that. Funny how easy it is to misplace that stuff in the warehouse, y’know.”
While the Free Beer conspirators were taking care of the OTV problem, though, another annoying hassle came to their attention, one much closer at hand: Lenny the Red, who had taken to spying on them.
“It wasn’t hard to figure out that Lenny was keeping tabs on us,” Bob said. “İ guess he thought he was James Bond, but he was about as subtle as an elephant fart. Fred and the Goon and I would be in the rec room, right? Maybe not even talking about this thing. And here he’d come down the ladder, kinda sauntering across the compartment to sit down real close to us, but being careful not to look our way so we wouldn’t notice him. Whistling, for Christ’s sake …”
“Inconspicuous behavior.”
Cowboy Bob sneered. “Nothing about Lenny was inconspicuous. It didn’t take a genius to see that he knew something was going on. At first we thought it was funny, ’cause if the Bill Casey Society thought smuggling beer into space was subversive …”
He shook his head in disgust and polished off his latest beer. “Anyway, they were definitely dumb to rely on a flathead like Lenny for intelligence, and that was the scary part.”
As it turned out, the Caseyites did not know that beer was being smuggled into space. Instead, the Society was once again gnawing on a favorite old bone of the right-wing fringe which had been lying around since the Soviets had launched Sputnik in 1957, that the USSR was preparing to place nuclear warheads in orbit in preparation for a sneak attack on the US from space. Apparently the group had discarded one Commie plot for another. In any case, the Society had informed Lenny to be alert for such a scheme, if there were indeed an active Communist element infiltrating Olympus Station.
So naturally Lenny Gibson, America’s vigilante in space, had discovered just such a plot. There were signs that a nuke would be ferried into orbit aboard an OTV, to be launched by the shuttle Willy Ley on April 12.
“Whoa, wait a minute,” I said. “How did you know what he was thinking?”
“Remember those coded messages he was sending to Baltimore? Lenny would write them down first in plain English, then rewrite them into code on the same page. Once he memorized the coded message, he would tear up the page and dump the scraps into the toilet in his bunkhouse. But the moron forgot to flush the pot one day.”
“So you found the scraps and put the uncoded message together.”
Cowboy Bob nodded, grinning. “Plus he talked in his sleep sometimes. Some secret agent, right?”
“Right.” I decided to take Bob’s story with a few more grains of salt. The yarn was getting a little implausible. But I wasn’t ready to call it total bullshit yet. “So now you knew that Lenny thought you guys were smuggling a bomb up there.”
“Yeah. Even though it was funny as hell, it did present another problem. If the Caseyites took Lenny’s reports seriously, they might decide to tip off somebody, like the FBI or NASA. Of course the feds might not take ’em seriously, but on the other hand NASA might not take any chances, and might make sure that security at the Shuttle Processing Center was tighter that week. So Lenny was becoming a pain in the ass and we had to take care of him.”
Pitching Lenny out the nearest airlock was briefly considered, but dismissed because nobody wanted to take a murder rap, although the idea was tempting. They also discussed tying him up and stuffing him into a suit locker for a few days, but the drawback was that he might be missed from his workshift. The conspirators thought about simply letting Gibson know what was going on, letting him in on the plan so that he would be aware that beer, not bombs, was the contraband inside the OTV scheduled to arrive on the 12th; yet a paranoid like Lenny would probably not believe the truth. Even if he did, it was always possible that he would twist it around so
While the Free Beer conspirators were taking care of the OTV problem, though, another annoying hassle came to their attention, one much closer at hand: Lenny the Red, who had taken to spying on them.
“It wasn’t hard to figure out that Lenny was keeping tabs on us,” Bob said. “İ guess he thought he was James Bond, but he was about as subtle as an elephant fart. Fred and the Goon and I would be in the rec room, right? Maybe not even talking about this thing. And here he’d come down the ladder, kinda sauntering across the compartment to sit down real close to us, but being careful not to look our way so we wouldn’t notice him. Whistling, for Christ’s sake …”
“Inconspicuous behavior.”
Cowboy Bob sneered. “Nothing about Lenny was inconspicuous. It didn’t take a genius to see that he knew something was going on. At first we thought it was funny, ’cause if the Bill Casey Society thought smuggling beer into space was subversive …”
He shook his head in disgust and polished off his latest beer. “Anyway, they were definitely dumb to rely on a flathead like Lenny for intelligence, and that was the scary part.”
As it turned out, the Caseyites did not know that beer was being smuggled into space. Instead, the Society was once again gnawing on a favorite old bone of the right-wing fringe which had been lying around since the Soviets had launched Sputnik in 1957, that the USSR was preparing to place nuclear warheads in orbit in preparation for a sneak attack on the US from space. Apparently the group had discarded one Commie plot for another. In any case, the Society had informed Lenny to be alert for such a scheme, if there were indeed an active Communist element infiltrating Olympus Station.
So naturally Lenny Gibson, America’s vigilante in space, had discovered just such a plot. There were signs that a nuke would be ferried into orbit aboard an OTV, to be launched by the shuttle Willy Ley on April 12.
“Whoa, wait a minute,” I said. “How did you know what he was thinking?”
“Remember those coded messages he was sending to Baltimore? Lenny would write them down first in plain English, then rewrite them into code on the same page. Once he memorized the coded message, he would tear up the page and dump the scraps into the toilet in his bunkhouse. But the moron forgot to flush the pot one day.”
“So you found the scraps and put the uncoded message together.”
Cowboy Bob nodded, grinning. “Plus he talked in his sleep sometimes. Some secret agent, right?”
“Right.” I decided to take Bob’s story with a few more grains of salt. The yarn was getting a little implausible. But I wasn’t ready to call it total bullshit yet. “So now you knew that Lenny thought you guys were smuggling a bomb up there.”
“Yeah. Even though it was funny as hell, it did present another problem. If the Caseyites took Lenny’s reports seriously, they might decide to tip off somebody, like the FBI or NASA. Of course the feds might not take ’em seriously, but on the other hand NASA might not take any chances, and might make sure that security at the Shuttle Processing Center was tighter that week. So Lenny was becoming a pain in the ass and we had to take care of him.”
Pitching Lenny out the nearest airlock was briefly considered, but dismissed because nobody wanted to take a murder rap, although the idea was tempting. They also discussed tying him up and stuffing him into a suit locker for a few days, but the drawback was that he might be missed from his workshift. The conspirators thought about simply letting Gibson know what was going on, letting him in on the plan so that he would be aware that beer, not bombs, was the contraband inside the OTV scheduled to arrive on the 12th; yet a paranoid like Lenny would probably not believe the truth. Even if he did, it was always possible that he would twist it around so
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