The Sam Gunn Omnibus Read online

  I must admit, however, that Sam was a good guest. He handed out trinkets that he fished from the deep pockets of his coveralls. A miniature penknife to one of the men who had rescued him. A pocket computer to the other, programmed to play a dozen different games when it was connected to a display screen. A small flat tin of rock candy. A Russian-English dictionary the size of your thumb.

  That dictionary should have alerted my suspicions. But I confess that I was more concerned with getting this noisy intrusion off my station and back where he belonged.

  Sam stayed a day. Two days. Teleconferences crackled between Washington and Moscow, Moscow and Geneva, Washington and Geneva, ground control to our station, our station to the NASA station. Meanwhile Sam had made himself at home and even started to learn how to tell jokes in Russian. He was particularly interested in dirty jokes, of course, being the kind of man he was. He began to peel off some of the patches and buttons that adorned his coveralls and hand them out as presents. My crewmen especially lusted after the pictures of beautiful video stars.

  He had taken over the galley, where he was teaching my men how to play dice in zero gravity, when I at last received permission to send him back to the American station. Not an instant too soon, I thought.

  Still, dear old Mir 5 became suddenly very quiet and dreary once we had packed him off in one of our own reliable transfer craft. We returned to our tedious tasks and the damnable exercise machines. The men growled and sulked at each other. Months of boredom and hard work stretched ahead of us. I could feel the tension pulling at my crew. I felt it myself.

  But not for long.

  Less than a week later Korolev again rousted me from my zipper bunk.

  “He’s back! The American!”

  This time Sam did not pretend to need an emergency rescue. He had flown an orbital transfer vehicle to our station and matched orbit. His OTV was hovering a few hundred meters alongside us.

  “Permission to come aboard?” His voice was unmistakable. “Unofficially?”

  I glanced at Zworkin, who was of course right beside me in the command center. Strangely, Nikolai Nikolaivich nodded. Nothing is unofficial with him, I knew. Yet he did not object to the American making an “unofficial” visit.

  I went to the docking chamber while Sam floated over to us. The airlock of his craft would not fit our docking mechanism, so he went EVA in his pressure suit and jetted across to us using his backpack maneuvering unit.

  “I was in the neighborhood so I thought I’d drop by for a minute,” Sam wisecracked once he got through our airlock and slid up the visor of his helmet.

  “Why are you in this area?” Zworkin asked, eyes slitted in his pimpled face.

  “To observe your laser tests,” replied Sam, grinning. “You guys don’t think our intelligence people don’t know what you’re up to, do you?”

  “We are not testing lasers!”

  “Not today, I know. Don’t worry about it, Ivan, I’m not spying on you, for chrissakes.”

  “My name is not Ivan!”

  “I just came over to thank you guys for saving my ass.” Sam turned slightly, his entire body pivoting weightlessly toward me. He reached into the pouches on the legs of his suit. “A couple of small tokens of my gratitude.”

  He pulled out two small plastic jewel cases and handed them to me. Videodiscs.

  “Latest Hollywood releases,” Sam explained. “With my thanks.”

  In a few minutes he was gone. Zworkin insisted on looking at the videos before anyone else could see them. “Probably capitalist propaganda,” he grumbled.

  I insisted on seeing them with him. I was not going to let him keep them all for himself.

  One of the videos was the very popular film, Rocky XVIII, in which the

  geriatric former prizefighter is rejuvenated and gets out of his wheelchair to defeat a nine-foot-tall robot for the heavyweight championship of the solar system.

  “Disgusting,” spat Zworkin.

  “But it will be good to show the crew how low the capitalists sink in their pursuit of money,” I said.

  He gave me a sour look but did not argue.

  The second video was a rock musical that featured decadent music at extreme decibel levels, decadent youths wearing outlandish clothes and weird hairdos, and decadent young women wearing hardly any clothes at all. Their gyrations were especially disturbing, no matter from which point of view you looked at them.

