Ben Bova - The Sam Gunn Omnibus

The skipper called us together into the command module for the news. Just as calmly as if he was announcing a weather report from Tibet he told us:

“There will be a special shuttle mission to the station three days from this morning. We will be visited for an unspecified length of time by a video crew from Hollywood. Gloria Lamour, the video star, will apparently be among them.”

It hit us like a shock wave, but Commander Johnson spelled it out just as if we were going to get nothing more than a new supply of aspirin.

“Miss Lamour will be here to photograph the first video drama ever filmed in space,” he told us. “She and her crew have received clearance from the highest levels of the White House.”

“Three cheers for President Heston,” Sam piped.

Commander Johnson started to glare at him, but his expression turned into a wintry smile. A smile that said, You’ll get yours, mister. None of the rest of us moved from where we stood anchored in our foot restraints.

The commander went on. “The video crew will be using the laboratory module for their taping. They will use the unoccupied scientists’ privacy cubicles for their sleeping quarters. There should be practically no interference with your task schedules, although I expect you to extend every courtesy and assistance to our visitors.”

The five of us grinned and nodded eagerly.

“It will be necessary to appoint a crew member to act as liaison between the video team and ourselves,” said the commander.

Five hands shot up to volunteer so hard that all five of us would have gone careening into the overhead if we hadn’t been anchored to the floor by the foot restraints.

“I will take on that extra duty myself,” the skipper said, smiling enough now to show his teeth, “so that you can continue with your work without any extra burdens being placed on you.”

“Son of a bitch,” Sam muttered. If the commander heard him, he ignored it.

Gloria Lamour on space station Freedom! The six of us had been living in this orbital monastery for almost two months. We were practically drooling with anticipation. I found it hard to sleep, and when I did my dreams were so vivid they were embarrassing. The other guys floated through their duties grinning and joking. We started making bets about who would be first to do what. But Sam, normally the cheerful one, turned glum. “Old Jay-Cubed is gonna hover around her like a satellite. He’s gonna keep her in the lab module and away from us. He won’t let any of us get close enough for an autograph, even.”

That took the starch out of us, so to speak.

The big day arrived. The orbiter Reagan made rendezvous with the station and docked at our main airlock. The five of us were supposed to be going about our regular tasks. Only the commander’s anointed liaison man—himself—went to the airlock to greet our visitors.

Yet somehow all five of us managed to be in the command module, where all three monitor screens on the main console were focused on the airlock.

Commander Johnson stood with his back to the camera, decked out in crisp new sky-blue coveralls, standing as straight as a man can in zero-gee.

“I’ll cut off the oxygen to his sleeping cubicle,” muttered Larry Minetti, our life-support specialist. “I’ll fix the bastard, you watch and see.”

We ignored Larry.

“She come through the hatch yet?” Sam called. He was at my regular station, the communications console, instead of up front with us watching the screens.

“What’re you doing back there?” I asked him, not taking my eyes off the screens. The hatch’s locking wheel was starting to turn.

“Checking into Cap’n Bligh’s files, what else?”

“Come on, you’re gonna miss it! The hatch is opening.”

Sam shot over to us like a stubby missile and stopped his momentum by grabbing Larry and me by the shoulders. He stuck his head between us.

The hatch was swung all the way open by a grinning shuttle astronaut. Two mission specialists—male—pushed a pallet loaded with equipment past the still-erect Commander Johnson. We were all erect too, with anticipation.

A nondescript woman floated through the hatch behind the mission specialists and the pallet. She was in gray coveralls. As short as Sam. Kind of a long, sour face. Not sour, exactly. Sad. Unhappy. Mousy dull brown hair plastered against her skull with a zero-gee net. Definitely not a glamorous video star.

“Must be her assistant,” Al Dupres muttered.

“Her director.”

“Her dog.”

We stared at those screens so hard you’d think that Gloria Lamour would have appeared just out of the energy of our five palpitating, concentrating brain waves.

No such luck. The unbeautiful woman floated right up to Commander Johnson and took his hand in a firm, almost manly grip.

“Hello,” she said, in a nasal Bronx accent. “Gloria Lamour is not on this trip, so don’t get your hopes up.”

I wish I could have seen the commander’s face. But, come to think of it, he probably didn’t blink an eye. Sam gagged and went over backwards into a zero-gee loop. The rest of us moaned, booed, and hollered obscenities at the screens.

Through it all I clearly heard the commander speak the little speech he had obviously rehearsed for days: “Welcome aboard space station Freedom! Miss Lamour. Mi casa es su casa.”

Big frigging deal!

What it worked out to was this: The crab apple’s name was Arlene Gold. She was a technician for the video company. In fact, she was the entire video crew, all by herself. “And her pallet-full of equipment. She was here to shoot background footage. Was Gloria Lamour coming up later? She got very cagey about answering that one.

We got to know her pretty well over the next several days. Commander Johnson lost interest in her immediately, but although he still wouldn’t let any of us go into the lab module, she had to come into the wardroom for meals. She was a New Yorker, which she pronounced “Noo Yawkeh.” Testy, suspicious, always on guard. Guess I can’t blame her, stuck several hundred miles up in orbit with five drooling maniacs and a commander who behaved like a robot.

But god, was she a sourpuss.

Larry approached her. “You handle zero-gee very well. Most of us got sick the first couple of days.”

“What’d ya expect,” she almost snarled, “screaming and fainting?”

A day or so later Rog Cranston worked up the courage to ask, “Have you done much flying?”

“Whatsit to ya?” she snapped back at him.

It only took a few days of that kind of treatment for us to shun her almost completely. When she came into the wardroom for meals we backed away and gave her the run of the galley’s freezers and microwave. We made certain there was an empty table for her.

Except that Sam kept trying to strike up a conversation with her. Kept trying to make her laugh, or even smile, no matter how many times she rebuffed him. He even started doing short jokes for her, playing the buffoon, telling her how much he admired taller women. (She might have been half a centimeter taller than he was on the ground; it was hard to tell in zero-gee.)

Her responses ranged from “Get lost” to “Don’t be such a jerk.”

I pulled Sam aside after a few evenings of this and asked him when he had turned into a masochist.

Sam gave me a knowing grin. “My old pappy always told me, ‘When they hand you a lemon, son, make lemonade.’ ”

“With her.”

“You see any other women up here?”

I didn’t answer, but I had to admit that Larry Minetti was starting to look awfully good to me.

“Besides,” Sam said, his grin turning sly, “when Gloria Lamour finally gets here, Arlene will be her guardian, won’t she?”