The Sam Gunn Omnibus

by Ben Bova

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. You’ll see.”

  The bartender waddled away, toward the crowd. When he came back, Jade saw that a compactly built gray-haired man was coming down the other side of the bar toward her, holding a pilsner glass half filled with beer in his left hand.

  “Jade, meet Felix Sanchez. Felix, this is Jade. I dunno what her last name is ‘cause she never told me.”

  Sanchez was a round-faced Latino with a thick dark mustache. He smiled at Jade and extended his hand. She let him take hers, and for a wild moment she thought he was going to bring it to his lips. But he merely held it for several seconds. His hand felt warm. It engulfed her own.

  “Such beautiful eyes,” Sanchez said, his voice so low that she had to strain to hear it over the buzz of the crowd. “No wonder you are called Jade.”

  She felt herself smiling back at him. Sanchez must have been more than fifty years old, she guessed. But he seemed to be in good athletic shape beneath his casual pullover and slacks.

  “You knew Sam Gunn?” Jade asked.

  “Knew him? I was nearly killed by him!” And Sanchez laughed heartily while the bartender gave up all pretense of working and planted both his elbows on the plastic surface of his bar.

  The Long Fall

  EVERYBODY BLAMED SAM FOR WHAT HAPPENED-SANCHEZ SAID—but if you ask me it never would’ve happened if the skipper hadn’t gone a little crazy.

  Space station Freedom was a purely government project, ten years behind schedule and a billion bucks or so over budget. Nothing unusual about that. The agency’s best team of astronauts and mission specialists were picked to be the first crew. Nothing unusual about that, either.

  What was weird was that somehow Sam Gunn was included in that first crew. And John J. Johnson was named commander. See, Sam and Commander Johnson got along like hydrazine and nitric acid—hypergolic. Put them in contact and they explode.

  You’ve got to see the picture. John J. Johnson was a little over six feet tall, lean as a contrail, and the straightest straight-arrow in an agency full of stiff old graybeards. He had the distinguished white hair and the elegant good looks of an airline pilot in a TV commercial.

  But inside that handsome head was a brain that had a nasty streak in it. “Jay-Cubed,” as we called him, always went by the rule book, even when it hurt. Especially when it hurt, if you ask me.

  Until the day we learned that Gloria Lamour was coming to space station Freedom. That changed everything, of course.

  Sam, you know, was the opposite of the commander in every way possible. Sam was short and stubby where Johnson was tall and rangy. Hair like rusty Brillo. Funny color eyes; I could never tell if they were blue or green. Sam was gregarious, noisy, crackling with nervous energy; Johnson was calm, reserved, detached. Sam wanted to be everybody’s pal; Johnson wanted respect, admiration, but most of all he wanted obedience.

  Sam was definitely not handsome. His round face was bright as a penny, and sometimes he sort of looked like Huckleberry Finn or maybe even that old-time child star Mickey Rooney. But handsome he was not. Still, Sam had a way with women. I know this is true because he would tell me about it all the time. Me, and anybody else who would be within earshot. Also, I saw him in action, back at the Cape and during our training sessions in Houston. The little guy could be charming and downright courtly when he wanted to be.

  Ninety days on a space station with Sam and Commander Johnson. It was sort of like a shakedown cruise; our job was to make sure all the station’s systems were working as they ought to. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. The station wasn’t big enough to hide in.

  There were only six of us on that first mission, but we kept getting in each other’s way—and on each other’s nerves. It was like a ninety-day jail sentence. We couldn’t get out. We had nothing to do but work. There were no women. I think we would’ve all gone batty if it weren’t for Sam. He was our one-man entertainment committee.

  He was full of jokes, full of fun. He organized the scavenger hunt that kept us busy every night for two solid weeks trying to find the odd bits of junk that he had hidden away in empty oxygen cylinders, behind sleep cocoons, even floating up on the ceiling of the station’s one and only working head. He set up the darts tournament, where the “darts” were really spitballs made of wadded Velcro and the reverse side of the improvised target was a blow-up photo of Commander Johnson.

