The Sam Gunn Omnibus (3 page)

“We have identified the problem, Artemis IV. The return module’s main
electrical power supply has malfunctioned.”

That was like telling Othello that he was a Moor.

“We’re checking out bypasses and other possible fixes,” Old Stone Face
went on. “Sit tight, we’ll get back to you.”

The Skipper gave a patient sigh. “Yes, sir.”

“We ain’t going anyplace,” said a whispered voice, just loud enough to be
heard. Sam’s.

The problem, we finally discovered, was caused by a micrometeoroid, no
less. A little grain of sand that just happened to roam through the solar
system for four and a half billion years and then decided to crash-dive itself
into the main fuel cell of our return module’s power supply. It was so tiny
that it didn’t do any visible damage to the fuel cell; just hurt it enough to let
it discharge electrically for most of the six weeks we had been on the Moon.
And the two other fuel cells, sensing the discharge through the module’s idiot
computer, tried to recharge their partner for six weeks. The result: all three
of them were dead and gone by the time we needed them.

It was Sam who discovered the pinhole in the fuel cell, the eighteenth
time we checked out the power supply. I can remember his exact words, once he
realized what had happened: “Shit!”

Sam was a feisty little guy who would have been too short for astronaut
duty if the agency hadn’t lowered the height requirements so that women could
join the corps. He was a good man, a whiz with a computer and a born tinkerer
who liked to rebuild old automobiles and then race them on abandoned freeways
whenever he could scrounge up enough old-fashioned petrol to run them. The
Terror of Clear Lake, we used to call him. The Texas Highway Patrol had other
names for him. So did the agency administrators; they cussed near threw him out
of the astronaut corps at least half a dozen times.

But we all liked Sam, back in those days, as we went through training and
then blasted off for our first mission on the Moon. He was funny; he kept us
laughing. And he did the things and said the things that none of the rest of us
had the guts to do or say.

The Skipper loved Sam a little less than the rest of us, especially after
six weeks of living in each other’s dirty laundry. Sam had a way of
almost
defying any order he received. He reacted
very poorly to authority figures. Our Skipper, Lord love him, was as
stiff-backed an old-school authority figure as any of them. He was basically a
good joe, and I’m cursed if I can remember his real name. But his big problem
was that he had memorized the rule book and tried never to deviate from it.

Well, anyway, there we were, stranded on the lunar surface after six weeks
of hard work. Our task had been to make a semipermanent underground base out of
prefabricated modules that had been, as the agency quaintly phrased it, “landed
remotely on the lunar regolith in a series of carefully coordinated unmanned
logistics missions.” In other words, they had dropped nine different module
packages over a fifty-square kilometer area of Mare Nubium and we had to find
them all, drag them to the site that Houston had picked for Base Gamma, set
them up properly, scoop up enough of the top layers of soil to cover each module
and the connecting tunnels to a depth of 0.9144 meters (that’s three feet in
English), and then link all the wiring, plumbing, heating and air circulation
units. Which we had done, adroitly and efficiently, and now that our labors
were finished and we were ready to leave—no go. Too bad we hadn’t covered the
return module with 0.9144 meters of lunar soil; that would have protected the
fuel cells from that sharpshooting micrometeoroid.

The Skipper decided it would be bad procedure to let us mope around and
brood.

“I want each of you to run a thorough inventory of all your personal
supplies: the special foods you’ve brought with you, your spare clothing,
entertainment kits, everything.”

“That’ll take four minutes,” Sam muttered, loud enough for us all to hear
him. The eight of us were crammed into the command module again, eight guys
squeezed into a space built for three. It was barely high enough to stand in,
and the metal walls and ceiling always felt cold to the touch. Sam was pressed
in with the guys behind me; I was practically touching noses with the Skipper.
The guys in back giggled at Sam’s wisecrack. The Skipper scowled.

“Goddammit Gunn, can’t you behave seriously for even a minute? We’ve got a
real problem here.”

