The Sam Gunn Omnibus (5 page)

“You mean it would be good for science,” Jade replied softly.

“Yes. Of course. For science. And for yourself, as well.”

Dr. Dinant was quite young, almost Jade’s own age. Yet she reminded Jade
of the blurry memory of her adoptive mother. She felt as if she wanted this
woman to love her, to take her to her heart as no one ever had since her mother
had gone away from her.

But what Dr. Dinant was asking was more than Jade could give.

“All you have to do is donate a few of your egg cells. It’s quite a simple
procedure. I can do it for you right here in the clinic in just a few minutes.”

Dinant’s skin was deeply tanned. She must spend hours under the sun lamps,
Jade thought. The physician was not a particularly handsome woman: her mousy
hair was clipped quite short and her clothes showed that she paid scant
attention to her appearance. But she had an air of self-assurance that Jade
sorely envied.

“Let me explain it again,” Dr. Dinant said gently. Even though the chairs
they were sitting in were close enough to touch one another, she kept a
distinct separation from the younger woman.

“I understand what you want,” Jade said. “You want to make a baby

from my eggs so that you
can test it for the bone disease I carry in my genes.”

“Osteopetrosis,” said Dr. Dinant, “is not a disease....”

“It prevents me from living on Earth.”

The doctor smiled at her kindly. “We would like to be able to see to it
that your children will not be so afflicted.”

“You can cure it?”

Dr. Dinant nodded. “We believe so. With gene therapy. We can remove the
defective gene from your egg cell and replace it with a healthy one, then
fertilize the cell, implant it in a host mother, and bring the fetus to term.”

“My—the baby won’t have the disease?”

“We believe we can eliminate the condition, yes.”

“But not for me,” Jade said.

“No, I’m afraid it must be done in the fetal or pre-fetal stage.”

“It’s too late for me. It was too late when I was born.”

“Yes, but your children needn’t be so afflicted.”

My children? Jade pulled her gaze away from the eager-eyed doctor and
glanced around the room. A bare little cell, like all the other offices in the
hospital. Like all of Selene City. Buried underground, gray and lifeless, like
living in a crypt.

“You must make a decision,” insisted the doctor.

“Why? Why now? I’ll marry some day. Why shouldn’t I have my own children myself?”

An uncomfortable expression crossed Dr. Dinant’s face. “Your job, up on
the surface. I know they keep the radiation exposure down to acceptable levels,
but...”

Jade nodded, understanding. She had heard tales about what long-term
exposure to the radiation levels up on the surface could do. Even inside the
armored space suits the radiation effects built up, over time. That’s why they
paid a bonus for working up on the surface. She wondered if that was how she
had acquired the bone disease in the first place. Was her father a worker on
the surface? Her mother?

Osteopetrosis. Marble bones, it was called. Jade remembered pictures of marble
statues from ancient Greece and Rome, arms broken off, fingers gone, noses missing.
That’s what my bones are like; too brittle for Earth’s gravity. That’s what
would happen to me.

Dr. Dinant forced a smile. “I realize that this is a difficult decision
for you to make.” “Yes.”

“But you must decide,
and soon. Otherwise ...”

Otherwise, Jade told
herself, the radiation buildup would end her chances of ever becoming a mother.

“Perhaps you should
discuss the matter with your family,” the doctor suggested.

“I have no family.”

“Your mother—the woman
who adopted you, she is still alive, is she not?”

Jade felt a block of ice
congealing around her. “I have not spoken to my mother in many years. She doesn’t
call me and I don’t call her.”

“Oh.” Dr. Dinant looked
pained, defeated. “I see.”

A long silence stretched
between the two women. Finally Dr. Dinant shifted uncomfortably in her chair
and said, “You needn’t make your decision at just this moment. Go home, think
about it. Sleep on it. Call me in a few days.”

Slowly, carefully, Jade
got to her feet. “Yes. Thank you. I’ll call you in a few days.”

“Good,” said the doctor,
without moving from her chair. She seemed relieved to see Jade leave her
office.

Jade walked blindly down
the corridors of the underground city. Men and women passed her, some nodding
or smiling a hello, most staring blankly ahead. Children were still rare in
Selene and if she saw any, she paid them no mind. It was too painful. The whole
subject tore at her heart, reminding her again of the mother that had abandoned
her, of the cold and empty life she was leading.

In those days there were
only two bars in Selene City, one frequented by management types and tourists,
the other the haunt of the workers. Jade found herself pushing through the
crowd at the incongruously named Pelican Bar.

Friends called to her;
strangers smiled at the diminutive redhead. But Jade saw and heard them only
dimly.

The Pelican’s owner
tended the bar himself, leaving the robots to handle anyone too much in a hurry
for a joke or a story. He was a paunchy middle-aged man, gleamingly bald
beneath the overhead fluorescents. He seemed to smile all the time. At least,
every time Jade had seen him his face was beaming happily.

“Hey there, Green Eyes!
Haven’t seen you since your birthday bash.”

Her coworkers had
surprised her with a party to celebrate her twentieth birthday, several weeks
earlier. Jade sat on the last stool in the farthest corner of the bar, as distant
from everyone else as she could manage.

“Want your usual?”

She hadn’t been to the Pelican—or anywhere else, for that matter— often
enough to know what her “usual” might be. But she nodded glumly.

“Comin’ right up.”

A guy in a tan leather vest and turquoise-cinched bolo tie pulled up the
stool next to Jade’s, a drink already in his hand. He smiled handsomely at her.

“Hi, Red. Haven’t I seen you up at the landing port?”

Jade shook her head. “Not me.”

“Must be someplace else. I’m new here, just arrived last week for a year’s
contract.”

Jade said nothing. The newcomer tried a few more ploys, but when they
failed to get a response from her he shrugged and moved away.

