The Sam Gunn Omnibus

by Ben Bova

  Sam made a growl from deep in his throat.

  “International law dating back to 1967 prohibits claiming sovereignty to any body found in space....”

  “I’m not claiming sovereignty,” Sam snapped to the unhearing screen. “And this ain’t a body, it’s a black hole.”

  She serenely continued,”... although it is allowed to claim the use of a body found in space, I’m afraid that the law clearly states that you must establish an operational facility on the body in question before such a claim will be recognized by the Interplanetary Astronautical Council.”

  Sam snorted like a bull about to charge. Me, I thought about establishing an operational facility on the body attached to that incredibly beautiful face.

  “So I’m afraid, my dear Mr. Gunn,” her smile widened to show dazzlingly perfect teeth, “that unless you establish an operational facility on your so-called black hole, your claim is worthless. And, oh yes! one more thing—an automated ship is on its way to you, filled with robot lawyers who will have authorization to take possession of your ship and all its equipment, in the name of your creditors. Good-bye. Have a nice day.”

  The screen went blank.

  Sam gave a screech that would make an ax-murderer shudder and flung himself at the dead screen. He bounced off and scooted weightlessly around the control center again, gibbering, jabbering, screaming insults

  and obscenities at the blonde, the IAA, the whole solar system in general, and all the lawyers on Earth in particular.

  “I’ll show ‘em!” he raged. “I’ll show ‘em all!”

  I stayed close to my instruments—actually, they were still the university’s instruments, I guess.

  After God knows how many orbits around the control center, screaming and raging, Sam propelled himself toward the hatch in the floor that led down to the equipment bay.

  “They want an operational facility, they’ll get an operational facility!”

  I wrenched my feet free so fast I twisted an ankle, and went diving after him.

  “Sam, what the hell are you thinking of?”

  He was already unlocking the hatch of our EVA scooter, a little one-man utility craft with a big bubble canopy and so many extensible arms it looked like a metal spider.

  “I’m gonna pop an instrument pod down Einstein’s throat. That’s gonna be our operational facility.”

  “But it’ll just disappear into the black hole!”

  “So what?”

  “It won’t be an operational facility.”

  “How do you know what it’ll be doing inside the event horizon? The gravity field will stretch out its signals, won’t it?”

  “Theoretically,” I answered.

  “Then we’ll be getting signals from the probe for years, right? Even after it goes past the event horizon.”

  “I guess so. But that doesn’t prove the probe will be operating inside the black hole, Sam.”

  “If the mother-humping lawyers want to prove that it’s not working, let ‘em jump into the black hole after it. And kiss my ass on the way down!”

  I argued with him for more than an hour while he got the instrument pod together and revved up the EVA craft. What he wanted to do was dangerous. Maybe adventure freaks would like to skim around the event horizon of a black hole. Me, I don’t feel really safe unless there’s good California soil shaking beneath my feet.

  But Sam would not be denied. Maybe he was a danger freak himself. Maybe he was desperate for the money he thought he could make. Maybe he just wanted to screw all the lawyers on Earth, especially that blonde.

  He didn’t even put on a pressure suit. He just clambered up into the

  cockpit of the EVA craft, slammed its hatch, and worked one of its spidery arms to pick up the instrument pod.

  Reluctantly I went back to the control center to monitor Sam’s mission.

  “Stay well clear of the event horizon,” I warned him over the radio. “I don’t know enough about Einstein to give you firm parameters....”

  Sam was no fool. He listened to my instructions. He released the instruments well clear of the event horizon. But the pod just orbited around the faint violet haze that marked Einstein’s position. It didn’t go spiraling into it.

  “Goddam mother-humping no-good son of a lawyer!”

  Sam jockeyed the EVA craft into a matching orbit and gave the pod a push inward. Not enough. Then another, swearing a blue streak every instant.

  “That’s close enough,” I yelled into the microphone, sweating bullets. “The event horizon fluctuates, Sam. You mustn’t...”

