The Sam Gunn Omnibus (2 page)

Her adopted mother’s name was Jane, the month was April, and
inconnu
is the French word for “unknown.” So the
orphaned baby girl became Jane Avril Inconnu, raised alone by the surgeon for
the first four years of her life.

By the time the surgeon’s five-year contract with Moonbase was completed
and she was due to return to Montreal, the medical staff—which doted on the
little girl—had discovered that Jane Avril suffered from a congenital bone
defect, a rare inability to manufacture sufficient amounts of calcium. Neither
exercise nor medicine could help. Although she could walk and run and play
normally in the gentle gravity of the Moon, on Earth she would be a helpless
cripple, confined to a wheelchair or a mechanical exoskeleton, in constant
danger of snapping her brittle, fragile bones.

Her adopted mother bravely decided to remain with the child, but then the
news came from Montreal that her own mother was gravely ill, dying. Torn
between the generations, the woman returned to Earth, promising to return soon,
soon. She never did. There were family obligations on Earth, and later a
husband who wanted children of his own.

Jane Avril remained at Moonbase, orphaned once again, raised by a
succession of medical personnel at the hospital. Some were warm and loving,
some were distant and uncaring. A few were actually abusive now and then.

Moonbase grew, over those years, into the city called Selene. The frontier
of civilization crept across the battered old face of the Moon and expanded
into cislunar space, where great habitats were built in the dark emptiness to
house hundreds of thousands of people. Explorers reached out to Mars, and then
farther. Entrepreneurs, some wildly reckless, some patient and cunning, began
to reap the wealth of space. Fortunes were built on lunar mining, on power
satellites to feed the energy hungers of Earth, on prospecting the metals and minerals
of the asteroids.

Of all those daring and dashing fortune-seekers, the first, the most
adventurous, the best known of them all was Sam Gunn. As she grew into young
womanhood, Jane Avril heard endless stories about Sam Gunn and the fortunes he
had found in space. Found and lost. For Sam was more impetuous and
unpredictable than a solar storm. Long before Jane Avril acquired the nickname
Jade, Sam Gunn was already a living legend.

She could not consider herself beautiful, despite the gorgeous red hair
and those dazzling green eyes that gave her the sobriquet. She was small, just
a shade over one hundred sixty-five centimeters tall. Her figure was slim,
elfin, almost childlike. Her face was just a trifle too long and narrow to suit
her, although she could smile very prettily when she wanted to. She seldom did.

Being raised as an orphan had built a hard shell of distrust around her.
She knew from painful experience that no relationship ever lasted long, and it
was foolish to open her heart to anyone.

Yet that heart of hers was a romantic one. Inside her protective crust was
a yearning for adventure and love that would not die, no matter how sternly she
tried to repress it. She dreamed of tall handsome men, bold heroes with whom she
would travel to the ends of the solar system. She wanted with all her heart to
get free of the dreary monotony of Selene, with its gray underground corridors
and its unending sameness every day, year after year.

She knew that she was forever barred from Earth, even though she could see
its blue beautiful glory shining at her in the dark lunar sky. Earth, with all
its teeming billions of people and its magnificent cities and oceans of water
so deep and blue and raging wild. Selene was a cemetery by comparison. She had
to get away, to fly free, anywhere. If she could never set foot on Earth, there
were still the great habitats at the La-grangian points, and the bridge ships
plying out toward Mars, the rugged frontier of the Asteroid Belt, and beyond,
to the deadly beautiful dangers of the gas giant worlds.

Such were her dreams. The best she could do, though, was to get a job as a
truck driver up on the dusty dead lunar surface.

But still she dreamed. And waited for her opportunity.

THE SPRING-WHEELED TRUCK ROLLED TO A SILENT STOP ON
the Mare Nubium. The
fine dust kicked up by its six wheels floated lazily back to the mare’s soil.
The hatch to the truck cab swung upward, and a space-suited figure climbed
slowly down to the lunar surface, clumped a dozen ponderously careful steps,
then turned back toward the truck.

