Short fiction complete, p.170
Short Fiction Complete, page 170
“So it was his father who fed him the inside information from the Department of Commerce.”
“Just the fact that the program had a small-business set-aside,” Johansen countered. “Which was public knowledge. He didn’t do anything wrong.”
“But he certainly didn’t want anyone to know about their relationship, either, did he?”
Johansen nodded. “I guess not. You know, I never saw Sam so—I guess subdued is the right word. He and Clement spent a solid week together. Once the hospital people let us get up and walk around, they even went deep-sea fishing together.”
“I’ll have to check him out,” the reporter said, mostly to herself.
“Clement died a few years later. He retired from the Commerce Department and applied for residency right here in this habitat. Thought the low gravity would help his heart condition, but he died in his sleep before the habitat was finished building. Sam gave him a nice funeral. Quiet and tasteful. Not what you’d expect from Sam at all.”
“And his mother? Is she still alive?”
Johansen shook his head. “He would never talk about his mother. Not a word. Maybe he discussed her with Clement, but I just don’t know.”
The reporter sat back in her chair, silent for a long moment while the candlelight flickered across her face. “So that’s how Sam made his first fortune. With Vacuum Cleaners, Incorporated.”
“VCI,” Johansen corrected. “Yeah, he made a fortune, all right. Then he squandered it all on that loony hotel deal a couple of years later. By then he was completely out of VCI, though. I stayed on as president until Rockledge eventually bought us out.”
“Rockledge?”
“Right. The big corporations always win in the end. Oh, I got a nice hunk of change out of it. Very nice. Set me up for life. Allowed me to buy a slice of this habitat and become a major shareholder.”
“Did Sam ever marry Bonnie Jo?”
Johansen grimaced.
That got decided while we were still on Guam—Johansen replied.
Bonnie Jo hung around, just like Clement did. Sam seemed to spend more time with his father than with her, so I wound up walking the hospital grounds with her, taking her out to dinner, that kind of stuff.
Finally, one night over dinner, she told me she and Clement would be leaving the next day.
I said something profound, like, “Oh.”
“When will you and Sam be allowed to leave the hospital?” she asked. We were in the best restaurant in the capital city, Agana. It was sort of a dump; the big tourist boom hadn’t started yet in Guam. That didn’t happen until a few years later, when Sam opened up the orbital hotel.
Anyway, I shrugged for an answer. I hadn’t even bothered to ask the medics about when we’d be let go. The week had been very restful, after all the pressures we had been through. And as long as Bonnie Jo was there, I really didn’t care when they sent us packing.
“Well,” she said, “Albert and I go out on the morning flight tomorrow.” There was a kind of strange expression on her face, as if she were searching for something and not finding it.
“I guess you’ll marry Sam once we get back to the States,” I said.
She moved her eyes away from mine and didn’t answer. I felt as low as one of those worms that lives on the bottom of the ocean.
“Well . . . congratulations,” I said.
In a voice so low I could barely hear her, Bonnie Jo said, “I don’t want to marry Sam.”
I felt my jaw muscles tighten. “But you still want to protect your father’s investment, don’t you? And your own.”
Her eyes locked onto mine. “I could do that by marrying the president of VCI, couldn’t I?”
I know how it feels to have your space suit ripped open. All the air whooshed out of me.
“Spence, you big handsome lunk, you’re my investment,” she said. “Didn’t you know that?”
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
I nearly knocked the table over kissing her. I had never felt so happy in all my life.
“Which number wife was she?” The reporter was surprised at the acid in her voice.
Johansen pushed his chair slightly back from the restaurant table. “Number four,” he said, somewhat reluctantly.
“And it didn’t work out?”
“Wasn’t her fault,” he said. “Not really. I spent more time in orbit than at home. She met this kid who was an assistant vice president at her fathers bank. They had a lot more in common. . . .”
Johansen’s voice trailed off. The candle between them was guttering low. The table was littered with the crumbs of dessert, emptied coffee cups. The restaurant was almost empty, except for one other couple and the stumpy little robot waiters standing impassively by each table.
