The Sam Gunn Omnibus Page 30

  Unless—there was only one way I could see out of the black pit that was staring at me. I had to swallow hard several times before I could work up the nerve to even put out a feeler. But it was either that or bankruptcy, the end of all my dreams. So the next morning I gritted my teeth (having swallowed hard several times) and took the first little step on the road to humiliation.

  “Hi, Larry old pal, how’s it going?” The words almost stuck in my throat, but I had to get started somehow.

  Oh, that’s right, I haven’t told you about Larry and Melinda and the Gunn Shield. Here’s the story.

  I had first started VCI, years earlier, to build magnetic bumpers for space stations, to protect them against the orbiting junk whizzing around up there. Larry designed them for me. They’re called Gunn Shields, of course. Without them, a space station would get dinged constantly from the crap zipping around in orbit. Even a chip of paint hits with the impact of a high-power bullet, and there’s a helluva lot more than paint chips flying around in the low orbits.

  The Russians finally had to abandon their original Mir space station because it was starting to look like a target in a shooting gallery. And the more stations and factories people built in orbit, the more debris they created and the more they needed Gunn Shields. A nice, steady, growing market. Not spectacular, not enough to bring in the kind of cash flow I needed, but dependable.

  Back in those days Melinda had a crush on me. Just a kid’s crush, that’s all it was, but Larry loved her madly and hated me for it. She was kind of pretty underneath her avoirdupois, but not my type.

  That surprises you? You heard that Sam Gunn chases all types of women, didn’t you. No discrimination at all. Well, that’s about as true as all the rest of the bull manure they spread about me.

  Melinda was not my type. But she had this thing about me and Larry had his heart set on her. So I hired Melinda to come to work for me at VCI, and then kind of offhand asked Larry if he’d like to come along too. Larry was the guy I needed, the one I had to have if VCI was going to be a success. He was the semi-genius who thought up the idea for magnetic bumpers in the first place. Poor fish rose to the bait without even stopping to think. They both moved to Florida and together we put VCI into business.

  So while Larry was designing the original bumper, I was touting Melinda off me and onto Larry. Cyrano de Gunn, that’s me. Made her fall in love with him. Voila. Once we tested the original bumper and it worked, I got it patented and Larry got Melinda to marry him. Everybody was happy, I thought. Wrong!

  For some unfathomable reason, Larry got pissed at me and went off to work for D’Argent, the sneaky sleazoid, over at Rockledge. And when he quit VCI, Melinda did, too.

  Oh, yeah, we almost got into a shooting war over the rights to the geocentric orbit. But that’s another story. Larry only played a minor role in that one.

  Anyway, I had spent a sleepless night tussling over my problems and couldn’t see a way out. Except to sell the goddamned hotel to Rockledge. And the rights to the Gunn Shield, too. Dump it all for cash. D’Argent had tried before to sneak the magnetic bumper design away from me. He had tried bribery and even theft. Hell, he had hired Larry with the idea of getting the kid to figure out a way to break my patent. I knew that, even if Larry himself didn’t.

  So now I toadied up to Larry, in the middle of the mayhem of the station’s gym. The kids had taken it over completely. Larry and I were the only adults among the yowling, zooming, screeching, barfing little darlings. Even the two teenaged girls who were supposed to be watching the kids were busy playing free-fall tag and screaming at the top of their considerable voices.

  Larry gave me a guarded look. He was feeding T.J., who was happily spraying most of his food into weightless droplets that hovered around him like tiny spheres of multicolored glop before drifting slowly toward the nearest ventilator grid.

  “Where’s Melinda?” I asked, trying to radiate good cheer and sincerity while dodging the goo that the baby was spewing out.

  “She’s down in the second wheel, doing aerobics,” he said. He spooned a bit of puke-colored paste out of a jar and stuck it in front of T.J.’s face. The baby siphoned it off with a big slurping noise and even managed to get some of it past his two visible teeth and into his mouth.