  I swear the black hole reached out and grabbed him. The event horizon sort of burped and engulfed Sam’s craft. I know it’s impossible, but that’s what happened.

  “Hey!” he yelled. “Heyyyyyy!”

  According to everything we knew about black holes up to that moment, Sam was being squeezed by Einstein’s immense gravitational forces, torn apart, crushed, mashed, squashed, pulverized.

  “What’s going onnnn?” Sam’s radio voice stretched out eerily, like in an echo chamber.

  “What’s going on?” I asked back.

  “It’s like sliding down a chuuute!”

  “You’re not being pulled apart?”

  “Hell nooo! But I can’t see anything. Like falling down an elevator shaaaft!”

  Sam should have been crushed. But he wasn’t. His radio messages were being stretched out, but apparently he himself was not. He was falling into the black hole on a one-way trip, swallowed alive.

  I started to laugh. We had named the black hole exactly right. Inside the event horizon space-time was being warped, all right. But Sam was now part of that continuum and to him, everything seemed normal. Our universe, the one we’re in, would have seemed weirdly distorted to him if he could see it.

  It had all been there in old Albert’s equations all along, if we had only had the sense enough to realize it.

  Sam Gunn, feisty, foulmouthed, womanizing, fast-talking Sam Gunn had discovered a shortcut to the stars, a space-time warp that one day would allow us to get around the limits of speed-of-light travel. That black hole was not a dead-end route to oblivion; it was a space-time warp that opened somewhere/somewhen else in the universe. Or maybe in another universe altogether.

  But it was a one-way route.

  Sam gave his life to his discovery. He was on a one-way trip to God knows where. Maybe there’d be kindly aliens at the other end of the warp to greet him and give him their version of the Nobel Prize.

  I got the terrestrial Nobel, of course. And now I’m heading up an enormous team of scientists who’re studying Einstein and trying to figure out how to put black hole warps to practical use.

  And Sam? Who knows where he is?

  But you can still hear him. Thanks to Einstein’s time-stretching effects, you can hear Sam swearing and cussing every moment, all the way down that long, long slide to whatever’s on the other side of the warp.

  And according to Einstein (Albert), we’ll be able to hear Sam yelling forever. Forever.

  Surprise, Surprise

  JADE LEANED BACK IN THE YIELDING WARMTH OF THE FORM-shaping chair, suddenly weary and drained. She turned off the computer on her lap. The interview with Professor Goodman was on its way to Selene. The final interview. Her long trek after Sam Gunn’s story was at last finished.

  She felt as if she had been struggling all her life to reach the top of a mountain, and now that she had done it, there was nothing to see, nothing more to do. The challenge had been met, and now she was surrounded by emptiness. There was no feeling of triumph, or even accomplishment. She was merely tired and empty and alone on a pinnacle with nowhere else to go.

  She leaned her head back into the chair’s comforting warmth. The dormitory room that the university had given her was more luxurious than most of the hotels she had slept in. The chair adjusted itself to her body shape and temperature, enfolding her like a gently pulsating womb. How pleasant it would be, Jade thought, to ju
st close my eyes and sleep—forever.

  But the smart screen on the wall of the small room showed a view of Titan’s spaceport out on the murky surface, and the sleek torch ship that had landed there only minutes earlier. The retractable dome was rising silently over it. Soon the ship would be disgorging its payload of passengers and cargo. In another two days it would start back toward the big scientific base in Mars orbit. And Jade would be on it, heading back toward Selene, toward the habitats crowding the Earth-Moon system, toward the world of her birth.

  And what then? she asked herself. What then?

  She drifted into an exhausted dreamless sleep. When the phone buzzed it startled her; her nerves jumped as if an emergency klaxon were hooting.

  Her laptop had slipped to the thickly carpeted floor. Thinking idly that the university life had all sorts of unwritten perquisites, Jade picked up the tiny box and pressed its ON switch.

  Spence Johansen’s grinning face filled the little screen.

  “Hello there,” he said.

