Ben Bova: The Sam Gunn Omnibus

“Just the thing for the tension that arises from pre-death syndrome,” Sam muttered. Loud enough for Skip to hear, of course.

“The medics say the pills will ease our anxieties and help us to remain as quiet as possible while we wait for the rescue mission,” Skip said, glowering in Sam’s direction.

He didn’t bother to remind us that the rescue mission, according to Sandi’s unofficial word, was still twelve days off. We would be out of food in three more days, and the recycled water was starting to taste as if it hadn’t been recycled, if you know what I mean. The air was getting foul, too, but that was probably just our imaginations.

Sam appeared blithely unconcerned, even happy. He whistled cheerfully as Skip rationed out the tranquilizers, then gave his pills to me and scuttled off down the tunnel that led toward our barracks module. By the time I got to my bunk Sam was nowhere in sight. His whistling was gone. So was his pressure suit.

I put his pills under his mattress, wondering where he could have gone. Outside? For what? To increase his radiation dose? To get away from the rest of us? That was probably it. Underneath his wise-guy shell Sam was probably just as worried and tense as any of us, and he just didn’t want us to know it. He needed some solitude, not chemical tranquility. What better place to find solitude than the airless rocky waste of Mare Nubium?

That’s what I thought. That’s why I didn’t go out after him.

The same thing happened the next “morning” (by which I mean the time immediately after our sleep shift). And the next. The Skipper would gather us together in the command module, we would each take our ceremonial tranquilizer pill and a sip of increasingly bad water, and then we would crawl back to our bunks and try to do nothing that would use up body energy or burn air. All of us except Sam. He faked swallowing his pill, handed it to me when Skip wasn’t watching, and then disappeared with his pressure suit.

All of us were getting grumpier, surlier. I know I found myself resenting it whenever I had to use the toilet. I kept imagining my urine flowing straight back into our water tank without reprocessing. I guess I was starting to go crazy.

But Sam was happy as could be: chipper, joking, laughing it up. He would disappear each morning for several hours and then show up with a lopsided grin on his round face, telling jokes and making us all feel a little better.

Until the day Julio suddenly sat bolt upright on his bunk, the second or third morning after we had run out of tranquilizers, and yelled:

“Booze!”

Sam had been sitting on the edge of Julio’s bunk, telling an outrageous story of what he planned to do with Sandi once we got back to Houston.

“Booze!” Julio repeated. “I smell booze! I’m cracking up. I must be losing my marbles. I smell booze!”

For once in his life Sam looked apologetic, almost ashamed.

“You’re not cracking up,” he said, in as quiet a voice as I’ve ever heard Sam use. “I was going to tell you about it tomorrow—the stuff is almost ready for human consumption.”

You never saw three grown men so suddenly attentive.

With a self-deprecating little grin Sam explained, “I’ve been tinkering with the propellants and other junk out in the return module. They’re not doing us any good just sitting there. So I tinkered up a small still. Seems to be working okay. I tasted a couple sips today. It’ll take the enamel off your teeth, but it’s not all that bad. By tomorrow …”

He never got any further. We did a Keystone Kops routine, rushing for our pressure suits, jamming ourselves through the airlock and running out to the inert, idle, cussedly useless return module.

Sam was not kidding us. He had jury-rigged an honest-to-backwoods still inside the return module, fueling it with propellants from the modules tanks. The basic alcohol also came from the propellant, with water from the fuel cells and a few other ingredients that Sam had scrounged from Base Gamma’s medical supplies.

We took turns at the still’s business end, sticking its little copper tube into the water nipple of our helmets to sample Sam’s concoction. It was terrible. We loved it.

By the time we had staggered back to our barracks module, laughing and belching, we had made up our minds to let the other three guys in Barracks B share in Sam’s juice. But the Skipper was a problem. If we told him about it he’d have Sam up on charges and drummed out of the agency even before the rescue mission reached us. I figured if Old Stone Face found out he’d order the rescue mission to leave Sam behind.

“Have no fear,” Sam told us with a giggle. “I myself will reveal my activities to our noble Skipper.”

And before we could stop him he had tottered off toward the command module, whistling through the tunnel in a horribly sour off-key way.

An hour went by. Then two. We could hear Skip’s voice yelling from the command module, although we couldn’t make out the words. None of us had the guts to go down the tunnel and try to help Sam. After a while the tumult and the shouting died. Mickey Lee gave me a questioning glance. Silence. Ominous silence.

“You think Skip’s killed him?” Mickey asked.

“More likely Sam’s talked the Skipper to death,” Julio replied.

Timidly we slunk down the tunnel to the command module. The three other guys were in there with Sam and the Skipper. They were all quaffing Sam’s rocket juice and giggling at each other.

We were shocked, but we joined right in. Six days later, when the guys from Base Alpha landed their return module crammed with emergency food and fresh water for us, we invited them to join the party. A week after that, when the rescue mission from Kennedy finally showed up, we had been under the influence for so long that we told them to go away.

I had never realized before then what a lawyer Sam was. He had convinced the Skipper to read the medics’ report carefully, especially the part where they recommended using tranquilizers to keep us calm and minimize our energy consumption. Sam had then gotten the Skipper to punch up the medical definition of alcohol’s effects on the body, out of Houston’s medical files. Sure, enough, if you squinted the right way, you could claim that alcohol was a sort of a tranquilizer. That was enough justification for the Skipper, and we just about pickled ourselves in rocket juice until we got rescued.

The crystal statue glittered under the harsh rays of the unfiltered sun. The supervisor, still sitting on the lip of the truck’s hatch, said:

“He looks beautiful. You guys did a good job. Is the epoxy set?”

“Needs another few minutes, just to be sure,” said the hoist operator, tapping the toe of his boot against the base that they had poured on the lunar plain.

“What happened when you got back to Houston?” asked Jade. “Didn’t they get angry at you for being drunk?”

“Sure,” laughed the supervisor. “But what could they do? Sam’s booze pulled us through, and we could show that we were merely following the recommendations of the medics. Old Stone Face hushed it all up and we became heroes, just like Sandi told us we’d be—for about a week.”

“And Sam?”

“Oh, after a while he left the agency and started his own business: S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited. The rest you know about from the history disks. Entrepreneur, showman, scoundrel, trailblazer. It’s all true. He was all those things.”

“Did he and Sandi ever, uh … get together?” the hoist operator asked.

“She was too smart to let him corner her. Sandi used one of the other guys to protect her; married him, finally. Cowboy, if I remember right. They eloped and spent their honeymoon in orbit. Zero gee and all that. Sam pretended to be very upset by it, but by that time he was surrounded by women, all of them taller than he was.”