The Sam Gunn Omnibus (31 page)

I
never figured out
exactly why it was, but I
liked
the little so-and-so. Maybe
it’s because he was always the underdog, the little guy in trouble with the big
boys. Although I’ve got to admit that most of the time Sam started the trouble
himself. I’m no angel; I’ve raised as much hell as the next guy, I guess. But
Sam—he was unique. A real loose cannon. He
never
did things by the book. I think Sam regarded the
regulations as a challenge, something to be avoided at all costs. He’d drive
everybody nuts. But he’d get the job done, no matter how many mission
controllers turned blue.

He quit the agency, of course. Too
many rules. I’ve got to confess that flying for the agency in those days was a
lot like working for a bus line. If those desk-jockeys in Washington could’ve
used robots instead of human astronauts they would’ve jumped at the chance. All
they wanted was for us to follow orders and fill out their damned paperwork.

Sam was itching to be his own boss.
“There’s m
-o-n-e-y
to be made out there,”
he’d spell out for me. “Billions and billions,” he’d say in his Carl Sagan
voice.

He got involved in this and that
while I stayed in the agency and tried to make the best of it despite the
bureaucrats. Maybe you heard about the tourist deal he got involved in. Later
on he actually started a tourist hotel at Alpha. But at this point Alpha hadn’t
even been started yet; the only facilities in orbit were a couple of Russian
jobs and the American station, Freedom. Sam had served on Freedom, part of the
very first crew. Ended the mission in a big mess.

Well, meantime, all I really wanted
was to be able to fly. That’s what I love. And back in those days, if you
wanted to fly you either worked for the agency or you tried to get a job
overseas. I just couldn’t see myself
sit
ting
behind a desk or working for the French or the Japs.

Then one fine day Sam calls me up.

“Pack your bags and open a Swiss
bank account,” he says.

Even over the phone—I didn’t have a
videophone back then—I could hear how excited he was. I didn’t do any packing,
but I agreed to meet him for a drink. The Cape was just starting to boom again,
what
with
commercial launches
(unmanned, in those days) and the clippers ferrying people to space stations
and all that. I had no intentions of moving; I had plenty of flight time
staring me in the face even if it was nothing more than bus driving.

Sam was usually the center of
attention wherever he went. You know, wisecracking with the waitresses, buying
drinks for everybody, buzzing all over the bar like a bee with a rocket where
his stinger ought to be. But that afternoon he was just sitting quietly in a
corner booth, nursing a flat beer.

Soon as I slid into the booth Sam
starts in,
bam,
with no preliminaries. “How
d’you like to be a junk collector?”

“Huh?”

Jabbing a thumb toward the ceiling
he says, “You know how many pieces of junk are floating around in low orbit?
Thousands! Millions!”

He’s talking in a kind of a low
voice, like he doesn’t want anybody to hear him.

I
said back to him,
“Tell me about it. On my last mission the damned canopy window got starred by a
stray piece of crap. If it’d been any
bigger...”

There truly were thousands of
pieces of debris floating in orbit around the Earth back then. All kinds of
junk: discarded equipment, flakes of paint, pieces of rocket motors, chunks of
crap of all kinds. Legend had it that there was still an old Hasselblad camera
that Mike Collins had fumbled away during the Gemini 10 mission floating around
out there. And a thermal glove from somebody else.

In fact, if you started counting
the really tiny stuff, too small to track by radar, there might actually have
been millions of bits of debris in orbit. A cloud of debris, a layer of man-made
pollution, right in the area where we were putting space stations in permanent
orbits.

Sam hunched across the table, making
a shushing gesture with both his hands. “That’s just it! Somebody’s gonna make
a fuckin’ fortune cleaning up that orbiting junk, getting rid of
it,
making
those low orbits safe to fly in.”

I
gave him a
sidelong look. Sam was trying to keep his expression serious, but a grin was
worming its way out. His face always reminded me of a leprechaun: round, freckled,
wiry red hair, the disposition of an imp who never grew up.

“To say nothing,” he damn near
whispered, “of what they’ll pay to remove defunct commsats from geosynchronous
orbit.”

He didn’t really say “geosynchronous
orbit,” he called it “GEO” like we all do. “LEO” is low Earth orbit. GEO is
22,300 miles up, over the equator. That’s where all the communications
satellites were. We damned near
got
into a shooting war with
half a dozen equatorial nations in South America and Africa over GEO rights—but
that’s a different story.

“Who’s going to pay you to collect
junk?” I asked. Damned if my voice didn’t come out as low as his.

Sam looked very pleased with
himself. “Our dear old Uncle Sam, at first. Then the fat-cat corporations.”

Turns out that Sam had a friend who
worked in the Department of Commerce, of all places, up in Washington. I
got
the impression that the friend was not a female, which surprised me. Seemed
that the friend was a Commerce Department bureaucrat, of all things. I just
couldn’t picture Sam being chummy with a desk-jockey. It seemed strange, not
like him at all.

Anyway, Commerce had just signed
off on an agreement with the space agency to provide funding for removing junk
from orbit. Like all government programs, there was to be a series of
experimental missions before anything else happened. What the government calls
a “feasibility study.” At least two competing contractors would be funded for
the feasibility study.

