The Sam Gunn Omnibus Read online

  “Holy Christmas!” I said when I read the letter. “We’re never going to get a contract. Look at who the competition is: three of the biggest aerospace corporations in the world!”

  Sam made like a Buddha. He folded his hands over his little belly and smiled enigmatically.

  “Don’t worry about it, Mutt,” he said for the thousand-and-first time. “It’s in the bag. If there’s any real problem, I’ve got four magic words that will take care of everything.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Four magic words,” Sam repeated.

  I did not share his confidence. In fact, I thought he had gone a little nutty under the pressure.

  I was nervous as a kid on his first solo as I flew to Washington on the appointed day. I had spent every day and night since we’d received that letter cramming every bit of technical and financial data into my thick skull. We had even flown over to College Station for a week, where our two bright Texas A&M youngsters stuffed all their info into me directly.

  I was surprised to see that one of Sam’s two young geniuses was female. Sort of round and chubby, but she had huge dark soulful Mediterranean eyes that followed Sam wherever he moved like twin radar dishes locked onto a target. I figured that maybe Sam had met her before he had read their paper in that journal.

  Anyway, there I was, stepping into an office in some big government building in Washington, my head bursting with facts and figures. As offices go, it wasn’t much bigger or better furnished than our own little place in Florida. Government-issue desk, table and chairs. Metal bookcases on one side. Faded pastel walls, hard to tell what color they were supposed to be originally. Everything looked kind of shabby.

  I was the last one to arrive. Representatives of our three competitors were already sitting side-by-side on one end of the long table that took up most of the room. They sure looked well-off, knowledgeable, slick and powerful. I felt like an intruder, an outsider, well beyond my depth.

  But Sam had given me those four magic words of his to use in an emergency, and I whispered them to myself as I took the last chair, at the foot of the table.

  Sitting at the head of the table was a guy from the agency I had met once, when he had visited the Cape for the official ceremonies when we opened space station Freedom. That had been years ago, and I hadn’t seen him anywhere around the working parts of the agency since then. On his right-hand side sat three more government types: old suits, gray hair or none at all, kind of pasty faces from being behind desks all their lives.

  The three industry reps were dressed in much better suits: not flashy, but obviously expensive. Two of them were so young their hair was still all dark. The third, from Rockledge International, was more my own age. His hair was kind of salt-and-pepper; looked like he spent plenty on haircuts, too. And tanning parlors. He was the only one who smiled at me as I sat down and introduced myself. I didn’t know it right at that moment, but it was the kind of smile a shark gives.

  “We’re glad you could make it, Mr. Johansen,” said the guy at the head of the table. The others sort of snickered.

  “My flight was delayed in Atlanta,” I mumbled. In those days, when you flew out of Florida, even if you died and were sent to hell you had to go by way of Atlanta.

  He introduced himself as Edgar Zane. Thin hair, thin lips, thin nose, and thin wire-frames on his bifocals. But his face looked round and bloated, too big for his features. Made him look like a cartoon character, almost. From what I could see of his belly behind the table, that was bloated too.

  Zane introduced everybody else around the table. The government types were from the Department of Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Commerce.

  Commerce? Was this bald, sallow-faced, cranky-looking old scarecrow Sam’s pigeon in the Commerce Department? He sure didn’t give me any reason to think so. He squinted at me like an undertaker taking measurements.

  “Before we begin,” said the Rockledge guy, Pierre D’Argent, “I’d like to ask Mr. Johansen for a clarification.”

  Zane peered at him through the top half of his bifocals. “You’re here to answer questions, Mr. D’Argent, not ask them.”

  He beamed a smile toward the head of the table. “Yes, I understand that. But I believe we all have the right to know exactly who we are dealing with here.”

  He turned his handsome face to me. “VCI is a new firm in this field. I think we’d all like to know a bit more about your company’s financial backing and management structure.”

  I knew right away what he wanted. He wanted me to tell them all that Sam Gunn was the man behind VCI.

