The Sam Gunn Omnibus Page 15

  And Hector, too, I realized. I’d put his life in danger, when all he wanted was to protect me.

  I felt really miserable about that. The poor guy was in as much danger as I was, even though none of this was his fault.

  I studied his face as he sat in the copilot’s chair next to Sam. Hector didn’t look worried. Or frightened. Or even tense. He was happy as a clam, behind the controls of this monstrous plane, five miles over the deep blue sea.

  “Now comes the tricky part,” Sam was telling him, leaning over toward Hector slightly so he could hear him better.

  Sitting on the jump seat behind Sam, I tightened my grip on the pistol. “You’re not going to separate the orbiter,” I said firmly.

  Without even glancing back at me, Sam broke into cackling laughter. “Couldn’t even if I wanted to, oh masked rider of the plains. The bird’s welded on. You’d need a load of primacord to blast ‘er loose.”

  “What about the explosive bolts?” I asked.

  Sam cackled again. “That’s part of the simulation, kiddo. There aren’t any.”

  I saw that Hector was grinning, as if he knew something that I didn’t.

  “Then how do you intend to separate the orbiter?” I demanded.

  “I don’t,” Sam replied.

  “Then how ...” The question died in my throat. I had been a fool. A stupendous fool. This wasn’t an assassination plot; Sam was taking the president of Cuba—and his ten-year-old daughter—for a space flight experience, just as he’d taken several hundred other tourists.

  I could feel my face burning. Hector, his smile gentle and sweet, turned toward me and said softly, “Maybe you should unload the gun, huh? Just to be on the safe side.”

  I clicked on the safety, then popped the magazine out of the pistol’s grip.

  I sat in silence for the rest of the flight. There was nothing for me to say. I had been an idiot, jumping to conclusions and suspecting Sam of being a partner in a heinous crime. I felt awful.

  After the regular routine over the Caribbean, Sam turned us back to Col6n, and we landed at the airport without incident. Sam taxied the plane to his hangar, where a throng of news reporters and photographers were waiting.

  With his daughter clinging to his side, the president of Cuba gave a long and smiling speech in Spanish to the news people. Sam squirmed out of his pilot’s chair and rushed down to the hangar floor so he could stand beside the Cuban president and bask in the glow of publicity. Naturally, he grabbed the woman who was supposed to be his copilot and took her along with him.

  I stayed in the cockpit with Hector, watching the whole thing. I could see Ms. Jones hovering around the edge of the crowd, together with her people; even she was smiling.

  El Presidente put his arm around Sam’s shoulders and spoke glowingly. It was still in Spanish, but the tone was very warm, very friendly. Cuban-American relations soared almost as high as the president thought he’d flown. Sam signed his autograph for the president’s daughter. She was almost as tall as he, I noticed.

  Cameras clicked and whirred, vidcams buzzed away, reporters shouted questions in English and Spanish. It was a field day—for everybody but me.

  Hector shook his head and gave me a rueful grin. “I guess we were a little wrong about all this,” he said, almost in a whisper.

  “It’s my fault,” I said. “I got you into this.”

  “Don’t look so sad. Everything came out okay. Sam’s a hero.”

  All I wanted to do was to stay in that cockpit and hide forever.

  At last El Presidente and his daughter made their way back to their limousine. The fleet of limos departed and the crowd of media people broke up. Even the American State Department people started to leave. That’s what they were, I reluctantly admitted to myself. Jones and her people really were from the State Department, not the CIA.

  Finally Sam came strolling the length of the 747’s cabin and climbed up the spiral staircase to the cockpit, whistling horribly off-key every step of the way.

  He popped his head through the hatch, grinning like a Jack-o’-lantern. “You want me to send some pizzas up here or are you gonna come out and have dinner with me?”

  Hector took me by the hand, gently, and got to his feet. He had to bend over slightly in the low-ceilinged cockpit, a problem that Sam didn’t have to worry about.

  “We’re coming out,” he said. I let him lead me, like a docile little lamb.

  We went straight to Sam’s favorite restaurant, the waterfront shack that served such good fish. Jones was already there, sipping at a deadly-looking rum concoction and smiling happily.