  Jade waited for him to go on, knowing that this was either a recorded message or a call from the Earth-Moon area, hours distant even at the lightspeed of video communications.

  “Hey, Jade, say something! I’m here. On Titan. Up in the flight lounge. Surprised?”

  She nearly dropped the computer again.

  “Spence? You’re here? It’s really you?”

  “Sure, I just arrived.”

  “I’ll be right up!”

  Jade tossed the computer onto her bed and dashed for the door, all fatigue forgotten, all the weariness melted away. By the time she tore through the corridors and rode the power stairs up to the flight lounge, Spence already had a pair of tall frosted drinks sitting on the bar, waiting for her.

  She threw herself into his arms. Their long passionate kiss drew admiring stares and a few low whistles from the other new arrivals and regulars in the lounge.

  “Whatever ... how did you ... why ... ?” Jade had a million questions bubbling within her.

  Johansen smiled, almost sheepishly. “Ol’ Jefferson got kind of boring after you went away. I missed you, Jade. Missed you a lot.”

  “So much that you came all the way out here?”

  He shrugged.

  She perched on the bar-stool next to his, ignoring the drink standing before her, all her attention on this man who had traveled across half the solar system. To be with her.

  “I missed you, too, Spence.”

  “Did you?”

  “Enormously.” She suddenly grinned maliciously. “Considering where we are, I might say titanically.”

  Spence Johansen threw his head back and laughed a genuine, hearty, full-throated laugh. And Jade knew that she loved him.

  She took his big hand in her little one and tugged him off the bar-stool. “Come on,” she said. “There’s so much I’ve got to tell you. Come on to my room where we can be alone together.”

  Without another word, Spence allowed the elfin little woman to lead him away.

  THERE IS NO natural day/night cycle on Titan. Ten times farther from the Sun than Earth is, Saturn’s major moon is always in gloomy twilight, at best. Usually its murky, clouded atmosphere even blots out the pale light from Saturn itself.

  The university base kept Greenwich Mean Time. The lights in the windowless base’s corridors and public areas dimmed at 2000 hours and went down to a “night” equivalent at 2200, then came up to “morning” at 0700.

  Jade and Spence had no way of knowing the time. He had purposely put his shaving kit in front of the dorm room’s digital clock, so that from the bed they could not see it. The only light in the room was from the video window, which they had set on views of the methane sea up on the surface: shadowy, muted, almost formless.

  Jade told Spence about all her discoveries, and the pain that they brought. He seemed utterly surprised when she explained that she was probably Sam Gunn’s daughter.

  “Talk about kismet,” he whispered low. “For both of us.”

  “If Sam were alive he could give the bride away,” Jade said.

  “And then be my best man.” Spence chuckled softly in the shadows. “Just like him to turn the ordinary rules upside down.”

  They made love again, languidly, unhurriedly. They slept and then made love once more. And talked. Talked of the past, of the wondrous ways that lives can intertwine, of the surprises and sheer luck—good or bad—that can determine a person’s fate. Talked of the pain one person can inflict on another without even knowing it. Talked of the happiness that can be had when two people click just right, as they had done.

  Suddenly a new question popped into Jade’s mind. “How many children do you have?” she asked. “Am I going to be a stepmother?”

  In the darkened room she could barely see him shake his head. “Never stayed married long enough to have kids. But now...” His voice drifted into silence.

  “I want babies. Lots of them.”

  “Me too,” he said. “At least two.”

  “A boy and a girl.”

  “Right.”

  “And then maybe two more.”

  He laughed softly. “Maybe we ought to have twins “

  “That would be more efficient, wouldn’t it?”

  “Want a big wedding? The main chapel at Selene and all the trimmings?” ]ade shook her head. “I never even thought about it. No, I don’t think I know enough people to invite.”

  “My parents are gone, but we could ask your adoptive mother to come up.”

  “No!” Jade snapped. “She abandoned me. I haven’t seen her for seventeen years. Let it stay that way.”

  “But she’s the only kin you have.”

