The Sam Gunn Omnibus Read online

  Apparently our final retro rocket blast singed the referee, much to the delight of the crowd.

  Sam’s CERV had been shot off the station too, we found out later. With the Gold woman aboard. Only the skipper remained aboard the space station, still yelling that he had postponed the test.

  Sam’s long ride back to Earth must have been even tougher than ours. He wound up in the hospital with a wrenched back and dislocated shoulder. He landed in the Australian outback, no less, but it took the Aussies only a couple of hours to reach him in their rescue VTOLs, once the agency gave them the exact tracking data.

  Sure enough, Arlene Gold was in the capsule with him, shaken up a bit but otherwise unhurt.

  The agency had no choice but to abort our mission and bring Commander Johnson back home at once. Popping the two CERVs was grounds for six months worth of intense investigation. Three Congressional committees, OSHA and even the EPA eventually got into the act. Thank God for Sam’s ingenuity, though. Nobody was able to find anything except an unexplained malfunction of the CERV ejection thrusters.

  The agency wound up spending seventeen million dollars redesigning the damned thing.

  As soon as we finished our debriefings, I took a few days’ leave and hustled over to the hospital outside San Antonio where they were keeping Sam.

  I could hear that he was okay before I ever saw him. At the nurses’ station half a block away from his room I could hear him yammering. Nurses were scurrying down the hall, some looking frightened, most sort of grinning to themselves.

  Sam was flat on his back, his left arm in a cast that stuck straight up toward the ceiling. “... and I want a pizza, with extra pepperoni!” he was yelling at a nurse who was leaving the room just as I tried to come in. We bumped in the doorway. She was young, kind of pretty.

  “He can’t eat solid foods while he’s strapped to the board,” she said to me. As if I had anything to do with it. The refreshment I was smuggling in for Sam was liquid, hidden under my flight jacket.

  Sam took one look at me and said, “I thought your nose was broken.”

  “Naw, just bloodied a little.”

  Then he quickly launched into a catalogue of the hospital’s faults: bedpans kept in the freezer, square needles, liquid foods, unsympathetic nurses.

  “They keep the young ones buzzing around here all day,” he complained, “but when it comes time for my sponge bath they send in Dracula’s mother-in-law.”

  I pulled up the room’s only chair. “So how the hell are you?”

  “I’ll be okay. If this damned hospital doesn’t kill me first.”

  “You rigged the CERVs, didn’t you?” I asked, dropping my voice low.

  Sam grinned. “How’d our noble skipper like being left all alone up there?”

  “The agency had to send a shuttle to pick him up, all by himself.”

  “The cost accountants must love him.”

  “The word is he’s going to be reassigned to the tracking station at Ascencion Island.”

  Sam chuckled. “It’s not exactly Pitcairn, but it’s kind of poetic anyway.”

  I worked up the nerve to ask him, “What happened?”

  “What happened?” he repeated.

  “In the CERV. How rugged was the flight? How’d you get hurt? What happened with Arlene?”

  Sam’s face clouded. “She’s back in L.A. Didn’t even wait around long enough to see if I would live or die.”

  “Must’ve been a punishing flight,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Sam muttered.

  “What do you mean?”

  Sam blew an exasperated sigh toward the ceiling. “We were screwing all the way down to the ground! How do you think I threw my back out?”

  “You and Arlene? The Bronx Ball-Breaker made out with you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. Then, “No.”

  I felt kind of stunned, surprised, confused.

  “You know the helmets we use in flight simulations?” Sam asked. “The kind that flash computer graphic visuals on your visor so you’re seeing the situation the computer is cooking up?”

  I must have nodded.

  Staring at the ceiling, he continued, “Arlene brought two of them into the lifeboat with us. And her Gloria Lamour disks.”

  “You were seeing Gloria Lamour ... ?”

  “It was like being with Gloria Lamour,” Sam said, his voice almost shaking, kind of hollow. “Just like being with her. I could touch her. I could even taste her.”

  “No shit?”

  “It was like nothing else in the world, man. She was fantastic. And it was all in zero-gee. Most of it, anyway. The landing was rough. That’s when I popped my damned shoulder.”

