The Sam Gunn Omnibus (32 page)

Sam raised the money, just barely.
He got most of it from a banker in Salt Lake City who had a daughter that
needed marrying. And did
that
cause trouble later on!
Let me tell you.

But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

We rented a dinky office on the
second floor of a shopping mall, over a women’s swimwear shop. Sam spent more
time downstairs than he did in the office. At least, when the stores were open.
Nights he worked with me writing our proposal. He seemed to work better after
the sun went down. Me, I worked night and day. Writing a proposal was not easy
for me.

Sam went out and hired a wagonload
of big-time consultants from academia and industry, guys with fancy degrees and
lists of publications longer than a gorilla’s arm.

“Gee, Sam, how can we afford all
these fancy pedigrees?” I asked him.

He just grinned. “All we need ‘em
for is to put their names on our
let
terhead and their
resumes in our proposal. That doesn’t cost a damned thing. They only get paid when
we ask them to consult with us, and we don’t have to ask ‘em a thing once we
win the contract.”

That sounded a little shady to me,
but Sam insisted our proposal needed some class and I had to agree with him
there. Our only real employees were two bright kids who were still students at
Texas A&M, and four local technicians who were part-time until we got the
government contract. We leased or borrowed every piece of office equipment.
Most of the software our Texas kids invented for us or pirated from elsewhere.
We really needed that impressive list of consultants.

Those two youngsters from Texas had
come up with a great idea for removing debris from orbit. At least, it looked
like a great idea to me. On paper. I knew enough engineering to get by, but
these kids were really sharp.

“How’d you find them?” I asked Sam.

“They wrote a paper about their
idea,” he said. “Published it in an aerospace journal. Their professor put his
name on
it,
just like they all do,
but I found those two kids who did the real work and put ‘em on the payroll.”

I
was impressed. I had
never realized that Sam kept up with the technical journals.

Well, we finished writing the
proposal and e-mailed it up to Washington just under the deadline. You know how
the government works: you could have the greatest invention since canned soup
but they won’t look at it if it isn’t in their hands by “close-of-business” on
the day they specify. Thank god for the Internet. We just barely made it.

Then we waited. For weeks. Months.

I
got nervous as
hell. Sam was as cool as liquid hydrogen. “Relax, Mutt,” he told me a thousand
times during those months. “It’s in the bag.” And he would smile a crooked
little smile.

So there I sat, behind a rented
desk in a dinky office, while the days ticked by and our money ran out. I was
president of a company that was so close to bankruptcy I was starting to think
about moonlighting as a spare pilot for Federal Express.

Then we got the letter from
Washington. Very official, with a big seal on it and everything.

We were invited to send a
representative to a meeting in Washington to defend our proposal against a
panel of government experts. The letter said that there were four proposals
being considered. The four companies were Rockledge International, Lockwood
Industries, Texas Aerospace, and VCI—us.

“Holy Christmas!” I said when I read
the letter. “We’re never going to get a contract. Look at who the competition
is: three of the biggest aerospace corporations in the world!”

Sam made like a Buddha. He folded
his hands over his little belly and smiled enigmatically.

“Don’t worry about
it,
Mutt,” he said for the thousand-and-first time. “It’s in the bag. If there’s
any real problem, I’ve got four magic words that will take care of everything.”

“What did you say?”

“Four magic words,” Sam repeated.

I
did not share his
confidence. In fact, I thought he had gone a little nutty under the pressure.

I
was nervous as a
kid on his first solo as I flew to Washington on the appointed day. I had spent
every day and night since we’d received that letter cramming every bit of
technical and financial data into my thick skull. We had even flown over to
College Station for a week, where our two bright Texas A&M youngsters
stuffed all their info into me directly.

I
was surprised to
see that one of Sam
’
s two young
geniuses was female. Sort of round and chubby, but she had huge dark soulful
Mediterranean eyes that followed Sam wherever he moved like twin radar dishes
locked onto a target. I figured that maybe Sam had met her
before
he had read their paper in that journal.

Anyway, there I was, stepping into
an office in some big government building in Washington, my head bursting with
facts and figures. As offices go, it wasn’t much bigger or better furnished
than our own little place in Florida. Government-issue desk, table and chairs.
Metal bookcases on one side. Faded pastel walls, hard to tell what color they
were supposed to be originally. Everything looked kind of shabby.

I
was the last one
to arrive. Representatives of our three competitors were already sitting
side-by-side on one end of the long table that took up most of the room. They
sure looked well-off, knowledgeable, slick and powerful. I felt like an
intruder, an outsider, well beyond my depth.

But Sam had given me those four magic
words of his to use in an emergency, and I whispered them to myself as I took
the last chair, at the foot of the table.

Sitting at the head of the table
was a guy from the agency I had met once, when he had visited the Cape for the
official ceremonies when we opened space station Freedom. That had been years
ago, and I hadn’t seen him anywhere around the working parts of the agency
since then. On his right-hand side sat three more government types: old suits,
gray hair or none at all, kind of pasty faces from being behind desks all their
lives.

