The Sam Gunn Omnibus (100 page)

Sam gave him his most innocent
look. “I’m under oath, right? How can I lie to you?”

The chief judge opened her mouth as
if she were going to zing Sam, then she seemed to think better of it and said
nothing.

“Besides,” Sam added impishly, “you
can check
Jokers
computer logs, if you
haven’t already done that.”

The Beryllium Blonde called from
the prosecution table, “A point of information, please?”

All three judges smiled and nodded.

Without rising, the Blonde, asked, “There
are twenty-seven moons in the Jupiter system, are there not?”

“Twenty-nine,” Sam snapped, “including
the two little sheepdog rocks that keep Jupiter’s ring in place.”

“Aren’t most of these moons
composed of ices that contain a goodly amount of oxygen?”

“Yes they are,” Sam replied before
anyone else could, as politely as if he were speaking to a stranger.

“Then why couldn’t you have
obtained the oxygen you claim you needed from one of those other satellites?”

“Because, oh fairest of the sadly mush-brained
profession of hired truth-twisters, my poor battered little ship couldn’t reach
any of those other moons.”

“Truly?”

Sam put his right hand over his
heart. “Absolutely.
Joker
was like a dart thrown
at a dartboard. I had aimed for a bull’s-eye, but the aerobraking flight had
jiggled my aim and now I was headed for Europa. Scout’s honor. It wasn’t my
idea. Blame Isaac Newton, or maybe Einstein.”

The Blonde said nothing more, but it
was perfectly clear from the expression on her gorgeous face that she didn’t
believe a word Sam was saying. I looked up at the judges—it took an effort to
turn my eyes away from the Blonde—and saw that none of the three of them
believed Sam either. Mentally I added the possibility of perjury charges to the
list Sam already faced.

IT WASN’T
MY
idea to hit Europa—Sam insisted—but there wasn’t much
else I could do. Sure, I had my tanks full of propellant for the fusion torch,
but I was gonna need that hydrogen and helium for the high-g burn back to Vesta
and the Twins. I couldn’t afford to spend any of it jinking around the Jupiter
system. I was pointed at Europa when I came out of Jupiter’s atmosphere. Act of
God, you could call it.

(I couldn’t fail to notice the grin
that crept across Sam’s face as he spoke. Neither could the judges. Either he
was not telling it exactly the way it had happened or he was downright pleased
that this “act of God” had pointed him squarely at Europa.)

I
called the
DULLards on Europa again and gave them a complete rundown of the situation.
Recorded my message and had the comm system keep replaying it to ‘em. They didn’t
respond. Not a peep.

I
had nothing to do
for several hours except feel good that I didn’t have all those damned tubes
poking into me. But even though I could get up and walk around my luxuriously
appointed bridge and take solid food from my highly automated and well-stocked
galley, my brain kept nibbling at a question that’d been nagging at me since
before I hit Jupiter.

Why did DULL insist on keeping the
whole Jupiter system off-limits to outside developers?

And why did the
I
AA agree to let them do that?

All of a sudden my comm system
erupted with noise from Europa. They started screaming at me that I wasn’t allowed
in the Jupiter system, I can’t land on Europa, I’d better haul ass out of
there, yaddida, yaddida, and so on. Threatened me with lawsuits and public
flogging and whatnot.

I
told them I was
on a mission of mercy and two human lives depended on my grabbing some of their
ice. Three lives, come to think of it. My butt was on the line, too.

But even if they heard me they didn’t
listen. They just kept screaming that I wasn’t allowed to land on Europa or be
anywhere in the Jupiter system. Different faces appeared on my comm screen
every fifteen seconds, seemed like, all of them getting more and more frantic
as I came hurtling closer to Europa’s ice-covered surface.

“I hear what you’re saying,” I told
them. “I’m not going to disturb your little green lichenoids. I just need to
grab some ice and, believe me, I’ll be out of your way as fast as a jackrabbit
in mating season.”

I m
ight as well
have been talking to myself. In fact, I think I was. They paid no attention to
what I was saying.

A really nasty-looking lug come on
my comm screen. “This is Captain Majerkurth. I’m in charge of security here on
Europa. If you try to land here I will personally break your balls.”

“Security?” I blurted. “What do you
need security for? And what army are you a captain in?”

“I am a captain in the security
department of Wankle Enterprises, on loan to Diversified Universities and
Laboratories, Limited,” he replied evenly—an even snarl, that is.

“Well, if I were you,
mon capitain
,”
I said, “I’d start getting my people under shelter. My spacecraft is
accompanied by about a hundred or so rocks that’re going to hit Europa like a meteor
shower.”

That was the remains of my heat
shield, of course. Most of the rocks had ablated down to pebble size, but at
the velocity we were traveling they could still do some damage. Europa’s icy
surface was going to get peppered and there wasn’t anything I could do about it
except warn them to get under shelter.

Well, to make a long story short
(the judges all sighed at that) I landed on Europa nice and smooth, a real
gentle touchdown. With
Clementine
still
dragging along beside me, of course. The meteor shower I promised Captain
Majerkurth didn’t harm anything, near as I can tell: just a few hundred new
little craterlets in Europa’s surface of ice.