  “God almighty, Sam. She must have fallen for you after all. For her to do that for you ...”

  His face went sour. “Yeah, she fell for me so hard she took the first flight from Sydney to L.A. I’ll never hear from her again.”

  “But—jeez, if she gave you Gloria Lamour ...”

  “Yeah. Sure,” he said. I had never seen Sam so bitter. “I just wonder who the hell was programmed in her helmet. Who was she making out with while she was fucking me?”

  The Pelican Bar

  “YOU MEAN SHE WAS SIMULATING IT WITH SOMEONE ELSE, too?” Jade asked.

  “You betcha.”

  “Like a VR parlor,” said the bartender.

  “Those helmets were an early version of the VRs,” Sanchez said.

  “VR parlor?” Jade asked. “What’s that?”

  The bartender eyed Sanchez, then when he saw that the man was blushing slightly, he turned back to Jade.

  “Virtual reality,” he said. “Simulating the full sensory spectrum. You know, visual, audial, tactile ...”

  “Smell and taste, too?”

  Sanchez coughed into his beer, sending up a small spray of suds.

  The bartender nodded. “Yep, the whole nine yards. For a while back then, some of the wise guys in the video business figured they’d be able to do away with actors altogether. Gloria Lamour was their first experimental test, I guess.”

  “But the public preferred real people,” Sanchez said. “Not that it made much difference in the videos, but with real people they had better gossip.”

  Jade thought she understood. But, “So what’s a VR parlor? And where are they? I’ve never seen one.”

  “Over at the joints in Hell Crater,” the bartender said. “Guys go there and they can get any woman they want, whole harem full, if they can afford it.”

  “And it’s all simulated?” Jade prompted.

  “Yeah.” The bartender grinned. “But it’s still a helluva lot of fun, eh Felix?”

  “I prefer real women.”

  “Do women go to the VR parlors?” Jade asked. “I mean, do they have programs of men?”

  “Every male heartthrob from Hercules to President Pastoza,” said the bartender.

  Jade grinned. “Gee, maybe I ought to check it out.”

  “A nice young lady such as yourself should not go to Hell Crater,” Sanchez said firmly.

  “Besides, you wouldn’t be able to afford it on your salary,” the bartender added.

  Jade saw that they were slightly embarrassed. She allowed the subject to drop.

  Sanchez finished his latest beer and put the pilsner glass on the bar a trifle unsteadily. One of the robot bartenders trundled to it and replaced it with a filled glass, as it had been doing all during his narrative.

  “Poor old Sam prob’ly thought that Bronx Ball-Breaker was falling for him, didn’t he?” the bartender asked, watching the robot roll smoothly toward the knot of customers further down the bar.

  Sanchez seemed happy to return to Sam’s story. “I suppose he did, at first. Funny thing is, I think he was actually starting to fall for her. At least a little. Maybe more sympathy than anything else, but Sam was a very empathetic guy, you know.”

  “Did he ever see her again?” Jade asked.

  “No, not her. He tried to cal
l her a few times but she never responded. Not a peep.”

  “Poor Sam.”

  “Oh, don’t feel so bad about him. Sam had plenty of other fish to fry. He was never down for long. Not Sam.”

  The bartender gave a hand signal to the nearer of the two robots and it quickly brought a fresh Coke for Jade and a thimble-sized glass of amber-colored liqueur for the bartender himself.

  He raised his glass and said with utter seriousness, “To Sam Gunn, the best sonofabitch in the whole goddamned solar system.”

  Jade felt a little foolish repeating the words, but she did it, as did Sanchez, and then sipped at her new drink.

  “Y’know,” Sanchez said, after smacking his lips over the beer, “nobody gives a damn about Sam any more. Here he is, dead and gone, and just about everybody’s forgotten him.”

  “Damn shame,” the bartender agreed.

  “I wouldn’t have my business if it wasn’t for Sam,” Sanchez said. “He set me up when I needed the money to get started. Nobody else would even look at me! The banks—hah!”

