The Sam Gunn Omnibus (49 page)

In truth, I had not. It had never
occurred to me that employees might become partial owners of the company. A
very clever gringo, this Sam Gunn. He undoubtedly keeps the majority of shares
in his own hands and doles out a pittance to his employees, thereby gaining
their loyalty.

As if he could read my thoughts,
Spence said, “Sam’s a minority stockholder now. My wife and I own more shares
than anybody else except Sam, but no individual owns more than a few percent.”

Wife? Spence was married. For some
reason I felt a pang of disappointment.

“Sam Gunn must be an unusual man,”
I said, loud enough to be heard over the rantings from the corner of the room.
But the instant I started to speak, the ravings stopped, and my voice shrilled
stupidly. I felt my face flame red. Spence’s grin widened but he said nothing.

“I would like to meet him some day,”
I said, more softly, as I turned to the computer terminal.

“You can meet him right now,” said
Spence. “That’s him in the VR rig.”

My mouth must have dropped open. I spun
the little chair around to see Spence looking off toward the corner. The man
there was pulling off his VR helmet, still muttering obscenities.

I
stared at Sam
Gunn as he got up from the chair and tugged the data gloves off. He was short,
much shorter than I. His torso was stocky, solid, although I could see that his
belly bulged the faded blue coveralls he wore. His face was round, with a
little snub of a nose and a sprinkling of freckles. Hair the color of rusted
wire, cut very short, and sprinkled with gray—which he insisted (I soon
learned) was due to exposure to cosmic radiation in space, not from age. From
this distance, halfway across the room, I could not tell the color of his eyes.
But I could easily see that he was angry, blazing furious, in fact.

“Goddammit, Spence,” he said,
stamping toward us, “if we don’t get this simulation fixed and fixed damned soon
somebody’s gonna lose his ass out there.”

Spence put a fatherly hand on my
shoulder. “Here’s the gal who’s going to fix it. Just started with us this morning.”
My shoulder tingled from his touch.

Sam gave me a stern look. “This
kid?”

“Juanita O’Rourke,” Spence
introduced me. It was my alias, of course.

Sam stared at me. He was about the
same height standing as I was sitting. I saw that his eyes were a bluish-green
hazel color, flecked with golden highlights.

“From Los Angeles,” Spence added. “Computer
programming degree from—”

“I don’t care where you’re from or
where you went to school,” said Sam Gunn. “I love you.”

I
had heard that he
was a womanizer of the worst sort. Some of his escapades had been included in
the dossier my father’s secret police had given me to study. The dossier hinted
at much more. Strangely, my father never mentioned the danger that Sam Gunn might
pose to me. Perhaps he did not know of it. After all, his attention was focused
on affairs of state, not affairs of the bedroom.

I
got to my feet
and put on a modest smile. Partly it was because I towered nearly thirty
centimeters over Sam Gunn. The feeling gave me joy.

“You give your heart quickly,” I said,
adding to myself silently, And very often.

His round, freckled face turned
into an elf’s delighted countenance. “Will you have dinner with me tonight?”

I
hesitated just
long enough to let him think I seriously considered his invitation. “Not
tonight,” I said. “I just arrived here and there’s so much to
do....”

Spence cleared his throat and said,
“You want this simulation checked out, don’t you?”

All Sam’s anger and frustration had
disappeared as quickly as a dry leaf is blown away by a gust of wind. “Okay,
Esmeralda—”

“Juanita,” I corrected.

Sam shook his head. “To me you’re
Esmeralda, the beautiful gypsy girl that Quasimodo loves.”

“I am not a gypsy.”

“But you’re beautiful,” he said.

“And you will be Quasimodo?”

Sam dropped into a crouch and
twisted his head up at a bizarre angle. “I’ll be whoever you want me to be,
Esmeralda.”

He made me laugh.

“The simulation,” Spence reminded
him.

“Oh. Yeah. That.”

Fortunately, the problem was simple
enough for me to solve, although it took several days’ intense work. VCI’s major
business was removing old commsats that had ceased to function from the
geosynchronous orbit so that new commsats could be placed there. There were
only a finite number of slots available in GEO, and they were strictly
allocated by the International Telecommunications Authority. VCI crews flew
from space stations in low Earth orbit (LEO) to GEO and removed the dead
commsats to make room for new ones.

It was a small part of the
satellite communications industry, but a key factor. VCI also had contracts to
sweep debris out of the lower orbits where the space stations flew. I learned
that the company’s name originally stood for Vacuum Cleaners, Incorporated. Sam’s
company cleaned up the vacuum of orbital space.

More recently, Sam had begun
sending people up to GEO to repair malfunctioning commsats. It was cheaper to
fix them than to replace them—in theory, at least. In practice, the costs of
sending astronauts to GEO even for a few hours was almost as much as replacing
a malfunctioning satellite.

The virtual reality simulation that
Sam was frustrated over was one in which an operator could remain aboard the
space station in LEO and remotely direct an unmanned spacecraft to repair a malfunctioning
satellite in GEO.

“Bring the dead back to life,” as
Sam put it.

“It would be much safer for our
people if they could stay in the space station rather than fly up to GEO,”
Spence explained to me. “GEO’s in the middle of the outer Van Allen Belt.
Astronauts can’t stay there very long because of the radiation.”

