The Sam Gunn Omnibus

The Long Fall

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.

“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 good ship Bounty.

They were right. Johnson was so eager to look good to the agency that he was starting to go a little whacko. 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, kept out of Johnson’s silver-fox hair as much as he could.

Oh, he had loosened the screw-top on the commander’s coffee squeeze-bulb 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 Reentry 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 would’ve been hit by a piece of man-made junk. There were millions of bits of debris floating around out there in those days.) 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, 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 me 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 eventually be coming up 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. Except for Sam, who somehow managed to keep himself put.

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 reentry trajectory.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. He got permission from Houston this morning for a full balls-out 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 on 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 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 reentry and then landing God knows where—maybe the middle of the ocean, maybe the middle of the Gobi Desert—it scared the hell out of me. Strangely, Sam grinned.

“You want to be the first guy who tries out one of those capsules?” I asked.

“Hell no,” he said. “But suppose our noble liege-lord happens to make a small mistake and he’s the one to take the ride back home?”

I felt my jaw drop open. “How’re you going to …”

Sam grinned his widest. “Wouldn’t it be poetic if we could arrange things so that ol’ Cap’n Bligh himself gets to take the fall?”

I stared at him. “You’re crazy.”

“That’s what they said about Orville and Wilbur, pal.”

The next week was very intense. Sam didn’t say another word to me about it, but I knew he was hacking into the commander’s comm link each night and trying to ferret out every last detail of the upcoming lifeboat drill. Commander Johnson played everything close to the vest, though. He never let on, except that he smiled whenever he saw Sam, the sort of smile that a homicidal maniac might give his next victim. I even thought I heard him cackling to himself once or twice.

The other three men in the crew began to sense the tension. Even Sam became kind of quiet, almost.

Then we got word that Gloria Lamour was coming up to the station.

Maybe you don’t remember her, because her career was so tragically short. She was the sexiest, slinkiest, most gorgeous hunk of redheaded femininity ever to grace the video screen. A mixture of Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe and Michelle Pfeiffer. With some Katharine Hepburn thrown in for brains and even a flash of Bette Midler’s sass.

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?”

I got it. Get close to the sourpuss and she’ll let you get close to the sex goddess. There was method in Sam’s madness. He seemed to spend all his spare time trying to melt Arlene’s heart of steel. I thought he had even lost interest in rigging the skipper’s CERV test so that it would be John J. Johnson who got fired off the station, not Sam Gunn.

Sam practically turned himself inside out for Arlene. He became elfin, a pixie, a leprechaun whenever she came to the galley or wardroom.

And it seemed to be working. She let him eat dinner at the same table with her one night.

“After all,” I overheard Sam tell her, “we little people have to stick together.”

“Don’t get ideas,” Arlene replied. But her voice had lost some of its sharp edge. She damned near smiled at Sam.

The next morning Johnson called Sam to his command console. “You are relieved of your normal duties for the next few days,” the skipper said. “You will report to the lab module and assist Ms. Gold in testing her equipment.”

I shot a surprised glance at Larry, who was at his console, next to mine. His eyebrows were rising up to his scalp. Sam just grinned and launched himself toward the hatch. The commander smiled crookedly at his departing back.

“So what’s with you two?” I asked him a couple nights later. He had just spent eighteen hours straight in the lab module with Arlene and her video gear.

“What two?”

“You and Arlene.”

Sam cocked his head to one side. “With us? Nothing. She needs a lot of help with all that video gear. Damned studio sent her here by herself. They expect her to muscle those lasers and camera rigs around. Hell, even in zero-gee that’s a job.”

I got the picture. “So when Gloria Lamour finally shows up you’ll be practically part of the family.”

I expected Sam to leer, or at least grin. Instead he looked kind of puzzled. “I don’t know if she’s coming up here at all. Arlene’s pretty touchy about the subject.”

Just how touchy we found out a couple nights later.

Larry and I were in the wardroom replaying Super Bowl XXIV on the computer simulator. I had lost the coin flip and gotten stuck with the Broncos. We had the sound turned way down so we wouldn’t annoy the commander, who was staying up late, watching a video drama over in his corner: Halloween XXXIX.

