Read Online Rude Astronauts by Allen Steele - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Allen Steele
Tags: Science-Fiction, Anthologies
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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
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
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