The Sam Gunn Omnibus

by Ben Bova

  Somewhere a band of university scientists that Spence had hired as consultants were figuring out how long Sam could remain in GEO safely.

  Queveda and the other technicians went home. Other technicians came in and sat on either side of me. After an hour of nothing to do, I told them to take a break, take a nap if they liked. I could monitor the controls by myself. I promised to call them if I needed them.

  I phoned my father instead. He was still in New York, where he planned to wait for the success of the Brazilian mission. I woke him, of course, but at least this time he was alone in his bed. Or so it seemed.

  “He is already on his way?” My father’s sleepy eyes opened wide once I told him about Sam.

  “Yes,” I said. “And the United States is asking the IAA to make a safety investigation of the Brazilian spacecraft.”

  He seemed confused by that.

  “It will delay the Brazilian mission for days!” I hissed, not daring to raise my voice. “Sam will be in GEO and claim the territory before they even get off the space station.”

  My father lapsed into a long string of heartfelt curses so foul that even today I blush at the memory.

  He raged at me, “And what have you done about it? Nothing!”

  “There is nothing I can do, Papa.”

  “Bah! I am surrounded by traitors and incompetents! My own daughter cannot raise a finger to help me.”

  “But Papa—”

  “Do you realize what this gringo is doing? He is turning our own position against us! He is using my speech as a pretext for taking the equatorial orbit away from us! I will look like a fool! Before the United Nations, before the news media, before the whole world—I will be made to appear like a fool!”

  I was shocked and saddened to realize that my father’s concern was not for his people or for the injustice of the situation. His first concern was about his own image.

  “But Papa,” I asked tearfully, “what can we do about it?”

  “You must act!” he said. “You said you were prepared to sabotage their spacecraft. Now is the time to do it. Strike! Strike now!”

  I stared at his image in horror. My father’s face was contorted with fury and hate.

  “Kill that gringo bastard!” he snarled at me. “He must never reach the equatorial orbit alive.”

  THE BUG THATI had inserted into the mission control program merely allowed me to fire an OTVs thrusters when I chose to. Originally I had thought that I could send an unmanned OTV crashing into a communications satellite; a neat piece of sabotage.

  Sam was not planning to park his spacecraft close enough to a commsat for my plan to work, however. He merely wanted to establish himself in GEO long enough to make the territorial claim that my father wanted for the Twelve—and for the UN to recognize that claim.

  I could not send him crashing into a satellite, I realized. But what if I used my bug to fire his thrusters as he approached GEO? He would go careening past the orbit, farther out into space. His trajectory would undoubtedly carry him into a wildly looping orbit that would either fling him into deep space forever, or send him hurtling back toward the Earth, to plunge into the atmosphere and burn up like a meteor.

  Yes, I told myself, I could kill Sam Gunn with the touch of a finger. I was alone in the mission control center. No one would see me do it. I could then erase the bug in the program and no one would ever know why Sam’s thrusters misfired.

  But—murder Sam? Only a few hours earlier I had been telling myself that my father was too good a man to stoop to murder. And now—

  “They’re going to assassinate him.”

  I whirled in my chair to see Ricardo standing just inside the control center’s doorway. His face was grim, his eyes red and sleepless.

  “I thought you had gone home,” I said.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” He stalked toward me, angry or frightened or both, I could not tell. “They’re going to kill him! Assassinate him!”

  “No ... I can’t....” My voice choked in my throat.

  “It’s all set up,” Ricardo said, padding to the chair beside me like a hunting cat. “There’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “I can’t kill Sam,” I said, nearly breaking into sobs.

  “Sam?” Ricardo’s brows knit. “I’m not talking about Sam. It’s your father. The rebels are going to assassinate him in New York.”

  “What? How do you know?”

  “Because I’m one of them,” he snapped. “I’ve been with them all along. And now I’ve been assigned to kidnap you.”

