The Sam Gunn Omnibus (11 page)

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.

I must admit, however, that Sam was a good guest. He handed out trinkets
that he fished from the deep pockets of his coveralls. A miniature penknife to
one of the men who had rescued him. A pocket computer to the other, programmed
to play a dozen different games when it was connected to a display screen. A
small flat tin of rock candy. A Russian-English dictionary the size of your
thumb.

That dictionary should have alerted my suspicions. But I confess that I was
more concerned with getting this noisy intrusion off my station and back where
he belonged.

Sam stayed a day. Two days. Teleconferences crackled between Washington
and Moscow, Moscow and Geneva, Washington and Geneva, ground control to our
station, our station to the NASA station. Meanwhile Sam had made himself at
home and even started to learn how to tell jokes in Russian. He was
particularly interested in dirty jokes, of course, being the kind of man he
was. He began to peel off some of the patches and buttons that adorned his
coveralls and hand them out as presents. My crewmen especially lusted after the
pictures of beautiful video stars.

He had taken over the galley, where he was teaching my men how to play
dice in zero gravity, when I at last received permission to send him back to
the American station. Not an instant too soon, I thought.

Still, dear old Mir 5 became suddenly very quiet and dreary once we had
packed him off in one of our own reliable transfer craft. We returned to our
tedious tasks and the damnable exercise machines. The men growled and sulked at
each other. Months of boredom and hard work stretched ahead of us. I could feel
the tension pulling at my crew. I felt it myself.

But not for long.

Less than a week later
Korolev again rousted me from my zipper bunk.

“He’s back! The
American!”

This time Sam did not
pretend to need an emergency rescue. He had flown an orbital transfer vehicle
to our station and matched orbit. His OTV was hovering a few hundred meters
alongside us.

“Permission to come
aboard?” His voice was unmistakable. “Unofficially?”

I glanced at Zworkin,
who was of course right beside me in the command center. Strangely, Nikolai
Nikolaivich nodded. Nothing is unofficial with him, I knew. Yet he did not
object to the American making an “unofficial” visit.

I went to the docking
chamber while Sam floated over to us. The airlock of his craft would not fit
our docking mechanism, so he went EVA in his pressure suit and jetted across to
us using his backpack maneuvering unit.

“I was in the
neighborhood so I thought I’d drop by for a minute,” Sam wisecracked once he
got through our airlock and slid up the visor of his helmet.

“Why are you in this
area?” Zworkin asked, eyes slitted in his pimpled face.

“To observe your laser
tests,” replied Sam, grinning. “You guys don’t think our intelligence people
don’t know what you’re up to, do you?”

“We are not testing
lasers!”

“Not today, I know. Don’t
worry about it, Ivan, I’m not spying on you, for chrissakes.”

“My name is not Ivan!”

“I just came over to
thank you guys for saving my ass.” Sam turned slightly, his entire body
pivoting weightlessly toward me. He reached into the pouches on the legs of his
suit. “A couple of small tokens of my gratitude.”

He pulled out two small
plastic jewel cases and handed them to me. Videodiscs.

“Latest Hollywood releases,”
Sam explained. “With my thanks.”

In a few minutes he was
gone. Zworkin insisted on looking at the videos before anyone else could see
them. “Probably capitalist propaganda,” he grumbled.

I insisted on seeing
them with him. I was not going to let him keep them all for himself.

One of the videos was
the very popular film,
Rocky XVIII,
in which
the

geriatric former
prizefighter is rejuvenated and gets out of his wheelchair to defeat a
nine-foot-tall robot for the heavyweight championship of the solar system.

“Disgusting,” spat Zworkin.

“But it will be good to show the crew how low the capitalists sink in
their pursuit of money,” I said.

He gave me a sour look but did not argue.

The second video was a rock musical that featured decadent music at
extreme decibel levels, decadent youths wearing outlandish clothes and weird
hairdos, and decadent young women wearing hardly any clothes at all. Their
gyrations were especially disturbing, no matter from which point of view you
looked at them.

