The Sam Gunn Omnibus Page 28

  I tried beefing up the acoustical insulation in the suites, but Heaven got the reputation of being like an ocean liner that’s always in rough seas. And to this day I’m still convinced that D’Argent used Rockledge’s high-powered public relations machine to badmouth Heaven. D’Argent hated my guts, and the feeling was mutual.

  And now Jack Spratt and his wife were bringing a baby up to Heaven. Perfect.

  They sat two rows in front of me: Larry Karsh, Melinda, and a squirming dribbling baby that couldn’t have been more than nine or ten months old. Larry had filled out a little in the couple of years since I had last seen him, but he still looked like an emaciated scarecrow. Melinda had slimmed down a trace. Maybe. They still looked like Jack Spratt and his wife. And baby.

  I could feel my face wrinkling into the grandfather of all frowns. A baby aboard a space station? That’s crazy! It’s sabotage! Yet, try as I might, I couldn’t think of any company rules or government regulations that prohibited people from bringing babies to Heaven. It just never occurred to me that anybody would. Well, I’ll fix that, I told myself. What the hell kind of a honeymoon hotel has a baby running around in it? Upchucking is bad enough; we don’t need dirty diapers and a squalling brat in orbit. They’re going to ruin the whole idea of Heaven.

  The Clipper took off normally; we pulled about three gs for a minute or so. The cabin was less than half full; plenty of empty seats staring at me like the Ghost of Bankruptcy To Come. I scrunched deeper in my seat so Jack Spratt and his wife wouldn’t see me. But I was listening for the yowling that I knew was on its way.

  Sure enough, as soon as the engines cut off and we felt weightless, the baby started screaming. The handful of paying passengers all turned toward the kid, and Larry unbuckled himself and drifted out of his seat.

  “Hey, T.J., don’t holler,” he said, in the kind of voice that only an embarrassed father can put out. While he talked, he and Melinda unbuckled the brat from his car seat.

  The baby kicked himself free of the last strap and floated up into his father’s arms. His yowling stopped. He gurgled. I knew what was coming next: his breakfast.

  But instead the kid laughed and waved his chubby little arms. Larry barely touched him, just sort of guided him the way you’d tap a helium-filled balloon.

  “See?” he cooed. “It’s fun, isn’t it?”

  The baby laughed. The passengers smiled tolerantly. Me, I was stunned that Jack Spratt had learned how to coo.

  Then he spotted me, slumped down so far in my seat I was practically on the floor. And it’s not easy to slump in zero-gee; you really have to work at it.

  “Sam!” he blurted, surprised. “I didn’t know you were on this flight.” And Melinda turned around in her chair and gave me a strained smile.

  “I didn’t know you had a baby,” I said, trying not to growl in front of the paying customers.

  Larry floated down the aisle to my row, looking so proud of his accomplishment you’d think nobody had ever fathered a son before. “Timothy James Karsh, meet Sam Gunn. Sam, this is T.J.”

  He glided T.J. in my direction, the baby giggling and flailing both his arms and legs. For just the flash of a second I thought of how much fun it would be to play volleyball with the kid, but instead I just sort of held him like he was a Ming vase or something. I didn’t know what the hell to do with a baby!

  But the baby knew. He looked me straight in the eye and spurted out a king-sized juicy raspberry, spraying me all over my face. Everybody roared with laughter.

  I shoved the kid back to Larry, thinking that baseball might be more fun than volleyball.

  In the fifty-eight minutes it took us to go from engine cutoff to docking with the space station, T.J. did about eleven thousand somersaults, seventy-three dozen midair pirouettes, and God knows how many raspberries. Everybody enjoyed the show, at first. The women especially gushed and gabbled and talked baby talk to the kid. They reached out to hold him, but little T.J. didn’t want to be held. He was having a great time floating around the tourist cabin and enjoying weightlessness.

  I had feared, in those first few moments, that seeing this little bundle of dribble floating through the cabin would make some of the passengers queasy. I was just starting to tell myself I was wrong when I heard the first retching heave from behind me. It finally caught up with them; the baby’s antics had taken their minds off that falling sensation you get when zero-gee first hits you. But now the law of averages took its toll.