  “Definitely not for the crew to see,” said Zworkin. None of us ever saw that video again. He kept it. But now and then I heard the music, faintly, from his private cubicle during the shifts when he was supposed to be sleeping. Mysteriously, his acne began to clear up.

  Almost two weeks afterward Sam popped up again. Again he asked permission to come aboard, claiming this time he was on a routine inspection mission of a commsat in geosynchronous orbit and had planned his return to the NASA station to take him close to us. He was a remarkable pilot, that much I must admit.

  “Got a couple more videos for you,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

  Zworkin immediately okayed his visit. The rest of my crew, who had cheered the rejuvenated Rocky in his proletarian struggle against the stainless-steel symbol of western imperialism (as we saw it), welcomed him aboard.

  Sam stayed for a couple of hours. We fed him a meal of borscht, soysteak and ice cream. With plenty of hot tea.

  “That’s the best ice cream I’ve ever had!” Sam told me as we made our weightless way from the galley back to the docking chamber, where he had left his pressure suit.

  “We get fresh supplies every week,” I said. “Our only luxury.”

  “I never knew you guys had such great ice cream.” He was really marveling over it.

  “Moscow is famous for its ice cream,” I replied.

  With a shake of his head that made his whole body sway slightly, Sam admitted, “Boy, we got nothing like that back at the NASA station.”

  “Would you like to bring some back to your station?” I asked. Innocent fool that I am, I did not realize that he had maneuvered me into making the offer.

  “Gee, yeah,” he said, like a little boy.

  I had one of the men pack him a container of ice cream while he struggled into his pressure suit. Zworkin was off screening the two new videos Sam had brought, so I did not bother him with the political question of offering a gift in return for Sam’s gift.

  As he put his helmet over his head, Sam said to me in a low voice, “Each of those videos is a double feature.”

  “A what?”

  Leaning close to me, so that the technician in charge of the docking airlock could not hear, he whispered, “Play the disks at half speed and you’ll see another whole video. But you look at them yourself first. Don’t let that sourball of a political officer see it or he’ll confiscate them both.”

  I felt puzzled, and my face must have shown it. Sam merely grinned, patted me on the shoulder and said, “Thanks for the ice cream.”

  Then he left.

  It took a bit of ingenuity to figure out how to play the disks at half speed. It took even more cleverness to arrange to look at them in private, without Zworkin or any of the other crew members hanging over my shoulders. But I did it.

  The “second feature” on each of the tapes was pornographic filth. Disgusting sexual acrobatics featuring beautiful women with large breasts and apparently insatiable appetites. I watched the degrading spectacles several times, despite stern warnings from my conscience. If I had been cursed with acne these videos would undoubtedly have solved the problem overnight. Especially the one with the trapeze.

  For the first time since I had been a teenager buying contraband blue jeans I faced a moral dilemma. Should I tell Zworkin about these secret pornographic films? He had seen only the normal, “regular” features on each tape: an ancient John Wayne western and a brand-new comedy about a computer that takes over Wall Street.

  In my own defense I say only that I was thinking of the good of my cr
ew when I made my decision. The men had been in orbit for nearly 650 days with almost two full months to go before we could return to our loved ones. The pornographic films might help them to bear their loneliness and perform better at their tasks, I reasoned.

  But only if Zworkin did not know about them.

  I decided to chance it. One by one I let the crew in on the little secret.

  Morale improved six hundred percent. Performance and productivity rose equally. The men smiled and laughed a lot more. I told myself it was just as much because they were pulling one over on the puritanical Zworkin as because they were watching the buxom Oral Roberta and her insatiable girlfriend Electric (AC/DC) Edna.

  Sam returned twice more, swapping videos for ice cream. He was our friend. He apparently had an inexhaustible supply of videos, each of them a “double feature.” While Zworkin spent the next several weeks happily watching the regular features on each disk and perspiring every time he saw a girl in a bikini, the rest of watched the erotic adventures of airline stewardesses, movie starlets, models, housewife-hookers, and other assorted and sordid specimens of female depravity.