  “I was helping my Daddy at his bar down in Florida when I first met Sam,” said the bartender. “He’s the one who first gave me the idea of opening a joint up here. It was still called Moonbase when I started this

  place. He had to argue a blue streak to get the base administrators to okay a saloon.”

  Jade, her own troubles pushed to the back of her mind, told them, “You two guys—and Zach, my boss—you’re the first I’ve ever heard say a decent word about Sam. Everything I ever heard from the time I was a kid has been ... well, not very flattering.”

  “That’s because the stories about him have mostly been spread by the guys who tangled with him,” said the bartender.

  “The big corporations,” Sanchez agreed.

  “And the government.”

  “They hated Sam’s guts. All those guys with suits and ties.”

  “Why?” asked Jade.

  The bartender made a sound halfway between a grunt and a snort. “Why? Because Sam was always fighting against them. He was the little guy, trying to get ahead, always bucking the big boys.”

  Sanchez smiled again. “Don’t get the idea that he was some kind of Robin Hood,” he said, glancing at the bartender, then fixing his gaze once again on Jade’s lustrous green eyes.

  The bartender guffawed. “Robin Hood? Sam? Hell no! All he wanted to do was to get rich.”

  “Which he did. Many times.”

  “And threw it all away, just as often.”

  “And helped a lot of little guys like us, along the way.”

  The bartender wiped at his eyes. “Hey, Felix, you remember the time...”

  Jade did not think it was possible to get drunk on Coca-Cola, so the exhilarated feeling she was experiencing an hour or so later must have been from the two men’s tales of Sam Gunn.

  “Why doesn’t somebody do a biography of him?” she blurted. “I mean, the networks would love it, wouldn’t they?”

  Both men stopped the reminiscences in mid-sentence. The bartender looked surprised. Sanchez inexplicably turned glum.

  “The networks? Pah!” Sanchez spat.

  “They’d never do it,” said the bartender, turning sad.

  “Why not?”

  “Two reasons. One: the big corporations run the networks and they still hate Sam, even though he’s dead. They won’t want to see him glorified. And two: guys like us will tell you stories about Sam, but do you think we’d trust some smart-ass reporter from one of the networks?” “Oh,” said Jade. “I see—I guess.”

  The men resumed their tales of their younger days. Jade half-listened as she sipped her Coke, thinking to herself, But they’re talking to me about Sam. Why couldn’t I get other people who knew him to talk to me?

  The Audition

  IT TOOK JADE THREE MONTHS TO GET HERSELF HIRED AS AN assistant video editor for the Selene office of the Solar News Network. She took crash courses in Video Editing and News Writing from the electronic university, working long into the nights in front of her interactive computer screen, catching a few winks of sleep, and then going to the garage to put in her hours on the surface driving a truck.

  At first Zach Bonner, her supervisor, scowled angrily at her baggy eyes and slowed reflexes.

  “Tell your boyfriend to let you get more sleep, little girl,” he growled at her. “Otherwise you’re going to make a mistake out there and kill yourself—maybe kill me, too.”

  Shocked with surprise, Jade blurted the truth. “I don’t have a boyfriend, Zach. I’m studying.”

  Bonner had three daughters of his own. As swiftly as he could, he transferred Jade to a maintenance job indoors. She gratefully accepted.

  “Just remember,” he said gruffly, “what you’re doing now is holding other guys’ lives in your hands. Don’t mess up.”

  Jade did her work carefully, both day and night, until her certificates of course completion arrived in her e-mail. Then she tackled the three network news offices at Selene. Minolta/Bell, the largest, turned her down cold; they had no job openings at the moment, they said, and they only hired people with experience. BBC accepted her application with a polite version of the classic, “Don’t call us; we’ll call you.”

  Solar News, the smallest of the three and the youngest, was an all-news network. They paid much less than Jade was making as a truck driver. But they had an opening for an assistant video editor. Jade took the job without thinking twice about it.

  Zach Bonner shook his head warily when she told him she was quitting. “You sure you want to do this?”

  “Yes,” Jade said. “I’m sure.”