  One woman. That’s all it took. One of those gargling groans and inside of two minutes almost everybody in the cabin is grabbing for their whoopie bags and making miserable noises. I turned up the air vent over my seat to max, but the stench couldn’t be avoided. Even Melinda started to look a little green, although Larry was as unaffected as I was and little T.J. thought all the noise was hysterically funny. He threw out raspberries at everybody.

  When we finally got docked we needed the station’s full medical crew and a fumigation squad to clean out the cabin. Three couples flatly refused to come aboard Heaven; green as guacamole, they cancelled their vacations on the spot, demanded their money back, and rode in misery back to Earth. The other eight couples were all honeymooners. They wouldn’t cancel, but they looked pretty damned unhappy.

  I went straight from the dock to my cubbyhole of an office in the hotel.

  “There’s gotta be a way to get rid of that baby,” I muttered as I slid my slippered feet into their restraint loops. I tend to talk to myself when I’m upset.

  My office was a marvel of zero-gee ergonomic engineering: compact as a fighter plane’s cockpit, cozy as squirrel’s nest, with everything I needed at my fingertips, whether it was up over my head or wherever. I scrolled through three hours worth of rules and regulations, insurance, safety, travel rights, even family law. Nothing there that would prevent parents from bringing babies onto a space station.

  I was staring bleary-eyed at old maritime law statutes on my display screen, hoping that as owner of the hotel I had the same rights as the captain of a ship and could make unwanted passengers walk the plank. No such luck. Then the phone light blinked. I punched the key and growled, “What?”

  A familiar voice said coyly, “Senator Meyers would like the pleasure of your company.”

  “Jill? Is that you?” I cleared my display screen and punched up the phone image. Sure enough, it was Sen. Jill Meyers (R-NH).

  Everybody said that Jill looked enough like me to be my sister. If so, what we did back in our youthful NASA days would have to be called incest. Jill had a pert round face, bright as a new penny, with a scattering of freckles across her button of a nose. Okay, so I look kind of like that, too. But her hair is a mousy brown and straight as a plumbline, while mine is on the russet side and curls so tight you can break a comb on it.

  Let me get one thing absolutely clear. I am taller than she. Jill is not quite five-foot three, whereas I am five-five, no matter what my detractors claim.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Roughly fifty meters away from you,” she said, grinning.

  “Here? In Heaven?” That was not the best news in the world for me. I had come up to my zero-gee hotel to get away from Jill.

  See, I had been sort of courting her down in Washington because she’s a ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee and I needed a favor or two from her. She was perfectly happy to do me the favor or two, but she made it clear she was looking for a husband. Jill had been widowed maybe ten years earlier. I had never been married and had no intention of starting now. I like women way too much to marry one of them.

  “Yes, I’m here in Heaven,” Jill said, with a big grin. “Came up on the same flight you did.”

  “But I didn’t see you.”

  “Senators ride first class, Sam.”

  I made a frown. “At the taxpayers’ expense.”

  “In this case, it was at the expense of Rockledge International Corporation. Feel better?”

  No, I didn’t fee
l better. Not at all. “Rockledge? How come?”

  “I’ve been invited to inspect their research facilities here at their space station,” Jill said. “Pierre D’Argent himself is escorting me.”

  I growled.

  Maybe I should tell you that the Rockledge space station was built of three concentric wheels. The outermost wheel spun around at a rate that gave it the feeling of regular Earth gravity: one g. The second wheel, closer to the hub, was at roughly one-third g: the gravity level of Mars. The innermost wheel was at one-sixth g, same as the Moon. And the hub, of course, was just about zero gravity. The scientists call it microgravity but it’s so close to zero-gee that for all intents and purposes you’re weightless at the hub.

  I had rented half the hub from Rockledge for my Hotel Heaven. Zero-gee for lovers. Okay, so it’s not exactly zero-gee, so what? I had built thirty lovely little mini-suites around the rim of the hub and still had enough room left over to set up a padded gym where you could play anything from volleyball to blind man’s bluff in weightlessness.