  Gradually, with every ounce of self-control and patient misdirection I could muster, I edged the topic of conversation to the Gunn Shields. All the time we were both dodging flying kids and the various missiles they were throwing at each other, as well as T.J.’s pretty constant spray of food particles. And I had to shout to make myself heard over the noise the brats were making.

  I only hoped that none of them figured out the combinations for the electronic locks on the zero-gee mini-suites. I could just see the little SOBs breaking into the mini-bars and throwing bottles all over the place or scalding themselves in the saunas. Come to think of it, boiling a couple of them might have been fun.

  But I had work to do.

  The more I talked to Larry about the magnetic shields, though, the more he seemed to drift away from me. I mean, literally move away. He kept floating backward through the big, padded zero-gee compartment and I kept pushing toward him. We slowly crossed the entire gym, with all those kids whooping and zooming around us. Finally I had him pinned against one of the padded walls, T.J. floating upside-down above him and the jar of baby food hovering between us. It was only then that I realized Larry was getting red in the face.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, earnestly. “Are you getting sick?”

  “Dammit, Sam, they shouldn’t be called Gunn Shields!” Larry burst out. “I designed the bumpers, not you! They ought to be called Karsh Shields!”

  I was stunned. I had never even thought of that. And he certainly had never mentioned it to me before.

  “You mean, all this time you’ve been sore at me over a public relations title?”

  “It means a lot to me,” he said, as surly as that teenaged grump.

  “Is that why you left me for Rockledge?”

  Larry nodded petulantly.

  It was my big chance. Maybe my only chance. I let my head droop as if I had suddenly discovered religion and was ashamed of my past life.

  “Gee, Larry,” I said, just loudly enough to be heard over the screams of the kids, “I never realized how much it meant to you.”

  “Well,” it’s my invention but you took out the patent and you took all the credit, too.”

  I noticed that he had not spoken a word about money. Not a syllable. Larry was pure of heart, bless his unblemished soul.

  I looked him in the eye with the most contrite expression I could manage. It was hard to keep from giggling; this was going to be like plucking apples off a blind man’s fruit stand.

  “If that’s the way you feel about it, kid,” I said, trying to keep up the hangdog expression, “then we’ll change the name. Look—I—I’ll even license Rockledge to manufacture and sell the shields. That’s right! Let Rockledge take it over completely! Then you can call them Karsh Shields with no trouble at all!”

  His eyes goggled. “You’d do that for me, Sam?”

  I slid an arm around his shoulder. “Sure I would. I never wanted to hurt you, Larry. If only you had told me sooner...” I let my voice fade away. Then I nodded, as if I had been struggling inside myself. “I’ll sell Rockledge the hotel, too.”

  “No!” Larry gasped. “Not your hotel.”

  “I know D’Argent wants it.” That wasn’t exactly the truth. But I had a strong suspicion the silver-haired bastard would be happy to take the hotel away from me—as long as he thought it would break my heart to part with it.

  Larry’s face turned red again, but this time he looked embarrassed, not angry. “Sam ...” He hesitated, then went on, “Look, Sam, I’m not supposed to tell you this, but the company’s been working on a cure for space sickness.”

  I blinked at him, trying to generate a tear or two. “Really?”

  “If it works, it shoul
d help to make your hotel a success.”

  “If it works,” I said, with a big sigh.

  The way I had it figured, Rockledge would pay a nice royalty for the license to manufacture and sell the magnetic bumpers. Not as much as VCI was making in profits from the shields, but the Rockledge royalties would go to me, personally, as the patent-holder. Not to VCI. The damned hotel’s debts wouldn’t touch the royalties. VCI would go down the tubes, but what the hell, that’s business. I’d be moving on to lunar mining and asteroid hunting. ET Resources, Inc. That’s what I would call my new company.

  Let Larry call them Karsh Shields, I didn’t give a fart’s worth about that. Let D’Argent do everything he could to make the world forget I had anything to do with them, as long as he sent me the royalty checks on time. What I really wanted, what I desperately needed, was the money to start moving on ET Resources, Inc.

