"Allen Steele - Free Beer and the William Casey Society" - читать интересную книгу автора (Steele Allen)

FREE BEER AND
THE WILLIAM CASEY
SOCIETY
by ALLEN M. STEELE
Illustrations ┬о1994 by Timothy Ballou

Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

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INTRODUCTION

This is the second short story of mine which was published in an SF
magazine; the first, тАЬLive From The Mars HotelтАЭ saw print in the
mid-December 1989 issue of Isaac Asimov тАШs Science Fiction, and тАЬFree
Beer and the William Casey SocietyтАЭ followed two issues later, in the
February тАШ89 issue of the same magazine.

The story was inspired by an off-hand comment made by Art Dula,
a Texas attorney specializing in space lawтАФyes, there is such a
fieldтАФwhen he spoke at the founding conference of the International
Space University, held at MIT in April, 1987. Art was delivering a
presentation on commercial space activity, and during the course of his
speech he happened to remark that the NASA space shuttles were
capable of delivering 2,000 gallons of beer into orbit.

Everyone laughed, of course, and I wrote this odd figure down in
my notebook. It wasnтАЩt until several months later, though, when I
rediscovered my notes from the ISU conference, that this story occurred
to me. I wrote a letter to art and asked if he was just making a rhetorical
comment; he wrote back and told me that he wasnтАШt, and explained his
reasoning, which is faithfully reported in this story.

Bob Jennings, the proprietor of the Fabulous Fiction SF bookstore
in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the rest of the gang who hung out
there on Friday afternoons, helped me develop some of the other bits
and pieces. I set the whole thing in the near-future background I had
created for my novel Orbital Decay (my first fiction sale, which wasnтАЩt
published until many months after this story was published); as it turned
out, it would be the first of several short stories and three more novels I
would write in this future history.

It is now dated somewhat by the subplot regarding the late,
not-so-great U.S.S.R. and the paranoia which underlined American
relationships with the Russians. When I included this story in my
collection, Rude Astronauts, I was tempted to update the story to
compensate for recent historical events. I chose not to do so; any
attempt to do so would be contrived at best, and IтАЩd rather let this minor
anachronism remain as a tombstone to the Cold War.