The Sam Gunn Omnibus (55 page)

“Second!” cried Bonnie Jo.

Spence stared at the back wall of
the meeting room as he said automatically, “Movement made and seconded.
Discussion?”

I
had expected Sam
to jump up on the table and do a war dance. Or at least to rant and scream and
argue until we all dropped from exhaustion. Instead, he glanced at his
wristwatch and said:

“Let’s postpone the discussion for
a bit. There’s a speech coming up at the UN that we should all take a look at.”

Spence agreed to Sam’s suggestion
so quickly that I knew the two of them had talked it over beforehand. Bonnie Jo
looked surprised, nettled, but her father laid a hand on her arm and she
refrained from objecting.

The UN speech was by my father, of
course, although no one in the room knew that I was the daughter of Ecuador’s
presidente.
I
felt a surge of pride when his handsome face appeared on the giant TV screens.
If only his new hair had matched his face better! He wore a civilian’s business
suit of dark blue, with the red sash of his office slanting across his chest.
He looked bigger than normal, his chest broader and deeper. I realized he must
have been wearing a bulletproof vest. Was he worried that the rebels would try
to assassinate him? Or merely wary of New York?

My father’s speech was marvelous,
although I had to listen to the English translation instead of hearing his
dramatic, flowery Spanish. Still, it was dramatic enough. My father explained
the legal origins of our claim to the equatorial orbit, the injustice of the
rich corporations who refused to share their wealth with the orbit’s rightful
owners, and the complicity of the United Nations for allowing this terrible
situation to persist.

I
sat in my hard
little folding chair and basked in the glow of my father’s unassailable logic
and undeterrable drive.

“Is there no one to help us?” he
asked rhetorically, raising his hands in supplication. “Cannot all the
apparatus of international law come to the aid of the Twelve nations who have
seen their territory invaded and usurped? Will no one support the Declaration
of Quito?”

Suddenly his face hardened. His
hands balled into fists. “Very well, then! The Twelve Equatorial Nations will
defend their sacred territory by themselves, if necessary. I serve notice, on
behalf of the Twelve Equatorial Nations, that the equatorial orbit belongs to
us,
and to no other nation, corporation, or entity. We are preparing to send an
international team of astronauts to establish permanent residence in the
equatorial orbit. Once there, they will dismantle or otherwise destroy the
satellites that the invaders have placed in our territory.”

The audience in the UN chamber
gasped. So did we, in the hotel’s meeting room. I felt a thrill of hot blood
race through me.

“We will defend our territory
against the aggressors who have invaded it,” my father declared. “If this means
war, then so be it. To do anything less would be to bow to the forces of
imperialism!”

The people around me stared at one
another, stunned into silence.

All except Sam, who yelled, “Jesus
H. Christ on a motorcycle!”

As the TV picture winked off, one
of the stockholders shouted, “What the hell are we going to do about
that?”

All sense of order in our meeting
room dissolved. Everyone seemed to talk at once. Spence rapped his knuckles on
the table but no one paid any attention to him. The argument about Sam’s
orbital hotel was forgotten. My father had turned our meeting into chaos.

Until Sam jumped up on the table
and waved his arms excitedly. “Shut the hell up and listen to me!” he bellowed.

The room silenced. All eyes turned
to the pudgy rust-haired elf standing on the head table.

“We’re gonna get there before they
do,” Sam told us. “We’re gonna put a person up there in GEO before they can and
we’re gonna claim the orbit for ourselves. They wanna play legal games, .we can
play ‘em too. Faster and better!”

Spence objected, “Sam, nobody can
stay in GEO for long. It’s in the middle of the outer Van Allen belt, for gosh
sakes.”

“Pull a couple of OTVs together,
fill the extra propellant tanks with water. That’ll provide enough shielding
for a week or so.”

“How do you know? We’ve got to do
some calculations, check with the experts—”

“No time for that,” Sam snapped. “We’re
in a race, a land rush, we gotta go
now.
Do the calculations
afterward. Right now the vital thing is to get somebody parked up there in GEO
before those greedy sonsofbitches get there!”

“But who would be nuts enough to—”

“I’ll do it,” Sam said, as if he
had made up his mind even before Spence asked the question. “Let’s get busy!”

That broke up our meeting, of
course. Spence officially called for an adjournment until a time to be decided.
Everyone raced for their cars and drove pell-mell back to the office. Except
for Sam and Spence, who jumped into Spence’s convertible Mustang and headed off
toward Cape Canaveral.

DESPITE MY FEELINGS
of patriotism and love of my
father, I felt thrilled. It was tremendously exciting to dash into the mission
control center and begin preparations for launching Sam to GEO. Spence went
with
him as far as Space Station Alpha. Together they
hopped up to the station where our OTVs were garaged on the next available
Delta Clipper, scarcely thirty-six hours after my father’s speech.

Even Bonnie Jo caught the wave of
enthusiasm. She came into the control center as Sam and Spence were preparing
the two
OTVs
for Sam’s mission. It was night; I was running the board, giving Gene a rest
after he had put in twelve hours straight. Bonnie Jo slid into the chair beside
me and asked me to connect her with Sam up at Alpha.

