The Sam Gunn Omnibus (10 page)

“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.

“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 everyone 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.