“Yessir,” Sam replied. If he hadn’t been squeezed in so tightly I’m sure
he would have made a snappy salute. “I’m merely attempting to keep morale high,
sir.”

The Skipper made an unhappy snorting noise, and then told us that we would
spend the rest of the shift checking out
all
the supplies that were left: not just our personal stuff, but the mission’s
supplies of food, the nuclear reactor, the water recycling system, equipment of
all sorts, air….

We knew it was busywork, but we had nothing else to do. So we wormed our
way out of the command module and crawled through the tunnels toward the other
modules that we had laid out and then covered with bulldozed soil. It was a
neat little buried base we had set up, for later explorers to use. I got a sort
of claustrophobic feeling just then, that this buried base might turn into a mass
grave for eight astronauts.

I was dutifully heading back for barracks module A—where four of us had
our bunks and personal gear—to check out my supplies, as the Skipper had
ordered. Sam snaked up beside me. Those tunnels, back in those days, were
prefabricated Earthside to be laid out once we got to the construction site. I think
they were designed by midgets. You couldn’t stand up in them: they were too
low. You had to really crawl along on hands and knees if you were normal size.
Sam was able to shuffle through them on bent knees, knuckle-walking like a
young chimpanzee. He loved those tunnels.

“Hey, wait up,” he hissed to me.

I stopped.

“Whattaya think will get us first, the air giving out or we starve to
death?”

He was grinning cheerfully. I said, “I think we’re going to poison the air
with methane. We’ll fart ourselves to death in another couple of days.”

Sam’s grin widened. “C’mon ... I’m setting up a pool on the computer. I hadn’t
thought of air pollution. You wanna make a bet on that?” He started to
King-Kong down the shaft to the right, toward the computer and life-support module.
If I had had the space I would have shrugged. Instead, I followed him there.

Three of the other guys were in the computer module, huddled around the
display screen like Boy Scouts around a campfire.

“Why aren’t you checking out the base’s supplies, like the Skipper said,”
I asked them.

“We are, Straight Arrow,” replied Mickey Lee, our refugee from Chinatown.
He tapped the computer screen. “Why go sorting through all that junk when the
computer already has it listed in alphabetical order for us?”

That wasn’t what the Skipper wanted and we all knew it. But Mickey was
right. Why bother with busywork? We wrote down lists that would make the
Skipper happy. By hand. If we had let the computer print out the lists, Skip
would have gotten wise right away.

While we scribbled away, copying what was on the screen, we talked over
our basic situation.

“Why the hell can’t we use the nuke to recharge the fuel cells?” Julio
Marx asked. He was our token Puerto Rican Jew, a tribute to the space agency’s
Equal Opportunity employment policy. Julio was also a crackerjack structural
engineer who had saved my life the day I had started to unfasten my helmet just
when one of those blessed prefab tunnels had cracked its airlock seal. But that’s
another story.

,
Sam gave Julio a
sorrowful stare. “The two systems are incompatible, Jules. Two separate teams
of engineers designed them and none of the geniuses in the labs ever thought we
might have to run one off the other in an emergency.”

Julio cast an unbelieving glance at Sam. So Sam grinned and launched into
the phoniest Latino accent you ever heard. “The nuclear theeng, man, it got too
many volts for the fuel cells. Like, you plug the nukie to the fuel cells, man,
you make a beeg boom an’ we all go to dat beeg San Juan in thee sky. You better
steek to pluckin’ chickens, man, an’ leave the eelectreecity alone.”

Julio, who towered a good inch and a half over Sam, laughed good-naturedly
and answered, “Okay, Shorty, I dig.”

“Shorty! Shorty?” Sam’s face went red. “All right, that’s it. The hell
with the betting pool. I’m gonna let you guys die of boredom. Serve you right.”