The reporter had one more question to ask. “I know that nobody ever retrieved the Apollo 11 lunar module. What happened to Sam’s plan?”
Johansen made a tight little grin. “The little guy was nobody’s fool. Once the World Court decided that the right of salvage was pretty much the same in space as it is at sea, we went to the Moon and laid claim to all the hardware that Apollo astronauts had left behind, at all six landing sites.”
“But it’s all still there,” the reporter said. “I’ve been to the Tranquility Base site. And the others. . . .”
“That’s right.” Johansen’s smile broadened, genuinely pleased. “Sam’s original thought was to auction the stuff off to the highest bidder. The Japanese were hot for it. So was the Smithsonian, of course. And some group of high-tech investors from Texas.”
“So who bought it?”
“Nobody,” Johansen replied. “Because Sam got the bright idea of offering it for free to Moonbase. The people there loved him for it. Thanks to Sam, Moonbase legally owns all the Apollo hardware resting on the Moon. Those landing sites are big tourist attractions for them.”
“That was generous.”
“Sure was. And, of course, Sam could get just about anything he wanted from Moonbase for years afterward.”
“I see,” said the reporter.
Johansen signaled for the bill. The robot trundled over, digits lighting up on the screen set into its torso. He tapped out his O.K. on the robot’s keyboard and let the photocell take an impression of his thumbprint. The reporter turned off her recorder.
Johansen moved gracefully around the little table and held her chair while she stood up, feeling strangely unhappy that this interview was at an end.
As they strolled slowly down the footpath that led to the hotel where she was staying, Johansen suggested, “How’d you like to go hang gliding tomorrow morning? We can use the low-gee area of the habitat; there’s no danger at all.”
The reporter knew she should refuse. Cut the cord cleanly. The interview is finished. Don’t get involved. Make the break now.
“I’d love to,” she heard herself say.
Johansen’s smile beamed brighter than a laser. They walked along the footpath in the man-made twilight toward the little cluster of low buildings that was Gunnstown, where her hotel was situated. Johansen pointed out the lights of other towns overhead. In the darkness they could not see that the habitat’s interior curved up and over them, the interior of a miles-wide cylinder.
“They’re like stars,” she said, gazing up at the lights.
“Some people even see constellations in them,” he told her. “See, there’s a cat—over there. And the mouse, down farther . . .
She nestled close to him as he pointed out the man-made constellations.
“Do you think you’ll ever marry again?” she asked in a whisper.
“Not until I’m certain it will last,” he answered immediately. “I’ve had enough hit-and-runs in my life. I want somebody I can settle down with and live happily ever after.”
The reporter smiled up at him, happy and content. After all, she told herself, if this story about Sam Gunn goes over well, I’ll be able to call my own shots with the network. Solar needs a correspondent here on this new habitat. Maybe I’ll settle down here permanently. It might not be so bad. In fact, it could be very good.
She smiled secretly and said to herself, Could be.
The Long Fall
Everybody blamed Sam for it, 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.
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, and most of all 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 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 but our work. There were no women. I think we would’ve all gone batty if it hadn’t been 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 short cuts, no flim-flams. 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.
“He’s gonna kill us with overwork,” grumbled Roger Cranston, our structural specialist.
“The way I figure it,” Sam said, “is that Jay-Cubed wants us to do all the tasks that the next crew is supposed to do. That way the agency can cut the next mission and save seventy million bucks or so.”
Al Dupres agreed sourly. “He works us to death and then he gets a big kiss on the cheek from Washington.” Al was French Canadian, the agency’s token international representative.
Sam started muttering about Captain Bligh and the Bounty.
They were right. Johnson was so eager to look good to the agency that he was starting to go a little wacko. Some of it was Sam’s fault, of course. But I really think zero-gee affected the flow of blood to his brain. That, and the news about Gloria Lamour, which affected his blood flow elsewhere.
We were six weeks into the mission. Sam had kept his nose pretty clean, stuck to his duties as logistics officer and all the other jobs the skipper thought up for him, and kept out of Johnson’s silver-fox hair as much as he could.