  “Maybe I can talk D’Argent into letting you use their new drug,” Larry suggested. “You know, try it out on your hotel customers.”

  I brightened up a little. “Gee,” I said, “that would be nice. If only I could keep my hotel.” I sighed again, heavier, heavy enough to nudge me slightly away from Larry and the baby. “It would break my heart to part with Heaven.”

  Larry gaped at me while T.J. stuck a sticky finger in his father’s ear.

  “It would make both of us happy,” I went on. “I could keep the hotel and Rockledge could take over the magnetic bumpers and call them Karsh Shields.”

  That really turned him on. “I’ll go find D’Argent right now!” Larry said, all enthusiasm. “Would you mind looking after T.J. for a couple of minutes?”

  And he was off like a shot before I could say a word, out across the mayhem of all those brats flinging themselves around the gym. Just before he disappeared through the main hatch he yelled back at me, “Oh, yeah, T.J.’s going to need a change. You know how to change a diaper, don’t you?”

  He ducked through the hatch before I could answer. The kids swarmed all through the place and little T.J. stared after his disappearing father.

  I was kind of stunned. I wasn’t a babysitter! But there I was, hanging in midair with twenty crazed kids zipping all around me and a ten-month-old baby hanging a couple of feet before my eyes, his chin and cheeks smeared with baby food and this weird expression on his face.

  “Well,” I said to myself, “what the hell do I do now?”

  T.J. broke into a bawling cry. He wanted his father, not this stranger. I didn’t know what to do. I tried talking to him, tried holding him, even tried making faces at him. He didn’t understand a word I said, of course; when I tried to hold him he squirmed and shrieked so loud even the other kids stopped their games to stare at me accusingly. And when I made a few faces at him he just screamed even louder.

  Then I smelled something. His diaper.

  One of the teen-aged girls gave me a nasty look and said firmly, “I’m going to call his mother!”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’ll bring the kid to her myself.”

  I nudged squalling T.J. weightlessly toward the hatch and started the two of us down the connector tube toward the second-level wheel, where the Rockledge gym was. It had been a stroke of genius (mine) to put their exercise facility in the wheel that rotated at about one-third gee, the gravity you’d feel on Mars. You can lift three times the weight you’d be able to handle on Earth and feel like you’ve accomplished something without straining yourself. But do you think D’Argent or any of his Rockledge minions would give me credit for the idea? When hell freezes over—maybe.

  T.J. stopped yowling once I got his flailing little body through the hatch and into the tube. This was a different enough place for his curiosity to override the idea that his father had abandoned him, and whatever discomfort his loaded diaper might be causing him. He was fascinated with the blinking lights on the hatch control panel. I opened and shut the damned hatch half a dozen times, just to quiet him down. Then I showed him the color-coded guide lines on the tube’s walls, and the glowing light strips. He pointed and smiled. Kind of a goofy smile, with just two teeth to show. But it was better than crying.

  By the time we reached the second wheel we were almost pals. I let him smear his greasy little hands over the hatch control panel; like I said, he liked to watch the lights blink, and there wasn’t much damage he could do to the panel except make it sticky. I even held his hand and let him touch the keypads that operated the hatch. He laughed when it started to swing open. After we went through he pointed at the control panel on the other side and made it clear he wanted to play with that one, too.

  There was enough of a feeling of gravity down at this level for me to walk on the floor, with T.J. crawling along beside me. I tried to pick him up and carry him, despite his smell, but he was too independent for that. He wanted to be on his own.

  Kind of reminded me of me.

  Melinda was sweaty and puffing and not an ounce lighter than she had been when she entered the exercise room. T.J. spotted her in the middle of all the straining, groaning women doing their aerobics to the latest top-forty pop tunes. He let out a squeal and all the women stopped their workout to surround the kid with cooing gushing baby talk. Melinda was queen of them all, the mother of the center of their attention. You’d think the brat had produced ice cream.