  Once I realized that most tourists got sick their first day or so in orbit, I tried to rent space down at the outermost wheel, so my customers could stay at normal Earth gravity and visit the zero-gee section when they wanted to play—or try weightless sex. No dice. D’Argent wouldn’t rent any of it to me. He claimed Rockledge was using the rest of the station— all of it—for their research labs and their staff. Which was bullcrap.

  I did manage to get them to rent me a small section in the innermost wheel, where everything was one-sixth g. I set up my restaurant there, so my customers could at least have their meals in some comfort. Called it the Lunar Eclipse. Best damned restaurant off Earth. Also the only one, at that time. Lots of spilled drinks and wine, though. Pouring liquids in low gravity takes some training. We had to work hard to teach our waiters and waitresses how to do it. I personally supervised the waitress training. It was one of the few bright spots in this black hole that was engulfing me.

  “How about lunch?” Jill asked me, with a bright happy smile.

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling trapped. “How about it?”

  “What a charming invitation,” said Jill. ‘Til see you at the restaurant in fifteen minutes.”

  Now here’s the deal. The first big industrial boom in orbit was just starting to take off. Major corporations like Rockledge were beginning to realize that they could make profits from manufacturing in orbit.

  They had problems with workers getting space sick, of course, but they weren’t as badly affected as I was with Heaven. There’s a big difference between losing the first two days of a week-long vacation because you’re nauseated and losing the first two days of a ninety-day work contract. Still, Rockledge was searching for a cure. Right there on the same space station as my Hotel Heaven.

  Anyway, I figured that the next step in space industrialization would be to start digging up the raw materials for the orbital factories from the Moon and the asteroids. A helluva lot cheaper than hauling them up from Earth, once you get a critical mass of mining equipment in place. The way I saw it, once we could start mining the Moon and some of the near-approach asteroids, the boom in orbital manufacturing would really take off. I’d make zillions!

  And I was right, of course, although it didn’t exactly develop the way I thought it would.

  I wanted to get there first. Start mining the Moon, grab an asteroid or two. Mega-fortunes awaited the person who could strike those bonanzas.

  But the goddamned honeymoon hotel was bleeding me to death. Unless and until somebody came up with a cure for space sickness, Heaven was going to be a financial bottomless pit. I was losing a bundle trying to keep the hotel open, and the day D’Argent became Rockledge’s Chief of Space Operations, he doubled my rent, sweetheart that he is.

  But I knew something that D’Argent didn’t want me to know. Rockledge was working on a cure for space sickness. Right here aboard the space station! If I could get my hands on that, my troubles would be over. Pretty much.

  It occurred to me, as I headed for the Lunar Eclipse, that maybe Jill could do me still another favor. Maybe her being here on the station might work out okay, after all.

  I pushed along the tube that went down to the inner ring. You had to be careful, heading from the hub towards the various rings, because you were effectively going downhill. Flatlanders coming up for the first time could flatten themselves but good if they let themselves drop all the way down to the outermost wheel. The Coriolis force from the stations spin would bang them against the tube’s circular wall as they dropped downward. The farther they dropped, the bigger the bangs. You could break bones.

  That’s why Rockledge’s engineers had designed ladder rungs and safety hatches in the tubes that connected the hub to the wheels, so you had something to grab on to and stop your fall. I had even thought about padding the walls, but D’Argent nixed my idea: too expensive, he claimed. He’d rather see somebody fracture a leg and sue me.

  I was almost at the lunar level. In fact, I was pulling open the hatch when I hear a yell. I look up and a bundle of screaming baby comes tumbling past me like a miniature bowling ball with arms and legs.

  “Catch him! Stop him!”

  I look around and here comes Larry Karsh, flailing around like a skinny spider on LSD, trying to catch up with his kid.

  “Sam! Help!”

  If I had thought about it for half a microsecond I would’ve let the kid bounce off the tube walls until he splattered himself on the next set of hatches. And Larry after him.

