The Sam Gunn Omnibus (38 page)

“The magnetic field won’t deflect it,” I said. “It hasn’t been in space
long enough to build up a static electrical charge on its skin.”

“Then we’ll have to abandon the station. Good thing the shuttle’s still
docked to us.”

She moved her hand toward the communications keyboard. I grabbed it away.

“Give me five minutes. Maybe there’s something we can do.”

I called Sam to the command module. Bonnie Jo was right behind him.
Swiftly I outlined the problem. He called Larry, back in Florida, who
immediately agreed that the magnetic bumper would have no effect on the Nerf
ball. He didn’t look terribly upset; to him this was a theoretical problem. I could
see Melinda standing behind him, smiling into the screen like a chubby Mona
Lisa.

“There’s no way we could deflect it?” Sam asked, a little desperation in
his voice.

“Not unless you could charge it up,” Larry said.

“Charge it?”

“Spray it with an electron beam,” he said. “That’d give it enough of a
surface charge for the magnetic field to deflect it.”

Sam cut the connection. Forty-two minutes and counting.

“We have several electron beam guns aboard,” the skipper said. “In the lab
module.”

“But they’re not powerful enough to charge the damned Nerf ball until it
gets so close it’ll hit us anyway,” Sam muttered.

“We could go out on one of the OMVs,” I heard myself suggest.

“Yeah!” Sam brightened. “Go out and push it out of the way.”

I had to shake my head. “No, Sam. That won’t work. The Nerf ball is coming
toward us; it’s in an opposite orbit. The OMV doesn’t have enough de
l
ta-v to go out there, turn around and match
orbit with it, and then nudge it into a lower orbit.”

“You’d have to ram the OMV into it,” the commander said. “Like a kamikaze.”

“No thanks,” Sam said. “I’m brave but I’m not suicidal.” He started
gnawing his fingernails.

I said, “But we could go out on an OMV and give it a good squirt with an
electron gun as we passed it. Charge it up enough for the magnetic bumper to do
the job.”

“You think so?”

“Forty minutes left,” Bonnie Jo said. Not a quaver in her voice. Not a
half-tone higher than usual. Not a hint of fear.

The commander shook her head. “The OMVs aren’t pressurized. You don’t have
enough time for pre-breathe.”

See, to run one of the OMVs you had to be suited up. Since the suits were
pressurized only to a third of the normal air pressure that the station used,
you had to pre-breathe oxygen for about an hour before sealing yourself inside
the suit. Otherwise nitrogen bubbles would collect in your blood and you’d get
the bends, just like a deep-sea diver.

“Fuck the pre-breathe,” Sam snapped. “We’re gonna save this goddamned
station from Rockledge’s runaway Nerf ball.”

“I can’t let you do that, Sam,” the skipper said. Her hand went out to the
comm keyboard again.

Sam leveled a stubby finger at her. “You let us give it a shot or I’ll
tell everybody back at the Cape what
really
happened when we were supposed to be testing the lunar rover simulator.”

Her face flushed dark red.

“Listen,” Sam said jovially. “You get everybody into the shuttle and pull
away from the station. Mutt and I will go out in the OMV. If we can deflect the
Nerf ball and save the station you’ll be a hero. If not, the station gets
shredded and you can give the bill to Rockledge International.”

I hadn’t thought of that. Who would be responsible for the destruction of
this twenty-billion-dollar government installation? Who carried damage
insurance on the space station?

“And the two of you will die of the bends,” she said. “No, I won’t allow
it. I’m in charge here
and
...”

“Stick us in an airlock when we get back,” Sam cajoled. “Run up the
pressure. That’s what they do for deep-sea divers, isn’t it? You’ve got a medic
aboard, use the jerk for something more than ramming needles into people’s
asses!”

“I can’t, Sam!”

He looked at her coyly. “I’ve got videodisks from the lunar simulator, you
know.”

Thirty-five minutes.

The skipper gave in, of course. Sam’s way was the only hope she had of
saving the station. Besides, whatever they had done in the lunar simulator was
something she definitely did not want broadcast. So ten minutes later Sam and I
are buttoning ourselves into space suits while the skipper and one of her crew
are floating an electron gun down the connecting tunnel to the airlock where
the OMVs were docked. Everybody else was already jamming themselves into the
shuttle mid-deck and cockpit. It must have looked like a fraternity party in
there, except that I’ll bet everybody was scared into constipation.

Everybody except Bonnie Jo. She seemed to have ice water in her veins.
Cool and calm under fire.

I shook my head to get rid of my thoughts about her as I pulled on the
space suit helmet. Sam was already buttoned up. My ears popped when I switched
on the suit’s oxygen system, but otherwise there were no bad effects.

The orbital maneuvering vehicle had a closed cockpit, but it wasn’t pressurized.
I lugged the electron gun and its power pack inside. “Lugged” isn’t the right
word, exactly. The apparatus was weightless, just like everything else. But it
was bulky and awkward to handle.

Sam did the piloting. I set up the electron gun and ran through its
checks. Every indicator light was green, although the best voltage I could
crank out of it was a bit below max. That worried me. We’d need all the juice
we could get when we whizzed past the Nerf ball.

We launched off the station with a little lurch and headed toward our
fleeting rendezvous with the runaway. Through my visor I saw the station
dwindle behind us, two football fields long, looking sort of like a square
double-ended paddle, the kind they use on kayaks, with a cluster of little cylinders
huddled in its middle. Those were the habitat and lab modules. They looked
small and fragile and terribly, terribly vulnerable.

For the first time in my life I paid no attention to the big beautiful
curving mass of the Earth glowing huge and gorgeous below us. I had no time for
sightseeing, even when the sights were the most spectacular that any human
being had ever seen.