  “Kidnap me?” My voice sounded like a stranger’s to me: pitched high with surprise and fear. Yet inwardly I was not afraid. Shocked numb, perhaps, but not frightened.

  Ricardo’s expression was unfathomable, but he seemed to be in torment. “Kidnap you,” he repeated. “Or assassinate you if kidnapping becomes impossible.”

  “You wouldn’t dare!”

  He made a bitter, twisted smile. “This is our moment, princess. Your father is in New York, where we have enough people to get past his security team. You are his only living relative—or the only one he admits to. General Quintana is already storming the main army barracks in the capital.”

  “General Quintana? But he’s ...” The words choked in my mouth as I realized that Quintana was a traitor.

  “He will be our next president,” Ricardo said, then added, “he thinks.”

  I could feel my eyes widening.

  Still with his twisted smile, Ricardo explained, “Do you think we are fools enough to trust a traitor? Or to put a general in the president’s chair?”

  “No, I suppose you are not.”

  Ricardo fell silent for a long moment, then he asked, “Will you allow me to kidnap you? It will be merely for long enough to keep you from warning your father.”

  “So that you can murder him.”

  “I didn’t want them to do that. I thought we could overthrow him without bloodshed, but the others want to make certain that he won’t be able to stop us.”

  I said nothing. I was desperately trying to think of something to do, some way to escape Ricardo and warn my father.

  “After we finish Sam’s mission I’ll have to take you with me.” His expression changed. He seemed almost shy, embarrassed. “I promise you that you will not be harmed in any way. Unless you try to resist, of course.”

  “Of course,” I snapped.

  He pointed to my display screen. “It’s almost time for you to activate your bug.”

  “You know about that?”

  “Of course I know about it,” he said. “I have been watching you very closely since the first day you came here, pretending to be from Los Angeles.”

  My heart sank. I had not fooled him for a moment. Yet, somehow, I was forced to admire how clever Ricardo had been, even though he was my enemy. Or rather, my father’s enemy.

  “It will be a shame to kill Sam,” he said, with real regret in his voice. “Maybe his trajectory will bring him close enough to one of the space stations so that somebody can rescue him.”

  “Not much chance of that,” I said.

  He shrugged. Unhappily, I thought. “It must be done. We can’t allow Sam to claim the equatorial orbit.”

  “So your glorious rebels want the orbit for themselves,” I taunted.

  “Yes! Why not? It is the one chance that a poor nation such as Ecuador has to gain some of the wealth these corporations are making in space.”

  “So you will kill Sam as well as my father.”

  “No,” he said grimly. “You will kill Sam.”

  At that instant Spence’s voice came through the radio receiver, “Preparing for OIB.”

  Spence’s voice. Not Sam’s.

  Ric looked surprised. I felt a flame of shock race through me. I whirled my chair back to the console and toggled the radio switch.

  “Spence! Where are you?”

  “Aboard the OTV, Juanita honey. Sam got a brilliant idea at the last minute and we switched plac
es.”

  “Where is Sam?”

  “He ought to be in New York by now.”

  “New York?” we both said in unison.

  “Yeah. Anyway, I’m five minutes away from OIB. You copy?”

  Orbital insertion burn. The final firing of the OTV’s thrusters to place the spacecraft in the geosynchronous orbit. The time when my bug would make the thrusters fire much longer than they should and fling the craft into a wild orbit that would undoubtedly kill its pilot.

  But the pilot was Spence! I had found it troubling to think of killing Sam, but it was Spence inside that OTV! No matter how angry I was with him, no matter how much I told myself I hated him, I could not knowingly, willingly, send him to his death.

  “For what it’s worth,” Spence reported cheerfully, “the radiation monitors in this ol’ tin can show everything’s in the green. Radiation’s building up outside, but the shielding’s protecting me just fine. So far.”

  I turned from the display screen to Ric. His face looked awful.

  “I can’t do it,” I whispered. “I can’t kill him.”

