The Sam Gunn Omnibus

Space Station Alpha

They faced each other suspiciously, floating weightlessly in emptiness.

The black man was tall, long-limbed, loose, gangling; on Earth he might have made a pro basketball player. His utilitarian coveralls were standard issue, frayed at the cuffs and so worn that whatever color they had been originally had long since faded into a dull gray. They were clean and pressed to a razor sharpness, though. The insignia patch on his left shoulder said ADMINISTRATION. A strictly nonregulation belt of royal blue, studded with rough lumps of meteoric gold and clamped by a heavy gold buckle, cinched his pencil-thin waist and made him look even taller and leaner.

He eyed the reporter warily. She was young, and the slightly greenish cast to her pretty features told him that she had never been in zero gravity before. Her flame-red hair was shoulder length, he judged, but she had followed the instructions given to groundlings and tied it up in a zero-gee snood. Terrific big emerald eyes, even if they did look kind of scared.

Her coveralls were spanking new white. She filled them nicely enough, a trim, coltish figure that he almost admired. She looked like a forlorn little waif floating weightlessly, obviously fighting down the nausea that was surging through her.

Frederick Mohammed Malone was skeptical to the point of being hostile toward this female interloper. Jade could see the resentment smoldering in the black man’s red-rimmed eyes. Malone’s face was narrow, almost gaunt, with a trim little Vandyke jutting out from his chin. His forehead was high, receding; his hair was cropped close to the skull. His skin was very black. She guessed Malone’s age at somewhere in his early sixties, although she knew that living in zero gravity could make a person look much younger than his or her calendar age.

She tried to restart their stalled conversation. “I understand that you and Sam Gunn were, uh, friends.”

“Why’re you doing a story on Sam?” Malone asked, his voice low and loaded with distrust.

The two of them were in Malone’s “office.” Actually it was an observation blister in the central hub of space station Alpha. Oldest and still biggest of the Earth-orbiting commercial stations, Alpha was built on the old wheels-within-wheels scheme. The outermost rim, where most of the staff lived and worked, spun at a rate that gave it almost a full Earth gravity, out-of-bounds for Jade. Two-thirds of the way toward the hub there was a wheel that spun at the Moon’s one-sixth g. That was where she was quartered for her visit. The hub itself, of course, was for all practical purposes at zero-gee, weightless.

Malone’s aerie consisted of one wall on which were located a semicircular sort of desk and communications center, a bank of display screens that were all blankly gray at the moment, and an airtight hatch that led to the spokes that radiated out to the various wheels. The rest of the chamber was a transparent glassteel bubble from which Malone could watch the station’s loading dock—and the overwhelming majesty of the huge, curved, incredibly blue and white-flecked Earth as it slid past endlessly, massive, brilliant, ever-changing, ever-beautiful.

To Jade, though, it seemed as if they were hanging in empty space itself, unprotected by anything at all, and falling, falling, falling toward the ponderous world that filled her peripheral vision. The background rumble of the bearings that bore the massive station’s rotation while the hub remained static sounded to her like the insistent bass growl of a giant grinding wheel that was pressing the breath out of her.

She swallowed bile, felt it burn in her throat, and tried to concentrate on the job at hand.

She said to Malone, “I’ve been assigned to do a biography of Mr. Gunn for the Solar News Network….”

Despite himself, Malone suddenly chuckled. “First time I ever heard him called Mr. Gunn.”

“Oh?” Jade’s microchip recorder, imbedded in her belt buckle, was already on, of course. “What did the people here call him?”

That lean, angular black face took on an almost thoughtful look. “Oh … Sam, mostly. ‘That tricky bastard,’ a good many times.” Malone actually laughed. “Plenty times I heard him called a womanizing sonofabitch.”

“What did you call him?”

The suspicion came back into Malone’s eyes. “He was my friend. I called him Sam.”

Silence stretched between them, hanging as weightlessly as their bodies. Jade turned her head slightly and found herself staring at the vast bulk of Earth. Her adoptive mother was down there, somewhere, living her own life without a thought about the daughter she had run away from. And her real mother? Was she on Earth, too, forever separated from the baby she had borne, the baby she had left abandoned, alone, friendless and loveless?

Jade’s mind screamed as if she were falling down an elevator shaft. Her stomach churned queasily. She could not tear her eyes away from the world drifting past, so far below them, so compellingly near. She felt herself being drawn toward it, dropping through the emptiness, spinning down the deep swirling vortex Malone’s long-fingered hand squeezed her shoulder hard enough to hurt. She snapped her attention to his dark, unsmiling face as he grasped her other shoulder and held her firmly in his strong hands.

“You were drifting,” he said, almost in a whisper.

“Was I… ?”

“It’s all right,” he said. “Gets everybody, at first. Don’t be scared. You’re perfectly safe.”

His powerful hands steadied her. She fought down the panic surging inside.

“If you got to upchuck, go ahead and do it. Nothing to be ashamed of.” His grin returned. “Only, use the bags they gave you, please.”

He looked almost handsome when he smiled, she thought. After another moment he released her. She took a deep breath and dabbed at the beads of perspiration on her forehead. The retch bags that the technicians had attached to her belt were a symbol to her now. I won’t need them, she insisted to herself. I’m not going to let this get to me. I’m not going to let them get to me.

“I… didn’t think … didn’t realize that zero gravity would affect me.”

“Why not? It gets to everybody, one way or another.”

“I’m from Selene,” Jade said. “I’ve lived all my life under lunar gravity.”

Malone gazed at her thoughtfully. “Still a big difference between one-sixth g and none at all, I guess.”

“Yes.” It was still difficult to breathe. “I guess there is.”

“Feel better?” he asked.

There was real concern in his eyes; “I think I’ll be all right. Thanks.”

“De nada,” he said. “I didn’t know you’d never been in weightlessness before.”

His attitude had changed, she saw. The sullenness had thawed. He had insisted on conducting the interview in the station’s zero-gravity area. He had allowed no alternative. But she was grateful that his shell of distrust seemed to have cracked.

It took several moments before she could say, “I’m not here to do a hatchet job on Mr. Gunn.”

Malone made a small shrug. “Doesn’t make much difference, one way or th’other. He’s dead; nothing you can say will hurt him now.”

“But we know so little about him. I suppose he’s the most famous enigma in the solar system.”

The black man made no response.

“The key question, I suppose … the thing our viewers will be most curious about, is why Sam Gunn exiled himself up here. Why did he turn his back on Earth?”

Malone snorted with disdain. “He didn’t! Those motherfuckers turned their backs on him.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a long story,” Malone said.

“That’s all right. I’ve got as much time as it takes.” Even as she said it Jade wished that Malone would volunteer to return back to the lunar-g wheel, where the gravity was normal. But she dared not ask the man to leave his office. Once a subject starts talking, never interrupt! That was the cardinal rule of a successful interview. Jumbo Jim had drilled that into her. Besides, she was determined not to let weightlessness get the better of her.

“Would you believe,” Malone was saying, “that it all started with a cold?”

“A cold?”

“Sam came down with a cold in the head. That’s how the whole thing began.”

“Tell me about it.”