The Sam Gunn Omnibus (26 page)

That lean, angular black face took
on an almost thoughtful
look. “Oh ...
Sam,
mostly. ‘That tricky bastard,’ a good many times.” Malone actually laughed. “Plenty
times I heard him called a womanizing sonofabitch.”

“What did you call him?”

The suspicion came back into Malone’s
eyes. “He was my friend. I called him Sam.”

Silence stretched between them,
hanging as weightlessly as their bodies. Jade turned her head slightly and
found herself staring at the vast bulk

of
Earth. Her adoptive mother was down there, somewhere, living her own life
without a thought about the daughter she had run away from. And her real mother?
Was she on Earth, too, forever separated from the baby she had borne, the baby
she had left abandoned, alone, friendless and loveless?

Jade’s
mind screamed as if she were falling down an elevator shaft. Her stomach
churned queasily. She could not tear her eyes away from the world drifting
past, so far below them, so compellingly near. She felt herself being drawn
toward it, dropping through the emptiness, spinning down the deep swirling
vortex          

Malone’s
long-fingered hand squeezed her shoulder hard enough to hurt. She snapped her
attention to his dark, unsmiling face as he grasped her other shoulder and held
her firmly in his strong hands.

“You
were drifting,” he said, almost in a whisper.

“Was
I... ?”

“It’s
all right,” he said. “Gets everybody, at first. Don’t be scared. You’re
perfectly safe.”

His
powerful hands steadied her. She fought down the panic surging inside.

“If
you got to upchuck, go ahead and do it. Nothing to be ashamed of.” His grin
returned. “Only, use the bags they gave you, please.”

He
looked almost handsome when he smiled, she thought. After another moment he
released her. She took a deep breath and dabbed at the beads of perspiration on
her forehead. The retch bags that the technicians had attached to her belt were
a symbol to her now. I won’t need them, she insisted to herself. I’m not going
to let this get to me. I’m not going to let
them
get to me.

“I...
didn’t
think ...
didn’t realize that
zero gravity would affect me.”

“Why
not? It gets to everybody, one way or another.”

“I’m
from Selene,” Jade said. “I’ve lived all my life under lunar gravity.”

Malone
gazed at her thoughtfully. “Still a big difference between one-sixth g and none
at all, I guess.”

“Yes.”
It was still difficult to breathe. “I guess there is.”

“Feel
better?” he asked.

There
was real concern in his eyes; “I think I’ll be all right. Thanks.”

“De nada,”
he said. “I didn’t know you’d never been in weightlessness before.”

His
attitude had changed, she saw. The sullenness had thawed. He had insisted on conducting
the interview in the station’s zero-gravity area. He had allowed no
alternative. But she was grateful that his shell of distrust seemed to have
cracked.

It took several moments before she
could say, “I’m not here to do a hatchet job on Mr. Gunn.”

Malone made a small shrug. “Doesn’t
make much difference, one way or th’other. He’s dead; nothing you can say will
hurt him now.”

“But we know so little about him. I
suppose he’s the most famous enigma in the solar system.”

The black man made no response.

“The key question, I suppose ...
the thing our viewers will be most curious about, is why Sam Gunn exiled
himself up here. Why did he turn his back on Earth?”

Malone snorted with disdain. “He
didn’t! Those motherfuckers turned their backs on him.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a long story,” Malone said.

“That’s all right. I’ve got as much
time as it takes.” Even as she said it Jade wished that Malone would volunteer
to return back to the lunar-g wheel, where the gravity was normal. But she
dared not ask the man to leave his office. Once a subject starts talking, never
interrupt! That was the cardinal rule of a successful interview. Jumbo Jim had
drilled that into her. Besides, she was determined not to let weightlessness
get the better of her.

“Would you believe,” Malone was
saying, “that it all started with a cold?”

“A cold?”

“Sam came down with a cold in the
head. That’s how the whole thing began.”

“Tell me about it.”

SAM WAS A FEISTY LITTLE BASTARD-MALONE REMINISCED—
full
of piss and vinegar. If there was ten different ways in the regulations to do a
job, he’d find an eleventh, maybe a twelfth or a fourteenth, just because he
couldn’t abide being bound by the regs. A free spirit, I guess you’d call him.

He’d had his troubles with the brass
in Houston
and
Washington. Why he ever
became an astronaut in the first place is beyond me. Maybe he thought he’d be
like a pioneer out on the frontier, on his own, way out in space. How he made
it through training and into flight operations is something I’ll never figure
out. I just don’t feature Sam sitting still long enough to get through
kindergarten, let alone flight school and astronaut training.

Anyway, when I first met him he was
finished as an astronaut. He had put in seven years, which he said was a
Biblical amount of time, and he wanted out. And the agency was glad to get rid
of him, believe me. But he had this cold in the head and they wouldn’t let him
go back Earthside until it cleared up.

“Six billion people down there with
colds, the flu, bad sinuses and postnasal drips and those assholes in Houston
won’t let me go back until this goddamned sniffle clears up.”

