Olympus Station, their bodies were lashed to the station’s hub to await pickup by the next OTV to dock with Skycan. The stiffs were then taken down-orbit to Freedom Station where they were loaded into a shuttle for the last leg of their final journey to Earth.

In Frank McDowell’s case, however, this couldn’t be done. The solar flares which had killed him were still raging, and were likely to continue for several days. Anyone attempting an EVA to tie the body to the station hub would have suffered the same fate Weird Frank had met. To make matters worse, all OTV flights to geosynchronous orbit were halted until the storm was over, since solar flares tended to screw up their internal guidance systems and cause them to head for the Moon and points beyond. A retrieval of the corpse any time soon was out of the question, and even to load Frank’s body into one of Skycan’s own OTVs was inadvisable, since the hub airlock was the least shielded of the station’s modules.

“So you were stuck with a dead body,” I said. “What did you do with him?” Marty belched into his fist. “’Scuse me. Doc took the only option that was available. He had one of the big refrigerators in the galley emptied out and the racks removed, and we stored him in there.

“Oh, jeez! The cooks must have loved that.”

“They weren’t crazy about it, no, but Doc made sure all the food was removed so that there wasn’t a chance of contamination.” He absently picked at the label on his beer bottle. “It wasn’t a bad idea, considering the circumstances. At least then no one had to look at him. The fridge had a temperature of 37 degrees Fahrenheit, so Frank remained … well, fresh.”

“Fresh meat. Sure.”

“Yeah, right. Anyway, he was put in an upright position and sealed in a black body bag. Doc hung a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door, so …”

I started to laugh. Marty gave me a dubious look. “If you think that’s funny,” he said, “you’re gonna love the rest.”

Death didn’t occur often aboard Skycan, but when it did there was tradition to be observed, even when the deceased was a geek like Frank McDowell. His passage from the mortal coil was marked by an Irish wake in the rec room.

This is swell for scholars and saints, but by then there were already signs that Weird Frank was not going to be honored in a manner befitting scholars and saints. At dinnertime, someone had altered the chalkboard menu in the mess module to announce that tonight’s entrees would include Soup du Frank, Frankloaf, and Frank-eyed peas, with Frozen Frank Pudding for dessert … and it didn’t help that the real main course was liver. But it was not until the wake that everyone’s true feelings emerged in regards to their fallen comrade.

There was plenty of beer to go around, since Skycorp had finally relaxed its in-orbit alcohol standards after the smuggling incident with the Free Beer conspiracy. For this mournful occasion, one of the weekends-only kegs was released from storage; since no one was working any EVA shifts because of the flare and wasn’t likely to do so within the next couple of days, almost everyone took the opportunity to get loaded.

During the first couple of rounds, most people were sincerely regretful about Weird Frank’s death: “Christ, man, what a way to buy the farm.” By the third round, though, many former victims of Frank’s bad practical jokes were recalling their experiences (“Hey, remember the story he told about your sister?”) and the rest were expressing the opinion that it was better that Frank’s number had been called instead of their own (“I was supposed to be on hole patrol tomorrow, d’ya’know that?”). By the fourth round, a few folks were quietly saying that the asshole deserved it (“Like, y’know, you get what’s coming to you in this life, right?”) and by the sixth, the opinion was unanimous (“Fuck him and good riddance”).

“That was when Frank made his first appearance,” Marty said.

“Let me guess,” I said. “A picture fell from the wall, or a cup mysteriously moved from one side of a table to another.” I couldn’t help it. Marty had promised me a Halloween story, and I had heard enough ghost stories from allegedly reliable sources to think I recognized a punchline when it was coming. Okay, here comes another bullshit yarn about the Haunted Space Station …

“No, no,” he replied. “I mean,
Frank
returned.”

“Yeah. You looked up and saw him sitting in a chair. He was surrounded by this strange glow and …”

“When nobody was looking,” Marty said calmly, “Russ the Bus and Horny Harry had sneaked over to the mess deck, found the fridge where Doc had stashed the body, and carried Frank back to the party.”

“… come again?”

He smiled and took another swig from his beer. “I didn’t even see it happen. I was over at the holotable watching the Lakers game when I heard some commotion behind me. I didn’t pay any attention, but I had just gotten through telling somebody about the time Weird Frank had reset my suit comlink so that I was picking up Russian crosstalk when Russ tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Hey, Marty, why doncha tell Frank what you thought about his shit?’ I turned around to tell the Bus to get lost …”

Marty grinned and shrugged. “And there was this body bag leaned up against the wall next to the hatch ladder. Frank.”

“Jesus Christ,” I murmured.

“No, it was Frank …”

“That’s pretty ill …”

Marty’s head cocked back and forth. “Actually, it was pretty funny at the time,” he said, completely blasé about the notion. “We were all bombed, of course, and Frank wasn’t high on anyone’s list of best-loved dead people.”

“But still …”

“Hey, the party was for him, so what the fuck? Anyway, everybody got their chance to come around and give Frank their last regards or whatever.”

“That’s sick!”

“Looky. The Russians put Lenin’s stiff in a glass case for almost a whole century. That was a national symbol for them.”

Marty smiled and tipped his bottle toward me. “I mean, there’s worse ways to be remembered. If anything, showing up for his own wake was the best practical joke Frank ever pulled.”

I started to say that Weird Frank hadn’t led the Russian communist revolution, as a practical joke or otherwise, but Marty sipped his beer and went on.

“The bag was kept zipped up, because nobody wanted to really look at him, but the thought that Weird Frank had made it to his own wake … well, you had to be there. It was funny.”

The humor was lost on Doc Felapolous when he stopped by the rec room a few minutes later to see how the wake was going. Skycan’s chief physician went berserk when he discovered that the body had been stolen from the refrigerator. After chewing out everyone in sight, he picked two crewmen at random to carry Frank’s body back to the galley, and Felapolous sealed the hatch with his keycard so no one else would try the same thing again.

That should have been the end of it. It wasn’t.

While Marty visited the men’s room, I got Jack to bring us another round and a shot of tequila for myself; this was beginning to look like a story best taken with raw liquor. Marty continued his tale when he got back from the head.

“You couldn’t keep the mess deck locked at all times because everyone had most of the keycard codes for everything else,” he went on. “Even though Doc had encrypted the hatchlock, it wasn’t hard for Horny Harry to figure out that, in a hurry, Doc might use the numbers 4-15-3 on the keypad … which spells D-O-C in alphanumeric. So it was easy for someone to get in there to steal the body from the fridge.”