The Sam Gunn Omnibus Page 31

  So I decided to steal it.

  It was no big deal. D’Argent and his Rockledge security types were too Earthbound in their attitudes. They thought that by guarding the corridor access to the laboratory area they had the lab adequately protected. But there were four emergency airlocks strung along that wheel of the station. Two of them opened onto the restaurant; the other two opened directly into the Rockledge research laboratory.

  All I had to do was wait until night, get into a space suit, and go EVA to one of those airlocks. I’d be inside the lab within minutes and the guards out in the corridor would never know it.

  Then I had a truly wicked idea. A diversion that would guarantee that the Rockledge security troops would be busy doing something else instead of guarding the access to their lab.

  The meeting with D’Argent ran out of steam with neither one of Us making any real effort to meet the other halfway. Halfway? Hell, neither D’Argent nor I budged an inch. Larry looked miserably unhappy when we finally decided to call it quits. He saw his Karsh Shield immortality sliding away from him.

  I went straight from D’Argent’s office to the station’s gym. Nothing had changed there, except that T.J. was gone. The place still looked like a perpetual-motion demonstration, kids flapping and yelling everywhere. All except that surly teenaged boy.

  I glided over to him.

  “Hi!” I said brightly.

  He mumbled something.

  “You don’t seem to be having a good time,” I said.

  “So what?” he said sourly.

  I made a shrug. “Seems a shame to be up here and not enjoying it.”

  “What’s to enjoy?” he grumbled. “My mother says I have to stay here with all these brats and not get in anybody’s way.”

  “Gee, that’s a shame,” I said. “There’s a lot of really neat stuff to see. You want a tour of the place?”

  For the first time his face brightened slightly. “You mean, like the command center and all?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “They threw me out of there when I tried to look in, a couple days ago.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I assured him. “I’ll get you in with no trouble.”

  Sliding an arm across his skinny shoulders as we headed for the command center, I asked him, “What’s your name, anyway, son?”

  “Pete,” he said.

  “Stick with me, Pete, and you’ll see stuff that hardly any of the adults ever see.”

  So I took him on a tour of the station. I spent the whole damned afternoon with Pete, taking him all over the station. I showed him everything from the command center to my private office. While we were in the command center I booted up the station security program and found that Rockledge didn’t even have intruder alarms or motion sensors inside their lab area. Breaking in through the airlock was going to be easy.

  It would have been nifty if I could’ve used Pete as an excuse to waltz through the Rockledge lab, just to get a look at the layout, but it was off-limits, of course. Besides, Pete grandly informed me that he had already seen them. “Just a bunch of little compartments with all kinds of weird glass stuff in them,” he said.

  He wasn’t such a bad kid, it turned out. Just neglected by his parents, who had dragged him up here, shown off Daddy’s place of work, and then dumped him with the other brats. Like any reasonable youth, he wanted to be an astronaut. When he learned that I had been one, he started to look up to me, at least a little bit. Well, actually he was a teeny bit taller than I, but you know what I mean.

  We had a great time in one of the escape pods. I sat Pete at the little control panel and he played astronaut for more than an hour. It only took a teeny bit of persuasion to get him to agree to what I wanted him to do. He even liked the idea. “It’ll be like being a real astronaut, won’t it?” he enthused.

  “Sure it will,” I told him.

  While he was playing astronaut in the escape pod I ducked out to my office and made two phone calls. I invited Jill to an early dinner at the Eclipse. She accepted right away, asking only why I wanted to eat at five o’clock.

  “I’ll be babysitting later,” I said.

  Her face on my display screen looked positively shocked. “Babysitting? You?”

  “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” That was all I could think of to say. And at that, it was probably too much.

  Then I tracked down Melinda by phone and invited her and Larry to have dinner, on me, in the Eclipse at eight o’clock.

  She was back in the damned exercise room, walking on one of the treadmills. “Dinner?” she puffed. “I’d love to, Sam, but by eight T.J.’s usually in bed for the night.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” I said as casually as I could manage. “I’ll take care of him.”

