The Sam Gunn Omnibus

by Ben Bova

“CALL ME SPENCE,” he said, dropping his lanky, sweaty frame onto the bench beside her.

  In spite of herself, Jade felt her heart skip a couple of beats. She was breathless, but not merely from the exertion of a hard game of low-g tennis.

  Spencer Johansen was tall and lean, with the flat midsection and sharp reflexes that come only from constant exercise. His eyes were sky blue, his face handsome in a rugged, clean-cut, honest way. When he smiled, as he was doing now, he looked almost boyish despite his silver-gray hair. He was older than Raki, she knew. Yet he seemed more open; innocent, almost.

  His smile was deadly. Jade had to remind herself that this man was the subject of an interview, not an object of desire. She was here to get a story out of him, and he was refusing to talk.

  Jefferson was the newest of the Lagrange habitats being built at the L-4 and L-5 libration points along the Moon’s orbit. A vast tube of asteroidal steel, twenty kilometers long and five wide, its interior was landscaped to look like a pleasant Virginia countryside, with rolling wooded hills and picturesque little villages dotting the greenery here and there. Best of all, from Jade’s point of view, was that Jefferson rotated on its long axis only fast enough to give an almost lunar feeling of weight inside. The entire habitat, with its population of seventy-five thousand, was pleasantly low-gee.

  “Why Sam?” Johansen asked, still smiling. But those clear blue eyes were wary, guarded.

  They were both still puffing from their punishing game. Out on the huge low-gee court, safely behind a shatterproof transparent wall, the next two players were warming up with long slow low-gravity lobs and incredible leaps to hit the ball five meters above the sponge metal surface of the court.

  “Solar Network wants to do his biography,” Jade replied, surreptitiously pressing the microswitch that activated the recorder built into her belt buckle.

  “Solar, huh?” Spencer Johansen huffed.

  “Well... it’s really me,” Jade confessed. “I’ve become fascinated by the man. I want to get Solar to do a special on him. I need all the help I can get. I need your story.”

  Johansen looked down at her. Sitting beside him she looked small, almost childlike, in a loose-fitting sleeveless gym top and shorts of pastel yellow.

  “You’re not the first woman to be fascinated by ol’ Sam,” he muttered. His own tennis outfit was nothing more than an ancient T-shirt and faded denim cutoffs.

  “Couldn’t you tell me something about him? Just some personal reminiscences?”

  “We made a deal, you and me.”

  She sighed heavily. “I know. And I lost.”

  His smile returned. “Yeah, but you played a helluva game. Never played in low-g before?”

  “Never,” she swore. “There’s no room for tennis courts in Selene. And this is my first time to a Lagrange habitat.”

  He seemed to look at her from a new perspective. The smile widened. “Come on, hit the showers and put on your drinking clothes.”

  “You’ll give me the interview? Even though I lost the game?”

  “You’re too pretty to say no to. Besides, you played a damned good game. A couple days up here and you’ll be beating me.”

  Vacuum Cleaner

  BACK IN THE OLD NASA DAYS SAM GUNN AND I WERE buddies—said Johansen to Jade over a pair of L-5 “libration libations.”

  They had height limitations for astronauts back then, even for the old shuttle. I just barely made it under the top limit. Little Sam just barely made it past the low end. Everybody used to call us Mutt and Jeff. In fact, Sam himself called me Mutt most of the time.

  I never figured out exactly why it was, but I liked the little so-and-so. Maybe it’s because he was always the underdog, the little guy in trouble with the big boys. Although I’ve got to admit that most of the time Sam started the trouble himself. I’m no angel; I’ve raised as much hell as the next guy, I guess. But Sam—he was unique. A real loose cannon. He never did things by the book. I think Sam regarded the regulations as a challenge, something to be avoided at all costs. He’d drive everybody nuts. But he’d get the job done, no matter how many mission controllers turned blue.

  He quit the agency, of course. Too many rules. I’ve got to confess that flying for the agency in those days was a lot like working for a bus line. If those desk-jockeys in Washington could’ve used robots instead of human astronauts they would’ve jumped at the chance. All they wanted was for us to follow orders and fill out their damned paperwork.

