The Sam Gunn Omnibus Read online

  The

  SAM GUNN

  Omnibus

  TOR BOOKS BY BEN BOVA

  As on a Darkling Plain

  The Astral Mirror

  Battle Station

  The Best of the Nebulas (editor)

  Challenges

  Colony

  Cyberbooks

  Escape Plus

  Gremlins Go Home (with Gordon R. Dickson)

  Jupiter

  The Kinsman Saga

  The Multiple Man Orion

  Orion Among the Stars

  Orion and the Conqueror

  Orion in the Dying Time

  Out of the Sun

  Peacekeepers

  The Precipice

  Privateers

  Prometheans

  The Rock Rats

  Saturn

  Star Peace: Assured Survival

  The Starcrossed

  Test of Fire

  To Fear the Light (with A. J. Austin)

  To Save the Sun (with A. J. Austin)

  The Trikon Deception (with Bill Pogue)

  Triumph

  Vengeance of Orion

  Venus

  Voyagers

  Voyagers II: The Alien Within

  Voyagers III: Star Brothers

  The Winds of Altair

  The

  SAM GUNN

  Omnibus

  Featuring every story ever written

  about Sam Gunn, and then some.

  BEN BOVA

  A Tom Doherty Associates Book New York

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these stories are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE SAM GUNN OMNIBUS

  Copyright © 2007 by Ben Bova All rights reserved. A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC 175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bova, Ben, 1932The Sam Gunn omnibus / Ben Bova. p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.” ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1620-2 ISBN-10: 0-7653-1620-X I. Title.

  PS3552.084S25 2007 813’.54—dc22

  2006033982

  First Hardcover Edition: February 2007 First Trade Paperback Edition: April 2009

  Printed in the United States of America

  0987654321

  an ebookman scan

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Earlier versions of “The Supervisor’s Tale,” “Diamond Sam,” “Isolation Area,” “Vacuum Cleaner,” and “Space University” appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, copyright © 1983, 1984, 1988, 1989, and 1990 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  An earlier version of “Einstein” appeared in Omni magazine, copyright © 1990 by Omni Publications International, Inc.

  “Sam’s War” and “Nursery Sam” originally appeared in Analogy copyright © 1994 and 1995 by D

  Dell Magazines.

  “The Prudent Jurist” (as “Sam and the Prudent Jurist”) and “Acts of God” originally appeared in Science Fiction Age, copyright 1997 and 1995 by Sovereign Media.

  These tales are dedicated to the entrepreneurs who are striving to open the space frontier for all humankind— and make a few bucks in the process.

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Preface

  Selene City

  The Sea of Clouds

  The Supervisor’s Tale

  The Hospital and the Bar

  The Long Fall

  The Pelican Bar

  The Audition

  Diamond Sam

  Decisions, Decisions

  Statement of Clark Griffith IV

  Tourist Sam

  The Show Must Go On!

  Space Station Alpha

  Isolation Area

  Lagrange Habitat Jefferson

  Vacuum Cleaner

  Selene City

  Armstrong Spaceport

  Nursery Sam

  Selene City

  Statement of Juanita Carlotta Maria Rivera y Queveda

  Sam’s War

  Habitat New Chicago

  Grandfather Sam

  Solar News Offices, Selene City

  Bridge Ship Golden Gate

  Two Years Before the Mast

  Marooned

  Bridge ShipGolden Gate

  Asteroid Ceres

  Space University

  A Can of Worms

  Titan

  Einstein

  Surprise, Surprise

  Reviews

  Torch Ship Hermes

  Acts of God

  Torch Ship Hermes

  Steven Achernar Wright

  The Prudent Jurist

  Pierre D’Argent

  Piker’s Peek

  Zoilo Hashimoto

  The Mark of Zorro

  The Maitre D’

  The Flying Dutchman

  Disappearing Act

  Takes Two to Tangle

  Solar News Headquarters, Selene

  Orchestra(ted) Sam

  End of The Sam Gunn Omnibus

  A thing worth having

  is a thing worth cheating for.

  ------------------------------------------

  ATTRIBUTED TO W. C. FIELDS

  Author’s Preface

  It isn’t easy to put all the tales of Sam Gunn together in any sequence that even vaguely resembles chronological order. Sam’s various tales are spread all over the solar system (and even beyond) and span a lifetime filled with adventure, romance, and more than a little trickery.

  I’ve done my best. I’ve sifted through all the stories about Sam Gunn and even added a couple of new ones. It’s been tricky, though. In the pages of this book, Sam’s life story is told from its beginning to the present moment. Please don’t expect exact chronological order or a well-defined sequence of events. Sam is far too clever to be pinned down like an ordinary person.

  All I can offer, at this point, is a quotation from a much better writer than I, Mr. Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain:

  Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

  I suggest you merely read the stories and enjoy them. Trying to make order out of the chaotic events of Sam Gunn’s life can drive you to drink. That’s one of the things that I like about Sam.