  I beat a hasty retreat, happy to be rid of the kid. Although, I’ve got to admit, little T.J. was kind of fun to be with. When he wasn’t crying. And if you held your breath.

  True to his naive word, Larry arranged a meeting between D’Argent and me that very afternoon. I was invited to the section of the station where Rockledge had its lab, up in the lunar wheel, alongside my restaurant.

  You might have thought we were trying to penetrate a top-secret military base. Between the Lunar Eclipse and the hatch to the Rockledge Laboratory was a corridor no more than ten meters long. Rockledge had packed six uniformed security guards, an X-ray scanner, three video cameras and a set of chemical sniffers into those ten meters. If we didn’t have a regulation against animals they would have probably had a few Dobermans in there, too.

  “What’re you guys doing in here?” I asked D’Argent, once they had let me through the security screen and ushered me into the compartment he was using as an office. “You’ve got more security out there than a rock star visiting the Emperor of Japan.”

  D’Argent never wore coveralls or fatigues like the rest of us. He was in a spiffy silk suit, pearl gray with pencil-thin darker stripes, just like he wore Earthside. He gave me one of his oily little smiles. “We need all that security, Sam,” he said, “to keep people like you from stealing our ideas”.

  I sat at the spindly little chair in front of his desk and gave him a sour look. “The day you have an idea worth stealing, the Moon will turn into green cheese.”

  He glared at me. Larry, sitting at the side of D’Argent’s desk, tried to cool things off. “We’re here to discuss a business deal, not exchange insults.”

  I looked at him with new respect. Larry wasn’t a kid anymore. He was starting to turn into a businessman. “Okay,” I said. “You’re right. I’m here to offer a trade.”

  D’Argent stroked his pencil-thin mustache with a manicured finger. “A trade?”

  Nodding, I said, “I’ll license Rockledge to manufacture and market the magnetic bumpers. You let me buy your space sickness cure.”

  D’Argent reached for the carafe on his desk. Stalling for time, I thought. He poured himself a glass of water, never offering any to Larry or me. In the soft lunar gravity of the inner wheel, the water poured at a gentler angle than it would on Earth. D’Argent managed to get most of the water into his glass; only a few drops messed up his desk.

  He pretended not to notice it. “What makes you think we’ve developed a cure for space sickness?” And he gave Larry a cold eye.

  “Senator Meyers told me,” I said calmly. D’Argent looked surprised. “Jill and I are old friends. Didn’t you know?”

&nb
sp; “You and Senator Meyers?” I could read the expression on his face. A new factor had entered his calculations.

  We went around and around for hours. D’Argent was playing it crafty. He wanted the magnetic bumper business, that was clear to see. And Larry was positively avid to call them Karsh Shields. I pretended that I wanted the space sickness cure to save my hotel, while all the time I was trying to maneuver D’Argent into buying Heaven and taking it off my hands.

  But he was smarter than that. He knew that he didn’t have to buy the hotel; it was going to sink of its own weight. In another two weeks I’d be in bankruptcy court.

  So he blandly kept insisting, “The space-sickness cure isn’t ready for public use, Sam. It’s still in the experimental stage.”

  I could see from the embarrassed red of Larry’s face that it was a gigantic lie.

  “Well then,” I suggested, “let me use it on my hotel customers as a field trial. I’ll get them to sign waivers, take you off the hook, legally.”

  But D’Argent just made helpless fluttering gestures and talked about the Food and Drug Administration, this law, that regulation, scientific studies, legal red tape, and enough bullcrap to cover Iowa six feet deep.

  He was stalling, waiting for my hotel to collapse so he could swoop in, grab Heaven away from me, and get the magnetic bumper business at a bargain.

  But while he talked in circles, I started to think. What if I could get my hands on his space-sickness cure and try it out on a few of my customers? What if I steal the damned cure right out from under D’Argent’s snooty nose and then get a tame chemist or two to reproduce whatever combination of drugs they’ve got in their cure? That would put me in a better bargaining position, at least. And it would drive the smooth-talking sonofabitch crazy!