  He gave a sigh that was almost an exasperated snort. “Okay, kid. If things don’t work out for you, come on back here and I’ll see what I can do for you.”

  She had more than half expected him to say that, but his words still warmed her. She stood up on tiptoes and pecked a kiss on his cheek. He sputtered with mixed embarrassment and happiness.

  Dr. Dinant was pleased that Jade was moving to a job belowground. “I still would like to do the procedure on you,” she said, “before I finish my tour here and return home.”

  Jade put her off, hoping she would return to Earth and forget about her. Just as her adoptive mother had.

  She started her new job, surprised that there were only six people in the entire Selene office of Solar News. Two of them were reporters, one male and one female, who went to the same hairdressing salon and actually appeared on screen now and then, when the network executives permitted such glory. Otherwise, their stories were “reported” by anchorpersons in Orlando who had never been to the Moon.

  It took her nearly a year to work up the courage to tell her new boss about her idea of doing a biography of Sam Gunn.

  “I’ve heard of him,” said her boss, a middle-aged woman named Monica Bianco. “Some sort of a con man, wasn’t he? A robber baron?”

  Although Monica affected a veneer of newsroom cynicism, she could not hide her basic good nature from Jade for very long. The two women had much in common in addition to their jobs. Monica had come to Selene to escape pollution allergies that left her gasping helplessly more than half the year on Earth. When Jade confided that she could never go to Earth, her boss broke into tears at the memory of all she had been forced to leave behind. The two of them became true friends after that.

  Monica was good-looking despite her years, Jade thought. She admitted to being over forty, and Jade wondered just how far beyond the Big Four-Oh she really was. Not that it mattered much. Especially in Selene, where men still outnumbered women by roughly three to one. Monica was a bit heavier than she ought to be, but her ample bosom and cheerful disposition kept lots of men after her. She confessed to Jade that she had been married twice. “I buried one and dumped the other,” she said, without a trace of remorse. “Both bastards. I just seem to pick rotten SOBs for myself.”

  Jade had nothing to confess beyond the usual teenager’s flings. So she told Monica
what she knew of Sam Gunn and asked how she might get the decision-makers of Solar News to assign her to do a biography.

  “Forget it, honey,” advised Monica. “The only ideas they go for are the ones they think up for themselves—or steal from somebody they envy. Besides, they’d never let an inexperienced pup like you tackle an assignment like that.”

  Jade felt her heart sink. But then Monica added, “Unless ...”

  So several weeks later Jade found herself at dinner with Monica and Jim Gradowsky, the Solar News office chief. They sat at a cozy round table in a quiet corner of the Ristorante de la Luna. Of Selene’s five eating establishments, the Ristorante was acknowledged to be the best bargain: lots of good food at modest prices. It was Jumbo Jim Gradowsky’s favorite eatery.

  Monica wore a black skirt and blouse with a scooped neckline. At Monica’s insistence, Jade had spent a week’s salary on a glittering green sheath that complemented her eyes. Now that she saw the checkered tablecloths and dripping candles, though, she thought that Monica had overdressed them both.

  Gradowsky, who showed up in a wrinkled short-sleeved shirt and baggy slacks, did not seem to notice what they were wearing. He was called Jumbo Jim because of his girth. But never to his face.

  “So you can never go Earthside,” Gradowsky was saying through a mouthful of coniglio cacciatore. His open-collared shirt was already stained and sprinkled with the soup and salad courses.

  “It’s a bone condition,” Jade replied. “Osteopetrosis.”

  Gradowsky took a tiny roasted rabbit leg in one big hand. Red gravy dripped onto his lap. “Isn’t that what little old ladies get? Makes ‘em stoop over?”

  “That’s osteoporosis,” Jade corrected. “The bones get soft with age. I’ve got just the opposite problem. My bones are too brittle. They’d snap under a full Earth gravity. They call it Marble Bones.”

  He shook his head and dabbed at the grease around his mouth with a checkered napkin. “Gee, that’s too bad. I could go back Earthside if I wanted to, but the medics say I’d hafta to lose forty-fifty pounds first.”