  Sam was itching to be his own boss. “There’s m-o-n-e-y to be made out there,” he’d spell out for me. “Billions and billions,” he’d say in his Carl Sagan voice.

  He got involved in this and that while I stayed in the agency and tried to make the best of it despite the bureaucrats. Maybe you heard about the tourist deal he got involved in. Later on he actually started a tourist hotel at Alpha. But at this point Alpha hadn’t even been started yet; the only facilities in orbit were a couple of Russian jobs and the American station, Freedom. Sam had served on Freedom, part of the very first crew. Ended the mission in a big mess.

  Well, meantime, all I really wanted was to be able to fly. That’s what I love. And back in those days, if you wanted to fly you either worked for the agency or you tried to get a job overseas. I just couldn’t see myself sitting behind a desk or working for the French or the Japs.

  Then one fine day Sam calls me up.

  “Pack your bags and open a Swiss bank account,” he says.

  Even over the phone—I didn’t have a videophone back then—I could hear how excited he was. I didn’t do any packing, but I agreed to meet him for a drink. The Cape was just starting to boom again, what with commercial launches (unmanned, in those days) and the clippers ferrying people to space stations and all that. I had no intentions of moving; I had plenty of flight time staring me in the face even if it was nothing more than bus driving.

  Sam was usually the center of attention wherever he went. You know, wisecracking with the waitresses, buying drinks for everybody, buzzing all over the bar like a bee with a rocket where his stinger ought to be. But that afternoon he was just sitting quietly in a corner booth, nursing a flat beer.

  Soon as I slid into the booth Sam starts in, bam, with no preliminaries. “How d’you like to be a junk collector?”

  “Huh?”

  Jabbing a thumb toward the ceiling he says, “You know how many pieces of junk are floating around in low orbit? Thousands! Millions!”

  He’s talking in a kind of a low voice, like he doesn’t want anybody to hear him.

  I said back to him, “Tell me about it. On my last mission the damned canopy window got starred by a stray piece of crap. If it’d been any bigger...”

  There truly were thousands of pieces of debris floating in orbit around the Earth back then. All kinds of junk: discarded equipment, flakes of paint, pieces of rocket motors, chunks of crap of all kinds. Legend had it that there was still an old Hasselblad camera that Mike Collins had fumbled away during the Gemini 10 mission floating around out there. And a thermal glove from somebody else.

  In fact, if you started counting the really tiny stuff, too small to track by radar, there might actually have been millions of bits of debris in orbit. A cloud of debris, a layer of man-made pollution, right in the area where we were putting space stations in permanent orbits.

  Sam hunched across the table, making a shushing gesture with both his hands. “That’s just it! Somebody’s gonna make a fuckin’ fortune cleaning up that orbiting junk, getting rid of it, making those low orbits safe to fly in.”

  I gave him a sidelong look. Sam was trying to keep his expression serious, but a grin was worming its way out. His face always reminded me of a leprechaun: round, freckled, wiry red hair, the disposition of an imp who never grew up.

  “To say nothing,” he damn near whispered, “of what they’ll pay to remove defunct commsats from geosynchronous orbit.”

  He didn’t really say “geosynchronous orbit,” he called it “GEO�
� like we all do. “LEO” is low Earth orbit. GEO is 22,300 miles up, over the equator. That’s where all the communications satellites were. We damned near got into a shooting war with half a dozen equatorial nations in South America and Africa over GEO rights—but that’s a different story.

  “Who’s going to pay you to collect junk?” I asked. Damned if my voice didn’t come out as low as his.

  Sam looked very pleased with himself. “Our dear old Uncle Sam, at first. Then the fat-cat corporations.”

  Turns out that Sam had a friend who worked in the Department of Commerce, of all places, up in Washington. I got the impression that the friend was not a female, which surprised me. Seemed that the friend was a Commerce Department bureaucrat, of all things. I just couldn’t picture Sam being chummy with a desk-jockey. It seemed strange, not like him at all.

