The Sam Gunn Omnibus Page 20

  “But he’ll lose-all his pension benefits and health care provisions.”

  “He knows that.”

  She turned those heartbreakingly blue eyes on Sam again. “It will be a big disappointment to us if you leave, Sam. It will be a personal disappointment to me.”

  To his credit, Sam found the strength within himself to hold his ground. “I’m awfully sorry... but I’ve worked very hard to create this opportunity and I can’t let it slip past me now.”

  She nodded once, as if she understood. Then she asked, “This opportunity you’re speaking about: does it have anything to do with the prospect of opening a tourist hotel on Space Station Alpha?”

  “That’s right! But not just a hotel, a complete tourist facility. Sports complex, entertainment center, zero-gravity honeymoon suites...” He stopped abruptly and his face turned red. Sam blushed! He actually blushed.

  Miss Beryllium smiled her dazzling smile at him. “But Sam dear, that idea is the proprietary intellectual property of Rockledge Industries, Incorporated. Rockledge owns the idea, not you.”

  For a moment the little conference room was absolutely silent. I could hear nothing except the faint background hiss of the air circulation fans. Sam seemed to have stopped breathing.

  Then he squawked, “WHAT?”

  With a sad little shake of her gorgeous head, the Blonde replied, “Sam, you developed that idea while an employee of Rockledge Industries. We own it.”

  “But you turned it down!”

  “That makes no difference, Sam. Read your employment contract. It’s ours.”

  “But I made all the contacts. I raised the funding. I worked everything out—on my own time, goddammit! On my own time!

  She shook her golden locks again. “No, Sam. You did it while you were a Rockledge employee. It is not your possession. It belongs to us.”

  Sam leaped out of my grasp and bounded to the ceiling. This time he was ready to make war, not love. “You can’t do this to me!”

  The Blonde looked completely unruffled by his display. She stood there patiently, a slightly disappointed little pout on her face, while I calmed Sam down and got him back to the table.

  “Sam, dear, I know how you must feel,” she cooed. “I don’t want us to be enemies. We’d be happy to have you take part in the tourist hotel program as a Rockledge employee. There could even be a raise in it for you.”

  “It’s mine, dammit!” Sam screeched. “You can’t steal it from me! It’s mine!”

  She shrugged deliciously. “I suppose our lawyers will have to settle it with your lawyers. In the meantime I’m afraid there’s nothing for us to do but to accept your resignation. With reluctance, of course. With my own personal and very sad reluctance.”

  That much I saw and heard with my own eyes and ears. I had to drag Sam out of the conference room and take him back to his own quarters. She had him whipsawed, telling him that he couldn’t claim possession of his own idea and at the same time practically begging him to stay on with Rockledge and run the tourist project for them.

  What happened next depends on who you ask. There are as many different versions of the story as there are people who tell it. As near as I can piece it all together, though, it went this way:

  The Beryllium Blonde was hoping that Sam’s financial partners would go along with Rockledge Industries once they realized that Rockledge had muscled Sam out of the hotel deal. But she probably wasn’t as sure of everything as she tried to make Sam think. After all, those backers had made their deal with the little guy; maybe they didn’t want to do business with a big multinational corporation. Worse still, she didn’t know exactly what kind of a deal Sam had cut with his backers. If Sam had legally binding contracts naming him as their partner they just might scrap the whole project when they learned that Rockledge had cut Sam out. Especially if it looked like a court battle was shaping up.

  So she showed up at Sam’s door that night. He told me that she was still wearing the same skintight jumpsuit, with nothing underneath it except her own luscious body. She brought a bottle of incredibly rare and expensive cognac with her. “To show there’s no hard feelings.”

  The Blonde’s game was to keep Sam with Rockledge and get him to go through with the tourist hotel deal. Apparently, once Rockledge’s management got word that Sam had actually closed a deal for creating a tourist facility on Alpha, their greedy little brains told them they might as well take the tourist business for themselves. Alpha was still badly underutilized; a tourist facility suddenly made sense to those jerkoffs.

