The Sam Gunn Omnibus (33 page)

“The costs ...” Zane started to mutter.

“The program will cost less than a continuing series of Nerf ball
launches,” I said before he could turn to the relevant pages in our proposal. “And
the elegant thing is that, since this program’s primary aim is to keep Freedom’s
orbit clear of debris, we will be doing exactly that.”

“And nothing else,” D’Argent sniped.

I smiled at him for a change. “Once Freedom’s orbit has been cleared we
could always detach the equipment, mount it in an orbital maneuvering vehicle,
and clean out other orbits. The equipment is very portable, yet durable and
long-lasting.”

We went into some really heavy-duty arguing, right through lunch (a plate
of soggy sandwiches and cans of soda brought in to us by a delivery boy who had
dirt under every one of his fingernails) and all through the long afternoon.

“I’ve got to admit,” Zane finally said as it started to get dark outside, “that
VCI’s technical proposal is extremely interesting.”

“But can a newly hatched company be expected to carry through?” D’Argent
asked. “I mean, after all, they have no track record, no real financial
strength. Do you really trust Sam Gunn, of all people, to get the job done?”

I held onto my temper. Partly because Sam had drilled it into me that they’d
drop our proposal if they thought I was as flaky as he was. But mostly because
I heard Sam’s four magic words.

“Small business set-aside.”

They were spoken by the cadaver from Commerce. Everything stopped. The
room fell so quiet I could hear the going-home traffic from out on the streets
below even through the double-paned sealed windows of the office.

“This program has a small business set-aside provision,” the Commerce
scarecrow said, his voice crackling as if it was coming over a radio link from
Mars. “VCI is the only small business firm to submit a proposal. Therefore, if
their proposal is technically sound—which we all agree that it is—and
financially in line, we have no choice but to award them one of the two
contracts.”

D’Argent’s handsome chin dropped to his expensive rep tie. Zane glared at
his crony from Commerce. The others muttered and mumbled to themselves. But
there was no way around it. Decades earlier the Congress had set up a system so
that little companies could compete against the big guys. Sam had found that
old government provision and used it.

Later, when I told Sam how things had gone, he whooped and danced on my
desktop. Nothing made him happier than using the government’s own red tape to
his advantage.

“WAIT A MINUTE,”
Jade said, putting down the tall cool glass she had been
holding for so long that its contents had melted down to ice water.

Johansen, who had hardly touched his own drink, eyed her quizzically.

“Was that old man Sam’s contact in the Commerce Department, after all? Had
he tipped Sam off about the small business set-aside?”

I
THOUGHT THE
same thing—Johansen answered—but the guy slipped out of
the meeting room like a ghost disappearing into thin air. And when I asked Sam
about it, back in Florida, he just got quiet and evasive. There was something
going on, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Not until a lot later.

Anyway, about six weeks afterward we got the official notification that we
had won one of the two contracts for what the government called “The Orbital
Debris Removal Test and Evaluation Program, Phase I.” The other contract went
to Rockledge.

“We’re in!” Sam yelped. “We did it!”

We partied all that weekend. Sam invited everybody from the swimwear shop
downstairs, for starters, and pretty soon it seemed like the whole shopping mall
was jammed into our little office. Sometime during the weekend our two geniuses
from Texas A&M showed up and joined the fun.

The hangover was monumental, but the party was worth it. Then the work
began.

I saw trouble right away. The kids from Texas were really brilliant about
superconductors and magnetic bumpers, but they were emotionally about on the
level of junior high school.

The girl—uh, woman—her name was Melinda Cardenas. It was obvious that she
had the hots for Sam. She followed him with those big brown eyes of hers
wherever Sam went. She was kind of cute although pretty badly overweight. Could
have been a real beauty, I guess, if she could stay away from sweets and junk
food. But that’s just about all she ate. And every time I looked at her, she
was eating.

Her boyfriend—Larry Karsh—ate as much junk food as she did, but never put
on an ounce. Some people have metabolisms like that. He never exercised. He
just sat all day long at the desktop computer he had brought with him,
designing our magnetic bumper and munching on sweet rolls and greaseburgers
from the fast-food joint a few doors down the mall from our office. He could
lose weight just by breathing, while Melinda gained a pound and a half every time
she inhaled.

It took me a while to figure out that Larry was plying Melinda with food
so she’d stay too fat for anybody else to be interested in her. They were
rooming together, but “like brother and sister,” according to Melinda. One look
at Larry’s pasty unhappy face, sprinkled with acne, told me that the
brother-and-sister thing was making him miserable.

“You gotta get her away from me,” Sam told me, a little desperation in his
voice, one evening down in the bar where we had originally formed VCI.

“Melinda?”

“Who else?”

“I thought you liked her,” I said.

“She’s just a kid.” Sam would not meet my eyes. He concentrated instead on
making wet rings on the tabletop with his beer bottle.

“Pretty well-developed kid.”

“You gotta get her off me, Mutt.” He was almost pleading. “If you don’t,
Larry’s going to pack up and leave.”

I finally got the picture. Sam had used his charm to get Melinda to join
VCI because he had known that Larry would come wherever she went. But now Larry
was getting resentful. If he broke up our design team VCI would be in deep
yogurt.

“Just how much charm did you use on her?” I asked.

Sam raised his hands over his head. “I never touched her, so help me.
Hell, I never even took her out to dinner without Larry coming with us.”

“Did he have acne back in Texas?”

“Yeah. I think they’re both virgins.” Sam said it as if it were a crime.

