Read Rude Astronauts for Free Online Page B

everyone wanted a beer bust.”
    The problem with that, of course, was that both Skycorp and NASA had stringent regulations against alcoholic beverages in space being made available to space work crews. The rules were tightly enforced; NASA inspectors searched all outbound orbital and lunar crews for booze, and Skycorp’s security cops on Olympus Station had already found and torn out two stills aboard the space station. Skycorp had tried to compromise with the beamjacks’ thirst by providing in the rec rooms nonalcoholic near-beer—a weak, watery brew which tasted like chilled boar whizz.
    “That just wasn’t good enough,” Bob said. “I mean, we’d been gagging on that stuff for the past eighteen months. We wanted real beer. Budweiser, Miller’s, Busch, Rolling Rock, Black Label … anything!”
    He hefted his latest bottle of beer to show what real beer looked like. “At this point, y’know, nobody gave a damn about Skycorp’s rules. The job was done, our money was in the bank. Once the last array of cells was laid down and the antennas were installed, we’d all be shipped home and it would be the end of a long tour of duty. So we were willing to take some risks, break some regs. Who cared? We were entitled to a good blowout, man.”
    Getting beer onto Skycan entailed a smuggling operation, of course. In the past, Skycan workers had managed to bribe KSC ground crews into packing off-limits personal items into the orbital transfer vehicles which resupplied Olympus Station on a weekly basis. A network of reliable connections at the Cape, therefore, was already in place. But the stuff which had been stashed into the OTVs before they were loaded into the cargo bays of the shuttles—tape players, cassettes, comic books, Monopoly games, and even the occasional fifth of whiskey or vodka—had taken up little room in the OTVs and could be easily hidden from NASA inspectors. The more the conspiring beamjacks thought about it, the more they realized that, in order to get enough beer into space for a proper party, this operation demanded smuggling an unprecedented volume of contraband into orbit.
    “Dog-Boy pulled out a calculator and figured it out,” Bob continued. “A Mark II shuttle’s OTV had a cargo capacity of 65,000 pounds, which translated to about a thousand gallons, water or beer. That was about 444 cases of twelve-ounce cans.”
    He paused and gazed at his empty bottle: I gave Jack the high sign to bring us another round. It looked as if I were going to have to pump a thousand gallons of beer into Cowboy Bob to get the story, which was probably what Bob wanted me to do. But the yarn was getting good and I wasn’t about to start being cheap. Jack silently put another round in front of us—he had already deprived Bob of the keys to his Jeep—and the former beamjack continued his story.
    “Of course, Dog-Boy made that calculation just to give us an idea of what could be done. ‘Of course that’s absurd,’ he said. But once he told us it could be done …” He laughed, shaking his head.
    “You only had about a hundred people up there,” I said. “Ten gallons of beer for every crew member was a little overkill, don’t you think?”
    “You’re missing the point, Al!” Bob slapped his hands down on the bartop. “It wasn’t a matter of whether everyone had a six-pack or a hundred gallons. We had just gotten through building a nineteen square mile structure in space. There was nothing we couldn’t do! We were the best space construction crew there had ever been! So it was … it was like …”
    “A matter of pride.”
    “Hell, yeah! It wasn’t having the beer that mattered. It was getting the beer, that was the point. The challenge was the thing.” He shrugged and picked up his beer. “So what the fuck? We decided to do it.”
    So the handful of beamjacks involved in the discussion—Bob, Dog-Boy and Dog-Girl, Eddie the Gentle Goon, Suffering Fred, a few others—got to work in plotting the