The Sam Gunn Omnibus

by Ben Bova

  She said to Malone, “I’ve been assigned to do a biography of Mr. Gunn for the Solar News Network....”

  Despite himself, Malone suddenly chuckled. “First time I ever heard him called Mr. Gunn.”

  “Oh?” Jade’s microchip recorder, imbedded in her belt buckle, was already on, of course. “What did the people here call him?”

  That lean, angular black face took on an almost thoughtful look. “Oh ... Sam, mostly. ‘That tricky bastard,’ a good many times.” Malone actually laughed. “Plenty times I heard him called a womanizing sonofabitch.”

  “What did you call him?”

  The suspicion came back into Malone’s eyes. “He was my friend. I called him Sam.”

  Silence stretched between them, hanging as weightlessly as their bodies. Jade turned her head slightly and found herself staring at the vast bulk

  of Earth. Her adoptive mother was down there, somewhere, living her own life without a thought about the daughter she had run away from. And her real mother? Was she on Earth, too, forever separated from the baby she had borne, the baby she had left abandoned, alone, friendless and loveless?

  Jade’s mind screamed as if she were falling down an elevator shaft. Her stomach churned queasily. She could not tear her eyes away from the world drifting past, so far below them, so compellingly near. She felt herself being drawn toward it, dropping through the emptiness, spinning down the deep swirling vortex

  Malone’s long-fingered hand squeezed her shoulder hard enough to hurt. She snapped her attention to his dark, unsmiling face as he grasped her other shoulder and held her firmly in his strong hands.

  “You were drifting,” he said, almost in a whisper.

  “Was I... ?”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Gets everybody, at first. Don’t be scared. You’re perfectly safe.”

  His powerful hands steadied her. She fought down the panic surging inside.

  “If you got to upchuck, go ahead and do it. Nothing to be ashamed of.” His grin returned. “Only, use the bags they gave you, please.”

  He looked almost handsome when he smiled, she thought. After another moment he released her. She took a deep breath and dabbed at the beads of perspiration on her forehead. The retch bags that the technicians had attached to her belt were a symbol to her now. I won’t need them, she insisted to herself. I’m not going to let this get to me. I’m not going to let them get to me.

  “I... didn’t think ... didn’t realize that zero gravity would affect me.”

  “Why not? It gets to everybody, one way or another.”

  “I’m from Selene,” Jade said. “I’ve lived all my life under lunar gravity.”

  Malone gazed at her thoughtfully. “Still a big difference between one-sixth g and none at all, I guess.”

  “Yes.” It was still difficult to breathe. “I guess there is.”

  “Feel better?” he asked.

  There was real concern in his eyes; “I think I’ll be all right. Thanks.”

  “De nada,” he said. “I didn’t know you’d never been in weightlessness before.”

  His attitude had changed, she saw. The sullenness had thawed. He had insisted on conducting the interview in the station’s zero-gravity area. He had allowed no alternative. But she was grateful that his shell of distrust seemed to have cracked.

  It took several moments before she could say, “I’m not here to do a hatchet job on Mr. Gunn.”

  Malone made a small shrug. “Doesn’t make much difference, one way or th’other. He’s dead; nothing you can say will hurt him now.”

  “But we know so little about him. I suppose he’s the most famous enigma in the solar system.”

  The black man made no response.

  “The key question, I suppose ... the thing our viewers will be most curious about, is why Sam Gunn exiled himself up here. Why did he turn his back on Earth?”

  Malone snorted with disdain. “He didn’t! Those motherfuckers turned their backs on him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a long story,” Malone said.

  “That’s all right. I’ve got as much time as it takes.” Even as she said it Jade wished that Malone would volunteer to return back to the lunar-g wheel, where the gravity was normal. But she dared not ask the man to leave his office. Once a subject starts talking, never interrupt! That was the cardinal rule of a successful interview. Jumbo Jim had drilled that into her. Besides, she was determined not to let weightlessness get the better of her.

  “Would you believe,” Malone was saying, “that it all started with a cold?”

