The Sam Gunn Omnibus

by Ben Bova

  Jade made a sympathetic noise.

  “You know, Jim,” said Monica, sitting on his other side, “Jade here’s got a terrific idea for a special. If you could sell it back in Orlando it’d be quite a feather in your cap.”

  “Yeah? Really?”

  Jade explained her hope to do a biography of Sam Gunn. Gradowsky was obviously cool to the idea, but Monica slid her chair closer to his and insisted that it was the kind of idea that Solar’s upper echelons would go for.

  “It could mean a boost for you,” Monica said, leaning so close to Gradowsky that Jade could see her cleavage from across the table. “A big boost.”

  The two women went to the ladies’ room together as the waiter cleared their table in preparation for dessert. Jade saw that there were greasy paw stains on Monica’s skirt.

  “You’re not throwing yourself at him for me?” Jade asked.

  Monica smiled. “Don’t worry about it, honey. Jumbo’s kind of cute, if you don’t mind his table manners.”

  “Cute?”

  “After three bottles of wine.”

  “Monica, I can’t let you ...”

  The older woman smiled sweetly at Jade. “Don’t give it another thought, child. Who knows, I might marry the bum and try to civilize him.”

  Thus it came to pass that Jim Gradowsky sold his idea of doing a biography of Sam Gunn to the top brass of the Solar News Network. He even won the responsibility of picking the reporter to handle the interviews.

  Jade faced him alone in his office, a minuscule cubbyhole crammed with a desk, two computer terminals, a battered pseudo-leather couch, and a whole wall full of TV screens.

  “Monica says you oughtta get the job of doing the Sam Gunn interviews,” Gradowsky said, his eyes narrowing as Jade sat demurely on the couch.

  She thought to herself, If he gets up from behind that desk I’ll run out of here and to hell with the interviews. Or will I?

  Gradowsky stayed in his creaking desk chair. “Well, I’m not sure that somebody with no real experience can handle the assignment. You’re awfully young....”

  Jade made herself smile at him. “That’s just the point. Most of Sam’s friends—even his enemies—wouldn’t talk to a regular news reporter. But they’ll talk to me.”

  “Why’s that?” Gradowsky seemed all business, thank goodness.

  “I don’t come across as a reporter. I’m a lunar worker, one of the guys.”

  “Hardly one of the guys” Gradowsky smirked.

  The phone built into one of the computers chirped. Grunting, he leaned forward and punched a button on its keyboard.

  Monica’s face took form on a wall screen. “How’s it going?” she asked cheerfully.

  Gradowsky raised both hands, palms out, as if to show he was unarmed. “Okay so far. We’re talkin’.”

  “Are we set for dinner tonight?”

  “Yeah, sure. Where d’you wanna go?”

  “I thought I’d cook for you tonight. How about my place at seven-thirty. You bring the wine.”

  Gradowsky grinned. “Great!”

  “See you then.”

  When he turned back to Jade he was still grinning.

  “Okay, listen up, kid. Here’s what I’m prepared to do. There’s a Russian living over at the retirement center next to Lunagrad. From what my contacts tell me, he knew Sam Gunn back in the old days, when Gunn was still a NASA astronaut. But he’s never talked to anybody about it.”

  “Has anyone tried to interview him?” Jade asked.

  “Yeah—BBC was after him for years but he always turned them down.”

  Jade clasped her hands together tightly, surprised to find that her palms were sweating.

  “You get the Russkie to talk and the assignment’s yours. Fair enough?”

  She nodded, almost breathless. “Fair enough,” she managed to say.

  Diamond Sam

  “A THIEF,” SAID GRIGORI ALEKSANDROVICH PROKOV. “A thief and a blackmailer”

  He said it flatly, without emotion, the way a man might observe that the sky is blue or that grass is green. A fact of life. He said it in excellent English, marred only slightly by the faint trace of a Russian accent.

  Jade wrinkled her nose slightly. There was neither blue sky nor green grass here in the Leonov Center for Retired Heroes of the Russian Federation, although there was a distinctly earthy odor to the place.