  Sam was a beehive of energy. He kept us laughing. All except the commander, who had never smiled in his life, so far as any of us knew.

  And it was all in zero-gee. Or almost. So close it didn’t make any real difference. The scientists called it microgravity. We called it weightlessness, zero-gee, whatever. We floated. Everything floated if it wasn’t nailed down. Sam loved zero-gee. Johnson always looked like he was about to puke.

  Johnson ruled with an aluminum fist. No matter how many tasks mission control loaded on us, Johnson never argued with them. He pushed us to do everything those clowns on the ground could think of, and to do it on time and according to regulations. No shortcuts, no flimflams. Naturally, the more we accomplished the more mission control thought up for us to do. Worse, Johnson asked mission control for more tasks. He volunteered for more jobs for us to do. We were working, working, working all the time, every day, without a break.

  “He’s gonna kill us with overwork,” grumbled Roger Cranston, our structural specialist.

  “The way I figure it,” Sam said, “is that Jay-Cubed wants us to do all the tasks that the next crew is supposed to do. That way the agency can cut the next mission and save seventy million bucks or so.”

  Al Dupres agreed sourly. “He works us to death and then he gets a big kiss on the cheek from Washington.” Al was French-Canadian, the agency’s token international representative.

  Sam started muttering about Captain Bligh and the good ship Bounty.

  They were right. Johnson was so eager to look good to the agency that he was starting to go a little whacko. Some of it was Sam’s fault, of course. But I really think zero-gee affected the flow of blood to his brain. That, and the news about Gloria Lamour, which affected his blood flow elsewhere.

  We were six weeks into the mission. Sam had kept his nose pretty clean, stuck to his duties as logistics officer and all the other jobs the skipper thought up for him, kept out of Johnson’s silver-fox hair as much as he could.

  Oh, he had loosened the screw-top on the commander’s coffee squeeze-bulb one morning, so that Johnson splashed the stuff all over the command module. Imagine ten thousand little bubbles of coffee (heavy on the cream) spattering all over, floating and scattering like ten thousand teeny fireflies. Johnson sputtered and cursed and glowered at Sam, his coveralls soaked from collar to crotch.

  I nearly choked, trying not to laugh. Sam put on a look of innocence that would have made the angels sigh. He offered to chase down each and every bubble and clean up the mess. Johnson just glowered at him while the bubbles slowly wafted into the air vent above the command console.

  Then there was the water bag in the commander’s sleep cocoon. And the gremlin in the computer system that printed out random graffiti like: Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. Or: Where is Fletcher Christian when we really need him?

  Commander Johnson started muttering to himself a lot, and staring at Sam when the little guy’s back was to him. It was an evil, red-eyed stare. Sent chills up my spine.

  Then I found out about the CERV test.

  Crew Emergency Reentry Vehicle, CERV. Lifeboats for the space station. We called them “capsules.” Suppose something goes really wrong on the station, like we’re hit by a meteor. (More likely, we would’ve been hit by a piece of man-made junk. There were millions of bits of debris floating around out there in those days.) If the station’s so badly damaged we have to abandon ship, we jump into the capsules and ride back down to Earth.

  Nobody’d done it, up to then. The lifeboats had been tested with dummies inside them, but not real live human being
s. Not yet.

  I was on duty at the communications console in the command module that morning when Commander Johnson was on the horn with Houston. All of a sudden my screen breaks up into fuzz and crackles.

  “This is a scrambled transmission,” the commander said in his monotone, from his station at the command console, three feet to my right. He plugged in a headset and clipped the earphone on. And he smiled at me.

  I took the hint and made my way to the galley for a squeeze of coffee, more stunned by that smile than curious about his scrambled conversation with mission control. When I got back Johnson was humming tunelessly to himself. The headset was off and he was still smiling. It was a ghastly smile.

