The Sam Gunn Omnibus (66 page)

“Excuse
me,” I said to Jean. Her high-society airs sort of made me act like a butler in
a bad video.

I
stepped past her to ask Erik, “Is something wrong?”

“I
think so,” he said, furrowing his brow even deeper.

“What
is it?” I asked softly.

“I’m
not really sure,” said Erik.

Jean
was watching us intently. I restrained my urge to grab Erik by the throat and
pull his tongue out of his head.

“What
seems to be the trouble?” I asked, as diffidently as possible. No roughneck, I.

“Funny
smell.”

“Ah.
A strange odor. And where might this odd scent be coming from?”

“The
food freezers.”

All
this polite badinage had lulled me into a sense of unreality.

“The
food freezers? Plural?”

“Yeah.”

“The
food freezers,” I repeated, smiling and turning toward the blue-blooded Ms.
Margaux. Then it hit me.
“The food freezers!”

I
lunged past Erik to the command console. The
goddamned Christmas Tree was as green as Clancy’s Bar on St. Patrick’s Day.

“No
malfunctions indicated,” Lonz said, in that deep rich basso of his. He’s from
Kenya, and any time he gets tired of space he can take up a career in the
opera.

My
heart rate went back to normal, almost, but I decided to go down to the freezers
and check them out anyway. Jean asked if she could accompany me. There was a
strange light in her eyes, something that told me she anticipated a lesson in
arctic survival.

I
nodded and headed for the hatch.

“Isn’t
Erik coming, too?” Jean asked.

Oh-ho,
I thought. She wants the cram course in arctic survival.

“Yeah,
right. Come on Erik. Show me where you smelled this funny odor.”

The
logistics section is almost exactly on the opposite side of the wheel from the
command center. We could have gone down one of the connecting tubes and through
the hub, but I decided with Jean along it’d be better if we just walked around
the wheel and stayed at a full one gee.

It’s
always a little strange, walking along inside the wheel. Your feet and your
inner ear tell you that you’re strutting along on a flat surface, while

your
eyes see that the floor is curving up in front of you, right out of sight.
Anyway, we walked down the central corridor, past the lounge, the galley and
dining salon, the passengers’ living quarters, and the gym before we got to the
logistics section. The workshops and maintenance facilities are all on the
other half of the wheel. Our factory and processing smelter are down near the
hub, of course, in microgravity.

Erik opens the big door to the
first of the walk-in food freezers. It smells like a camel caravan had died in
there several days ago. The second one smelled worse. By the time we got to the
third one I guess our noses were suffering from sensory overload: it only
smelled as bad as rancid milk poured over horse manure.

Jean kept her oh-so-proper
attitude, but her face looked like she had stopped breathing. Erik was giving me
a sort of hangdog grin, like he expected me to blame him for the catastrophe.

I
kept my cool. I did
not puke or even gag. I just raised my clenched fists over my head and uttered
a heartfelt, “Son of a
BITCH!”

Jean couldn’t control her ladylike
instincts any further; she yanked a facial tissue from a pocket in her blouse,
pressed it to her face, and fled back toward her quarters.

I
left Erik there
and zipped back to the lounge to call the passengers together to ask for
volunteers to help with the cleanup.

It’s a very nice lounge, if I say
so myself. Plush chairs, deep carpeting, big video screens that can serve as
windows to the splendors of the universe outside. At the moment they were
showing a video of some tropical beach: gentle waves lapping in, palm trees
swaying against a clean blue sky, no people in sight. Must have been a clip
from some travel agency’s come-on. There hasn’t been a beach that clean and
empty of tourists since the first commercial flights of the hypersonic
airliners.

“Wait just a moment, Sam,” said
Lowell Hubble, our pipe-smoking astronomer. No tobacco, of course, that stuff
had been outlawed way back in
‘
08 or
‘
09. Whatever he had in the blackened,
long-stemmed pipe he always held clamped in his teeth was smokeless and
sweet-smelling. I think it was a bubblegum derivative.

“Are you telling us,” he said from
around the pipe, “that our food supply is ruined?”

“Most of the frozen food, yes,” I admitted.
“Looks that way. I need some help checking out the situation.”

“We’ll starve!” Rick Darling
yelped.

“You’ll starve last,” quipped Grace
Harcourt. Good old Grace: she could be tough or tender, and she knew when to be
which.

Darling stuck out his lower lip at
her. The others were staring at me apprehensively. They had been sitting in the
recliner chairs scattered about the room; now they were hunching forward
tensely on the front two inches of each chair. I was standing in front of the
bar, trying to look cool and competent.

“Nobody’s going to starve,” I told
them. “It’s only the frozen food that’s affected and I think we can save a good
deal of it, if we move quickly enough.”

“Isn’t all the food frozen?” asked
Bo Williams, our Pulitzer Prize author, the man who had already signed a megabuck
contract to write the book about this voyage. Bo looked more like a
professional wrestler than an author: shaved bullet head, no neck, heavy
shoulders and torso, bulging gut.

“Most of it. But we have a backup
supply of packaged food. And the reprocessors, of course.”

“Canned food.” Darling shuddered.

“Some of it’s canned. Most of it’s
been preserved by irradiation. Food’s been stored for half a century and more
that way.”

