The Sam Gunn Omnibus (110 page)

Except down at the end where the magnetrons
were. They were sparking and flashing spectacularly, blue electrical snakes
writhing all across them, shooting off brilliant lightning flashes into the dead
black emptiness of space. It was all in eerie silence, naturally, but in my mind
I could imagine the crackling and hissing of gigawatts of electricity straining
to get loose.

“Nothing to be alarmed about,” said
the OTV pilot over his shoulder to me, shoehorned in behind him. The man’s
voice was decidedly quavering. “Besides, we’ll be docking several klicks away
from that mess.”

He docked us at the port on the
shaded underside of the sunsat, where the so-called living quarters were. There
were only three people there, two Asian women and a frowning, bearded, bald,
portly European man. They a
l
l looked
nervous, worried. Much to my consternation, the OTV pulled away and headed back
for the Moon as soon as it detached its cargo pods. Its crew never waited to
find out if I wanted to return with them.

I
was informed by
the worried-looking trio that Sam was “up topside,” working with the
technicians who were trying to fix the “transient” that was afflicting the magnetrons.

They pulled a space suit out of a locker
and before I realized what was happening they were stuffing me into it. The
suit was brand new and stiff; it smelled of freshly cured plastic and cleaning
oils, like a new car. Believe it or not, in those days it was difficult to find
a suit that would fit someone as tall as I. This one barely did; my fingers
were cramped in the gloves, and my toes crunched uncomfortably into the boots.
I felt as if I had to stoop to keep the suit from popping open on me.

Once I was suited up they hustled me
to the access tube that led up and out to the sunlit side of the satellite.

I
had been in space
suits before; they saw that on my dossier, so they felt no qualms about sending
me outside alone with only the barest briefing on how to attach the suit’s
tether to one of the guard rails that ran the length of the satellite, between
the rows of solar panels.

They told me which radio
frequencies were which, and left me at the hatch of the access tube. I nodded
to them from inside my helmet, went through the hatch, and started to pull myself
weightlessly along the rungs set into the curving inner wall of the tube.

I
am one of those
fortunate few who have never been bothered by weightlessness. Practically
everyone gets queasy at first, a fact that ruined Sam’s original plan for his
honeymoon hotel. Yes, there are patches and pills you can take. Biofeedback
training, too. Still, most people want to barf when they first experience
zero-gee. Not me. I found it exhilarating, right from the first moment.

So I swam weightlessly the length
of the access tube and opened the hatch at its other end. Stepping out onto the
broad, flat surface of the sunsat was something like stepping from a cool
darkened room into the full brilliance of a blazing Arizona summer afternoon.

My suit creaked and groaned from
the sudden heat load of the Sun’s unfiltered fury. I heard the fans whir up and
the pumps gurgle. But none of that mattered. The scenery was too breathtaking
to care about anything else.

I
was standing on a
wide, flat expanse of dark, glassy solar panels. Actually, I was standing in an
aisle between rows of panels. The sunsat was a world of its own, a world that
stretched for kilometers in every direction, row upon row of panels so dark
they looked almost like emptiness, like the void of space itself. Between the
rows, however, metal strips of aisles glinted in the brilliant sunlight.

I
could not see the
Earth; it was on the satellite’s other, shaded side. For all I could see, I was
alone in the universe on this giant raft of solar panels, just me and the
distant stars and the blazing Sun with its pulsing, glowing corona and a halo
of zodiacal light extending on either side of it.

For the first time in my life I felt
a dizzying surge of vertigo. It took me several moments to catch my breath.
Then I remembered what I was here for, and tapped the keypad at my wrist to
turn on the suit-to-suit radio frequency.

“... never seen such a collection
of misbegotten, ham-handed, under-brained, overpaid jerkoffs in my whole
life!
Don’t you guys know
anything
?
Where’d you get your degrees, Genghis Dumb University?”

Those were the first words I heard
Sam Gunn speak.

I
attached my
tether to the guard rail and started slowly toward the end of the sunsat where
six space-suited figures were hovering off to one side of the sparking,
sputtering magnetrons like a half-dozen toy balloons tethered to various guard
rails. In their midst was one stumpy little figure, bobbing up and down like a
Mexican jumping bean on amphetamines, literally at the end of his tether.

“Eleven billion dollars to build
this pile of junk,” Sam was yelling, “and all of it’s going down the toilet
because nobody here knows how to shut down a stupid, frigging power bus!”

“Ah ... Mr Gunn?” I said into my
helmet microphone.

He paid no attention. He kept up
his tirade, describing in considerable detail the physical, mental and moral
shortcomings of the technicians surrounding him, their families, their friends,
their entire gene pool, even their herds of goats and sheep.

“Mr. Gunn!” I bellowed.

“... never been smart enough to
wipe your own—WHAT?” he snarled, turning in my direction.

“I am Zoilo Hashimoto, from—”

“Leapin’ lizards, Sandy!” Sam
exclaimed. “It’s Zorro, come to right wrongs and carve a zee into my chest!”

“Zoilo,” I corrected. I might as
well have saved my breath.

“That’s what we need around here.
The masked avenger. The mark of Zorro. You can start by transplanting some
brains into these zombies.”

