The Sam Gunn Omnibus Read online

  She moved her hand toward the communications keyboard. I grabbed it away.

  “Give me five minutes. Maybe there’s something we can do.”

  I called Sam to the command module. Bonnie Jo was right behind him. Swiftly I outlined the problem. He called Larry, back in Florida, who immediately agreed that the magnetic bumper would have no effect on the Nerf ball. He didn’t look terribly upset; to him this was a theoretical problem. I could see Melinda standing behind him, smiling into the screen like a chubby Mona Lisa.

  “There’s no way we could deflect it?” Sam asked, a little desperation in his voice.

  “Not unless you could charge it up,” Larry said.

  “Charge it?”

  “Spray it with an electron beam,” he said. “That’d give it enough of a surface charge for the magnetic field to deflect it.”

  Sam cut the connection. Forty-two minutes and counting.

  “We have several electron beam guns aboard,” the skipper said. “In the lab module.”

  “But they’re not powerful enough to charge the damned Nerf ball until it gets so close it’ll hit us anyway,” Sam muttered.

  “We could go out on one of the OMVs,” I heard myself suggest.

  “Yeah!” Sam brightened. “Go out and push it out of the way.”

  I had to shake my head. “No, Sam. That won’t work. The Nerf ball is coming toward us; it’s in an opposite orbit. The OMV doesn’t have enough delta-v to go out there, turn around and match orbit with it, and then nudge it into a lower orbit.”

  “You’d have to ram the OMV into it,” the commander said. “Like a kamikaze.”

  “No thanks,” Sam said. “I’m brave but I’m not suicidal.” He started gnawing his fingernails.

  I said, “But we could go out on an OMV and give it a good squirt with an electron gun as we passed it. Charge it up enough for the magnetic bumper to do the job.”

  “You think so?”

  “Forty minutes left,” Bonnie Jo said. Not a quaver in her voice. Not a half-tone higher than usual. Not a hint of fear.

  The commander shook her head. “The OMVs aren’t pressurized. You don’t have enough time for pre-breathe.”

  See, to run one of the OMVs you had to be suited up. Since the suits were pressurized only to a third of the normal air pressure that the station used, you had to pre-breathe oxygen for about an hour before sealing yourself inside the suit. Otherwise nitrogen bubbles would collect in your blood and you’d get the bends, just like a deep-sea diver.

  “Fuck the pre-breathe,” Sam snapped. “We’re gonna save this goddamned station from Rockledge’s runaway Nerf ball.”

  “I can’t let you do that, Sam,” the skipper said. Her hand went out to the comm keyboard again.

  Sam leveled a stubby finger at her. “You let us give it a shot or I’ll tell everybody back at the Cape what really happened when we were supposed to be testing the lunar rover simulator.”

  Her face flushed dark red.

  “Listen,” Sam said jovially. “You get everybody into the shuttle and pull away from the station. Mutt and I will go out in the OMV. If we can deflect the Nerf ball and save the station you’ll be a hero. If not, the station gets shredded and you can give the bill to Rockledge International.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. Who would be responsible for the destruction of this twenty-billion-dollar government installation? Who carried damage insurance on the space station?

  “And the two of you will die of the bends,” she said. “No, I won’t allow it. I’m in charge here and ...”

  “Stick us in an airlock when we get back,” Sam cajoled. “Run up the pressure. That’s what they do for deep-sea divers, isn’t it? You’ve got a medic aboard, use the jerk for something more than ramming needles into people’s asses!”

  “I can’t, Sam!”

  He looked at her coyly. “I’ve got videodisks from the lunar simulator, you know.”

  Thirty-five minutes.

  The skipper gave in, of course. Sam’s way was the only hope she had of saving the station. Besides, whatever they had done in the lunar simulator was something she definitely did not want broadcast. So ten minutes later Sam and I are buttoning ourselves into space suits while the skipper and one of her crew are floating an electron gun down the connecting tunnel to the airlock where the OMVs were docked. Everybody else was already jamming themselves into the shuttle mid-deck and cockpit. It must have looked like a fraternity party in there, except that I’ll bet everybody was scared into constipation.