  Anyway, Commerce had just signed off on an agreement with the space agency to provide funding for removing junk from orbit. Like all government programs, there was to be a series of experimental missions before anything else happened. What the government calls a “feasibility study.” At least two competing contractors would be funded for the feasibility study.

  The winner of the competition, Sam told me, would get an exclusive contract to remove debris and other junk from LEO on an ongoing basis.

  “They’ve gotta do something to protect the space station,” Sam said.

  “Freedom?”

  He bobbed his head up and down. “Sooner or later she’s gonna get hit by something big enough to cause real damage.”

  “The station’s already been dinged here and there. Little stuff, but some of it causes damage. They’ve got guys going EVA almost every day for inspection and repair.”

  “And the corporations who own the commsats are going-to be watching this competition very closely,” Sam went on, grinning from ear to ear.

  I knew that GEO was getting so crowded that the International

  Telecommunications Authority had put a moratorium on launching new commsats. The communications companies were only being allowed to replace old satellites that had gone dead. They were howling about how their industry was being stifled.

  “Worse than that,” Sam added. “The best slots along the GEO are already so damned crowded that the commsat signals are interfering with one another. Indonesia’s getting porno movies from the Polynesian satellite!”

  That made me laugh out loud. Must have played holy hob with Indonesia’s family planning program.

  “How much do you think Turner or Toshiba would pay to have dead commsats removed from orbit so new ones can be spotted in the best locations?” Sam asked.

  “Zillions,” I said.

  “At least!”

  I thought it over for all of ten seconds. “Why me?” I asked Sam. I mean, we had been buddies but not all that close.

  “You wanna fly, don’tcha? Handling an OMV, going after stray pieces of junk, that’s going to call for real flying!”

  An OMV was an orbital maneuvering vehicle: sort of a little sports car built to zip around from the space station to other satellites; never comes back to Earth. Compared to driving the space shuttle, flying an OMV would be like racing at Le Mans.

  I managed to keep a grip on my enthusiasm, though. Sam wasn’t acting out of altruism, I figured. Not without some other reason to go along with it. I just sat there sipping at my beer and saying nothing.

  He couldn’t keep quiet for long. “Besides,” he finally burst out, “I need somebody with a good reputation to front the organization. If those goons in Washington see my name on top of our proposal they’ll send it to the Marianas Trench and deep-six it.”

  That made sense. Washington was full of bureaucrats who’d love to see Sam mashed into corn fritters. Except, apparently, for his one friend at Commerce.

  “Will you let me be president of the company?” I asked.

  He nodded. The corners of his mouth tightened, but he nodded.

  I let my enthusiasm show a little. I grinned and stuck my hand out over the table. Sam grinned back and we shook hands between the beer bottles.

  But I had a problem. I would have to quit the agency. I couldn’t be a government employee—even on long-term leave—and work for a private company. Washington’s ethics rules were very specific about that. Oh yeah, Sam formed a private company to tackle the job. Very private: he owned it all. He called it VCI. That stood for Vacuum Cleaners, Inc. Cute.

  I solved my problem with a single night’s sleepless tussling. The next morning I resigned from the agency. Hell, if Sam’s plan worked I’d be getting more flying time than a dozen shuttle-jockeys. And I’d be doing some real flying, not just driving a big bus.

  If things didn’t work out with Sam I could always re-up with the agency. They’d take me back, I felt sure, although all my seniority and pension would be gone. What the hell. It was only money. Most of my salary went to my first three wives anyway.

  JADE NEARLY DROPPED the tall frosty glass from which she had been sipping.

  “Your first three wives?” she gulped.

  Johansen inched back in the fabric-covered slingchair. He looked flustered, embarrassed. “Uh, I’ve been married six times,” he said, in a low fumbling voice.

  “Six?”

  He seemed to be mentally counting. Then he nodded, “Yeah, six. Funny thing, Sam always had the reputation for chasing ... women. But somehow I always wound up getting married.”

