The Sam Gunn Omnibus (35 page)

Well, it all got straightened out. The next day I got a very apologetic
phone call from the director of contracts at the Massachusetts firm, some guy
with an Armenian name. Terrible misunderstanding. Of course they wouldn’t let
this enormous order from Rockledge get in the way of delivering what they had
promised to us. On schedule, absolutely. Maybe a week or so late, nothing more
than that. Guaranteed. On his mother’s grave.

I said nice things back to him, like, “
U
h-huh.
That’s fine. I’m glad to hear it.” Sam was watching me, grinning from ear to
ear.

The guy’s voice dropped a note lower, as if he was afraid he’d be
overheard. “It’s so much pleasanter dealing with you than that Mr. Gunn,” he
said. “He’s so excitable!”

“Well, I’m the president of the firm,” I said back to him, while Sam held
both hands over his mouth to stifle his guffaws. “Whenever a problem arises,
feel free to call me.”

He thanked me three dozen times.

I no sooner had put the phone down than it rang again. Pierre D’Argent,
calling from Rockledge headquarters in Pennsylvania.

In a smarmy, oily voice he professed shock and surprise that
anyone
would think that Rockledge was trying to
sabotage a smaller competitor. I motioned for Sam to pick up his phone and
listen in.

“We would never stoop to anything like that,” he assured me. “There’s no
need for anyone to get hysterical.”

“Well,” I said, “it seemed strange to us that Rockledge placed such a
large order with the outfit that’s making our teeny little coils, and then
tried to muscle them into shunting our work aside.”

“We never did that,” D’Argent replied, like a saint accused of rifling the
poor-box. “It’s all a misunderstanding.”

Sam said sweetly into
his phone, “We’ve subpoenaed their records, oh silver-tongued devil.”

“What? Who is that?
Gunn, is that you?”

“See you in Leavenworth,
Pee-air.”

D’Argent hung up so hard
I thought a gun had gone off in my ear. Sam fell off his chair laughing and
rolled on the floor, holding his middle and kicking his feet in the air. We had
not subpoenaed anybody for anything, but it cost Rockledge a week’s worth of
extremely expensive legal staff work to find that out.

Anyway, that had
happened months earlier, and now the superconducting coils had finally arrived
at the Cape and Sam had to buzz over there to inspect them. Leaving Bonnie Jo
and me alone in the office. Friday afternoon. The weekend looming.

I did my level best to
avoid her. She was staying at the Marriott hotel in Titusville, so I steered
clear of the whole town. Kept to myself in my little rattrap of a one-room
apartment. Worked on my laptop all day Saturday, ate a microwaved dinner,
watched TV. Then worked some more. Did not phone her, although I thought about
it now and then. Maybe once every other minute.

Sunday it rained hard. I
started to feel like a convict in prison. By noontime I had convinced myself
that there was work to do in the office; anything to get out of my room. It was
pouring so thick I got soaked running from my parking space to the covered
stairs that led up to our office. First thing I did there was phone Sam’s hotel
down at the Cape. Checked out. Then I phoned his apartment. Not there.

I slid into my desk
chair, squishing wet. Okay. He’s back from the Cape. He’s with Bonnie Jo. Good.
I guess.

But I guessed wrong,
because Bonnie Jo came into the office, brighter than sunshine in a bright
yellow slicker and plastic rain hat.

“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t
know you’d be here.”

“Where’s Sam?” I asked
her.

She peeled off the hat
and slicker. “I thought he’d be here. Probably he stayed at the Cape for the
weekend.”

“Yeah. He’s got a lot of
old buddies at the Cape.”

“And girlfriends?”

“Uh, no. Not really.” I was
never much good at shading the truth.

Bonnie Jo sat at her
desk and picked up the phone. “Highway Patrol,” she said to the dialing
assistance computer program.

She saw my eyebrows hike
up.

“On a stormy day like
this, maybe he drove off the road.”

The Highway Patrol had
no accidents to report between where we were and the Cape. I puffed out a
little sigh of relief. Bonnie Jo put the phone down with a bit of a dark frown
on her pretty face.

“You worry about Sam
that much?” I asked her.

“My job is to protect my
daddy’s investment,” she said. “And my own.”

Well, one thing led to
another and before I knew it we were having dinner together in the Japanese
restaurant down at the end of the mall. I had to teach Bonnie Jo how to use
chopsticks. She caught on real fast. Quick learner.

“Are you two engaged, or
what?” I heard myself ask her.

She smiled, kind of sad,
almost. “It depends on who you ask. My father considers us engaged, although
Sam has never actually popped the question to me.”

“And what do you think?”

Her eyes went distant. “Sam
is going to be a very rich man someday. He has the energy and drive and willingness
to swim against the tide, and that will make him a multimillionaire eventually.
If somebody doesn’t strangle him first.”

“So that makes him a
good marriage prospect.”

Her unhappy little smile
came back. “Sam will make a terrible husband. He’s a womanizer who doesn’t give
a thought to anybody but himself. He’s lots of fun to be with, but he’d be hell
to be married to.”

“Then
why... ?”

“I already told you. To
protect my daddy’s investment.”

“You’d
marry
him? For that?”

“Why not? He’ll have his
flings, I’ll have mine. As long as I can present my daddy with a grandson,
everyone will be satisfied.”

“But...
love. What about love?”

Her smile turned bitter.
“You mean like Melinda and Larry? That’s for the peasants. In my family marriage
is a business proposition.”

I dropped the chunk of
sushi in my chopsticks right into my lap.

Bonnie Jo leaned across
the little table. “You’re really a very romantic guy, aren’t you, Spence? Have
I shocked you?”

“Uh, no,
not...
well, I guess
I never met a woman with your outlook on life.”

“Never dated an MBA
before?” Her eyes sparkled with amusement now. She was teasing me.

