The Sam Gunn Omnibus (122 page)

That stopped Sam. But only for a moment. “You could make all these lawsuits
go away?”

“I think a settlement could be arranged,” she said.

“A settlement?”

“A settlement.”

“Forgive me my debts,” Sam mused, “as I forgive my debtors.”

“Even the Devil can quote scripture,” Ingrid retorted.

They were talking as if I wasn’t there. I felt like a spectator at a
tennis match; my eyes shifted back and forth from one to the other.

“Mr. Gunn, the New Morality—” “Sam,” he said. “Call me Sam.”

Ingrid smiled. “Very
well. Sam.”

“May I call you Ingrid?”
he asked her.

Her smile widened slightly.
“Bishop MacTavish, Sam.”

“No,” Sam replied, not
taken aback at all. “I’ll call you Aphrodite: the goddess of beauty.”

I saw anger flare in her
deeply blue eyes, but only for the flash of a second. She controlled it
immediately.

“That’s the name of a
pagan goddess.”

“It’s the only name I can
think of that fits you,” Sam said, looking totally sincere.

And then I heard myself
blab, “Galileo said, ‘Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence
of things, and not the essence to the names, for things come first and names
afterward.’“

They both stared at me.”
Whaat?”

“Well, I m
ean ...
that
is ...”
I was back in the conversation, but floundering like a particle in Brownian motion.

“Galileo was a notorious
heretic,” Ingrid said.

“The Church apologized
for that,
er...
misunderstanding,” I said. Then I added, “Three hundred and fifty-nine years
afterward.”

“What’s Galileo got to
do with anything?” Sam demanded.

“Well, he said names
should be given based on the observable attributes of the thing being named.”
Turning to Ingrid, I said, “I think naming you Aphrodite is completely
appropriate.”

She looked thoughtfully
at me. Then, her face totally serious, “You mean that as a compliment, Dr.
Townes. And I accept it as such. Thank you.”

“Dan,” I said. “Please
call me Dan.”

She nodded, then turned
back to Sam. “But you, Sam, you’re trying to seduce me, aren’t you?”

“Me?” The innocence on
Sam’s face was about as obvious as a flying elephant. And as phony.

“You,” Ingrid said
sternly.

Gesturing toward the
next table, Sam asked, “Is that why you brought the Four Horsewomen of the
Apocalypse? For protection?”

“I don’t need protection
from you, Sam. I can take care of myself.”

Sam hmmfed. “I bet you’re
still a virgin.”

“That’s none of your
business.”

He shrugged. “Now what
was this about forgiving me my debts?”

It took her a moment to
get her mind back on business. At last she

folded her hands on the
tabletop and said slowly, carefully, “The New Morality is willing to intervene
on your behalf in the various lawsuits against you.”

“The New Morality, huh?” If this surprised Sam he certainly didn’t show
it. “They own a lot of stock in Masterson, and Rockledge too, don’t they?”

“That’s neither here nor there.”

“And what do I have to do to get the New Morality to save my ass?”

Her eyes flared again at Sam’s crudity. I figured he had chosen his words
precisely to rattle her.

“You will give up this effort of yours to create a matter transmitter.”

“Wait a minute!” I yelped. “That’s
my
work you’re talking about!”

“It is blasphemous presumption,” said Bishop MacTavish. “You are both
placing your souls in grave danger.”

“Bullsnorts!” Sam snapped. “The New Morality doesn’t want a matter
transmitter because it would loosen their control over people.”

“This is a matter of religion, Sam,” Ingrid said. “The state of your soul—”

“Stow it, Aphrodite. This is a matter of politics. Power. The New Morality
isn’t worried about my soul, but they’re scared that a matter transmitter might
l
et people do things they don’t want
them to do.”

Ingrid turned to me. She actually reached across the table and took my
hands in hers. “Daniel, you understand, don’t you? You can see that I’m trying
to save your soul.”

I was thinking more about my body. And hers.

“Ingrid,” I said, my voice nothing more than a husky whisper, “we’re
talking about my work. My life.”

“No,” she replied softly. “We’re talking about your soul.”

Up to that moment I hadn’t even considered that I might possess a soul.
But gazing into those incredible eyes, with her hands in mine, I started
thinking about how wonderful it would be to please her, to make her smile at me,
to be with her for all eternity.

“Hey! Break it up!” Sam said sharply. “I’m supposed to be the seducer
here.”

At that, all four of the women at the next table got to their feet. I saw
that they were all pretty hefty; they looked like professional athletes.

“Bishop MacTavish,” one of them said in a sanctimonious whisper, “it’s
time to leave.”

Ingrid looked up at her quartet of bodyguards as if breaking free of

a trance. She pulled her
hands away from me and nodded. “Yes. I must go.”

And she left me there,
staring after her.

I
THOUGHT
I knew as much about entanglement as any person living. More, in fact. But all
I knew was about subatomic particles and quantum physics. Not about people. And
I got myself entangled with Bishop Ingrid MacTavish so completely that I couldn’t
even see straight half the time.

We had dinners together.
She visited my lab several times and we had lunch with my grad student
assistants. She and I took long walks up in the Main Plaza, strolling along the
bricked lanes that curved through the greenery so lovingly tended up there
beneath the massive concrete dome of the Plaza. I kissed her and she kissed me
back. I fell in love.

But she didn’t.

“I can’t let myself love
you, Daniel,” she told me one evening, as we sat on a park bench near the
curving shell of the auditorium. We had attended a symphonic concert: all
Tchaikovsky, lushly romantic music.

