The Sam Gunn Omnibus (7 page)

Through it all I clearly heard the commander speak the little speech he
had obviously rehearsed for days: “Welcome aboard space station
Freedom!
Miss Lamour.
Mi casa es su casa.”

Big frigging deal!

What it worked out to was this: The crab apple’s name was Arlene Gold. She
was a technician for the video company. In fact, she was the entire video crew,
all by herself. “And her pallet-full of equipment. She was here to shoot background
footage. Was Gloria Lamour coming up later? She got very cagey about answering
that one.

We got to know her pretty well over the next several days. Commander
Johnson lost interest in her immediately, but although he still wouldn’t let
any of us go into the lab module, she had to come into the wardroom for meals.
She was a New Yorker, which she pronounced “Noo Yawkeh.” Testy, suspicious,
always on guard. Guess I can’t blame her, stuck several hundred miles up in
orbit with five drooling maniacs and a commander who behaved like a robot.

But god, was she a sourpuss.

Larry approached her. “You handle zero-gee very well. Most of us got sick
the first couple of days.”

“What’d ya expect,” she almost snarled, “screaming and fainting?”

A day or so later Rog Cranston worked up the courage to ask, “Have you
done much flying?”

“Whatsit to ya?” she snapped back at him.

It only took a few days of that kind of treatment for us to shun her
almost completely. When she came into the wardroom for meals we backed away and
gave her the run of the galley’s freezers and microwave. We made certain there
was an empty table for her.

Except that Sam kept trying to strike up a conversation with her. Kept
trying to make her laugh, or even smile, no matter how many times she rebuffed
him. He even started doing short jokes for her, playing the buffoon, telling
her how much he admired taller women. (She might have been half a centimeter
taller than he was on the ground; it was hard to tell in zero-gee.)

Her responses ranged from “Get lost” to “Don’t be such a jerk.”

I pulled Sam aside after a few evenings of this and asked him when he had
turned into a masochist.

Sam gave me a knowing grin. “My old pappy always told me, ‘When they hand
you a lemon, son, make lemonade.’“ “With her.”

“You see any other women up here?”

I didn’t answer, but I had to admit that Larry Minetti was starting to
look awfully good to me.

“Besides,” Sam said, his grin turning sly, “when Gloria Lamour finally
gets here, Arlene will be her guardian, won’t she?”

I got it. Get close to the sourpuss and she’ll let you get close to the
sex goddess. There was method in Sam’s madness. He seemed to spend all his
spare time trying to melt Arlene’s heart of steel. I thought he had even lost
interest in rigging the skipper’s CERV test so that it would be John J. Johnson
who got fired off the station, not Sam Gunn.

Sam practically turned himself inside out for Arlene. He became elfin, a
pixie, a leprechaun whenever she came to the galley or wardroom.

And it seemed to be working. She let him eat dinner at the same table with
her one night.

“After all,” I overheard Sam tell her, “we little people have to stick
together.”

“Don’t get ideas,” Arlene replied. But her voice had lost some of its
sharp edge. She damned near smiled at Sam.

The next morning Johnson called Sam to his command console. “You are
relieved of your normal duties for the next few days,” the skipper said. “You
will report to the lab module and assist Ms. Gold in testing her equipment.”

I shot a surprised glance at Larry, who was at his console, next to mine.
His eyebrows were rising up to his scalp. Sam just grinned and launched himself
toward the hatch. The commander smiled crookedly at his departing back.

“So what’s with you two?” I asked him a couple nights later. He had just
spent eighteen hours straight in the lab module with Arlene and her video gear.

“What two?”

“You and Arlene.”

Sam cocked his head to one side. “With us? Nothing. She needs a lot of
help with all that video gear. Damned studio sent her here by herself. They
expect her to muscle those lasers and camera rigs around. Hell, even in
zero-gee that’s a job.”

I got the picture. “So when Gloria Lamour finally shows up you’ll be
practically part of the family.”

