The Sam Gunn Omnibus (103 page)

“So?” I repeated.

His grin got even wider. “So I’m
heading back to Ceres tomorrow. I mean, a blank check is just too good to
ignore!”

And that’s how Sam Gunn beat the
rap on the charge of genocide and opened the Jupiter system for development. He
went out to Ganymede and set up a new corporation to scoop helium-three from
the clouds of Jupiter and sell it for fuel to fusion power plants all over the
solar system.

Then he dumped every penny he had,
and a lot he didn’t legally have, into zipping out past Pluto to find Planet X.
You know the rest: he found a mini-black hole out there and fell into it and
found aliens and all that.

Now he’s on his way back. You know,
despite everything, it’s going to be great to see him again. Life was pretty
dull without Sam around! Productive, of course, and safe and comfortable. But
dull.

Me, I never left Selene City. I’m
still running Sam’s old company, Asteroidal Resources, Inc., from our new
corporate headquarters here on the Moon.

Of course, Sam wanted me to return to
Ceres after the trial, but I happened to run into the Beryllium Blonde in
Selene City and she seemed so dejected and lonely—but that’s another story.

“I
’M GETTING ENOUGH MATERIAL FOR A
FOLLOW-ON SERIES
,” Jade said to Jim Gradowsky’s
image on the wall screen of her compartment. She wasn’t actually having a
dialog with her boss; the distance between Selene and the torch ship
Hermes
made
that impossible. Instead she was giving Jumbo Jim a report on what she had come
up with since the Sam Gunn bio had been aired.

Spence Johansen sat on the
king-sized bed, studiously reading a manual on
Hermes’
s
fusion propulsion system. A former astronaut, Spence had buddied up with
several of the ship’s officers and was learning all he could about the massive
torch ship.

Jade was telling Gradowsky about
her newfound friendship with Jill Meyers when she noticed the yellow light at
the bottom of the wall screen blinking. She cut her report short and called out
to the screen, “Show incoming message, please.”

To her surprise, Jumbo Jim’s face
filled the screen, grinning lopsidedly. “Hi, Jade. Hope everything’s okay with
you on your honeymoon trip.” Before Jade could reply that she was working (not
that Gradowsky would have received her reply for an hour or more), Jumbo Jim
added, “Hey, Monica sends love and kisses. Says she misses you.”

Jade realized that Gradowsky didn’t
send a call across the solar system just for social chitchat.

Sure enough, her boss’s face grew
serious. “Uh, Jade, you know that Rockledge’s lawyers have been threatening to
sue us for libel or something, ‘cause of the series. Well, Raki got our own
lawyers to threaten
‘
em right back,
infringing freedom of the press or something like that.

“So yesterday we get a long message
from Pierre D’Argent, you know, Rockledge Industries’s CEO. He’s waving an
olive branch. Says he’ll drop the suit if we’ll run his story in a follow-on series.
Says he can show the world what a rotten no-good crook Sam was.”

Jade felt her cheeks flaming with
anger.

“Well, anyway, here’s D’Argent’s
story. I’ve listened to it and it’s damned interesting, even if he hates Sam’s
guts. I think we could go with it. And it would make the lawyers on both sides
very happy.

“Lemme know what you think.”

Controlling her anger, Jade glanced at Spence, his nose still buried in
the propulsion manual. She leaned back in the compartment’s padded little desk
chair and waited for D’Argent’s story to begin.

I
KNOW SAM GUNN’S SUPPOSED
TO BE SOME SORT OF FOLK
hero, a space-age Robin Hood or
something, but let me tell you, he’s nothing more than a cheating, womanizing,
loudmouthed little scoundrel. And those are his good points!

Take the business about Hell
Crater, for example.

I
was perfectly
happy running Rockledge Industries’s space operations despite the fact that Sam
Gunn was always causing us trouble. True, we had euchred him out of that
orbital honeymoon hotel he had started, but we knew how to make a profit out of
it and Sam didn’t. And we paid him a decent price for it; not as much as he had
expected, but more than he deserved, certainly.

Of course, we had withheld the
space-sickness cure that our Rockledge research labs had come up with. Without
it, people coming to enjoy a romantic tryst in weightlessness spent their
honeymoons upchucking. With it, Rockledge could buy out Sam on the cheap when
he was on the verge of bankruptcy and make a first-class orbital tourist
facility out of his vomit palace.

Well, perhaps we did take slightly
unfair advantage of Sam, but that’s the way the world turns. Business is
business. Sentiment has no part in it. Still, Sam took it personally, and he
took it hard. My spies in his operation—which he called S. Gunn Enterprises,
Unlimited, no less— told me had vowed vengeance.

“I’ll get that silver-plated SOB,”
was one of his milder remarks, I was told. He snarled that choice little bon mot
after he had Rockledge’s check in his bank account, I might add.

Frankly, I thought Sam was
finished. I thought we had heard the last of him. How wrong I was!

Imagine my surprise when, some months
later, my phone told me that Sam Gunn wanted to have a meeting with me.
Surprise quickly turned to suspicion when I played back Sam’s call.

“Pierre, you old silver fox,” Sam
said, grinning malevolently, “I know we’ve had our differences in the past....”

He had a nerve, addressing me by my
first name. For people of Sam’s ilk I expected to be called Mr. D’Argent. But
Sam never paid any attention to the finer points of politesse.