We made a big fuss and soothed his feathers and cajoled him into setting
up the pool. With a great show of hurt feelings and reluctant but utterly
selfless nobility, Sam pushed Mickey Lee out of the chair in front of the
computer terminal and began playing the keyboard like a virtuoso pianist.
Within a few minutes the screen was displaying a list of the possible ways for
us to die, with Sam’s swiftly calculated odds next to each entry. At the touch
of a button the screen displayed a graph showing how the odds for each mode of
dying changed as time went on.

Suffocation, for example, started off as less than a one percent
probability. But within a month the chances began to rise fairly steeply. “The
air scrubbers need replacement filters,” Sam explained, “and we’ll be out of
‘
em inside of two more weeks.”

“They’ll have us out of here in two weeks, for Christ’s sake,” Julio said.

“Or drop fresh supplies for us,” said Ron Avery, the taciturn pilot we
called Cowboy because of his lean, lanky build and slow western drawl.

“Those are the odds,” Sam snapped. “The computer does not lie. Pick your
poison and place your bets.”

I put fifty bucks down on Air Contamination, not telling the other guys
about my earlier conversation with Sam. Julio took Starvation, Mickey settled
on Dehydration (Lack of Water) and Cowboy picked Murder—which made me shudder.

“What about you, Sam?” I asked.

“I’ll wait till the other guys have a chance,” he said.

“You gonna let the Skipper in on this?” asked Julio.

Sam shook his head. “If I tell him ...”

“I’ll tell him,” Cowboy volunteered, with a grim smile. “I’ll even let him
have Murder, if he wants it. I can always switch to Suicide.”

“Droll fellow,” said Sam.

“Well, hell,” Cowboy insisted, “if a feller takes Suicide he can always make
sure he wins just by killing himself, can’t he now?”

It was one of those rare occasions when Sam had no reply. He simply stared
at Cowboy in silence.

Well, you probably read about the mission in your history classes. Houston
was supporting three separate operations on the Moon at the same time and they
were stretched to the limit down there. Old Stone Face promised us a rescue
flight in a week. But they had a problem with the booster when they tried to
rush things on the launch pad too much and the blessed launch had to be put
back a week, then another week. They sent an unmanned supply craft to us, of
course, but the descent stage got gummed up. Our fresh food, air filters and
water supply wound up orbiting the Moon fifty miles over our heads.

Sam calculated the odds against all these foul-ups and came to the
conclusion that Houston was working overtime to kill us. “Must be some kind of
an experiment,” he told us. “Maybe they need some martyrs to make people more
aware of the space program.”

Cowboy immediately asked if that fell under the category of Murder. He was
intent on winning the pool, even if it killed him.

We learned afterward that Houston was deep in trouble because of us. The
White House was firing people right and left, Congressional committees were
gearing up to investigate the fiasco, and the CIA was checking out somebody’s
crackbrained idea that the Japanese were behind all our troubles. Or maybe
Arianespace, the European space company.

Meanwhile, we were stranded on the Mare Nubium with nothing much to do but
let our beards grow and hope for sinus troubles that would cut off our ability
to sense odors.

Old Stone Face was magnificent, in his unflinching way. He was on the line
to us every day, despite the fact that his superiors in Houston and Washington
were either being fired directly by the President herself or roasted over the
simmering fires of media criticism. There must have been a zillion reporters at
Mission Control by the second week of our marooning. We could
feel
the hubbub and tension whenever we talked
with Stony.

“The countdown for your rescue flight is proceeding on an accelerated
schedule,” he told us. It would never occur to him to say,
We’re hurrying as fast as we can.
“Liftoff is now
scheduled for 0700 hours on the twenty-fifth.”

None of us needed to look at a calendar to know that the twenty-fifth was
seventeen days away. Sam’s betting pool was looking more serious by the hour.
Even the Skipper had finally taken the plunge: Suffocation.

If it weren’t for Sandi Hemmings we might all have gone crazy. She took
over as Capcom during the night shift, when most of the reporters and the
agency brass were either asleep or drinking away their troubles. She gave us
the courage and desire to pull through, partly by just smiling at us and
looking female enough to
make
us want to
survive, but mainly by giving us the straight info with no nonsense.