The six space-suited technicians
simply hung on their tethers, silent as corpses, unmoving and apparently
unmoved by Sam’s insults.

“Would you believe,” Sam said to me,
“that they sent me the only six techs in all of Asia that can’t speak English?
They expect me to talk to them in Sanskrit or whatever.”

“That must be frustrating,” I said.

“Not all that bad.” I detected a
grin in his voice. “I can call them anything that pops into my head and they
don’t take offense.... as long as I stick to English.”

Then he whirled back toward them
and unleashed a blast of heavily accented Japanese that galvanized the
technicians into frenzied action. I understood a little of what he said and I have
no intention of repeating it.

It took the better part of two
hours, but Sam finally got the electrical sparking stopped. He had to do the
toughest part of the job by himself; the technicians either could not or would
not go within fifty meters of the crackling blue fireworks. I had to hang there
like a lanky sausage, with nothing to do but watch Sam work while I worried
about how much radiation I was absorbing.

When the sparking finally stopped,
however, the six technicians began dismantling the magnetron with the intense
purposiveness of a team of ants tearing into a jelly doughnut that someone had
carelessly dropped.

“C’mon,” Sam said, pulling himself
along the guide rail toward me, “let’s go back inside, Zorro.”

“Zoi
l
o,”
I corrected.

“Yeah, sure.”

As we headed for the tube hatch I tried
to make some conversation. “How much time do you spend outside like this?”

“Too damned much,” Sam snapped.

“I mean, the radiation levels out
here are—”

“That’s why I wear a lead
jockstrap, pal.”

I
thought he was
joking. Years later I found out that he wasn’t.

I
followed him back
to the access tube and down to the office/habitat area. The worried trio I had
met earlier was nowhere in sight, although where they could hide in the narrow
confines of the office/habitat area was beyond me.

We stopped in front of the space
suit lockers and began to work our way out of our suits. Once Sam lifted off
his helmet I took a good look at him. I had seen videos and stills of him,
naturally. I knew that round, snub-nosed face with its bristling rust-red hair
almost as well as I knew my own. Yet seeing him live and close-up was
different: he looked more

animated,
livelier. And his eyes seemed to twinkle with the awareness that he knew things
I didn’t.

Sam’s space suit looked grimy,
hard-used. Its torso and helmet were covered with corporate logos and mission
patches, everything from
Vacuum Cleaners Inc.
to an ancient, faded
Space Station Freedom.
Several emblems puzzled me: one that said
Keep the
baby, Faith,
and another that looked like the
gaudily striped flattened sphere of the planet Jupiter with four little stars
beside it and the word
Roemer
beneath.

“C’mon,” Sam said. “Lemme show you
where you’ll be sleeping tonight.”

“Don’t you want to know why I’m
here?” I asked.

He gave me an exaggerated frown. “I
know why you’re here. C.C. wants to pin my balls to her office wall, right?”

It was clear that he understood
exactly why I had come; no cover story was necessary with Sam. So I nodded,
then realized that Sam was at eye level with me, despite the fact that I was
almost a foot taller than he. I had unconsciously slipped my feet into the
floor loops, to anchor myself down. Sam, on the other hand, floated free and
bobbed weightlessly beside me.

“Why is it,” he asked the empty
air, “that when a little guy makes some money, everybody in the goddamned
government wants to investigate him?”

“Mr. Gunn,” I started to explain, “you
have had an extremely—”

“Call me Sam,” he snapped.

“Very well. You may call me Zoilo.”

“I already do, Zorro.”

“Zoilo.”

“I still can’t figure out why the
double-dipped ISC is worried about my good luck on the commodities market.”

“Ms. Chatsworth is concerned that more
than good luck may be involved,” I replied.

He grinned at me, a gap-toothed
grin of pure boyish glee.

“She thinks I’m cheating?”

He said it with such wide-eyed
innocence that I was left speechless.

Sam laughed and said, “C’mon, let’s
get some shut-eye. The next OTV won’t be here until tomorrow afternoon.”

He floated down the corridor,
propelling himself with deft touches of his fingers against the metal walls. I pulled
my stockinged feet out of the floor loops and clambered hand-over-hand after
him, using the grips that studded the walls.

To say that the personnel quarters
aboard Sunsat Seventeen were spartan would be an understatement. They consisted
of a row of lockers, nothing more. A mesh sleeping cocoon was fastened to one
side, a fold-down sink on the other. There was an electrical outlet and a data
port for connecting a computer. The locker was barely tall enough for me to
squeeze into it; I had to keep my chin pressed down on my chest.

The
next morning I groaned as I unfolded myself out in the corridor. Sam, on the
other hand, was chipper and as bright as a new-minted penny.

“Whatsamatter,
Zorro,” he asked, almost solicitously, “you in pain or something?”

Stretching
in an effort to ease the crick in my neck, I explained that the privacy booths
were too cramped for comfort.

“Gee,”
Sam said, bouncing lightly off the floor to rise to eye level with me, “I always
thought they were really spacious.”

Over
breakfast in the minuscule galley I asked, “Why are you here, Sam, instead of
in your office in Selene City? Surely you can hire engineers to supervise the
work here.”

He
gave me a sour look as he spooned up oatmeal. “Yeah, sure. I can hire the
entire graduating class of MIT if I want to.”