Ben Bova - The Sam Gunn Omnibus

“Hey!” said Sam. “You guys are as short as me!”

No word of thanks. No formal greetings or offers of international friendship. His first words upon being rescued dealt with our heights.

He was no taller than my own 160 centimeters, although he claimed 165. He pushed himself next to Korolev, the biggest man of our crew, who stood almost 173 centimeters, according to the medical files. Naturally, under zero-gravity conditions Korolev—and all of us—had grown an extra two or three centimeters.

“I’m just about as tall as you are!” Sam exulted.

He flitted from one member of our crew to another comparing heights. It was difficult to make an accurate measurement because he kept bobbing like a floating cork, thanks to the zero gravity. In other words, he cheated. I should have recognized this as the key to his character immediately. Unfortunately, I did not.

Neither did Zworkin, although he later claimed that he knew all along that Sam was a spy.

All in all, Sam was not unpleasant. He was friendly. He was noisy. I remember thinking, in those first few moments he was aboard our station, that it was like having a pet monkey visit us. Amusing. Diverting. He made us laugh, which was something we had not done in many weeks.

Sam’s face was almost handsome, but not quite. His lips were a bit too thin and his jaw a little too round. His eyes were bright and glowing like a fanatic’s. His hair bristled like a thicket of wires, brownish red. His tongue was never still.

Most of my crew understood English well enough so that Sam had little trouble expressing himself to us. Which he did incessantly. Sam kept up a constant chatter about the shoddy construction of his orbital transfer vehicle, the solid workmanship of our station, the lack of aesthetics in spacecraft design, the tyranny of ground controllers who forbade alcoholic beverages aboard space stations, this, that and the other. He even managed to say a few words that sounded almost like gratitude.

“I guess giving you guys a chance to save my neck makes a nice break in the routine for you, huh? Not much else exciting going on around here, is there?”

He talked so much and so fast that it never occurred to any of us, not even to Zworkin, to ask why he had been flying so near to us. As far as I knew, there were no Western satellites in orbits this close to our station. Or there should not have been.

Next to his machine-gun dialogue the thing that impressed my men most about this American astronaut was his uniform. Like ours, it was basically a one-piece coverall, quite utilitarian. Like us, he bore a name patch sewn over his left chest pocket. There the similarities ended.

Sam’s coveralls were festooned with all sorts of fancy patches and buttons. Not merely one shoulder patch with his mission insignia. He had patches and insignia running down both sleeves and across his torso, front and back, like the tattooed man in the circus. Dragons, comic-book rocket ships, silhouettes of naked women, buttons that bore pictures of video stars, strange symbols and slogans that made no sense to me, such as “Beam me up, Scotty, there’s no intelligent life down here” and “King Kong died for our sins.”

Finally I ordered my men back to their duties and told Sam to accompany me to the control center.

Zworkin objected. “It is not wise to allow him to see the control center,” he said in Russian.

“Would you prefer,” I countered, “that he be allowed to roam through the laboratories? Or perhaps the laser module?”

Most of my own crew was not allowed to enter the laser module. Only men with specific military clearance were permitted there. And most of the laboratories, you see, were testing systems that would one day be the heart of our Red Shield antimissile system. Even the diamond manufacturing experiment was a Red Shield program, according to my mission orders.

Zworkin did not reply to my question. He merely stared at me sullenly. He had a sallow, pinched face that was blemished with acne—unusual for a man of his age. The crew joked behind his back that he was still a virgin.

“The visitor stays with me, Nikolai Nikolaivich,” I told him. “Where I can watch him.”

Unfortunately, I had to listen to Sam as well as watch him.

I ordered my communications technician to contact the NASA space station and allow Sam to tell them what had happened. Meanwhile Zworkin reported again to ground control. It was not a simple matter to transfer Sam back to the NASA station. First we had to apprise ground control of the situation, and they had to inform Moscow, where the American embassy and the International Astronautics Commission were duly briefed. Hours dragged by and our work schedule became hopelessly snarled.

I must admit, however, that Sam was a good guest. He handed out trinkets that he fished from the deep pockets of his coveralls. A miniature penknife to one of the men who had rescued him. A pocket computer to the other, programmed to play a dozen different games when it was connected to a display screen. A small flat tin of rock candy. A Russian-English dictionary the size of your thumb.

That dictionary should have alerted my suspicions. But I confess that I was more concerned with getting this noisy intrusion off my station and back where he belonged.

Sam stayed a day. Two days. Teleconferences crackled between Washington and Moscow, Moscow and Geneva, Washington and Geneva, ground control to our station, our station to the NASA station. Meanwhile Sam had made himself at home and even started to learn how to tell jokes in Russian. He was particularly interested in dirty jokes, of course, being the kind of man he was. He began to peel off some of the patches and buttons that adorned his coveralls and hand them out as presents. My crewmen especially lusted after the pictures of beautiful video stars.

He had taken over the galley, where he was teaching my men how to play dice in zero gravity, when I at last received permission to send him back to the American station. Not an instant too soon, I thought.

Still, dear old Mir 5 became suddenly very quiet and dreary once we had packed him off in one of our own reliable transfer craft. We returned to our tedious tasks and the damnable exercise machines. The men growled and sulked at each other. Months of boredom and hard work stretched ahead of us. I could feel the tension pulling at my crew. I felt it myself.

But not for long.

Less than a week later Korolev again rousted me from my zipper bunk.

“He’s back! The American!”

This time Sam did not pretend to need an emergency rescue. He had flown an orbital transfer vehicle to our station and matched orbit. His OTV was hovering a few hundred meters alongside us.

“Permission to come aboard?” His voice was unmistakable. “Unofficially?”

I glanced at Zworkin, who was of course right beside me in the command center. Strangely, Nikolai Nikolaivich nodded. Nothing is unofficial with him, I knew. Yet he did not object to the American making an “unofficial” visit.

I went to the docking chamber while Sam floated over to us. The airlock of his craft would not fit our docking mechanism, so he went EVA in his pressure suit and jetted across to us using his backpack maneuvering unit.

“I was in the neighborhood so I thought I’d drop by for a minute,” Sam wisecracked once he got through our airlock and slid up the visor of his helmet.

“Why are you in this area?” Zworkin asked, eyes slitted in his pimpled face.

“To observe your laser tests,” replied Sam, grinning. “You guys don’t think our intelligence people don’t know what you’re up to, do you?”

“We are not testing lasers!”

“Not today, I know. Don’t worry about it, Ivan, I’m not spying on you, for chrissakes.”