  Everybody except Bonnie Jo. She seemed to have ice water in her veins. Cool and calm under fire.

  I shook my head to get rid of my thoughts about her as I pulled on the space suit helmet. Sam was already buttoned up. My ears popped when I switched on the suit’s oxygen system, but otherwise there were no bad effects.

  The orbital maneuvering vehicle had a closed cockpit, but it wasn’t pressurized. I lugged the electron gun and its power pack inside. “Lugged” isn’t the right word, exactly. The apparatus was weightless, just like everything else. But it was bulky and awkward to handle.

  Sam did the piloting. I set up the electron gun and ran through its checks. Every indicator light was green, although the best voltage I could crank out of it was a bit below max. That worried me. We’d need all the juice we could get when we whizzed past the Nerf ball.

  We launched off the station with a little lurch and headed toward our fleeting rendezvous with the runaway. Through my visor I saw the station dwindle behind us, two football fields long, looking sort of like a square double-ended paddle, the kind they use on kayaks, with a cluster of little cylinders huddled in its middle. Those were the habitat and lab modules. They looked small and fragile and terribly, terribly vulnerable.

  For the first time in my life I paid no attention to the big beautiful curving mass of the Earth glowing huge and gorgeous below us. I had no time for sightseeing, even when the sights were the most spectacular that any human being had ever seen.

  The shuttle was pulling away in the opposite direction, getting the hell out of the line of fire. Suddenly we were all alone out there, just Sam and me inside this contraption of struts and spherical tanks that we called an OMV.

  “Just like a World War I airplane movie,” Sam said to me over the suit radio. “I’ll make a pass as close to the Nerf ball as I can get. You spray it with the gun.”

  I nodded inside my helmet.

  “Five minutes,” Sam said, tapping a gloved finger on the radar display. In the false-color image of the screen the Nerf ball looked like a tumbling mass of long thin filaments, barely hanging together. Something in my brain clicked; I remembered an old antimissile system called Homing Overlay that looked kind of like an umbrella that had lost its fabric. When it hit a missile nose cone it shattered the thing with the pure kinetic energy of the impact. That’s what the tatters of the aluminized plastic Nerf ball would do to the thin skin of the space station, if we let it hit. I could picture those great big solar panels exploding, throwing off jagged pieces that would slice up the lab and habitat modules like shards of glass going through paper walls.

  “Three minutes.”

  I swung the cockpit hatch open and pushed the business end of the electron gun outside with my boots.

  “How long will the power pack run?” I asked. “The longer we fire this thing the more chance we’ll have of actually charging up the ball.”

  Sam must have shrugged inside his suit. “Might as well start now, Mutt. Build up a cloud that the sucker has to fly through. Won’t do us a bit of good to have power still remaining once we’ve passed the goddamned spitball.”

  That made sense. I clicked the right switches and turned the power dial up to max. In the vacuum I couldn’t hear whether it was humming or not, although I thought I felt a kind of vibration through my boots. All the dials said it was working, but that was scant comfort.

  “One minute,” Sam said. I knew he was flying our OMV as close to the Nerf b
all as humanly possible. Sam was as good as they came at piloting. Better than me; not by much, but better. He’d get us close enough to kiss that little sucker, I knew.

  We were passing over an ocean, which one I don’t know to this day. Big wide deep blue below us, far as the eye could see, bright and glowing with long parades of teeny white clouds marching across it.

  I saw something dark hurtling toward us, like a black octopus waving all its arms, like a silent banshee coming to grab us.

  “There it... was,” Sam said.

  The damned thing thrashed past us like a hypersonic bat out of hell. I looked down at the electron gun’s gauges. Everything read zero. We had used up all the energy in the power pack.

  “Well, either it works or it doesn’t,” Sam said. All of a sudden he sounded tired.

  I nodded inside my helmet. I felt it too: exhausted, totally drained. Just like the electron gun; we had given it everything we had. Now we had nothing left. We had done everything we could do. Now it was up to the laws of physics.