“Why not?” I asked. “I love
you, Ingrid. I truly do.”

“We live in different
worlds,” she said.

“You’re here on the Moon
now. We’re in the same world.”

“No, it’s your work.
Your soul.”

She meant the matter
transmitter, of course. I spread my hands in a halfhearted gesture and said, “My
soul isn’t in any danger. The damned experiment isn’t working. Not at all.”

She looked hopefully at
me. “It
is
damned! It’s that devil Sam Gunn. He’s leading you down the road to perdition.”

“Sam? He’s no devil. An
imp, maybe.”

“He’s evil, Daniel. And
this matter transmitter he wants you to make for him—it’s the Devil’s work.”

“Come on, Ingrid. That’s
what they said about the telescope, for God’s sake.”

“Yes, for God’s sake,”
she murmured.

“Do you really think
what I’m doing is evil?”

“Why do you think your
experiment won’t work? God won’t allow you to succeed.”

“But—”

“And if you do succeed,
if you should somehow manage to make the device work the way Sam Gunn wants it
to, it will only be because the Devil has helped you.” “You mean it’ll be
witchcraft?” My voice must have gone up two octaves.

Ingrid nodded, her lips
pressed into a tight line. “Don’t you see, Daniel? I’m struggling to save your
very soul.”

And there it was. She
was attracted to me, I knew she was. But my work stood in the way. And her medieval
outlook on life.

“Ingrid, I can’t give up
my work. It’s my career. My life.”

She bowed her head. Her
voice so low I could barely hear her, she said, “I know, Daniel. I know. I can’t
even ask you to give it up. I do love you, dearest. I love you so much that I can’t
ask you to make this sacrifice. I won’t ruin your life. I should do everything
in my power to get you away from this devilish task you’ve set yourself. But I can’t
bring myself to do it. I can’t hurt you that way. Even if it means both our
souls.”

She loved me! She
admitted that she loved me! But nothing would come of it as long as I worked on
Sam’s matter transmitter.

I told Sam about it the
following morning. Actually, he ferreted the information out of me.

Sam was already in my
lab when I came in that morning. He was always bouncing into the lab, urging me
to make the damned bench-top model work so we could go ahead and build a
full-scale transmitter.

“Why isn’t it working
yet?” he would ask, about twenty thousand times a day.

“Sam, if I knew why it
isn’t working I’d know how to make it work,” I would always reply.

And he would buzz around
the lab like a redheaded bumblebee, getting in everybody’s way. My three
technicians—graduate student slave labor—were getting so edgy about Sam’s
presence that they had threatened to go to the dean and complain about their
working conditions.

This particular morning,
after that park bench confession from Ingrid the evening before, I had to drag
myself to the lab. Sam, as I said, was already there.

He peered up at me. “What
bulldozer ran over you?”

I blinked at him.

“You look as if you
haven’t slept in a week.”

“I haven’t,” I muttered,
heading for the coffee urn the techs had perking away on one of the lab
benches.

“The good Bishop
MacTavish?” Sam asked, trailing after me.

“Yep.”

“She still trying to
save your soul?”

I whirled around, my
anger flaring. “Sam, I love her and she loves me. Stay out of it.”

He put up his hands in mock
surrender. “Hey, I’m just an innocent bystander. But take it from me, pal, what
she really wants from you is to give up on the transmitter.”

“You want her yourself,
don’t you? That’s why—”

“Me?” Sam seemed
genuinely astounded by the idea. “Me and that religious fanatic? You’ve gotta
be kidding!”

“You’re not attracted to
her?”

“Well, she’s gorgeous, true
enough. But there are too many other women in the world for me to worry about a
psalm-singing bishop who’s working for lawyers that’re trying to skin me alive.”
He took a breath. “Besides,” he added, “she’s too tall for me.”

“She loves me. She told
me so.”

Sam hoisted himself up
onto the lab bench beside the coffee urn and let his stubby legs swing freely. “Let
me give you a piece of priceless wisdom, pal. Hard-earned on the field of
battle.”

I grabbed the
cleanest-looking mug and poured some steaming coffee into it. Sam watched me,
his expression somewhere between knowing and caring.

“What wisdom might that
be?” I asked.

“It’s about love. Guys
fall in love because they want to get laid. Women fall in love because they
want something: it might be security, it might be their own sense of
self-worth, it might even be because they pity the guy who’s coming on to them.
But to women, sex is a means to an end, not an end in itself.”

I felt like throwing the
coffee in his face. “That’s the most cynical crap I’ve ever heard, Sam.”

“
But it’s true. Believe me,
pal. I know. I’ve got the scars to prove it.”

“Bullshit,” I snapped,
heading for the nonworking model on the bench across the lab. I noticed that
one of the grad students had hung a set of prayer beads from the ceiling light
over the equipment. A cruel joke, I thought.

“Okay,” Sam said
brightly, hopping down from his perch. “Prove that I’m wrong.”

“Prove it? How?”

“Make the dingus work.
Then see if she really loves you, or if she’s just trying to make you give up
on the experiment.”

Talk about challenges! I
stared at the clutter of equipment on the lab

bench. Wires and heavy
insulated cables snaked all over the place, hung in festoons from the ceiling
(along with the prayer beads) and coiled across the floor. They say a neat,
orderly laboratory is a sign that no creative work’s being done. Well, my lab
was obviously a beehive of intense creativity.

Except that the damned experiment refused to work.

Make the transmitter work, and then see if Ingrid still says she loves me.
What was that old Special Forces motto? Who dares, wins. Yeah. But I thought
there was a damned good chance of my daring and losing.