The Sam Gunn Omnibus Page 29

  Omar, my buddy from years back, was serving as the maitre d’ that afternoon. He was the general manager of the hotel, but everybody was pulling double or triple duty, trying to keep the place afloat. He loomed over us, painfully gaunt and tall as a basketball star, his black pate shaved bald, a dense goatee covering his chin. In the easy lunar gravity Omar could walk normally with nothing more than the lightest of braces on his atrophied legs. Omar had more to lose than I did if the hotel went bust. He’d have to go back to Earth and be a cripple.

  As he showed us to our table, all dignity and seriousness, Jill cracked, “You’re getting gray, Sam.”

  “Cosmic rays,” I snapped back at her. “Not age. I’ve been in space so much that primary cosmic rays have discolored my pigmentation.”

  Jill nodded as if she knew better but didn’t want to argue about it. The restaurant was almost completely empty. It was the only place aboard the station to eat, unless you were a Rockledge employee and could use their cafeteria, yet still it was a sea of empty tables. I mean, there wasn’t any other place for the tourists to eat—it was lunch hour for those who came up from the States—but the Eclipse had that forlorn look. Three tables occupied, seventeen bare. Twelve human waiters standing around with nothing to do but run up my salary costs.

  As Omar sat us at the finest table in the Eclipse (why not?) Jill said, “You ought to get some new clothes, Sam. You’re frayed at the cuffs, for goodness’ sake.”

  I refrained from telling her about T.J.’s urinary gift. But I gave her the rest of the story about my thrilling rescue, which nobody had witnessed except the butterfingered Jack Spratt.

  “My goodness, Sam, you saved that baby’s life,” Jill said, positively glowing at me.

  “I should’ve let him go and seen how high he’d bounce when he hit the hatch.”

  “Sam!”

  “In the interest of science,” I said.

  “Don’t be mean.”

  “He’s supposed to be a bouncing baby boy, isn’t he?”

  She did not laugh.

  “Dammit, Jill, they shouldn’t have brought a kid up here,” I burst. “It’s not right. There ought to be a regulation someplace to prevent idiots from bringing their lousy brats to my hotel!”

  Jill was not helpful at all. “Sam,” she told me, her expression severe, “we made age discrimination illegal half a century ago.”

  “This isn’t age discrimination,” I protested. “That baby isn’t a voting citizen.”

  “He’s still a human being who has rights. And so do his parents.”

  I am not a gloomy guy, but it felt like a big rain cloud had settled over my head. Little T.J. was not the only one pissing on me.

  But I had work to do. As long as Jill was here, I tried to make the best of it. I started spinning glorious tales of the coming bonanza in space manufacturing, once we could mine raw materials from the Moon or asteroids.

  I never mentioned our weightless escapades, but she knew that I held that trump card. Imagine the fuss the media would make if they discovered that the conservative Senator from New Hampshire had once been a wild woman in orbit. With the notorious Sam Gunn, of all people!

  “What is it you want, Sam?” Jill asked me. That’s one of the things I liked best about her. No bull-hickey. She came straight to the point.

  So I did, too. “I’m trying to raise capital for a new venture.”

  Before I could go any farther, she fixed me with a leery eye. “Another new venture? When are you going to stop dashing around after the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, Sam?”

  I gave her a grin. “When I get my hands on the gold.”

  “Is that what you’re after, money? Is that all that you’re interested in?”

  “Oh no,” I said honestly. “What I’m really interested in is the things money can buy.”

  She frowned; it was part annoyance, part disappointment, I guess. Easy for her. She was born well-off, married even better, and now was a wealthy widowed United States Senator. Me, I was an orphan at birth, raised by strangers. I’ve always had to claw and scrabble and kick and bite my way to wherever I had to go. There was nobody around to help me. Only me, all five foot three—excuse me, five foot five inches of me. All by myself. You’re damned right money means a lot to me. Most of all, it means respect. Like that old ballplayer said, the home-run hitters drive the Cadillacs. I also noticed, very early in life, that they also get the best-looking women.

