Ben Bova - The Sam Gunn Omnibus

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 Dracula’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.

Jade grinned. “Gee, maybe I ought to check it out.”

“A nice young lady such as yourself should not go to Hell Crater,” Sanchez said firmly.

“Besides, you wouldn’t be able to afford it on your salary,” the bartender added.

Jade saw that they were slightly embarrassed. She allowed the subject to drop.

Sanchez finished his latest beer and put the pilsner glass on the bar a trifle unsteadily. One of the robot bartenders trundled to it and replaced it with a filled glass, as it had been doing all during his narrative.

“Poor old Sam prob’ly thought that Bronx Ball-Breaker was falling for him, didn’t he?” the bartender asked, watching the robot roll smoothly toward the knot of customers further down the bar.

Sanchez seemed happy to return to Sam’s story. “I suppose he did, at first. Funny thing is, I think he was actually starting to fall for her. At least a little. Maybe more sympathy than anything else, but Sam was a very empathetic guy, you know.”