  “We’ll be back at the station in an hour,” Sam said. “We’ll know then.”

  We knew before then. Our helmet earphones erupted a few minutes later with cheers and yells, even some whistles. By the time we had completed our orbit and saw the station again, the shuttle was already re-docked. Freedom looked very pretty hanging up there against the black sky. Gleaming in the sunlight. Unscathed. So all we had to worry about was the bends.

  “WAS IT VERY painful?” Jade asked.

  Johansen gave her a small shrug. “Kind of like passing kidney stones for sixteen or seventeen hours. From every pore of your body.”

  She shuddered.

  “We came out of it okay,” he said. “But I wouldn’t want to go through it again.”

  “You saved the station. You became heroes.”

  WE SAVED THE station—Johansen agreed—but we didn’t become heroes. The government didn’t want to acknowledge that there had been any danger to Freedom, and Rockledge sure as hell didn’t want the public to know that their Nerf ball had almost wrecked the station.

  Everybody involved had to sign a secrecy agreement. That was Ed Zane’s idea. To give the guy credit, though, it was also his idea to force Rockledge to pay a cool ten million bucks for the cost of saving the station from their runaway Nerf ball. Rockledge ponied up without even asking their lawyers, and Zane saw to it that the money was split among the people who had been endangered—which included himself, of course.

  Each of us walked away with about five hundred thousand dollars, although it wasn’t tax-free. The government called it a hazardous duty bonus. It was a bribe, to keep us from leaking the story to the media.

  Everybody agreed to keep quiet—except Sam, of course.

  The medics took us out of the airlock, once we stopped screaming from the pain, and hustled us down to a government hospital on Guam. Landed the blessed shuttle right there on the island, on the three-mile-long strip they had built as an emergency landing field for the shuttle. They had to fly a 747 over to Guam to carry the orbiter back to Edwards Space Base. I think they got Rockledge to pay for that, too.

  Anyway, they put Sam and me in a semiprivate room. For observation and tests, they said. I figured they wouldn’t let either one of us out until Sam signed the secrecy agreement.

  “Five hundred thousand bucks, Sam,” I needled him from my bed. “I could pay a lot of my bills with that.”

  He turned toward me, frowning. “There’s more than money involved here, Mutt. A lot more.”

  I shrugged and took a nap. I wouldn’t sign their secrecy agreement unless Sam did, of course. So there was nothing for me to do but wait.

  Zane visited us. Sam yelled at him about kidnapping and civil rights. Zane scuttled out of the room. A couple of other government types visited us. Sam yelled even louder, especially when he heard that one of them was from the Justice Department in Washington.

  I was starting to get worried. Maybe Sam was carrying things too far. They could keep us on ice forever in a place like Guam. They wouldn’t let us call anybody; we were being held incommunicado. I wondered what Bonnie Jo was doing, whether she was worried about us. About me.

  And just like that, she showed up. Like sunshine breaking through the

  clouds she breezed into our hospital room the third day we were there, dressed in a terrific pair of sand-colored slacks and a bright orange blouse. And a briefcase.

  She waltzed up between the beds and gave us each a peck on the cheek.

  “Sorry I couldn’t get here sooner,” she said. “The agency wouldn’t answer any questions about you until my Uncle Ralph issued a writ.”

  “Your Uncle Ralph?” Sam and I asked in unison.

  “Justice Burdette,” she said, sounding a little surprised that we didn’t recognize the name. “The Supreme Court. In Washington.”

  “Oh,” said Sam.”That Uncle Ralph.”

  Bonnie Jo pulled up a chair between our beds, angling it to face Sam more than me. She placed her slim briefcase neatly on the tiled floor at her feet.

  “Sam, I want you to sign the secrecy agreement,” she said.

  “Nope.”

  “Don’t be stubborn, Sam. You know it wouldn’t be in the best interests of VCI to leak this story to the media.”

  “Why not? We saved the friggin’ space station, didn’t we?”

  “Sam—you have proved the feasibility of the magnetic bumper concept. In a few months the agency will give out a contract to run the facility. If you don’t sign the secrecy agreement they won’t give the contract to VCI. That’s all there is to it.”