  “Okay,” I backpedaled. “So money can’t buy happiness. But neither can poverty. I want to get filthy rich. Is there anything wrong with that?”

  Despite her New England upbringing, a faint smile teased at the corners of Jill’s mouth. “No, I suppose not,” she said softly.

  So I went into the details about my hopes for lunar mining and asteroid prospecting. Jill listened quietly; attentively, I thought, until I finished my pitch.

  She toyed with her wine glass as she said, “Mining the Moon. Capturing asteroids. All that’s a long way off, Sam.”

  “It’s a lot closer than most people realize,” I replied, in my best-behaved, serious man of business attitude. Then I added, “It’s not as far in the future as our own space shuttle missions are in the past.”

  Jill sighed, then grinned maliciously. “You always were a little bastard, weren’t you?”

  I grinned back at her. “What’s the accident of my birth got to do with it?”

  She put the wine glass down and hunched closer to me. “Just what are you after, Sam, specifically?” I think she was enjoying the challenge of dealing with me.

  I answered, “I want to make sure that the big guys like Rockledge and Yamagata don’t slit my throat.”

  “How can I help you do that?”

  “You’re on the Commerce Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee, right? I need to be able to assure my investors that the Senate won’t let my teeny little company be squashed flat by the big guys.”

  “Your investors? Like who?”

  I refused to be rattled by her question. “I’ll find investors,” I said firmly, “once you level the playing field for me.”

  Leaning back in her chair, she said slowly, “You want me to use my influence as a United States Senator to warn Rockledge and the others not to muscle you.”

  I nodded.

  Jill thought about it for a few silent moments, then she asked, “And what’s in it for me?”

  Good old straight-from-the-shoulder Jill. “Why,” I said, “you get the satisfaction of helping an old friend to succeed in a daring new venture that will bring the United States back to the forefront of space industrialization.”

  She gave me a look that told me that wasn’t the answer she had wanted to hear. But before I could say anything more, she muttered, “That might win six or seven votes in New Hampshire, I guess.”

  “Sure,” I said. “You’ll be a big hero with your constituents, helping the little guy against the big, bad corporations.”

  “Cut the serenade, Sam,” she snapped. “You’ve got something else going on in that twisted little brain of yours; I can tell. What is it?”

  She was still grinning as she said it, so I admitted, “Well, there’s a rumor that Rockledge is developing an anti-nausea remedy that’ll stop space sickness. It could mean a lot for my hotel.”

  “I hear your zero-gee sex palace is on its way to bankruptcy.”

  “Not if Rockledge will sell me a cure for the weightless whoopies.”

  “You think they’d try to keep it from you?”

  “Do vultures eat meat?”

  She laughed and started in on her plate of soyburger.

  After lunch I took Jill down to her mini-suite in the hub and asked how she liked her accommodations.

  “Well,” she said, drawing the word out, “it’s better than the old shuttle mid-deck, I suppose.”

  “You suppose?” I was shocked. “Each one of Heaven’s rooms is a luxurious, self-contained mini-suite.” I quoted from our publici
ty brochure.

  Jill said nothing until I found her door and opened it for her with a flourish.

  “Kind of small, don’t you think?” she said.

  “Nobody’s complained about the size,” I replied. Then I showed her the controls that operated the minibar, the built-in sauna, the massage equipment, and the screen that covered the observation port.

  “A real love nest,” Jill said.

  “That’s the idea.”

  I opened the observation port’s screen and we saw the Earth hanging

  out there, huge and blue and sparkling. Then it slid past as the station revolved and we were looking at diamond-hard stars set against the velvet black of space. It was gorgeous, absolutely breathtaking.

  And then we heard somebody vomiting in the next compartment. The hotel’s less than one-quarter full and my crackbrained staff books two zero-gee compartments next to one another!

  But Jill just laughed. “This hotel isn’t going to prosper until somebody comes up with a cure for space sickness.”

  “That’s what Rockledge is doing,” I grumbled. “Right aboard this station.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Jill pursed her lips. Then, “Let me ask D’Argent about that. Unofficially, of course. But maybe I can find out something for you.”

  My eyes must have widened. “You’d do that for me?”