“Yeah, this is the spot. The transponder’s beeping away, all right.”

At first Jade had been excited by her work as a truck driver. Even inside
a space suit, being out on the wide-open surface of the Moon, beneath the
solemn eyes of the unblinking stars, was almost like being able to run wild and
free in comparison to the dreariness of Selene’s underground corridors. But now
she had been at the job for nearly a year. The excitement had worn away, eroded
as inevitably as the meteor-pitted rocks of the Sea of Clouds.

And always in that dead-black sky there hung the glowing jewel of Earth, tantalizing,
beautiful, forever out of her reach.

She and the hoist operator (male and married) clambered down from the cab,
bulbous and awkward-looking in their bulky space suits. Jade turned a full
three hundred sixty degrees, scanning the scene through the gold-tinted visor
of her suit’s bubble helmet. There was nothing to be seen except the monotonous
gray plain, pockmarked by craters like an ancient, savage battlefield that had
been petrified into solid stone long eons ago.

“Merde, you can’t even see the ringwall from here!” she exclaimed.

“That’s what he wanted,” came the voice of their supervisor through her
helmet earphones. “To be out in the open, without a sign of civilization in
sight. He picked this spot himself, you know.”

“Helluva place to want to be buried,” said the hoist operator.

“That’s what he specified in his will. Come on, let’s get to work. I want
to get back to Selene City before the sun goes down.”

It was a local joke: the three space-suited workers had more than two
hundred hours before sunset.

Grunting even in the gentle lunar gravity, they slid the gleaming
sarcophagus from the back of the truck and placed it softly on the roiled,
dusty ground. It was made of stainless steel, delicately inscribed in gold by
the solar system’s most famous sculptress. At one end, in tastefully small
lettering, was a logo:
S. Gunn Enterprises,
Unlimited.

The supervisor carefully paced to the exact spot where the tiny
transponder lay blinking, and used a hand laser to draw an exact circle around
it. Then he sprayed the stony ground inside the circle with the blue-white
flame of a plasma torch. Meanwhile, Jade helped the hoist operator swing the
four-meter-high crate down from the truck bed to the ground next to the
sarcophagus.

“Ready for the statue?” Jade asked.

The supervisor said nothing as he inspected his own work. The hot plasma
had polished the stony ground. Jade and the hoist operator heard him muttering
over their helmet earphones as he used the hand laser to check the polished
ground’s dimensions. Satisfied, he helped them drag the gold-filigreed
sarcophagus to its center and slide it into place over the transponder.

“A lot of work to do for a dead man.”

“He wasn’t just any ordinary man.”

“It’s still a lot of work. Why in hell couldn’t he be recycled like
everybody else?” the hoist operator complained.

“He’s not in the sarcophagus, dumbskull,” snapped the supervisor. “Don’t
you know any goddamned thing?”

“He’s not... ?”

Jade had known that the sarcophagus was empty, symbolic. She was surprised
that her coworker didn’t. Some people pay no attention to anything, she told
herself. I’ll bet he doesn’t know anything at all about Sam Gunn.

“Sam Gunn,” said the supervisor, “never did things like everybody else.
Not in his whole cussed life. Why should he be like the rest of us in death?”

They chattered back and forth through their suit radios as they uncrated
the big package. Once they had removed all the plastic and the bigger-than-life
statue stood sparkling in the sunlight, they stepped back and gaped at it.

“It’s glass!”

“Christ, I never saw any statue so damned big.”

“Must have cost a fortune to get it here. Two fortunes!”

“He had it done at Island One, I heard. Brought the sculptress in from the
Belt and paid her enough to keep her at L-4 for two whole years. God knows how
many times she tried to cast a statue this big and failed, even in low gee.”

“I didn’t know you could
make a glass statue this big.”