“We’ve been monitoring the
Brazilian launch facility,” she said, once Sam’s round, freckled face appeared
on the screen. “They’re counting down a manned launch. They claim it’s just a
scientific research team going up to the Novo Brasil space station. But get
this Sam: the Brazilians are also counting down an unmanned launch.”

“With what payload?”

“An old storm cellar that the U.S.
government auctioned off five years ago.”

“A what?”

“A shielded habitat module, like
the ones the scientists used on their first Mars missions to protect themselves
from solar flare radiation,” Bonnie Jo said.

Sam looked tired and grim. “They
ain’t going to Mars.”

“According to the flight plan they
filed, they’re merely going to the Brazilian space station.”

“My ass. They’re heading for GEO.”

“Can you get there first?” Bonnie
Jo asked.

He nodded. “Got the second OTV’s
tanks filled with water. Rockledge bastards charged us two arms and a leg for
it, but the tanks are filled. Spence is out on EVA now, rigging an extra
propulsion unit to the tanker.”

“Where did you get an extra propulsion
unit?”

“Cannibalized from a third OTV.”

Bonnie Jo tried not to, but she
frowned. “That’s three OTVs used for this mission. We only have two left for
our regular work.”

“There
won’t be any regular work if we don’t get to GEO and establish our claim.”

Her frown melted into a tight
little smile. “I think I can help you there.”

“How?”

“The Brazilians haven’t filed an
official flight plan with the LAA safety board.”

The International Astronautical
Administration had legal authority over all flights in space.

“Hell, neither have we,” said Sam.

“Yes, but you didn’t have that
fatheaded Ecuadorian spouting off about sending a team to occupy GEO.”

Fatheaded Ecuadorian! I almost
slapped her. But I held on to my soaring temper. There was much to be learned
from her, and I was a spy, after all.

Sam was muttering, “I don’t see
what—”

With a smug, self-satisfied smile,
Bonnie Jo explained, “I just asked my uncle, the Senator from Utah, to request
that our space agency people ask the
I
AA
if they’ve inspected the Brazilian spacecraft to see if it’s properly fitted
out for long-term exposure to high radiation levels.”

Sam grinned back at her. “You’re
setting the lawyers on them!”

“The safety experts,” corrected
Bonnie Jo.

“Son of a bitch. That’s great!”

Bonnie Jo’s smile shrank. “But you’d
better get your butt off the space station and on your way to GEO before the
IAA figures out what you’re up to.”

“We’ll be ready to go in two shakes
of a sperm cell’s tail,” Sam replied happily.

If Bonnie Jo was worried about Sam’s
safety up there in the Van Allen radiation, she gave no indication of it. I must
confess that I felt a twinge of relief that it was Sam who was risking himself,
not Spence. But still I smoldered at Bonnie Jo’s insulting words about my
father.

And suddenly I realized that I had
to tell Papa about her scheme to delay the Brazilian mission. But how? I was
stuck here in the mission control center until eight
am.

I
could risk a
telephone call, I thought. Later, in the dead of night, when there was little chance
of anyone else hanging around.

The hours dragged by slowly. At midnight
Queveda and another technician were in the center with me, helping Sam and
Spence to check out their jury-rigged
OTV
prior to launch. By one-thirty they were almost
ready to start the countdown.

I
found myself
holding my breath as I watched Sam and Spence go through the final inspection
of the OTV, both of them encased in bulky space suits as they floated around
the ungainly spacecraft, checking every strut and tank and electrical
connection. Their suits had once been white, I suppose, but long use had turned
them both dingy gray. Over his years in space Sam had brightened his with
decorative patches and pins, but they too were frayed and faded. I could barely
read the patch just above his name stencil. It said,
The meek shall inherit the Earth. The rest of us are
going to the stars.

“Hey Esmeralda,” Sam called to me, “why
don’t you come up here with me? It’s gonna be awful lonesome up there all by myself.”

“Pay attention to your inspection,”
I told him.

But Sam was undeterred, of course. “We
could practice different positions for my zero-gee hotel.”

“Never in a million years,” I said.

He grinned and said, “I’ll wait.”

At last the inspection was finished
and we began the final countdown. I cleared my display screen of the TV
transmission from Alpha and set up the OTV’s interior readouts. For the next
half-hour I concentrated every molecule of my attention on the countdown. A man
could be killed by the slightest mistake now.

A part of my mind was saying, so
what if Sam is killed? That would stop his mission to GEO and give your father
the chance he needs to triumph. But I told myself that my father would not
condone murder or even a political assassination. He would triumph and keep his
hands clean. And mine. It was one thing to tinker with a computer program so
that an unmanned spacecraft would be destroyed. I was not a murderer and
neither was my father. Or so I told myself.

“Thirty seconds,” said Ricardo
Queveda, sitting on my left.

Sam had become very quiet. Was he
nervous? I wondered. I certainly was. My hands were sweaty as I stared at the
readouts on my display screen.

“Fifteen seconds.”

Everything seemed right. All
systems functioning normally. All the readouts on my screen in the green.

“Separation,” the tech announced.

The launch was not dramatic. I cleared
my display screen for a moment and switched to a view from one of the space
stations outside cameras and saw Sam’s ungainly conglomeration move away,
without so much as a puff of smoke, and dwindle into the star-filled darkness.