The Sam Gunn Omnibus Page 5

Through it all I clearly heard the commander speak the little speech he had obviously rehearsed for days: “Welcome aboard space station Freedom! Miss Lamour. Mi casa es su casa.”

  Big frigging deal!

  What it worked out to was this: The crab apple’s name was Arlene Gold. She was a technician for the video company. In fact, she was the entire video crew, all by herself. “And her pallet-full of equipment. She was here to shoot background footage. Was Gloria Lamour coming up later? She got very cagey about answering that one.

  We got to know her pretty well over the next several days. Commander Johnson lost interest in her immediately, but although he still wouldn’t let any of us go into the lab module, she had to come into the wardroom for meals. She was a New Yorker, which she pronounced “Noo Yawkeh.” Testy, suspicious, always on guard. Guess I can’t blame her, stuck several hundred miles up in orbit with five drooling maniacs and a commander who behaved like a robot.

  But god, was she a sourpuss.

  Larry approached her. “You handle zero-gee very well. Most of us got sick the first couple of days.”

  “What’d ya expect,” she almost snarled, “screaming and fainting?”

  A day or so later Rog Cranston worked up the courage to ask, “Have you done much flying?”

  “Whatsit to ya?” she snapped back at him.

  It only took a few days of that kind of treatment for us to shun her almost completely. When she came into the wardroom for meals we backed away and gave her the run of the galley’s freezers and microwave. We made certain there was an empty table for her.

  Except that Sam kept trying to strike up a conversation with her. Kept trying to make her laugh, or even smile, no matter how many times she rebuffed him. He even started doing short jokes for her, playing the buffoon, telling her how much he admired taller women. (She might have been half a centimeter taller than he was on the ground; it was hard to tell in zero-gee.)

  Her responses ranged from “Get lost” to “Don’t be such a jerk.”

  I pulled Sam aside after a few evenings of this and asked him when he had turned into a masochist.

  Sam gave me a knowing grin. “My old pappy always told me, ‘When they hand you a lemon, son, make lemonade.’“ “With her.”

  “You see any other women up here?”

  I didn’t answer, but I had to admit that Larry Minetti was starting to look awfully good to me.

  “Besides,” Sam said, his grin turning sly, “when Gloria Lamour finally gets here, Arlene will be her guardian, won’t she?”

  I got it. Get close to the sourpuss and she’ll let you get close to the sex goddess. There was method in Sam’s madness. He seemed to spend all his spare time trying to melt Arlene’s heart of steel. I thought he had even lost interest in rigging the skipper’s CERV test so that it would be John J. Johnson who got fired off the station, not Sam Gunn.

  Sam practically turned himself inside out for Arlene. He became elfin, a pixie, a leprechaun whenever she came to the galley or wardroom.

  And it seemed to be working. She let him eat dinner at the same table with her one night.

  “After all,” I overheard Sam tell her, “we little people have to stick together.”

  “Don’t get ideas,” Arlene replied. But her voice had lost some of its sharp edge. She damned near smiled at Sam.

  The next morning Johnson called Sam to his command console. “You are relieved of your normal duties for the next few days,” the skipper said. “You will report to the lab module and assist Ms. Gold in testing her equipment.”

  I shot a surprised glance at Larry, who was at his console, next to mine. His eyebrows were rising up to his scalp. Sam just grinned and launched himself toward the hatch. The commander smiled crookedly at his departing back.

  “So what’s with you two?” I asked him a couple nights later. He had just spent eighteen hours straight in the lab module with Arlene and her video gear.

  “What two?”

  “You and Arlene.”

  Sam cocked his head to one side. “With us? Nothing. She needs a lot of help with all that video gear. Damned studio sent her here by herself. They expect her to muscle those lasers and camera rigs around. Hell, even in zero-gee that’s a job.”

  I got the picture. “So when Gloria Lamour finally shows up you’ll be practically part of the family.”

  I expected Sam to leer, or at least grin. Instead he looked kind of puzzled. “I don’t know if she’s coming up here at all. Arlene’s pretty touchy about the subject.”

  Just how touchy we found out a couple nights later.

