She pulled free of his arm, sending herself spinning across the wardroom. She grabbed a table and yelled at all of us:
“Lemme tell you something, lover boys. Gloria Lamour ain’t comin’ up here at all. Never! This is as good as it gets, studs. What you see is what you got!”
The commander had to haul her through the hatch. We could hear her yelling and raving all the way down the connecting passageway to the lab module.
“Where’d she get the booze?” Larry asked.
“Brought it up with her,” said Sam. “She’s been drinking since five o’clock. Something I said ticked her off.”
“Never mind that.” I got straight to the real problem. “Is she serious about Gloria Lamour not coming up here?”
Sam nodded glumly.
“Aw shit,” moaned Larry.
I felt like somebody had shot Santa Claus.
“There isn’t any Gloria Lamour,” Sam said, his voice so low that I thought maybe I hadn’t heard him right.
“No Gloria Lamour?”
“Whattaya mean?”
Sam steadied himself with a hand on the edge of our table. “Just what I said. There isn’t any such person as Gloria Lamour.”
“That’s her show-business name.”
“She’s not real!” Sam snapped. “She’s a simulation. Computer graphics, just like your damned football game.”
“But…”
“All the publicity about her …”
“All faked. Gloria Lamour is the creation of a Hollywood talent agency and some bright computer kids. It’s supposed to be a secret, but Arlene spilled it to me after she’d had a few drinks.”
“A simulation?” Larry looked crushed. “Computer graphics can do that? She looked so … so real.”
“She’s just a bunch of algorithms, pal.” Sam seemed more sober than I had ever seen him. “Arlene’s her ‘director.’ She programs in all her moves.”
“The damned bitch,” Larry growled. “She could’ve let us know. Instead of building up our expectations like this.”
“It’s supposed to be a secret,” Sam repeated.
“Yeah, but she should’ve let us in on it. It’s not fair! It’s just not fair!”
Sam gave him a quizzical little half-smile. “Imagine how she’s been feeling, watching the six of us—even old Jay-Cubed—waiting here with our tongues hanging out and full erections. Not paying any attention to her; just waiting for this dream—this computerized doll. No wonder she got sore.”
I shook my head. The whole thing was too weird for me.
Sam was muttering, “I tried to tell her that I liked her, that I was interested in her for her own sake.”
“She saw through that,” Larry said.
“Yeah …” Sam looked toward the hatch. Everything was quiet now. “Funny thing is, I was getting to like her. I really was.”
“Her? The Bronx Ball-Breaker?”
“She’s not that bad once she lets herself relax a little.”
“She sure didn’t look relaxed tonight,” I said.
Sam agreed with a small nod. “She never got over the idea that I was after Gloria Lamour, not her.”
“Well, weren’t you?”
“At first, yeah, sure. But…”
Larry made a sour face. “But once she told you there wasn’t any Gloria Lamour you were willing to settle for her, right?”
I chimed in, “You were ready to make lemonade.”
Sam fell silent. Almost. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I don’t think so.”
The skipper came back into the wardroom, and fixed Sam with a firing-squad stare.
“Lights out, gentlemen. Gunn, you return to your normal duties tomorrow. Ms. Gold will finish her work here by herself and depart in two days.”
Sam’s only reply was a glum, “Yes, sir.”
The next morning when we started our shift in the command module Sam looked terrible. As if he hadn’t slept all night. Yet there was a hint of a twinkle in his eye. He kept his face straight, because the skipper was watching him like a hawk. But he gave me a quick wink at precisely ten o’clock.
I know the exact time for two reasons.
First, Commander Johnson punched up the interior camera view of the lab module and muttered, “Ten in the morning and she’s not at work yet.”
“She must be under the weather, sir,” Sam said in a funny kind of stiff, military way of talking. Like he was rehearsing for a role in a war video or trying to get on the skipper’s good side. (Assuming he had one.)
“She must be hung over as hell,” Al Dupres muttered to me.
“I suppose I should call her on the intercom and wake her up,” the commander said. “After all, if she’s only got two more days …”
“Emergency! Emergency!” called the computer’s synthesized female voice. “Prepare to abandon the station. All personnel to Crew Emergency Reentry Vehicles. All personnel to Crew Emergency Reentry Vehicles. Prepare to abandon the station.”
Bells and klaxons started going off all over the place. The emergency siren was wailing so loud you could barely hear yourself think. Through it all the computer kept repeating the abandon-ship message. The computer’s voice was calm but urgent. The six of us were urgent, but definitely not calm.
“But I postponed the test!” Commander Johnson yelled at his computer screen. It was filled with big block letters in red, spelling out what the synthesizer was saying.
Larry and the others were already diving for the hatch that led to the nearest CERV. They had no idea that this was supposed to be a drill.
I hesitated only a moment. Then I remembered Sams wink a minute earlier. And the little sonofagun was already flying down the connecting passageway toward the lab module like a red-topped torpedo.
“I postponed the goddamned test!” Johnson still roared at his command console, over the noise of all the warning hoots and wails. Sure he had. But Sam had spent the night rerigging it.
The station had four CERVs, each of them big enough to hold six people. Typical agency overdesign, you might think. But the lifeboats were spotted at four different locations, so no matter where on the station you might be, there was a CERV close enough to save your neck and big enough to take the whole crew with you, if necessary.
They were round unglamorous spheres, sort of like the early Russian manned reentry vehicles. Nothing inside except a lot of padding and safety harnesses. The idea was you belted off the station, propelled by cold gas jets, then the CERV’s onboard computer automatically fired a set of retro rockets and started beeping out an emergency signal so the people on the ground could track where you landed.
The sphere was covered with ablative heat shielding. After reentry it popped parachutes to plop you gently on the ocean or the ground, wherever. There was also a final descent rocket to slow your fall down to almost zero.
I caught up with Larry and the other guys inside the CERV and told them to take it easy.
“This is just a drill,” I said, laughing.
Rog Cranston’s face was dead white. “A drill?” He had already buckled himself into his harness.
“You sure?” Larry asked. He was buckled in, too. So was Al.
“Do you see the skipper in here?” I asked, hovering nonchalantly in the middle of the capsule.
Al said, “Yeah. We’re all buttoned up but we haven’t been fired off the station.”
Just at that moment we felt a jolt like somebody had whanged the capsule with the world’s biggest hammer. I went slamming face first into the padded bulkhead, just missing a head-on collision with Larry by about an inch.
“Holy shit!” somebody yelled.
I was plastered flat against the padding, my nose bleeding and my body feeling like it weighed ten tons.
“My ass, a drill!”
It was like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, only worse. After half a minute that seemed like half a year the g-force let up and we were weightless again. I fumbled with shaking hands into one of the empty harnesses. My nose was stuffed up with blood that couldn’t run out in zero-gee and I thought I was going to strangle to death. Then we started feeling heavy again. The whole damned capsule started to shake like we were inside a food processor and blood sprayed from my aching nose like a garden sprinkler.