The Sam Gunn Omnibus (36 page)

So I sat at his little
table. With my back to the wall. Just the two of us, although there were a few
regulars up at the bar watching a baseball game from Japan.

I ordered a Bass. D’Argent
already had a tall frosted glass of something in front of him, decorated with
enough fruit slices to start a plantation. And a little paper umbrella.

“Your friend Gunn sent
our legal department into quite a spin,” he said, smiling with his teeth.

“Sam’s a very emotional
guy,” I said as the waitress brought my ale. She was a cute little thing, in a
low-cut black outfit with a teeny-tiny skirt.

“Yes, he is indeed.” D’Argent
let out a sigh. “I’m afraid Mr. Gunn has no clear idea of where his own best
interests lie.”

I took a sip of ale
instead of trying to answer.

“Now you, Mr. Johansen,” he went on, “you look like someone who
understands where your best interests lie.”

All I could think of to say was, “Really?”

“Really.” D’Argent leaned back in his chair, looking like a cool million
on the hoof: elegant from his slicked-back salt-and-pepper hair to the tips of
his Gucci suede loafers.

“I must confess that I thought your technical proposal was little short of
daring. Much better than the job my own technical people did
.
They were far too conservative. Far too.”

Was he pumping me for information? I mumbled something noncommittal and
let him go on talking.

“In fact,” he said, smiling at me over his fruit salad, “I think your
technical approach is brilliant. Breathtaking.”

The smile was very slick. He was insurance-salesman handsome. Trim gray mustache
neatly clipped; expensive silk suit, dark gray. I couldn’t tell the color of
his eyes, the lighting in the lounge was too dim, but I expect they were gray
too.

I shrugged off his compliment. But he persisted. “A magnetic deflector
system actually mounted on the space station. Very daring. Very original.”

“It was Sam’s idea,” I said, trying to needle him.

It didn’t faze him a bit. “It was actually the idea of Professor Luke
Steckler, of Texas A&M. Our people saw his paper in the technical
literature, but they didn’t have the guts to use the idea. You did.”

“Sam did.”

He hiked his eyebrows a bit. They were gray, too. “You’re much too modest,
Spence. You don’t mind if I call you Spence, do you?”

I did mind. I suddenly felt like I was in the grip of a very slick
used-car salesman. But I shook my head and hid behind my mug of ale.

D’Argent said, “Spence, I know that my technical people at Rockledge would
love to have you join their team. They need some daring, someone willing to
take chances.”

I guess my eyebrows went up, too.

Leaning forward over the tiny table, D’Argent added in a whisper, “And we’ll
pay you twice what Gunn is paying.”

I blinked. Twice.

The lounge was slowly filling up with “happy hour” customers: mostly
engineers from the base and sales people trying to sell them stuff. They all
talked low, almost in whispers. At least, until they got a couple of drinks

into them. Then the
noise volume went up and some of the wilder ones even would laugh now and then.
But while I was sitting there trying to digest D’Argent’s offer without
spitting beer in his face, I could still hear the soft-rock music coming
through the ceiling speakers, something old and sad by the Carpenters.

“I would like you to talk with a few of my technical people, Spence. Would
you be willing to do that?”

Twice my VCI salary. And that was just for openers. It was obvious he’d be
willing to go higher. Maybe a lot higher. I’d been living on Happy Hour hors d’oeuvres
and junk food. I was four months behind on the rent for my seedy dump of an
apartment—which was sitting empty, because of Bonnie Jo.

But I shook my head. “I’m happy with VCI.”
Happy
wasn’t exactly the right word, but I couldn’t leave Sam in the
lurch. On the other hand, this might be the best way to make a break with
Bonnie Jo.

Turning slightly in his chair, D’Argent sort of nodded toward a trio of
guys in suits sitting a few tables away from us.

“I’ve taken the liberty of asking a few of my technical people to come
here to meet you. Would you be willing to talk with them, Spence? Just for a
few minutes.”

Son of a bitch! It was no accident that we bumped into each other. It was
a planned ambush.

“I think, with your help, we can adapt the magnetic bumper concept easily
enough,” he was saying, silky-smooth. “We’d even pay you a sizable bonus for
joining Rockledge: say, a year’s salary.”

They wanted to steal Sam’s idea and squeeze him out of the picture. And
they thought I’d help them do it. For money.

I got to my feet. “Mr. D’Argent, Rockledge doesn’t have enough money in
its whole damned corporate treasury to buy me away from VCI.”

D’Argent shrugged, very European-like, and made a disappointed sigh. “Very
well, although your future would be much more secure with Rockledge than with a
con-man such as Mr. Gunn.”

Through gritted teeth I said, “I’ll take my chances with Sam.” And I stalked
out of the lounge, leaving him sitting there.

“THAT WAS A
pretty noble thing to do,” Jade said.

They were more than halfway through their dinners. She had ordered trout
from the habitat’s aquaculture tanks. Johansen was eating braised rabbit. Jade
had to remind herself that rabbit was bred for meat here in

the space habitat, just
as it was on Selene. But she had never eaten rabbit at home and she could not
bring herself to order it here.

“Nothing noble about it,” he said easily. “It made me feel kind of slimy
just to be sitting at the same table with D’Argent. Working with
the ...
gentleman,
well, I just couldn’t do it.”

“Even though you were trying to get away from Bonnie Jo.”

He shook his head slightly, as if disappointed with himself. “That was the
really tough part. I wanted to get away from her and I wanted to be with her,
both at the same time.”

“So what did you do?”

He grinned. “I got away. I went up to space station Freedom.”