  He reached out his hand toward my keyboard, then let it drop to his side. “Neither can I.”

  “OIB in three minutes,” Spence’s voice called out. “You copy?”

  I looked at the mission timeline clock as I flicked the radio switch again. “We copy OIB in two minutes, fifty-six seconds.”

  Ric sank down onto the chair next to me, his head drooping. “Some revolutionary,” he muttered.

  “Let me warn my father,” I pleaded. “You don’t want his blood on your hands.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head stubbornly. “I can’t go that far.”

  “But Sam will be with him, don’t you understand?”

  “Sam? Why would—”

  “Sam went to New York! That’s what Spence told us. The only reason for Sam to go to New York is to see my father. Sam will be in the line of fire when your assassins strike. They’ll kill him too!”

  Ric looked miserable, but he said in a hoarse croak, “That can’t be helped. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “Well, I can,” I said, reaching for the telephone.

  “Don’t!”

  “What will you do? Kill me?”

  He grabbed my arm. I tried to pull free but he was stronger. I struggled but he held me in his powerful arms and pulled me to him and kissed me. Before I realized what I was doing I was kissing him, wildly, passionately, with all the heat of a jungle beast.

  At last Ric pulled loose. He stared into my eyes for a long, timeless moment, then said, “Yes. Call your father. Warn him. I can’t be a party to murder. It’s one thing to talk about it, plan for it. But I just can’t go through with it.”

  “OIB in one minute,” Spence’s voice chirped.

  “Copy OIB in fifty-nine seconds,” I said as I took up the telephone. My eyes were still on Ric. He smiled at me, the sad smile of a man who has given up everything. For me.

  “You are not a killer,” I said to him. “That is nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “But the revolution—”

  “To hell with the revolution and all politics!” I snapped as I tapped out the number for my father’s hotel room.

  “We are sorry,” said a computer-synthesized voice, “but the number you have called is not in service at this time.”

  Cold terror gripped my heart.

  I called the hotel’s main number. It was busy. For half an hour, while Spence’s OTV settled into its equatorial orbit and he read off all the radiation monitors inside and outside the spacecraft, the hotel’s main switchboard gave nothing but a busy signal.

  I was ready to scream when Ric suddenly bolted from the control center and came back a moment later with a hand-sized portable TV. He turned it to the all-news channel.

  “... hostage situation,” said a trench-coated reporter standing in front of a soaring hotel tower. It was drizzling in New York but a huge throng had already gathered out on the streets.

  “Is the president of Venezuela still in there?” asked an unseen anchor woman.

  “It’s the president of Ecuador, Maureen,” said the reporter on the street. “And, yes, as far as we know he’s still in his suite with the gunmen who broke in about an hour ago.”

  “Do you know who’s in there with him?”

  The reporter, bareheaded in the chilly drizzle, squinted into the camera. “A couple of members of his staff. The gunmen let all the women in the suite go free about half an hour ago. And there is apparently an American businessman in there, too. The hotel security director has identified the American as a Sam Gunn, from Orlando, Florida.”

  “How could the rebels get past my father’s security guards?” I wondered out loud.

  “Bribes,” said Ric. He spoke the word as if it were a loathsome thing. “Some men will sell their souls for money.”

  I told Spence what was happening, of course. He seemed strangely nonchalant.

  “Sam’s been in fixes like this before. He always talks his way out of ‘em.”

  He was trying to keep my spirits up, I thought. “But these men are killers!” I said. “Assassins.”

  “If they haven’t shot anybody yet, the chances are they won’t. Unless the New York cops get trigger-happy.”

  That was not very encouraging.

  “For what it’s worth,” Spence added, “the radiation monitors inside my cabin are still in the green.”

  We had not had time to link the radiation monitors to the telemetry system, so there was no readout for them on my console.

  “Maybe you could pipe the television news up to me,” he suggested. “I’ve got nothing else to do for a stretch.”

