Free Rude Astronauts by Allen Steele Page B

NASA pathologists back at the Cape perform autopsies as standard operating procedure, at least to settle life insurance requirements, not to mention making sure the space companies aren’t overlooking government regulations. Besides, the way people die out there is still a seldom-documented aspect of space medicine, since it doesn’t occur all that often. Every stiff is an education, you might say; the more you learn from one chap’s demise, the more it may help to save the next guy who knocks on heaven’s door.
    Because people do get killed in space, though, there are a number of contingency plans. Black, heavy-duty plastic body bags were stowed in Skycan’s sickbay; once Frank was pronounced dead, Doc Felapolous zipped his corpse into one of them. Yet it was more difficult than usual to inter Frank’s body until it could be returned to Earth.
    Standard practice, albeit seldom mentioned beyond the pages of the NASA manual, dictates that the body-bagged corpse should be taken outside the pressure vessel and tied to the outer hull with cables. When people had died before on Olympus Station, their bodies were lashed to the station’s hub to await pickup by the next OTV to dock with Skycan. The stiffs were then taken down-orbit to Freedom Station where they were loaded into a shuttle for the last leg of their final journey to Earth.
    In Frank McDowell’s case, however, this couldn’t be done. The solar flares which had killed him were still raging, and were likely to continue for several days. Anyone attempting an EVA to tie the body to the station hub would have suffered the same fate Weird Frank had met. To make matters worse, all OTV flights to geosynchronous orbit were halted until the storm was over, since solar flares tended to screw up their internal guidance systems and cause them to head for the Moon and points beyond. A retrieval of the corpse any time soon was out of the question, and even to load Frank’s body into one of Skycan’s own OTVs was inadvisable, since the hub airlock was the least shielded of the station’s modules.
    “So you were stuck with a dead body,” I said. “What did you do with him?” Marty belched into his fist. “’Scuse me. Doc took the only option that was available. He had one of the big refrigerators in the galley emptied out and the racks removed, and we stored him in there.
    “Oh, jeez! The cooks must have loved that.”
    “They weren’t crazy about it, no, but Doc made sure all the food was removed so that there wasn’t a chance of contamination.” He absently picked at the label on his beer bottle. “It wasn’t a bad idea, considering the circumstances. At least then no one had to look at him. The fridge had a temperature of 37 degrees Fahrenheit, so Frank remained … well, fresh.”
    “Fresh meat. Sure.”
    “Yeah, right. Anyway, he was put in an upright position and sealed in a black body bag. Doc hung a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door, so …”
    I started to laugh. Marty gave me a dubious look. “If you think that’s funny,” he said, “you’re gonna love the rest.”
    Death didn’t occur often aboard Skycan, but when it did there was tradition to be observed, even when the deceased was a geek like Frank McDowell. His passage from the mortal coil was marked by an Irish wake in the rec room.
    This is swell for scholars and saints, but by then there were already signs that Weird Frank was not going to be honored in a manner befitting scholars and saints. At dinnertime, someone had altered the chalkboard menu in the mess module to announce that tonight’s entrees would include Soup du Frank, Frankloaf, and Frank-eyed peas, with Frozen Frank Pudding for dessert … and it didn’t help that the real main course was liver. But it was not until the wake that everyone’s true feelings emerged in regards to their fallen comrade.
    There was plenty of beer to go around, since Skycorp had finally relaxed its in-orbit alcohol standards after the