The bartender returned with a tall frosted glass filled with a dark
bubbling liquid and tinkling with real ice cubes.

“Here you go! Genuine Coca-Cola!”

Jade said, “Thanks,” as she took the cold sweating glass in her hand.

“You’re never gonna win the Miss Popularity contest if you keep givin’
guys the cold shoulder, y’know.”

“I’m not interested in any contests.”

The bartender shrugged. “H’m, yeah, well maybe. But there’s somebody over
there—” he jabbed a thumb back toward the crowd at the other end of the bar,”—that
you oughtta meet.”

“Why?”

“You were askin’ about Sam Gunn, weren’t you? Zach Bonner said you were.”

Her supervisor. “Is Zach here?” she asked..

“Naw, too early for him. But this guy here now, he was a buddy of Sam’s,
back in the early days.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. You’ll see.”

The bartender waddled away, toward the crowd. When he came back, Jade saw
that a compactly built gray-haired man was coming down the other side of the
bar toward her, holding a pilsner glass half filled with beer in his left hand.

“Jade, meet Felix Sanchez. Felix, this is Jade. I dunno what her last name
is ‘cause she never told me.”

Sanchez was a round-faced Latino with a thick dark mustache. He smiled at
Jade and extended his hand. She let him take hers, and for a wild moment she
thought he was going to bring it to his lips. But he merely held it for several
seconds. His hand felt warm. It engulfed her own.

“Such beautiful eyes,” Sanchez said, his voice so low that she had to
strain to hear it over the buzz of the crowd. “No wonder you are called Jade.”

She felt herself smiling back at him. Sanchez must have been more than
fifty years old, she guessed. But he seemed to be in good athletic shape
beneath his casual pullover and slacks.

“You knew Sam Gunn?” Jade asked.

“Knew him? I was nearly killed by him!” And Sanchez laughed heartily while
the bartender gave up all pretense of working and planted both his elbows on
the plastic surface of his bar.

EVERYBODY
BLAMED SAM FOR WHAT HAPPENED-SANCHEZ
SAID—but if you ask me it never
would’ve happened if the skipper hadn’t gone a little crazy.

Space station Freedom was a purely government project, ten years behind
schedule and a billion bucks or so over budget. Nothing unusual about that. The
agency’s best team of astronauts and mission specialists were picked to be the
first crew. Nothing unusual about that, either.

What was weird was that somehow Sam Gunn was included in that first crew.
And John J. Johnson was named commander. See, Sam and Commander Johnson got
along like hydrazine and nitric acid—hypergolic. Put them in contact and they
explode.

You’ve got to see the picture. John J. Johnson was a little over six feet
tall, lean as a contrail, and the straightest straight-arrow in an agency full
of stiff old graybeards. He had the distinguished white hair and the elegant
good looks of an airline pilot in a TV commercial.

But inside that handsome head was a brain that had a nasty streak in it. “Jay-Cubed,”
as we called him, always went by the rule book, even when it hurt. Especially
when it hurt, if you ask me.

Until the day we learned that Gloria Lamour was coming to space station
Freedom. That changed everything, of course.

Sam, you know, was the opposite of the commander in every way possible.
Sam was short and stubby where Johnson was ta
l
l
and rangy. Hair like rusty Brillo. Funny color eyes; I could never tell if they
were blue or green. Sam was gregarious, noisy, crackling with nervous energy;
Johnson was calm, reserved, detached. Sam wanted to be everybody’s pal; Johnson
wanted respect, admiration, but most of all he wanted obedience.

Sam was definitely not handsome. His round face was bright as a penny, and
sometimes he sort of looked like Huckleberry Finn or maybe even that old-time
child star Mickey Rooney. But handsome he was not. Still, Sam had a way with
women. I know this is true because he would tell me about it all the time. Me,
and anybody else who would be within earshot. Also, I saw him in action, back
at the Cape and during our training sessions in Houston. The little guy could
be charming and downright courtly when he wanted to be.

Ninety days on a space station with Sam and Commander Johnson. It was sort
of like a shakedown cruise; our job was to make sure all the station’s systems
were working as they ought to. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. The station wasn’t
big enough to hide in.

There were only six of us on that first mission, but we kept getting in
each other’s way—and on each other’s nerves. It was like a ninety-day jail
sentence. We couldn’t get out. We had nothing to do but work. There were no
women. I think we would’ve all gone batty if it weren’t for Sam. He was our
one-man entertainment committee.

He was full of jokes, full of fun. He organized the scavenger hunt that
kept us busy every night for two solid weeks trying to find the odd bits of
junk that he had hidden away in empty oxygen cylinders, behind sleep cocoons,
even floating up on the ceiling of the station’s one and only working head. He
set up the darts tournament, where the “darts” were really spitballs made of
wadded Velcro and the reverse side of the improvised target was a blow-up photo
of Commander Johnson.

Sam was a beehive of energy. He kept us laughing. All except the
commander, who had never smiled in his life, so far as any of us knew.

And it was all in zero-gee. Or almost. So close it didn’t make any real
difference. The scientists called it microgravity. We called it weightlessness,
zero-gee, whatever. We floated. Everything floated if it wasn’t nailed down.
Sam loved zero-gee. Johnson always looked like he was about to puke.

Johnson ruled with an aluminum fist. No matter how many tasks mission
control loaded on us, Johnson never argued with them. He pushed us to do
everything those clowns on the ground could think of, and to do it on time and
according to regulations. No shortcuts, no flimflams. Naturally, the more we
accomplished the more mission control thought up for us to do. Worse, Johnson
asked
mission control for more tasks. He
volunteered
for more jobs for us to do. We were
working, working, working all the time, every day, without a break.