  “A cold?”

  “Sam came down with a cold in the head. That’s how the whole thing began.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Isolation Area

  SAM WAS A FEISTY LITTLE BASTARD-MALONE REMINISCED— full of piss and vinegar. If there was ten different ways in the regulations to do a job, he’d find an eleventh, maybe a twelfth or a fourteenth, just because he couldn’t abide being bound by the regs. A free spirit, I guess you’d call him.

  He’d had his troubles with the brass in Houston and Washington. Why he ever became an astronaut in the first place is beyond me. Maybe he thought he’d be like a pioneer out on the frontier, on his own, way out in space. How he made it through training and into flight operations is something I’ll never figure out. I just don’t feature Sam sitting still long enough to get through kindergarten, let alone flight school and astronaut training.

  Anyway, when I first met him he was finished as an astronaut. He had put in seven years, which he said was a Biblical amount of time, and he wanted out. And the agency was glad to get rid of him, believe me. But he had this cold in the head and they wouldn’t let him go back Earthside until it cleared up.

  “Six billion people down there with colds, the flu, bad sinuses and postnasal drips and those assholes in Houston won’t let me go back until this goddamned sniffle clears up.”

  Those were the first words Sam ever said to me. He had been assigned to my special isolation ward, where I had reigned alone for nearly four years. Alpha was under construction then. We were in the old Mac-Dac Shack, a glorified tin can that passed for a space station back in those primitive days. It didn’t spin, it just hung there. Everything inside was weightless.

  My isolation ward was a cramped compartment with four zero-gee sleep restraints Velcroed to the four walls together with lockers to stow personal gear. Nobody but me had ever been in it until that morning. Sam shuffled over to the bed next to mine, towing his travel-bag like a kid with a sinking balloon.

  “Just don’t sneeze in my direction, Sniffles,” I growled at him.

  That stopped Sam for about half a second. He gave me that lopsided grin of his—his face sort of looked like a scuffed-up soccer ball, kind of round, scruffy. Little wart of a nose in the middle of it. Longest hair I ever saw on a man who works in space; hair length was one of the multitudinous points of contention between Sam and the agency. His eyes sparkled. Kind of an odd color, not quite blue, not really green. Sort of in-between.

  “Malone, huh?” He read the name-tag clipped over my sleep restraint.

  “Frederick Mohammed Malone,” I said.

  “Jesus Christ, they put me in with an Arab!”

  But he stuck out his hand. Sam was really a little guy; his hand was almost the size of a baby’s. After a moment’s hesitation I swallowed it in mine.

  “Sam,” he told me, knowing I could see his last name on the tag pinned to his coveralls.

  “I’m not even a Muslim,” I said. “My father was, though. First one in Arkansas.”

  “Good for him.” Sam disengaged his Velcro shoes from the carpeting and floated over to one of the sleeping bags. His travel-bag hung alongside. He ignored it and sniffed the air. “Goddamned hospitals all smell like somebody’s dying. What’re you in for? Hangnail or something?”

  “Something,” I said. “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.”

  His eyes
went round. “AIDS?”

  “It’s not contagious. Not unless we make love.”

  “I’m straight.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Terrific. Just what I need, a gay black Arab with AIDS.” But he was grinning at me.

  I had seen plenty of guys back away from me once they knew I had AIDS. Some of them had a hang-up about gays. Others were scared out of their wits that they’d catch AIDS from me, or from the medical personnel or equipment. I had more than one reason to know how a leper felt, back in those days.

  Sam’s grin faded into a puzzled frown. “How the hell did the medics put me in here if you’ve got AIDS? Won’t you catch my cold? Isn’t that dangerous for you?”

  “I’m a guinea pig....”

  “You don’t look Italian.”

  “Look,” I said, “if you’re gonna stay in here, keep off the ethnic jokes, okay? And the puns.”

  He shrugged.

  “The medics think they got my case arrested. New treatment that the gene therapy people have come up with.”

  “I get it. If you don’t catch my cold, you’re cured.”