Those were the first words Sam ever
said to me. He had been assigned to my special isolation ward, where I had
reigned alone for nearly four years. Alpha was under construction then. We were
in the old Mac-Dac Shack, a glorified tin can that passed for a space station
back in those primitive days. It didn’t spin, it just hung there. Everything
inside was weightless.

My isolation ward was a cramped
compartment with four zero-gee sleep restraints Velcroed to the four walls
together with lockers to stow personal gear. Nobody but me had ever been in it
until that morning. Sam shuffled over to the bed next to mine, towing his
travel-bag like a kid with a sinking balloon.

“Just don’t sneeze in my direction,
Sniffles,” I growled at him.

That
stopped Sam for about half a second. He gave me that lopsided grin of his—his
face sort of looked like a scuffed-up soccer ball, kind of round, scruffy. Little
wart of a nose in the middle of it. Longest hair I ever saw on a man who works
in space; hair length was one of the multitudinous points of contention between
Sam and the agency. His eyes sparkled. Kind of an odd color, not quite blue,
not really green. Sort of in-between.

“Malone,
huh?” He read the name-tag clipped over my sleep restraint.

“Frederick
Mohammed Malone,” I said.

“Jesus
Christ, they put me in with an Arab!”

But
he stuck out his hand. Sam was really a little guy; his hand was almost the size
of a baby’s. After a moment’s hesitation I swallowed it in mine.

“Sam,”
he told me, knowing I could see his last name on the tag pinned to his
coveralls.

“I’m
not even a Muslim,” I said. “My father was, though. First one in Arkansas.”

“Good
for him.” Sam disengaged his Velcro shoes from the carpeting and floated over
to one of the sleeping bags. His travel-bag hung alongside. He ignored it and
sniffed the air. “Goddamned hospitals all smell like somebody’s dying. What’re
you in for? Hangnail or something?”

“Something,”
I said. “Acquired Immune Def
i
ciency
Syndrome.”

His
eyes went round. “AIDS?”

“It’s
not contagious. Not unless we make love.”

“I’m
straight.”

“I’m
not.”

“Terrific.
Just what I need, a gay black Arab with AIDS.” But he was grinning at me.

I
had seen plenty of guys back away from me once they
knew I had AIDS. Some of them had a hang-up about gays. Others were scared out
of their wits that they’d catch AIDS from me, or from the medical personnel or
equipment. I had more than one reason to know how a leper felt, back in those
days.

Sam’s
grin faded into a puzzled frown. “How the hell did the medics put me in here if
you’ve got AIDS? Won’t you catch my cold? Isn’t that dangerous for you?”

“I’m
a guinea
pig....”

“You
don’t look Italian.”

“Look,”
I said, “if you’re gonna stay in here, keep off the ethnic jokes, okay? And the
puns.”

He shrugged.

“The medics think they got my case
arrested. New treatment that the gene therapy people have come up with.”

“I get it. If you don’t catch my
cold, you’re cured.”

“They never use words like ‘cured.’
But that’s the general idea.”

“So I’m a guinea pig too.”

“No, you are a part of the
apparatus for this experiment. A source of infection. A bag of viruses. A host
of bacteria. Germ city.”

Sam hooked his feet into his sleep
restraint’s webbing and shot me a dark look. “And this is the guy who doesn’t
like ethnic jokes.”

The Mac-Dac Shack had been one of
the first space stations that the agency had put up. It wasn’t fancy, but for
years it had served as a sort of research laboratory, mainly for medical work.
Naturally, with a lot of MDs in it, the Shack sort of turned into a floating
hospital in orbit. With all the construction work going on in those days there
was a steady stream of injured workmen and technicians.

Then some bright bureaucrat got the
idea of using one module of the Shack as an isolation ward where the medics
could do research on things like AIDS, ebola, the New Delhi virus, and some of
the paralytic afflictions that required either isolation or zero gravity. Or
both. The construction crew infirmary was moved over to the yet-unfinished
Alpha while the Shack was turned into a pure research facility with various
isolation wards for guinea pigs like me.

Sam stayed in my ward for
three-four days; I forget the exact time. He was like an energetic little bee,
buzzing all over the place, hardly ever still for a minute. In zero-gee, of
course, he could literally climb the curved walls of the ward and hover up on
the ceiling. He terrified the head nurse in short order by hanging near the
ceiling or hiding inside one of the sleeping bags and then launching himself at
her like a missile when she showed up with the morning’s assortment of needles.

Never once did Sam show the
slightest qualm at having his blood sampled alongside mine, although he watched
the nurses taking the samples
very
closely. I’ve seen guys
get violent from the fear that they’d get a needle contaminated by my blood and
catch what I had. But Sam never even blinked. Me, I never liked needles. Couldn’t
abide them. Couldn’t look when the nurse stuck me; couldn’t even look when she
stuck somebody else. Sam looked. He told me so.

By the end of the first day Sam
noticed something. “All the nurses are women.”

“All six of them,” I affirmed.

“The doctors are all males?”

“Eight men, four women.”

“That leaves two extra women for
us.”

“For you. I’m on the other side.”

“How come all women nurses?” he
wondered.

“I think it’s because of me. They
don’t want to throw temptation in my path.”

Sam started to frown at me but it
turned into that lopsided grin. “They didn’t think about
my
path.”