  “You?” Her eyes went round.

  “Sure. We’re old pals now. I’ll babysit while you and Larry have a decent meal for a change. Why should D’Argent and the old farts on his board of directors be the only ones to enjoy good food?”

  “I don’t know....” She wavered.

  “The best cooking in the solar system,” I tempted her. “My chef is cordon bleu.” Which was almost true. He had worked in Paris one summer. As a busboy.

  “I’ll have to check with Larry,” she said.

  “Sure. Do that.”

  I noticed that she turned up the speed on her treadmill. Like I said, taking apples off a blind man’s fruit stand.

  So I had a nice, relaxed dinner with Jill early that evening. Then I escorted her back to her mini-suite in the zero-gee section. Some of the kids were still in the gym area, whizzing around and screaming at each other.

  “You’re not going to get much sleep until they get put away,” I said to Jill.

  She gave me a crooked grin as she opened the door to her suite. “I wasn’t planning to sleep—not yet.”

  I didn’t like the sly look in her eye. “Uh, I promised Larry and Melinda I’d watch their baby....”

  “When do you have to be there?” Jill asked, gliding through the doorway and into her zero-gee love nest.

  I glided in after her, naturally, and she maneuvered around and shut the door, cutting off the noise of the kids playing outside.

  I can recognize a trap when I see one, even when the bait is tempting. “Jill—uh, I’ve got to go. Now.”

  “Oh, Sam.” She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me passionately. I’ve got to admit that while I was kissing her back a part of my brain was calculating how much time I had left before I had to show up at Larry and Melinda’s door. Which was just on the opposite side of the wailing banshees in the gym.

  Reluctantly I disengaged from Jill and said, “I don’t have the time. Honest.” My voice sounded odd, like some embarrassed acne-faced teenager’s squeak.

  Jill smiled glumly and said, “A promise is a promise, I suppose.”

  “Yeah,” I answered weakly. And I didn’t want to make any promises to a United States Senator that I didn’t intend to keep.

  So I left Jill there in her suite, looking sad and disappointed, and zipped through the gym area, heading straight for the Karshes’ suite.

  Larry and Melinda were waiting for me. He was wearing an actual suit, dark blue, and a tie that kept floating loose from his shirt front. Melinda had a dress full of flounces that billowed in zero-gee like a waterfall of lace. Jack Spratt and the Missus. They’d look better in the restaurant’s lunar gravity.

  Melinda floated me into the bedroom of their suite, where T.J. was zippered into a sleep cocoon. They had stuffed it with pillows because it was way too big for him. The kid was sound asleep with a thumb in his mouth. I’ve got to admit, he looked like a little angel.

  “He won’t wake up for at least four hours,” she assured me. “We’ll be back by then.” Still, she gave me the whole orientation demonstration: bottle, milk, diapers, ass wipes, the whole ugly business.

  I kept a smile on my face and s
hooed them out to their dinner. Then I went back into T.J.’s room.

  “Okay, kid,” I whispered. “It’s you and me now.”

  I fidgeted around their suite for more than an hour, waiting for Larry and Melinda to get through most of their meal, thinking that I might swing back to Jill’s suite and—no, no; there lay madness. Finally I went into the baby’s room and gendy, gentiy picked up T.J., blankets and all, and headed for the escape pod where I had stashed Pete.

  The baby stirred and half woke up when I lifted him, but I shushed and rocked him. He kind of opened one eye, looked at me, and made a little smile. Then he curled himself into my arms and went back to sleep. Like I said, we were old pals by now.

  I’ve got to admit that I felt a slight pang of conscience when I thought about how Larry and especially Melinda would feel when they came back from dinner and found their darling baby missing. I’d be missing, too, of course, and probably at first they’d be more miffed than scared. They’d phone around, trying to find me, figuring I had their kid with me, wherever I was. But after fifteen minutes, half an hour at most, they would panic and call for the security guards.