  Jade’s heart fluttered with disappointment. Yet a tiny voice deep within her noted that seven is a lucky number. She felt shocked, confused.

  It took an effort of will to pull her eyes away from Johansen and gaze out at the scenery. The patio on which they sat hung out over the curving landscape of the gigantic habitat. Jade saw gentle grassy hills with a lazy stream meandering among them, in the distance a little village that looked like a scene for a Christmas card except there was no snow. Farther still there were farms, kilometers off, like a checkerboard of different shades of green. Her eyes followed the curve of this vast structure, up and up, woods and fields and more villages overhead, all the way around until her gaze settled on Johansen’s relaxed, smiling face once again.

  “It’s quite a sight, isn’t it?” he said. “A complete self-sufficient ecology, man-made, inside a twenty-kilometer cylinder.”

  “Quite a sight,” she murmured.

  Putting the glass down on the little cocktail table between them, Jade forced herself to return to the subject at hand. “You were talking about leaving the agency to go to work for Sam.”

  OH, YEAH—J0HANSEN replied, deftly ordering a new round of drinks with a hand signal to their robot waiter.

  Sam had two problems to wrestle with: how to raise the money to make VCI more than a bundle of paper, and how to get the government to award us one of the two contracts for the experimental phase of the junk removal program.

  Sam raised the money, just barely. He got most of it from a banker in Salt Lake City who had a daughter that needed marrying. And did that cause trouble later on! Let me tell you.

  But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

  We rented a dinky office on the second floor of a shopping mall, over a women’s swimwear shop. Sam spent more time downstairs than he did in the office. At least, when the stores were open. Nights he worked with me writing our proposal. He seemed to work better after the sun went down. Me, I worked night and day. Writing a proposal was not easy for me.

  Sam went out and hired a wagonload of big-time consultants from academia and industry, guys with fancy degrees and lists of publications longer than a gorilla’s arm.

  “Gee, Sam, how can we afford all these fancy pedigrees?” I asked him.

  He just grinned. “All we need ‘em for is to put their names on our letterhead and their resumes in our proposal. That doesn’t cost a damned thing. They only get paid when we ask them to consult with us, and we don’t have to ask ‘em a thing once we win the contract.”

  That sounded a littl
e shady to me, but Sam insisted our proposal needed some class and I had to agree with him there. Our only real employees were two bright kids who were still students at Texas A&M, and four local technicians who were part-time until we got the government contract. We leased or borrowed every piece of office equipment. Most of the software our Texas kids invented for us or pirated from elsewhere. We really needed that impressive list of consultants.

  Those two youngsters from Texas had come up with a great idea for removing debris from orbit. At least, it looked like a great idea to me. On paper. I knew enough engineering to get by, but these kids were really sharp.

  “How’d you find them?” I asked Sam.

  “They wrote a paper about their idea,” he said. “Published it in an aerospace journal. Their professor put his name on it, just like they all do, but I found those two kids who did the real work and put ‘em on the payroll.”

  I was impressed. I had never realized that Sam kept up with the technical journals.

  Well, we finished writing the proposal and e-mailed it up to Washington just under the deadline. You know how the government works: you could have the greatest invention since canned soup but they won’t look at it if it isn’t in their hands by “close-of-business” on the day they specify. Thank god for the Internet. We just barely made it.

  Then we waited. For weeks. Months.

  I got nervous as hell. Sam was as cool as liquid hydrogen. “Relax, Mutt,” he told me a thousand times during those months. “It’s in the bag.” And he would smile a crooked little smile.

  So there I sat, behind a rented desk in a dinky office, while the days ticked by and our money ran out. I was president of a company that was so close to bankruptcy I was starting to think about moonlighting as a spare pilot for Federal Express.

  Then we got the letter from Washington. Very official, with a big seal on it and everything.

  We were invited to send a representative to a meeting in Washington to defend our proposal against a panel of government experts. The letter said that there were four proposals being considered. The four companies were Rockledge International, Lockwood Industries, Texas Aerospace, and VCI—us.