  Jill touched my cheek with cool fingertips. “Of course I would, Sam. You have no idea of the things I’d do for you, if you’d only let me.”

  That sounded dangerous to me. So I bid her a hasty adieu and pushed through her doorway, heading for my cubbyhole of an office. Jill just gave me a sphinx-like inscrutable smile as I floated out of her compartment.

  When I got back to my office there was more depressing news on my computer screen. A contingent of Rockledge board members and junior executives were scheduled for a tour of the station and its facilities. They would be staying for a week and had booked space in my hotel—at the discount prices Rockledge commanded as my landlord. Those prices, negotiated before I had ever opened Heaven, were lower than the rent D’Argent was now charging me. If I filled the hotel with Rockledge people I could go bankrupt even faster than I already was.

  And they were all bringing their wives. And children! Larry, Melinda, and their bouncing baby boy were just the first wave of the invasion of the weightless brats. I began to think about suicide. Or murder.

  I can’t describe the horrors of that week. By actual count there were only twenty-two kids. The oldest was fifteen and the youngest was little T.J., ten months or so. But it seemed like there were hundreds of them, thousands. Everywhere I turned there were brats getting in my way, poking around the observation center, getting themselves stuck in hatches, playing tag along the tubes that connected the station’s hub with its various wheels, yelling, screaming, tumbling, fighting, throwing food around, and just generally making my life miserable.

  Not only my life. Even the honeymooners started checking out early, with howls of protest at the invasion of the underage monsters and dire threats about lawsuits.

  “You’ll pay for ruining our honeymoon,” was the kindest farewell statement any of them made.

  The brats took over the zero-gee gym. It looked like one of those old martial arts films in there, only in weightlessness. They were swarming all over the padded gym, kicking, thrashing, screaming, arms and legs everyplace, howls and yelps and laughing and crying. One five-year-old girl, in particular, had a shriek that could cleave limestone.

  I tried to get the three teenagers among them to serve as guardians— guards, really—for the younger tots. I offered them damned good money to look after the brats. The two girls agreed with no trouble. The one boy—fourteen, sullen, face full of zits—refused. He was the son of one of the board members. “My mother didn’t bring me up here to be a babysitter,” he growled.

  As far as I could see, the only thing the pizza-faced jerk did was hang around the hub weightlessly and sulk.

  I couldn’t blame the honeymooners for leaving. Who wants to fight your way through a screaming horde of little monsters to get to your zero-gee love nest? It was hopeless. I could see D’Argent smiling that oily smile of his; he knew I was going down in flames and he was enjoying every minute of it.

  And right in the middle of it were Larry and Melinda and their bouncing baby boy—who really did bounce around a lot off the padded walls of the gym. T.J. loved it in there, especially with all the other kids to keep him company. The two teen-aged girls made him their living doll. And T.J. seemed to look out with his ten-month-old eyes at the whole noisy, noisome gang of kids as if they were his personal play-toys, a swirling, riotous, colorful mobile made up of twenty-two raucous, runny-nosed, rotten kids.

  Make that twenty-one kids and one fourteen-year-old moper.

  I found that Larry and Melinda started feeding the baby in the gym. “It’s easier than doing it in the restaurant or in our own quarters,” Melinda said, as T.J. gummed away at some pulpy baby goop. “Practically no mess at all.”

  I could see what she meant. They just hovered in midair with the baby. Three-fourths of what they aimed at the brat’s mouth wound up in his ear or smeared over his face or spit into the air. Being weightless, most of the stuff just broke into droplets or crumbs and drifted along in the air currents until they stuck on one of the intake ventilator screens. At the end of the meal Larry would break out a hand vacuum and clean off the screens while Melinda cleaned the baby with pre-moistened towels. Not bad, I had to admit. Didn’t have to mop the floor or clean any furniture.

  The other kids liked to eat in zero-gee, too. Made their food fights more interesting. It was okay with me; anything that kept them out of the restaurant or the other areas where adult human beings lived and worked was a score for our side, far as I was concerned. But zero-gee sex was a thing of the past as long as they held the station’s gym in their grubby little paws. My honeymoon hotel had turned into an orbital camp for tots.

