The Sam Gunn Omnibus (50 page)

Yet it was Spence that I felt drawn
to. He was quietly competent, always even-tempered, extremely capable. I knew
he was married, but somehow I felt that his marriage was not all that happy for
him. Perhaps it was because I wanted to believe so. Perhaps it was because he
was a kind, fatherly, caring, truly gentle man.

And then I met Spence’s wife. Her
name was Bonnie Jo. Apparently she had once been engaged to marry Sam Gunn but
somehow had married Spence instead. The story I gathered from my fellow workers
was that her father had provided the money for Sam to start VCI. Spence had mentioned
that he and his wife were both stockholders, which made me wonder if her father
was still a financial backer of the company.

But it was not her finances that
stunned me. It was her beauty. Bonnie Jo’s hair was the color of lustrous gold,
her eyes a rich, deep, mysterious grayish green. She was almost as tall as I,
her figure slim and athletic, her clothes always impeccably stylish. Compared
to her, I felt fat and stupid. Her voice was low, melodious; not the piercing
high-pitched shrill of so many gringo women. But her eyes were hard,
calculating; her beauty was cold, like an exquisite statue or a fashionably
draped mannequin.

It quickly became clear to me that
she no longer loved Spence, if she ever had. She was cool to him, sometimes
cruelly so, as when she bought herself a sapphire ring for her own birthday and
loudly announced that Spence could not have afforded it on the salary Sam gave
him.

For his part, Spence buried himself in
his work, driving himself deeper and deeper into the technical side
of VCI, leaving
the administration to Bonnie Jo and the office staff. This brought us together
every day. I realized that I was falling in love with this handsome, kind,
suffering older man. I also realized that he saw me as nothing more than
another employee, young enough almost to be his daughter.

Spence traveled to Space Station
Alpha to personally test the program for remotely repairing satellites in GEO.
I remained in Orlando, at VCI’s mission control center. It was a tiny room, big
enough only for three monitoring stations. Windowless, it would have been
unbearably stuffy if the air conditioning had not been turned up so high that
it became unbearably frigid. The front wall was one huge display screen, which
could be broken into smaller displays if we desired.

I
sat at the right-hand
monitor, almost shivering despite the sweater I wore, ready to give whatever
assistance I could to the man who was actually controlling Spence’s mission. We
both wore earphones clamped over our heads, with pin-sized mikes at our lips.
However, the mission controller was supposed to do all the talking; I was told
to remain silent. Sam took the third seat, on the left, but it was empty most
of the time because Sam hardly sat still for two seconds at a time. He was
constantly bouncing out of his chair, pacing behind us, muttering to himself.

“This has gotta work, guys,” he mumbled.
“The whole future of the company’s riding on this mission.”

I
thought he was
being overly dramatic. Only later did I come to realize that he was not.

The big display screen before us
showed a telescope view from Alpha of our Orbital Transfer Vehicle as it
approached the satellite that needed repair. The OTV was an ugly contraption:
clusters of spherical tanks and ungainly metal struts. At its front a pair of mechanical
arms poked out stiffly. Ridiculously small rocket nozzles studded the vehicle
fore and aft and around its middle; they reminded me of the bulbous eyes of a mutant
iguana.

I
could feel Sam’s
breath on my neck as Spence’s voice said, “Shifting to onboard camera view.”

“Roger, onboard view,” said the mission
controller, sitting at my elbow.

The screen abruptly showed a
close-up view of the malfunctioning satellite. It seemed huge as it hung
serenely against the black backdrop of space.

“Starting rendezvous sequence,”
Spence’s voice said. Calmly, quietly, as unruffled as a man tying his
shoelaces.

Sam was just the opposite. “Keep
your eyes glued on the readouts,” he snapped. “And your finger on the abort
button. The
last
thing we want is a
collision out there.”

He was speaking to the mission
controller, I knew, but his words applied to me as well. I had inserted a
subroutine into the automatic rendezvous program that would fire an extra burst
of thrust at the critical moment. Not only would the OTV be destroyed, but the
communications satellite, too. VCI would be sued by the commsat’s insurer, at
the very least. All I had to do was touch one keypad on the board in front of me.
Despite the frigid air-conditioning I began to perspire.

But I kept my hands in my lap. Calmly,
methodically, Spence achieved the rendezvous and then directed the OTV’s machinery
to remove the malfunctioning power conditioner from the commsat and insert the
new one. I watched the screen, fascinated, almost hypnotized, as the robot arms
did their delicate work, directed by Spence’s fingers from more than thirty
thousand kilometers’ distance.

At last the mission controller said
into his microphone, “I copy power conditioning checkout in the green. Move off
for communications test.”

“Moving off for comm test.” The mission
plan called for the OTV to back away from the commsat while its owners in Tokyo
tested the new power conditioner to make certain it properly fed electrical
power to the satellite’s forty transponders.

The display screen showed the
commsat dwindling away. And then the great glowing blue curve of the Earth
swung into view, speckled with dazzling white clouds. I felt my breath gush
from me. It was overwhelming.

I
heard Spence
chuckle in my earphone. “I’ll bet that’s Juanita.”

“Yes,” I replied without thinking.
I glanced at the mission controller. Instead of frowning at my breaking the mission
protocol, he was grinning at me.

“Never seen the view from orbit
before, huh?” Spence asked.

