The Sam Gunn Omnibus (6 page)

“He’s gonna kill us with overwork,” grumbled Roger Cranston, our
structural specialist.

“The way I figure it,” Sam said, “is that Jay-Cubed wants us to do all the
tasks that the next crew is supposed to do. That way the agency can cut the
next mission and save seventy million bucks or so.”

Al Dupres agreed sourly. “He works us to death and then he gets a big kiss
on the cheek from Washington.” Al was French-Canadian, the agency’s token
international representative.

Sam started muttering about Captain Bligh and the good ship
Bounty.

They were right. Johnson was so eager to look good to the agency that he
was starting to go a little whacko. Some of it was Sam’s fault, of course. But
I really think zero-gee affected the flow of blood to his brain. That, and the
news about Gloria Lamour, which affected his blood flow elsewhere.

We were six weeks into the mission. Sam had kept his nose pretty clean,
stuck to his duties as logistics officer and all the other jobs the skipper
thought up for him, kept out of Johnson’s silver-fox hair as much as he could.

Oh, he had loosened the screw-top on the commander’s coffee squeeze-bulb
one morning, so that Johnson splashed the stuff all over the command module.
Imagine ten thousand little bubbles of coffee (heavy on the cream) spattering
all over, floating and scattering like ten thousand teeny fireflies. Johnson
sputtered and cursed and glowered at Sam, his coveralls soaked from collar to
crotch.

I nearly choked, trying not to laugh. Sam put on a look of innocence that
would have made the angels sigh. He offered to chase down each and every bubble
and clean up the mess. Johnson just glowered at him while the bubbles slowly
wafted into the air vent above the command console.

Then there was the water bag in the commander’s sleep cocoon. And the
gremlin in the computer system that printed out random graffiti like:
Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.
Or:
Where is Fletcher Christian when we really need him?

Commander Johnson started muttering to himself a lot, and staring at Sam
when the little guy’s back was to him. It was an evil, red-eyed stare. Sent
chills up my spine.

Then I found out about the CERV test.

Crew Emergency Reentry Vehicle, CERV. Lifeboats for the space station. We
called them “capsules.” Suppose something goes really wrong on the station,
like we’re hit by a meteor. (More likely, we would’ve been hit by a piece of man-made
junk. There were millions of bits of debris floating around out there in those
days.) If the station’s so badly damaged we have to abandon ship, we jump into
the capsules and ride back down to Earth.

Nobody’d done it, up to then. The lifeboats had been tested with dummies
inside them, but not real live human beings. Not yet.

I was on duty at the communications console in the command module that morning
when Commander Johnson was on the horn with Houston. All of a sudden my screen
breaks up into fuzz and crackles.

“This is a scrambled transmission,” the commander said in his monotone,
from his station at the command console, three feet to my right. He plugged in
a headset and clipped the earphone on. And he
smiled
at me.

I took the hint and made my way to the galley for a squeeze of coffee, more
stunned by that smile than curious about his scrambled conversation with mission
control. When I got back Johnson was humming tunelessly to himself. The headset
was off and he was still smiling. It was a ghastly smile.

Although we put in a lot of overtime hours to finish the tasks our
commander so obligingly piled on us, Johnson himself left the command module
precisely at seven each evening, ate a solitary meal in the wardroom and then
got eight full hours of sleep. His conscience was perfectly at ease, and he
apparently had no idea whose face was on the reverse of the darts target.

As soon as he left that evening I pecked out the subroutine I had put into
the comm computer and reviewed his scrambled transmission to Houston. He may be
the skipper, but I’m the comm officer and
nothing
goes
in or out without me seeing it.

The breath gushed out of me when I read the file. No wonder the skipper
had smiled.

I called Sam and got him to meet me in the wardroom. The commander had
assigned him to getting the toilet in the unoccupied laboratory module to work,
so that the scientists who’d eventually be coming up could crap in their own
territory. In addition to all his regular duties, of course.

“A CERV test, huh,” Sam said when I told him. “We don’t have enough to do;
he’s gonna throw a lifeboat drill at us.”

“Worse than that,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Sam was hovering a few inches off the floor. He liked
to do that; made him feel taller.

Chairs are useless in zero-gee. I had my feet firmly anchored in the foot
loops set into the floor around the wardroom table. Otherwise a weightless body
would drift all over the place. Except for Sam, who somehow managed to keep
himself put.

Leaning closer toward Sam, I whispered, “It won’t be just a drill. He’s
going to pop one of the lifeboats and send it into a real reentry trajectory.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. He got
permission from Houston this morning for a full balls-out test.”

Sam grabbed the edge of
the galley table and pulled himself so close to me I could count the pale
freckles on his snub of a nose. Sudden understanding lit up those blue-green
eyes of his.

“I’ll bet I know who’s
going to be on the lifeboat that gets to take the long fall,” he whispered back
at me.

I nodded.

“That’s why he smiled at
me this evening.”

“He’s been working out
every detail in the computer,” I said, my voice as low as a guy planning a bank
heist, even though we were alone in the wardroom. “He’s going to make certain
you’re in the lab module by yourself so you’ll be the only one in the lifeboat
there. Then he’s going to pop it off.”

The thought of riding
one of those uncontrolled little capsules through the blazing heat of reentry
and then landing God knows where— maybe the middle of the ocean, maybe the middle
of the Gobi Desert—it scared the hell out of me. Strangely, Sam grinned.

“You
want
to be the first guy who tries out one of
those capsules?” I asked.

“Hell no,” he said. “But
suppose our noble liege-lord happens to make a small mistake and
he’s
the one to take the ride back home?”

