The Sam Gunn Omnibus (54 page)

Spence worked closely with us,
handling most of the remotely controlled missions himself, operating the
unmanned OTVs that now ran regular repair-and-refurbishment missions to GEO.

Sam practically danced with joy. “I’ll
be able to declare a dividend for the stockholders,” he told us, “and
still
have a wad of moolah to get the hotel started.”

Bonnie Jo frowned at him. “We could
give the stockholders a bigger dividend if you’d forget about your orbital sex
palace.”

Sam laughed. “Are you kidding? My
hotel’s gonna be the biggest moneymaker you’ve ever seen in space. I’ve even
got an advertising motto for it: ‘If you like water beds, you’re gonna
love
zero-gee!’“

Bonnie Jo huffed.

Spence spent more time in the
simulator than at home with Bonnie Jo. Sam was frugal when it came to hiring more
staff; he might take on a very junior computer programmer from Los Angeles, but
astronauts and mission controllers carried much higher price tags, and he
refrained from hiring them. We worked extremely long hours, and Sam himself “flew”
many of the remote missions; Spence did the rest of them—more than Sam did, by
actual count.

It seemed to me that Spence was
glad of the excuse to spend so much time away from his wife. Anyone could sense
that their marriage was ripping apart. It made me sad to see him so unhappy,
and I had to remind myself often that he had treated me like a schoolgirl and I
hated him. For her part, Bonnie Jo seemed perfectly content to have Spence
spend most of his time on the remote missions. She herself began to fly back to
Salt Lake City every weekend.

Naturally, with my duties as the
second mission controller and his as principal operator of the remote satellite
repairs, we were together quite a
bit.

Well, not together in the physical
sense, precisely. Spence was in another room, some twenty meters down the hall
from my mission control desk. But somehow, when I was not on duty I often found
myself walking down that hallway to watch him at work. He sat in an astronaut’s
contoured couch, his hands covered with metallic gloves that trailed hair-thin
fiber-optic cables, the top half of his handsome face covered by the stereo
screens that showed him what the OTV’s cameras were seeing.

I
told myself that
I was studying his moves, learning how to sabotage the repair missions. When
the time came I would strike without mercy. When I was not hanging by the
doorway to the remote manipulator lab, studying him like a avenging angel, I was
at my mission control console, actually speaking with Spence, connected
electronically to him, closer to him than anyone else in the world. Including
his wife. I wanted to be close to him; that made it easier to find a way to
sabotage his work, his company, his life.

“You planning to attend the
stockholders’ meeting?” Spence asked me during a lull in one of the missions.

I
was startled that
he asked a personal question. “Say again?” I asked, in the professional jargon
of a mission controller.

Spence chuckled. “It’s okay, Juanita.
The OTV’s still in coast mode. It’ll be another hour before we have to get to
work. Loosen up.”

“Oh.
Yes. Of course.”

“You bought some stock, didn’t you?”

“A few shares,” I said. In
actuality I was spending my entire salary on shares of VCI. If there had been a
way to buy up all the existing shares I would have done it, using my father’s
treasury to deliver the company into his hands.

As fate would have
it,
the annual stockholders’ meeting took place on the
same day that my father gave his famous speech at the United Nations.

He told me about the speech the
night before the meeting. As usual, I had driven to the consulate late at night
and called him on the videophone. At least he had the good sense to receive my
calls in his office, when he knew I was going to contact him.

My father was glowing with pride.
His smile was brilliant, the shoulders of his suit wider than ever. He had even
faced the necessity of replacing his thinning hair. Although his new mane of
curly brown hair looked as if it had been stolen from a teenaged rock star, it
was so wild and thick, it obviously made him feel younger and more vigorous.

“With Brazil in the chair at the
Security Council and the Committee of the Twelve Equatorial Nations lining up
support among the small nations in the General Assembly, I have high hopes for
our cause.”

“And your speech?” I asked him. “What
will you say?”

His smile became even wider, even more
radiant. “You must watch me on television, little one. I want you to be just as
surprised as the rest of the world will be.”

He would tell me no more. I of
course reported in full to him about VCI’s continuing success in repairing and
refurbishing satellites remotely. And of the growing strains in the company’s management.

“You still have the capability of
destroying their spacecraft?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I replied, thinking of how much
damage I could do to Spence.

“Good,” said my father. “The time
is fast approaching when we will strike.”

“Will it be necessary—”

But his attention was suddenly
pulled away from me. I heard an aide shouting breathlessly at him, “The rebels
have ambushed General Quintana’s brigade!”

“Ambushed?” my father snapped, his
eyes no longer looking at me. “Where? When?”

“In the mountains of Azuay, south
of Cuenca. The general has been captured and his troops are fleeing for their
lives!”

My father’s face went gray, then
red with fury. He turned back to me. “Excuse me, daughter. I have urgent
business to attend to.”

“Go with God,” I mumbled, feeling
silly at using such an archaic phrase. But it was all I could think to say.

The rebels were very clever. They must
have known that my father was scheduled to fly to New York to deliver his
speech to the United Nations. Now he either had to cancel his speech and admit
to the world that his nation was in the throes of a serious internal conflict,
or go to New York and leave his army leaderless for several days.