  “Sam Gunn,” Prokov muttered. His voice seemed weak, almost quavering. The weakening voice of a dying old man. Then he gave a disdainful snort. “Not even the other capitalists liked him!”

  They were sitting on a bench made of native lunar stone near the edge of the surface dome, as far away from the yawning entrance to the underground retirement center as possible. To Jade, that dark entrance looked like the opening of a crypt.

  The floor of the dome was bare lunar rock that had been glazed by plasma torches and smoothed to a glassy finish. She wondered how many elderly Heroes of the Russian Federation slipped and broke their necks. Was that their government’s ultimate retirement benefit?

  The wide curving window in front of the bench looked out on absolute desolation: the barren expanse of the Ocean of Storms, a pockmarked undulating surface without a sign of life as far as the eye could see. Nothing but rocks and bare lunar regolith broiling in the harsh sunlight. The sky remained black, though, and above the strangely close horizon hung the tantalizing blue and white-streaked globe of Earth, a lonely haven of color and life in the stark cold darkness of space.

  For the tenth time in the past ten minutes Jade fumbled with the heater control of her electrified jumpsuit. She felt the chill of that merciless vacuum seeping through the tinted glassteel of the big window. She strained her ears for the telltale hiss of an air leak. There were rumors that maintenance at the Leonov Center was far from top-rate.

  Prokov seemed impervious to the cold. Or perhaps, rather, he was so accustomed to it that he never noticed it anymore. He was very old, his face sunken in like a rotting Jack-o’-lantern, wrinkled even across his utterly bald pate. The salmon-pink coveralls he wore seemed brand new, as if he had put them on just for this visit from a stranger. Or had the managers of the Center insisted that he wear new clothes whenever a visitor called? Whichever, she saw that the outfit was at least a full size too big for the man. He seemed to be shrinking, withering away before her eyes.

  But his eyes glittered at her balefully. “Why do you ask about Sam Gunn? I was given to understand that you were only a student doing a thesis on the history of early space flight.”

  “That was a bit of a white lie,” Jade said, trying to keep the tremble of fear out of her voice. “I—I’m actually trying to do a biography of Sam Gunn.”

  “That despicable money-grubber,” Prokov muttered.

  “Would you help me? Please?”

  “Why should I?” the old man snapped.

  Jade made a little shrug.

  “I have never spoken to anyone about Sam Gunn. Not in more than thirty years.”

  “I know,” Jade said.

  Frowning, Prokov examined her intently. A little elf, he thought. A child-woman in a pale green jumpsuit. How frightened she looks! Such beautiful red hair. Such entrancing green eyes.

  “Ah,” he sighed. “If I were a younger man ...”

  Jade smiled kindly at him. “You were a hero then, weren’t you? A cosmonaut and a Hero of the Russian Federation.”

  His eyes glimmered with distant memories.

  “Sam Gunn,” he repeated. “Thief. Liar. Warmonger. He almost caused World War III, did you know that?”

  “No!” said Jade, truly surprised. She checked the recorder in her belt buckle and slid a few centimeters closer to the old man, to make certain that the miniaturized device did not miss any of his words.

  There was hardly any other noise in the big, dark, gloomy dome. Far off in the shadows sat a couple of other old people, as still as mummies, as if frozen by time and the indifference that comes from having oudived ever
yone you loved.

  “A nuclear holocaust, that’s what your Sam Gunn would have started. If not for me” Prokov tapped the folds of cloth that covered his sunken chest, “the whole world might have gone up in radioactive smoke thirty years ago.”

  “I never knew,” said Jade.

  Without any further encouragement Prokov began to speak in his whispery trembling voice.

  YOU MUST REALIZE that we were then in the grip of what the media journalists now call the Neo-Cold War. When the old Soviet Union broke up, back in the last century, Russia nearly disappeared in chaos and anarchy. But new leaders arose, strong and determined to bring Russia back to its rightful position as one of the world’s leading powers. We were proud to be part of that rebirth of Russian strength and courage. I was proud to be part of it myself.