  I grinned to myself at that. While the goons were searching the station I’d be in a space suit, breaking into the Rockledge lab from the outside. The one place nobody would bother looking for me because it was already so heavily guarded. Hah!

  Okay, so Larry and Melinda would have a rough hour or two. They’d forget it when I returned their kid to them and they saw he was none the worse for wear. And if Larry wanted to call the bumpers Karsh Shields he owed me some kind of payment, didn’t he?

  Pete was in the escape pod waiting for me. I had told him only that he could play astronaut in the pod for a couple of hours, as long as he watched the baby. I had some work to do but I’d be back when I was finished. The kid was as happy as an accordion player in a Wisconsin polka bar. Little T.J. was snoozing away, the picture of infant innocence.

  “I’ll take good care of him, Mr. Gunn,” Pete assured me. He had come a long way from the surliness he had shown earlier. He was even grinning at the thought of playing inside the pod for hours.

  I’m not a complete idiot, though. I carefully disconnected the pod’s controls. Pete could bang on the keyboard and yank at the T-yokes on the control panel till his arms went numb; nothing would happen—except in his imagination. I disconnected the communications link, too, so he wouldn’t be able to hear the commotion that was due to come up. Wouldn’t be able to call to anybody, either.

  “Okay, captain,” I said to Pete. “You’re in charge until I return.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!” And he snapped me a lopsided salute. The grin on his face told me that he knew what we were doing was not strictly kosher, and he loved it.

  I carefully sealed the pod’s hatch, then closed the connecting airlock hatch and sealed it. I hustled down the corridor to the emergency airlock and my personal space suit, which I had stashed there. It was going to be a race to get into a suit and out the airlock before any of the security types poked their noses in this section of the corridor. I had disabled the surveillance cameras earlier in the afternoon and duly reported the system malfunction in the station’s log. By the time they got them fixed I’d be long gone.

  As if on cue, the intercom loudspeakers in the corridor started blaring, “SAM GUNN, PLEASE REPORT TO SECURITY AT ONCE. SAM GUNN, PLEASE REPORT TO SECURITY AT ONCE.”

  They had found T.J. was missing and had called security. The panic was on.

  You know, the more you hurry the slower things seem to go. Felt like an hour before I had the suit sealed up, the helmet screwed on, and was opening the emergency airlock.

  But once I popped outside, I got that rush I always get when I’m back in space, on my own. My suit was old and smelled kind of ripe, but it felt homey inside it. And there was the big curving ball of Earth, huge and blue and sparkling in the sunlight. I just hung there for a minute or so and watched the sunset. It happens fast from orbit, but the array of colors are dazzling.

  Now we were in shadow, on the night side. All the better to sneak around in. The controls to my maneuvering pack were on the equipment belt of my suit. I worked them as easily and unconsciously as a pianist playing scales and jetted over to the laboratory airlock on the innermost wheel.

  I kept my suit radio tuned to the station’s intercom frequency. Plenty of jabbering going on. They were looking for me and T.J. Starting a compartment-to-compartment search. There would be plenty more disgruntled customers before this night was through, but most of them were

  Rockledge people staying at my hotel at a ruinous discount, so what the hell did I care?

  I got to the lab’s emergency airlock with no trouble. The light was dim, and I didn’t want to use my helmet lamp. No sense advertising that I was out here. Over my shoulder the lights of night-side cities and highways twinkled and glittered like a connect-the-dots map of North America.

  I was just starting to work the airlock’s control panel when the station shuddered. At first I thought I had hiccupped or something, but almost immediately I realized that the airlock hatch had shaken, shivered. Which meant that the whole damned station must have vibrated, quivered for some reason.

  Which meant trouble. The station was big, massive. It wouldn’t rattle unless it had been hit by something dangerous, or somebody had set off an explosion inside it, or—

  I spun around and my eyes damn near popped out of my head. An escape pod had just fired off. Somebody had set off the explosive separation bolts and detached it from the station. It was floating away like a slow-motion cannonball.

