The Sam Gunn Omnibus (120 page)

Yet there was no sign of Sam Gunn. He had disappeared. There were rumors
that he was in Selene, but no one admitted to seeing him. Then, after weeks of
such rumors, the news flashed through Selene that Sam Gunn had been working
with a professor at the university. And he’d been arrested by Selene’s security
police.

Jade looked up the professor, Daniel C. Townes IV. A physicist. She called
him several times, but always got his answering machine.

Then he walked into her office, tall, lanky, looking slightly bemused.

“I understand you’re looking for me,” he said, folding his long-legged
figure into the little plastic chair in front of Jade’s desk.

She almost leaped across the desk. “Do you know where Sam Gunn is?”

He frowned slightly. “I know where one of them is,” said Townes.

ONE SAM GUNN IS BAD ENOUGH-SAID PROFESSOR
TOWNES.

But now there’s at least
two of them, maybe more, and it’s all my fault.

Well, mostly my fault. Sam had something to do with it, of course. More
than a little, as you might suspect if you know anything about Sam.

And, if you know anything about Sam, you know that of course there was a
woman involved. A beautiful, statuesque, golden-haired Bishop of the New Lunar
Church, no less.

I didn’t know anything about Sam except the usual stuff that the general
public knew: Sam Gunn was a freewheeling space entrepreneur, a little stubby
loudmouthed redheaded guy who always found himself battling the big boys of
huge interplanetary corporations and labyrinthine government bureaucracies. Sam
was widely known as a womanizer, a wiseass, a stubby Tasmanian Devil with a mind
as sharp as a laser beam and a heart as big as a spiral galaxy.

He had disappeared years earlier out on some wild-ass trek to the Kuiper
Belt. Everybody thought he had died out in that frozen darkness beyond Pluto.
There was rejoicing in the paneled chambers of corporate and government power,
tears shed among Sam’s legion of friends.

And then after his long absence he showed up again, spinning a wild tale
about having fallen into a black hole. He was heading back to Earth, coming in
from the cold, claiming that friendly aliens on the other side of the black
hole had showed him how to get back to our space-time, back to home. Sam’s
enemies nodded knowingly: of
course
the
aliens would want to get rid of him, they said to each other.

And they sent just about every lawyer on Earth after Sam. He owed megabucks
to dozens of creditors, including some pretty shady characters. He was so
deeply in debt that there was no place on Earth he could land his spacecraft
without having umpteen dozen eager lawyers slam him with liens and lawsuits.

Which is why Sam landed not on Earth, but on the Moon. At Selene, which
was now an independent nation and apparently the only human community in the
solar system that didn’t have Sam at the head of its “most wanted” list.

He came straight to the underground halls of Selene University. To my
office!

Imagine my surprise when Sam Gunn showed up at my doorway, all one hundred
sixty-some centimeters of him.

And asked me to invent a matter transmitter for him.

“A matter transmitter?” I must have sputtered, I was so shocked. “But that’s
nonsense. It’s kiddie fantasy. It’s nothing but—”

“It’s physics,” Sam said. “And you’re a physicist. Right?”

He had me there.

I am Daniel C. Townes IV, PhD. I am a particle physicist. I was on the
short list last year for the Nobel Prize in physics. But that was before I met
Sam Gunn.

Sam had popped into my office unannounced, sneaking past the department
secretary during her lunch break. (Which, I must confess, often takes a couple
of hours.) He just waltzed through my open doorway, walked up to my desk, stuck
out his hand and introduced himself. Then he told me he needed a matter
transmitter. Right away.

I sagged back in my desk chair while Sam perched himself on the only bare
corner of my desk, grinning like a gap-toothed Jack-o’-lantern. His face was
round, with a snub nose and a sprinkling of freckles. Wiry reddish hair; I think
they call that color auburn. His eyes were light, twinkling.

“Physics is one thing,” I said, trying to regain my dignity. “A matter
transmitter is something else.”

“Come on,” Sam said, wheedling, “you guys have transmitted photons, haven’t
you? You yourself just published a paper about transmitting atomic particles
from one end of your lab to the other.”

He had read the literature. That impressed me.

You have to understand that I was na
i
ve
enough to think that I might be the youngest person ever to receive the physics
Nobel. I had to be careful, though. More than one young genius had been cut
down by the knives that whirl through academia’s hallowed halls in the dark of
night.

Sam aged me, though.

I think he had roosted on my desk because that made him taller than I was,
as long as I remained sitting in my swivel chair. I have to confess, though,
that there wasn’t any place else he could have sat. My office was littered with
reports, journals, books, even popular magazines. The visitor’s chair was piled
high with memos that the secretary had printed out

from the department’s
unending file of meaningless trivia. There might be no paper on the Moon, but
we sure do pile up the monofilament plastic sheets that we use in its place.

“So how about it, Dan-o?”
Sam asked. “Can you make me a matter transmitter? It’s worth a considerable
fortune and I’ll cut you in on it, fifty-fifty.”

“What makes you think—”

“You’re the expert on
entanglement, aren’t you?”

I was impressed even more.
Entanglement is not a subject your average businessman either knows or cares
about.

Curiosity is a funny
thing. It not only kills cats, it makes physicists forget Newton’s Third Law,
the one about action and reaction.

I heard myself ask him, “Did
you really survive going through a black hole?”

Grinning even wider, Sam
nodded. “Yep. Twice.”

“What’s it like? What
did you experience? How did it feel?”

Sam shrugged. “Nothing
to it, really. I didn’t see or feel anything all that unusual.”

“That’s impossible.”

