Ben Bova - The Sam Gunn Omnibus

“Did he ever see her again?” Jade asked.

“No, not her. He tried to call her a few times but she never responded. Not a peep.”

“Poor Sam.”

“Oh, don’t feel so bad about him. Sam had plenty of other fish to fry. He was never down for long. Not Sam.”

The bartender gave a hand signal to the nearer of the two robots and it quickly brought a fresh Coke for Jade and a thimble-sized glass of amber-colored liqueur for the bartender himself.

He raised his glass and said with utter seriousness, “To Sam Gunn, the best sonofabitch in the whole goddamned solar system.”

Jade felt a little foolish repeating the words, but she did it, as did Sanchez, and then sipped at her new drink.

“Y’know,” Sanchez said, after smacking his lips over the beer, “nobody gives a damn about Sam any more. Here he is, dead and gone, and just about everybody’s forgotten him.”

“Damn shame,” the bartender agreed.

“I wouldn’t have my business if it wasn’t for Sam,” Sanchez said. “He set me up when I needed the money to get started. Nobody else would even look at me! The banks—hah!”

“I was helping my Daddy at his bar down in Florida when I first met Sam,” said the bartender. “He’s the one who first gave me the idea of opening a joint up here. It was still called Moonbase when I started this place. He had to argue a blue streak to get the base administrators to okay a saloon.”

Jade, her own troubles pushed to the back of her mind, told them, “You two guys—and Zach, my boss—you’re the first I’ve ever heard say a decent word about Sam. Everything I ever heard from the time I was a kid has been … well, not very flattering.”

“That’s because the stories about him have mostly been spread by the guys who tangled with him,” said the bartender.

“The big corporations,” Sanchez agreed.

“And the government.”

“They hated Sam’s guts. All those guys with suits and ties.”

“Why?” asked Jade.

The bartender made a sound halfway between a grunt and a snort. “Why? Because Sam was always fighting against them. He was the little guy, trying to get ahead, always bucking the big boys.”

Sanchez smiled again. “Don’t get the idea that he was some kind of Robin Hood,” he said, glancing at the bartender, then fixing his gaze once again on Jade’s lustrous green eyes.

The bartender guffawed. “Robin Hood? Sam? Hell no! All he wanted to do was to get rich.”

“Which he did. Many times.”

“And threw it all away, just as often.”

“And helped a lot of little guys like us, along the way.”

The bartender wiped at his eyes. “Hey, Felix, you remember the time…”

Jade did not think it was possible to get drunk on Coca-Cola, so the exhilarated feeling she was experiencing an hour or so later must have been from the two men’s tales of Sam Gunn.

“Why doesn’t somebody do a biography of him?” she blurted. “I mean, the networks would love it, wouldn’t they?”

Both men stopped the reminiscences in mid-sentence. The bartender looked surprised. Sanchez inexplicably turned glum.

“The networks? Pah!” Sanchez spat.

“They’d never do it,” said the bartender, turning sad.

“Why not?”

“Two reasons. One: the big corporations run the networks and they still hate Sam, even though he’s dead. They won’t want to see him glorified. And two: guys like us will tell you stories about Sam, but do you think we’d trust some smart-ass reporter from one of the networks?” “Oh,” said Jade. “I see—I guess.”

The men resumed their tales of their younger days. Jade half-listened as she sipped her Coke, thinking to herself, But they’re talking to me about Sam. Why couldn’t I get other people who knew him to talk to me?

It took Jade three months to get herself hired as an assistant video editor for the Selene office of the Solar News Network. She took crash courses in Video Editing and News Writing from the electronic university, working long into the nights in front of her interactive computer screen, catching a few winks of sleep, and then going to the garage to put in her hours on the surface driving a truck.

At first Zach Bonner, her supervisor, scowled angrily at her baggy eyes and slowed reflexes.

“Tell your boyfriend to let you get more sleep, little girl,” he growled at her. “Otherwise you’re going to make a mistake out there and kill yourself—maybe kill me, too.”

Shocked with surprise, Jade blurted the truth. “I don’t have a boyfriend, Zach. I’m studying.”

Bonner had three daughters of his own. As swiftly as he could, he transferred Jade to a maintenance job indoors. She gratefully accepted.

“Just remember,” he said gruffly, “what you’re doing now is holding other guys’ lives in your hands. Don’t mess up.”

Jade did her work carefully, both day and night, until her certificates of course completion arrived in her e-mail. Then she tackled the three network news offices at Selene. Minolta/Bell, the largest, turned her down cold; they had no job openings at the moment, they said, and they only hired people with experience. BBC accepted her application with a polite version of the classic, “Don’t call us; we’ll call you.”

Solar News, the smallest of the three and the youngest, was an all-news network. They paid much less than Jade was making as a truck driver. But they had an opening for an assistant video editor. Jade took the job without thinking twice about it.

Zach Bonner shook his head warily when she told him she was quitting. “You sure you want to do this?”

“Yes,” Jade said. “I’m sure.”

He gave a sigh that was almost an exasperated snort. “Okay, kid. If things don’t work out for you, come on back here and I’ll see what I can do for you.”

She had more than half expected him to say that, but his words still warmed her. She stood up on tiptoes and pecked a kiss on his cheek. He sputtered with mixed embarrassment and happiness.

Dr. Dinant was pleased that Jade was moving to a job belowground. “I still would like to do the procedure on you,” she said, “before I finish my tour here and return home.”

Jade put her off, hoping she would return to Earth and forget about her. Just as her adoptive mother had.

She started her new job, surprised that there were only six people in the entire Selene office of Solar News. Two of them were reporters, one male and one female, who went to the same hairdressing salon and actually appeared on screen now and then, when the network executives permitted such glory. Otherwise, their stories were “reported” by anchorpersons in Orlando who had never been to the Moon.

It took her nearly a year to work up the courage to tell her new boss about her idea of doing a biography of Sam Gunn.

“I’ve heard of him,” said her boss, a middle-aged woman named Monica Bianco. “Some sort of a con man, wasn’t he? A robber baron?”

Although Monica affected a veneer of newsroom cynicism, she could not hide her basic good nature from Jade for very long. The two women had much in common in addition to their jobs. Monica had come to Selene to escape pollution allergies that left her gasping helplessly more than half the year on Earth. When Jade confided that she could never go to Earth, her boss broke into tears at the memory of all she had been forced to leave behind. The two of them became true friends after that.

Monica was good-looking despite her years, Jade thought. She admitted to being over forty, and Jade wondered just how far beyond the Big Four-Oh she really was. Not that it mattered much. Especially in Selene, where men still outnumbered women by roughly three to one. Monica was a bit heavier than she ought to be, but her ample bosom and cheerful disposition kept lots of men after her. She confessed to Jade that she had been married twice. “I buried one and dumped the other,” she said, without a trace of remorse. “Both bastards. I just seem to pick rotten SOBs for myself.”