So I’ve got
Clementine
chewing up ice and storing it in her holds. Bypassed her dumbass mass
spectrometer, otherwise her computer would’ve stopped everything because it
couldn’t figure out what elements were going into which bins. Didn’t matter. It
was all ice, which added up to hydrogen for
Jokers
fusion torch and oxygen for the Twins.

I
expected
Majerkurth to show up, and sure enough, I hadn’t been sitting on Europa for more
than an hour before this flimsy little hopper pops up over my horizon, heading
my way on a ballistic trajectory. For half a second I thought the hardass had
fired a missile at me, but my computer analyzed the radar data in picoseconds
and announced that it was a personnel hopper, not a missile, and it was gonna
land beside
Joker.

I
buttoned up
Joker
good and tight. I had no intention of letting
Majerkurth come aboard. But the space-suited figure that climbed down from the
hopper wasn’t the security captain.

“Mr. Gunn, this is Anitra O’Toole.
Permission to come aboard?”

I
stared at the
image in my display screen. You can’t tell much about a person when she’s
zipped into a space suit, but Anitra O’Toole looked small—maybe my own height
or even a little less—and her voice was kind
of...
well, she sounded almost
scared.

“Are you one of Majerkurth’s
security people?” I asked.

“Security? Goodness no! If Captain
Majerkurth knew I was here
he’d...”
She hesitated, then pleaded, “Please let me come aboard, Mr. Gunn. Please!”

What could I do? I could never
refuse a woman asking for help, and she seemed to need my help pretty
desperately. It was like the time I—

(“Please stick to the facts of this
case!” the chief judge demanded.)

Yeah, okay. So I let her in. Anitra
O’Toole turned out to be young, kinda pretty in a cheerleader way, and very
worried. Oh, and she was one of the three biologists among the DULL team on
Europa.

And she was scared, too. She wouldn’t
say why, at first, or why she wanted to come aboard
Joker.
She just fidgeted and blathered about her husband waiting for her back on Earth
and how she was afraid that her marriage was coming apart because they’d been
separated so long and her career might be going down the tubes as well.

I
only had a few
hours to be on Europa, but while my brain-dead
Clementine
was ingesting ice I tried to be as hospitable as
possible. I sat Anitra down in my quarters, just off the bridge, and programmed
the galley to produce a gourmet dinner of roast squab, sweet potatoes, string
beans—

(“Mr. Gunn!” growled the Toad.)

All right, all right. I popped a
bottle of champagne for her.
Joker
has the best wine
cellar in space, bar none.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t
try to seduce married women, even when they tell me their marriage is in
trouble. Especially then, as a matter of fact. Too complicated; too many
chances for lawsuits or grievous bodily harm.

I
was more
interested in her saying that her career might be going down the tubes. One of
three biologists on Europa, working on a newly discovered form of
extraterrestrial life, and her career was in trouble?

“Why?”
I asked her.

Anitra
had these big violet eyes and the kind of golden blonde hair that most women
get out of a bottle. Sitting there beside me in a one-piece zipsuit, she looked
young and unhappy and vulnerable, like a runaway waif. I stayed an arm’s length
away; it wasn
’
t easy, but I kept
thinking about the Twins as much as I could.

“The
adaptation isn’t working,” Anitra said, miserable. “All this planning and
genetic engineering and they still won’t reproduce.”

“What
won’t reproduce?” I asked.

She
sipped at the champagne. I refilled her glass.

“Could
you take me back to Earth?” she blurted.

I
started to say no, which was the truth. But long,
long ago I had learned that the truth doesn’t always get the job done.

“I
’m heading back to the belt. My company headquarters
is in Ceres,”
I
said.
“I could arrange transportation from there.”

She
clutched at my wrist, nearly spilling my champagne. “Would you?”

“Why
do you want to leave Europa so badly?”

Those
violet eyes looked away from me. “My husband,” she said vaguely.

“Won’t
DULL set you up with transportation? They have regular resupply flights, don’t
they? You could hook a ride back Earthside with them.”

“No,”
she said, barely a whisper. “I’ve got to go now, while I’ve got.the chance. And
the nerve.”

“But
your work here on the lichenoids ...”

“That’s
the whole point!” she burst. “It isn’t working and everybody’s going to find
out and I’m going to be ruined professionally and nobody will want me, not even
Brandon.”

I
figured Brandon was her husband.

(“Is
there a point to all this?” asked the chief judge, frowning.)

The
point is this. Anitra O’Toole told me that the lichenoids DULL was studying are
not native to Europa. They were engineered in a biology lab in Zurich and
planted on Europa by the DULL team.

THE COURTROOM ERUPTED.
As if a bomb had gone
off. Half the spectators jumped to their feet, shouting. The Beryllium Blonde
and her four cohorts were screaming objections. The chief judge was banging the
stump of her gavel on the banc, demanding order.

But
what caught my eye was the look on the splotchy face of the Toad.

Weatherwax
was staring at Sam as if he would have gladly strangled him if he’d had the
chance.