Anyway, I had programmed an old Minnesota Vikings defense into the game, and we had sacked Montana four times already in the first quarter. The disgusted look on his face when he climbed up from the fourth burial was so real you’d think we were watching an actual game instead of creating a simulation. The crowd was going wild.

Elway was just starting to get hot, completing three straight passes, when Arlene sailed into the wardroom, looking red in the face, really pissed off. Sam was right behind her, talking his usual blue streak.

“So what’d I say that made you so sore? How could I hurt your feelings talking about the special-effects computer? What’d I do, what’d I say? For chrissakes, you’re breaking the Fifth Amendment! The accused has got a right to be told what he did wrong. It’s in the Constitution!”

Arlene whirled in midair and gave him a look that would have scorched a rhinoceros. “It’s not the Fifth Amendment, stupid.”

Sam shrugged so hard he propelled himself toward the ceiling. “So I’m not a lawyer. Sue me!”

Larry and I both reached for the HOLD button on our tabletop keyboard. I got there first. The game stopped with the football in midair and Denver’s wide receiver on the ten-yard line behind the Forty-Niners’ free safety.

Arlene pushed herself to the galley while Sam hovered up near the ceiling, anchoring himself there by pressing the fingertips of one hand against the overhead panels. Commander Johnson did not stir from his corner, but I thought his eyes flicked from Arlene to Sam and then back to his video screen.

Before Larry and I got a chance to restart our game, Arlene squirted some hot coffee into a squeezebulb and went to the only other table in the wardroom, sailing right past Sam’s dangling feet. The commander watched her. As she slipped her feet into the floor restraints he turned off his video screen and straightened up to his full height.

“Ms. Gold …” he began to say.

She ignored Johnson and pointed up at Sam with her free hand. “You’re hanging around with your tail wagging, waiting for Gloria Lamour to get here.”

“Ms. Gold,” the commander said, a little louder.

Sam pushed off the ceiling. “Sure. We all are.”

“Sure,” Arlene mimicked. “We all are.” She gave Larry and me a nasty stare.

Sam stopped himself about six inches off the floor. How he did that was always beyond me. Somehow he seemed able to break Newton’s First Law, or at least bend it a little to make himself feel taller.

Johnson disengaged himself from his foot restraints and came out from behind his video set. He was staring at Arlene, his own face pinched and narrow-eyed.

“Ms. Gold,” he repeated, firmly.

Arlene ignored him. She was too busy yowling at Sam, “You’re so goddamned transparent it’s pathetic! You think Gloria Lamour would even bother to glance at a little snot like you? You think if she came up here she’d let you wipe her ass? Ha!”

“Ms. Gold, I believe you are drunk,” said our fearless skipper. The look on his face was weird: disapproval, disgust, disappointment, and a little bit of disbelief.

“You’re damned right I’m drunk, mon capitain. What th’ fuck are you gonna do about it?”

Instead of exploding like a normal skipper would, the commander surprised us all by replying with great dignity, “I will escort you to your quarters.”

But he turned his beady-eyed gaze toward Sam.

Sam drifted slowly toward the skipper, bobbing along high enough to be eye-to-eye with Johnson.

“Yes, sir, she has been drinking. Vodka, I believe. I tried to stop her but she wouldn’t stop,” Sam said.

The commander looked utterly unconvinced.

“I have not touched a drop,” Sam added. And he exhaled right into Commander Johnson’s face hard enough to push himself backward like a punctured balloon.

Johnson blinked, grimaced, and looked for a moment like he was going to throw up. “I will deal with you later, Mr. Gunn,” he muttered. Then he turned to Arlene again and took her by the arm. “This way, Ms. Gold.”

She made a little zero-gee curtsy. “Thank you, Commander Johnson. I’m glad that there is at least one gentleman aboard this station.” And she shot Sam a killer stare.

“Not at all,” said the commander, patting her hand as it rested on his arm. He looked down at her in an almost grandfatherly way. Arlene smiled up at him and allowed Commander Johnson to tow her toward the hatch. Then he made his big mistake.