  “That’s illegal!” Sam shot upright in his bed. “You know that! We’ll sue the bastards! Call the news networks! Call...”

  She reached out and put a finger on his lips, silencing him and making me feel rotten.

  “Sam, the more fuss you make the less likely it is that the government will award you the contract. They can sit there with their annual budgets and wait until you go broke paying lawyers. Then where will you be?”

  He grumbled under his breath.

  Bonnie Jo took her finger away. “Besides, that’s not really what you want, is it? You want to operate the debris removal system, don’t you? You want to sell the Vanguard satellite to the Smithsonian, don’t you?”

  He kind of nodded, like a kid being led to the right answer by a kindly teacher.

  “And after that?”

  “Remove defunct commsats from GEO. Retrieve the Eagle from Tranquility Base and sell it to the highest bidder.”

  Bonnie Jo gave him a pleased smile. “All right, then,” she said, picking

  up the briefcase. She placed it on her lap, opened it, and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “You have some signing to do.”

  “What about me?” I asked, kind of sore that she had ignored me.

  Bonnie Jo peeled the top sheet from the pile and held it up in the air by one corner. “This one’s for Sam. It’s the secrecy agreement. There’s one for you, too, Spence. All the others have to be signed by the president of VCI.”

  “Over my dead body,” Sam growled.

  “Don’t tempt me,” Bonnie Jo answered sweetly. “Read them first. All of them. Engage brain before putting mouth in gear.”

  Sam glared at her. I tried not to laugh and wound up sputtering. Sam looked at me and then he grinned, too, kind of self-consciously.

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ll read.”

  He put the secrecy agreement on the bed to one side of him and started going through the others. As he finished each document, he handed it to me so I could read it, too.

  The first was a sole-source contract from the agency to run the debris removal system for space station Freedom for five years. Not much of a profit margin, but government contracts never give a high percentage of profit. What they do is give you a steady income to keep your overhead paid. On the money from this contract Larry and Melinda could get married and take a honeymoon in Tasmania, if they want
ed to.

  The second document made my eyes go wide. I could actually feel them dilating, like camera lenses. It was a contract from Rockledge International for VCI to remove six of their defunct commsats from geosynchronous orbit. I paged through to the money numbers. More zeroes than I had seen since the last time I had read about the national debt!

  When I looked up, Bonnie Jo was grinning smugly at me. “That’s D’Argent’s peace offering. You don’t blab about the Nerf ball incident and you can have the job of removing their dead commsats.”

  “What about retrieving the Nerf balls before they reenter the atmosphere?” I asked. “I’d think that Rockledge would want to get their hands on them, see why they failed.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “I want a separate contract from Rockledge to retrieve their Nerf balls and ...”

  “Keep reading,” Bonnie Jo said. “It’s in the pile there.”

  She had done it all. VCI would be the exclusive contractor for garbage removal not only for the government, but for Rockledge as well. With that kind of a lead, we’d be so far ahead of any possible competitors that nobody would even bother to try to get into the business against us.

  I signed all the contracts. With a great show of reluctance, Sam signed the secrecy agreement. Then I signed mine.

  “You’re marvelous,” I said to Bonnie Jo, handing her back all the documents. “To do all this ...”

  “I’m just protecting my daddy’s investment,” she said coolly. There was no smile on her face. She was totally serious. “And my own.”

  I couldn’t look into those gray-green eyes of hers. I turned away.

  Somebody knocked at the door. Just a soft little tap, kind of weak, timid.

  “Now what?” Sam snapped. “Come on in,” he yelled, exasperated. “Might as well bring the Mormon Tabernacle Choir with you.”

  The door opened about halfway and Albert Clement slipped in, thin and gray as ever, back in his usual charcoal three-piece undertaker’s suit.

  “I’m sorry if I’m intruding,” he said, softly, apologetically.

  Sam’s frown melted. “You’re not intruding.”

  Clement sort of hovered near the door, as if he didn’t dare come any further into the room.