The Sam Gunn Omnibus

Decisions, decisions

“Hey, that’s not bad,” said Jim Gradowsky as he turned off the recorder. He grinned across his desk at Jade. “You did a good job, kid.”

She was sitting on the front inch and a half of her boss’s couch. “It’s only a voice disk,” she said apologetically. “I couldn’t get any video.”

Gradowsky leaned back and put his slippered feet on the desktop. “That’s okay. We’ll do a simulation. There’s enough footage on Sam Gunn for the computer graphics program to paint him with no sweat. The viewers’ll never know the difference. And we can recreate what Prokov must’ve looked like from his current photo; I assume he’ll have no objection to having his portrait done in 3-D.”

“He might,” Jade said in a small voice.

Shrugging, her boss answered, “Then we’ll fake it. We’ll have to fake the other people anyway, so what the hell. Public’s accustomed to it. We put a disclaimer in small print at the end of the credits.”

So that’s how they do the historical documentaries, Jade said to herself, suddenly realizing how the networks showed such intimate details of people long dead.

“Okay, kid, you got the assignment,” Gradowsky said grandly. “There must be dozens of people here in Selene and over at Lunagrad that knew Sam. Track ’em down and get ’em to talk to you.”

She jumped to her feet eagerly. “I’ve already heard about a couple of mining engineers who’re over at the base in Copernicus. And there’s a hotel executive at the casino in Hell Crater, a woman who—”

“Yeah, yeah. Great. Go find ’em,” said Gradowsky, suddenly impatient. “I’ll put an expense allowance in your credit account.”

“Thanks!” Jade felt tremendously excited. She was going to be a real reporter. She had won her spurs.

As she reached the door of Gradowsky’s office, though, he called to her. “Don’t let the expense account go to your head. And I want a copy of every bill routed to me, understand?”

“Yes. Of course.”

The weeks rolled by. Jade found that the real trick of interviewing people was to get them started talking. Once they began to talk the only problem was how much storage space her micro-recorder carried. Of course, many of her intended subjects refused to talk at all. Almost all of them were suspicious of Jade, at first. She learned how to work around their suspicions, how to show them that she was not an ordinary network newshound, how to make them understand that she liked Sam Gunn and wanted this biography to be a monument to his memory. Still, half the people she tried to see refused to be interviewed at all.

Jade tried to plan her travels logically, efficiently, to make the best use of the network’s expense money. But an interview in Copernicus led to a tip about a retired accountant living in Star City, all the way over on the Farside. The exotic woman who claimed that Sam had jilted her at the altar knew about a tour guide who lived by the Tranquility Base shrine, where the Apollo 11 lander sat carefully preserved under its glassteel meteor dome. And on, and on.

Jade traveled mostly by tour bus, trundling across the pockmarked lunar plains at a reduced fare, packed in with visitors from Earth. For the first time she saw her home world as strangers see it: barren yet starkly beautiful, new and rugged and wild. When they talked of their own homes on Earth they mostly complained about the weather, or the taxes, or the crowds of people at the spaceport. Jade looked through the bus’s big tinted windows at the lovely blue sphere hanging above the horizon and wondered if she would find Earth crowded and dirty and humdrum if she lived there.

Once she took a passenger rocket for the jaunt from Selene to Aristarchus, crossing Mare Nubium and the wide Sea of Storms in less than half an hour. She felt her insides drop away for the few minutes the rocket soared in free fall at the top of its ballistic trajectory. The retros fired and she felt weight returning before her stomach became unmanageable.

She piled up more voice disks, more stories about Sam Gunn. Some were obviously fabrications, outright lies. Others seemed outrageous exaggerations of what might have originally been true events.

“You’ve got to get some corroboration for this stuff,” Gradowsky told her time and again. “Even when your pigeons are talking about people who’re now dead, their families could come out of nowhere and sue the ass off us.”

Corroboration was rare. No two people seemed to remember Sam Gunn in exactly the same way. A single incident might be retold by six different people in six different ways. Jade had to settle for audio testaments, where her interviewee swore on disk that the information he or she had given was true, to the best of his or her recollection.

Clark Griffith IV, for example, had plenty to say about Sam, and he had no qualms about telling his story—as he saw it.