  I gave him the standard spiel that Sam had drummed into me, like a POW reciting name, rank, and serial number: “VCI is a privately held company. I am the president and Chief Executive Officer. While our staff is small and elite we have an extensive list of consultants who can provide world-class technical, management and financial expertise on every aspect of our program. VCI’s principal financial backer is the First Federal Bank of Utah. Our accounting firm is Robb and Steele, of Merritt Island, Florida.”

  D’Argent smiled at me with all his teeth. “And what role does Mr. Gunn play in VCI?”

  “Who?” My voice squeaked a little.

  “Sam Gunn,” D’Argent said.

  I looked up the table. Zane was scowling at me through his wire-frame glasses. He knew Sam, that was for sure.

  Never lie to the government, Sam had instructed me, when there’s a good chance that they’ll catch you at it.

  “Mr. Gunn is the founder of VCI,” I said.

  “His name doesn’t appear in your proposal,” Zane practically snarled.

  “Yes it does, sir,” I corrected him. “On page four hundred and sixty-three.” That was back in the boilerplate section where we were required to put in a history of the company. Ordinarily nobody read the boilerplate, but now I knew that Zane and his three harpies would go over it with electron microscopes. How Sam managed to produce forty-seven pages of history about a company that wasn’t even forty-seven weeks old was beyond me.

  Zane gave D’Argent a glance, then asked me, “Is Sam Gunn going to be actively involved in the project—if you should be fortunate enough to win one of the contracts?”

  “We have no intention to actively involve him in the day-to-day work,” I said. It was pretty close to the truth.

  Zane looked as if he didn’t believe a word of it. I figured we had been shot down before we even got off the runway. D’Argent gave me another one of his shark smiles, looking pleased with himself.

  But the bald scarecrow from Commerce cleared his throat and rasped, “Are we here to discuss the competing proposals or to conduct a witch hunt? Sounds to me like a cult of personality.”

  Zane huffed through his pinched nose and started the official proceedings.

  The one thing we had going for us was our technical approach. I quickly saw that all three of our giant corporate competitors had submitted pretty much the same proposal: the old Nerf ball idea. You know, launch a balloon and blow it up to full size once it’s in orbit. The balloon’s surface is sort of semi-sticky. As it runs into debris in space it bounces them into orbits that spin down into the atmosphere, where the junk burns up. The idea had been around for decades. It was simple and would probably work—except for sizable chunks of debris, like discarded pieces of rocket stages or hand tools that got away.

  It also required a lot of launches, because the Nerf ball itself got slowed down enough after a few orbits to come spiraling back into the atmosphere. The Nerfs could be launched with small unmanned boosters pretty cheaply, or ride piggyback on bigger boosters. They could even be tucked into spare corners of shuttle payload bays and injected into orbit by the shuttle crews.

  Our proposal was different. See, the junk hanging around up there picked up an electrical charge after a couple of orbits. From electrons in the solar wind, if I remember correctly. Sam’s idea was to set up a big electromagnetic bumper on
the front end of space station Freedom and deflect the debris with it, neatly clearing out the orbit that the station was flying through. Kind of like the cowcatcher on the front of an old locomotive, only instead of being made of steel our bumper was an invisible magnetic field that stretched hundreds of meters into space out in front of the station.

  “The equipment we need is small enough to fit into a shuttle’s student experiment canister,” I explained. “The bumper itself is nothing more than an extended magnetic field, generated by a superconducting coil that would be mounted on the forward-facing side of the space station.”

  “The costs ...” Zane started to mutter.

  “The program will cost less than a continuing series of Nerf ball launches,” I said before he could turn to the relevant pages in our proposal. “And the elegant thing is that, since this program’s primary aim is to keep Freedom’s orbit clear of debris, we will be doing exactly that.”

  “And nothing else,” D’Argent sniped.