The shuttle was pulling away in the opposite direction, getting the hell
out of the line of fire. Suddenly we were all alone out there, just Sam and me
inside this contraption of struts and spherical tanks that we called an OMV.

“Just like a World War I airplane movie,” Sam said to me over the suit
radio. “I’ll make a pass as close to the Nerf ball as I can get. You spray it
with the gun.”

I nodded inside my helmet.

“Five minutes,” Sam said, tapping a gloved finger on the radar display. In
the false-color image of the screen the Nerf ball looked like a tumbling mass
of long thin filaments, barely hanging together. Something in my brain clicked;
I remembered an old antimissile system called Homing Overlay that looked kind
of like an umbrella that had lost its fabric. When it hit a missile nose cone
it shattered the thing with the pure kinetic energy of the impact. That’s what
the tatters of the aluminized plastic Nerf ball would do to the thin skin of
the space station, if we let it hit. I could picture those great big solar
panels exploding, throwing off jagged pieces that would slice up the lab and
habitat modules like shards of glass going through paper walls.

“Three minutes.”

I swung the cockpit hatch open and pushed the business end of the electron
gun outside with my boots.

“How long will the power pack run?” I asked. “The longer we fire this
thing the more chance we’ll have of actually charging up the ball.”

Sam must have shrugged inside his suit. “Might as well start now, Mutt.
Build up a cloud that the sucker has to fly through. Won’t do us a bit of good
to have power still remaining once we’ve passed the goddamned spitball.”

That made sense. I clicked the right switches and turned the power dial up
to max. In the vacuum I couldn’t hear whether it was humming or not, although I
thought I felt a kind of vibration through my boots. All the dials said it was
working, but that was scant comfort.

“One minute,” Sam said. I knew he was flying our OMV as close to the Nerf
ball as humanly possible. Sam was as good as they came at piloting. Better than
me; not by much, but better. He’d get us close enough to kiss that little
sucker, I knew.

We were passing over an ocean, which one I don’t know to this day. Big
wide deep blue below us, far as the eye could see, bright and glowing with long
parades of teeny white clouds marching across it.

I saw something dark hurtling toward us, like a black octopus waving all
its arms, like a silent banshee coming to grab us.

“There
it...
was,” Sam said.

The damned thing thrashed past us like a hypersonic bat out of hell. I looked
down at the electron gun’s gauges. Everything read zero. We had used up all the
energy in the power pack.

“Well, either it works or it doesn’t,” Sam said. All of a sudden he
sounded tired.

I nodded inside my helmet. I felt it too: exhausted, totally drained. Just
like the electron gun; we had given it everything we had. Now we had nothing
left. We had done everything we could do. Now it was up to the laws of physics.

“We’ll be back at the station in an hour,” Sam said. “We’ll know then.”

We knew before then. Our helmet earphones erupted a few minutes later with
cheers and yells, even some whistles. By the time we had completed our orbit
and saw the station again, the shuttle was already re-docked. Freedom looked
very pretty hanging up there against the black sky. Gleaming in the sunlight.
Unscathed. So all we had to worry about was the bends.

“WAS
IT VERY
painful?” Jade asked.

Johansen gave her a small shrug. “Kind of like passing kidney stones for
sixteen or seventeen hours. From every pore of your body.”

She shuddered.

“We came out of it okay,” he said. “But I wouldn’t want to go through it
again.”

“You saved the station. You became heroes.”

WE SAVED THE
station—Johansen agreed—but we didn’t become heroes. The
government didn’t want to acknowledge that there had been any danger to
Freedom, and Rockledge sure as hell didn’t want the public to know that their
Nerf ball had almost wrecked the station.

Everybody involved had to sign a secrecy agreement. That was Ed Zane’s
idea. To give the guy credit, though, it was also his idea to force Rockledge
to pay a cool ten million bucks for the cost of saving the station from their
runaway Nerf ball. Rockledge ponied up without even asking their lawyers, and
Zane saw to it that the money was split among the people who had been
endangered—which included himself, of course.

Each of us walked away with about five hundred thousand dollars, although
it wasn’t tax-free. The government called it a hazardous duty bonus. It was a
bribe, to keep us from leaking the story to the media.

Everybody agreed to keep quiet—except Sam, of course.

The medics took us out of the airlock, once we stopped screaming from the
pain, and hustled us down to a government hospital on Guam. Landed the blessed
shuttle right there on the island, on the three-mile-long strip they had built
as an emergency landing field for the shuttle. They had to fly a 747 over to
Guam to carry the orbiter back to Edwards Space Base. I think they got
Rockledge to pay for that, too.

Anyway, they put Sam and me in a semiprivate room. For observation and
tests, they said. I figured they wouldn’t let either one of us out until Sam
signed the secrecy agreement.

“Five hundred thousand bucks, Sam,” I needled him from my bed. “I could
pay a
lot
of my bills with that.”

He turned toward me, frowning. “There’s more than money involved here,
Mutt. A lot more.”

I shrugged and took a nap. I wouldn’t sign their secrecy agreement unless
Sam did, of course. So there was nothing for me to do but wait.

Zane visited us. Sam yelled at him about kidnapping and civil rights. Zane
scuttled out of the room. A couple of other government types visited us. Sam
yelled even louder, especially when he heard that one of them was from the
Justice Department in Washington.

I was starting to get worried. Maybe Sam was carrying things too far. They
could keep us on ice forever in a place like Guam. They wouldn’t let us call
anybody; we were being held incommunicado. I wondered what Bonnie Jo was doing,
whether she was worried about us. About me.

And just like that, she showed up. Like sunshine breaking through the

clouds she breezed into
our hospital room the third day we were there, dressed in a terrific pair of
sand-colored slacks and a bright orange blouse. And a briefcase.