I can see now, with twenty-twenty hindsight, that what I should have done
was buddy up to Larry, give him a few pointers about personal grooming and manners.
The kid was brilliant, sure, but his idea of evening wear was an unwashed
T-shirt and a pair of cutoffs. And he was so damned shy that he hid behind his
computer just about all the time. He never went anywhere and he never did
anything except massage his computer. And eat junk food. He had that dead-fish
complexion of a guy in solitary confinement. He was about as much fun as
staring at a blank wall.

To tell the truth, I just couldn’t see myself buddying up to the kid. So,
instead, I made the mistake of trying to get Melinda interested in me, rather
than Sam. I invited her out to dinner. That’s all it took. I didn’t even hold
her hand, but the next morning there was a love poem on my desk, signed with a
flowery M. And Larry didn’t show up in the office.

“Where is he?” Sam snapped the minute he entered the office—around
ten-thirty. He headed straight for his desk, which I called “Mount Blanc”
because of the mountain of paperwork heaped on top of it. Sam paid practically
no attention to any incoming paper. The mountain just grew bigger. How he ever
found anything in that pile I never knew, but whenever I couldn’t find some
form or some piece of important correspondence, Sam would rummage through the mountain
and pull out the right piece of paper in half a minute.

Neither Melinda nor I answered Sam’s question. I didn’t know where the kid
was. Melinda was watching me shyly from behind her computer. Then I realized
that Larry’s desk was bare. He had taken his computer.

“Where the hell is he?” Sam screeched.

It took me about ten seconds to figure out what had happened. Ten seconds,
plus reading Melinda’s poem. It was pretty awful. Can you imagine a poem that
rhymes dinner, winner, and thinner?

“Where the hell is Larry?” Sam asked her directly.

She shrugged from behind her computer screen. “He’s very immature,” she
said, batting her eyelashes at me. Good lord, I realized that she was wearing makeup.
Lots of it.

“Of all the gin-joints in all the towns in all the world,” Sam growled,
scurrying from behind his desk and heading for the door. “Come on, Mutt! I’ve
got to meet Bonnie Jo at the airport and you’ve got to find that kid before he
runs back to Texas!”

“Bonnie Jo?” I called after him. I flicked my phone console to automatic
answer and then dashed out after him. Melinda sat where she had been since
eight that morning; her only exercise was reaching for a bag of nacho chips.

Bonnie Jo Murtchison was the daughter of our financial backer, the banker
who wanted his daughter married.

“
She’s coming in on the eleven o’clock plane,” Sam said over
his shoulder as we rattled down the stairs and ran out to his leased Jaguar
convertible. I never saw it with the top up, yet somehow it was always under
shelter when Florida decided to have a cloudburst. Sam was uncanny that way.

“You’ll never make it to the airport by eleven,” I said, vaulting over the
Jag’s door.

Sam gave me a sour look as he slid behind the wheel. “And when’s the last
time
any
goddamned commercial airliner
arrived on schedule?”

He had a point there.

The apartment that Larry and Melinda shared was on the way to the airport.
Sam’s intention was to drop me off, assuming Larry was still there, and hustle
on to the airport.

We spotted him on the driveway of the old frame three-storey house,
packing all his belongings into their battered old Volvo station wagon. As far
as I could see, Larry’s belongings consisted of one duffel bag of clothes and
seventeen cartons of computer hardware and documentation books.

He was just getting into the car when we pulled up and blocked the
driveway, just like the Highway Patrol.

“Where’re you going?” Sam yelped as he bounded out of the Jag. I followed
behind, my boots crunching on the driveway’s gravel.

The three of us looked like a set of Russian dolls, the kind that fit one inside
of the other. Sam stood about shoulder-high to Larry, who stood little more
than shoulder-high to me.

“Back to Texas,” he said, his voice kind of cracking. “You want Melinda,
she’s all yours.”

“I don’t want her!” Sam said. “I want her to stop pestering me, for cryin’
out loud.”

Larry put down the cardboard carton he was carrying on the tailgate of the
Volvo and drew himself up to his full height.

“She’s not interested in you anymore, Mr. Gunn. She’s gone batty over this
guy.” He jutted his lower lip at me.

For a ridiculous instant I felt like a gunslinger in a Western, about to
be challenged by a callow youth.

“Listen, son,” I said as reasonably as I could, “I was just trying to get
her mind off Sam.”

He kind of sagged, as if he’d been holding himself together for so long
that his strength had given out. I thought he might drop to the ground and
start crying.

But he didn’t. “Sam, you—what’s the difference? She doesn’t like me
anymore. I guess she never really liked me in the first place.”

I looked at Sam and he looked at me. Then he got a sort of strange, benign
smile on his face, an almost saintly kind of expression I had never seen on Sam
before.

He went over to Larry and slid an arm around the kid’s skinny shoulders,
as much to prop him up as anything else. “Larry,” he asked in a quiet, kindly
sort of voice, “have you ever heard of a fella named Cyrano de Bergerac?”

“Who?”

“CYRANO?” JADE LOOKED
sharply into Johansen’s sparkling blue eyes.

“You know the play?” he asked.

“I played Roxane in our high school drama class,” she said.

“Oh.” Johansen looked slightly uncomfortable. “I think I saw it on video
once. Had a lot of sword fighting in it.”

She sighed and nodded. “Yes, a lot of sword fighting. And Cyrano coached
Christian so that he could win Roxane’s heart—even though he loved her himself.”

Johansen nodded back at her. “Yep. That’s just what Sam did. Or at least,
that’s what he got me to do.”

IT
WAS SHEER
desperation—Johansen continued. Without Larry we’d never
be able to build our hardware on the schedule we had promised in our proposal.
Or maybe not at all.

“Don’t worry about a thing,” Sam told the kid, right there in the
driveway. “Mutt and I know everything there is to know about women. With us
helping you, she’ll fall into your arms in no time flat.”