  So instead of shuttling back to Phoenix, as we had thought she would, the Blonde knocked on Sam’s door that night. The next morning I saw him floating along the Shack’s central corridor. He looked kind of dazed.

  “She’s staying here for a few more days,” Sam mumbled. It was like he was talking to himself instead of to me.

  But there was that happy little grin on his face.

  Everybody in the Shack started to make bets on how long Sam could hold out. The best odds had him capitulating in three nights. Jokes about Delilah and haircuts became uproariously funny to everybody—except me. My future was tied up with Sam’s. If the tourist project collapsed it wouldn’t be long before I got shipped back to Earth, I knew.

  After three days there were dark circles under Sam’s eyes. He looked weary. Dazed. The grin was gone.

  After a week had gone by I found Sam snoring in the Blue Grotto. As gently as I could I woke him.

  “You getting any food into you?” I asked.

  He blinked, gummy-eyed. “Chicken soup. I been taking chicken soup. Had some yesterday.... I think it was yesterday....”

  By the tenth day more money had changed hands among the bettors than on Wall Street. Sam looked like a case of battle fatigue. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes haunted.

  “She’s a devil, Omar,” he whispered hoarsely. “A devil.”

  “Then get rid of her, man!” I urged. “Send her packing!”

  He smiled wanly, like a man who knew he was addicted. “And quit show business?” he said weakly.

  Two weeks to the day after she arrived, the Blonde packed up and left. Her eyes were blazing with anger. I saw her off at the docking port. She looked just as perfectly radiant as the day she had first arrived at the Shack. But what she was radiating now was rage. Hell hath no fury... I thought. But I was happy to see her go.

  Sam slept for two days straight. When he managed to get up and around again he was only a shell of his old self. He had lost ten pounds. His eyes were sunken into his skull. His hands trembled. His chin was stubbled. He looked as if he had been through hell and back. But his crooked little grin had returned.

  “What happened?” I asked him.

  “She gave up.”

  “You mean she’s going to let you go?”

  He gave a deep, soulful, utterly weary sigh. “I guess she finally figured out that she couldn’t change my mind and she couldn’t kill me—at least not with the method she was using.” His grin stretched a little wider.

  “We all thought she was wrapping you around her little finger,” I said.

  “So did she.”

  “You outsmarted her!”

  I outlasted her,” Sam said, his voice low and truly sorrowful. “You know, at one point there, she almost had me convinced that she had fallen in love with me.”

  “In love with you?”

  He shook his head slowly, like a man who had crawled across miles of burning desert toward an oasis that turned out to be a mirage.

  “You had me worried, man.”

  “Why?” His eyes were really bleary.

  “Well... she’s a powerful hunk of woman. Like you said, they sent her up here because you’re susceptible.”

  “Yeah. But once she tried to steal my idea from me I stopped being so susceptible. I kept telling myself, ‘She’s not a gorgeous hot-blooded sex-pot of a woman. She’s a company stooge, an android they sent here to nail you, a bureaucrat with boobs. Gr
eat boobs.”

  “And it worked.”

  “By a millimeter. Less. She damned near beat me. She damned near did. She should never have mentioned marriage. That woke me up.”

  What had happened, while Sam was fighting the Battle of the Bunk, was that when Sam’s partners-to-be realized that Rockledge was interested in the tourist facility, they became absolutely convinced that they had a gold mine on their hands. They backed Sam to the hilt. Their lawyers challenged Rockledge’s lawyers, and once the paper-shufflers down in Phoenix saw that, they understood that Miss Berylliums mission to the Shack was doomed. The Blonde left in a huff when Phoenix ordered her to return. I guess she was enjoying her work. Or maybe she thought she had Sam weakening.

  “Now lemme get another week’s worth of sleep, will you?” Sam asked me. “And, oh yeah, find me about a ton and a half of vitamin E.”

