Ben Bova - The Sam Gunn Omnibus

, Sam gave Julio a sorrowful stare. “The two systems are incompatible, Jules. Two separate teams of engineers designed them and none of the geniuses in the labs ever thought we might have to run one off the other in an emergency.”

Julio cast an unbelieving glance at Sam. So Sam grinned and launched into the phoniest Latino accent you ever heard. “The nuclear theeng, man, it got too many volts for the fuel cells. Like, you plug the nukie to the fuel cells, man, you make a beeg boom an’ we all go to dat beeg San Juan in thee sky. You better steek to pluckin’ chickens, man, an’ leave the eelectreecity alone.”

Julio, who towered a good inch and a half over Sam, laughed good-naturedly and answered, “Okay, Shorty, I dig.”

“Shorty! Shorty?” Sam’s face went red. “All right, that’s it. The hell with the betting pool. I’m gonna let you guys die of boredom. Serve you right.”

We made a big fuss and soothed his feathers and cajoled him into setting up the pool. With a great show of hurt feelings and reluctant but utterly selfless nobility, Sam pushed Mickey Lee out of the chair in front of the computer terminal and began playing the keyboard like a virtuoso pianist. Within a few minutes the screen was displaying a list of the possible ways for us to die, with Sam’s swiftly calculated odds next to each entry. At the touch of a button the screen displayed a graph showing how the odds for each mode of dying changed as time went on.

Suffocation, for example, started off as less than a one percent probability. But within a month the chances began to rise fairly steeply. “The air scrubbers need replacement filters,” Sam explained, “and we’ll be out of ’em inside of two more weeks.”

“They’ll have us out of here in two weeks, for Christ’s sake,” Julio said.

“Or drop fresh supplies for us,” said Ron Avery, the taciturn pilot we called Cowboy because of his lean, lanky build and slow western drawl.

“Those are the odds,” Sam snapped. “The computer does not lie. Pick your poison and place your bets.”

I put fifty bucks down on Air Contamination, not telling the other guys about my earlier conversation with Sam. Julio took Starvation, Mickey settled on Dehydration (Lack of Water) and Cowboy picked Murder—which made me shudder.

“What about you, Sam?” I asked.

“I’ll wait till the other guys have a chance,” he said.

“You gonna let the Skipper in on this?” asked Julio.

Sam shook his head. “If I tell him …”

“I’ll tell him,” Cowboy volunteered, with a grim smile. “I’ll even let him have Murder, if he wants it. I can always switch to Suicide.”

“Droll fellow,” said Sam.

“Well, hell,” Cowboy insisted, “if a feller takes Suicide he can always make sure he wins just by killing himself, can’t he now?”

It was one of those rare occasions when Sam had no reply. He simply stared at Cowboy in silence.

Well, you probably read about the mission in your history classes. Houston was supporting three separate operations on the Moon at the same time and they were stretched to the limit down there. Old Stone Face promised us a rescue flight in a week. But they had a problem with the booster when they tried to rush things on the launch pad too much and the blessed launch had to be put back a week, then another week. They sent an unmanned supply craft to us, of course, but the descent stage got gummed up. Our fresh food, air filters and water supply wound up orbiting the Moon fifty miles over our heads.

Sam calculated the odds against all these foul-ups and came to the conclusion that Houston was working overtime to kill us. “Must be some kind of an experiment,” he told us. “Maybe they need some martyrs to make people more aware of the space program.”

Cowboy immediately asked if that fell under the category of Murder. He was intent on winning the pool, even if it killed him.

We learned afterward that Houston was deep in trouble because of us. The White House was firing people right and left, Congressional committees were gearing up to investigate the fiasco, and the CIA was checking out somebody’s crackbrained idea that the Japanese were behind all our troubles. Or maybe Arianespace, the European space company.

Meanwhile, we were stranded on the Mare Nubium with nothing much to do but let our beards grow and hope for sinus troubles that would cut off our ability to sense odors.

Old Stone Face was magnificent, in his unflinching way. He was on the line to us every day, despite the fact that his superiors in Houston and Washington were either being fired directly by the President herself or roasted over the simmering fires of media criticism. There must have been a zillion reporters at Mission Control by the second week of our marooning. We could feel the hubbub and tension whenever we talked with Stony.

“The countdown for your rescue flight is proceeding on an accelerated schedule,” he told us. It would never occur to him to say, We’re hurrying as fast as we can. “Liftoff is now scheduled for 0700 hours on the twenty-fifth.”

None of us needed to look at a calendar to know that the twenty-fifth was seventeen days away. Sam’s betting pool was looking more serious by the hour. Even the Skipper had finally taken the plunge: Suffocation.

If it weren’t for Sandi Hemmings we might all have gone crazy. She took over as Capcom during the night shift, when most of the reporters and the agency brass were either asleep or drinking away their troubles. She gave us the courage and desire to pull through, partly by just smiling at us and looking female enough to make us want to survive, but mainly by giving us the straight info with no nonsense.

“They’re in deep trouble over at Kennedy,” she would tell us. “They’ve had to go on triple shifts and call up boosters that they didn’t think they would need until next year. Some Senator in Washington is yelling that we ought to ask the Russians or the Japanese to help us out.”

“As if either of them had upper stages that could make it to the Moon without six months worth of modification work,” one of our guys grumbled.

“Well,” Sandi said with her brightest smile, “you’ll all be heroes when you finally get back here. The women will be standing in line to admire you.”

“You won’t have to stand in line, Sandi,” Cowboy answered, in a rare burst of words. “You’ll always be number one with us.”

The others crowded into the command module added their heartfelt agreement.

Sandi laughed, undaunted by the prospect of having the eight of us grabbing for her. “I hope you shave first,” she said.

Remember, she could see us but she couldn’t smell us.

A night or two later she spent hours reading to us the suggestions made by the Houston medical team on how to stretch out our dwindling supplies of food, water, and air. They boiled down to one basic rule: lie down and don’t exert yourselves. Great advice, especially when you’re beginning to really worry that you’re not going to make it through this mess. Just what we needed to do, lie back in our bunks and do nothing but think.

I caught a gleam in Sam’s eye, though, as Sandi waded through the medics’ recommendations. The Skipper asked her to send the whole report through our computer. She did, and he spent the whole next day poring over it. Sam spent the day—well, I couldn’t figure out where he’d gotten to. I didn’t see him all day long, and Base Gamma really wasn’t big enough to hide in, even for somebody as small as Sam.

After going through all the medics’ gobbledegook the Skipper ordered us to take tranquilizers. We had a small supply of downers in the base pharmaceutical stores, and Skip divided them equally among us. At the rate of three a day they would last just four days, with four pills left over. About as useful as a cigarette lighter in hell, but the Skipper played it by the book and ordered us to start swallowing the tranquilizers.