Sam just sat there on
the corner of my desk, grinning knowingly.

“Unless,” I mused, “the
laws of physics change under the intense gravitational
field...”

“Or I’m telling you a
big, fat lie,” Sam said.

“A lie?” That stunned me.
“You wouldn’t—”

“Look,” Sam said,
bending closer toward me, “I need a matter transmitter. You whip one up for me
and I’ll give you all the data in my ship’s computer.”

I could feel my eyes go
wide. “Your ship? The one that went through the black hole?”

“Twice,” said Sam.

Thus began my
partnership with Sam Gunn.

INGRID MACTAVISH WAS
something else. A missionary from the New Morality back
Earthside, she had come to Selene to be installed as a Bishop in the New Lunar
Church. She was nearly two meters tall, with bright golden hair that
glowed
and cascaded down past her shoulders, and
eyes the color of perfect sapphires. A Junoesque goddess. A Valkyrie in a
virginal white pants suit that fit her snugly enough to send my blood pressure
soaring.

I’ll never forget my
first encounter with her. She just stormed into my office and, without
preamble, demanded, “Is it true?”

It’s hard to keep a
secret in a community as small and intense as Selene. Rumors fly along those
underground corridors faster than kids on jetblades. Sam wanted me to keep my
work on the matter transmitter absolutely, utterly, cosmically top-secret. But
the word leaked out, of course, after only a couple of weeks. I was surprised
that nobody blabbed about it before then.

That’s what brought
Bishop MacTavish into my office, all one hundred and eighty-two centimeters of
her.

“Is it true?” she
repeated.

She was practically
radiating righteous wrath, those sapphire eyes blazing at me.

I swallowed as I got
politely to my feet from my desk chair. I’m accustomed to being the tallest
person in any crowd. I’m just a tad over two meters; I’d been a fairly successful
basketball player back at Cal-Tech, but here on the Moon even Sam could jump so
high in the light gravity that my height wasn’t all that much of an advantage.

Bishop MacTavish was not
accustomed to looking up at anyone, I saw.

“Is what true?” I asked
mildly. A soft answer turneth away wrath, I reasoned.

I think it was my height
that softened her attitude. “That you’re working on a device to transmit people
through space instantaneously,” she replied, her voice lower, gentler.

“No, that is not true,”
I replied. Honestly.

She sank down into the
chair in front of my desk, which I had cleaned off since Sam’s first visit.
There were hardly more than three or four slim reports resting on it.

Bishop MacTavish looked
startled for a moment; then she slipped the reports out from beneath her
curvaceous rump and let them fall to the floor in the languid low gravity of
the Moon.

“Thank God,” she murmured.
“That’s one blasphemy we won’t have to deal with.”

“Blasphemy?” I asked, my
curiosity piqued.

She blinked those
gorgeous eyes at me. “A matter transmitter, if it could be made successfully,
could also be used as a matter duplicator, couldn’t it?”

It took me a moment to
understand what she was saying; I was rather hypnotized by her eyes.

“Couldn’t it?” she
repeated.

“Duplicator? Yes, I suppose
it might be feasible....”

“And every time you use
it you’d be murdering a human being.” “What?” That truly stunned me. “What are
you talking about?”

“When someone goes into
your transporter his body is broken down into individual atoms, isn’t it? The
pattern is sent to the receiver, where the body is reconstituted out of other
atoms. The original person has been destroyed. Just because a copy comes out of
the receiver—”

“No, no, no!” I interrupted.
“That’s fantasy from the kiddie shows. Entanglement doesn’t work that way.
Nothing gets destroyed.”

“It doesn’t?”

I shook my head. “It’s
rather complicated, but essentially the process matches the pattern of the thing
to be transported and reproduces that pattern at the other end of the
transmission. The original is not destroyed; it isn’t harmed in any way.”

She cocked a suspicious
brow at me.

“It takes a lot of
energy, though,” I went on. “I doubt that it will ever be practical.”

“But such a machine
would be creating living human beings, wouldn’t it? Only God can create people.
A matter duplicator would be an outright blasphemy, clearly.”

“Maybe so,” I muttered.
But then I came back to my senses. “Uh ... although, that is, well, I thought
that people create people. You
know...
uh, sexually.”

“Of course.” She smiled
and lowered her lashes self-consciously. “That’s doing God’s work.”

“It is?”

She nodded, then took a
deep breath. I nearly started hyperventilating.

“But if you’re not
working on a matter transmitter,” she said, breaking into a happy smile as she
started to get up from the chair, “then there’s no cause for alarm.”

The trouble with being a
scientist is that it tends to make you honest. Oh, sure, there’ve been cheats
and outright frauds in science. But the field has a way of winnowing them out,
sooner or later. Honesty is the bedrock of scientific research. Besides, I didn’t
want her to leave my office.

So I confessed, “I am
working on a matter transmitter, I’m afraid.”

She looked shocked. “But
you said you weren’t.”

“I’m not working on a
device to transport people. That would be too dangerous. My device is intended
merely to transmit documents and other lightweight, nonorganic materials.”

She thumped back into
the chair. “And you’re doing this for Sam Gunn?” “Yes, that’s true.”

She took an even deeper
breath. “That little devil. Blasphemy means nothing to him.”

“But the transmitter won’t
be used for people.”

“You think not?” she
said sharply. “Once Sam Gunn has a matter transmitter in his hands he’ll use it
for whatever evil purposes he wants.”

“But the risks—”

“Risks? Do you think for
one microsecond that Sam Gunn cares about risks? To his body or his soul?”

“I...
suppose not,” I replied weakly.