Oh, he had loosened the screwtop on the commander’s coffee squeezebulb one morning, so that Johnson splashed the stuff all over the command module. Imagine ten thousand little bubbles of coffee (heavy on the cream) spattering all over, floating and scattering like ten thousand teeny fireflies. Johnson sputtered and cursed and glowered at Sam, his coveralls soaked from collar to crotch.
I nearly choked, trying not to laugh. Sam put on a look of innocence that would have made the angels sigh. He offered to chase down each and every bubble and clean up the mess. Johnson just glowered at him while the bubbles slowly wafted into the air vent above the command console.
Then there was the water bag in the commander’s sleep cocoon. And the gremlin in the computer system that printed out random graffiti like: Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. Or: Where is Fletcher Christian when we really need him?
Commander Johnson started muttering to himself a lot, and staring at Sam when the little guy’s back was to him. It was an evil, red-eyed stare. Sent chills up my spine.
Then I found out about the CERV test.
Crew Emergency Re-entry Vehicle, CERV. Lifeboats for the space station. We called them “capsules.” Suppose something goes really wrong on the station, like we’re hit by a meteor. (More likely, we’d be hit by a piece of manmade junk. There’s millions of bits of crap floating around out there.) If the station’s so badly damaged we have to abandon ship, we jump into the capsules and ride back down to Earth.
Nobody’d done it yet, up to then. The lifeboats had been tested with dummies inside them. But not real live human beings. Not yet.
I was on duty at the communications console in the command module that morning when Commander Johnson was on the horn with Houston. All of a sudden my screen breaks up into fuzz and crackles.
“This is a scrambled transmission,” the commander said in his monotone, from his station at the command console, three feet to my right. He plugged in a headset and clipped the earphone on. And he smiled at me.
I took the hint and made my way to the galley for a squeeze of coffee, more stunned by that smile than curious about his scrambled conversation with Mission Control. When I got back Johnson was humming tunelessly to himself. The headset was off and he was still smiling. It was a ghastly smile.
Although we put in a lot of overtime hours to finish the tasks our commander so obligingly piled on us, Johnson himself left the command module precisely at seven each evening, ate a solitary meal in the wardroom and then got eight full hours of sleep. His conscience was perfectly at ease, and he apparently had no idea whose face was on the reverse of the darts target.
As soon as he left that evening I pecked out the subroutine I had put into the comm computer and reviewed his scrambled transmission to Houston. He may be the skipper, but I’m the comm officer—and nothing goes in or out without my seeing it.
The breath gushed out of me when I read the file. No wonder the skipper had smiled.
I called Sam and got him to meet me in the wardroom. The commander had assigned him to getting the toilet in the unoccupied laboratory module to work, so that the scientists who’d be coming up eventually could crap in their own territory. In addition to all his regular duties, of course.
“A CERV test, huh?” Sam said when I told him. “We don’t have enough to do; he’s gonna throw a lifeboat drill at us.”
“Worse than that,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Sam was hovering a few inches off the floor. He liked to do that; made him feel taller.
Chairs are useless in zero-gee. I had my feet firmly anchored in the foot loops set into the floor around the wardroom table. Otherwise a weightless body would drift all over the place.
Leaning closer toward Sam, I whispered, “It won’t be just a drill. He’s going to pop one of the lifeboats and send it into a real re-entry trajectory.”
“No shit?”
“No shit. He got permission from Houston this morning for a full test.”
Sam grabbed the edge of the galley table and pulled himself so close to me I could count the pale freckles on his snub of a nose. Sudden understanding lit up those blue-green eyes of his.
“I’ll bet I know who’s going to be in the lifeboat that gets to take the long fall,” he whispered back at me.
I nodded.
“That’s why he smiled at me this evening.”
“He’s been working out every detail in the computer,” I said, my voice as low as that of a guy planning a bank heist, even though we were alone in the wardroom. “He’s going to make certain you’re in the lab module by yourself so you’ll be the only one in the lifeboat there. Then he’s going to pop it off.”
The thought of riding one of those uncontrolled little capsules through the blazing heat of re-entry and then landing God knows where—maybe the middle of the ocean, maybe the middle of the Gobi Desert—scared the hell out of me. Strangely, Sam grinned.