SAM HAD SERVED
aboard Freedom when he’d been in the agency—Johansen explained.
He was definitely persona non grata there, as far as the bureaucrats in
Washington and the Cape were concerned, even though all the working stiffs—the
astronauts and mission specialists—they all asked me how he was and when he
would be coming up. Especially a couple of the women astronauts.

Living aboard Freedom was sort of like living in a bad hotel, without
gravity. The quarters were cramped, there was precious little privacy, the hot
water was only lukewarm, and the food was as bland as only a government agency
can make it. I spent ten-twelve hours a day inside a space suit, strapped into
an MMU—a manned maneuvering unit—assembling our equipment on a special boom
outside the station.

The agency insisted that the magnetic field could not be turned on until
every experiment being run inside the lab module was completed. Despite all our
calculations and simulations (including a week’s worth of dry run on the
station mock-up in Huntsville) the agency brass was worried that our magnetic
field might screw up some delicate experiment the scientists were doing. It
occurred to me that they didn’t seem worried about screwing up the station’s
own instrumentation or life-support systems. That would just have threatened
the lives of astronauts and mission specialists, not important people like
university scientists sitting safe on their campuses.

Anyway, after eleven days of living in that zero-gee tin can I got the go-ahead
from mission control to turn on the magnetic field. Maybe the fact that one of
the big solar panels got dinged with a stray chunk of junk hurried their
decision. The panel damage cut the station’s electrical power by a couple of
kilowatts.

Rockledge had already launched two of their Nerf balls, one on a shuttle mission
and the other from one of their own little commercial boosters. They were put
into orbits opposite in direction to the flow of all the junk floating around,
sort of like setting them to swim upstream.

Right away they started having troubles. The first Nerf ball expanded only
partway. Instead of knocking debris out of orbit it became a piece of junk
itself, useless and beyond anybody’s control. The second one performed okay,
although the instrumentation aboard it showed that it was getting sliced up by
some of the bigger pieces of junk. Rather than being nudged out of orbit when
they hit the sticky balloon, they just rammed right through it and came out the
other end. Maybe they got slowed enough to start spiraling in toward reentry.
But it wouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks before the Nerf ball was
ripped to shreds—and became still yet another piece of orbiting junk.

“They’re part of the problem,” I said to Sam over the station’s videophone
link, “instead of being part of the solution.”

Sam’s round face grinned like a Jack-o’-lantern. “So that’s why D’Argent’s
looking like a stockbroker on Black Tuesday.”

“He’s got a lot to be worried about,” I said.

Sam cackled happily. Then, lowering his voice, he said, “A friend of mine
at the tracking center says the old original Vanguard satellite is going to
reenter in a couple weeks.”

“The one they launched in ‘58?”

“Yep. It’s only a couple of pounds. They called it the Grapefruit back
then.”

I looked over my shoulder at Freedom’s crew members working at their
stations. I was in the command module, standing in front of the videophone
screen with my stockinged feet anchored in floor loops to keep me from floating
around the place weightlessly. The crew—two men and a woman—were paying
attention to their jobs, not to me. But
still...

“Sam,” I said in a near-whisper, “you want me to try to retrieve it?”

“Do you have any idea of what the Smithsonian will pay for it?” he
whispered back. “Or the
Japanese?”

I felt like a fighter pilot being asked to take on a risky mission. “Shoot
me the orbital data. I’ll see what I can do.”

It took a lot of good-natured wheedling and sweet-talking before Freedom’s
commander allowed me to use one of the station’s OMVs. There was a provision
for it in our contract, of course, but the station commander had the right to make
the decision as to whether VCI might actually use one of the little flitters.
She was a strong-willed professional astronaut; I’d known her for years and we’d
even dated now and then. She made me promise her the Moon, just about. But at last
she agreed.

The orbital maneuvering vehicles were sort of in-between the MMUs that you
could strap onto your back and the orbital transfer vehicles that were big
enough for a couple of guys to go all the way to GEO. The OMVs were
stripped-down little platforms with an unpressurized cockpit, a pair of
extensible arms with grippers on their ends, and a rocket motor hanging out the
rear end.

I snatched the old Vanguard grapefruit without much trouble, saving it
from a fiery death after it had spent more than half a century in space. It was
just about the size and shape of a grapefruit, with a metal skin that had been
blackened by years of exposure to high-energy radiation. Its solar cells had
gone dead decades ago.

Anyway, Sam was so jubilant that he arranged to come up to Freedom in
person to take the satellite back to Earth. Under his instructions I had not
brought the grapefruit inside the station; instead I stored it in one of the
racks built into the station’s exterior framework. Sam was bringing up a special
sealed vacuum container to bring the satellite back to the ground without
letting it get contaminated by air.

Sam was coming up on one of the regular shuttle resupply flights. Since
there wasn’t any room for more personnel aboard the station he would only stay
long enough to take the Vanguard satellite and bring it back to Earth with him.

That was the plan, anyway.

Well, the news that a private company had recaptured the old satellite hit
the media like a Washington scandal. Sam was suddenly hot news, proclaiming the
right of salvage in space while all sorts of lawyers from government agencies
and university campuses argued that the satellite by rights belonged to the
government. The idea of
selling
it to the
Smithsonian or some other museum seemed to outrage them.

I saw Sam on the evening TV news the night before he came up to the
station. Instead of playing the little guy being picked on by the big bullies,
Sam went on the attack:

“That grapefruit’s been floating around up there as dead as a doornail
since before I was born,” he said to the blonde who was interviewing him.
“My people located it, my people went out
and grabbed it. Not the government. Not some college professor who never even
heard of the Vanguard 1958b until last week. My people. VCI. Part of S. Gunn
Enterprises, Unlimited.”