  I smiled at him for a change. “Once Freedom’s orbit has been cleared we could always detach the equipment, mount it in an orbital maneuvering vehicle, and clean out other orbits. The equipment is very portable, yet durable and long-lasting.”

  We went into some really heavy-duty arguing, right through lunch (a plate of soggy sandwiches and cans of soda brought in to us by a delivery boy who had dirt under every one of his fingernails) and all through the long afternoon.

  “I’ve got to admit,” Zane finally said as it started to get dark outside, “that VCI’s technical proposal is extremely interesting.”

  “But can a newly hatched company be expected to carry through?” D’Argent asked. “I mean, after all, they have no track record, no real financial strength. Do you really trust Sam Gunn, of all people, to get the job done?”

  I held onto my temper. Partly because Sam had drilled it into me that they’d drop our proposal if they thought I was as flaky as he was. But mostly because I heard Sam’s four magic words.

  “Small business set-aside.”

  They were spoken by the cadaver from Commerce. Everything stopped. The room fell so quiet I could hear the going-home traffic from out on the streets below even through the double-paned sealed windows of the office.

  “This program has a small business set-aside provision,” the Commerce scarecrow said, his voice crackling as if it was coming over a radio link from Mars. “VCI is the only small business firm to submit a proposal. Therefore, if their proposal is technically sound—which we all agree that it is—and financially in line, we have no choice but to award them one of the two contracts.”

  D’Argent’s handsome chin dropped to his expensive rep tie. Zane glared at his crony from Commerce. The others muttered and mumbled to themselves. But there was no way around it. Decades earlier the Congress had set up a system so that little companies could compete against the big guys. Sam had found that old government provision and used it.

  Later, when I told Sam how things had gone, he whooped and danced on my desktop. Nothing made him happier than using the government’s own red tape to his advantage.

  “WAIT A MINUTE,” Jade said, putting down the tall cool glass she had been holding for so long that its contents had melted down to ice water.

  Johansen, who had hardly touched his own drink, eyed her quizzically.

  “Was that old man Sam’s contact in the Commerce Department, after all? Had he tipped Sam off about the small business set-aside?”

  I THOUGHT THE same thing—Johansen answered—but the guy slipped out of the meeting room like a ghost disappearing into thin air. And when I asked Sam about it, back in Florida, he just got quiet and evasive. There was something going on, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Not until a lot later.

  Anyway, about six weeks afterward we got the official notification that we had won one of the two contracts for what the government called “The Orbital Debris Removal Test and Evaluation Program, Phase I.” The other contract went to Rockledge.

  “We’re in!” Sam yelped. “We did it!”

  We partied all that weekend. Sam invited everybody from the swimwear shop downstairs, for starters, and pretty soon it seemed like the whole shopping mall was jammed into our little office. Sometime during the weekend our two geniuses from Texas A&M showed up and joined the fun.

  The hangover was monumental, but the party was worth it. Then the work began.

  I saw trouble right away. The kids from Texas were really brilliant about superconductors and magnetic bumpers, but they were emotionally about on the level of junior high school.

  The girl—uh, woman—her name was Melinda Cardenas. It was obvious that she had the hots for Sam. She followed him with those big brown eyes of hers wherever Sam went. She was kind of cute although pretty badly overweight. Could have been a real beauty, I guess, if she could stay away from sweets and junk food. But that’s just about all she ate. And every time I looked at her, she was eating.

  Her boyfriend—Larry Karsh—ate as much junk food as she did, but never put on an ounce. Some people have metabolisms like that. He never exercised. He just sat all day long at the desktop computer he had brought with him, designing our magnetic bumper and munching on sweet rolls and greaseburgers from the fast-food joint a few doors down the mall from our office. He could lose weight just by breathing, while Melinda gained a pound and a half every time she inhaled.

  It took me a while to figure out that Larry was plying Melinda with food so she’d stay too fat for anybody else to be interested in her. They were rooming together, but “like brother and sister,” according to Melinda. One look at Larry’s pasty unhappy face, sprinkled with acne, told me that the brother-and-sister thing was making him miserable.