“I see,” I said.

“We could save a bundle of money if
we could do this job remotely,” said Sam eagerly. “Just the drop in our
insurance costs could pay for the whole program.”

Spence added, “In the long run we
could operate right here from the ground. No need to send people to one of the
space stations, even.”

“That’d save even more money,” Sam
agreed happily.

“But the simulation keeps
glitching,” said Spence.

“And until we get it right in the
simulator we can’t try it in the real world.”

Thus the burden of their hopes was
placed on my young shoulders. I thought it strange that something so vital
would be entrusted to a totally new and untried employee. Was this a trap of
some sort? Or a test? Soon enough I learned that it was typical of the way Sam
Gunn ran his company. He kept his staff as small as he possibly could, hiring
only when there was no other way to get a necessary job done. And make no mistake
about it, Sam

Gunn
ran VCI. Despite his lofty title, Spence took orders from Sam. Most of the
time.

The problem with the simulation was
not terribly difficult. If Sam had not been so impatient his own staff
personnel or a consultant would eventually have found it. But what Sam wanted
was instant results, which meant that I spent virtually twenty-four hours a day
working on the problem. Except for the hour or so each day I spent fending off Sam’s
invitations to dinner, to lunch, to a suite in the zero-gravity honeymoon hotel
he wanted to build in orbit.

Within a few days I had the program
running so smoothly that Sam was willing to try a test in orbit. And I realized
that I could sabotage his operation quite easily. In fact, I planted a bug in
the program that I could activate whenever I chose to.

I
discussed my
accomplishment with my father on the direct phone link from our consulate in
Orlando. I drove to the consulate in the dark of night, well past midnight, to
make certain that no one from VCI would see me.

I
had feared that I
would wake my father from his justly-earned sleep. As it turned out, he was in
bed, but not asleep. At first he did not activate the phone’s video, which puzzled
me. When he finally did, I realized that he was not alone in his bed. He tried
to hide her, but I could see that a tousle-haired young trollop lay beside him,
bundled under the sheets. She peeked out from behind my father’s back, showing
a bare shoulder, a pair of flashing dark eyes, and piles of raven black hair.

My father was delighted with the
progress I had made in little more than a week.

“I can sabotage their mission to
repair satellites,” I reported to him, trying to ignore his companion. She could
not have been much older than I. “And they will never even know that sabotage
has occurred.”

“Good!” He beamed at me. “Excellent!
But do not attack them just yet. Let them run a successful mission or two. Wait
until the strategic moment to strike.”

“I understand, Papa.”

“You are doing well, my child.”

I
looked past him
to the young woman sharing his bed. My mother had been dead for many years and
my father was still a man of vigor. Yet I felt angry. I did not tell him that
Sam Gunn was attracted to me.

“And you are well, Papa?” My
question sounded acidly cynical to my own ears.

Yet my beloved father obviously did
not feel my anger. “I am in good health,” he reported smilingly. “Although the
rebels have surrounded the army base at Zamora.”

“What?” I felt a double pang of
alarm. The lieutenant who had been infatuated with me was at the Zamora base.

“Not to worry, my daughter. We are
reinforcing the base by helicopter and will soon drive the scum back to their
caves in the mountains.”

Yet I did worry. The rebels seemed
to get bolder, stronger, each year. I went back to work, angry with my father
yet frightened for him. We needed to wrest control of the equatorial orbit from
the gringo corporations, quickly. I began to look for more ways to sabotage
VCI. I even let Sam take me out to dinner several times, although each evening
ended at the front door of my apartment building with nothing more romantic
than a handshake. Sam was not exactly a perfect gentleman: he was a persistent
as a goat in mating season. I fended him off, however. My arms were longer than
his.

“Esmeralda,” he complained one
evening, “you’re turning my love life into the petrified forest.”

We were at the entrance to my
apartment building. I thought of it as my castle, its walls and electronic door
locks my defense against Sam’s assaults.

“I agreed to have dinner with you,”
I said, “nothing more.”

He sighed heavily. “I guess I’m
paying you too much.”

“Paying m
e ...”

With an almost wicked grin he said,
“If you were broke and hungry you’d appreciate me more, I betcha.”

“What an evil thing to say!”

“Well, look at this apartment
building,” he went on. “It’s a frigging luxury palace! I’m just paying you too
much money. You’re living too well—”

I
had to cut off
his line of thought before he realized that my salary could never pay the rent
on my apartment. Before he began to ask himself how a poor computer programmer
from Los Angeles could afford the clothes and the sports car I had.

“So you want women to be starving
and poor,” I snapped at him. “Or perhaps you prefer them barefoot and pregnant?”

He shrugged good-naturedly. “Barefoot
is okay.”

I
did not have to
pretend to be angry. I could feel the blood heating my cheeks. “Sam, the days
of male domination over women were finished long ago,” I told him. “Don’t you
understand that?”

“I’m not interested in domination.
All I want is a little cooperation.”

“You are a hopeless chauvinist,
Sam.”

He broke into an impish grin. “Not
quite hopeless, Esmeralda. I still have some hope.”

It was impossible to dislike Sam,
even though I tried. But at least I stopped him from asking himself how I could
afford my lifestyle on the salary he was paying me.