  The days flew by with each man counting the hours until Sam showed up with another few videos. We stopped eating ice cream so that we would have plenty to give him in return.

  Then Sam sprang his trap on us. On me.

  “Listen,” he said as he was suiting up in the docking chamber, preparing to leave, “next time, how about sticking a couple of those diamonds you’re making into the ice cream.”

  I flinched with surprise and automatically looked over my shoulder at the technician standing by to operate the airlock. He was busy admiring the four new videocassettes Sam had brought, wondering what was in them as he studied their labels.

  “What are you talking about?” I meant to say it out loud but it came out as a whispered croak.

  Sam flashed a cocky grin at me. “Come on, everybody knows you guys are making gem-quality diamonds out of methane gas in your zero-gee facility. Pump a little extra methane in and make me a couple to sell Earthside. I’ll split the profits with you fifty-fifty.”

  “Impossible,” I snapped. Softly.

  His smile became shrewd. “Look, Greg old pal, I’m not asking for any military secrets. Just a couple of stones I can peddle back on Earth. We can both make a nice wad of money.”

  “The diamonds we manufacture are not of gemstone quality,” I lied.

  “Let my friends on Forty-seventh Street decide what quality they are,” Sam whispered.

  “No.”

  He puffed out a sad sigh. “This has nothing to do with politics, Greg. It’s business. Capitalism.”

  I shook my head hard enough to sway my entire body.

  Sam seemed to accept defeat. “Okay. It’s a shame, though. Hell, even your leaders in the Kremlin are making money selling their biographies to western publishers. Capitalism is swooping in on you.”

  I said nothing.

  He pulled the helmet over his head, fastened the neck seal. But before sliding down his visor he asked, quite casually, “What happens if Zworkin finds out what’s on the videos you guys have been watching?”

  My face went red. I could feel the heat flaming my cheeks.

  “Just a couple of little diamonds, pal. A couple of carats. That’s not so much to ask for, is it?”

  He went through the airlock and jetted back to his own craft. I would have gladly throttled him at that moment.

  Now I had a real dilemma on my hands. Give in to Sam’s blackmail or face Zworkin and the authorities back on the ground. It would not only be me who would be in trouble, but my entire crew. They did not deserve to suffer because of my bad decisions, but they would. We would all spend the rest of our lives shoveling cow manure in Siberia or running mining machines on the Moon.

  I had been corrupted and I knew it. Oh, I had the best of motives, the loftiest of intentions. But how would they appear next to the fact that I had allowed my crew to watch disgusting pornographic films provided by a capitalist agent of the CIA? Corruption, pure and simple. I would be lucky to be sentenced to Siberia.

  I gave in to Sam’s demands. I told myself it was for the sake of my crew, but it was to save my own neck, and to save my dear family from disgrace. I had the technicians make three extra small diamonds and embedded them in the ice cream when Sam made his next visit.

  That was the exact week, naturally, when the Russian Federation and the western powers were meeting in Geneva to decide on deployment of space weapons. Our own Red Shield system and the American Star Wars system were well into the testing phase. We had conducted a good many of the tests ourselves aboard Mir 5. Now the question was, should each side begin to deploy its own system or should we hammer out some method of working cooperatively?

  Sam returned a few days later. I did not want to see him, but was afraid not to. He seemed happy and cheerful, as usual, and carried no less than six new videos with him. I spoke to him very briefly, very coldly. He seemed not to be bothered at all. He laughed and joked. And passed me a note on a tiny scrap of paper as he handed me the new videos.

  I read the note in the privacy of my cubicle, after he left. “Good stuff. Worth a small fortune. How many can you provide each week?”

  I was accustomed to the weightlessness of zero gravity, but at that instant I felt as if I were falling into a deep, dark pit, falling and falling down into an utterly black well that had no bottom.

