The Sam Gunn Omnibus

The Sea of Clouds

The spring-wheeled truck rolled to a silent stop on the Mare Nubium. The fine dust kicked up by its six wheels floated lazily back to the mare’s soil. The hatch to the truck cab swung upward, and a space-suited figure climbed slowly down to the lunar surface, clumped a dozen ponderously careful steps, then turned back toward the truck.

“Yeah, this is the spot. The transponder’s beeping away, all right.”

At first Jade had been excited by her work as a truck driver. Even inside a space suit, being out on the wide-open surface of the Moon, beneath the solemn eyes of the unblinking stars, was almost like being able to run wild and free in comparison to the dreariness of Selene’s underground corridors. But now she had been at the job for nearly a year. The excitement had worn away, eroded as inevitably as the meteor-pitted rocks of the Sea of Clouds.

And always in that dead-black sky there hung the glowing jewel of Earth, tantalizing, beautiful, forever out of her reach.

She and the hoist operator (male and married) clambered down from the cab, bulbous and awkward-looking in their bulky space suits. Jade turned a full three hundred sixty degrees, scanning the scene through the gold-tinted visor of her suit’s bubble helmet. There was nothing to be seen except the monotonous gray plain, pockmarked by craters like an ancient, savage battlefield that had been petrified into solid stone long eons ago.

“Merde, you can’t even see the ringwall from here!” she exclaimed.

“That’s what he wanted,” came the voice of their supervisor through her helmet earphones. “To be out in the open, without a sign of civilization in sight. He picked this spot himself, you know.”

“Helluva place to want to be buried,” said the hoist operator.

“That’s what he specified in his will. Come on, let’s get to work. I want to get back to Selene City before the sun goes down.”

It was a local joke: the three space-suited workers had more than two hundred hours before sunset.

Grunting even in the gentle lunar gravity, they slid the gleaming sarcophagus from the back of the truck and placed it softly on the roiled, dusty ground. It was made of stainless steel, delicately inscribed in gold by the solar system’s most famous sculptress. At one end, in tastefully small lettering, was a logo: S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited.

The supervisor carefully paced to the exact spot where the tiny transponder lay blinking, and used a hand laser to draw an exact circle around it. Then he sprayed the stony ground inside the circle with the blue-white flame of a plasma torch. Meanwhile, Jade helped the hoist operator swing the four-meter-high crate down from the truck bed to the ground next to the sarcophagus.

“Ready for the statue?” Jade asked.

The supervisor said nothing as he inspected his own work. The hot plasma had polished the stony ground. Jade and the hoist operator heard him muttering over their helmet earphones as he used the hand laser to check the polished ground’s dimensions. Satisfied, he helped them drag the gold-filigreed sarcophagus to its center and slide it into place over the transponder.

“A lot of work to do for a dead man.”

“He wasn’t just any ordinary man.”

“It’s still a lot of work. Why in hell couldn’t he be recycled like everybody else?” the hoist operator complained.

“He’s not in the sarcophagus, dumbskull,” snapped the supervisor. “Don’t you know any goddamned thing?”

“He’s not… ?”

Jade had known that the sarcophagus was empty, symbolic. She was surprised that her coworker didn’t. Some people pay no attention to anything, she told herself. I’ll bet he doesn’t know anything at all about Sam Gunn.

“Sam Gunn,” said the supervisor, “never did things like everybody else. Not in his whole cussed life. Why should he be like the rest of us in death?”

They chattered back and forth through their suit radios as they uncrated the big package. Once they had removed all the plastic and the bigger-than-life statue stood sparkling in the sunlight, they stepped back and gaped at it.

“It’s glass!”

“Christ, I never saw any statue so damned big.”

“Must have cost a fortune to get it here. Two fortunes!”

“He had it done at Island One, I heard. Brought the sculptress in from the Belt and paid her enough to keep her at L-4 for two whole years. God knows how many times she tried to cast a statue this big and failed, even in low gee.”

“I didn’t know you could make a glass statue this big.”

“In micro-gee you can. It’s hollow. If we were in air, I could ping it with my finger and you’d hear it ring.”

“Crystal.”

“That’s right.”

Jade laughed softly.

“What’s so funny?” the supervisor asked.

“Who else but Sam Gunn would have the gall to erect a crystal statue to himself and then have it put out in the middle of this godforsaken emptiness, where nobody’s ever going to see it? It’s a monument to himself, for himself. What ego! What monumental ego.”

The supervisor chuckled, too. “Yeah. Sam had an ego, all right. But he was a smart little SOB, too.”

“You knew him?” Jade asked.

“Sure. Knew him well enough to tell you that he didn’t pick this spot for his tomb just for the sake of his ego. He was smarter than that.”

“What was he like?”

“When did you know him?” the hoist operator asked.

“Come on, we’ve still got work to do. He wants the statue positioned exactly as he stated in his will, with its back toward Selene and the face looking up toward Earth.”

“Yeah, okay, but when did you know him, huh?”

“Oh golly, years ago. Decades ago. When the two of us were just young pups. The first time either of us came here, back in—Lord, it’s thirty years ago. More.”

“Tell us about it. Was he really the rogue that the history disks say he was? Did he really do all the things they say?” Jade found to her surprise that she was eager to know.

“He was a phony!” the hoist operator snapped. “Everybody knows that. A helluva showman, sure, but he never did half the stuff he took credit for. Nobody could have, not in one lifetime.”

“He lived a pretty intense life,” said the supervisor. “If it hadn’t been for that black hole he’d still be running his show from here to Titan.”

“A showman. That’s what he was.” “What was he like?” Jade asked again.

So, while the two young workers struggled with the huge, fragile crystal statue, the older man sat himself on the lip of the truck’s hatch and told them what he knew about the first time Sam Gunn had come to the Moon.