  So Sam became the manager and part owner of the human race’s first extraterrestrial tourist facility. I was his partner and, the way things worked out, a major shareholder in the project. Rockledge got some rent money out of it. Actually, so many people enjoyed their vacations and honeymoons aboard the Big Wheel that a market eventually opened up for low-gravity retirement homes. Sam beat Rockledge on that, too. But that’s another story.

  MALONE WAS HANGING weightlessly near the curving transparent dome of his chamber, staring out at the distant Moon and cold unblinking stars.

  Jade had almost forgotten her fear of weightlessness. The black man’s story seemed finished. She blinked and turned her attention to here and now. Drifting slightly closer to him, she turned off the recorder with an audible click, then thought better of it and turned it on again.

  “So that’s how this hotel came into being,” she said.

  Malone nodded, turning in midair to face her. “Yep. Sam got it started and then lost interest in it. He had other things on his mind, bigger fish to fry. He went into the advertising business, you know.”

  “Oh yes, everybody knows about that,” she replied. “But what happened to the woman, the Beryllium Blonde? And why didn’t Sam ever return to Earth again?”

  “Two parts of the same answer,” Malone said tiredly. “Miss Beryllium thought she was playing Sam for a fish, using his Casanova complex to literally screw him out of his hotel deal. Once she realized that he was playing her, fighting a delaying action until his partners got their lawyers into action, she got damned mad. Powerfully mad. By the time it finally became clear back at Phoenix that Sam was going to beat them, she took her revenge.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sam wasn’t the only one who could riffle through old safety regulations and use them for his own benefit. She found a few early NASA regs, then got some bureaucrats in Washington—from the Office of Safety and Health, I think—to rewrite them so that anybody who’d been living in zero-gee for a year or more had to undertake six months’ worth of retraining and exercise before he could return to Earth.”

  “Six months? That’s ridiculous!”

  “Is it?” Malone smiled with humor. “That regulation is still on the books, lady. Nobody pays attention to it anymore, but it’s still there.”

  “She did that to spite Sam?”

  “And she made sure Rockledge put all its weight behind enforcing it. Made people think twice before signing an employment contract to work up here. Stuck Sam, but good. He wasn’t going to spend no six months retraining! He just never bothered going back to Earth again.”

  “Did he want to go back?”

  “Sure he did. He wasn’t like me. He liked it back there. There were billions of women on Earth! Sam wanted to return but he just could never take six months out of his life to do it.”

  “That must have hurt him terribly.”

  “Yeah, I guess. Hard to tell with Sam. He didn’t like to bleed where other people could watch.”

  “And you never went back to Earth.”

  “No,” Malone said. “Thanks to Sam I stayed up here. He made me manager of the hotel, and once Sam bought the rest of this Big Wheel from Rockledge, I became manager of the whole Alpha Station.”

  “And you’ve never had the slightest yearning to see Earth again?”

  Malone gazed at her solemnly for long moments before answering. “Sure I get the itch. But when I do I go down to the one-g section of the Wheel here. I sit in a wheelchair and try to get around with these crippled legs of mine. The itch goes away then.”

  “But they have prosthetic legs that you can’t tell from the real thing,” she said. “Lots of paraplegics ...”

  “Maybe you can’t tell them from the real thing, but I guarantee you that any paraplegic who uses those legs can tell.” Malone shook his head stubbornly. “Naw, once you’ve spent some time up here in zero-gee you realize that you don’t need legs to get around. You can live a good and useful life here instead of being a cripple down there.”

  “I see,” Jade said softly.

  “Yeah. Sure you do.”

  “Sure I do,” Jade said softly. “I can never go to Earth, either.”

  “Never?” Malone sounded skeptical.

  “Bone disease. I was born with it.”

  An uncomfortable silence rose between them. She turned off the recorder in her belt buckle, for good this time.

  Finally Malone softened. “Hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve been nasty with you. It’s just that... thinking about Sam again. He was a great guy, you know. And now he’s dead and everybody thinks he was just a troublemaking bastard.”