I expected Sam to leer, or at least grin. Instead he looked kind of
puzzled. “I don’t know if she’s coming up here at all. Arlene’s pretty touchy
about the subject.”

Just how touchy we found out a couple nights later.

Larry and I were in the wardroom replaying Super Bowl XXIV on the computer
simulator. I had lost the coin flip and gotten stuck with the Broncos. We had
the sound turned way down so we wouldn’t annoy the commander, who was staying
up late, watching a video drama over in his corner:
Halloween
XXXIX.

Anyway, I had programmed an old Minnesota Vikings defense into the game,
and we had sacked Montana four times already in the first quarter. The
disgusted look on his face when he climbed up from the fourth burial was so
real you’d think we were watching an actual game instead of creating a
simulation. The crowd was going wild.

Elway was just starting to get hot, completing three straight passes, when
Arlene sailed into the wardroom, looking red in the face, really pissed off.
Sam was right behind her, talking his usual blue streak.

“So what’d I say that made you so sore? How could I hurt your feelings
talking about the special-effects computer? What’d I do, what’d I say? For
chrissakes, you’re breaking the Fifth Amendment! The accused has got a right to
be told what he did wrong. It’s in the Constitution!”

Arlene whirled in midair and gave him a look that would have scorched a
rhinoceros. “It’s not the Fifth Amendment, stupid.”

Sam shrugged so hard he propelled himself toward the ceiling. “So I’m not
a lawyer. Sue me!”

Larry and I both reached for the
hold
button on our tabletop keyboard. I
got there first. The game stopped with the football in midair and Denver’s wide
receiver on the ten-yard line behind the Forty-Niners’ free safety.

Arlene pushed herself to the galley while Sam hovered up near the ceiling,
anchoring himself there by pressing the fingertips of one hand against the
overhead panels. Commander Johnson did not stir from his corner, but I thought
his eyes flicked from Arlene to Sam and then back to his video screen.

Before Larry and I got a chance to restart our game, Arlene squirted some
hot coffee into a squeezebulb and went to the only other table in the wardroom,
sailing right past Sam’s dangling feet. The commander watched her. As she
slipped her feet into the floor restraints he turned off his video screen and
straightened up to his full height.

“Ms. Gold ...” he began to say.

She ignored Johnson and pointed up at Sam with her free hand. “You’re
hanging around with your tail wagging, waiting for Gloria Lamour to get here.”

“Ms. Gold,” the commander said, a little louder.

Sam pushed off the ceiling. “Sure. We all are.”

“Sure,” Arlene mimicked. “We all are.” She gave Larry and me a nasty
stare.

Sam stopped himself about six inches off the floor. How he did that was
always beyond me. Somehow he seemed able to break Newton’s First Law, or at
least bend it a little to make himself feel taller.

Johnson disengaged himself from his foot restraints and came out from
behind his video set. He was staring at Arlene, his own face pinched and
narrow-eyed.

“Ms. Gold,” he repeated, firmly.

Arlene ignored him. She was too busy yowling at Sam, “You’re so goddamned
transparent it’s pathetic! You think Gloria Lamour would even bother to
glance
at a little snot like you? You think if
she came up here she’d let you wipe her ass? Ha!”

“Ms. Gold, I believe you are drunk,” said our fearless skipper. The look
on his face was weird: disapproval, disgust, disappointment, and a little bit
of disbelief.

“You’re damned right I’m drunk,
mon capitain.
What th’ fuck are you gonna do about it?”

Instead of exploding like a normal skipper would, the commander surprised
us all by replying with great dignity, “I will escort you to your quarters.”

But he turned his beady-eyed gaze toward Sam.

Sam drifted slowly toward the skipper, bobbing along high enough to be
eye-to-eye with Johnson.

“Yes, s
i
r, she has been drinking. Vodka, I believe.
I tried to stop her but she wouldn’t stop,” Sam said.