  “They never use words like ‘cured.’ But that’s the general idea.”

  “So I’m a guinea pig too.”

  “No, you are a part of the apparatus for this experiment. A source of infection. A bag of viruses. A host of bacteria. Germ city.”

  Sam hooked his feet into his sleep restraint’s webbing and shot me a dark look. “And this is the guy who doesn’t like ethnic jokes.”

  The Mac-Dac Shack had been one of the first space stations that the agency had put up. It wasn’t fancy, but for years it had served as a sort of research laboratory, mainly for medical work. Naturally, with a lot of MDs in it, the Shack sort of turned into a floating hospital in orbit. With all the construction work going on in those days there was a steady stream of injured workmen and technicians.

  Then some bright bureaucrat got the idea of using one module of the Shack as an isolation ward where the medics could do research on things like AIDS, ebola, the New Delhi virus, and some of the paralytic afflictions that required either isolation or zero gravity. Or both. The construction crew infirmary was moved over to the yet-unfinished Alpha while the Shack was turned into a pure research facility with various isolation wards for guinea pigs like me.

  Sam stayed in my ward for three-four days; I forget the exact time. He was like an energetic little bee, buzzing all over the place, hardly ever still for a minute. In zero-gee, of course, he could literally climb the curved walls of the ward and hover up on the ceiling. He terrified the head nurse in short order by hanging near the ceiling or hiding inside one of the sleeping bags and then launching himself at her like a missile when she showed up with the morning’s assortment of needles.

  Never once did Sam show the slightest qualm at having his blood sampled alongside mine, although he watched the nurses taking the samples very closely. I’ve seen guys get violent from the fear that they’d get a needle contaminated by my blood and catch what I had. But Sam never even blinked. Me, I never liked needles. Couldn’t abide them. Couldn’t look when the nurse stuck me; couldn’t even look when she stuck somebody else. Sam looked. He told me so.

  By the end of the first day Sam noticed something. “All the nurses are women.”

  “All six of them,” I affirmed.

  “The doctors are all males?”

  “Eight men, four women.”

  “That leaves two extra women for us.”

  “For you. I’m on the other side.”

  “How come all women nurses?” he wondered.

  “I think it’s because of me. They don’t want to throw temptation in my path.”

  Sam started to frown at me but it turned into that lopsided grin. “They didn’t think about my path.”

  He proceeded to cause absolute havoc among the nurses. With the single-minded determination of a sperm cell seeking blindly for an ovum, Sam pursued them all: the fat little redhead, the cadaverous ash-blonde, the really good-looking one, the kid who still had acne—all of them, even the head nurse, who threatened to inject him with enough estrogen to grow boobs on him if he didn’t leave her and her crew alone.

  Nothing deterred Sam. He would be gone for long hours from the ward, and when he’d come back he would be grinning from ear to ear. As politely as I could I’d ask him how he made out.

  “It matters not if you win or lose,” he would say. “It’s how you play the game.... as long as you get laid.”

  When he finally left the isolation ward it seemed as if we had been friends for years. And it was damned quiet in there without him. I was alone again. I missed him. I realized how many years it had been since I’d had a friend.

  I sank into a real depression of self-pity and despair. I had caught Sam’s cold, sure enough. I was hacking and sneezing all day and night. One good thing about zero gravity is that you can’t have a postnasal drip. One bad thing is that all the fluids accumulate in your sinuses and give you a headache of monumental proportions. The head nurse seemed to take special pleasure in inflicting upon me the indignity of forcing tubes up my nose to drain the sinuses.

  The medics were overjoyed. Their guinea pig was doing something interesting. Would I react to the cold like any normal person and get over it in a few days? Or would the infection spread through my body and worsen, turn into pneumonia or maybe kill me? I could see them writing their learned papers in their heads every time they examined me, which was four times a day.

  I was really unfit company for anyone, including myself. I went on for months that way, just wallowing in my own misery. Other patients came and went: an African kid with a new strain of polio; an asthmatic who had developed a violent allergy to dust; a couple of burn victims from the Alpha construction crew who had to be suspended in zero-gee. I stayed while they were treated in the other wards and sent home.

