The Best of Bova Page 4

  Several couples sort of disappeared during the party. The Shack isn’t so big that people can get lost in it, but they just seemed to vanish. Most of them showed up, looking tired and sheepish, by Monday morning. Three of those couples eventually got married. One pair of them was stopped by a security guard when they tried to go out an air lock while stark naked.

  Sam himself engaged in a bit of EVA with one of the nurses, a tiny little elf of fragile beauty and uncommon bravery. She snuggled into a pressure suit with Sam, and the two of them made several orbits around the Shack, outside, propelled by nothing more than their own frenetic pulsations and Newton’s Third Law of Motion.

  Two days after the party, however, the Beryllium Blonde showed up.

  Her real name was Jennifer Marlow, and she was as splendidly beautiful as a woman can be. A figure right out of a high school boy’s wettest dreams. A perfect face, with eyes of china blue and thickly glorious hair like a crown of shining gold. She staggered every male who saw her, she stunned even me, and she sent Sam into a complete tailspin.

  To top things off, she was Global Technology’s ace troubleshooter. Her official title was Administrative Assistant (Special Projects) to the President. The word we got from Earthside was that she had a mind like a steel trap, and a vagina much the same.

  The official reason for her visit was to discuss Sam’s letter of resignation with him.

  “You stay right beside me,” Sam insisted as we drifted down the Shack’s central corridor, toward the old conference room. “I won’t be able to control myself if I’m in there alone with her.”

  His face was as white as the Moon’s. He looked like a man in shock.

  “Will you be able to control yourself with me in there?” I wondered.

  “If I can’t, rap me on the head. Knock me out. Give me a Vulcan nerve pinch. Anything! Just don’t let me go zonkers over her.”

  I smiled.

  “I’m not kidding, Omar!” Sam insisted. “Why do you think they sent her up here, instead of some flunky? They know I’m susceptible. God knows how many scalps she’s got nailed to her teepee.”

  I grabbed his shoulder and dug my cleats into the corridor’s floor grid. We skidded to a stop.

  “Look,” I said, “maybe you want to avoid meeting with her altogether. I can represent you. I’m not. . .uh, susceptible.”

  His eyes went so wide I could see white all around the pupils. “Are you nuts? Miss a chance to be in the same room with her? I want to be protected, Omar, but not that much!”

  What could I do with him? He was torn in half. He knew the Beryllium Blonde was here to talk him out of resigning, but he couldn’t resist the opportunity of letting her try her wiles on him any more than Odysseus could resist listening to the Sirens.

  Like a couple of schoolboys dragging ourselves down to the principal’s office, we made our way slowly along the corridor and pushed through the door to the conference room. She was already seated at the head of the table, wearing a Chinese-red jumpsuit that fit her like skin. I gulped down a lump in my throat at the sight of her. She smiled a dazzling smile and Sam gave a little moan and rose right off the floor.

  He would have launched himself at her like a missile if I hadn’t grabbed his belt and yanked him down into the nearest chair. Wishing there were safety harnesses on the seats, I sat down next to Sam, keeping the full length of the polished imitation-wood table between us and the Blonde.

  “I think you know why I’m here,” she said. Her voice was music.

  Sam nodded dumbly, his jaw hanging open. I thought I saw a bit of saliva bubbling at the corner of his mouth.

  “Why do you want to leave us, Sam? Don’t you like us anymore?”

  It took three tries before Sam could make his voice work. “It’s. . .not that. I. . .I. . .I want to go into business for myself.”

  “But your employment contract has almost two full years more to run.”

  “I can’t wait two years,” he said in a tiny voice. “This opportunity won’t keep.”

  “Sam, you’re a very valued employee of Global Technologies, Incorporated. We want you to stay with us. I want you to stay with us.”

  “I. . .can’t.”

  “But you signed a contract with us, Sam. You gave us your word.”

  I stuck in my dime’s worth. “The contract doesn’t prohibit Sam from quitting. He can leave whenever he wants to.”

  “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. 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, that idea is the proprietary property of Global Technologies. Global owns the idea, not you.”