  “You were right, Sam,” Jill told me over dinner the third or fourth night of Hell Week.

  The restaurant was almost empty. Nearly every one of Rockledge’s junior executives took their meals in their rooms. Too cheap for the restaurant, they used the fast-food dispensers and the cafeteria in the Rockledge research facility.

  At least the Eclipse was quiet. No kids. I had thought about trying to make a rule that nobody under twenty-one was allowed into the Lunar Eclipse, but Omar, my long-suffering hotel manager, had convinced me that it would just cause a ruckus with the parents. They were happy as Torquemada in a synagogue to be in the restaurant without their little darlings. But if I said they weren’t allowed to bring their kids to the Eclipse they’d get pissed off and demand their rights.

  So the restaurant was nice and quiet and civilized with all the kids up in the gym dashing around and playing zero-gee games.

  “I was right about what?” I asked. I must have looked as miserable as I felt. My mind was echoing with the screeches of all those brats yowling at the top of their lungs and the somber prediction of my accountant that the hotel would sink beneath the financial waves in another two weeks. All day long I had been receiving cancellation notices from travel agencies. The word was going around at the speed of light.

  Jill nudged her chair a little closer to mine. “Rockledge really is working on a preventative for space sickness. Pierre D’Argent showed me the laboratory studies they’ve done so far. It looks as if they’ve got it.”

  No sooner had she mentioned D’Argent’s name than the silver-haired sonofabitch showed up at the restaurant’s door, leading a contingent of six senior Rockledge board members and their trophy wives. The men all looked like grumpy old farts, white-haired or bald; the women were heavy with jewelry. I wondered which one of them owned that fourteen-year-old sourpuss.

  “What lovely women,” Jill said.

  I made no response.

  “Don’t you think th
ey’re beautiful, Sam?”

  I grunted. “Who cares.”

  Jill gave me a funny expression. I didn’t realize it at the time, but her expression was a mixture of surprise and admiration. She thought I had finally matured to the point where I didn’t salivate like one of Pavlov’s dogs every time I saw a good-looking woman. What Jill didn’t realize was that I was too down in the dumps to be interested in a bevy of expensively dressed advertisements for cosmetic surgery who were already married. I never chased married women. Never. That’s a point of honor with me. It also saves you a lot of threats, fights, lawsuits and attempts on your life.

  Jill returned to her original subject. “Didn’t you hear me, Sam? Rockledge is going to market a skin patch that prevents space sickness.”

  “Yeah,” I said gloomily. “The day after this hotel closes, that’s when they’ll put it on the market.”

  I was watching D’Argent and his troupe as they sat at the biggest table in the restaurant. Laughing softly among themselves, happy, relaxed, their biggest worry was how to evade the taxes that were due on their enormous profits. The more they ate and drank, at their discount prices, the deeper into the red they pushed me.

  Jill shook me by my wrist and made me look at her. She had a kind of pixie grin on her face. Almost evil. “Suppose I could get D’Argent to use your hotel customers as a field trial for their new drug?”

  “Suppose you could get the Pope to pee off the roof of the Vatican.”

  “Wouldn’t that help you?” she insisted.

  I had to admit that it might.

  “Then that’s what I’ll do,” Jill said, as firmly as a U.S. Senator announcing she was running for reelection.

  I had no romantic interest in Jill, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why she was interested in me. What did it matter? I was in such a funk over those brats infesting my hotel that I wouldn’t have noticed if Helen of Troy had been sitting naked in my bed with her arms out to me. Well, maybe.

  What was going through my mind was an endless vicious circle. The hotel is failing. When the hotel goes down the tubes it’ll drag my company, VCI, down with it. VCI was technically in the black, making steady money selling magnetic bumpers that protected space facilities from orbiting debris. But legally, VCI owned Hotel Heaven and the hotel’s accumulated debts would force VCI into bankruptcy. I would be broke. Nobody would lend me a cent. There went my dreams for mining the Moon and making myself the tycoon of the asteroids. I’d have to find a job someplace.