  Larry and I were in the wardroom replaying Super Bowl XXIV on the computer simulator. I had lost the coin flip and gotten stuck with the Broncos. We had the sound turned way down so we wouldn’t annoy the commander, who was staying up late, watching a video drama over in his corner: Halloween XXXIX.

  Anyway, I had programmed an old Minnesota Vikings defense into the game, and we had sacked Montana four times already in the first quarter. The disgusted look on his face when he climbed up from the fourth burial was so real you’d think we were watching an actual game instead of creating a simulation. The crowd was going wild.

  Elway was just starting to get hot, completing three straight passes, when Arlene sailed into the wardroom, looking red in the face, really pissed off. Sam was right behind her, talking his usual blue streak.

  “So what’d I say that made you so sore? How could I hurt your feelings talking about the special-effects computer? What’d I do, what’d I say? For chrissakes, you’re breaking the Fifth Amendment! The accused has got a right to be told what he did wrong. It’s in the Constitution!”

  Arlene whirled in midair and gave him a look that would have scorched a rhinoceros. “It’s not the Fifth Amendment, stupid.”

  Sam shrugged so hard he propelled himself toward the ceiling. “So I’m not a lawyer. Sue me!”

  Larry and I both reached for the HOLD button on our tabletop keyboard. I got there first. The game stopped with the football in midair and Denver’s wide receiver on the ten-yard line behind the Forty-Niners’ free safety.

  Arlene pushed herself to the galley while Sam hovered up near the ceiling, anchoring himself there by pressing the fingertips of one hand against the overhead panels. Commander Johnson did not stir from his corner, but I thought his eyes flicked from Arlene to Sam and then back to his video screen.

  Before Larry and I got a chance to restart our game, Arlene squirted some hot coffee into a squeezebulb and went to the only other table in the wardroom, sailing right past Sam’s dangling feet. The commander watched her. As she slipped her feet into the floor restraints he turned off his video screen and straightened up to his full height.

  “Ms. Gold ...” he began to say.

  She ignored Johnson and pointed up at Sam with her free hand. “You’re hanging around with your tail wagging, waiting for Gloria Lamour to get here.”

  “Ms. Gold,” the commander said, a little louder.

  Sam pushed off the ceiling. “Sure. We all are.”

  “Sure,” Arlene mimicked. “We all are.” She gave Larry and me a nasty stare.

  Sam stopped himself about six inches off the floor. How he did that was always beyond me. Somehow he seemed able to break Newton’s First Law, or at least bend it a little to make himself feel taller.

  Johnson disengaged himself from his foot restraints and came out from behind his video set. He was staring at Arlene, his own face pinched and narrow-eyed.

  “Ms. Gold,” he repeated, firmly.

  Arlene ignored him. She was too busy yowling at Sam, “You’re so goddamned transparent it’s pathetic! You think Gloria Lamour would even bother to glance at a little snot like you? You think if she came up here she’d let you wipe her ass? Ha!”

  “Ms. Gold, I believe you are drunk,” said our fearless skipper. The look on his face was weird: disapproval, disgust, disappointment, and a little bit of disbelief.

  “You’re damned right I’m dru
nk, mon capitain. What th’ fuck are you gonna do about it?”

  Instead of exploding like a normal skipper would, the commander surprised us all by replying with great dignity, “I will escort you to your quarters.”

  But he turned his beady-eyed gaze toward Sam.

  Sam drifted slowly toward the skipper, bobbing along high enough to be eye-to-eye with Johnson.

  “Yes, sir, she has been drinking. Vodka, I believe. I tried to stop her but she wouldn’t stop,” Sam said.

  The commander looked utterly unconvinced.

  “I have not touched a drop,” Sam added. And he exhaled right into Commander Johnson’s face hard enough to push himself backward like a punctured balloon.

  Johnson blinked, grimaced, and looked for a moment like he was going to throw up. “I will deal with you later, Mr. Gunn,” he muttered. Then he turned to Arlene again and took her by the arm. “This way, Ms. Gold.”

  She made a little zero-gee curtsy. “Thank you, Commander Johnson. I’m glad that there is at least one gentleman aboard this station.” And she shot Sam a killer stare.

