The Sam Gunn Omnibus (14 page)

Jade tried to plan her travels logically, efficiently, to make the best
use of the network’s expense money. But an interview in Copernicus led to a tip
about a retired accountant living in Star City, all the way over on the
Farside. The exotic woman who claimed that Sam had jilted her at the altar knew
about a tour guide who lived by the Tranquility Base shrine, where the Apollo
11 lander sat carefully preserved under its glassteel meteor dome. And on, and
on.

Jade traveled mostly by tour bus, trundling across the pockmarked lunar
plains at a reduced fare, packed in with visitors from Earth. For the first
time she saw her home world as strangers see it: barren yet starkly beautiful,
new and rugged and wild. When they talked of their own homes on Earth they mostly
complained about the weather, or the taxes, or the crowds of people at the
spaceport. Jade looked through the bus’s big tinted windows at the lovely blue
sphere hanging above the horizon and wondered if she would find Earth crowded
and dirty and humdrum if she lived there.

Once she took a passenger rocket for the jaunt from Selene to Aristarchus,
crossing Mare Nubium and the wide Sea of Storms in less than half an hour. She
felt her insides drop away for the few minutes the rocket soared in free fall
at the top of its ballistic trajectory. The retros fired and she felt weight
returning before her stomach became unmanageable.

She piled up more voice disks, more stories about Sam Gunn. Some were
obviously fabrications, outright lies. Others seemed outrageous exaggerations
of what might have originally been true events.

“You’ve got to get some corroboration for this stuff,” Gradowsky told her
time and again. “Even when your pigeons are talking about people who’re now
dead, their families could come out of nowhere and sue the ass off us.”

Corroboration was rare. No two people seemed to remember Sam Gunn in
exactly the same way. A single incident might be retold by six different people
in six different ways. Jade had to settle for audio testaments, where her
interviewee swore on disk that the information he or she had given was true, to
the best of his or her recollection.

Clark Griffith IV, for example, had plenty to say about Sam, and he had no
qualms about telling his story—as he saw it.

(Recorded at Lunar Retirement Center,
Copernicus)

THAT’S RIGHT, I’VE KNOWN SAM GUNN LONGER THAN ANY
BODY
still living.
Except maybe for Jill Meyers.

How long? I knew the little sonofabitch when he was a NASA astronaut, back
in the days when we were first setting up a permanent base here on the Moon,
over at Alphonsus.

I was his boss, believe it or not. It was like trying to train a cat—Sam
always went his own way, fractured the rules left and right and somehow managed
to come out smelling like a rose. Most of the time. He stepped into the
doggie-doo now and then, but usually he was too fast on his feet for it to matter.
By the time we’d catch up to him he was off somewhere else, raising more hell
and giving us more trouble back in Washington.

Another thing about Sam. He’s not that much younger than I am, yet he was
off flitting around the goddamned solar system like some kid on pills. How did
he do that? And from what I hear he was still chasing women from here to Pluto
when he fell into that black hole. At his age! Well, maybe it’s because he
spent so much of his life in low-gravity environments. Keeps you young, so I hear.
That’s why I retired here to the Moon, but it doesn’t seem to be helping me much.

Digressing? I’m
digressing? I was talking about Sam. That’s what you want, isn’t it?

No, I don’t believed he’s dead. Never believed he fell into that mini-black
hole out there past Pluto, either. It’s all a fraud. A load of bullcrap. Pure
Sam Gunn, another one of his tricky little gambits.

He’ll be back, you can
bet on it. Mini-black hole my great-grandmother! It’s a scam, the whole thing;
don’t think otherwise.

When did I first meet Sam? God, let me think. It was back... never mind.
Let me tell you about Sam’s last days with NASA. I got to fire the little
pain-in-the-butt. Bounced him right out of the agency, good and proper.
Happiest day of my life.

WHY DID NASA FIRE SAM GUNN? IT’D BE
BETTER TO ASK
why we
didn’t fire the little SOB. out of a cannon and get rid of him once and for
all. Would’ve been a service to the human race.

I’m no detective, but I smelled a rat when Sam put in a formal request for
a three-month leave of absence. I just stared at my desktop screen. Sam Gunn,
going through regular channels? Something was fishy. I mean, Sam
never
did things according to regulations. Give
him a road map with a route on the interstates plotted out by AAA and he’d go
down every dirt road and crooked alley he could find, just to drive my blood
pressure up to the bursting point.

Trouble was, the sawed-off little runt was a damned good astronaut. About
as good as they came, as a flyer and ingenious troubleshooter. Like the time he
saved the lunar mission by jury-rigging a still and getting all the stranded
astronauts plastered so they’d be unconscious most of the time and use up less
oxygen.

That was typical of Sam Gunn. A hero who left the rules and regulations in
a shambles every time.

He had just come off his most notorious stunt of all, getting the first
skipper of space station Freedom to punch the abandon ship alarm and riding
back down to Earth in an emergency escape capsule with some young woman from a
movie studio. He had to be hospitalized after they landed; he claimed it was
from stress during reentry, but everybody at the Cape was wondering who was
reentering what.

Anyway, there was his formal request for a three-month leave of absence,
all filled out just as neat and precise as I would have done it myself. He was
certainly entitled to the leave. But I knew Sam. Something underhanded was
going on.

I called him into my office and asked him point-blank what he was doing. A
waste of time.

“I need a rest,” he said. Then he added, “Sir.”

Sam’s face was as round and plain as a penny, and his wiry hair was kind
of coppery color, come to think of it. Little snub of a nose with a scattering
of freckles. His teeth had enough spaces between them so that he reminded me of
a Jack-o’-lantern when he grinned.

