Free Rude Astronauts by Allen Steele Page A

construction shack, Vulcan Station. On the other hand, everyone had to play things very close. The construction schedule for SPS-3 was such that Skycorp couldn’t order an indefinite stop-work just because someone thought a solar flare might occur soon. Crying wolf could result in several days of labor being lost for nothing, and even the beamjacks didn’t want to sit around in the bunkhouse modules, wasting time for little reason. Not when their bonuses depended upon completing each stage of construction on time. So flare alerts were done at the last minute, when it was absolutely certain that serious storms were kicking up on the Sun’s corona and that everyone had better dive for cover. In general, there was a nine-minute leeway between the time the flares reached lethal proportions and the time their radiation reached Earth orbit. When the alerts happened, beamjacks on EVA abandoned whatever they were doing, untethered from the powersat and split for the Vulcan Station, mucho pronto.
    On the day that a flare alert was called, Weird Frank was on EVA, but not on the powersat, where he could have seen everyone heading for shelter in the construction shack. He was outside Olympus Station, performing one of the routine jobs that, once each week, someone draws from the duty roster: “hole patrol,” checking the outer hulls of the rim modules for micrometeorite damage and filling the little holes with “Silly Putty,” the goop used to repair small punctures. When the alert was called, Frank McDowell apparently did not hear, nor did he respond.
    “Why didn’t he hear the alert?” I asked.
    Marty finished his beer, belched and signaled Jack to bring us another round. “The stupid sumbitch had stuck a micro-CD in his chest unit, where you usually put talk-through tutorials for new guys. He had put in Led Zeppelin and cranked it to the max, so he couldn’t hear anything coming over his comlink. When Command was trying to warn him to get inside, all he was hearing was Led Zep. Drowned out everything else.” He shrugged. “Can’t knock his taste, though. Led Zep was classic shit for spacewalking …”
    “But he never got inside?”
    “Oh, he finally got in. Not until the CD ended, though, or until he started feeling dizzy. They had been yelling for him to get inside for ten minutes after the storm hit us before he cycled through the hub airlock and told Dave Chang he felt sick. Then he collapsed, right there in the Docks. Chang got his suit off and called Doc Felapolous, but by the time Doc got up there, Frank was comatose. The radiation had gone right through his suit. Bone marrow, lymph glands, guts and nuts …”
    Marty winced and snapped his fingers. “Boom. He was a dead man before he even got to the airlock. The only good thing was that he was unconscious when he kicked off. Poor bastard died hard. It’s a shitty way to go.”
    “Hmmm.” I took another hit off my beer and gazed at the photo of Weird Frank, grinning and strangling a rubber bird. “That’s it?”
    Marty chuckled morosely and looked at the picture himself. “Nope. That was just the beginning. Weird Frank wasn’t about to let go that easy. The fucker couldn’t leave without playing another practical joke.”
    “But he was dead …”
    “That’s what I said.” Marty took another chug from his beer, oblivious to his own rhyme. “The problem was, we couldn’t get rid of the body.”
    In the old science fiction movies, the cliche was that the dearly departed was given a burial in space, much like the traditional burial at sea practiced by sailors, except that in the films the shroud-wrapped corpse was ejected from the spacecraft, presumably to float through the cosmos forever. Stirring music, bagpipes, grim comrades, Matthew 7 read by the captain … yeah, you know the bit.
    The truth, however, is that nobody is ever buried in space. For one thing, the families and friends of the deceased usually want to bury them at home. For another,