  She peered at the video window, the murky gloom of the methane sea. “I have family. Lots of family. Monica Bianco and Zach Bonner and Felix Sanchez. Frederick Mohammed Malone. Rick Darling. Elverda Apacheta. The owner of the Pelican Bar. They’re my family. They’d come to Selene for my wedding, if I asked them to.”

  Spence said, “And here I thought you were an orphan.”

  “Not anymore,” Jade answered, surprised at the reality of it. I’m not alone, she told herself. I have friends all across the solar system now. And a man who loves me.

  “I’m pretty old for you,” Spence said in the darkness. “Hell, if Sam really is your father, I’m a year or two older than he is.”

  “Would you be embarrassed to have a wife young enough to be your daughter?” she asked, half teasing, half fearful of his answer.

  “Embarrassed? Hell no! Every guy my age will eat his heart out with envy the minute he meets you.”

  Jade laughed, relieved.

  “But there’s you to think about,” he said, turning toward her in the bed. “How’re you going to feel, tied to an old fart like me when you’re so young? There’s plenty of stories about old men with young wives....”

  “Old stories,” Jade quickly said. “Stories from ancient times. You’re as young and vigorous as Sir Lancelot was, and you’ll stay that way for another thirty or forty years, at least, thanks to modern medicine.”

  He propped himself on one elbow and, with his other hand, traced a finger from her lips to her chin, down her throat and the length of her body. Jade felt her skin tingle at his touch.

  “Well,” he said, quite seriously, “I’m sure going to keep abreast of all the research going on in the field of aging and rejuvenation.”

  Jade burst out laughing and grabbed for him. They made love again and then drifted back to sleep.

  It was the phone buzzer that awoke Jade. She blinked once, twice, coming out of the fog, suddenly panicked that she had been dreaming. Then she felt the warmth of Spence’s body next to hers and heard him snoring softly, almost like the purr of a contented cat.

  Smiling, she groped in the dark for the oblong box that controlled the wall screen. Without turning on any lights she pecked at the keys until the scene of the methane sea was replaced by bold yellow lettering:

  URGENT CALL
FROM PROF. GOODMAN.

  Jade had to turn on her bedside lamp to see the control wand well enough to tap out the command that put Goodman on the video window without activating the wall camera that would let him see her.

  Spence stirred groggily. “Whassamatter?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Goodman was apparently in the communications center, hunched over a technician who was sitting at one of the consoles. Display screens covered the wall behind him, no two of them showing the same picture.

  The professor was scowling fiercely. Or was his expression one of fear? Or even utter surprise, shock? Jade could not tell.

  “Professor Goodman? This is Jade.”

  “Oh!” He jumped back slightly, as if pricked by a hot needle. “There’s no video.”

  “I know. You have an urgent message for me?”

  He bobbed his head up and down so hard that a lock of his curly hair flopped in front of his eyes. Brushing it back, he broke into a strange, toothy smile that just might have been a grimace of pain.

  “It just came in ... from the automated station at Einstein....”

  “Einstein? The black hole?”

  “Yes. No video, of course. But—well, listen for yourself.”

  A long, low bass note, throbbing slightly, like the last distant echo of faraway thunder or the rumble of a torch ship’s engines.

  Spence sat up in the bed beside Jade. “What the hell is that?” he whispered.

  “What is it?” Jade asked Goodman’s image on the video screen.

  The professor looked startled all over again. “Oh! Excuse me. In my haste I activated the raw data chip. Here—here’s the same message, but time-compressed and computer-enhanced.”

  “... you wouldn’t believe what these guys can do! It’s fantastic!”

  Sam Gunn’s voice!

  Jade felt her heart clutch in her chest. “What is that?” she blurted.

  “It’s Sam!” Goodman almost yelled. “Sam! He’s on his way back! He’s coming out of the black hole!”

  “That’s impossible,” Spence said, his voice hollow.

  “I know! But he’s doing it,” Professor Goodman answered, oblivious to the fact that he was now speaking to a man’s voice.