The Sam Gunn Omnibus

by Ben Bova

  Once she took a passenger rocket for the jaunt from Selene to Aristarchus, crossing Mare Nubium and the wide Sea of Storms in less than half an hour. She felt her insides drop away for the few minutes the rocket soared in free fall at the top of its ballistic trajectory. The retros fired and she felt weight returning before her stomach became unmanageable.

  She piled up more voice disks, more stories about Sam Gunn. Some were obviously fabrications, outright lies. Others seemed outrageous exaggerations of what might have originally been true events.

  “You’ve got to get some corroboration for this stuff,” Gradowsky told her time and again. “Even when your pigeons are talking about people who’re now dead, their families could come out of nowhere and sue the ass off us.”

  Corroboration was rare. No two people seemed to remember Sam Gunn in exactly the same way. A single incident might be retold by six different people in six different ways. Jade had to settle for audio testaments, where her interviewee swore on disk that the information he or she had given was true, to the best of his or her recollection.

  Clark Griffith IV, for example, had plenty to say about Sam, and he had no qualms about telling his story—as he saw it.

  Statement of Clark Griffith IV

  (Recorded at Lunar Retirement Center, Copernicus)

  THAT’S RIGHT, I’VE KNOWN SAM GUNN LONGER THAN ANYBODY still living. Except maybe for Jill Meyers.

  How long? I knew the little sonofabitch when he was a NASA astronaut, back in the days when we were first setting up a permanent base here on the Moon, over at Alphonsus.

  I was his boss, believe it or not. It was like trying to train a cat—Sam always went his own way, fractured the rules left and right and somehow managed to come out smelling like a rose. Most of the time. He stepped into the doggie-doo now and then, but usually he was too fast on his feet for it to matter. By the time we’d catch up to him he was off somewhere else, raising more hell and giving us more trouble back in Washington.

  Another thing about Sam. He’s not that much younger than I am, yet he was off flitting around the goddamned solar system like some kid on pills. How did he do that? And from what I hear he was still chasing women from here to Pluto when he fell into that black hole. At his age! Well, maybe it’s because he spent so much of his life in low-gravity environments. Keeps you young, so I hear. That’s why I retired here to the Moon, but it doesn’t seem to be helping me much.

  Digressing? I’m digressing? I was talking about Sam. That’s what you want, isn’t it?

  No, I don’t believed he’s dead. Never believed he fell into that mini-black hole out there past Pluto, either. It’s all a fraud. A load of bullcrap. Pure Sam Gunn, another one of his tricky little gambits.

  He’ll be back, you can bet on it. Mini-black hole my great-grandmother! It’s a scam, the whole thing; don’t think otherwise.

  When did I first meet Sam? God, let me think. It was back... never mind. Let me tell you about Sam’s last days with NASA. I got to fire the little pain-in-the-butt. Bounced him right out of the agency, good and proper. Happiest day of my life.

  Tourist Sam

  WHY DID NASA FIRE SAM GUNN? IT’D BE BETTER TO ASK why we didn’t fire the little SOB. out of a cannon and get rid of him once and for all. Would’ve been a service to the human race.

  I’m no detective, but I smelled a rat when Sam put in a formal request for a three-month leave of absence. I just stared at my desktop screen. Sam Gunn, going through regular channels? Something was fishy. I mean, Sam never did things according to regulations. Give him a road map with a route on the interstates plotted out by AAA and he’d go down every dirt road and crooked alley he could find, just to drive my blood pressure up to the bursting point.

  Trouble was, the sawed-off little runt was a damned good astronaut. About as good as they came, as a flyer and ingenious troubleshooter. Like the time he saved the lunar mission by jury-rigging a still and getting all the stranded astronauts plastered so they’d be unconscious most of the time and use up less oxygen.

  That was typical of Sam Gunn. A hero who left the rules and regulations in a shambles every time.