  “Not at all,” said the commander, patting her hand as it rested on his arm. He looked down at her in an almost grandfatherly way. Arlene smiled up at him and allowed Commander Johnson to tow her toward the hatch. Then he made his big mistake.

  “And tell me, Ms. Gold,” said the skipper, “just when will Gloria Lamour arrive here?”

  Arlene’s face twisted into something awful. “You too? You too! That’s all you bastards are thinking about, isn’t it? When’s your favorite wet dream going to get here.”

  The commander sputtered, “Ms. Gold, I assure you ...”

  She pulled free of his arm, sending herself spinning across the wardroom. She grabbed a table and yelled at all of us:

  “Lemme tell you something, lover boys. Gloria Lamour ain’t comin’ up here at all. Never! This is as good as it gets, studs. What you see is what you got!”

  The commander had to haul her through the hatch. We could hear her yelling and raving all the way down the connecting passageway to the lab module.

  “Where’d she get the booze?” Larry asked.

  “Brought it up with her,” said Sam. “She’s been drinking since five o’clock. Something I said ticked her off.”

  “Never mind that.” I got straight to the real problem. “Is she serious about Gloria Lamour not coming up here?”

  Sam nodded glumly.

  “Aw shit,” moaned Larry.

  I felt like somebody had shot Santa Claus.

  “There isn’t any Gloria Lamour,” Sam said, his voice so low that I thought maybe I hadn’t heard him right.

  “No Gloria Lamour?”

  “Whattaya mean?”

  Sam steadied himself with a hand on the edge of our table. “Just what I said. There isn’t any such person as Gloria Lamour.”

  “That’s her show-business name.”

  “She’s not real!” Sam snapped. “She’s a simulation. Computer graphics, just like your damned football game.”

  “But...”

  “All the publicity about her ...”

  “All faked. Gloria Lamour is the creation of a Hollywood talent agency and some bright computer kids. It’s supposed to be a secret, but Arlene spilled it to me after she’d had a few drinks.”

  “A simulation?” Larry looked crushed. “Computer graphics can do that? She looked so ... so real.”

  “She’s just a bunch of algorithms, pal.” Sam seemed more sober than I had ever seen him. “Arlene’s her ‘director.’ She programs in all her moves.”

  “The damned bitch,” Larry growled. “She could’ve let us know. Instead of building up our expectations like this.”

  “It’s supposed to be a secret,” Sam repeated.

  “Yeah, but she should’ve let us in on it. It’s not fair! It’s just not fair!”

  Sam gave him a quizzical little half-smile. “Imagine how she’s been feeling, watching the six of us—even old Jay-Cubed—waiting here with our tongues hanging out and full erections. Not paying any attention to her; just waiting for this dream—this computerized doll. No wonder she got sore.”

  I shook my head. The whole thing was too weird for me.

  Sam was muttering, “I tried to tell her that I liked her, that I was interested in her for her own sake.”

  “She saw through that,” Larry said.

  “Yeah ...” Sam looked toward the hatch. Everything was quiet now. “Funny thing is, I was getting to like her. I really was.”

  “Her? The Bronx Ball-Breaker?”

  “She’s not that bad once she lets herself relax a little.”

  “She sure didn’t look relaxed tonight,” I said.

  Sam agreed with a small nod. “She never got over the idea that I was after Gloria Lamour, not her.”

  “Well, weren’t you?”

  “At first, yeah, sure. But...”

  Larry made a sour face. “But once she told you there wasn’t any Gloria Lamour you were willing to settle for her, right?”

  I chimed in, “You were ready to make lemonade.”

  Sam fell silent. Almost. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I don’t think so.”

  The skipper came back into the wardroom, and fixed Sam with a firing-squad stare.

  “Lights out, gentlemen. Gunn, you return to your normal duties tomorrow. Ms. Gold will finish her work here by herself and depart in two days.”

  Sam’s only reply was a glum, “Yes, sir.”

  The next morning when we started our shift in the command module Sam looked terrible. As if he hadn’t slept all night. Yet there was a hint of a twinkle in his eye. He kept his face straight, because the skipper was watching him like a hawk. But he gave me a quick wink at precisely ten o’clock.