  But, no—instinct took over and I shot through the hatch and launched myself after the baby like a torpedo on a rescue mission. S. Gunn, intrepid hero.

  It was a long fall to the next set of hatches. I could see the kid tumbling around like a twenty-pound meteoroid, bare-ass naked, hitting the wall and skidding along it for a moment, then flinging out into midair again. His size worked for him: a little guy like he was didn’t hit the wall so hard—at first. But each bump down the tube was going to be harder, I knew. If I didn’t catch him real fast, he’d get hurt. Bad.

  There was nobody else in the damned tube, nobody there to grab him or break his fall or even slow him down a little.

  I started using the ladder rungs to propel myself faster, grabbing the rungs with my fingertips and pushing off them, one after another, faster and faster. Like the Lone Ranger chasing a runaway horse. Damned Coriolis force was getting to me, though, making me kind of dizzy.

  As I got closer and closer, I saw that little T.J. wasn’t screaming with fear. He was screeching with delight, happy as a little cannonball, kicking his arms and legs and tumbling head over bare ass, laughing hard as he could.

  Next time he hits the wall he won’t be laughing anymore, I thought. Then I wondered if I could reach him before he slammed into the hatch at the bottom of this level of the tube. At the speed I was going I’d come down right on top of him, and the kid wouldn’t be much of a cushion.

  Well, I caught up with him before either of us reached the next hatch, tucked him under one arm like he was a wriggling football, and started trying to slow my fall with the other hand. It wasn’t going to work, I saw, so I flipped myself around so I was coming down feet-first and kept grabbing at rungs with my free hand, getting dizzier and dizzier. Felt like my shoulder was going to come off, and my hand got banged up pretty good, but at least we slowed down some.

  The baby was crying and struggling to get loose. He’d been having fun, dropping like an accelerating stone. He didn’t like being saved. I heard Larry yelling and looked up; he was clambering down the ladder, all skinny arms and legs, jabbering like a demented monkey.

  I hit the hatch feet-first like I’d been dropped out of an airplane. I mean, I did my share of parachute jumps back when I was in astronaut training, but this time I hit a hell of a lot harder. Like my shinbones were shattering and my knees were trying to ram themselves up into my ribcage. I saw every star in the Milky Way, and the wind was knocked ou
t of me for a moment.

  So I was sprawled on my back, kind of dazed, with the kid yelling to get loose from me, when Larry comes climbing down the ladder, puffing like he’d been trying to save the kid, and takes the yowling little brat in his arms.

  “Gee, thanks, Sam,” he says. “I was changing his diaper when he got loose from me. Sorry about the mess.”

  That’s when I realized that the ungrateful little so-and-so had peed all down the front of my shirt.

  So I was late for my lunch date with Senator Meyers. My hand was banged up and swollen, my legs ached, my knees felt like they were going to explode, and the only other shirt I had brought with me was all wrinkled from being jammed into my travel bag. But at least it was dry. Even so, I got to the restaurant before she did. Jill was one of those women who has a deathly fear of arriving anywhere first.

  I was so late, though, that she was only half a minute behind me. I hadn’t even started for a table yet; I was still in the restaurant’s teeny little foyer, talking with my buddy Omar.

  “Am I terribly late?” Jill asked.

  I turned at the sound of her voice and, I’ve got to admit, Jill looked terrific. I mean, she was as plain as vanilla, with hardly any figure at all, but she still looked bright and attractive and, well, I guess the right word is radiant. She was wearing a one-piece zipsuit, almost like the coveralls that we used to wear back on the NASA shuttle. But now her suit was made of some kind of shiny stuff and decorated with color accents and jewels. Like Polonius said: rich, not gaudy.

  Her hair was a darker shade than I remembered it from the old days, and impeccably coiffed. She was dyeing it, I figured. And getting it done a lot better than she did when she’d been a working astronaut.

  “You look like a million dollars,” I said as she stepped through the hatch into the restaurant’s foyer.

  She grinned that freckle-faced grin of hers and said, “It costs almost that much to look like this.”

  “It’s worth it,” I said.