The Sam Gunn Omnibus (8 page)

Sam agreed with a small
nod. “She never got over the idea that I was after Gloria Lamour, not her.”

“Well, weren’t you?”

“At first, yeah, sure.
But...”

Larry made a sour face. “But
once she told you there wasn’t any Gloria Lamour you were willing to settle for
her, right?”

I chimed in, “You were
ready to make lemonade.”

Sam fell silent. Almost.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I don’t think so.”

The skipper came back
into the wardroom, and fixed Sam with a firing-squad stare.

“Lights out, gentlemen.
Gunn, you return to your normal duties tomorrow. Ms. Gold will finish her work
here by herself and depart in two days.”

Sam’s only reply was a
glum, “Yes, sir.”

The next morning when we
started our shift in the command module Sam looked terrible. As if he hadn’t
slept all night. Yet there was a hint of a twinkle in his eye. He kept his face
straight, because the skipper was watching him like a hawk. But he gave me a
quick wink at precisely ten o’clock.

I know the exact time
for two reasons.

First, Commander Johnson
punched up the interior camera view of the lab module and muttered, “Ten in the
morning and she’s not at work yet.”

“She must be under the
weather, sir,” Sam said in a funny kind of stiff, military way of talking. Like
he was rehearsing for a role in a war video or trying to get on the skipper’s
good side. (Assuming he had one.)

“She must be hung over
as hell,” Al Dupres muttered to me.

“I suppose I should call
her on the intercom and wake her up,” the commander said. “After all, if she’s
only got two more days ...”

“Emergency! Emergency!”
called the computer’s synthesized female voice. “Prepare to abandon the
station. All personnel to Crew Emergency Reentry Vehicles. All personnel to
Crew Emergency Reentry Vehicles. Prepare to abandon the station.”

Bells and klaxons
started going off all over the place. The emergency siren was wailing so loud
you could barely hear yourself think. Through it all the computer kept
repeating the abandon-ship message. The computer’s voice was calm but urgent.
The six of us were urgent, but definitely not calm.

“But I postponed the
test!” Commander Johnson yelled at his computer screen. It was filled with big
block letters in red, spelling out what the synthesizer was saying.

Larry and the others were already diving for the hatch that led to the
nearest CERV. They had no idea that this was supposed to be a drill.

I hesitated only a moment. Then I remembered Sams wink a minute earlier.
And the little sonofagun was already flying down the connecting passageway
toward the lab module like a red-topped torpedo.

“I postponed the goddamned test!” Johnson still roared at his command
console, over the noise of all the warning hoots and wails. Sure he had. But
Sam had spent the night rerigging it.

The station had four CERVs, each of them big enough to hold six people.
Typical agency overdesign, you might think. But the lifeboats were spotted at
four different locations, so no matter where on the station you might be, there
was a CERV close enough to save your neck and big enough to take the whole crew
with you, if necessary.

They were round unglamorous spheres, sort of like the early Russian manned
reentry vehicles. Nothing inside except a lot of padding and safety harnesses. The
idea was you belted off the station, propelled by cold gas jets, then the CERV’s
onboard computer automatically fired a set of retro rockets and started beeping
out an emergency signal so the people on the ground could track where you
landed.

The sphere was covered with ablative heat shielding. After reentry it
popped parachutes to plop you gently on the ocean or the ground, wherever.
There was also a final descent rocket to slow your fall down to almost zero.

I caught up with Larry and the other guys inside the CERV and told them to
take it easy.

“This is just a drill,” I said, laughing.

Rog Cranston’s face was dead white. “A drill?” He had already buckled
himself into his harness.

“You sure?” Larry asked. He was buckled in, too. So was Al.

“Do you see the skipper in here?” I asked, hovering nonchalantly in the middle
of the capsule.

Al said, “Yeah. We’re all buttoned up but we haven’t been fired off the
station.”

Just at that moment we felt a jolt like somebody had whanged the capsule
with the world’s biggest hammer. I went slamming face first into the padded
bulkhead, just missing a head-on collision with Larry by about an inch.

“Holy shit!” somebody yelled.

I was plastered flat against the padding, my nose bleeding and my body
feeling like it weighed ten tons.

“My ass, a drill!”

It was like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, only worse. After half a
minute that seemed like half a year the g-force let up and we were weightless
again. I fumbled with shaking hands into one of the empty harnesses. My nose
was stuffed up with blood that couldn’t run out in zero-gee and I thought I was
going to strangle to death. Then we started feeling heavy again. The whole
damned capsule started to shake like we were inside a food processor and blood
sprayed from my aching nose like a garden sprinkler.

And through it all I had this crazy notion in my head that I could still
hear Commander Johnson’s voice wailing, “But I postponed the drill!”

We were shaken, rattled, and frazzled all the way down. The worst part of
it, of course, was that the flight was totally beyond our control. We just hung
in those harnesses like four sides of beef while the capsule automatically went
through reentry and parachuted us into the middle of a soccer field in Brazil.
There was a game going on at the time, although we could see nothing because
the capsule had neither windows nor exterior TV cameras.

Apparently our final retro rocket blast singed the referee, much to the
delight of the crowd.

Sam’s CERV had been shot off the station too, we found out later. With the
Gold woman aboard. Only the skipper remained aboard the space station, still
yelling that he had postponed the test.

Sam’s long ride back to Earth must have been even tougher than ours. He
wound up in the hospital with a wrenched back and dislocated shoulder. He
landed in the Australian outback, no less, but it took the Aussies only a
couple of hours to reach him in their rescue VTOLs, once the agency gave them
the exact tracking data.