“Radiation?” Sheena Chang’s big
eyes went wider than usual. She was wearing violet contacts to go with the
color of her out
f
it, a Frederick’s of
Hollywood version of a flight suit, real tight, with lots of zippers.

“It’s all right,” Hubble said,
leaning over from his chair to pat her hand reassuringly. “Nothing to worry
about.”

“What was that about reprocessors?”
Grace asked.

This was not a subject I wanted to
discuss in any detail. “We can recycle the food, to a certain extent.”

“Recycle?” For once I was not happy
that Grace was a newshound.

“It’s been done on space stations
and long-duration missions.” I tried to pass the whole thing off. “The Mars
expedition has a recycling system.”

“The food we eat will be recycled?”
Damn Grace and her goddamned tenacity!

“Right,” I snapped. “Now, I need
...”

Rick Darling was catching on. “You
mean our
garbage
will be recycled into
fresh food?”

“Not just our garbage, sweetheart,”
Grace told him.

Jean Margaux, she who gave the
impression she did not do that sort of thing, stared at me as if I had insulted
her entire family tree.

Marjorie
Dupray said grimly, “I’ll starve first.”

Marj
wouldn’t have far to go before she starved. She was all skin and bones already.
As usual, she was wearing the crummiest clothes of the group: a shapeless
sweater of dingy gray and baggy oversized slacks decorated with fake machine
oil stains. But I knew that underneath that camouflage was a body as sleek and
responsive as a racing yacht.

“Nobody
needs to starve,” I said, getting irritated with the bunch of them. Maybe this
was the Ship of Fools, after all.

“Sure,”
Darling groused. “We can spend the next year and a half eating recycled...”

“Don’t
say it!” Jean snapped. “I can’t bear even to think of it.”

“Let’s
see how much of the frozen food we can rescue,” I urged. “Who’s gonna help us
clean up the freezers?”

Not
a hand was raised. None of my partners would volunteer to help.

“That’s
the crew’s responsibility; not ours,” said the always gracious Jean Margaux.

The
others agreed.

It
was grisly work.

We
had to go in there and see what was spoiled beyond recovery, what could be
saved if we cooked it immediately, and what was still reasonably okay. At the
same time I wanted to figure out how all three freezers could fail without any
warning lights showing up on the command console.

Erik
and I did the dirty work with the food. Will checked out the freezers’
electrical systems. He wore an oxygen mask with a little supply bottle on the
belt of his flight suit. Sensitive kid.

“Where
I grew up in South Philadelphia used to smell like this,” he grumbled through
the clear plastic mask as he entered the first of the freezers. “I never
thought I’d get a whiff of home out here in space.”

“Don’t
get homesick on me,” I told him. “Just find out what went wrong.”

About
half of the food had turned to green slime, really putrid. The stench didn’t
seem to affect Erik at all; he just cleaned away with the same obtuse smile on
his chiselled features as ever.

“Doesn’t
the smell bother you?” I asked him.

“What
smell?”

“For
chrissakes, you’re the one who reported it in the first place!”

“Oh
that. Yeah, it is rather annoying, isn’t it?”

I
just shook my head and Erik went back to work in
blond, blue-eyed innocence.

So we shoveled several tons of
spoiled food into the reprocessor, which chugged and burped and buzzed for
hours on end, turning out neat little bricks of stuff, some colored reddish
gray, others colored greenish gray. They were supposed to be synthetic meat and
synthetic vegetables. I nibbled on one each, then wished we had brought a cargo
bay filled with Worcester sauce, ketchup, soy sauce, and Texas three-alarm
salsa.

WILL BASSINIO JUST
showed me what went wrong with the
freezers.

He looked really worn out when he
reported to me this morning in the command center. Eyes red from lack of sleep,
a black ring around his nose and mouth from the oxygen mask he’d been wearing
for nearly twelve hours straight. He didn’t smell so good, either. The rotting
food had impregnated his coveralls.

“You been at it all night?” I asked
him.

He nodded wearily. “Whoever did the
job on the freezers was pretty fuckin’ smart.”

Will pulled three tiny chips from
the chest pocket of his smelly, stained coveralls. They were so small I couldn’t
make out what they were.

“Timers,” he explained before I could
ask. “Somebody spliced ‘em into the control unit of each freezer. Really neat
job; took me all fuckin’ night to find ‘em. Interrupted the current flow and
shut the freezers down, while at the same time sending an okay reading to the monitors
up here on the bridge. Pretty fuckin’ ingenious.”

“Can you fix the freezers before
all the food thaws out?” I asked.

Will gave me a sad shake of his
head. “Whoever did this job knew what he was doing. I’d have to rebuild the
whole control unit in each freezer. Take two-three weeks, maybe more.”

“We don’t have spares?”

“We were supposed to. They’re
listed in the logistics computer but the bin where they ought to be stored is
dead-empty.”

I
felt my blood
seething. Sabotage.

“Were they put into the control
units before we launched, or during the flight?” I asked.

Will gave me a shrug. “Can’t tell.”

“There aren’t any locks on the
freezer doors,” I muttered.

“Never saw anybody goin’ in there,”
he muttered back. “Except that Darling guy, once. He said he was looking for a
key lime pie.”