Ben Bova - The Sam Gunn Omnibus

She jumped to her feet eagerly. “I’ve already heard about a couple of mining engineers who’re over at the base in Copernicus. And there’s a hotel executive at the casino in Hell Crater, a woman who—”

“Yeah, yeah. Great. Go find ’em,” said Gradowsky, suddenly impatient. “I’ll put an expense allowance in your credit account.”

“Thanks!” Jade felt tremendously excited. She was going to be a real reporter. She had won her spurs.

As she reached the door of Gradowsky’s office, though, he called to her. “Don’t let the expense account go to your head. And I want a copy of every bill routed to me, understand?”

“Yes. Of course.”

The weeks rolled by. Jade found that the real trick of interviewing people was to get them started talking. Once they began to talk the only problem was how much storage space her micro-recorder carried. Of course, many of her intended subjects refused to talk at all. Almost all of them were suspicious of Jade, at first. She learned how to work around their suspicions, how to show them that she was not an ordinary network newshound, how to make them understand that she liked Sam Gunn and wanted this biography to be a monument to his memory. Still, half the people she tried to see refused to be interviewed at all.

Jade tried to plan her travels logically, efficiently, to make the best use of the network’s expense money. But an interview in Copernicus led to a tip about a retired accountant living in Star City, all the way over on the Farside. The exotic woman who claimed that Sam had jilted her at the altar knew about a tour guide who lived by the Tranquility Base shrine, where the Apollo 11 lander sat carefully preserved under its glassteel meteor dome. And on, and on.

Jade traveled mostly by tour bus, trundling across the pockmarked lunar plains at a reduced fare, packed in with visitors from Earth. For the first time she saw her home world as strangers see it: barren yet starkly beautiful, new and rugged and wild. When they talked of their own homes on Earth they mostly complained about the weather, or the taxes, or the crowds of people at the spaceport. Jade looked through the bus’s big tinted windows at the lovely blue sphere hanging above the horizon and wondered if she would find Earth crowded and dirty and humdrum if she lived there.

Once she took a passenger rocket for the jaunt from Selene to Aristarchus, crossing Mare Nubium and the wide Sea of Storms in less than half an hour. She felt her insides drop away for the few minutes the rocket soared in free fall at the top of its ballistic trajectory. The retros fired and she felt weight returning before her stomach became unmanageable.

She piled up more voice disks, more stories about Sam Gunn. Some were obviously fabrications, outright lies. Others seemed outrageous exaggerations of what might have originally been true events.

“You’ve got to get some corroboration for this stuff,” Gradowsky told her time and again. “Even when your pigeons are talking about people who’re now dead, their families could come out of nowhere and sue the ass off us.”

Corroboration was rare. No two people seemed to remember Sam Gunn in exactly the same way. A single incident might be retold by six different people in six different ways. Jade had to settle for audio testaments, where her interviewee swore on disk that the information he or she had given was true, to the best of his or her recollection.

Clark Griffith IV, for example, had plenty to say about Sam, and he had no qualms about telling his story—as he saw it.

That’s right, I’ve known Sam Gunn longer than anybody still living. Except maybe for Jill Meyers.

How long? I knew the little sonofabitch when he was a NASA astronaut, back in the days when we were first setting up a permanent base here on the Moon, over at Alphonsus.

I was his boss, believe it or not. It was like trying to train a cat—Sam always went his own way, fractured the rules left and right and somehow managed to come out smelling like a rose. Most of the time. He stepped into the doggie-doo now and then, but usually he was too fast on his feet for it to matter. By the time we’d catch up to him he was off somewhere else, raising more hell and giving us more trouble back in Washington.

Another thing about Sam. He’s not that much younger than I am, yet he was off flitting around the goddamned solar system like some kid on pills. How did he do that? And from what I hear he was still chasing women from here to Pluto when he fell into that black hole. At his age! Well, maybe it’s because he spent so much of his life in low-gravity environments. Keeps you young, so I hear. That’s why I retired here to the Moon, but it doesn’t seem to be helping me much.

Digressing? I’m digressing? I was talking about Sam. That’s what you want, isn’t it?

No, I don’t believed he’s dead. Never believed he fell into that mini-black hole out there past Pluto, either. It’s all a fraud. A load of bullcrap. Pure Sam Gunn, another one of his tricky little gambits.

He’ll be back, you can bet on it. Mini-black hole my great-grandmother! It’s a scam, the whole thing; don’t think otherwise.

When did I first meet Sam? God, let me think. It was back… never mind. Let me tell you about Sam’s last days with NASA. I got to fire the little pain-in-the-butt. Bounced him right out of the agency, good and proper. Happiest day of my life.

Why did NASA fire Sam Gunn? it’d be better to ask why we didn’t fire the little SOB. out of a cannon and get rid of him once and for all. Would’ve been a service to the human race.

I’m no detective, but I smelled a rat when Sam put in a formal request for a three-month leave of absence. I just stared at my desktop screen. Sam Gunn, going through regular channels? Something was fishy. I mean, Sam never did things according to regulations. Give him a road map with a route on the interstates plotted out by AAA and he’d go down every dirt road and crooked alley he could find, just to drive my blood pressure up to the bursting point.

Trouble was, the sawed-off little runt was a damned good astronaut. About as good as they came, as a flyer and ingenious troubleshooter. Like the time he saved the lunar mission by jury-rigging a still and getting all the stranded astronauts plastered so they’d be unconscious most of the time and use up less oxygen.

That was typical of Sam Gunn. A hero who left the rules and regulations in a shambles every time.

He had just come off his most notorious stunt of all, getting the first skipper of space station Freedom to punch the abandon ship alarm and riding back down to Earth in an emergency escape capsule with some young woman from a movie studio. He had to be hospitalized after they landed; he claimed it was from stress during reentry, but everybody at the Cape was wondering who was reentering what.

Anyway, there was his formal request for a three-month leave of absence, all filled out just as neat and precise as I would have done it myself. He was certainly entitled to the leave. But I knew Sam. Something underhanded was going on.

I called him into my office and asked him point-blank what he was doing. A waste of time.

“I need a rest,” he said. Then he added, “Sir.”

Sam’s face was as round and plain as a penny, and his wiry hair was kind of coppery color, come to think of it. Little snub of a nose with a scattering of freckles. His teeth had enough spaces between them so that he reminded me of a Jack-o’-lantern when he grinned.

He wasn’t grinning as he sat in front of my desk. He was all perfectly polite earnestness, dressed in a tie and a real suit, like an honest-to-Pete straight-arrow citizen. His eyes gave him away, though: they were as crafty as ever, glittering with visions that he wanted to keep secret from me.