The winner of the competition, Sam
told me, would get an exclusive contract to remove debris and other junk from
LEO on an ongoing basis.

“They’ve gotta do something to
protect the space station,” Sam said.

“Freedom?”

He bobbed his head up and down. “Sooner
or later she’s gonna get hit by something big enough to cause real damage.”

“The station’s already been dinged
here and there. Little stuff, but some of it causes damage. They’ve got guys
going EVA almost every day for inspection and repair.”

“And the corporations who own the
commsats are going-to be watching this competition very closely,” Sam went on,
grinning from ear to ear.

I
knew that GEO was
getting so crowded that the International

Telecommunications
Authority had put a moratorium on launching new commsats. The communications companies
were only being allowed to replace old satellites that had gone dead. They were
howling about how their industry was being stifled.

“Worse than that,” Sam added. “The
best slots along the GEO are already so damned crowded that the commsat signals
are interfering with one another. Indonesia’s getting porno movies from the
Polynesian satellite!”

That made me laugh out loud. Must
have played holy hob with Indonesia’s family planning program.

“How much do you think Turner or
Toshiba would pay to have dead commsats removed from orbit so new ones can be
spotted in the best locations?” Sam asked.

“Zillions,” I said.

“At least!”

I
thought it over
for all of ten seconds. “Why me?” I asked Sam. I mean, we had been buddies but
not all that close.

“You wanna fly, don’tcha? Handling
an OMV, going after stray pieces of junk, that’s going to call for
real
flying!”

An OMV was an orbital maneuvering
vehicle: sort of a little sports car built to zip around from the space station
to other satellites; never comes back to Earth. Compared to driving the space
shuttle, flying an OMV would be like racing at Le Mans.

I m
anaged to keep a
grip on my enthusiasm, though. Sam wasn’t acting out of altruism, I figured.
Not without some other reason to go along with it. I just sat there sipping at
my beer and saying nothing.

He couldn’t keep quiet for long. “Besides,”
he finally burst out, “I need somebody with a good reputation to front the
organization. If those goons in Washington see my name on top of our proposal
they’ll send it to the Marianas Trench and deep-six it.”

That made sense. Washington was
full of bureaucrats who’d love to see Sam mashed into corn fritters. Except,
apparently, for his one friend at Commerce.

“Will you let me be president of
the company?” I asked.

He nodded. The corners of his mouth
tightened, but he nodded.

I
let my enthusiasm
show a little. I grinned and stuck my hand out over the table. Sam grinned back
and we shook hands between the beer bottles.

But I had a problem. I would have
to quit the agency. I couldn’t be a government employee—even on long-term
leave—and work for a private company. Washington’s ethics rules were very
specific about that. Oh yeah, Sam formed a private company to tackle the job.
Very private: he owned it all. He called it VCI. That stood for
Vacuum
Cleaners, Inc.
Cute.

I
solved my problem
with a single night’s sleepless tussling. The next morning I resigned from the
agency. Hell, if Sam’s plan worked I’d be getting more flying time than a dozen
shuttle-jockeys. And I’d be doing some real flying, not just driving a big bus.

If things didn’t work out with Sam
I could always re-up with the agency. They’d take me back, I felt sure,
although all my seniority and pension would be gone. What the hell. It was only
money. Most of my salary went to my first three wives anyway.

JADE NEARLY
DROPPED
the tall frosty glass from which she had been
sipping.

“Your first three wives?” she
gulped.

Johansen inched back in the
fabric-covered slingchair. He looked flustered, embarrassed. “Uh, I’ve been married
six times,” he said, in a low fumbling voice.

“Six?”

He seemed to be mentally counting.
Then he nodded, “Yeah, six. Funny thing, Sam always had the reputation for
chasing ...
women. But somehow I always wound up getting married.”

Jade’s heart fluttered with
disappointment. Yet a tiny voice deep within her noted that seven is a lucky
number. She felt shocked, confused.

It took an effort of will to pull
her eyes away from Johansen and gaze out at the scenery. The patio on which
they sat hung out over the curving landscape of the gigantic habitat. Jade saw
gentle grassy hills with a lazy stream meandering among them, in the distance a
little village that looked like a scene for a Christmas card except there was
no snow. Farther still there were farms, kilometers off, like a checkerboard of
different shades of green. Her eyes followed the curve of this vast structure,
up and up, woods and fields and more villages overhead, all the way around
until her gaze settled on Johansen’s relaxed, smiling face once again.

“It’s quite a sight, isn’t it?” he
said. “A complete self-sufficient ecology, man-made, inside a twenty-kilometer
cylinder.”

“Quite a sight,” she murmured.

Putting the glass down on the
little cocktail table between them, Jade forced herself to return to the
subject at hand. “You were talking about leaving the agency to go to work for
Sam.”

OH,
YEAH—J0HANSEN replied, deftly ordering a new round
of drinks with a hand signal to their robot waiter.

Sam had two problems to wrestle
with: how to raise the money to make VCI more than a bundle of paper, and how
to get the government to award us one of the two contracts for the experimental
phase of the junk removal program.