Rude Astronauts by Allen Steele Read Free Book Online Page B

standard procedures, the OTV would not be reopened for inspection once the shuttle was mated with its flyback booster and moved to the launch pad. Once the shuttle reached orbit, the flight crew would routinely deploy the OTV from the cargo bay and fire its engine, sending it towards Olympus Station as if it were any other resupply mission.
    So the hard part was to get all that beer into an OTV, a difficulty compounded by NASA regulations forbidding all alcoholic beverages at Kennedy Space Center. There was no way a beer truck could simply drive past the checkpoints and offload over four hundred cases of beer at the SPC. Not without attracting the wrath of KSC’s security cops, infamous for their lack of humor.
    Eddie relayed these concerns to the bribed cargo loader at the Cape. The cargo loader’s reply, in effect, was: don’t sweat the details, we’ve got it covered. Eddie was also asked if he and his buddies wanted a hundred pounds of beer nuts, cheap.
    The cargo loader did his job well. First, he purchased 444 cases from a liquor wholesaler in Titusville, apparently explaining that he was planning a little get-together for a few friends. The wholesaler, not asking too many difficult questions, delivered the beer to the loader’s house in Cocoa Beach, where the cases were stacked in his garage.
    Then the cargo loader approached a few touchable cronies who also worked at KSC, and, bribing them for $500 each, managed to enlist their help. He was careful to select Skycorp employees who worked at the SPC, were less than completely honest, and who owned pickup trucks. He found four guys who met that description.
    “The big hangup,” Bob continued, “was getting an OTV. The cargo manifests for the weekly shuttle flights were scheduled well in advance and were pretty tight at that point. With SPS-1 soon going on-line, the low-orbit factory stations wanted to stock up their supplies. This guy wouldn’t and couldn’t bump any life-critical cargo, and he couldn’t slide any military or scientific pallets off the board without attracting a lot of attention. So for awhile there we were stuck. We had the beer, we had the plan, and we had the people, but we didn’t have the OTV.”
    “The Mark III shuttle was in operation then,” I pointed out. “It could have gone direct to Skycan, and you wouldn’t need to use OTVs at all.”
    Bob shook his head. “ The Columbia II and the Shepard were big-ticket birds then. Too high-profile for smuggling stuff, and their cargo bays could be opened anytime, even if you could get something bumped from their cargo manifests. We had to use a Mark II like the Ley or the Sally Ride , which were doing milk runs with no big fanfare. But, y’know, they had LEO ceilings, which meant we had to find an OTV.
    “Anyway, Dog-Boy came up with the solution, but Fred and I did the actual engineering. Three OTVs were permanently docked at Skycan, mainly used to ferry stuff over to the construction shack. Fred and I, when nobody was looking, climbed into one of the things, accessed the guidance computer, and plugged in some new co-ordinates that Dog-Boy figured out. Next time the OTV was sent out to the shack, the engine misfired.” Grinning, Cowboy Bob sipped his beer. “It ended up in an elliptic polar orbit over the Moon. It was a real bitch to retrieve the thing.”
    “Oh, ho. Convenient little accident …”
    “Exactly. Hank Lutton had to request a new OTV for Skycan, since we were running three shifts to get SPS-1 finished on schedule and we needed three OTVs to get the job done. Skycorp was pissed, but they managed to get NASA to bump a science payload back a couple of weeks so we could be sent a new OTV. We got lucky. It was manifested for the Willy Ley , with launch scheduled for April 12, right on the money.”
    “Hmmm. KSC doesn’t send up empty OTVs, so something must have been bumped from the manifest anyway.”
    “Toilet paper, logbooks, frozen food, screwdriver heads, shit like