Rude Astronauts by Allen Steele Read Free Book Online

Free Beer conspiracy, as it came to be called. There were quite a few obstacles which had to be crossed, the largest of which was circumnavigating NASA and Skycorp. But the obstacle which they didn’t foresee was the William Casey Society, personified aboard Skycan by one Leonard Gibson, sometimes known as Lenny the Red.
    The William Casey Society, of course, was the extreme right-wing group which had taken up in the new century where the fanatics of the 20th century—the John Birch Society, the LaRouchians, the American Nazi Party—had left off. Named after an old CIA chief who had died during one of those White House scandals ’way back when, the Bill Casey Society had become the cause of choice for disenfranchised Communist-haters of every stripe, from conspiracy mavens to shellshocked vets of Gulf War II to survivalists disappointed that a global thermonuclear war had not occurred. Fueled by a distrust of the new cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union—particularly in space, as typified by the joint exploration of Mars—and led by a minor presidential candidate named George White, the Caseyites compensated for a lack of political clout with fervor, paranoia, and a few well-placed connections.
    Space industrialization had become a favorite target of the Bill Casey Society—in particular, Skycorp’s powersat project. It was George White’s contention that the building of SPS-1 was the first stage in a Communist-backed secret operation to control the world. Skycorp was being backed by the Soviet Union, White claimed, and the SPS networks were being established not for use as orbital power stations but as microwave beam weapons. Once three powersats were established over the United States and two were built in geostationary orbit above Great Britain and Japan, Soviet moles in Skycorp and NASA would take control of the SPS system, turn the microwave transmitters against American, British, and Japanese armed forces—namely, hypersonic bombers and submarines—and fry them, thus paving the way for Soviet global conquest.
    Never mind that SPS microwave beams, designed to relay energy from space to ground-based rectennas with as little environmental damage as possible, barely had the power to blister the paint job on a bomber or a sub. Never mind that the Soviets were building their own SPS system in orbit above the USSR, or that the Kremlin had better fish to fry—so to speak—than whacky schemes for global domination. But this kind of paralogia always finds the audience, and it keeps the tax-free contributions rolling in.
    The Caseyites, to their credit, realized that the SPS construction crews on Olympus Station—the latest generation of high-risk, blue-collar, All American hardhats—were unlikely to be Communist sympathizers, but were guilty only of ignorance. This was obviously the soft belly of the Commie plot. So the Caseyites went so far as to plant their own agent on Skycan, picking a member from their ranks to go to work on Olympus Station in an effort to convince the beamjacks that there was a plot afoot and to convert them to the Caseyite cause.
    That person was Leonard Gibson, a thin and somewhat wild-eyed former arc welder for Martin Marietta, who managed to get a job as a beamjack on Skycan.
    “We already had Lenny’s number by this time, of course,” Bob said, “and we tended to leave him alone.”
    “What do you mean, you had his number?”
    Bob sipped his beer. “He came aboard Skycan, from day one, passing out Caseyite leaflets, trying to make converts out of his bunkmates, claiming that certain members of the command crew were Russian sleepers. Lenny used to get into these brain-damaged rants in the rec room about how we were all Commie dupes, that sort of thing. He even insisted on changing his bunk assignment regularly, saying that he was being bugged or something.”
    I shrugged. “There were a lot of weird cases on Skycan. He should have fit right in.”
    Bob shook