  “I ought to be angry with you two,” she said, once we sat at the little round table with her.

  “It’s my fault,” I said immediately. “I’m the one to blame.”

  Hector started to say something, but Jones shushed him with a gesture of her long, graceful hand. “No harm, no foul. The flight went beautifully, and I’m not going to screw up my report by even mentioning your names.”

  Sam was aglow. He ordered drinks for all of us, and as the waiter left our table, he looked over at the bar.

  “Lookit that!” Sam said, pointing to the TV over the joint’s fake-bamboo bar.

  We saw the president of Cuba smiling toothily, his daughter on one side of him and Sam Gunn on the other.

  “Worldwide publicity!” Sam crowed. “I’m a made man!”

  Hector shook his head. “If anybody ever finds out that your orbiter never left the 747, Sam, the publicity won’t be so good.”

  For Hector, that was a marathon speech.

  Sam grinned at him. “Now who’s going to tell on me? The Department of State?”

  Jones shook her head. “Not us.” “NASA?” Sam asked rhetorically. “You think some rocket expert in NASA’s gonna stand up and declare that you can’t remate the orbiter with its carrier plane once it’s been separated?”

  Before any of us could reply, Sam answered his own question. “In a pig’s eye! The word’s going through the agency now, from top to bottom: no comment on Space Adventure Tours. Zip. Nada. Zilch. The lid is on and it’s on tight.”

  “What about you two?” Jones asked, arching a perfect brow.

  Hector glanced at me, then shrugged. “I’m in the Air Force. If I’m ordered to keep quiet, I’ll keep quiet.”

  “And you, Ms. Perkins?” Jones asked me.

  I focused on Sam. “You promised to end this bogus business, Sam.”

  “Yeah, that’s right, I did.”

  “Did you tell the president of Cuba that all he got was a simulation?” I asked.

  Sam screwed up his face and admitted, “Not exactly.”

  “What happens to Cuban-American relations when he finds out?”

  Jones’s smile had evaporated. “Which brings us back to the vital question: are you going to try to blow the whistle?”

  I didn’t like the sound of that try to.

  “No, she’s not,” Sam said. “Ramona’s a good American citizen and this is a matter of international relations now.”

  The gall of the man! He had elevated his scam into an integral part of the State Department’s efforts to end the generations-old split between Cuba and the U.S. I wondered who in Washington had been crazy enough to hang our foreign policy on Sam Gunn’s trickery and deceit. Probably the same kind of deskbound lunkheads who had once dickered with the Mafia to assassinate Castro with a poisoned cigar.

  “I want to hear what you have to say, Ms. Perkins,” Jones said, her voice low but hard as steel.

  What could I say? What did I want to say? I really didn’t know.

  But I heard my own voice tell them, “Sam promised to close down Space Adventure Tours in two more months. I think that would be a good idea.”

  Sam nodded slowly. “Sure. By that time I oughtta be able to raise enough capital to buy a Clippership and take tourists into orbit for real.”

  Jones looked from me to Sam and back again.

  Sam added, “Of cour
se, it would help if the State Department ponied up some funding for me.”

  She snapped her attention to Sam. “Now wait a minute ..

  “Not a lot,” Sam said. “Ten or twenty million, that’s all.”

  Jones’s mouth dropped open. Then she yelped, “That’s extortion!”

  Sam placed both hands on his flowered shirt in a gesture of aggrieved innocence. “Extortion? Me?”

  “AND THAT’S JUST about the whole story, Uncle Griff,” Ramona said to me.

  I leaned back in my desk chair and stared at her. “That business with the president of Cuba happened two months ago. What kept you down there in Panama until now?”

  She blushed. Even beneath her deep suntan I could see her cheeks reddening.

  “Uh ... well, I wanted to stay on Sam’s tail and make certain he closed up his operation when he promised he would.”