He wasn’t grinning as he sat in front of my desk. He was all perfectly
polite earnestness, dressed in a
tie
and a
real suit, like an honest-to-Pete straight-arrow citizen. His eyes gave him away,
though: they were as crafty as ever, glittering with visions that he wanted to
keep secret from me.

“Going anyplace special?” I asked, trying to make it sound nonchalant.

Sam nonchalanted me right back. “No, not really. I just need to get away
from it all for a while.”

Yeah, sure. Like Genghis Khan just wanted to take a little pony ride.

I had no choice except to approve his request. But I had no intention of
letting the sneaky little sumbitch pull one over on me. Sam was up to
something; I knew it, and the glitter in his eyes told me that he knew I knew
it.

As I said, I’m no detective. So I hired one. Well, she really wasn’t a
detective. My niece, Ramona Perkins, was an agent with the Drug Enforcement
Agency—a damned stupid name, if you ask me. Makes it sound like the government
is
forcing
people to do drugs.

Well, anyway, Ramona wasn’t too thrilled with the idea of trailing a
furloughed astronaut for a few weeks.

“Yes, Uncle Griff, I have three weeks of vacation time coming, but I was
going to wait until December and go to Alaska.”

That was Ramona, as impractical as they come. She was pretty, in a
youngish, girl-next-door way. Nice sandy-blonde hair that she always kept
pinned up; made her look even younger than she was. And there was no doubt
about her courage. Anybody who makes a career out of posing as an innocent kid
and inf
i
ltrating drug gangs has more
guts than brains, if you ask me.

She had just gone through a pretty rough divorce. No children, thank Pete,
but her ex-husband made a big to-do about their house and cars. Seemed to me he
cared more about their damned stereo and satellite TV setup than he did about my
niece.

I made myself smile at her image in my phone screen. “Suppose I could get
you three months of detached duty, assigned to my office. Then you wouldn’t use
up any of your vacation time.”

“I don’t know....” She sort of scrunched up her perky face. I figured she
was trying to bury herself in her work and forget about her ex.

“It’d do you good to get away from everything for a while,” I said.

Ramona’s cornflower-blue eyes went curious. “What’s so important about
this one astronaut that you’d go to all this trouble?”

What could I tell her? That Sam Gunn had been driving me nuts for years
and I was certain he was up to no good? That I was afraid Sam would pull some
stunt that would reflect dishonorably on the space agency? That if and when he
got himself in trouble the agency management would inevitably dump the blame on
me, since I was in charge of his division.

I wasn’t going to have Sam botch up my record, dammit! I was too close to
retirement to let him ruin me. And don’t think the little SOB wasn’t trying to
do me dirt. He’d slit my throat and laugh about it, if I let him.

But to my sweet young niece, I merely said, “Ramona, this is a matter of
considerable importance. I wouldn’t be asking your help if it weren’t. I really
can’t tell you any more than that.”

Her image in my phone screen grew serious. “Does it involve narcotics,
then?”

I took a deep breath and nodded. “That’s a possibility.” It was a lie, of
course; Sam was as straight as they come about drugs. Wasn’t even much of a
drinker. His major vice was women.

“All right,” she said, completely businesslike. “If you can arrange the
reassignment, I’ll trail your astronaut for you.”

“That’s my girl!” I said, really happy with her. She’d always been my
favorite niece. At that point in time it never occurred to me that sending her
after Sam might put her in more danger than the entire Colombian cartel could
throw at her.

The three weeks passed. No report from her. I began to worry. Called her
supervisor at DEA and he assured me she’d been phoning him once a week, just to
tell him she was okay. I complained that she should’ve been phoning me, so a
few days later I got an e-mail message:

everything is fine but this is
going to take longer than we thought.

It took just about the
whole three damned months. It wasn’t until then that Ramona popped into my
office, sunburnt and weary-looking, and told me what Sam had been up to. This
is what she told me:

I
KN0W THIS
investigation took a
lot longer than you thought it would, Uncle Griff. It was a lot more
complicated than either one of us thought it’d be.
Nothing
that Sam Gunn does is simple!

To begin with, by the time I started after him, Sam had already gone to
Panama to set up the world’s first space tourist line.

That’s right, Uncle Griff. A tourist company. In Panama.

He called his organization Space Adventure Tours and registered it as a
corporation in Panama. All perfectly legal, but it started alarm bells ringing
in my head right from the start. I knew that Panama was a major
drug-transshipment area, and a tourist company could be a perfect front for
narcotics smuggling.

By the time I arrived in Colon, on the Caribbean side of the Panama Canal,
Sam had established himself in a set of offices he rented on the top floor of
one of the three-storey stucco commercial buildings just off the international
airport.

As I said, my first thought was that he was running a smuggling operation,
probably narcotics, and his wild-sounding company name was only a front. I spent
a week watching his office, seeing who was coming and going. Nobody but Sam
himself and a couple of young Panamanian office workers. Now and then an
elderly guy in casual vacation clothes or a silver-haired couple. Once in a
while a blue-haired matronly type would show up. Seldom the same people twice.
No sleazebags in five-hundred-dollar suits. No Uzi-toting enforcer maniacs.

I dropped in at the office myself to look the place over. It seemed normal
enough. An anteroom with a couple of tacky couches and armchairs, divided by a
chest-high counter. Water stains on the ceiling tiles. On the other side of the
counter sat the two young locals, a male and a female, both working at desktop
computers. Beyond them was a single door prominently marked
s.
gunn, president
and ceo.