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busted plastic beer sign, clusters of Harley-Davidsons and GM pickup trucks parked outside. It looks like the sort of northern Florida redneck joint where you can get a cold stare for requesting a vodka collins instead of a Budweiser, or get hit over the head with a pool cue for fouling someone else’s shot. Appearances aren’t deceiving, either. You’re better off drinking in the fern bars down on Cocoa Beach.
    But if you can survive a few consecutive nights in Jack’s without being punched out or thrown out, you’re on the way to joining the regulars: professional spacers whose lives revolve around the Cape and the space business. Shuttle pilots, launch pad crews, firing room techs, spacecraft mechanics, flight software writers, cargo loaders, moondogs, the Vacuum Suckers, and beamjacks.
    Inside, Diamondback Jack’s is all space. On the walls are framed photos and holos of Mark I, II, and III shuttles lifting off, of beamjacks tethered to sections of powersats, moondogs building the mass driver at Descartes Station, Big Dummy HLVs coasting into orbit, Olympus Station revolving like a huge wheel in geostationary orbit above a crescent Earth. The bulletin board near the door is pinned with job openings and torn-out articles from Aviation Week . Behind the long oak-top bar, along with the varnished and mounted skin of the rattlesnake that Jack Baker claims to have killed while fishing in the Everglades (“Sumbitch crawled into my boat and I kilt it with my shotgun. Blew the bastard’s head clean off.”), are snapshots of spacers past and present, dead and alive, unknown and infamous: Tiny Prozini, Joe Mama, Lisa Barnhart, Virgin Bruce Neiman, Dog-Boy and Dog-Girl, Monk Walker, Mike Webb, Eddie the Gentle Goon, Sandy Fey. There’s a picture of Jack Baker, as a skinny kid, standing with Robert A. Heinlein, taken at a science fiction convention many years ago. And there’s a picture of Cowboy Bob, wearing a hardsuit with his helmet off, sneering at the camera. He’s wearing his trademark Stetson in that picture.
    I think that Bob was born with that tan felt Stetson on his head. I don’t think it could be removed without surgery. Maybe he’s got a pointed head underneath. With his white beard, wrinkled eyes, and bad teeth, though, he was no singing cowpoke or last noble horseman. Bob was a space grunt. Once he told me he couldn’t stand horses.
    When I knew him, Cowboy Bob was one of those hard-up, unemployed cases who were regular fixtures in Jack’s, pissing away the money they had made years ago as beamjacks on the powersat project. Jack was one of those semi-skilled young turks who had signed on with Skycorp and spent two tough years in orbit on Olympus Station—Skycan, as the vets knew the giant orbital base. They went because the pay was good, or for the adventure, or because they were wanted back home by the law, the IRS, or their former spouses. The ones who survived the experience and didn’t screw up came home to small fortunes in accumulated back pay and bonuses. Those guys bought restaurants or small businesses, or just bought condos on the Cape and were lazy for the rest of their lives.
    Some other vets, though, screwed up and lost much of their pay to fines and penalties. Those guys came back with not much more money in the bank than they had before they left. Most of these grunts left the industry. The ones who stayed, for the most part, tried to find ground jobs on the Cape, or went overseas to work for the Europeans or the Japanese. A handful of diehards tried to get another space job.
    Cowboy Bob, the former Utah goat roper who couldn’t stand horses, was one of those in the last category. Skycorp wouldn’t rehire him, though; nor would Uchu-Hiko or Arianespace. So he took small jobs for the little companies which did short-term subcontract work for NASA or the Big Three. But I don’t think he ever left Earth again after he finished his contract on Skycan; his jobs were always on the ground. I