  I was commander of Mir 5, the largest Russian space station ever. Not like that political compromise, the International Space Station. Mir 5 was Russian, entirely Russian.

  My rank was full colonel. My crew had been in space for 638 days and it was my goal to make it two full years—730 days. It would be a new record, fourteen men in orbit for two full years. I would be picked to command the Mars mission if I could get my men to the two-year mark. A big if.

  Sam Gunn, as you know, was an American astronaut at that time. Officially he was a crew member of the NASA space station Freedom. Secretly he worked for the CIA, I am certain. No other explanation fits the facts.

  You must understand that despite all the comforts that Russian technology could provide, life aboard Mir 5 was—well, spartan. We worked in shifts and slept in hot beds. You know, when one man finished his sleep shift he got out of his zipper bag and a man who had just finished his work shift would get into the bag to sleep. Sixteen hours of work, eight of sleep. Four bunks for twelve crewmen. It was all strictly controlled by ground command.

  Naturally, as colonel in command I had my own bunk and my own private cubicle. This was not a deviation from comradely equality; it was necessary and all the crew recognized that fact. My political officer had his own private cubicle as well.

  Believe me, after the first eighteen months of living under such stringencies life became very tense inside Mir 5. Fourteen men cooped up inside a set of aluminum cans with nothing but work, no way to relieve their tedium, forced to exercise when there were no other tasks to do— the tension was becoming dangerously high. Sam must have known that. I was told that the CIA employed thousands of psychologists in those days.

  His first visit to our station was made to look like an accident. He waited until I was asleep to call us.

  My second-in-command, a thickheaded technician from Omsk named Korolev, shook me awake none too gently.

  “Sir!” he said, pummeling my zippered bag. “There’s an American asking us for help!”

  It was like being the toothpaste in a tube while some big oaf tries to squeeze you out.

  “An Ameri—Stop that! I’m awake! Get your hands off me!”

  Fortunately, I slept in my coveralls. I simply unzippered the bag and followed Korolev toward the command center. He was a bulky fellow, a wrestler back at home and a decent electronics technician up here. But he had been made second-in-command by seniority only. His brain was not swift enough for such responsibilities.

  The station was composed of nine modules—nine aluminum cylinders joined together by airlocks. It was all under zero gravity. The Americans had not even started to build their fancy rotating stations yet.

  We floated through the hatch of the command center, where four more of my men were hovering by the communications console. It was cramped and hot; six men in the center were at least two too many.

  I immediately heard why they had awakened me.

  “Hey, are you guys gonna help me out or let me die?” a sharp-edged voice was rasping on our radio receiver. “I got a dead friggin’ OTV here and I’m gonna drift right past you and out into the Van Allen Belt and fry my cojones if you don’t come and get me.”

  That was my introduction to Sam Gunn.

  Zworkin, my political officer, was already in contact with ground control, reporting on the incident. On my own authority—and citing the reciprocal rescue treaty that had been in effect for many decades—I sent one of our orbital transfer vehicles with two of my best men to rescue the American.

  His vehicle’s rocket propellant line had ruptured, with the same effect as if your automobile fuel line had split apart. His rocket engine died and he was drifting without propulsion power.

  “Goddamn cheap Hong Kong parts.” Sam kept up a running monologue all through our rescue flight. “Bad enough we gotta fly birds built by the lowest goddamn bidders, but now they’re buying parts from friggin’ toy manufacturers! Whole goddamn vehicle works like something put together from a Mattel kit by a brain-damaged chimpanzee. Those mother-humpers in Washington don’t give a shit whose neck they put on the mother-humpin’ line as long as it ain’t theirs.”

  And so on, through the entire three hours it took for us to send out our transfer vehicle, take him aboard it, and bring him safely to the station.

  Once he came through the airlock and actually set foot inside Mir 5 his tone changed. I should say that “set foot” is a euphemism. We were all weightless, and Sam floated into the docking chamber, turned himself a full three-hundred-sixty degrees around, and grinned at us.

  All fourteen of us had crowded into the docking chamber to see him. This was the most excitement we had had since Boris Malenovsky’s diarrhea, six months earlier.