  To make matters worse, after a few days of progress the conference at Geneva seemed to hit a snag for some unfathomable reason. The negotiations stopped dead and the diplomats began to snarl at each other in the old Cold War fashion. The world was shocked. We received orders to accelerate our tests of the Red Shield laser that had been installed in the laboratory module at the aft end of our station.

  We watched the TV news broadcasts from every part of the world (without letting Zworkin or ground control know about it, of course.) Everyone was frightened at the sudden intransigence in Geneva.

  Zworkin summed up our fears. “The imperialists want an excuse to strike us with their nuclear missiles before our Red Shield defense is deployed.”

  I had to admit that he was probably right. What scared me was the thought that we might strike at them before their Star Wars defense was deployed. Either way it meant the same thing: nuclear holocaust.

  Even thickheaded Korolev seemed worried. “Will we go to war?” he kept asking. “Will we go to war?” No one knew.

  Needless to say, it was clear that if we did go to war Mir 5 would be a sitting duck for Yankee anti-satellite weapons. As everyone knew, the war on the ground would begin with strikes against space stations and satellites.

  To make matters even worse, in the midst of our laser test preparations Sam sent a radio message that he was on his way and would rendezvous with our station in three hours. He said he had “something special” for us.

  The crisis in Geneva meant nothing to him, it seemed. He was coming for “business as usual.” Zworkin had been right all along about him. Sam was a spy. I was certain of it now.

  A vision formed in my mind. I would personally direct the test of the Red Shield laser. Its high-energy beam would happen to strike the incoming American spacecraft. Sam Gunn would be fried like a scrawny chicken in a hot oven. A regrettable accident. Yes. It would solve my problem.

  Except—it would create such a furor on Earth that the conference in

  Geneva would break up altogether. It could be the spark that would lead to war, nuclear war.

  Yet—Sam had no business flying a Yankee spacecraft so close to a Soviet station. Both the U.S. and the Russian Federation had clearly proclaimed that the regions around their stations were sovereign territory, not to be violated by the other side’s craft. Sam’s visits to Mir 5 were strictly illegal, secret, clandestine, except for his first “emergency” visit. If we fried him we would be within out legal rights.

  On the other hand—could the entire crew remain silent ab
out Sam’s many visits? Would Zworkin stay silent or would he denounce me once we had returned to Mother Russia?

  On the other hand—what difference would any of that make if we triggered nuclear war?

  That is why I found myself sweating in the laser laboratory, a few hours after Sam’s call. He knew that we were going to test the laser, he had to know. That was why he was cheerfully heading our way at this precise point in time.

  The laboratory was chilly. The three technicians operating the giant laser wore bulky sweaters over their coveralls and gloves with the fingers cut so they could manipulate their sensitive equipment properly.

  This section of the station was a complete module in itself; it could be detached and de-orbited, if necessary, and a new section put in its place. The huge laser filled the laboratory almost completely. If we had not been in zero gravity it would have been impossible for the technicians to climb into the nooks and crannies necessary to service all the hardware.

  One wide optical-quality window gave me a view of the black depths of space. But no window could withstand the incredible intensity of the laser’s high-power beam. The beam was instead directed through a polished copper pipe to the outside of the station’s hull, which is why the laboratory was always so cold. It was impossible to keep the module decently warm; the heat leaked out through the laser beam channel. On the outer end of that channel was the aiming mirror (also highly polished copper) that directed the beam toward its target—hypothetical or actual.

  One day we would have mirrors and a laser output window of pure diamond, once we had learned how to fabricate large sheets of the stuff in zero gravity. That day had not yet come. It seemed that ground control was more interested in growing gem-quality diamonds than large sheets.

  I had calculated Sam’s approach trajectory back at the control center and pecked the numbers into my hand computer. Now, as the technicians labored and grumbled over their big laser I fed those coordinates into the laser aiming system. As far as the technicians knew, they were firing their multi-megawatt beam into empty space, as usual. Only I knew that when they fired the laser its beam would destroy the approaching Yankee spacecraft and kill Sam Gunn.