  Although we put in a lot of overtime hours to finish the tasks our commander so obligingly piled on us, Johnson himself left the command module precisely at seven each evening, ate a solitary meal in the wardroom and then got eight full hours of sleep. His conscience was perfectly at ease, and he apparently had no idea whose face was on the reverse of the darts target.

  As soon as he left that evening I pecked out the subroutine I had put into the comm computer and reviewed his scrambled transmission to Houston. He may be the skipper, but I’m the comm officer and nothing goes in or out without me seeing it.

  The breath gushed out of me when I read the file. No wonder the skipper had smiled.

  I called Sam and got him to meet me in the wardroom. The commander had assigned him to getting the toilet in the unoccupied laboratory module to work, so that the scientists who’d eventually be coming up could crap in their own territory. In addition to all his regular duties, of course.

  “A CERV test, huh,” Sam said when I told him. “We don’t have enough to do; he’s gonna throw a lifeboat drill at us.”

  “Worse than that,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Sam was hovering a few inches off the floor. He liked to do that; made him feel taller.

  Chairs are useless in zero-gee. I had my feet firmly anchored in the foot loops set into the floor around the wardroom table. Otherwise a weightless body would drift all over the place. Except for Sam, who somehow managed to keep himself put.

  Leaning closer toward Sam, I whispered, “It won’t be just a drill. He’s going to pop one of the lifeboats and send it into a real reentry trajectory.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit. He got permission from Houston this morning for a full balls-out test.”

  Sam grabbed the edge of the galley table and pulled himself so close to me I could count the pale freckles on his snub of a nose. Sudden understanding lit up those blue-green eyes of his.

  “I’ll bet I know who’s going to be on the lifeboat that gets to take the long fall,” he whispered back at me.

  I nodded.

  “That’s why he smiled at me this evening.”

  “He’s been working out every detail in the computer,” I said, my voice as low as a guy planning a bank heist, even though we were alone in the wardroom. “He’s going to make certain you’re in the lab module by yourself so you’ll be the only one in the lifeboat there. Then he’s going to pop it off.”

  The thought of riding one of those uncontrolled little capsules through the blazing heat of reentry and then landing God knows where— maybe the middle of the ocean, maybe the middle of the Gobi Desert—it scared the hell out of me. Strangely, Sam grinned.

  “You want to be the first guy who tries out one of those capsules?” I asked.

  “Hell no,” he said. “But suppose our noble liege-lord happens to make a small mistake and he’s the one to take the ride back home?”

  I felt my jaw drop open. “How’re you going to ...”

  Sam grinned his widest. “Wouldn’t it be poetic if we could arrange things so that ol’ Cap’n Bligh himself gets to take the fall?”

  I stared at him. “You’re crazy.”

  “That’s what they said about Orville and Wilbur, pal.”

  The next week was very intense. Sam didn’t say another word to me about it, but I knew he was hacking into the commander’s comm link each night and trying to ferret out every last detail of the upcoming lifeboat drill. Commander Johnson played everything close to the vest, though. He never let on, except that he smiled whenever he saw Sam, the sort of smile that a homicidal maniac might give his next victim. I even thought I heard him cackling to himself once or twice.

  The other three men in the crew began to sense the tension. Even Sam became kind of quiet, almost.

  Then we got word that Gloria Lamour was coming up to the station.

  Maybe you don’t remember her, because her career was so tragically

  short. She was the sexiest, slinkiest, most gorgeous hunk of redheaded femininity ever to grace the video screen. A mixture of Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe and Michelle Pfeiffer. With some Katharine Hepburn thrown in for brains and even a flash of Bette Midler’s sass.

  The skipper called us together into the command module for the news. Just as calmly as if he was announcing a weather report from Tibet he told us:

  “There will be a special shuttle mission to the station three days from this morning. We will be visited for an unspecified length of time by a video crew from Hollywood. Gloria Lamour, the video star, will apparently be among them.”

  It hit us like a shock wave, but Commander Johnson spelled it out just as if we were going to get nothing more than a new supply of aspirin.