I felt my jaw drop open.
“How’re you going to ...”

Sam grinned his widest. “Wouldn’t
it be poetic if we could arrange things so that ol’ Cap’n Bligh himself gets to
take the fall?”

I stared at him. “You’re
crazy.”

“That’s what they said
about Orville and Wilbur, pal.”

The next week was very
intense. Sam didn’t say another word to me about it, but I knew he was hacking
into the commander’s comm link each night and trying to ferret out every last
detail of the upcoming lifeboat drill. Commander Johnson played everything
close to the vest, though. He never let on, except that he smiled whenever he
saw Sam, the sort of smile that a homicidal maniac might give his next victim.
I even thought I heard him cackling to himself once or twice.

The other three men in
the crew began to sense the tension. Even Sam became kind of quiet, almost.

Then we got word that
Gloria Lamour was coming up to the station.

Maybe you don’t remember
her, because her career was so tragically

short. She was the
sexiest, slinkiest, most gorgeous hunk of redheaded femininity ever to grace
the video screen. A mixture of Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe and Michelle
Pfeiffer. With some Katharine Hepburn thrown in for brains and even a flash of
Bette Midler’s sass.

The skipper called us together into the command module for the news. Just
as calmly as if he was announcing a weather report from Tibet he told us:

“There will be a special shuttle mission to the station three days from
this morning. We will be visited for an unspecified length of time by a video
crew from Hollywood. Gloria Lamour, the video star, will apparently be among
them.”

It hit us like a shock wave, but Commander Johnson spelled it out just as
if we were going to get nothing more than a new supply of aspirin.

“Miss Lamour will be here to photograph the first video drama ever filmed
in space,” he told us. “She and her crew have received clearance from the
highest levels of the White House.”

“Three cheers for President Heston,” Sam piped.

Commander Johnson started to glare at him, but his expression turned into
a wintry smile. A smile that said,
You’ll get
yours, mister.
None of the rest of us moved from where we stood anchored
in our foot restraints.

The commander went on. “The video crew will be using the laboratory module
for their taping. They will use the unoccupied scientists’ privacy cubicles for
their sleeping quarters. There should be practically no interference with your
task schedules, although I expect you to extend every courtesy and assistance
to our visitors.”

The five of us grinned and nodded eagerly.

“It will be necessary to appoint a crew member to act as liaison between
the video team and ourselves,” said the commander.

Five hands shot up to volunteer so hard that all five of us would have
gone careening into the overhead if we hadn’t been anchored to the floor by the
foot restraints.

“I will take on that extra duty myself,” the skipper said, smiling enough
now to show his teeth, “so that you can continue with your work without any
extra burdens being placed on you.”

“Son of a bitch,” Sam muttered. If the commander heard him, he ignored it.

Gloria Lamour on space station Freedom! The six of us had been living in
this orbital monastery for almost two months. We were practically drooling with
anticipation. I found it hard to sleep, and when I did my dreams were so vivid
they were embarrassing. The other guys floated through their duties grinning
and joking. We started making bets about who would be first to do what. But
Sam, normally the cheerful one, turned glum. “Old Jay-Cubed is gonna hover
around her like a satellite. He’s gonna keep her in the lab module and away
from us. He won’t let any of us get close enough for an autograph, even.”

That took the starch out of us, so to speak.

The big day arrived. The orbiter
Reagan
made rendezvous with the station and docked at our main airlock. The five of us
were supposed to be going about our regular tasks. Only the commander’s
anointed liaison man—himself—went to the airlock to greet our visitors.

Yet somehow all five of us managed to be in the command module, where all
three monitor screens on the main console were focused on the airlock.

Commander Johnson stood with his back to the camera, decked out in crisp
new sky-blue coveralls, standing as straight as a man can in zero-gee.

“I’ll cut off the oxygen to his sleeping cubicle,” muttered Larry Minetti,
our life-support specialist. “I’ll fix the bastard, you watch and see.”

We ignored Larry.

“She come through the hatch yet?” Sam called. He was at my regular
station, the communications console, instead of up front with us watching the
screens.

“What’re you doing back there?” I asked him, not taking my eyes off the
screens. The hatch’s locking wheel was starting to turn.

“Checking into Cap’n Bligh’s files, what else?”

“Come on, you’re gonna miss it! The hatch is opening.”

Sam shot over to us like a stubby missile and stopped his momentum by
grabbing Larry and me by the shoulders. He stuck his head between us.

The hatch was swung all the way open by a grinning shuttle astronaut. Two
mission specialists—male—pushed a pallet loaded with equipment past the
still-erect Commander Johnson. We were all erect too, with anticipation.

A nondescript woman floated through the hatch behind the mission
specialists and the pallet. She was in gray coveralls. As short as Sam. Kind of
a long, sour face. Not sour, exactly. Sad. Unhappy. Mousy dull brown hair
plastered against her skull with a zero-gee net. Definitely not a glamorous
video star.

“Must be her assistant,” Al Dupres muttered.

“Her director.”

“Her dog.”

We stared at those screens so hard you’d think that Gloria Lamour would
have appeared just out of the energy of our five palpitating, concentrating
brain waves.

No such luck. The unbeautiful woman floated right up to Commander Johnson
and took his hand in a firm, almost manly grip.

“Hello,” she said, in a nasal Bronx accent. “Gloria Lamour is not on this
trip, so don’t get your hopes up.”

I wish I could have seen the commander’s face. But, come to think of it,
he probably didn’t blink an eye. Sam gagged and went over backwards into a
zero-gee loop. The rest of us moaned, booed, and hollered obscenities at the
screens.