The three industry reps were
dressed in much better suits: not flashy, but obviously expensive. Two of them
were so young their hair was still all dark. The third, from Rockledge
International, was more my own age. His hair was kind of salt-and-pepper;
looked like he spent plenty on haircuts, too. And tanning parlors. He was the
only one who smiled at me as I sat down and introduced myself. I didn’t know it
right at that moment, but it was the kind of smile a shark gives.

“We’re glad you could make
it,
Mr. Johansen,” said the guy at the head of the table. The others sort of
snickered.

“My flight was delayed in Atlanta,”
I mumbled. In those days, when you flew out of Florida, even if you died and
were sent to hell you had to go by way of Atlanta.

He introduced himself as Edgar
Zane. Thin hair, thin lips, thin nose, and thin wire-frames on his bifocals.
But his face looked round and bloated, too big for his features. Made him look
like a cartoon character, almost. From what I could see of his belly behind the
table, that was bloated too.

Zane introduced everybody else
around the table. The government types were from the Department of
Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of
Commerce.

Commerce? Was this bald,
sallow-faced, cranky-looking old scarecrow Sam’s pigeon in the Commerce
Department? He sure didn’t give me any reason to think so. He squinted at me
like an undertaker taking measurements.

“Before we begin,” said the
Rockledge guy, Pierre D’Argent, “I’d like to ask Mr. Johansen for a clarification.”

Zane peered at him through the top
half of his bifocals. “You’re here to answer questions, Mr. D’Argent, not ask
them.”

He beamed a smile toward the head
of the table. “Yes, I understand that. But I believe we all have the right to
know exactly who we are dealing with here.”

He turned his handsome face to me. “VCI
is a new firm in this field. I think we’d all like to know a bit more about
your company’s financial backing and management structure.”

I
knew right away
what he wanted. He wanted me to tell them all that Sam Gunn was the man behind
VCI.

I
gave him the
standard spiel that Sam had drummed into me, like a POW reciting name, rank,
and serial number: “VCI is a privately held company. I am the president and
Chief Executive Officer. While our staff is small and elite we have an
extensive list of consultants who can provide world-class technical, management
and financial expertise on every aspect of our program. VCI’s principal
financial backer is the First Federal Bank of Utah. Our accounting firm is Robb
and Steele, of Merritt Island, Florida.”

D’Argent smiled at me with all his
teeth. “And what role does Mr. Gunn play in VCI?”

“Who?” My voice squeaked a little.

“Sam Gunn,” D’Argent said.

I
looked up the
table. Zane was scowling at me through his wire-frame glasses. He knew Sam,
that was for sure.

Never lie to the government, Sam
had instructed me, when there’s a good chance that they’ll catch you at it.

“Mr. Gunn is the founder of VCI,” I
said.

“His name doesn’t appear in your
proposal,” Zane practically snarled.

“Yes it does, sir,” I corrected
him. “On page four hundred and sixty-three
.
”
That was back in the boilerplate section where we were required to put in a
history of the company. Ordinarily nobody read the boilerplate, but now I knew
that Zane and his three harpies would go over it with electron microscopes. How
Sam managed to produce forty-seven pages of history about a company that wasn’t
even forty-seven weeks old was beyond me.

Zane gave D’Argent a glance, then
asked me, “Is Sam Gunn going to be actively involved in the project—if you
should be fortunate enough to win one of the contracts?”

“We have no intention to actively
involve him in the day-to-day work,” I said. It was pretty close to the truth.

Zane looked as if he didn’t believe
a word of it. I figured we had been shot down before we even got off the
runway. D’Argent gave me another one of his shark smiles, looking pleased with
himself.

But the bald scarecrow from
Commerce cleared his throat and rasped, “Are we here to discuss the competing
proposals or to conduct a witch hunt? Sounds to me like a cult of personality.”

Zane huffed through his pinched
nose and started the official proceedings.

The one thing we had going for us
was our technical approach. I quickly saw that all three of our giant corporate
competitors had submitted pretty much the same proposal: the old Nerf ball
idea. You know, launch a balloon and blow it up to full size once it’s in
orbit. The balloon’s surface is sort of semi-sticky. As it runs into debris in
space it bounces them into orbits that spin down into the atmosphere, where the
junk burns up. The idea had been around for decades. It was simple and would
probably work—except for sizable chunks of debris, like discarded pieces of
rocket stages or hand tools that got away.

It also required a lot of launches,
because the Nerf ball itself got slowed down enough after a few orbits to come
spiraling back into the atmosphere. The Nerfs could be launched with small
unmanned boosters pretty cheaply, or ride piggyback on bigger boosters. They
could even be tucked into spare corners of shuttle payload bays and injected
into orbit by the shuttle crews.

Our proposal was different. See, the junk hanging around up there picked
up an electrical charge after a couple of orbits. From electrons in the solar
wind, if I remember correctly. Sam’s idea was to set up a big electromagnetic
bumper on the front end of space station Freedom and deflect the debris with
it, neatly clearing out the orbit that the station was flying through. Kind of
like the cowcatcher on the front of an old locomotive, only instead of being made
of steel our bumper was an invisible magnetic field that stretched hundreds of
meters into space out in front of the station.

“The equipment we need is small enough to fit into a shuttle’s student
experiment canister,” I explained. “The bumper itself is nothing more than an
extended magnetic field, generated by a superconducting coil that would be mounted
on the forward-facing side of the space station.”