  “You gotta get her away from me,” Sam told me, a little desperation in his voice, one evening down in the bar where we had originally formed VCI.

  “Melinda?”

  “Who else?”

  “I thought you liked her,” I said.

  “She’s just a kid.” Sam would not meet my eyes. He concentrated instead on making wet rings on the tabletop with his beer bottle.

  “Pretty well-developed kid.”

  “You gotta get her off me, Mutt.” He was almost pleading. “If you don’t, Larry’s going to pack up and leave.”

  I finally got the picture. Sam had used his charm to get Melinda to join VCI because he had known that Larry would come wherever she went. But now Larry was getting resentful. If he broke up our design team VCI would be in deep yogurt.

  “Just how much charm did you use on her?” I asked.

  Sam raised his hands over his head. “I never touched her, so help me. Hell, I never even took her out to dinner without Larry coming with us.”

  “Did he have acne back in Texas?”

  “Yeah. I think they’re both virgins.” Sam said it as if it were a crime.

  I can see now, with twenty-twenty hindsight, that what I should have done was buddy up to Larry, give him a few pointers about personal grooming and manners. The kid was brilliant, sure, but his idea of evening wear was an unwashed T-shirt and a pair of cutoffs. And he was so damned shy that he hid behind his computer just about all the time. He never went anywhere and he never did anything except massage his computer. And eat junk food. He had that dead-fish complexion of a guy in solitary confinement. He was about as much fun as staring at a blank wall.

  To tell the truth, I just couldn’t see myself buddying up to the kid. So, instead, I made the mistake of trying to get Melinda interested in me, rather than Sam. I invited her out to dinner. That’s all it took. I didn’t even hold her hand, but the next morning there was a love poem on my desk, signed with a flowery M. And Larry didn’t show up in the office.

  “Where is he?” Sam snapped the minute he entered the office—around ten-thirty. He headed straight for his desk, which I called “Mount Blanc” because of the mountain of paperwork heaped on top of it. Sam paid practically no attention to any incoming paper. The mo
untain just grew bigger. How he ever found anything in that pile I never knew, but whenever I couldn’t find some form or some piece of important correspondence, Sam would rummage through the mountain and pull out the right piece of paper in half a minute.

  Neither Melinda nor I answered Sam’s question. I didn’t know where the kid was. Melinda was watching me shyly from behind her computer. Then I realized that Larry’s desk was bare. He had taken his computer.

  “Where the hell is he?” Sam screeched.

  It took me about ten seconds to figure out what had happened. Ten seconds, plus reading Melinda’s poem. It was pretty awful. Can you imagine a poem that rhymes dinner, winner, and thinner?

  “Where the hell is Larry?” Sam asked her directly.

  She shrugged from behind her computer screen. “He’s very immature,” she said, batting her eyelashes at me. Good lord, I realized that she was wearing makeup. Lots of it.

  “Of all the gin-joints in all the towns in all the world,” Sam growled, scurrying from behind his desk and heading for the door. “Come on, Mutt! I’ve got to meet Bonnie Jo at the airport and you’ve got to find that kid before he runs back to Texas!”

  “Bonnie Jo?” I called after him. I flicked my phone console to automatic answer and then dashed out after him. Melinda sat where she had been since eight that morning; her only exercise was reaching for a bag of nacho chips.

  Bonnie Jo Murtchison was the daughter of our financial backer, the banker who wanted his daughter married.

  “She’s coming in on the eleven o’clock plane,” Sam said over his shoulder as we rattled down the stairs and ran out to his leased Jaguar convertible. I never saw it with the top up, yet somehow it was always under shelter when Florida decided to have a cloudburst. Sam was uncanny that way.

  “You’ll never make it to the airport by eleven,” I said, vaulting over the Jag’s door.

  Sam gave me a sour look as he slid behind the wheel. “And when’s the last time any goddamned commercial airliner arrived on schedule?”