“And tell me, Ms. Gold,” said the skipper, “just when will Gloria Lamour arrive here?”

Arlene’s face twisted into something awful. “You too? You too! That’s all you bastards are thinking about, isn’t it? When’s your favorite wet dream going to get here.”

The commander sputtered, “Ms. Gold, I assure you …”

She pulled free of his arm, sending herself spinning across the wardroom. She grabbed a table and yelled at all of us:

“Lemme tell you something, lover boys. Gloria Lamour ain’t comin’ up here at all. Never! This is as good as it gets, studs. What you see is what you got!”

The commander had to haul her through the hatch. We could hear her yelling and raving all the way down the connecting passageway to the lab module.

“Where’d she get the booze?” Larry asked.

“Brought it up with her,” said Sam. “She’s been drinking since five o’clock. Something I said ticked her off.”

“Never mind that.” I got straight to the real problem. “Is she serious about Gloria Lamour not coming up here?”

Sam nodded glumly.

“Aw shit,” moaned Larry.

I felt like somebody had shot Santa Claus.

“There isn’t any Gloria Lamour,” Sam said, his voice so low that I thought maybe I hadn’t heard him right.

“No Gloria Lamour?”

“Whattaya mean?”

Sam steadied himself with a hand on the edge of our table. “Just what I said. There isn’t any such person as Gloria Lamour.”

“That’s her show-business name.”

“She’s not real!” Sam snapped. “She’s a simulation. Computer graphics, just like your damned football game.”

“But…”

“All the publicity about her …”

“All faked. Gloria Lamour is the creation of a Hollywood talent agency and some bright computer kids. It’s supposed to be a secret, but Arlene spilled it to me after she’d had a few drinks.”

“A simulation?” Larry looked crushed. “Computer graphics can do that? She looked so … so real.”

“She’s just a bunch of algorithms, pal.” Sam seemed more sober than I had ever seen him. “Arlene’s her ‘director.’ She programs in all her moves.”

“The damned bitch,” Larry growled. “She could’ve let us know. Instead of building up our expectations like this.”

“It’s supposed to be a secret,” Sam repeated.

“Yeah, but she should’ve let us in on it. It’s not fair! It’s just not fair!”

Sam gave him a quizzical little half-smile. “Imagine how she’s been feeling, watching the six of us—even old Jay-Cubed—waiting here with our tongues hanging out and full erections. Not paying any attention to her; just waiting for this dream—this computerized doll. No wonder she got sore.”

I shook my head. The whole thing was too weird for me.

Sam was muttering, “I tried to tell her that I liked her, that I was interested in her for her own sake.”

“She saw through that,” Larry said.

“Yeah …” Sam looked toward the hatch. Everything was quiet now. “Funny thing is, I was getting to like her. I really was.”

“Her? The Bronx Ball-Breaker?”

“She’s not that bad once she lets herself relax a little.”

“She sure didn’t look relaxed tonight,” I said.

Sam agreed with a small nod. “She never got over the idea that I was after Gloria Lamour, not her.”

“Well, weren’t you?”

“At first, yeah, sure. But…”

Larry made a sour face. “But once she told you there wasn’t any Gloria Lamour you were willing to settle for her, right?”

I chimed in, “You were ready to make lemonade.”

Sam fell silent. Almost. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I don’t think so.”

The skipper came back into the wardroom, and fixed Sam with a firing-squad stare.

“Lights out, gentlemen. Gunn, you return to your normal duties tomorrow. Ms. Gold will finish her work here by herself and depart in two days.”

Sam’s only reply was a glum, “Yes, sir.”

The next morning when we started our shift in the command module Sam looked terrible. As if he hadn’t slept all night. Yet there was a hint of a twinkle in his eye. He kept his face straight, because the skipper was watching him like a hawk. But he gave me a quick wink at precisely ten o’clock.

I know the exact time for two reasons.

First, Commander Johnson punched up the interior camera view of the lab module and muttered, “Ten in the morning and she’s not at work yet.”

“She must be under the weather, sir,” Sam said in a funny kind of stiff, military way of talking. Like he was rehearsing for a role in a war video or trying to get on the skipper’s good side. (Assuming he had one.)

