The Sam Gunn Omnibus (4 page)

“They’re in deep trouble over at Kennedy,” she would tell us. “They’ve had
to go on triple shifts and call up boosters that they didn’t think they would
need until next year. Some Senator in Washington is yelling that we ought to
ask the Russians or the Japanese to help us out.”

“As if either of them had upper stages that could make it to the Moon
without six months worth of modification work,” one of our guys grumbled.

“Well,” Sandi said with her brightest smile, “you’ll all be heroes when
you finally get back here. The women will be standing in line to admire you.”

“You won’t have to stand in line, Sandi,” Cowboy answered, in a rare burst
of words. “You’ll always be number one with us.”

The others crowded into the command module added their heartfelt
agreement.

Sandi laughed, undaunted by the prospect of having the eight of us
grabbing for her. “I hope you shave first,” she said.

Remember, she could see us but she couldn’t smell us.

A night or two later she spent hours reading to us the suggestions made by
the Houston medical team on how to stretch out our dwindling supplies of food,
water, and air. They boiled down to one basic rule: lie down and don’t exert
yourselves. Great advice, especially when you’re beginning to really worry that
you’re not going to make it through this mess. Just what we needed to do, lie
back in our bunks and do nothing but think.

I caught a gleam in Sam’s eye, though, as Sandi waded through the medics’
recommendations. The Skipper asked her to send the whole report through our
computer. She did, and he spent the whole next day poring over it. Sam spent
the day—well, I couldn’t figure out where he’d gotten to. I didn’t see him all
day long, and Base Gamma really wasn’t big enough to hide in, even for somebody
as small as Sam.

After going through all the medics’ gobbledegook the Skipper ordered us to
take tranquilizers. We had a small supply of downers in the base pharmaceutical
stores, and Skip divided them equally among us. At the rate of three a day they
would last just four days, with four pills left over. About as useful as a
cigarette lighter in hell, but the Skipper played it by the book and ordered us
to start swallowing the tranquilizers.

“Just the thing for the tension that arises from pre-death syndrome,” Sam
muttered. Loud enough for Skip to hear, of course.

“The medics say the pills will ease our anxieties and help us to remain as
quiet as possible while we wait for the rescue mission,” Skip said, glowering
in Sam’s direction.

He didn’t bother to remind us that the rescue mission, according to Sandi’s
unofficial word, was still twelve days off. We would be out of food in three more
days, and the recycled water was starting to taste as if it hadn’t been
recycled, if you know what I mean. The air was getting foul, too, but that was probably
just our imaginations.

Sam appeared blithely unconcerned, even happy. He whistled cheerfully as
Skip rationed out the tranquilizers, then gave his pills to me and scuttled off
down the tunnel that led toward our barracks module. By the time I got to my
bunk Sam was nowhere in sight. His whistling was gone. So was his pressure
suit.

I put his pills under his mattress, wondering where he could have gone.
Outside? For what? To increase his radiation dose? To get away from the rest of
us? That was probably it. Underneath his wise-guy shell Sam was probably just
as worried and tense as any of us, and he just didn’t want us to know it. He
needed some solitude, not chemical tranquility. What better place to find
solitude than the airless rocky waste of Mare Nubium?

That’s what I thought. That’s why I didn’t go out after him.

The same thing happened the next “morning” (by which I mean the time
immediately after our sleep shift). And the next. The Skipper would gather us
together in the command module, we would each take our ceremonial tranquilizer
pill and a sip of increasingly bad water, and then we would crawl back to our
bunks and try to do nothing that would use up body energy or burn air. All of
us except Sam. He faked swallowing his pill, handed it to me when Skip wasn’t
watching, and then disappeared with his pressure suit.

All of us were getting grumpier, surlier. I know I found myself resenting
it whenever I had to use the toilet. I kept imagining my urine flowing straight
back into our water tank without reprocessing. I guess I was starting to go
crazy.

But Sam was happy as could be: chipper, joking, laughing it up. He would
disappear each morning for several hours and then show up with a lopsided grin
on his round face, telling jokes and making us all feel a little better.

Until the day Julio suddenly sat bolt upright on his bunk, the second or
third morning after we had run out of tranquilizers, and yelled:

“Booze!”

Sam had been sitting on the edge of Julio’s bunk, telling an outrageous
story of what he planned to do with Sandi once we got back to Houston.

“Booze!” Julio repeated. “I smell booze! I’m cracking up. I must be losing
my marbles. I smell
booze!”

For once in his life Sam looked apologetic, almost ashamed.

“You’re not cracking up,” he said, in as quiet a voice as I’ve ever heard
Sam use. “I was going to tell you about it tomorrow—the stuff is almost ready
for human consumption.”

You never saw three grown men so suddenly attentive.

With a self-deprecating little grin Sam explained, “I’ve been tinkering
with the propellants and other junk out in the return module. They’re not doing
us any good just sitting there. So I tinkered up a small still. Seems to be
working okay. I tasted a couple sips today. It’ll take the enamel off your
teeth, but it’s not all that bad. By tomorrow ...”

He never got any further. We did a Keystone Kops routine, rushing for our
pressure suits, jamming ourselves through the airlock and running out to the
inert, idle, cussedly useless return module.

Sam was not kidding us. He had jury-rigged an honest-to-backwoods still
inside the return module, fueling it with propellants from the modules tanks.
The basic alcohol also came from the propellant, with water from the fuel cells
and a few other ingredients that Sam had scrounged from Base Gamma’s medical
supplies.

We took turns at the still’s business end, sticking its little copper tube
into the water nipple of our helmets to sample Sam’s concoction. It was
terrible.
We loved it.