“Only photographs in magazines or
videos,” I said.

“Welcome to the club,” said Spence.
“It still gets me, every time.”

“Let’s get back to work, shall we?”
Sam said. But his voice was strangely subdued.

The word came from Tokyo that the
power conditioner functioned perfectly. A seventy-million-dollar commsat had
been saved by replacing one faulty component.

Now it was Sam who gushed out a
heartfelt sigh. “Good work, guys. C’mon, I’m gonna buy you all the best dinner
in town.”

I
wanted to stay at
my monitoring station and talk with Spence. But I could not. The mission
controller cut the link to him even before I could say adios.

For some reason, Sam insisted that
Bonnie Jo join us. So he bundled the four of us into his leased Mercedes and
drove us to a Moroccan restaurant on the strip just outside Disney World.

“You’re gonna love this place,” Sam
assured us as our turbanned host guided us to a table by the dance floor, a big
round engraved brass table, barely a few centimeters off the floor. There were
no chairs, only pillows scattered around the table.

“Relax, kick your shoes off,” Sam
said as he flopped onto one of the big pillows. “The belly dancers start in a
few minutes.”

The restaurant was small, almost
intimate. Although smoking in restaurants had been outlawed for decades, the management
filtered a thin gray haze (nontoxic, the menu assured us) through the air-conditioning
system. For “atmosphere,” the menu said. The food was surprisingly good,
roasted goat and couscous and a tangy sauce that reminded me of the best
Mexican dishes. But it was clear that Sam had come to see the dancers. And that
he had seen them many times before. They all seemed to recognize him and to
spend most of their performances close enough to our table for me to smell the
heavy perfumes they used.

Our mission controller’s name was
Gene Redding. He was well into his forties, balding, portly and very competent
at his job. As he sat on the pillows gazing up at the dancers gyrating within
arm’s reach, his face turned redder and redder and his bald pate began to
glisten with perspiration. His glasses kept fogging, and he constantly removed
them to wipe them clear, squinting at the dancers all the while. From the silly
grin on his face it was obvious that he was enjoying the entertainment.

Conversation was impossible while
the dancers were on. The reedy music and thumping percussion were too loud, and
the men were too engrossed. I saw that Bonnie Jo was just as interested in the
dancers as the men were. I must admit that they were fascinating: erotic
without being vulgar. God knows what fantasies they stirred in the men’s minds.

It was on the drive back to the
office that the argument began.

“We turned the corner today,” Sam
said happily as he drove along Interstate 4. “Now the money’s gonna start
pouring in.”

“And you’ll pour it all out again,
won’t you, Sam?” said Bonnie Jo.

She was sitting in the back seat,
with me. Gene was up front with Sam.

“I’m gonna invest it in the company’s
growth,” Sam said lightly.

“You’re going to sink it into your
idiotic orbital hotel scheme.” It sounded to me as if Bonnie Jo was speaking
through gritted teeth.

“Idiotic?” Sam snapped. “Whattaya mean,
idiotic? People are gonna pay good money for vacations in zero-gee. It’s gonna
be the honeymoon capital of the world!”

“Sam, if just for once you’d think
with your brain instead of your testicles, you’d see what a damned fool scheme
this is!”

“Yeah
,
sure. They laughed at Edison, too.”

“We can’t piss away our profits on
your harebrained schemes, Sam!”

“As
long as I’m the biggest stockholder I can.”

I
noticed that we were going faster as the argument
got hotter. Sam was using neither the highway’s electronic guidance system nor
the car’s cruise control; his rising blood pressure made his foot lean harder
on the car’s accelerator.

Bonnie
Jo said, “Not if I can get a bloc to outvote you at the annual meeting.”

“You
tried that before and it didn’t get you very far, did it?”

“Spence
will vote on my side this time,” she said.

The
other cars were blurring past us, streaks of headlights on one side, streaks of
red tail lights on the other. I felt like a crew member in a relativistic
starship.

“The
hell he will,” Sam yelled back. “Spence is solidly behind me on this. So’s your
father.”

“My
father has already given me his proxy.”

Sam
was silent for several moments. We sped past a huge double trailer rig like a
bullet passing a tortoise.

“So
what,” he said at last. “Most of the employees’ll vote my way. And that
includes Spence.”

“We’ll
see,” said Bonnie Jo.

“We
sure as hell will.”

So
there were internal strains within VCI’s top management. My discovery of this
pleased me very much, mainly, I must confess, because I realized that Spence
and Bonnie Jo were truly unhappy with one another. I began to think that I might
use their differences to destroy VCI—and their marriage.

But
Sam had other ideas. So did my father. And also, so did the rebels.

THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY
afternoon Sam popped into my
cubbyhole of an office, whistling off-key and grinning at the same time. It made
him look rather like a lopsided Jack-o’-lantern.

“Got
any plans for this weekend?” he asked me as he pulled up the only other chair
in my cubicle, turned it backwards, and straddled it.

I
certainly did. I was planning to spend the weekend
at my desk, studying every scrap of data I could call up on my computer about
VCI’s finances. I already knew enough about the technical operations of the
company. Sam’s argument with Bonnie Jo had opened my eyes to the possibilities
of ruining the corporation by financial manipulations.

“I
will be working all weekend,” I said.

“You
sure will,” said Sam, crossing his arms over the back of the little plastic
chair and leaning his chin on them.