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always figured that was because of his drinking problem.
    So Bob spent his nights in Diamondback Jack’s, swilling beer, talking shop with the techs and other unemployed space grunts, making sour-breathed passes at the college cuties who slummed in Jack’s during spring break, keeping his feelers out for job leads, shooting the bull with anyone who would buy the next round. That’s how he told me the story, that Wednesday night when the place was dead, about the Skycan beer scam.
    He was already drunk when I sat down next to him at the bar. I signaled to Jack to bring me a Bud, and the first thing Bob said to me was the sort of thing one would expect from an inebriated wreck. Cocking his head toward the door, he asked, “You just came in, didn’t ya, Al?”
    I nodded.
    “Did you see any cars parked out there?” he asked.
    “Sure, Bob. Yours. Mine. Jack’s. Whose car are you looking for?”
    He cast me a look suggesting that I had become stupid since the last time he had seen me. “Brown Toyota-GM Cutlass. One or two men sitting inside.” He paused and added, “William Casey Society sticker on the rear window. Remember what I told you last Saturday?”
    I shook my head as Jack pushed a tallneck in front of me. “I wasn’t here last Saturday, Bob.”
    (Of course, I didn’t say where I had been last Saturday. There’s nothing wrong with attending a routine press conference at KSC, unless you’re a patron at Jack’s. Spacers and reporters have an acrimonious relationship going back to the days when Project Apollo press pool reporters gave NASA a new definition—Never A Straight Answer. Jack used to keep a bag of Morton’s salt underneath the counter for the novice journalists who wandered into the bar looking for sources, to dump on their heads as soon as they pulled out their notebooks “so the bloodsucking leeches will wither up and die.” My presence was tolerated only because I was lowkey about my profession and because I never brought my work into Jack’s. So the less said about my stringer work for the Times , the better.)
    “Huh,” Bob said, wearing the vaguely puzzled expression of a heavy drinker facing short-term memory lapses. “Maybe I didn’t tell you about it.” He looked towards the door again. “Well, is there a car like that out there?”
    “I didn’t see one. But I don’t think I’d recognize a Casey Society sticker if I saw one.”
    Now Cowboy Bob had my curiosity worked up. Perhaps that was his intent all along; get me involved in a conversation and cadge drinks off me all night. I decided to play along. It was a slow, humid summer night, and I was in the mood for a tall tale.
    I got Jack to bring Cowboy Bob another Miller’s and I pulled out my cigarettes. Bob took a long hit off his beer, tilted the frayed rim of his hat back a half inch, and leaned a little closer to me. “Did I ever tell you about how we got 444 cases of beer up to Skycan? Well …”
    Ten years ago (Cowboy Bob told me) his crew was doing the final work on SPS-1, the first large-scale solar power satellite to be built by Skycorp. Almost five years and the labor of nearly three hundred men and women had gone into the project, not to mention over $10 billion in corporate investments and government loans. The result was the 21st century equivalent to the Golden Gate Bridge, a landmark achievement in space construction. All that remained to be done before the beginning of the low-power tests was the final installment of the microwave dish antennas at both ends of the thirteen-mile span of the powersat.
    “So we were pretty proud of what we had done there,” Bob recalled. “There would be other powersats, of course, but this was the first big one, and we were the crew that was putting on the finishing touches. That called for some kind of celebration, right? So one night a few guys from the second shift got together in one of the rec rooms and started talking about what we wanted to do. As it turned out,