  Sam hadn’t closed Space Adventure Tours, I knew. He had suspended operations in Panama and returned to the agency. Gone back on duty. He was scheduled for a classified Air Force mission, of all things. I had talked myself blue in the face, trying to get the astronaut office in Houston to replace him with somebody else, but they kept insisting Sam was the best man they had for the mission. Lord knows who he bribed, and with what.

  “You didn’t have to stay in Panama all that time,” I pointed out to my niece. “You could have kept tabs on him from here in Washington.”

  She blushed even more deeply. “Well, Uncle Griff, to tell the truth ... it was sort of like a, you know, kind of like a honeymoon.”

  I snorted. Couldn’t help it. The thought of my own little niece shacked up with ...

  “You were living with him?” I bellowed.

  She just smiled at me. “Yes,” she said, dreamily.

  I was furious. “You let Sam Gunn—”

  “Not Sam!” Ramona said quickly. Then she grinned at me. “You thought I was living with Sam?” She laughed at me.

  Before I could ask, she told me, “Hector! We fell in love, Uncle Griff! We’re going to get married.”

  That was different. Sort of. “Oh. Congratulations, I suppose. When?”

  “Next year,” my niece answered. “When Sam starts real flights into orbit, Hector and I are going to spend our official honeymoon in space!”

  I wanted to puke.

  So that’s why we had to fire Sam Gunn. Government regulations specifically state that you can’t be running a business of your own while you’re on the federal payroll. Besides, the little SOB made a shambles of everything he touched.

  It wasn’t easy, though. Actually firing somebody from a government job is never easy, and Sam played every delaying trick in the book. Just to see if he could give me apoplexy, I’m sure.

  The little conniving sneak was even working out an arrangement to rent a section of a new space station and turn it into an orbiting honeymoon hotel before I finally got all the paperwork I needed to fire his butt out of the agency.

  And he didn’t leave quietly. Not Sam. Know what his final masterstroke was? He left me a prepaid ticket to ride his goddamned Clipper-ship into orbit and spend a full week in his orbiting hotel.

  He knew damned well I’d never give him the satisfaction! Probably the little bastard thought I was too old to enjoy sex. Or maybe he expected me to bust a blood vessel while I’m making love in weightlessness.

  But I fooled him. Good and proper. I grew a beard. I got hair implants. The little wiseass never recognized me.

  When they opened this retirement center here at Copernicus I was one of the first residents. I thought maybe Sam would come here, sooner or later, if and when he finally retired.

  That’s what I’m waiting for. I know he’s not dead. Sooner or later he’s going to show up again, and sooner or later he’ll end up here in this low-gravity old folks’ home. Retired, with nothing to do. Then I can drive him nuts, for a change.

  That’s something worth living for!

  The Show Must Go On!

  “PRETTY SHAKY,” GRADOWSKY MUTTERED, AFTER LISTENING to Griffith’s narration. “Even with his sworn testament the lawyers aren’t going to like this.”

  Jade slumped in the battered old couch, feeling exhausted from her weeks of travel and tension.

  “You don’t mean that we can’t use any of it, do you?”

  “That’s not my decision, kid,” said Gradowsky from behind his desk. “We’ll have to let the lawyers listen to what you’ve got.”

  She nodded glumly, too tired to argue. Besides, it would do no good to fight Gradowsky on this. His hands were tied. She began to get an inkling of how Sam Gunn had felt about being hemmed in by office procedures and red tape.

  “So where do you go from here?” Gradowsky asked her.

  Jade pulled herself up straighter in the chair, startled by the question. “You mean we’re going on with the project?”

  “Sure. Until the lawyers pull the plug on us. Why not? I think what you’re getting is great stuff. I just worry about people suing us, that’s all.”

  Jade’s weariness seemed to wash away like water-paint under a fire hose.

  “Well,” she said, “several of the people I talked to said there’s a man at space station Alpha who—”

  “Alpha? That’s in Earth orbit.” “Right.”

  “We don’t have the budget to send you out there,” Gradowsky said.

  “We don’t?”

  “Hell, kiddo, you’ve just about used up the whole expense budget I gave you just traipsing around the different lunar settlements. Do you have any idea of what it costs to fly back Earthside?”