“Definitely not for the crew to see,” said Zworkin. None of us ever saw
that video again. He kept it. But now and then I heard the music, faintly, from
his private cubicle during the shifts when he was supposed to be sleeping.
Mysteriously, his acne began to clear up.

Almost two weeks afterward Sam popped up again. Again he asked permission
to come aboard, claiming this time he was on a routine inspection mission of a
commsat in geosynchronous orbit and had planned his return to the NASA station
to take him close to us. He was a remarkable pilot, that much I must admit.

“Got a couple more videos for you,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

Zworkin immediately okayed his visit. The rest of my crew, who had cheered
the rejuvenated Rocky in his proletarian struggle against the stainless-steel
symbol of western imperialism (as we saw it), welcomed him aboard.

Sam stayed for a couple of hours. We fed him a meal of borscht, soysteak
and ice cream. With plenty of hot tea.

“That’s the best ice cream I’ve ever had!” Sam told me as we made our
weightless way from the galley back to the docking chamber, where he had left
his pressure suit.

“We get fresh supplies every week,” I said. “Our only luxury.”

“I never knew you guys had such great ice cream.” He was really marveling
over it.

“Moscow is famous for its ice cream,” I replied.

With a shake of his head that made his whole body sway slightly, Sam
admitted, “Boy, we got nothing like that back at the NASA station.”

“Would you like to bring some back to your station?” I asked. Innocent fool
that I am, I did not realize that he had maneuvered me into making the offer.

“Gee, yeah,” he said, like a little boy.

I had one of the men pack him a container of ice cream while he struggled
into his pressure suit. Zworkin was off screening the two new videos Sam had
brought, so I did not bother him with the political question of offering a gift
in return for Sam’s gift.

As he put his helmet over his head, Sam said to me in a low voice, “Each
of those videos is a double feature.”

“A what?”

Leaning close to me, so that the technician in charge of the docking
airlock could not hear, he whispered, “Play the disks at half speed and you’ll
see another whole video. But
you
look at them
yourself first. Don’t let that sourball of a political officer see it or he’ll
confiscate them both.”

I felt puzzled, and my face must have shown it. Sam merely grinned, patted
me on the shoulder and said, “Thanks for the ice cream.”

Then he left.

It took a bit of ingenuity to figure out how to play the disks at half
speed. It took even more cleverness to arrange to look at them in private,
without Zworkin or any of the other crew members hanging over my shoulders. But
I did it.

The “second feature” on each of the tapes was pornographic filth.
Disgusting sexual acrobatics featuring beautiful women with large breasts and
apparently insatiable appetites. I watched the degrading spectacles several
times, despite stern warnings from my conscience. If I had been cursed with
acne these videos would undoubtedly have solved the problem overnight.
Especially the one with the trapeze.

For the first time since I had been a teenager buying contraband blue
jeans I faced a moral dilemma. Should I tell Zworkin about these secret
pornographic films? He had seen only the normal, “regular” features on each
tape: an ancient John Wayne western and a brand-new comedy about a computer
that takes over Wall Street.

In my own defense I say only that I was thinking of the good of my crew
when I made my decision. The men had been in orbit for nearly 650 days with
almost two full months to go before we could return to our loved ones. The
pornographic films might help them to bear their loneliness and perform better
at their tasks, I reasoned.

But only if Zworkin did not know about them.

I decided to chance it. One by one I let the crew in on the little secret.

Morale improved six
hundred percent. Performance and productivity rose equally. The men smiled and
laughed a lot more. I told myself it was just as much because they were pulling
one over on the puritanical Zworkin as because they were watching the buxom
Oral Roberta and her insatiable girlfriend Electric (AC/DC) Edna.

Sam returned twice more, swapping videos for ice cream. He was our friend.
He apparently had an inexhaustible supply of videos, each of them a “double
feature.” While Zworkin spent the next several weeks happily watching the
regular features on each disk and perspiring every time he saw a girl in a
bikini, the rest of watched the erotic adventures of airline stewardesses, movie
starlets, models, housewife-hookers, and other assorted and sordid specimens of
female depravity.