  “I don’t,” she said. “A womanizing sonofabitch, like you said. A male chauvinist of the first order. But after listening to you tell it, even at that he doesn’t seem so awful.”

  The black man smiled at her. “Look at the time! No wonder I’m hungry! Can I take you down to the dining room for some supper?”

  “The dining room in the lunar-gravity section?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Won’t you be uncomfortable there? Isn’t there a galley in the micro-gravity section?”

  “Sure, but won’t you be uncomfortable there?”

  She laughed. “I think I can handle it.”

  “Really?”

  “I can try. And maybe you can tell me how Sam got himself into the retirement home business.”

  “All right. I’ll do that.”

  As she turned she caught sight of the immense beauty of Earth sliding past the observation dome; the Indian Ocean a breathtaking swirl of deep blues and greens, the subcontinent of India decked with purest white clouds. The people who lived there, she thought. All those people. And the two, in particular, who were hiding away from her.

  “But...” She looked at Malone, then asked in a whisper, “Do you ever miss being home, being on Earth? Don’t you feel isolated here, away from ...”

  His booming laughter shocked her. “Isolated? Up here?” Malone pitched himself forward into a weightless somersault, then pirouetted in midair. He pointed toward the ponderous bulk of the planet and said, “They’re the ones who’re isolated. Up here, I’m free!”

  Then he offered his arm to her and they floated together toward the gleaming metal hatch, their feet a good eight inches above the chamber’s floor.

  Still, Jade glanced back over her shoulder at the gleaming expanse of cloud-decked blue. She thought of the two women who lived among the billions down there, the two women who would never see her, whom she could never see. There are many kinds of isolation, Jade thought. Many kinds.

  Lagrange Habitat Jefferson

  THE DINING ROOM IN ALPHA’S ZERO-GRAVITY SECTION WAS actually a self-service galley. Malone helped Jade to fill her tray with prepackaged courses, then they fit their slippered feet into loop restraints on the spindly legs of a table, Jade using the highest level of the plastic loops, long-legged Malone the lowest.

  Their dinner together was relaxed and pleasant. Malone recommended for dessert what he called “the Skylab bomb”: a paper-thin shell of vanilla ice cream filled with
strawberries.

  “You can only make it this thin in zero-gee,” he pointed out.

  As they finished their squeezebulbs of coffee, Malone said, “Y’know, there’s a guy over in the new habitat at L-5, the one they’ve named Jefferson. You’d do well to talk to him.”

  Jade turned on her belt recorder to get the man’s name and location.

  “Yeah. Spence Johansen,” Malone continued. “He knew Sam when they were both astronauts with the old NASA. Then they went into business together.”

  “What kind of business?” Jade asked.

  Malone grinned at her. “Junk collecting.”

  “IT’S JUST A small increment on the fare,” Jade said to Raki’s image on the phone screen. She was leaning against the side wall of the cubicle she had rented aboard Alpha, her bags packed, ready to head back to Selene by way of habitat Jefferson.

  Raki had a strange smile on his darkly handsome face. “You got the story from this man Malone?” he asked.

  “Yes. It’s really good, Raki. Very personal stuff. Great human interest. And Malone told me about this Spencer Johansen who’s living at Jefferson. I can get there on the transfer ship that’s leaving in half an hour.”

  He shook his head. “What would you do if I said no?”

  She grinned at his image. “I’d go there anyway; the difference in fare is so small I’d pay it myself.”

  He puffed out a sigh. “Do you realize how far out on a limb I am with you? The CEO hates Sam Gunn. If Sam were alive today the old man would want to have him murdered.”

  Jade said nothing. She merely hung there weightlessly, her back plastered to the wall to prevent her from drifting out of range of the phone’s camera eye.

  “All right,” Raki said finally, with a little shrug of acquiescence. “I think it’s crazy. I think maybe I’m crazy. But go ahead, get everything you can.”

  “Thanks!” Jade said. “You won’t regret it, Raki.”

  “I already regret it.”