  “I wouldn’t be going all the way to Earth,” Jade answered. “Just to the space station.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Gradowsky seemed embarrassed with the recollection that Jade could not go to Earth even if she wanted to.

  “I’ve covered just about everybody I could find here on the Moon,” she

  said. “But there are plenty of people elsewhere: on Alpha, in the Lagrange habitats, even out in the Belt.”

  Gradowsky puffed his cheeks and blew out a heavy sigh. “The Asteroid Belt. Christ!”

  Jade knew she had to do something, and quickly, or the Sam Gunn project was finished.

  “When I first started this job,” she said to her boss, “you told me that a good reporter goes where the story is, regardless of how far or how difficult it might be.”

  He grinned sheepishly at her. “Yeah, I know. But I forgot to tell you the other half of it—as long as the big brass okays the expenses.”

  Straightening her spine, Jade replied, “We’ll have to talk to the big brass, then.”

  Gradowsky looked surprised for an instant. Then he ran both his hands over his ample belly and said, “Yeah. I guess maybe we will.”

  Several weeks later, one of the corporation’s big brass came to Selene City for the annual “fear of god” meeting that every branch office of Solar News Network received from management.

  His full name was Arak al Kashan, although he smilingly insisted on being called Raki. “Raki,” he would say, almost self-deprecatingly, “not Rocky.” Yet Jade overheard Gradowsky mumble to one of the technicians, “Count your fingers after you shake hands with him.”

  Raki was tall and tan and trim, dark of hair and eye, old enough to be a network vice president yet young enough to set women’s hearts fluttering. The grapevine had it that he was descended from very ancient blood; his aristocratic lineage went all the way back to the earliest Persian emperors. He had the haughtiness to match the claim. Jade heard him with her own ears saying disdainfully, “The unlamented Pahlavi Shahs were nothing more than upstart peasants.”

  Jade thought he was the handsomest man she had ever seen. Raki dressed in hand-tailored suits of the latest fashion, darkly iridescent lapel-less jackets in shades of blue or charcoal that fit him like a second skin over pale pastel turtlenecks. Tight slacks that emphasized his long legs and bulging groin.

  If Raki noticed Jade among the half-doze
n employees at the Solar office he gave no outward sign of it. His task, as vice president in charge of human resources, was to have a brief personal chat with each man and woman at the Selene City office, review their job performances, and assure them that headquarters, back in Orlando, had their best interests at heart—even though there were to be no salary increases this year.

  “Be careful of him,” Monica warned Jade when she saw the look in her young friend’s eyes. “He’s a lady-killer.”

  Jade smiled at Monica’s antique vocabulary. With the Sam Gunn project stalled, Jade had been assigned to covering financial news. Her current project was a report on the growth in tourism at Selene. Next she would tackle the consortium that was trying to raise capital for building a new mass driver that would double Selene’s export capacity. Hardly as thrilling as tracking down Sam Gunn’s old lovers and adversaries.

  “Jumbo Jim says that Raki could get headquarters to okay my Sam Gunn project,” Jade told Monica.

  “Honey, I’m warning you. All he’ll want to do is get into your bed.”

  They were sitting in Monica’s cubbyhole office, sipping synthetic coffee before starting the day’s tasks. Through the window that took up one whole wall they could see the dimly lit editing room where two technicians were bent over their computers, using the graphics program to “recreate” the construction of the new mass driver, from the first ceremonial shovel of excavation to the ultimate finished machine hurling hundreds of tons of cargo into space per hour.

  Monica’s office was too small for a desk. There were only the two chairs and a computer console built into the back wall. Its keyboard rested on the floor until Monica needed it.

  Jade appreciated Monica’s warning. “Mother Monica,” she called her older friend. But she had other ideas in mind.

  Trying not to smile too broadly, she told Monica, “You know, Sam Gunn used to say that he wanted to get laid without getting screwed. Maybe that’s what I’ve got to do.”

  Monica gave her a long, troubled look.

  “I mean,” Jade said, “I wouldn’t mind having sex with him. It might even be fun. The question is: how do I make sure that he’ll okay the project afterward?”