  “Miss Lamour will be here to photograph the first video drama ever filmed in space,” he told us. “She and her crew have received clearance from the highest levels of the White House.”

  “Three cheers for President Heston,” Sam piped.

  Commander Johnson started to glare at him, but his expression turned into a wintry smile. A smile that said, You’ll get yours, mister. None of the rest of us moved from where we stood anchored in our foot restraints.

  The commander went on. “The video crew will be using the laboratory module for their taping. They will use the unoccupied scientists’ privacy cubicles for their sleeping quarters. There should be practically no interference with your task schedules, although I expect you to extend every courtesy and assistance to our visitors.”

  The five of us grinned and nodded eagerly.

  “It will be necessary to appoint a crew member to act as liaison between the video team and ourselves,” said the commander.

  Five hands shot up to volunteer so hard that all five of us would have gone careening into the overhead if we hadn’t been anchored to the floor by the foot restraints.

  “I will take on that extra duty myself,” the skipper said, smiling enough now to show his teeth, “so that you can continue with your work without any extra burdens being placed on you.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Sam muttered. If the commander heard him, he ignored it.

  Gloria Lamour on space station Freedom! The six of us had been living in this orbital monastery for almost two months. We were practically drooling with anticipation. I found it hard to sleep, and when I did my dreams were so vivid they were embarrassing. The other guys floated through their duties grinning and joking. We started making bets about who would be first to do what. But Sam, normally the cheerful one, turned glum. “Old Jay-Cubed is gonna hover around her like a satellite. He’s gonna keep her in the lab module and away from us. He won’t let any of us get close enough for an autograph, even.”

  That took the starch out of us, so to speak.

  The big day arrived. The orbiter Reagan made rendezvous with the station and docked at our main airlock. The five of us were supposed to be going about our regular tasks. Only the commander’s anointed liaison man—himself—went to the airlock to greet our visitors.

  Yet somehow all five of us managed to be in the command module, where all three monitor screens on the main console were focused on the airlock.

  Commander Johnson stood with his back to the camera, decked out in crisp new sky-blue coveralls, standing as straight as a man can in zero-gee.r />
  “I’ll cut off the oxygen to his sleeping cubicle,” muttered Larry Minetti, our life-support specialist. “I’ll fix the bastard, you watch and see.”

  We ignored Larry.

  “She come through the hatch yet?” Sam called. He was at my regular station, the communications console, instead of up front with us watching the screens.

  “What’re you doing back there?” I asked him, not taking my eyes off the screens. The hatch’s locking wheel was starting to turn.

  “Checking into Cap’n Bligh’s files, what else?”

  “Come on, you’re gonna miss it! The hatch is opening.”

  Sam shot over to us like a stubby missile and stopped his momentum by grabbing Larry and me by the shoulders. He stuck his head between us.

  The hatch was swung all the way open by a grinning shuttle astronaut. Two mission specialists—male—pushed a pallet loaded with equipment past the still-erect Commander Johnson. We were all erect too, with anticipation.

  A nondescript woman floated through the hatch behind the mission specialists and the pallet. She was in gray coveralls. As short as Sam. Kind of a long, sour face. Not sour, exactly. Sad. Unhappy. Mousy dull brown hair plastered against her skull with a zero-gee net. Definitely not a glamorous video star.

  “Must be her assistant,” Al Dupres muttered.

  “Her director.”

  “Her dog.”

  We stared at those screens so hard you’d think that Gloria Lamour would have appeared just out of the energy of our five palpitating, concentrating brain waves.

  No such luck. The unbeautiful woman floated right up to Commander Johnson and took his hand in a firm, almost manly grip.

  “Hello,” she said, in a nasal Bronx accent. “Gloria Lamour is not on this trip, so don’t get your hopes up.”

  I wish I could have seen the commander’s face. But, come to think of it, he probably didn’t blink an eye. Sam gagged and went over backwards into a zero-gee loop. The rest of us moaned, booed, and hollered obscenities at the screens.