  He had just come off his most notorious stunt of all, getting the first skipper of space station Freedom to punch the abandon ship alarm and riding back down to Earth in an emergency escape capsule with some young woman from a movie studio. He had to be hospitalized after they landed; he claimed it was from stress during reentry, but everybody at the Cape was wondering who was reentering what.

  Anyway, there was his formal request for a three-month leave of absence, all filled out just as neat and precise as I would have done it myself. He was certainly entitled to the leave. But I knew Sam. Something underhanded was going on.

  I called him into my office and asked him point-blank what he was doing. A waste of time.

  “I need a rest,” he said. Then he added, “Sir.”

  Sam’s face was as round and plain as a penny, and his wiry hair was kind of coppery color, come to think of it. Little snub of a nose with a scattering of freckles. His teeth had enough spaces between them so that he reminded me of a Jack-o’-lantern when he grinned.

  He wasn’t grinning as he sat in front of my desk. He was all perfectly polite earnestness, dressed in a tie and a real suit, like an honest-to-Pete straight-arrow citizen. His eyes gave him away, though: they were as crafty as ever, glittering with visions that he wanted to keep secret from me.

  “Going anyplace special?” I asked, trying to make it sound nonchalant.

  Sam nonchalanted me right back. “No, not really. I just need to get away from it all for a while.”

  Yeah, sure. Like Genghis Khan just wanted to take a little pony ride.

  I had no choice except to approve his request. But I had no intention of letting the sneaky little sumbitch pull one over on me. Sam was up to something; I knew it, and the glitter in his eyes told me that he knew I knew it.

  As I said, I’m no detective. So I hired one. Well, she really wasn’t a detective. My niece, Ramona Perkins, was an agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency—a damned stupid name, if you ask me. Makes it sound like the government is forcing people to do drugs.

  Well, anyway, Ramona wasn’t too thrilled with the idea of trailing a furloughed astronaut for a few weeks.

  “Yes, Uncle Griff, I have three weeks of vacation time coming, but I was going to wait until December and go to Alaska.”

  That was Ramona, as impractical as they come. She was pretty, in a youngish, girl-next-door way. Nice sandy-blonde hair that she always kept pinned up; made her look even younger than she was. And there was no doubt about her courage. Anybody who makes a career out of posing as an innocent kid and infiltrating drug gangs has more guts than brains, if you ask me.

  She had just gone through a pretty rough divorce. No children, thank Pete, but her ex-husband made a big to-do about their house and cars. Seemed to me he cared more about their damned stereo and satellite TV setup than he did about my niece.

  I made myself smile at her image in my phone screen. “Suppose I could get you three months of detached duty, assigned to my office. Then you wouldn’t use up any of your vacation time.”

  “I don’t know....” She sort of scrunched up her perky face. I figured she was trying to bury herself in her work and forget about her ex.

  “It’d do you good to get away from everything for a while,” I said.

  Ramona’s cornflower-blue eyes went curious. “What’s so important about this one astronaut that you’d go to all this trouble?”

  What could I tell her? That Sam Gunn had been driving me nuts for years and I was certain he was up to no good? That I was afraid Sam would pull some stunt that would reflect dishonorably on the space agency? That if and when he got himself in trouble the agency management would inevitably dump the blame on me, since I was in charge of his division.

  I wasn’t going to have Sam botch up my record, dammit! I was too close to retirement to let him ruin me. And don’
t think the little SOB wasn’t trying to do me dirt. He’d slit my throat and laugh about it, if I let him.

  But to my sweet young niece, I merely said, “Ramona, this is a matter of considerable importance. I wouldn’t be asking your help if it weren’t. I really can’t tell you any more than that.”

  Her image in my phone screen grew serious. “Does it involve narcotics, then?”

  I took a deep breath and nodded. “That’s a possibility.” It was a lie, of course; Sam was as straight as they come about drugs. Wasn’t even much of a drinker. His major vice was women.

  “All right,” she said, completely businesslike. “If you can arrange the reassignment, I’ll trail your astronaut for you.”

