Rude Astronauts by Allen Steele Page B

knew of, but maybe he had managed to sneak one up in case he had to assassinate some Commies. Maybe he was planning to defuse the nuke all by himself, I dunno. But we just made sure that he was covered when he got there.”
    He reached for a cigarette and almost knocked over his beer without noticing. Jack threw us a look of warning which Bob didn’t catch either. He was ripped. “So when the day came, at 1100 hours about, there were ten, fifteen guys crowded into the Docks when the OTV hard-docked with Skycan. Eddie and Fred and me and a couple of the other jacks were kinda casually floating around Lenny while Chang pressurized the airlock and undogged the hatch, so I got to see Lenny’s face when the thing was opened up.”
    Cowboy Bob coughed loudly, and then began to laugh. “Jesus! Was he pissed! He was staring with this look on his face when Dog-Boy got the covers and ropes off and started pushing one case after another out into the Docks.”
    Bob drunkenly hobbled off his bar stool. “Man! One case after another! Fred screaming ‘Free beer! Free beer!’ And all the guys howling, cracking up, grabbing the cases. Someone opened a can—and you can imagine how shook up that stuff was, after sitting through a rocket launch—and beer started spewing all over the place, making these big yellow bubbles that flew all around, splattering everywhere, and more guys started appearing, hauling the cases out of the Docks, down the ladders through the spokes to the rim. A fucking riot, Al … and in the middle of all this, Lenny, mouth working like a fish, can’t believe what’s going on, shouts …”
    Bob shot his arm out wide and yelled, getting the attention of everyone in the bar: “This is un-American! Where’s the goddamn bomb?”
    “Hey, Cowboy!” Jack snarled from the other end of the bar. “Cool it or I’ll cut you off!”
    Bob was doubled over the bar, cracking up and breathless with the memory of the scene. He got control of himself after a few moments. Clambering back on his stool and reaching for his beer, he said, “And that’s when we dropped the blanket over him.”
    Jack Baker gave us one last round of beers and then shut us both off, after first making me walk a straight line to see if I were halfway capable of driving both Bob and myself home. While Cowboy Bob sucked down his last beer he finished the story.
    Once Bob, Eddie, and Fred had grabbed Lenny in the blanket and trussed him with nylon cords, they shoved him into an empty suit locker in the Docks and locked it shut. By then the party was beginning to roll down into the rim modules; most of the second-shift beamjacks were logging in sick, and the third shift was looking for excuses. Once it became obvious that a surprise party was in progress and that trying to shut it down would only incite general mutiny, Hank Lutton grudgingly called the day off, halting construction work for the next twenty-four hours before heading down to the rim himself. He later told the honchos at Skycorp and NASA that a spread of stomach virus had caused the stop-work. No big deal, in the long run; the party only delayed the low-power tests by a day.
    Sometime during the celebration, Bob and Eddie and Dog-Girl slipped to the Docks, hauling behind them two garbage bags filled with empty beer cans. Dog-Girl had already sneaked into the vacant medical bay and swiped one of Doc Felapolous’ sedative guns. The three of them opened the suit locker and Dog-Girl tranked Lenny with a shot to the neck, and once Lenny was in a stupor they untied him and stuffed him into a hardsuit, making certain that he had two full airtanks in his life-support pack.
    “We then threw him in the OTV, emptied the bags in there so that there were dozens of empty cans floating around with him, and closed the hatch,” Bob said. “Dog-Girl and the Goon reset the nav computer so it would rendezvous with Columbus Station in LEO, and then we fired the sunnuvabitch back to Earth. Never saw him