“Can’t say that I have.”

She leaned closer. “Sam’s out at the Cape chasing cocktail waitresses and
barmaids. Maybe I ought to go to a bar and see what I can pick up.”

“Maybe you ought to go home before you pick up something that’ll increase
your father’s health insurance premiums,” I said, suddenly feeling sore at her.

She gave me a long look. “Maybe I should, at that.”

And that was our dinner together. I never touched her. I never told Sam
about it. But the next morning when he showed up at the office looking like
every blue Monday morning in the history of the world—bleary-eyed, pasty-faced,
muttering about vitamin E—I knew I couldn’t hang around there with Bonnie Jo so
close.

Melinda and Larry arrived hand in hand. I swear his stuttering had cleared
up almost entirely in just that one weekend. Bonnie Jo came in around ten, took
a silent look at Sam, and went to her desk as cool as liquid nitrogen. Sam was
inhaling coffee and orange juice in roughly equal quantities.

“Sam,” I said, my voice so loud that it startled me, “since I’m president
of this outfit, I’ve just made an executive decision.”

He looked over toward me with bloodshot eyes.

“I’m going over to the Cape,” I announced.

“I was just there,” he croaked.

“I mean to stay. Hardware’s starting to arrive. We need somebody to direct
the assembly technicians
,
somebody
there on the scene all the time, not just once a week. Somebody with the power
to make decisions.”

“The techs know what they’re doing.better than you do, Mutt,” argued Sam. “If
they run into any problems they’ve got phones, e-mail, faxes— they can even use
the agency’s video link if they have to.”

“It’ll be better if I’m on the scene,” I insisted, trying not to look at
Bonnie Jo. “We can settle questions before they become problems.”

Sam shook his head stubbornly. “We haven’t budgeted for you to be living
in a hotel at the Cape. You know how tight everything is.”

“The budget can be stretched,” Bonnie Jo said. “I think Spence is right.
His being on the Cape could save us a lot of problems.”

Sam’s head swiveled from her to me and back to her again. He looked
puzzled, not suspicious. Finally he shrugged good-naturedly and said, “Okay, as
long as it won’t bust the bank.”

So I moved to the Cape. During the weeks I was there supervising the
assembly and checkout of our equipment I actually did save a couple of minor
glitches from growing into real headaches. Larry drove over once a week to check
the hardware against his design; then he’d drive back to Melinda again that
evening. I knew I could justify the expenses legitimately, if to came to that.
Most important, though, was that I had put some miles between myself and Bonnie
Jo. And she must have realized how attracted I was to her, because she
convinced Sam I should get away.

A couple of my old agency buddies snuck me some time on the OMV simulator,
so I spent my evenings and spare weekends brushing up on my flying. Our
official program didn’t call for any use of orbital maneuvering vehicles. What
we had proposed was to set up our magnetic bumper on the forward end of space
station Freedom and see how well it deflected junk out of the station’s orbital
path. Called for some EVA work, but we wouldn’t need to fly OMVs.

But Sam had warned me to be prepared for flying an OMV, back when we first
started writing the proposal.

“Whattaya think we oughtta do,” he had asked me, “if we scoop up something
valuable?”

“Valuable?” I had asked.

“Like that glove Ed White lost. Or the famous Hasselblad camera from back
in the Gemini days.”

I stared at him. “Sam, those things reentered and burned up years ago.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” He flapped an annoyed hand in the air. “But
suppose—just suppose, now—that we scoop up something like that.”

We had been sitting in our favorite booth in our favorite bar. Sam liked
Corona in those days; slices of lime were littered across his side of the
table, with little plastic spears stuck in their sides. They looked like tiny green
harpooned whales. Me, I liked beer with more flavor to it: Bass Ale was my
favorite.

Anyway, I thought his question was silly.

“In the first place,” I said, “the magnetic field won’t scoop up objects;
it’ll deflect them away from the path of the station. Most of them will be
bounced into orbits that’ll spiral into the atmosphere. They’ll reenter and
burn up.”

“But suppose we got to something really
valuable
,” Sam insisted. “Like a spacer section from the Brazilian
booster. Or a piece of that European upper stage that blew up. Analysts would
pay good money to get their hands on junk like that.”

“Analysts?”

“In Washington,” Sam said. “Or Paris, for that matter. Hell, even our
buddy D’Argent would like to be able to present his Rockledge lab boys with chunks
of the competition’s hardware.”

I had never thought of
that.

“Then there’s the museums,”
Sam went on, kind of dreamy, the way he always gets when he’s thinking big. “How
much would the Smithsonian pay for the
Eagle?”

“The Apollo 11 lunar module?”

“Its lower section is
still up there, sitting on the Sea of Tranquility.”

“But that’s the Moon,
Sam. A quarter-million miles away from where we’ll be!”

He gave me his sly grin.
“Brush up on your flying, Mutt. There are interesting times ahead. Ve-r-r-y interesting.”

I could see taking an
OMV from the space station and flitting out to retrieve some hunk of debris
that looked important or maybe valuable. So I spent as many of my hours at the
Cape as possible in the OMV simulator. It helped to keep me busy; helped me to
not think about Bonnie Jo.

At first I thought it
was an accident when I bumped into Pierre D’Argent in the Shuttle Lounge. It
was mid-afternoon, too soon for the after-work crowd. The lounge was cool and
so dark that you could break your neck tripping over cocktail tables before
your eyes adjusted from the summer glare outside.

I actually did bump into
D’Argent. He was sitting with his back to the aisle between tables, wearing an
expensive dark suit that blended into the shadows so well I just didn’t see
him.

I started to apologize,
then my eyes finally adjusted to the dimness and I saw who he was.

“Mr. Johansen!” He
professed surprise and asked me to join him.