  Then, without any warning at all, Sam showed up again.

  “Hello, Omar, how’s the tent-making business?” My middle name had become Omar, as far as he was concerned.

  I gaped at him. He was wearing the powder-blue coveralls and shoulder insignia of Rockledge Industries, Inc., which in those days was just starting to grow into the interplanetary conglomerate it has become.

  “What the hell you doing back here?” My voice came out a full octave higher than normal, I was so surprised. And glad.

  “I work here.”

  “Say what?”

  He ambled over to me in the zero-gee strides we all learn to make: maintain just enough contact with the carpeted flooring to keep from floating off toward the ceiling. As Sam approached my bunk the head nurse pushed through the ward’s swinging doors with a trayful of the morning’s indignities for me.

  “Rockledge Industries just won the contract for running this tin can. The medical staff still belongs to the government, but everybody else will be replaced by Rockledge employees. I’m in charge of the whole place.”

  Behind him, the head nurse’s eyes goggled, her mouth sagged open, and the tray slid from her hand. It just hung there, revolving slowly as she turned a full one-eighty and flew out of the ward without a word. Or maybe she was screaming so high that no human ear could hear it, like a bat.

  “You’re in charge of this place?” I was laughing at the drama that had been played out behind Sam’s back. “No shit?”

  Sam seemed happy that I seemed pleased. “I got a five-year contract.”

  We got to be really friends then. Not lovers. Sam was the most heterosexual man I have ever seen. One of the shrinks aboard the station told me Sam had a Casanova complex: he had to take a shot at any and every female creature he saw. I don’t know how good his batting average was, but he surely kept busy—and grinning.

  “The thrill is in the chase, Omar, not the capture,” he said to me many times. Then he would always add, “As long as you get laid.”

  But Sam could be a true friend, caring, understanding, bringing out the best in a
man. Or a woman, for that matter. I saw him help many of the station’s female employees, nurses, technicians, scientists, completely aside from his amorous pursuits. He knew when to put his Casanova complex in the back seat. He was a surprisingly efficient administrator and a helluva good leader. Everybody liked him. Even the head nurse grew to grant him a grudging respect, although she certainly didn’t want anybody to know it, especially Sam.

  Of course, knowing Sam you might expect that he would have trouble with the chain of command. He had gotten himself out of the space agency, and it was hard to tell who was happier about it, him or the agency. You could hear sighs of relief from Houston and Washington all the way up to where we were, the agency was so glad to be rid of the pestering little squirt who never followed regulations.

  It didn’t take long for Sam to find out that Rockledge Industries, Inc. had its own bureaucracy, its own sets of regulations, and its own frustrations.

  “You’d think a multibillion-dollar company would want to make all the profits it can,” Sam grumbled to me, about six months after he had returned to the Shack. “Half the facilities on Alpha are empty, right? They overbuilt, right? So I show them how to turn Alpha into a tourist resort and they reject the goddamned idea. ‘We are not in the tourism business,’ they say. Goddamned assholes.”

  I found it hard to believe that Rockledge didn’t understand what a bonanza they could reap from space tourism. It’s not just twenty-twenty hindsight; Sam had me convinced then and there that tourism would be worth a fortune to Alpha. But Rockledge just failed to see it, no matter how hard Sam tried to convince them. Maybe the harder he tried the less they liked the idea. Some outfits are like that. The old Not-Invented-Here syndrome. Or more likely, the old If-Sam’s-For-It-I’m-Against-It syndrome.

  Sam spent weeks muttering about faceless bureaucrats who sat on their brains, and how much money a zero-gravity honeymoon hotel could make. At least, that’s what I thought he was doing.

  The big crisis was mostly my fault. Looking back on it, if I could have figured out a different way to handle things, I would have. But you know how it is when your emotions are all churned up; you don’t see any alternatives. Truthfully, I still don’t see how I could have done anything else except what I did.