“She must be hung over as hell,” Al Dupres muttered to me.

“I suppose I should call her on the intercom and wake her up,” the commander said. “After all, if she’s only got two more days …”

“Emergency! Emergency!” called the computer’s synthesized female voice. “Prepare to abandon the station. All personnel to Crew Emergency Reentry Vehicles. All personnel to Crew Emergency Reentry Vehicles. Prepare to abandon the station.”

Bells and klaxons started going off all over the place. The emergency siren was wailing so loud you could barely hear yourself think. Through it all the computer kept repeating the abandon-ship message. The computer’s voice was calm but urgent. The six of us were urgent, but definitely not calm.

“But I postponed the test!” Commander Johnson yelled at his computer screen. It was filled with big block letters in red, spelling out what the synthesizer was saying.

Larry and the others were already diving for the hatch that led to the nearest CERV. They had no idea that this was supposed to be a drill.

I hesitated only a moment. Then I remembered Sams wink a minute earlier. And the little sonofagun was already flying down the connecting passageway toward the lab module like a red-topped torpedo.

“I postponed the goddamned test!” Johnson still roared at his command console, over the noise of all the warning hoots and wails. Sure he had. But Sam had spent the night rerigging it.

The station had four CERVs, each of them big enough to hold six people. Typical agency overdesign, you might think. But the lifeboats were spotted at four different locations, so no matter where on the station you might be, there was a CERV close enough to save your neck and big enough to take the whole crew with you, if necessary.

They were round unglamorous spheres, sort of like the early Russian manned reentry vehicles. Nothing inside except a lot of padding and safety harnesses. The idea was you belted off the station, propelled by cold gas jets, then the CERV’s onboard computer automatically fired a set of retro rockets and started beeping out an emergency signal so the people on the ground could track where you landed.

The sphere was covered with ablative heat shielding. After reentry it popped parachutes to plop you gently on the ocean or the ground, wherever. There was also a final descent rocket to slow your fall down to almost zero.

I caught up with Larry and the other guys inside the CERV and told them to take it easy.

“This is just a drill,” I said, laughing.

Rog Cranston’s face was dead white. “A drill?” He had already buckled himself into his harness.

“You sure?” Larry asked. He was buckled in, too. So was Al.

“Do you see the skipper in here?” I asked, hovering nonchalantly in the middle of the capsule.

Al said, “Yeah. We’re all buttoned up but we haven’t been fired off the station.”

Just at that moment we felt a jolt like somebody had whanged the capsule with the world’s biggest hammer. I went slamming face first into the padded bulkhead, just missing a head-on collision with Larry by about an inch.

“Holy shit!” somebody yelled.

I was plastered flat against the padding, my nose bleeding and my body feeling like it weighed ten tons.

“My ass, a drill!”

It was like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, only worse. After half a minute that seemed like half a year the g-force let up and we were weightless again. I fumbled with shaking hands into one of the empty harnesses. My nose was stuffed up with blood that couldn’t run out in zero-gee and I thought I was going to strangle to death. Then we started feeling heavy again. The whole damned capsule started to shake like we were inside a food processor and blood sprayed from my aching nose like a garden sprinkler.

And through it all I had this crazy notion in my head that I could still hear Commander Johnson’s voice wailing, “But I postponed the drill!”

We were shaken, rattled, and frazzled all the way down. The worst part of it, of course, was that the flight was totally beyond our control. We just hung in those harnesses like four sides of beef while the capsule automatically went through reentry and parachuted us into the middle of a soccer field in Brazil. There was a game going on at the time, although we could see nothing because the capsule had neither windows nor exterior TV cameras.

Apparently our final retro rocket blast singed the referee, much to the delight of the crowd.

Sam’s CERV had been shot off the station too, we found out later. With the Gold woman aboard. Only the skipper remained aboard the space station, still yelling that he had postponed the test.

Sam’s long ride back to Earth must have been even tougher than ours. He wound up in the hospital with a wrenched back and dislocated shoulder. He landed in the Australian outback, no less, but it took the Aussies only a couple of hours to reach him in their rescue VTOLs, once the agency gave them the exact tracking data.

