Rude Astronauts by Allen Steele Page A

that the beer was being laced with mind-altering drugs by those evil Russians.
    “Dog-Girl, bless her, came up with the answer,” Bob continued. “Pretty simple, actually. Lenny had to maintain contact with his pals in Baltimore to do any real harm, right? This meant he had to use the phone. Orbit-to-Earth phone calls were rationed items, and you were only allowed to use up so many minutes a month. So we managed to get the communications officers to adjust the phone logs in the computer just a weensy bit so that, suddenly, Lenny was overdrawn on his phone rations for April. No more phone calls, no more messages to Aunt Jane and Uncle George. No secret messages, no word of a Commie plot.”
    “Nice going,” I said. “But that just took care of the Caseyites leaking word to NASA. What about Lenny himself?”
    “You’re getting ahead of me, Al. I’ll get to that. Hey, Jack! Another round here?”
    Around this time a few more of the regulars were wandering into Diamondback Jack’s; some were loitering around the bar watching a baseball game on TV, and a pool game was getting started at the table on the other side of the room. Bob was getting blitzed on the beers I was buying him and I was catching up, so I barely noticed the guy who had elbowed up to the bar a few feet behind Bob. He didn’t look familiar, but that was the only impression I had of him. He seemed not to be paying attention to us and Bob didn’t notice him; the next time I happened to look his way, he was gone. I didn’t think about him again until later.
    Two days before the Willy Ley made its April 12 milk run, the cargo loader whom Eddie the Goon had bribed, with the help of the four other loaders he paid off, quickly placed 444 cases of beer into OTV OL-3643. The load-in took place during the first shift at the SPC, in the wee hours of the morning on April 10.
    For the past week the cargo loaders had been smuggling the beer, a few cases a time, through the KSC security gates, hidden under camper caps in the backs of their trucks. The graveyard shift at the Cape was more easy-going than other shifts at the launch center; the shift supervisors tended to huddle over coffee in the cafeteria, so the loaders apparently had no trouble stashing the beer into the OTV. By the time the SPC’s shift supervisor finished his early-morning coffee break, the OTV was sealed and was being trucked out to Pad 40 to be loaded into the Ley ’s cargo bay. The shift supervisor routinely checked off OL-3643 as ready to fly, not bothering to check inside.
    Eddie the Goon received a telegram from his enterprising friends later that day, innocuously informing him that the party supplies were on the way. Goony grin plastered across his face, Eddie told Bob and the other principal people involved in the scam, and they put the next phase into motion by spreading word along the station grapevine: something wonderful was arriving by OTV at the docking module on April 11, at the beginning of the second shift, and a few volunteers were needed at the Docks to get it hauled from the station’s hub down to the rim modules.
    “You didn’t tell them what was coming?” I asked.
    Bob belched and shook his head. “Naw. We wanted it to be a surprise. We also didn’t want Hank to find out. But we got enough guys to say they’d be there. Everybody knew it was something good.”
    As anticipated, Lenny the Red got the word through the grapevine. He had realized by now that his messages weren’t getting through to Paranoid Central—all part of the Commie plot, of course—so he interpreted the subterfuge as the hatching of the conspiracy. Right idea, wrong conspiracy. To the quiet satisfaction of Cowboy Bob and company, Lenny began to get jumpy. He even switched his bunk assignment again.
    “We knew that Dick Tracy would be at the Docks when our OTV arrived, of course,” Bob said. “He was planning on something, though he didn’t know what. There weren’t any guns on Skycan that we