Rude Astronauts Read Online Free PDF Page B

you a call in the next week,” he said. “I need to talk it over with Irene and … sorta put things together in my own mind.”
    Dick nodded again. “Sure. That’s fine with me.”
    Roy let out his breath and gazed up again at the Moon. “You know,” he said, “I resent you for this, sort of.”
    Dick blinked, looking surprised. “How come?”
    “I’ve come to appreciate getting old,” Roy said. “Retirement has its pleasures. It means you’ve finally grown up. I thought I had outgrown the Moon, but maybe there’s still that kid in me.” He hesitated. “I don’t care what you say, Dick, but it’s a choice between growing old and becoming young again. It’s a helluva choice to make.”
    “At least you get a choice,” Dick said.
    Roy grinned and cocked his head. “Yeah, that’s true.” He studied the beer bottle again. “But sometimes, though, you’d rather wish you didn’t know you had one.”
    None of them said anything after that. They killed their beers and listened to the night. A few minutes later the back door opened and the two women walked out to the deck. It was the usual signal that it was time for the party to end. Beth found Ronnie and Jack asleep on the front lawn, having dozed off during the fireworks, guarded by Max; she picked up Veronica and Howie lifted Jackson and, without waking them, loaded them into the back seat of the Bronco. They could get to the National Forest campground in Pinkham Notch in a couple of hours; Dick was reserved at the Holiday Inn in Manchester.
    They had long since learned to make departures short and sweet; the three men didn’t like mushy scenes. Handshakes and hugs, promises to call and write, then both cars were pulling out of the driveway and heading for the highway. Roy caught a meaningful final glance from Dick before his rental car disappeared from sight.
    Roy and Irene cleaned up the deck and the kitchen, turned off the lights, put Max out for the night. In their pajamas, they lay in bed for a short while, Irene reading the latest Book-of-the-Month Club thriller, Roy staring at last week’s issue of Time . A brief article in the international section said that the Russians had set another longevity record for a cosmonaut on their space station—nothing really new.
    Irene finished a chapter, marked her place with a paper bookmark, and Roy dropped his magazine on the floor. She leaned over and kissed him goodnight, then Roy reached up and turned off the light. But while his wife rolled over and went to sleep, Roy lay awake and stared at the ceiling for a long, long time.
    Remembering the last time he had gone walking on the Moon.

Free Beer and the William Casey Society
    C OWBOY BOB TOLD ME this story one slow Wednesday night while we were hunched over the bar in Diamondback Jack’s, so I can’t make a strong case for its veracity. If you drink and hang around in barrooms, you should know that half the stories you hear are outright lies, and the other half are at least slightly exaggerated. And one would have to be more than a little gullible to completely believe a former beamjack named Cowboy Bob. Gullible, stoned, or both.
    If it weren’t for the events which happened after Bob told me about the Bill Casey Society and the Free Beer Conspiracy on Skycan, I wouldn’t be bothering to pass this yarn along. I’m a respectable journalist; I don’t trade in hearsay. But maybe there’s a moral in this story. If not a moral, then at least a warning.
    Diamondback Jack’s is a hole-in-the-wall beer joint on Merritt Island, Cape Canaveral, about two miles down Route 3 from the Kennedy Space Center. It’s a dive for space grunts, which means that it’s not the sort of place to take the kids. In fact, tourists, space groupies, execs from the space companies, NASA honchos, and most media people are unwelcome in Jack’s. Not that the place is all that attractive; windowless, weatherbeaten pine walls, oil-spattered and littered sand parking lot,