Ben Bova - The Sam Gunn Omnibus

In those days there were only two bars in Selene City, one frequented by management types and tourists, the other the haunt of the workers. Jade found herself pushing through the crowd at the incongruously named Pelican Bar.

Friends called to her; strangers smiled at the diminutive redhead. But Jade saw and heard them only dimly.

The Pelican’s owner tended the bar himself, leaving the robots to handle anyone too much in a hurry for a joke or a story. He was a paunchy middle-aged man, gleamingly bald beneath the overhead fluorescents. He seemed to smile all the time. At least, every time Jade had seen him his face was beaming happily.

“Hey there, Green Eyes! Haven’t seen you since your birthday bash.”

Her coworkers had surprised her with a party to celebrate her twentieth birthday, several weeks earlier. Jade sat on the last stool in the farthest corner of the bar, as distant from everyone else as she could manage.

“Want your usual?”

She hadn’t been to the Pelican—or anywhere else, for that matter—often enough to know what her “usual” might be. But she nodded glumly.

“Comin’ right up.”

A guy in a tan leather vest and turquoise-cinched bolo tie pulled up the stool next to Jade’s, a drink already in his hand. He smiled handsomely at her.

“Hi, Red. Haven’t I seen you up at the landing port?”

Jade shook her head. “Not me.”

“Must be someplace else. I’m new here, just arrived last week for a year’s contract.”

Jade said nothing. The newcomer tried a few more ploys, but when they failed to get a response from her he shrugged and moved away.

The bartender returned with a tall frosted glass filled with a dark bubbling liquid and tinkling with real ice cubes.

“Here you go! Genuine Coca-Cola!”

Jade said, “Thanks,” as she took the cold sweating glass in her hand.

“You’re never gonna win the Miss Popularity contest if you keep givin’ guys the cold shoulder, y’know.”

“I’m not interested in any contests.”

The bartender shrugged. “H’m, yeah, well maybe. But there’s somebody over there—” he jabbed a thumb back toward the crowd at the other end of the bar,”—that you oughtta meet.”

“Why?”

“You were askin’ about Sam Gunn, weren’t you? Zach Bonner said you were.”

Her supervisor. “Is Zach here?” she asked..

“Naw, too early for him. But this guy here now, he was a buddy of Sam’s, back in the early days.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. You’ll see.”

The bartender waddled away, toward the crowd. When he came back, Jade saw that a compactly built gray-haired man was coming down the other side of the bar toward her, holding a pilsner glass half filled with beer in his left hand.

“Jade, meet Felix Sanchez. Felix, this is Jade. I dunno what her last name is ’cause she never told me.”

Sanchez was a round-faced Latino with a thick dark mustache. He smiled at Jade and extended his hand. She let him take hers, and for a wild moment she thought he was going to bring it to his lips. But he merely held it for several seconds. His hand felt warm. It engulfed her own.

“Such beautiful eyes,” Sanchez said, his voice so low that she had to strain to hear it over the buzz of the crowd. “No wonder you are called Jade.”

She felt herself smiling back at him. Sanchez must have been more than fifty years old, she guessed. But he seemed to be in good athletic shape beneath his casual pullover and slacks.

“You knew Sam Gunn?” Jade asked.

“Knew him? I was nearly killed by him!” And Sanchez laughed heartily while the bartender gave up all pretense of working and planted both his elbows on the plastic surface of his bar.

Everybody blamed Sam for what happened—Sanchez said—but if you ask me it never would’ve happened if the skipper hadn’t gone a little crazy.

Space station Freedom was a purely government project, ten years behind schedule and a billion bucks or so over budget. Nothing unusual about that. The agency’s best team of astronauts and mission specialists were picked to be the first crew. Nothing unusual about that, either.

What was weird was that somehow Sam Gunn was included in that first crew. And John J. Johnson was named commander. See, Sam and Commander Johnson got along like hydrazine and nitric acid—hypergolic. Put them in contact and they explode.

You’ve got to see the picture. John J. Johnson was a little over six feet tall, lean as a contrail, and the straightest straight-arrow in an agency full of stiff old graybeards. He had the distinguished white hair and the elegant good looks of an airline pilot in a TV commercial.

But inside that handsome head was a brain that had a nasty streak in it. “Jay-Cubed,” as we called him, always went by the rule book, even when it hurt. Especially when it hurt, if you ask me.

Until the day we learned that Gloria Lamour was coming to space station Freedom. That changed everything, of course.

Sam, you know, was the opposite of the commander in every way possible. Sam was short and stubby where Johnson was tall and rangy. Hair like rusty Brillo. Funny color eyes; I could never tell if they were blue or green. Sam was gregarious, noisy, crackling with nervous energy; Johnson was calm, reserved, detached. Sam wanted to be everybody’s pal; Johnson wanted respect, admiration, but most of all he wanted obedience.

Sam was definitely not handsome. His round face was bright as a penny, and sometimes he sort of looked like Huckleberry Finn or maybe even that old-time child star Mickey Rooney. But handsome he was not. Still, Sam had a way with women. I know this is true because he would tell me about it all the time. Me, and anybody else who would be within earshot. Also, I saw him in action, back at the Cape and during our training sessions in Houston. The little guy could be charming and downright courtly when he wanted to be.

Ninety days on a space station with Sam and Commander Johnson. It was sort of like a shakedown cruise; our job was to make sure all the station’s systems were working as they ought to. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. The station wasn’t big enough to hide in.

There were only six of us on that first mission, but we kept getting in each other’s way—and on each other’s nerves. It was like a ninety-day jail sentence. We couldn’t get out. We had nothing to do but work. There were no women. I think we would’ve all gone batty if it weren’t for Sam. He was our one-man entertainment committee.

He was full of jokes, full of fun. He organized the scavenger hunt that kept us busy every night for two solid weeks trying to find the odd bits of junk that he had hidden away in empty oxygen cylinders, behind sleep cocoons, even floating up on the ceiling of the station’s one and only working head. He set up the darts tournament, where the “darts” were really spitballs made of wadded Velcro and the reverse side of the improvised target was a blow-up photo of Commander Johnson.

Sam was a beehive of energy. He kept us laughing. All except the commander, who had never smiled in his life, so far as any of us knew.

And it was all in zero-gee. Or almost. So close it didn’t make any real difference. The scientists called it microgravity. We called it weightlessness, zero-gee, whatever. We floated. Everything floated if it wasn’t nailed down. Sam loved zero-gee. Johnson always looked like he was about to puke.

Johnson ruled with an aluminum fist. No matter how many tasks mission control loaded on us, Johnson never argued with them. He pushed us to do everything those clowns on the ground could think of, and to do it on time and according to regulations. No shortcuts, no flimflams. Naturally, the more we accomplished the more mission control thought up for us to do. Worse, Johnson asked mission control for more tasks. He volunteered for more jobs for us to do. We were working, working, working all the time, every day, without a break.