“In micro-gee you can.
It’s hollow. If we were in air, I could ping it with my finger and you’d hear
it ring.”

“Crystal.”

“That’s right.”

Jade laughed softly.

“What’s so funny?” the
supervisor asked.

“Who else but Sam Gunn
would have the gall to erect a crystal statue to himself and then have it put
out in the middle of this godforsaken emptiness, where nobody’s ever going to
see it? It’s a monument to himself, for himself. What ego! What monumental ego.”

The supervisor chuckled,
too. “Yeah. Sam had an ego, all right. But he was a smart little SOB, too.”

“You knew him?” Jade
asked.

“Sure. Knew him well enough
to tell you that he didn’t pick this spot for his tomb just for the sake of his
ego. He was smarter than that.”

“What was he like?”

“When did you know him?”
the hoist operator asked.

“Come on, we’ve still
got work to do. He wants the statue positioned exactly as he stated in his
will, with its back toward Selene and the face looking up toward Earth.”

“Yeah, okay, but when
did you know him, huh?”

“Oh golly, years ago. Decades
ago. When the two of us were just young pups. The first time either of us came
here, back in—Lord, it’s thirty years ago. More.”

“Tell us about it. Was
he really the rogue that the history disks say he was? Did he really do all the
things they say?” Jade found to her surprise that she was eager to know.

“He was a phony!” the
hoist operator snapped. “Everybody knows that. A helluva showman, sure, but he
never did half the stuff he took credit for. Nobody could have, not in one
lifetime.”

“He lived a pretty
intense life,” said the supervisor. “If it hadn’t been for that black hole he’d
still be running his show from here to Titan.”

“A showman. That’s what
he was.” “What was he like?” Jade asked again.

So, while the two young
workers struggled with the huge, fragile crystal statue, the older man sat
himself on the lip of the truck’s hatch and told them what he knew about the
first time Sam Gunn had come to the Moon.

THE SKIPPER USED THE
TIME-HONORED CLICHE. HE SAID, “Houston, we have a problem here.”

There were eight of us, the whole crew of Artemis IV, huddled together in
the command module. After six weeks of living on the Moon, the module smelled
like a pair of unwashed gym socks. With a woman President, the space agency
figured it would be smart to name the second round of lunar exploration after a
female: Artemis was Apollo’s sister. Get it?

But it had just happened that the computer that made the crew selections
for Artemis IV picked all men. Six weeks without even the sight of a woman, and
now our blessed-be-to-God return module refused to light up. We were stranded.
No way to get back home.

As usual, Capcom in Houston was the soul of tranquility. “Ah, A-IV, we
read you and copy that the return module is no-go. The analysis team is
checking the telemetry. We will get back to you soonest.”

It didn’t help that Capcom, that shift, was Sandi Hemmings, the woman we
all lusted after. Among the eight of us, we must have spent enough energy
dreaming about cornering Sandi in zero gravity to propel each of us right back
to Houston. Unfortunately, dreams have a very low specific impulse, and we were
still stuck on the Moon, a quarter-million miles from the nearest woman.

Sandi played her Capcom duties strictly by the book, especially since all
our transmissions were taped for later review. She kept the traditional Houston
poker face, but she managed to say, “Don’t worry, boys. We’ll figure it out and
get you home.”

Praise God for small favors.

We had spent hours checking and rechecking the cursed return module. It
was engineer’s hell: everything checked but nothing worked. The thing just sat
there like a lump of dead metal. No electrical power. None. Zero. The control
board just stared at us cold and glassy-eyed as a banker listening to your
request for an unsecured loan. We had pounded it. We had kicked it. In our
desperation we had even gone through the instruction manual, page by page, line
by line. Zip. Zilch. The bird was dead.

When Houston got back to us, six hours after the Skipper’s call, it was
the stony unsmiling image of the mission coordinator glowering at us as if we
had deliberately screwed up the return module. He told us: