The Sam Gunn Omnibus (37 page)

The interviewer
objected, “But you used government facilities ...”

“We are
leasing
government facilities, lady. We pay for
their use.”

“But that satellite was
paid for by the American taxpayer.”

“It was nothing but
useless junk. It went unclaimed for decades. The law of salvage says whoever
gets it, owns it.”

“But the law of salvage
is from maritime law. No one has extended the law of salvage into space.”

“They have now!” Sam
grinned wickedly into the camera.

It didn’t help, of
course, when some Japanese billionaire offered thirty million yen for the
satellite.

Next thing you know, the
shuttle resupply flight has no less than five guests aboard. They had to bump
an astronomer who was coming up to start a series of observations and a medical
doctor who was scheduled to replace the medic who’d been serving aboard the
station for ninety days.

Five guests: Sam; Ed
Zane from the space agency; Albert Clement from the Department of Commerce;
Pierre D’Argent of Rock-by-damn-ledge.

And Bonnie Jo
Murtchison.

Sam was coming up to
claim the satellite, of course. Zane and Clement were there at the request of
the White House to investigate this matter of space salvage before Sam could
peddle the satellite to anyone—especially the Japs. I wasn’t quite sure what
the hell D’Argent was doing there, but I knew he’d be up to no good. And Bonnie
Jo?

“I’m here to protect my
investment.” She smiled when I asked her why she’d come.

“How did you get them to
allow
you ... ?”

We were alone in the
shuttle’s mid-deck compartment, where she and Sam and the other visitors would
be sleeping until the shuttle undocked from the station and returned to
Earth—with the satellite, although who would have ownership of the little
grapefruit remained to be seen.

Bonnie Jo was wearing a
light blue agency-issue flight suit that hugged her curves so well it looked
like it was tailor-made for her. She showed no signs of space adaptation
syndrome, no hint that she was ill at ease in zero-gee. Looked to me as if she
enjoyed being weightless.

“How did I talk them
into letting me come up here with Sam? Simple. I am now VCI’s legal counsel.”

She sure was beautiful.
She had cropped her hair real short, almost a crew cut. Still she looked
terrific. I heard myself ask her, as if from a great distance away, “You’re a
lawyer, too?”

“I have a law degree from the University of Utah. Didn’t I tell you?” The
whole situation seemed to amuse her.

When a government employee gets an order from the White House, even if it’s
from some third assistant to a janitor, he jumps as high as is necessary. In
the case of Zane and Clement, they had been told to settle this matter about
the Vanguard satellite, and they had jumped right up to space station Freedom.
Clement looked mildly upset at being in zero gravity. I think what bothered him
more than anything else was that he had to wear coveralls instead of his usual
chalky gray three-piece suit. Darned if he didn’t find a gray flight suit,
though.

Zane was really sick. The minute the shuttle went into weightlessness, Sam
gleefully told me, Zane had started upchucking. The station doctor took him in
tow and stuck a wad of antinausea slow release medication pads on his neck.
Still, it would take a day or more before he was well enough to convene the
hearing he’d been sent to conduct.

Although the visitors were supposed to stay aboard the shuttle, Sam showed
up in the station’s command module and even wheedled permission to wriggle into
a space suit and go EVA to inspect our hardware. It was working just the way we
had designed it, deflecting the bits of junk and debris that floated close
enough to the station to feel the influence of our magnetic bumper.

“I must confess that I didn’t think it would work so well.”

I turned from my console in the command module and saw Pierre D’Argent
standing behind me. “Standing” is the wrong word, almost, because you don’t
really stand straight in zero-gee; your body bends into a sort of question-mark
kind of semi-crouch, as if you were floating in very salty water. Unless you
consciously force them down, your arms tend to drift up to chest height and
hang there.

It made me uneasy to have D’Argent hanging (literally) around me. My
console instruments showed that the bumper system was working within its
nominal limits. I could patch the station’s radar display onto my screen to see
what was coming toward us, if anything. Otherwise there were only graphs to
display and gauges to read. Our equipment was mounted outside and I didn’t have
a window. The magnetic field itself was invisible, of course.

“The debris actually gains an electrical charge while it orbits the Earth,”
he murmured, stroking his gray mustache as he spoke.

I said nothing.

“I wouldn’t have thought the charge would be strong enough to be useful,”
he went on, almost as if he was talking to himself. “But then your magnetic
field is very powerful, isn’t it, so you can work with relatively low charge
values.”

I nodded.

“We’re going to have to retrieve our Nerf balls,” he said with a sad little
sigh. “The corporation will have to pay the expense of sending a team up to
physically retrieve them and bring them back to Earth for study. We won’t be
launching any more of them until we find out where we went wrong with these.”

“The basic idea is wrong,” I said. “You should have gone magnetic in the
first place.”

“Yes,” D’Argent agreed. “Yes, I see that now.”

When I told Sam about our little conversation he got agitated.

“That sneaky sonofabitch is gonna try to steal it out from under us!”

“He can’t do that,” I said.

“And rain makes applesauce.”

It all came to a head two days later, when Zane finally got well enough to
convene his meeting.

It took place in the shuttle’s mid-deck compartment, the six of us crammed
in among the zippered sleeping bags and rows of equipment trays. Bonnie Jo
anchored herself next to the only window, the little round one set into the
hatch. D’Argent managed to get beside her, which made me kind of sore. I plastered
my back against the airlock hatch at the rear of the compartment; that gave me
enough traction to keep from floating around.

Sam, being Sam, hovered up by the ceiling, one arm wrapped casually on a
rung of the ladder that led up to the cockpit. Zane and Clement strapped
themselves against the rows of equipment trays that made up the front wall of
the compartment.

Zane still looked unwell, even more bloated in the face than usual, and
queasy green. His coveralls showed off his pear
-l
ike
shape. Clement seemed no different than he’d been in Washington; it was as if
his surroundings made no impact on him at all. Even in a flight suit he was a
thin, gray old man and nothing more.

Yet he avoided looking at Sam. And I noticed that Sam avoided looking at
him. Like two conspirators who didn’t want the rest of us to know that they
were working secretly together.

“This is a preliminary hearing,” Zane began, his voice a little shaky. “Its

purpose is to make
recommendations, not decisions. I will report the results of this meeting
directly to the Vice President, in his capacity as chairman of the Space
Council.”

Vice President Benford
had been a scientist before going into politics. I doubted that he would look
on Sam’s free-enterprise salvage job with enthusiasm.

“Before we begin ...”
There was D’Argent with his finger raised in the air again.

“What’s he doing here,
anyway?” Sam snapped. “What’s Rockledge got to do with this hearing?”

Zane had to turn his
head and look up to face Sam. The effort made him pale slightly. I saw a bunch
of faint rings against the skin of his neck, back behind his ear, where medication
patches had been. Looked like he’d been embraced by a vampire octopus.

“Rockledge is one of the
two contractors currently engaged in the orbital debris removal feasibility
program,” Zane said carefully, as if he was trying hard not to throw up.

Sam frowned down at
Zane, then at D’Argent.

Bonnie Jo said, “VCI has
no objection to Rockledge’s representation at this hearing.”

“We don’t?” Sam snapped.

She smiled up at him. “No,
we don’t.”

Sam muttered something
that I couldn’t really hear, but I could imagine what he was saying to himself.

D’Argent resumed, “I realize
that this hearing has been called to examine the question of space salvage. I merely
want to point out that there is a larger question involved here, also.”

“A larger question?”
Zane dutifully gave his straight line.

“Yes. The question of
who should operate the debris removal system once the feasibility program is
completed.”

“Who should operate ...”
Sam turned burning red.

“After all,” D’Argent
went on smoothly, “the debris removal system should be used for the benefit of
its sponsor—the government of the United States. It should
not
be used as a front for shady fly-by-night
schemes to enrich private individuals.”

Sam gave a strangled cry
and launched himself at D’Argent like a guided missile. I unhooked my feet from
the floor loops just in time to get a shoulder into Sam’s ribs and bounce him
away from D’Argent. Otherwise I think he would have torn the guy limb from limb
right then and there.

Bonnie Jo yelled, “Sam, don’t!” Clement seemed to faint. My shoulder felt
as if something had broken in there.

And Zane threw up over all of us.

That broke, up the meeting pretty effectively.

It took Bonnie Jo and me several hours to calm Sam down. He was absolutely
livid. We carried him kicking and screaming out of the shuttle and into the
station’s wardroom, by the galley. The station physician, the guy who had to
stay aboard longer than the usual ninety days because of Sam and the others
commandeering the shuttle seats, came in and threatened to give him a shot of
horse tranquilizer.

What really sobered Sam up was Bonnie Jo. “You damned idiot! You’re just
proving to those government men that you shouldn’t be allowed to operate
anything more sophisticated than a baby’s rattle!”

He blinked at her. I had backed him up against the wall of the wardroom
and was holding him by his shoulders to stop him from thrashing around. The
station’s doctor was sort of hovering off to one side with a huge hypodermic
syringe in his hand and an expectant smile on his face. Bonnie Jo was standing
squarely in front of Sam, her eyes snapping like pistols.

“I screwed up, huh?” Sam said, sheepishly.

“You certainly showed Zane and Clement how mature you are,” said Bonnie
Jo.

“But that sonofabitch is trying to steal the whole operation right out
from under us!”

“And you’re helping him.”

I waved the medic away. He seemed disappointed that he wouldn’t have to
stick a needle into Sam’s anatomy. We drifted over to the table. There was only
one of them in the cramped little wardroom, rising like a flat-topped toadstool
from a single slim pedestal. It was chest-high; nobody used chairs in zero-gee:
you stuck your feet in the floor loops and let your arms drift to their natural
level.

Sam hung onto the table, letting his feet dangle a few inches off the
floor. He looked miserable and contrite.

Before I could say anything, the skipper poked her brunette head into the
wardroom.

“Can I see you a minute, Spence?” she asked. From the look on her face I guessed
it was business, and urgent.

I pushed over to her. She motioned me through the hatch and we both headed
for the command module, like a pair of swimmers coasting side by side.

“Got a problem,” she said. “Mission control just got the word from the
tracking center that Rockledge’s damned Nerf ball is on a collision course with
us.”

I got that sudden lurch in the gut that comes when your engine quits or
you hear a hiss in your space suit.

“How the hell could it be on a collision course?” I didn’t want to believe
it.

She pulled herself through the hatch and swam up to her command station.
Pointing to the trio of display screens mounted below the station’s only
observation window, she said, “Here’s the data; see for yourself.”

I still couldn’t believe it, even though the numbers made it abundantly
clear that in less than one hour the shredded remains of one of the Nerf balls
was going to come barreling into the station at a closing velocity of more than
ten miles per second.

“It could tear a solar panel off,” the commander said tightly. “It could
even puncture these modules if it hits dead center.”

“How the
hell...”

“It banged into the spent final stage of the Ariane 4 that was launched
last week. Got enough energy from the collision to push it up into an orbit
that will intersect with ours
in ...”
She glanced at the digital clock on her
panel.”...
fifty-three minutes.”