  “That’s my girl!” I said, really happy with her. She’d always been my favorite niece. At that point in time it never occurred to me that sending her after Sam might put her in more danger than the entire Colombian cartel could throw at her.

  The three weeks passed. No report from her. I began to worry. Called her supervisor at DEA and he assured me she’d been phoning him once a week, just to tell him she was okay. I complained that she should’ve been phoning me, so a few days later I got an e-mail message:

  EVERYTHING IS FINE BUT THIS IS GOING TO TAKE LONGER THAN WE THOUGHT.

  It took just about the whole three damned months. It wasn’t until then that Ramona popped into my office, sunburnt and weary-looking, and told me what Sam had been up to. This is what she told me:

  I KN0W THIS investigation took a lot longer than you thought it would, Uncle Griff. It was a lot more complicated than either one of us thought it’d be. Nothing that Sam Gunn does is simple!

  To begin with, by the time I started after him, Sam had already gone to Panama to set up the world’s first space tourist line.

  That’s right, Uncle Griff. A tourist company. In Panama.

  He called his organization Space Adventure Tours and registered it as a corporation in Panama. All perfectly legal, but it started alarm bells ringing in my head right from the start. I knew that Panama was a major drug-transshipment area, and a tourist company could be a perfect front for narcotics smuggling.

  By the time I arrived in Colon, on the Caribbean side of the Panama Canal, Sam had established himself in a set of offices he rented on the top floor of one of the three-storey stucco commercial buildings just off the international airport.

  As I said, my first thought was that he was running a smuggling operation, probably narcotics, and his wild-sounding company name was only a front. I spent a week watching his office, seeing who was coming and going. Nobody but Sam himself and a couple of young Panamanian office workers. Now and then an elderly guy in casual vacation clothes or a silver-haired couple. Once in a while a blue-haired matronly type would show up. Seldom the same people twice. No sleazebags in five-hundred-dollar suits. No Uzi-toting enforcer maniacs.

  I dropped in at the office myself to look the place over. It seemed normal enough. An anteroom with a couple of tacky couches and armchairs, divided by a chest-high counter. Water stains on the ceiling tiles. On the other side of the counter sat the two young locals, a male and a female, both working at desktop computers. Beyond them was a single door prominently marked s. GUNN, PRESIDENT AND CEO.

  Most smuggling operators don’t put their own names on doors.

  The young woman glanced up from her display screen and saw me standing at the counter. Immediately she came out from behind her desk, smiling brightly, and asked in local-accented English, “Can I help you?”

  I put on my best Dorothy-from-Kansas look and said, “What kind of tours do you offer?”

  “An adventure in space,” she said, still smiling.

  “In space?”

  “Yes. Like the astronauts.”

  “For tourists?”

  “Si—Yes. Our company is the very first in the world to offer a space flight adventure.”

  “In space?” I repeated.

  She nodded and said, “Perhaps Mr. Gunn himself should explain it to you.”

  “Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to bother him.”

  “No bother,” she said sweetly. “He enjoys speaking to the customers.”

  She must have pressed a buzzer, because the s. GUNN door popped open and out walked Sam, smiling like a used-car salesman.

  The first thing about him to strike me was how short he was. I mean, I’m barely five-five in my flats and Sam was a good two inches shorter than I. He seemed solidly built, though, beneath the colorful flowered short-sleeve shirt and sky-blue slacks he was wearing. Good shoulders, a little thick in the midsection.

  His face was, well.. .cute. I thought I saw boyish enthusiasm and charm in his eyes. He certainly didn’t look like your typical drug lord.

  “I’m Sam Gunn,” he said to me, sticking his hand out over the counter. “At your service.”

  I got the impression he had to stand on tiptoe to get his arm over the counter.

  “Ramona Perkins,” I said taking his hand in mine. He had a firm, friendly grip. With my free hand I activated the microchip recorder in my shoulder bag.

  “You’re interested in a space adventure?” Sam asked, opening the little gate at the end of the counter and ushering me through.