Sure enough, Arlene Gold was in the capsule with him, shaken up a bit but otherwise unhurt.

The agency had no choice but to abort our mission and bring Commander Johnson back home at once. Popping the two CERVs was grounds for six months worth of intense investigation. Three Congressional committees, OSHA and even the EPA eventually got into the act. Thank God for Sam’s ingenuity, though. Nobody was able to find anything except an unexplained malfunction of the CERV ejection thrusters.

The agency wound up spending seventeen million dollars redesigning the damned thing.

As soon as we finished our debriefings, I took a few days’ leave and hustled over to the hospital outside San Antonio where they were keeping Sam.

I could hear that he was okay before I ever saw him. At the nurses’ station half a block away from his room I could hear him yammering. Nurses were scurrying down the hall, some looking frightened, most sort of grinning to themselves.

Sam was flat on his back, his left arm in a cast that stuck straight up toward the ceiling. “… and I want a pizza, with extra pepperoni!” he was yelling at a nurse who was leaving the room just as I tried to come in. We bumped in the doorway. She was young, kind of pretty.

“He can’t eat solid foods while he’s strapped to the board,” she said to me. As if I had anything to do with it. The refreshment I was smuggling in for Sam was liquid, hidden under my flight jacket.

Sam took one look at me and said, “I thought your nose was broken.”

“Naw, just bloodied a little.”

Then he quickly launched into a catalogue of the hospital’s faults: bedpans kept in the freezer, square needles, liquid foods, unsympathetic nurses.

“They keep the young ones buzzing around here all day,” he complained, “but when it comes time for my sponge bath they send in Dracula’s mother-in-law.”

I pulled up the room’s only chair. “So how the hell are you?”

“I’ll be okay. If this damned hospital doesn’t kill me first.”

“You rigged the CERVs, didn’t you?” I asked, dropping my voice low.

Sam grinned. “How’d our noble skipper like being left all alone up there?”

“The agency had to send a shuttle to pick him up, all by himself.”

“The cost accountants must love him.”

“The word is he’s going to be reassigned to the tracking station at Ascencion Island.”

Sam chuckled. “It’s not exactly Pitcairn, but it’s kind of poetic anyway.”

I worked up the nerve to ask him, “What happened?”

“What happened?” he repeated.

“In the CERV. How rugged was the flight? How’d you get hurt? What happened with Arlene?”

Sam’s face clouded. “She’s back in L.A. Didn’t even wait around long enough to see if I would live or die.”

“Must’ve been a punishing flight,” I said.

“I wouldn’t know,” Sam muttered.

“What do you mean?”

Sam blew an exasperated sigh toward the ceiling. “We were screwing all the way down to the ground! How do you think I threw my back out?”

“You and Arlene? The Bronx Ball-Breaker made out with you?”

“Yeah,” he said. Then, “No.”

I felt kind of stunned, surprised, confused.

“You know the helmets we use in flight simulations?” Sam asked. “The kind that flash computer graphic visuals on your visor so you’re seeing the situation the computer is cooking up?”

I must have nodded.

Staring at the ceiling, he continued, “Arlene brought two of them into the lifeboat with us. And her Gloria Lamour disks.”

“You were seeing Gloria Lamour … ?”

“It was like being with Gloria Lamour,” Sam said, his voice almost shaking, kind of hollow. “Just like being with her. I could touch her. I could even taste her.”

“No shit?”

“It was like nothing else in the world, man. She was fantastic. And it was all in zero-gee. Most of it, anyway. The landing was rough. That’s when I popped my damned shoulder.”

“God almighty, Sam. She must have fallen for you after all. For her to do that for you …”

His face went sour. “Yeah, she fell for me so hard she took the first flight from Sydney to L.A. I’ll never hear from her again.”

“But—jeez, if she gave you Gloria Lamour …”

“Yeah. Sure,” he said. I had never seen Sam so bitter. “I just wonder who the hell was programmed in her helmet. Who was she making out with while she was fucking me?”