Rude Astronauts by Allen Steele Page A

heard someone describing someone else as a goddamn sumbitch asshole, or similar words to the effect. I couldn’t be certain, because it was drowned out by more demolition work which sounded only slightly less painful than root canal surgery.
    A wise man would have stayed put in the men’s room. The Rude Astronauts were not, by definition, the only obnoxious space types out there tonight. Pack a few dozen ornery drunks into a bar, that’s one thing: pack a few dozen of the Cape’s blue-collar workforce into Diamondback Jack’s on a sticky-hot Saturday night in July, and that’s quite another. Cross one of ’em and there’s gonna be trouble: “Hey, pal, you gotta nice house? Huh? You gotta nice wife? You got nice kids? You gotta nice cat? Don’t fuck with me, or I’ll drop a dead satellite on ’em.” But I’m a journalist by trade and lifestyle, which by definition makes me a dummy; reporters go where angels fear to tread. I zipped up my fly and cautiously ventured out front into the barroom, figuring that I would probably see the result of some guy getting too personal with another man’s wife or girlfriend on the dance floor.
    I came through the door just in time to see Jack Baker sprinting from behind the bar, his trusty Louisville slugger clenched in his right hand. That was a surprise in itself. Jack’s got a gut the size of a medicine ball—have you ever met a skinny bar-owner?—but he moved like Ricky Brock stealing second for the Indians. “Make a hole!” I heard him shout, and as the roomful of regulars veered out of his way, Jack hurled himself toward the epicenter of the melee, which was not on the tiny dance-floor in front of the stage where I expected, but toward the left rear end of the barroom.
    Five men were on the floor, wrestling with each other in a bath of blood and beer. The three on top looked like regulars—denims, sneakers, cowboy shirts, a couple of Skycorp caps—but the moment I glimpsed the two guys who were pinned down, I knew they didn’t belong in this place. Not that I recognized them personally; like the other three, they were complete strangers, but judging by the way they were duded out, I recognized their type.
    They were company men. Any company; pick one, they all look alike. Skycorp, Uchu-Hiko, or Galileo if you choose the privates, or maybe NASA, FBI, CIA, NSA, NSC, FAA, FDA, DEA, IRS or any of the rest of the alphabet soup one normally associates with the government bureaucracy which haunts the Cape. However, Diamondback Jack’s was one of the few places which was tacitly verboten to suits. If you’re not a working-class spacer who does more at the Kennedy Space Center than carry around a clipboard and a nametag, you should have had better sense than to walk into the joint. These guys—with their off-the-rack sport coats, nylon golf shirts, flat-top haircuts and matching used-car-dealer mustaches—stuck out in a dive like this. Someone should tell these bozos that just putting on a pair of Levis and Monkey Ward topsiders doesn’t do the trick; even New York City subway cops have a better sense of camouflage. These yahoos had narc written all over them; I wondered how they had gotten through the door in the first place.
    Jack was already pushing back one of the regulars with his baseball bat; the other two were backing off, suddenly mindful of the mess they had created. The two suits on the bottom were beginning to pick themselves off the floor; one of them, a guy with thinning blond hair, had a large rip down the back of his plaid sport coat and one eye which was half closed from a bruise he had taken from a punch. He looked as if he were in bad shape; I instinctively went forward to give the guy a hand off the floor. People are people, right?
    “Hey, hey …” I said as I knelt down to grab the suit from under his armpits, intending to help him to his feet. “Don’t … let’s take a look at …”
    “Fuck you,” he snarled. And then the jerk, still