  For a moment the little conference room was absolutely silent. I could hear nothing except the faint background hum 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 Global Technologies. 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 head again. “No, Sam. You did it while you were a Global employee. It’s not your possession. It belongs to us.”

  Sam leaped from his chair 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 sat there patiently, a slightly disappointed little frown on her face, while I calmed Sam down and got him back into his chair.

  “Sam, dear, I know how you must feel,” she said. “I don’t want us to be enemies. We’d be happy to have you take part in the tourist hotel program—as a Global 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. “Well, I expect our lawyers will have to settle it with your lawyers. In the meantime, I suppose there’s nothing for us to do but accept your resignation. With reluctance. With my 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 Global and run the tourist project for them.

  What happened next depends on whom 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 had figured that Sam’s financial partners would go along with Global Technologies once they realized that Global had muscled Sam out of the tourist business. 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 wouldn’t want to do business with a big multinational corporation. Worse still, she didn’t know exactly
what kind of deal Sam had cut with his backers; if Sam had a legally binding contract with them that named him as their partner, they might scrap the whole project when they learned that Global had cut Sam out.

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

  The Blonde’s game was to keep Sam with Global and get him to go through with the tourist hotel idea. Apparently, once Global’s management got word that Sam had actually closed a deal for building a tourist facility on Alpha, they figured they might as well go into the tourist business for themselves. Alpha was still 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 a 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 hotel project collapsed, it wouldn’t be long before I was shipped back Earthside, I knew.

  After three days there were dark circles under Sam’s eyes. He looked weary. 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.

  He smiled wanly. “And quit show business?”

  Two weeks to the day after she arrived, the Blonde packed up and left. Her eyes were blazing anger. I saw her off at the docking port. She looked just as perfectly radiant as she had the day she 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 shook. 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 figured 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 had you wrapped around her. . .eh, her little finger,” I said.

  “So did she.”

  “You outsmarted her!”

  “I outlasted her,” Sam said, his voice low and suddenly 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 sand toward an oasis that turned out to be a mirage.

  I said, “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 because you’re susceptible.”

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

  “And it worked,” I said.

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

  What had happened, while Sam was fighting the Battle of the Bunk, was that when Sam’s partners realized that Global was interested in the tourist facility, they become absolutely convinced that they had a gold mine and backed Sam to the hilt. Their lawyers challenged Global’s lawyers, and once the paper-shufflers in Phoenix saw that, they realized that Miss Beryllium’s mission at the Shack was doomed to fail. The Blonde left in a huff when Phoenix ordered her to return. Apparently, either she was enjoying her work or she thought that 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 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 he worked things out, a major shareholder in the project. Global got some rent money out of it. Actually, so many people enjoyed their vacations aboard the Big Wheel so much that a market eventually opened up for low-gravity retirement homes. Sam beat Global 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 the cold, unblinking stars.

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

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

  Malone nodded, turning in midair to face her. “Yep. Sam got it built, got it started, and then lost interest in it. He had other things on his mind. 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. “Miss Beryllium thought she was playing Sam for a fish, using his Casanova complex to literally screw him out of the 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 on Sam.”

  “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 undergo six months’ worth of retraining and exercise before he could return to Earth.”

  “Six months? That’s ridiculous!”

  “Is it?” Malone smiled without humor. “That regulation is still on the books, lady. Nobody pays any attention to it anymore, but it’s still there.”

  “She did that to spite Sam?”

  “And she made sure Global put all its weight behind enforcing it. Made people think twice before signing an employment contract for working up here. Stuck Sam, but good. He wasn’t going to spend any 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! He wanted to return, but he just couldn’t take six months out of his life for it.”

  “That must have hurt him.”

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

  “And you never went back to Earth,” the reporter said.

  “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 Global, I became the manager of the entire 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-gee 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 things can tell.” Malone shook his head. “No, 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 hack down there.”

  “I see,” the reporter said.

  “Yeah. Sure you do.”

  An uncomfortable silence stretched between them. She turned off the recorder on her belt, for good this time. Finally Malone softened. “Hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be 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 trouble-making bastard.”

  “I don’t, not anymore,” 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 sound so terrible.”