Free Rude Astronauts by Allen Steele

moment. “Okay … so long as you don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
    When Marty had been employed by Skycorp in 2022 as one of the high-orbit construction workers who were building the first powersats, there had been another beamjack aboard Olympus Station named Frank McDowell. It’s a well-known fact that many of the men and women who worked as beamjacks aboard Skycan were deranged. Sanity was not a necessary prerequisite for working in space, at least not with the private American space companies. The big buffalo went to work in space, and only the toughest and craziest of the herd were hired for the obligatory one-year contracts on Olympus. Weird Frank, though, was one of the most fucked of a fucked-up crowd.
    Weird Frank was a practical joker without a decent sense of humor. He was the type of person who is compelled to play pranks, but doesn’t have a good handle on what is funny and what is not. Weird Frank liked to put fresh turds in people’s bunks or line the crotch of their hardsuits with Ben-Gay. Weird Frank would find out that someone had a dead sister, then would tell another guy that the poor girl had a great body and he should ask about getting a date once they got back to Earth. Weird Frank, while some guy was floating next to him in the EVA ready-room, suiting up for work on the next shift, would surreptitiously drain his air supply from his life-support pack; when that person got out on tether, he would find that he only had about ten minutes of oxygen in the tank, just enough time to get into an emergency airlock. Weird Frank would borrow your water squeezebulb during a break and spit down the tube, then crack up when you put it to your mouth: “Heeeeey, Phil! I just spit in your water …”
    “Weird Frank was a sick kinda dude,” Marty said. “I don’t know why we put up with him as long as we did.”
    “So why did you?” I asked.
    Marty swigged his beer. “He was a nice guy somehow. He got under your skin, sure, but nothing he did was much worse than any of the weird bullshit anyone else did up there. And there wasn’t anything really malicious about what he did … it was just the way he did it. Every now and then someone would grab him by the neck and get ready to pound the fuck out of him, and his eyes would go wide and he’d put up his hands. ‘Hey, man, I didn’t mean it, I swear!’”
    I nodded. I knew a jerk like Weird Frank, during my teenage exile to a boarding school in Tennessee. That guy, though, was too huge to be pounded and his daddy was too wealthy for the school to afford to expel him, which explained how he got away with his pranks. After twenty years, though, I would still like to get him alone in a dark alley. “Nobody ever got serious with him?”
    “Not really. Frank wanted to be a pal, that’s all. He just didn’t know what a good joke was … except when he told one accidentally, then we all laughed.” He shrugged. “But that wasn’t very often. The guy was a freak. We were looking for some way to get him off Skycan when he got killed.” Something in my chest went cold. “Marty,” I asked tentatively, “did somebody …?”
    He shook his head. “Uh-uh. Nothing like that. We only were trying to find a way to get his contract cancelled. What happened was an accident, believe me.”
    In March, 2022, a wicked series of solar flares occurred on the surface of the Sun. Solar flares are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to predict. The only way astronomers can tell that they’re coming is by gauging the eleven-year cycle of increased sunspot activity and watching for an increase in solar luminosity preceding a major flux … a dicey proposition at best, considering that these flares occur with the swift, random violence of a serial killer deciding it was time to take to the streets again.
    The protons were potentially lethal to the work crews on the powersats, since they were on EVA outside the shielded environments of Olympus Station or the