Sure enough, Arlene Gold was in the capsule with him, shaken up a bit but
otherwise unhurt.

The agency had no choice but to abort our mission and bring Commander
Johnson back home at once. Popping the two CERVs was grounds for six months
worth of intense investigation. Three Congressional committees, OSHA and even
the EPA eventually got into the act. Thank God for Sam’s ingenuity, though.
Nobody was able to find anything except an unexplained malfunction of the CERV
ejection thrusters.

The agency wound up
spending seventeen million dollars redesigning the damned thing.

As soon as we finished
our debriefings, I took a few days’ leave and hustled over to the hospital
outside San Antonio where they were keeping Sam.

I could hear that he was
okay before I ever saw him. At the nurses’ station half a block away from his
room I could hear him yammering. Nurses were scurrying down the hall, some
looking frightened, most sort of grinning to themselves.

Sam was flat on his
back, his left arm in a cast that stuck straight up toward the ceiling. “...
and I want a pizza, with extra pepperoni!” he was yelling at a nurse who was
leaving the room just as I tried to come in. We bumped in the doorway. She was
young, kind of pretty.

“He can’t eat solid
foods while he’s strapped to the board,” she said to me. As if I had anything
to do with it. The refreshment I was smuggling in for Sam was liquid, hidden
under my flight jacket.

Sam took one look at me
and said, “I thought your nose was broken.”

“Naw, just bloodied a
little.”

Then he quickly launched
into a catalogue of the hospital’s faults: bedpans kept in the freezer, square
needles, liquid foods, unsympathetic nurses.

“They keep the young
ones buzzing around here all day,” he complained, “but when it comes time for my
sponge bath they send in Dracu
l
a’s mother-in-law.”

I pulled up the room’s
only chair. “So how the hell are you?”

“I’ll be okay. If this
damned hospital doesn’t kill me first.”

“You rigged the CERVs,
didn’t you?” I asked, dropping my voice low.

Sam grinned. “How’d our
noble skipper like being left all alone up there?”

“The agency had to send
a shuttle to pick him up, all by himself.”

“The cost accountants must
love him.”

“The word is he’s going
to be reassigned to the tracking station at Ascencion Island.”

Sam chuckled. “It’s not
exactly Pitcairn, but it’s kind of poetic anyway.”

I worked up the nerve to
ask him, “What happened?”

“What happened?” he
repeated.

“In the CERV. How rugged
was the flight? How’d you get hurt? What happened with Arlene?”

Sam’s face clouded. “She’s back in L.A. Didn’t even wait around long
enough to see if I would live or die.”

“Must’ve been a punishing flight,” I said.

“I wouldn’t know,” Sam muttered.

“What do you mean?”

Sam blew an exasperated sigh toward the ceiling. “We were screwing all the
way down to the ground! How do you think I threw my back out?”

“You and Arlene? The Bronx Ball-Breaker made out with you?”

“Yeah,” he said. Then, “No.”

I felt kind of stunned, surprised, confused.

“You know the helmets we use in flight simulations?” Sam asked. “The kind
that flash computer graphic visuals on your visor so you’re seeing the
situation the computer is cooking up?”

I must have nodded.

Staring at the ceiling, he continued, “Arlene brought two of them into the
lifeboat with us. And her Gloria Lamour disks.”

“You were seeing Gloria Lamour ... ?”

“It was like being with Gloria Lamour,” Sam said, his voice almost
shaking, kind of hollow. “Just like being with her. I could touch her. I could
even taste her.”

“No shit?”

“It was like nothing else in the world, man. She was fantastic. And it was
all in zero-gee. Most of it, anyway. The landing was rough. That’s when I popped
my damned shoulder.”

“God almighty, Sam. She must have fallen for you after all. For her to do that
for you ...”

His face went sour. “Yeah, she fell for me so hard she took the first
flight from Sydney to L.A. I’ll never hear from her again.”

“But—jeez, if she gave you Gloria Lamour ...”

“Yeah. Sure,” he said. I had never seen Sam so bitter. “I just wonder who
the hell was programmed in
her
helmet. Who
was she making out with while she was fucking me?”

“YOU MEAN
SHE
WAS SIMULATING IT WITH
SOMEONE ELSE,
too?” Jade asked.

“You betcha.”

“Like a VR parlor,” said
the bartender.

“Those helmets were an
early version of the VRs,” Sanchez said.

“VR parlor?” Jade asked.
“What’s that?”

The bartender eyed
Sanchez, then when he saw that the man was blushing slightly, he turned back to
Jade.

“Virtual reality,” he
said. “Simulating the full sensory spectrum. You know, visual, audial, tactile
...”

“Smell and taste, too?”

Sanchez coughed into his
beer, sending up a small spray of suds.

The bartender nodded. “Yep,
the whole nine yards. For a while back then, some of the wise guys in the video
business figured they’d be able to do away with actors altogether. Gloria
Lamour was their first experimental test, I guess.”

“But the public
preferred real people,” Sanchez said. “Not that it made much difference in the
videos, but with real people they had better gossip.”

Jade thought she
understood. But, “So what’s a VR parlor? And where are they? I’ve never seen
one.”

“Over at the joints in
Hell Crater,” the bartender said. “Guys go there and they can get any woman
they want, whole harem full, if they can afford it.”

“And it’s all simulated?”
Jade prompted.

“Yeah.” The bartender
grinned. “But it’s still a helluva lot of fun, eh Felix?”

“I prefer real women.”

“Do women go to the VR
parlors?” Jade asked. “I mean, do they have programs of men?”

“Every male heartthrob
from Hercules to President Pastoza,” said the bartender.