  BEN BOVA

  Naples, Florida

  January 2006

  The

  SAM GUNN

  Omnibus

  Selene City

  THE STORY OF SAM GUNN IS INEXTRICABLY INTERWOVEN with the story of a beautiful, vulnerable, and determined young woman. Knowing Sam, you would expect she was an object of his rabid testosterone-fed sex drive (or, as Shakespeare put it, the bottomless cistern of his lust).

  But you’d be wrong.

  She likes to be called Jade, although her name is actually Jane. Jane Avril Inconnu. Sometimes new acquaintances mistake that last name for Romanian, although her flame-red hair and dazzling green eyes speak of more northern and flamboyant lands. She will tolerate such misunderstandings— when there is some advantage to being tolerant.

  She received her name from the Quebecois surgeon who adopted her as a foundling at the old original Moonbase, back when that precarious settlement was civilization’s rugged frontier. There were no pediatricians on the Moon; the surgeon happened to be on duty when the female infant, red-faced and squalling, was discovered in the corridor just outside the base’s small hospital. No more than a few days old, the infant had been placed in a plastic shipping container, neat
ly bundled and warmly blanketed. And abandoned. Who the baby’s mother might be remained a mystery, even though Moonbase hardly supported more than two hundred men and women in those days, plus a handful of visitors.

  Her adopted mother’s name was Jane, the month was April, and inconnu is the French word for “unknown.” So the orphaned baby girl became Jane Avril Inconnu, raised alone by the surgeon for the first four years of her life.

  By the time the surgeon’s five-year contract with Moonbase was completed and she was due to return to Montreal, the medical staff—which doted on the little girl—had discovered that Jane Avril suffered from a congenital bone defect, a rare inability to manufacture sufficient amounts of calcium. Neither exercise nor medicine could help. Although she could walk and run and play normally in the gentle gravity of the Moon, on Earth she would be a helpless cripple, confined to a wheelchair or a mechanical exoskeleton, in constant danger of snapping her brittle, fragile bones.

  Her adopted mother bravely decided to remain with the child, but then the news came from Montreal that her own mother was gravely ill, dying. Torn between the generations, the woman returned to Earth, promising to return soon, soon. She never did. There were family obligations on Earth, and later a husband who wanted children of his own.

  Jane Avril remained at Moonbase, orphaned once again, raised by a succession of medical personnel at the hospital. Some were warm and loving, some were distant and uncaring. A few were actually abusive now and then.

  Moonbase grew, over those years, into the city called Selene. The frontier of civilization crept across the battered old face of the Moon and expanded into cislunar space, where great habitats were built in the dark emptiness to house hundreds of thousands of people. Explorers reached out to Mars, and then farther. Entrepreneurs, some wildly reckless, some patient and cunning, began to reap the wealth of space. Fortunes were built on lunar mining, on power satellites to feed the energy hungers of Earth, on prospecting the metals and minerals of the asteroids.

  Of all those daring and dashing fortune-seekers, the first, the most adventurous, the best known of them all was Sam Gunn. As she grew into young womanhood, Jane Avril heard endless stories about Sam Gunn and the fortunes he had found in space. Found and lost. For Sam was more impetuous and unpredictable than a solar storm. Long before Jane Avril acquired the nickname Jade, Sam Gunn was already a living legend.

  She could not consider herself beautiful, despite the gorgeous red hair and those dazzling green eyes that gave her the sobriquet. She was small, just a shade over one hundred sixty-five centimeters tall. Her figure was slim, elfin, almost childlike. Her face was just a trifle too long and narrow to suit her, although she could smile very prettily when she wanted to. She seldom did.

  Being raised as an orphan had built a hard shell of distrust around her. She knew from painful experience that no relationship ever lasted long, and it was foolish to open her heart to anyone.

  Yet that heart of hers was a romantic one. Inside her protective crust was a yearning for adventure and love that would not die, no matter how sternly she tried to repress it. She dreamed of tall handsome men, bold heroes with whom she would travel to the ends of the solar system. She wanted with all her heart to get free of the dreary monotony of Selene, with its gray underground corridors and its unending sameness every day, year after year.

  She knew that she was forever barred from Earth, even though she could see its blue beautiful glory shining at her in the dark lunar sky. Earth, with all its teeming billions of people and its magnificent cities and oceans of water so deep and blue and raging wild. Selene was a cemetery by comparison. She had to get away, to fly free, anywhere. If she could never set foot on Earth, there were still the great habitats at the La-grangian points, and the bridge ships plying out toward Mars, the rugged frontier of the Asteroid Belt, and beyond, to the deadly beautiful dangers of the gas giant worlds.

  Such were her dreams. The best she could do, though, was to get a job as a truck driver up on the dusty dead lunar surface.

  But still she dreamed. And waited for her opportunity.

  The Sea of Clouds

  THE SPRING-WHEELED TRUCK ROLLED TO A SILENT STOP ON the Mare Nubium. The fine dust kicked up by its six wheels floated lazily back to the mare’s soil. The hatch to the truck cab swung upward, and a space-suited figure climbed slowly down to the lunar surface, clumped a dozen ponderously careful steps, then turned back toward the truck.