The commander looked
utterly unconvinced.

“I have not touched a
drop,” Sam added. And he exhaled right into Commander Johnson’s face hard
enough to push himself backward like a punctured balloon.

Johnson blinked,
grimaced, and looked for a moment like he was going to throw up. “I will deal
with you later, Mr. Gunn,” he muttered. Then he turned to Arlene again and took
her by the arm. “This way, Ms. Gold.”

She made a little
zero-gee curtsy. “Thank you, Commander Johnson. I’m glad that there is at least
one gentleman aboard this station.” And she shot Sam a killer stare.

“Not at all,” said the
commander, patting her hand as it rested on his arm. He looked down at her in
an almost grandfatherly way. Arlene smiled up at him and allowed Commander
Johnson to tow her toward the hatch. Then he made his big mistake.

“And tell me, Ms. Gold,”
said the skipper, “just when will Gloria Lamour arrive here?”

Arlene’s face twisted
into something awful. “You too? You too! That’s all you bastards are thinking about,
isn’t it? When’s your favorite wet dream going to get here.”

The commander sputtered,
“Ms. Gold, I assure you ...”

She pulled free of his
arm, sending herself spinning across the wardroom. She grabbed a table and
yelled at all of us:

“Lemme tell you something,
lover boys. Gloria Lamour ain’t comin’ up here at all. Never! This is as good
as it gets, studs. What you see is what you got!”

The commander had to
haul her through the hatch. We could hear her yelling and raving all the way
down the connecting passageway to the lab module.

“Where’d she get the
booze?” Larry asked.

“Brought it up with her,”
said Sam. “She’s been drinking since five o’clock. Something I said ticked her
off.”

“Never mind that.” I got
straight to the real problem. “Is she serious about Gloria Lamour not coming up
here?”

Sam nodded glumly.

“Aw shit,” moaned Larry.

I felt like somebody had
shot Santa Claus.

“There isn’t any Gloria
Lamour,” Sam said, his voice so low that I thought maybe I hadn’t heard him
right.

“No Gloria Lamour?”

“Whattaya mean?”

Sam steadied himself
with a hand on the edge of our table. “Just what I said. There isn’t any such
person as Gloria Lamour.”

“That’s her
show-business name.”

“She’s not real!” Sam
snapped. “She’s a simulation. Computer graphics, just like your damned football
game.”

“But...”

“All the publicity about
her ...”

“All faked. Gloria
Lamour is the creation of a Hollywood talent agency and some bright computer
kids. It’s supposed to be a secret, but Arlene spilled it to me after she’d had
a few drinks.”

“A simulation?” Larry
looked crushed. “Computer graphics can do that? She looked so ... so
real.”

“She’s just a bunch of
algorithms, pal.” Sam seemed more sober than I had ever seen him. “Arlene’s her
‘director.’ She programs in all her moves.”

“The damned bitch,”
Larry growled. “She could’ve let us know. Instead of building up our
expectations like this.”

“It’s supposed to be a
secret,” Sam repeated.

“Yeah, but she should’ve
let us in on it. It’s not fair! It’s just not fair!”

Sam gave him a quizzical
little half-smile. “Imagine how she’s been feeling, watching the six of us—even
old Jay-Cubed—waiting here with our tongues hanging out and full erections. Not
paying any attention to her; just waiting for this dream—this computerized
doll. No wonder she got sore.”

I shook my head. The
whole thing was too weird for me.

Sam was muttering, “I tried
to tell her that I liked her, that I was interested in her for her own sake.”

“She saw through that,”
Larry said.

“Yeah ...” Sam looked
toward the hatch. Everything was quiet now. “Funny thing is, I was getting to
like her. I really was.”

“Her? The Bronx
Ball-Breaker?”

“She’s not that bad once
she lets herself relax a little.”

“She sure didn’t look
relaxed tonight,” I said.