Rude Astronauts Read Online Free

definitely getting lumpy. Howie’s twins didn’t pay a bit of attention to any of this, of course; Roy’s friendly old collie, Max, came bounding out of the woods to meet them, and soon Jack and Ronnie were chasing the dog down to the lakeshore.
    Another summer afternoon, another barbecue. They all changed into their swimsuits and went down to the dock to swim and admire Roy’s second-hand Chris-Craft cabin cruiser which he was gradually restoring. Roy, Dick, and Howie attempted to play softball with Jackson and Veronica, giving up when Howie popped a fly ball into the dense woods behind the house, losing it so thoroughly that even Max couldn’t find it. By this time, Irene had started the charcoal in the grill on the backyard deck while Beth had fixed the salad, so Roy put the steaks on the grill and opened the case of Coors he had tucked in the refrigerator.
    They ate on the deck while across the still twilight waters of the lake local teenagers shot off bottle rockets and firecracker strings. When dinner was over, Irene and Beth cleared the table and carried the remains into the kitchen. Max lay down on the deck and gnawed at a T-bone Howie had tossed his way. Jackson found the carved-wood Saturn V model in the living room and tried to take it out into the front yard before Roy stopped him and gently removed the prized model from the child’s grasp; the kids found their toys in the Bronco and ran back down to the dock with the dog.
    Wives gossiping in the kitchen—thank God, they had finally learned to get along with each other after all these years—kids torturing the dog, the sun setting behind the distant hills, Roy, Dick, and Howie sat together on the deck, chugging beer. As the photosensor switched on the backyard lights, their talk finally turned to space.
    As usual, the grapevine stuff came first, stories about what other ex-astronauts were doing. Glenn was making another re-election run in the Senate; no doubt his constituents in Ohio would let him keep his seat (“But, Christ, you’d think he would have switched parties by now”). Collins was publishing another book (“He knows how to write, but if he wants another bestseller, he’d better do fiction like that Tom Clancy guy”). Armstrong was maintaining a low profile again after his stint on the Rogers Commission (“You gotta admire the guy. He could have opened shopping centers for the rest of his life”), and Bean was solidifying his reputation as a fine artist (“He ain’t no Rembrandt, but his stuff sure is pretty”).
    Then there were the old yarns about themselves, retold countless times, always worth hearing again: the time when Dick had been chewed out for doing low-altitude aerobatics over the Cape in his T-38 trainer; when Howie had let a urine sample “slip” out of his hands to splatter all over a flight doctor’s penny loafers; when Roy, flying a Gulfstream over Merritt Island just before the Apollo 14 launch to check the weather conditions, had buzzed a Soviet spy trawler operating just outside the ten-mile coastal limit. There were other stories they all knew—like when Howie had played “Moon River” on a Jew’s-harp while in lunar orbit, just to annoy CapCom—but these weren’t brought up. Stories about being up there meant, eventually, that they would talk about walking on the Moon.
    Yet there are subjects which cannot be ignored for long. As night settled on the New England countryside, an alabaster crescent began to rise over the distant shoreline, tinting the lake with silver beams. The three men gradually fell silent and gazed at the Moon, each absorbed with their own thoughts. Through the cabin’s open windows they could hear the unintelligible voices of Irene and Beth from the living room, just under the electronic beep-boop-beep of the kids playing a computer game on Roy’s Macintosh. The collection of dead beer bottles had grown around them and Roy was beginning to wish he had picked up a second case the day