  I did that. We watched the tiny television screen until Gene Redding and his assistants showed up at eight AM A murky morning was breaking through the clouds in New York. I thought about hiring a jet plane to fly up there, but realized it would do no good. The hostage crisis dragged on, with the hotel surrounded by police and no one entering or leaving the penthouse suite of my father.

  All the employees of VCI were watching the TV scene by now. It seemed as if at least half of them were jammed into the mission control center. Gene Redding had taken over as controller; I had moved to the right-hand chair, a headset still clamped over my ear.

  “Want to make a bet Sam talks them out of whatever they came for?” Spence asked me.

  I shook my head, then realized that he could not see me. “No,” I said. “Not even Sam could—”

  “Wait a minute!” said the news reporter. Like the rest of us, he had been on the scene all night without relief. “Wait a minute! There seems to be some action up there!”

  The camera zoomed up to the rooftop balcony of my father’s suite. And there stood Sam, grinning from ear to ear, and my father next to him, also smiling—although he looked drawn and pale, tired to the point of exhaustion. Behind them, three of the rebel gunmen were pulling off their ski masks. They too were laughing.

  I rented the fastest jet available at the Orlando airport and flew to New York. With Ric at my side.

  By the time we reached my father’s hotel suite the police and the crowds and even the news reporters had long since gone. Sam was perched on the edge of one of the big plush chairs in the sitting room, looking almost like a child playing in a grown-up’s chair. He was still wearing the faded coveralls that he had put on for the space mission.

  My father, elegantly relaxed in a silk maroon dressing gown and white silk ascot, lounged at his ease in the huge sofa placed at a right angle to Sam’s chair. The coffee table before them was awash with papers.

  My father was smoking a cigarette in a long ivory holder. He was just blowing a cloud of gray smoke up toward the ceiling when Ric and I burst into the room.

  “Papa!” I cried.

  He leaped to his feet and put the cigarette behind him like a guilty little boy. Sam laughed.

  “Papa, are you all right?” I rushed across the room to him. A
wkwardly,

  he balanced the long cigarette holder on the arm of the sofa as I flung my arms around his neck.

  “I am unharmed,” he announced calmly. “The rebels have gone back to Quito to form the new government.”

  “New government?”

  “General Quintana will head the provisional government,” my father explained, “until new elections are held.”

  “Quintana?” I blurted. “The traitor?”

  Ric’s face clouded over. “The army will run the government and find excuses not to hold elections. It’s an old story.”

  “What else could I do?” my father asked sadly.

  Still seated in the oversized chair, Sam grinned up at us. “You didn’t do too badly, Carlos old buddy.”

  Sam Gunn, on a first-name basis with my father?

  Getting to his feet, Sam said to me, “Meet the new co-owner of OrbHotel, Inc.”

  One shock after another. It took hours for me to get it all straight in my head. Gradually, as my father and Sam told me slightly conflicting stories, I began to put the picture together.

  Sam had barged into my father’s hotel suite just as the rebel assassination team had arrived, guns in hand.

  “They had bribed two of my security guards,” my father said grimly. “They just walked in through the front door of the suite, wearing those ridiculous ski masks.”

  Sam added, “They were so focused on your father and the other two guys in his security team that I walked in right behind them and they never even noticed. Some assassins. A trio of college kids with guns.”

  Once they realized that an American citizen was in the suite the student-assassins became confused. Sam, of course, immediately began bewildering them with a nonstop monologue about how rich they could become if they would merely listen to reason.

  “They’re all shareholders in my new corporation,” Sam told us happily. “Sam Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited. Neat title, isn’t it?”

  “They refrained from assassinating my father in exchange for shares in a nonexistent corporation?” I asked.

  “It’ll exist!” Sam insisted. “It’s going to be the holding company for all my other enterprises—VCI, OrbHotel, I got lots of other ideas, too, you know.”

  My father’s face turned somber. “They did not settle merely for shares in Sam’s company.”