By the time we had staggered back to our barracks module, laughing and
belching, we had made up our minds to let the other three guys in Barracks B
share in Sam’s juice. But the Skipper was a problem. If we told him about it he’d
have Sam up on charges and drummed out of the agency even before the rescue mission
reached us. I figured if Old Stone Face found out he’d order the rescue mission
to leave Sam behind.

“Have no fear,” Sam told us with a giggle. “I myself will reveal my
activities to our noble Skipper.”

And before we could stop him he had tottered off toward the command module,
whistling through the tunnel in a horribly sour off-key way.

An hour went by. Then two. We could hear Skip’s voice yelling from the
command module, although we couldn’t make out the words. None of us had the
guts to go down the tunnel and try to help Sam. After a while the tumult and
the shouting died. Mickey Lee gave me a questioning glance. Silence. Ominous
silence.

“You think Skip’s killed him?” Mickey asked.

“More likely Sam’s talked the Skipper to death,” Julio replied.

Timidly we slunk down the tunnel to the command module. The three other
guys were in there with Sam and the Skipper. They were all quaffing Sam’s
rocket juice and giggling at each other.

We were shocked, but we joined right in. Six days later, when the guys
from Base Alpha landed their return module crammed with emergency food and
fresh water for us, we invited them to join the party. A week after that, when
the rescue mission from Kennedy finally showed up, we had been under the
influence for so long that we told them to go away.

I had never realized before then what a lawyer Sam was. He had convinced
the Skipper to read the medics’ report carefully, especially the part where
they recommended using tranquilizers to keep us calm and minimize our energy
consumption. Sam had then gotten the Skipper to punch up the medical definition
of alcohol’s effects on the body, out of Houston’s medical files. Sure, enough,
if you squinted the right way, you could claim that alcohol was a sort of a
tranquilizer. That was enough justification for the Skipper, and we just about
pickled ourselves in rocket juice until we got rescued.

THE CRYSTAL STATUE
glittered under the harsh rays of the unfiltered sun. The
supervisor, still sitting on the lip of the truck’s hatch, said:

“He looks beautiful. You guys did a good job. Is the epoxy set?”

“Needs another few minutes, just to be sure,” said the hoist operator,
tapping the toe of his boot against the base that they had poured on the lunar
plain.

“What happened when you got back to Houston?” asked Jade. “Didn’t they get
angry at you for being drunk?”

“Sure,” laughed the supervisor. “But what could they do? Sam’s booze
pulled us through, and we could show that we were merely following the
recommendations of the medics. Old Stone Face hushed it all up and we became
heroes, just like Sandi told us we’d be—for about a week.”

“And Sam?”

“Oh, after a while he left the agency and started his own business: S.
Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited. The rest you know about from the history disks.
Entrepreneur, showman, scoundrel, trailblazer. It’s all true. He was all those
things.”

“Did he and Sandi ever, uh ... get together?” the hoist operator asked.

“She was too smart to let him corner her. Sandi used one of the other guys
to protect her; married him, finally. Cowboy, if I remember right. They eloped
and spent their honeymoon in orbit. Zero gee and all that. Sam pretended to be
very upset by it, but by that time he was surrounded by women, all of them
taller than he was.”

The three of them walked slowly around the gleaming statue.

“Look at the rainbows it makes where the sun hits it,” said Jade. “It’s marvelous.”

“But if he was so smart,” the hoist operator said, “why’d he pick this
spot way out here for his grave? It’s kilometers from Selene City. You can’t
even see the statue from the City.”

“Imbecile
,” Jade said. “This is the place
where Base Gamma was located. Isn’t that right?”

“Nope,” the supervisor said. “Gamma was all the way over on the other side
of Nubium. It’s still there. Abandoned, but still there. Even the blasted
return module is still sitting there, dumb as ever.”

“Then why put the statue here?”

The supervisor chuckled. “Sam was a pretty shrewd guy. In his will he set
up a tourist agency that’ll guide people to the important sites on the Moon.
They’ll start at Selene and go along the surface in those big cruisers they’ve
got back at the city. Sam’s tomb is going to be a major tourist attraction, and
he wanted it to be far enough out on the mare so that

people won’t be able to
see it from Selene; they have to buy tickets and take the bus.”

Both the young people
laughed tolerantly.

“I guess he was pretty
smart, at that,” the hoist operator admitted.

“And he had a long memory,
too,” said the supervisor. “He left this tourist agency to me and the other
guys from Artemis IV, in his will. We own it. I figure it’ll keep us
comfortable for the rest of our lives.”

“Why did he do that?”

The supervisor shrugged
inside his cumbersome suit. “Why did he build that still? Sam always did what
he darned well felt like doing. And no matter what you think of him, he always
remembered his friends.”

The three of them gave
the crystal statue a final admiring glance, then clumped back to the truck and
started the hour-long drive to Selene City.

But as she drove across
the empty pitted plain, Jade thought of Sam Gunn. She could not escape the
feeling that somehow, in some unexplainable way, her future was intimately tied
to Sam Gunn’s past.

JADE’S
FIRST MEMORIES WERE NOT OF PEOPLE, BUT OF THE
bare-walled rooms and wards of the
hospital. The hushed voices. The faintly tangy smell of disinfectant. The
hospital had seemed so snug and safe when she had been a child. Even though she
had never had a room of her own, and had spent most of her childhood nights
sleeping in the main ward, the hospital was the closest thing to a home that
Jade had ever had.

She was an adult now, with a job and an apartment of her own. A single
room carved deep into the lunar rock, two levels below the hospital, four
levels below Selene City’s main plaza and the surface. Still, returning to the
hospital was like returning to the warmth of home. Almost.

“It would be a really good thing to do,” said Dr. Dinant. She was a
Belgian, and even though her native language was French, between her Walloon
accent and Jade’s fragmentary Quebecois, they found it easier to converse in
English.