  “Hey!” said Sam. “You guys are as short as me!”

  No word of thanks. No formal greetings or offers of international friendship. His first words upon being rescued dealt with our heights.

  He was no taller than my own 160 centimeters, although he claimed 165. He pushed himself next to Korolev, the biggest man of our crew, who stood almost 173 centimeters, according to the medical files. Naturally, under zero-gravity conditions Korolev—and all of us—had grown an extra two or three centimeters.

  “I’m just about as tall as you are!” Sam exulted.

  He flitted from one member of our crew to another comparing heights. It was difficult to make an accurate measurement because he kept bobbing like a floating cork, thanks to the zero gravity. In other words, he cheated. I should have recognized this as the key to his character immediately. Unfortunately, I did not.

  Neither did Zworkin, although he later claimed that he knew all along that Sam was a spy.

  All in all, Sam was not unpleasant. He was friendly. He was noisy. I remember thinking, in those first few moments he was aboard our station, that it was like having a pet monkey visit us. Amusing. Diverting. He made us laugh, which was something we had not done in many weeks.

  Sam’s face was almost handsome, but not quite. His lips were a bit too thin and his jaw a little too round. His eyes were bright and glowing like a fanatic’s. His hair bristled like a thicket of wires, brownish red. His tongue was never still.

  Most of my crew understood English well enough so that Sam had little trouble expressing himself to us. Which he did incessantly. Sam kept up a constant chatter about the shoddy construction of his orbital transfer vehicle, the solid workmanship of our station, the lack of aesthetics in spacecraft design, the tyranny of ground controllers who forbade alcoholic beverages aboard space stations, this, that and the other. He even managed to say a few words that sounded almost like gratitude.

  “I guess giving you guys a chance to save my neck makes a nice break in the routine for you, huh? Not much else exciting going on around here, is there?”

  He talked so much and so fast that it never occurred to any of us, not even to Zworkin, to ask why he had been flying so near to us. As far as I knew, there were no Western satellites in orbits this close to our station. Or there should not have been.

  Next to his machine-gun dialogue the thing that impressed my men most about this American astronaut was his uniform. Like ours, it was basically a
one-piece coverall, quite utilitarian. Like us, he bore a name patch sewn over his left chest pocket. There the similarities ended.

  Sam’s coveralls were festooned with all sorts of fancy patches and buttons. Not merely one shoulder patch with his mission insignia. He had patches and insignia running down both sleeves and across his torso, front and back, like the tattooed man in the circus. Dragons, comic-book rocket ships, silhouettes of naked women, buttons that bore pictures of video stars, strange symbols and slogans that made no sense to me, such as “Beam me up, Scotty, there’s no intelligent life down here” and “King Kong died for our sins.”

  Finally I ordered my men back to their duties and told Sam to accompany me to the control center.

  Zworkin objected. “It is not wise to allow him to see the control center,” he said in Russian.

  “Would you prefer,” I countered, “that he be allowed to roam through the laboratories? Or perhaps the laser module?”

  Most of my own crew was not allowed to enter the laser module. Only men with specific military clearance were permitted there. And most of the laboratories, you see, were testing systems that would one day be the heart of our Red Shield antimissile system. Even the diamond manufacturing experiment was a Red Shield program, according to my mission orders.

  Zworkin did not reply to my question. He merely stared at me sullenly. He had a sallow, pinched face that was blemished with acne—unusual for

  a man of his age. The crew joked behind his back that he was still a virgin.

  “The visitor stays with me, Nikolai Nikolaivich,” I told him. “Where I can watch him.”

  Unfortunately, I had to listen to Sam as well as watch him.

  I ordered my communications technician to contact the NASA space station and allow Sam to tell them what had happened. Meanwhile Zworkin reported again to ground control. It was not a simple matter to transfer Sam back to the NASA station. First we had to apprise ground control of the situation, and they had to inform Moscow, where the American embassy and the International Astronautics Commission were duly briefed. Hours dragged by and our work schedule became hopelessly snarled.