  “Yeah, this is the spot. The transponder’s beeping away, all right.”

  At first Jade had been excited by her work as a truck driver. Even inside a space suit, being out on the wide-open surface of the Moon, beneath the solemn eyes of the unblinking stars, was almost like being able to run wild and free in comparison to the dreariness of Selene’s underground corridors. But now she had been at the job for nearly a year. The excitement had worn away, eroded as inevitably as the meteor-pitted rocks of the Sea of Clouds.

  And always in that dead-black sky there hung the glowing jewel of Earth, tantalizing, beautiful, forever out of her reach.

  She and the hoist operator (male and married) clambered down from the cab, bulbous and awkward-looking in their bulky space suits. Jade turned a full three hundred sixty degrees, scanning the scene through the gold-tinted visor of her suit’s bubble helmet. There was nothing to be seen except the monotonous gray plain, pockmarked by craters like an ancient, savage battlefield that had been petrified into solid stone long eons ago.

  “Merde, you can’t even see the ringwall from here!” she exclaimed.

  “That’s what he wanted,” came the voice of their supervisor through her helmet earphones. “To be out in the open, without a sign of civilization in sight. He picked this spot himself, you know.”

  “Helluva place to want to be buried,” said the hoist operator.

  “That’s what he specified in his will. Come on, let’s get to work. I want to get back to Selene City before the sun goes down.”

  It was a local joke: the three space-suited workers had more than two hundred hours before sunset.

  Grunting even in the gentle lunar gravity, they slid the gleaming sarcophagus from the back of the truck and placed it softly on the roiled, dusty ground. It was made of stainless steel, delicately inscribed in gold by the solar system’s most famous sculptress. At one end, in tastefully small lettering, was a logo: S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited.

  The supervisor carefully paced to the exact spot where the tiny transponder lay blinking, and used a hand laser to draw an exact circle around it. Then he sprayed the stony ground inside the circle with the blue-white flame of a plasma torch. Meanwhile, Jade helped the hoist operator swing the four-meter-high crate down from the truck bed to the ground next to the sarcophagus.

  “Ready for the statue?” Jade asked.

  The supervisor said nothing as he inspected his own work. The hot plasma had polished the stony ground. Jade and the hoist operator heard him muttering over their helmet earphones as he used the hand laser to check the polished ground’s dimensions. Satisfied, he helped them drag the gold-filigreed sarcophagus to its center and slide it into place over the transponder.

  “A lot of work to do for a dead man.”

  “He wasn’t just any ordinary man.”

  “It’s still a lot of work. Why in hell couldn’t he be recycled like everybody else?” the hoist operator complained.

  “He’s not in the sarcophagus, dumbskull,” snapped the supervisor. “Don’t you know any goddamned thing?”

  “He’s not... ?”

  Jade had known that the sarcophagus was empty, symbolic. She was surprised that her coworker didn’t. Some people pay no attention to anything, she told herself. I’ll bet he doesn’t know anything at all about Sam Gunn.

  “Sam Gunn,” said the supervisor, “never did things like everybody else. Not in his whole cussed life. Why should he be like the rest of us in death?”

  They chattered back and forth through their suit radios as they
uncrated the big package. Once they had removed all the plastic and the bigger-than-life statue stood sparkling in the sunlight, they stepped back and gaped at it.

  “It’s glass!”

  “Christ, I never saw any statue so damned big.”

  “Must have cost a fortune to get it here. Two fortunes!”

  “He had it done at Island One, I heard. Brought the sculptress in from the Belt and paid her enough to keep her at L-4 for two whole years. God knows how many times she tried to cast a statue this big and failed, even in low gee.”

  “I didn’t know you could make a glass statue this big.”

  “In micro-gee you can. It’s hollow. If we were in air, I could ping it with my finger and you’d hear it ring.”

  “Crystal.”

  “That’s right.”

  Jade laughed softly.

  “What’s so funny?” the supervisor asked.

  “Who else but Sam Gunn would have the gall to erect a crystal statue to himself and then have it put out in the middle of this godforsaken emptiness, where nobody’s ever going to see it? It’s a monument to himself, for himself. What ego! What monumental ego.”

  The supervisor chuckled, too. “Yeah. Sam had an ego, all right. But he was a smart little SOB, too.”

  “You knew him?” Jade asked.

  “Sure. Knew him well enough to tell you that he didn’t pick this spot for his tomb just for the sake of his ego. He was smarter than that.”

  “What was he like?”

  “When did you know him?” the hoist operator asked.

  “Come on, we’ve still got work to do. He wants the statue positioned exactly as he stated in his will, with its back toward Selene and the face looking up toward Earth.”

  “Yeah, okay, but when did you know him, huh?”

  “Oh golly, years ago. Decades ago. When the two of us were just young pups. The first time either of us came here, back in—Lord, it’s thirty years ago. More.”

  “Tell us about it. Was he really the rogue that the history disks say he was? Did he really do all the things they say?” Jade found to her surprise that she was eager to know.