  I know the exact time for two reasons.

  First, Commander Johnson punched up the interior camera view of the lab module and muttered, “Ten in the morning and she’s not at work yet.”

  “She must be under the weather, sir,” Sam said in a funny kind of stiff, military way of talking. Like he was rehearsing for a role in a war video or trying to get on the skipper’s good side. (Assuming he had one.)

  “She must be hung over as hell,” Al Dupres muttered to me.

  “I suppose I should call her on the intercom and wake her up,” the commander said. “After all, if she’s only got two more days ...”

  “Emergency! Emergency!” called the computer’s synthesized female voice. “Prepare to abandon the station. All personnel to Crew Emergency Reentry Vehicles. All personnel to Crew Emergency Reentry Vehicles. Prepare to abandon the station.”

  Bells and klaxons started going off all over the place. The emergency siren was wailing so loud you could barely hear yourself think. Through it all the computer kept repeating the abandon-ship message. The computer’s voice was calm but urgent. The six of us were urgent, but definitely not calm.

  “But I postponed the test!” Commander Johnson yelled at his computer screen. It was filled with big block letters in red, spelling out what the synthesizer was saying.

  Larry and the others were already diving for the hatch that led to the nearest CERV. They had no idea that this was supposed to be a drill.

  I hesitated only a moment. Then I remembered Sams wink a minute earlier. And the little sonofagun was already flying down the connecting passageway toward the lab module like a red-topped torpedo.

  “I postponed the goddamned test!” Johnson still roared at his command console, over the noise of all the warning hoots and wails. Sure he had. But Sam had spent the night rerigging it.

  The station had four CERVs, each of them big enough to hold six people. Typical agency overdesign, you might think. But the lifeboats were spotted at four different locations, so no matter where on the station you might be, there was a CERV close enough to save your neck and big enough to take the whole crew with you, if necessary.

  They were round unglamorous spheres, sort of like the ear
ly Russian manned reentry vehicles. Nothing inside except a lot of padding and safety harnesses. The idea was you belted off the station, propelled by cold gas jets, then the CERV’s onboard computer automatically fired a set of retro rockets and started beeping out an emergency signal so the people on the ground could track where you landed.

  The sphere was covered with ablative heat shielding. After reentry it popped parachutes to plop you gently on the ocean or the ground, wherever. There was also a final descent rocket to slow your fall down to almost zero.

  I caught up with Larry and the other guys inside the CERV and told them to take it easy.

  “This is just a drill,” I said, laughing.

  Rog Cranston’s face was dead white. “A drill?” He had already buckled himself into his harness.

  “You sure?” Larry asked. He was buckled in, too. So was Al.

  “Do you see the skipper in here?” I asked, hovering nonchalantly in the middle of the capsule.

  Al said, “Yeah. We’re all buttoned up but we haven’t been fired off the station.”

  Just at that moment we felt a jolt like somebody had whanged the capsule with the world’s biggest hammer. I went slamming face first into the padded bulkhead, just missing a head-on collision with Larry by about an inch.

  “Holy shit!” somebody yelled.

  I was plastered flat against the padding, my nose bleeding and my body feeling like it weighed ten tons.

  “My ass, a drill!”

  It was like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, only worse. After half a minute that seemed like half a year the g-force let up and we were weightless again. I fumbled with shaking hands into one of the empty harnesses. My nose was stuffed up with blood that couldn’t run out in zero-gee and I thought I was going to strangle to death. Then we started feeling heavy again. The whole damned capsule started to shake like we were inside a food processor and blood sprayed from my aching nose like a garden sprinkler.

  And through it all I had this crazy notion in my head that I could still hear Commander Johnson’s voice wailing, “But I postponed the drill!”

  We were shaken, rattled, and frazzled all the way down. The worst part of it, of course, was that the flight was totally beyond our control. We just hung in those harnesses like four sides of beef while the capsule automatically went through reentry and parachuted us into the middle of a soccer field in Brazil. There was a game going on at the time, although we could see nothing because the capsule had neither windows nor exterior TV cameras.