I COULD NOT
sleep that night. When I arrived
at the stockholders’ meeting my eyes were red and puffy, my spirits low. How
can I help my father? I kept asking myself. What can I do? He had sent me here
to help him triumph over Sam Gunn and these other gringos
.
But he was being threatened at home and I was
thousands of kilometers away from him. I felt miserable and stupid and
helpless.

Spence noticed my misery.

More than a hundred people were
filing into the room in the big hotel where the stockholders’ meeting was being
held. Employees and their spouses, all ages, all colors. Blacks and Hispanics
and Asians, women and men, Sam had brought together every variety of the human
species in his company. He hired for competence; VCI was truly a company without
prejudice of any kind. Except that it helped if you were female and young and
attractive. That was Sam’s one obvious weakness.

Out of that throng Spence noticed me.
He made his way through the crowd that was milling around the coffee and
doughnuts and came to my side.

“What’s the matter, Juanita?”

I
looked up into
his clear blue eyes and saw that he too was sad-faced.

“Family problems,” I muttered. “Back
home.”

He
nodded grimly. “Me too.” “Oh?”

Before he could say more, Sam’s
voice cut through the hubbub of conversations. “Okay, let’s get this show on
the road. Where’s our noble president? Hey, Spence, you silver-haired devil,
come on up here and preside, for god’s sake, will ya?”

Spence lifted my chin a centimeter
and gave me a forced grin. “Time to go to work,” he said. Then he turned and
almost sprinted up to the front of the room and jumped up onto the makeshift
dais.

Sam, Bonnie Jo, and two other men
flanked Spence at the long table set up on the dais. The board of directors, I realized.
Each of them had a microphone and a name card in front of them. I was fairly
certain that the older of the two strangers—Eli G. Murtchison—was Bonnie Jo’s
father.

There were two mammoth television
sets on either side of the dais as well. I wondered if the hotel kept them
there all the time, or if they had been brought in for some specific reason.

The rest of us took the folding
plastic chairs that the hotel had set along the floor of the meeting room. They
were hard and uncomfortable: a stimulus to keep the meeting short, I thought.
The meeting began with formalities. Spence asked that the minutes of the last meeting
be accepted. Bonnie Jo read her treasurer’s report so fast that I could not
understand a word of it.

Then Sam, as chairman of the board,
began his review of the year’s business and plans for the coming year.

I
could feel the
tension in the air. Even as Sam spoke glowingly to the stockholders about VCI’s
new capabilities in remote satellite repair, even while they loudly applauded
his announcement of a dividend, the room seemed to crackle with electricity.

And all the while I wondered where
my father was, what he was doing, what decisions he was making.

A stockholder—Gene Redding, of all
people—rose to ask a question. “Uh, Sam, uh, why isn’t our dividend bigger, if
we’re, uh, making such good profits now?”

I
turned in my
chair to see Gene better. He was standing: portly, bald, looking slightly
flustered. I had never before seen him in a suit and tie; he had always worn jeans
and sports shirts at the office. But his suit was rumpled and his tie hung
loosely from his unbuttoned shirt. It seemed to me that he felt guilty about
asking his question. He was on Bonnie Jo’s side, I realized.

Sam said tightly, “We have always
plowed our profits back into the company, to assure our growth. This year the
profits have been big enough to allow a dividend. But we are still plowing some
of the profits back into growth.”

Gene got red in the face, but he
found the strength to ask, “Back into the growth of VCI’s existing projects,
or, uh, some other program?”

Sam shot a glance along the head
table toward Bonnie Jo. Then he grinned at Gene. “You can sit down, Gene. This
is gonna take some time, I can see that.”

Bonnie Jo said, “Sam wants to put
our profits—
your
profits—into building
an orbital tourist hotel.”

“A honeymoon hotel,” Sam corrected.

A few chuckles arose from the
stockholders.

“And we don’t have to build it,”
Sam added. “We can lease space aboard Alpha from Rockledge International.”

“Didn’t you try that once before,
when Global Technology first built Space Station Alpha?” asked another
stockholder, a woman I did not recognize.

“And it didn’t work out?” asked
another.

“You went broke on that deal, didn’t
you?” still another asked. I realized that Bonnie Jo had recruited her troops
carefully.

“Yeah, yeah,” Sam answered
impatiently. “That was years ago. Rockledge has taken over Alpha now and they’re
looking for customers to lease space.”

“Under what terms?” Bonnie Jo
asked.

“It’s a bargain,” said Sam
enthusiastically. “A steal!”

I
looked at Spence,
sitting between Sam and Bonnie Jo. His face was a mask, his usual smile gone,
his features frozen as if he wished to betray not even the slightest sign of
emotion or partisan bias.

Gene Redding rose to his feet once
again. I could see that his hands were trembling, he was so nervous.

“I...”
he cleared his throat, “I want to make a, uh, a motion.”

Spence said grimly, “Go ahead.”

“I move ...
that the board of directors ...” he seemed to be reciting a memorized speech, “refuse
to allocate, uh, any m
onies ...
for any pro
grams ...
not directly associated with VCI’s existing lines of business.” Gene said the
last words in a rush, then immediately sat down.