On and on he went. If there’s one
thing that Sam can do, it’s talk. His tongue must be made of triple-laminated
heat shield cermet. I sat back in my desk chair and studied his sly,
shifty-eyed face while he chattered nonstop. Sam looks like a grown-up
Huckleberry Finn, although he hasn’t grown up all that much. He claims he’s one
hundred sixty-five centimeters tall, which is an obvious lie. If he’s one
sixty-five, Napoleon must have been two meters and then some.

Sam’s face is round, topped with a
thatch of wiry rust-red hair. His snub nose is sprinkled with freckles, and his
eyes seem never to be the same color twice. Hazel eyes, he says. The eyes of a
born con artist, I say. For the life of me I can’t understand what women see in
him, but Sam is never without a beautiful woman hanging on him. Or two. Or
three.

I
was just
considering fast-forwarding his message when at last he got to the point.

“Pierre, I have an idea that’ll
knock your jockstrap out from under you. But it’s going to take a big chunk of
capital to put it into operation. So I figured, with Rock
l
edge’s money and my brains we could make an
indecent profit. Wanna talk about it?”

And that was it. His message was
over. The phone screen froze on Sam’s grinning image and a string of callback
numbers.

I
didn’t call him
back. Not at first. Let him stew in his own juices for a while, I thought, and
I waited for an onslaught of messages from Sam. As a matter of fact, I was
looking forward to seeing the detestable little snot get down on his knees and
beg me to listen to him.

But Sam didn’t beg. He didn’t even
try to call me again. I waited for days, going about my business as normal,
without hearing a peep from Sam. I began to wonder what he’d wanted. Why did he
call? He said he needed a large amount of capital to finance his latest scheme.
What was he up to? Had he gone to someone else to raise the money? To BLM
Aerospace, perhaps?

In those days, incidentally, my
office was on Earth. In beautiful Montreal, actually. Rockledge Industries was
a truly diversified and multinational corporation, with fingers in literally
thousands of operations all over the Earth and, of course, in orbital space. We
were even beginning to build O’Neill type habitats at the L-4 and L-5 libration
points along the Moon’s orbit. We were so fully committed financially that I didn’t
know where I’d come up with funding for whatever harebrained scheme Sam had in
mind, even if I were foolish enough to invest Rockledge money in it.

So it was something of a surprise
when, one fine crisp winter morning as I took my usual walking commute from my
condominium home to my office through the glassteel tube that connects the two
towers at their twentieth floors, I saw Sam walking along with me.

Outside the tube!

My eyes must have popped wide. Sam
was out there in the mid-February cold, apparently walking on air. He just
plodded along, step by step, with nothing visible between him and the city
streets, twenty storeys below. He paid no attention to me, nor to the other men
and women in the tube who stopped to gape in amazement at him.

The temperature out there was below
zero and I could see from the clouds scudding overhead and the way that the
bare tree branches were swaying far below that a considerable wind was blowing.
Sam was wearing nothing heavier than a suit jacket as he leaned into the wind
and trudged along, his shifty eyes squeezed almost shut, but a crooked grin on
his freckled, snub-nosed face, doggedly slogging toward the Rockledge corporate
office tower.

I
found myself
slowing down to keep pace with him, slack-jawed. A crowd of other commuters was
gathering, watching Sam with equal astonishment. A woman tapped at the curving
glassteel wall to get his attention. Sam paid her no heed.

An older man rapped hard on the
glassteel with his walking stick, looking annoyed.

“Get down from there, you damned
fool!” he shouted.

Sam abruptly stopped his forward motion
and turned to stare at us: For an instant he seemed frozen in midair. Then he
looked down. His eyes went wide as he realized there was nothing below him but
thin air. He dropped as if an invisible trapdoor had opened beneath him,
plummeting downward like a dead weight.

I
banged my nose
painfully against the transparent wall of the tube, trying to follow his figure
as it hurtled down toward the streets. I heard a dozen other thumps and grunts
as others in the crowd did the same. Sam dropped like a stone and disappeared
from our view.

My God! I thought. He’s committed
suicide! For a moment I felt horrified, but then (I must confess) I said to myself,
That’s the last I’ll see of the exasperating little bastard.

I
was, of course,
quite wrong.

I
raced to my
office, sprinting past several assistants who tried to catch my attention. I had
to call the police, turn on the local news, find out what had happened to Sam.

Imagine my stupefied shock, then,
when I saw Sam sitting behind my desk, grinning from ear to ear like a poorly
carved Jack-o’-lantern.

“You!” I gasped, out of breath from
surprise, astonishment and exertion. “I saw you—”

“You saw a hologram, Pierre old
buddy-pal. Looked realistic, didn’t it?”

I
sank into the
bottle-green leather armchair in front of my desk. “Hologram?”

“The old geezer with the cane was stooging
for me. Caught your attention, didn’t it?”

Astonishment quickly gave way to
pique. Sam had tricked me, and wormed his way into my private office in the
bargain.

“Get out from behind my desk,” I snapped.

“Certainly, oh gracious captain of
industry,” said Sam. He got up from my swivel chair, pretended to dust off its
seat, and bowed as I came around the desk. He scampered around the other end of
the desk and took the leather armchair. It was too big for him: his feet
dangled several centimeters off the floor and he looked like a child in a man’s
chair.

I
scowled at him as
I sat down. Sam grinned back at me. For several moments neither of us said
anything, something of a record for silence on Sam’s part.

“All right,” I said at last, “you’ve
finagled your way into my office. Now what’s this latest castle in the sky of
yours all about?”