  “I really don’t know,” I said, as if I were taking the first step on the Yellow Brick Road. “It all seems so new and different.”

  “Come into my office and let me explain it to you.”

  Sam’s office was much more posh than the outer room. He had a big modernistic desk, all polished walnut and chrome, and two chairs in front of it that looked like reclinable astronauts’ seats. I learned soon enough that they were reclinable, and Sam liked to recline in them with female companions.

  No windows, but the walls were lined with photographs of astronauts hovering in space, with the big blue curving Earth as a backdrop. Behind Sam’s desk, on a wide walnut bookcase, there were dozens of photos of Sam in astronaut uniform, in a space suit, even one with him in scuba gear with his arm around a gorgeous video starlet in the skimpiest bikini I’ve ever seen.

  He sat me in one of the cushioned, contoured recliners and went around behind his desk. I realized there was a platform back there, because when Sam sat down he was almost taller than he had been standing up in front of the desk.

  “Ms. Perkins ... may I call you Ramona?”

  “Sure,” I said, in a valley-girl accent.

  “That’s a beautiful name.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Ramona, until now the thrill of flying in space has been reserved to a handful of professional astronauts like myself—”

  “Haven’t some politicians and video stars gone into orbit?” I asked, with wide-eyed innocence.

  “Yes indeed they certainly have. A few mega-millionaires, too,” Sam answered. “And if they’ve flown in space there’s no good reason why you shouldn’t have the experience, too. You, and anyone else who wants the adventure of a lifetime!”

  “How much does it cost?” I asked.

  Sam hiked his rust-red eyebrows at me. And launched into a nonstop spiel about the beauties and glories and excitement of space travel. He wasn’t really eloquent; that wasn’t Sam’s style. But he was persistent and energetic. He talked so fast and so long that it seemed as if he didn’t take a breath for half an hour. I remember thinking that he could probably go out for an EVA space walk without oxygen if he put his mind to it.

  For the better part of an hour Sam worked up and down the subject.

  “And why shouldn’t ordinary people, people just like you, be allowed to share in the excitement of space flight? The once-in-a-lifetime adventure of them all! Why do government agencies and big, powerful corporations refuse to allow ordinary men and women the chance to fly in space?”

  I batted my baby blues at him and asked, in a breathless whisper, “Why?”

  Sam heaved a big sigh. “I’ll tell you why. They’re all big bureaucracies, run by petty-minded bureaucrats who don’t care about
the little guy. Big corporations like Rockledge could be running tourists into orbit right now, but their bean-counting bureaucrats won’t let that happen for fear that some tourist might get a little nauseous in zero gravity and sue the corporation when he comes back to Earth.”

  “Maybe they’re afraid of an accident,” I said, still trying to sound naive. “I mean, people have been killed in rocket launches, haven’t they?”

  “Not in years,” Sam countered, waggling a hand in the air. “Besides, the launch system we’re gonna use is supersafe. And gentle. We take off like an airplane and land like an airplane. No problems.”

  “But what about space sickness?” I asked.

  “Likewise, no problem. We’ve developed special equipment that eliminates space sickness just about completely. In fact, you feel just as comfortable as you would in your own living room for just about the entire flight.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” he said, with a trust-me nod of his head.

  “Wouldn’t you be better off operating in the States?” I probed. “I mean, like, I just ran across your office kind of by accident while I was checking on my flight back home.”

  Sam scowled at me. “The U.S. government is wrapped up with bureaucrats and—worse—lawyers. You can’t do anything new there anymore. If I tried to start a space tourist company in the States I’d have sixteen zillion bozos from NASA, OSHA, the Department of Transportation, the Commerce Department, the State Department, the National Institutes of Health and St. Francis of Assisi knows who else coming down on my head. I’d be filling out forms and talking to lawyers until I was old and gray!”

  “It’s easier to get started in Panama, then.”

  “Much easier.”

  I sat there, gazing at Sam, pretending to think it all over.

  Then I asked again, “How much does it cost?”