  And I knew exactly which pod it was. Pete must have figured out how to override my disconnect and booted up the pod’s mother-loving systems. Now he was riding off into the sunrise, on an orbit of his own, with T.J. aboard. Son of a motherless she-dog!

  I jetted after the goddamned pod. I didn’t stop to think about it, I just went out after it. Everything else dropped out of my mind. All I could think of was that little T.J. and Pete were in there and they stood a better than even chance of getting themselves killed if somebody didn’t get to them before they sailed out beyond reach. And it was all my fault.

  If I had been really smart, I would have just reported the loose pod over my suit radio and gone about my business of burglarizing the Rockledge lab. The security people would have fired up another pod to go out and rescue the kids, everybody in the station would be plastered to the view ports or display screens to watch the scene, and I could pilfer away inside the lab without being disturbed.

  But I’m not that smart. I went chasing after the damned pod. It was only after I had been barreling toward it for a few minutes that I realized I had damned well better reach it because I didn’t have enough juice in my jet pack to get me back to the station again.

  Pete must be scared purple, I thought, floating off into his own orbit. He apparently hadn’t figured out how to reconnect the radio, because I

  heard nothing from the pod when I tapped into its assigned frequency. Maybe he was yelling himself hoarse into the microphone, but he was getting no response. Poor kid must have been crapping his pants by now.

  Fortunately, he hadn’t lit off the pod’s main thruster. That would’ve zoomed him out so far and so fast that I wouldn’t have had a prayer of reaching him. He had just fired the explosive disconnect bolts, which blew the pod away from the station. If he fired the main thruster without knowing how to use the pod’s maneuvering jets, he’d either blast the damned cannonball down into the atmosphere so steeply that he’d burn up like a meteor, or he’d rocket himself out into a huge looping orbit that would take days or even weeks to complete.

  As it was, he was drifting in an independent orbit, getting farther from the station every second. And I was jamming along after him, hard as I could.

  I knew I had to save enough of my fuel to slow myself down enough to latch onto the pod. Otherwise I’d go sailing out past them like some idiotic jerk and spend t
he rest of my numbered hours establishing my own personal orbit in empty space. I wondered if anybody would bother to come out and pick up my body, once they knew what had happened to me.

  Okay, I was on-course. The pod was growing bigger, fast, looming in front of me. I turned myself around and gave a long squirt of my maneuvering jet to slow me down. Spun around again and saw the pod coming up to smack me square in the visor. I was still coming on too fast! Christ, was my flying rusty.

  I had to jink over sideways a bit, or splatter myself against the pod. As the jets slid me over, I yanked out the tether from my equipment belt and whipped it against the curving hull of the pod as I zoomed by. Its magnetized head slid along the hull until it caught on a handhold. The tether stretched a bit, like a bungee cord, and then held.

  As I pulled myself hand over hand to the pod, I glanced back at the station. It was so far away now it looked like a kid’s toy hanging against the stars.

  Grunting, puffing, totally out of shape for this kind of exercise, I finally . got to the pod’s airlock and lifted open its outer hatch. I was pouring sweat from every square inch of my skin. Got the hatch shut again, activated the pump, and as soon as the telltale light turned green I popped the inner hatch with one hand and slid my visor up with the other.

  There sat Pete at the controls, ecstatic as a Hungarian picking pockets. And little T.J. was snoozing happily in the arms of Senator Jill Meyers.

  “Hello, Sam,” she said sweetly to me. “What kept you?”

  It was then that I realized I had been nothing but the tool of a superior brain.

  Jill had reconnected the pod’s systems and blown the explosive bolts. She had known exactly what I was doing because she had stuck a microminiaturized video homing beacon on the back of my shirt when she had clutched me so passionately there in the doorway of her suite.

  “It’s standard equipment for a U.S. Senator,” she quipped, once she had plucked it off my shirt.

  For once in my life I was absolutely speechless.

  “When you told me you were babysitting—voluntarily—I started to smell a rodent,” Jill said as she almost absently showed Pete how to maneuver the pod back to the station. “I knew you were up to something,” she said to me.