The Sam Gunn Omnibus (123 page)

Yet I had to do it. To prove to Ingrid that the transmitter wouldn’t
destroy my soul, if for no other reason.

So I fiddled around with the power feeds and the connections between the
plasma chamber and the thin mesh grid in the middle of the platform that served
for the beam’s focus. The same damned flimsy sheet of monofilament that I wanted
to transmit to the other side of the lab sat on the grid just as it had for the
past two weeks, like a permanent symbol of frustration.

Entanglement. All the equipment had to do was to match the quantum states
of the monofilament’s atoms and transmit that information to the receiver
across the lab. That’s a lot of information to juggle, but I had six oversized
quantum computers lined up against the lab’s wall, more than enough qubits to
handle the job. In theory.

I checked the computers; they were connected in parallel, humming nicely,
awaiting the command to go to work.

Everything checked, just as it had for the past two weeks. I went to the master
control on the other side of the bench. I noticed my three grad students edging
toward the door. They weren’t worried about the equipment exploding; they knew
from experience that I was the one who blew up when the system failed to work.

Sam was standing by the door, arms folded across his chest, a curious
expression on his face: kind of crafty, devious.

“Ready,” I called out. Then, “Stand clear.”

The latter call was strictly routine. The nearest human body to the
equipment was several meters away, by the door. Except for me, and I made sure
I was on the other side of the apparatus from the focus grid, shielded by the
bulk of the plasma chamber.

As if I needed protection. I pushed the keypad that activated the
equipment. It buzzed loudly. The plasma chamber glowed for a moment, then went
dark. The sheet of monofilament stayed right there on the focus grid, just as
it had since the first time I tried to make the godforsaken junk-pile perform.

I took a deep breath and
started counting to one hundred.

Then I heard a scuffle
behind me. Turning, I saw Sam had a hammer-lock on one of my grad students; he
was dragging the kid toward me.

“He had this in his
pocket,” Sam said, tossing me a slim plastic oblong from his free hand. The
grad student was grimacing; Sam had his arm screwed up pretty tight behind his
back.

“It’s a remote of some
kind,” I muttered, turning the device over in my hand.

“He clicked it on just
before you pressed the start button,” Sam said.

I turned to the student,
W. W. Wilson. He was the beefy kind; I was surprised Sam could hold an arm-lock
on him.

“Woody,” I asked,
dumbfounded, “what the hell is this?”

Woody just glared at me,
his chunky face red with either anger or pain. Maybe some of both. He was a
biology graduate who had volunteered to work in my lab for a little extra
spending money.

Sam hiked the Woody’s
arm up a little higher and said, “You either tell us or I’ll personally pump
you so full of babble juice your brain’ll shrink to the size of a walnut.”

“Go ahead and torture me!”
Woody cried. “I’m prepared to suffer for my faith!”

“Let him go, Sam,” I said.
“We’re not the Gestapo.”

Sam shot me a
disapproving frown, but released Woody’s arm. I clicked the cover off the
remote and studied its interior. It seemed simple enough. It looked somewhat
like an old-fashioned cell phone. But it had no keypad, no display screen.

I looked up at Woody. “What
frequency band does this work on?”

Woody just scowled at me
as he rubbed his arm.

“I can find out for myself
easily enough.” I started for the array of test equipment stored in the lab’s
lockers.

“Microwave,” Woody muttered.
“Just enough power to scramble the recognition circuitry.”

“Sabotage,” Sam growled.
“A goddam saboteur planted here by the New Lunar Church.”

My heart sank.

“Not that bunch of
pansies,” Woody snarled. “I was sent here by the New Morality, straight from
Earthside headquarters in Atlanta.”

Sam jabbed a finger at
him. “You must be doing real well in your bio classes.”

“I lead the class discussions in Intelligent Design,” Woody said, with
some pride. “I can tie those Darwinians into pretzel knots.”

“And you screwed up Dan-o’s experiment.”

“I’ll do more than that!” Woody suddenly leaped past Sam and me and
grabbed the cover of the plasma chamber. He ripped it off and threw it to the
floor.

“I’ll wreck this Devil’s tool once and for all!” he yelled, reaching for
the focal grid. The grid was oversized, much bigger than I needed it to be; I had
scavenged it from a colleague’s experiment with a PET full-body scanner. Yet
Woody was wrenching it out of its hold-down screws; the screech of the screws
ripping out of the benchtop was enough to freeze my blood.

I was paralyzed with shock, but Sam sprang onto the kid’s back like a monkey
jumping onto a racing horse, knocking him on top of the lab bench. They
wrestled around on the half bent focal grid, arms and legs thrashing, grunting
and swearing. Woody was much bigger, of course; he got atop Sam and started
punching him with both fists.

It seemed like hours, but it was really only a few seconds. I finally came
out of my surprised funk and grasped Woody by the shoulders and pulled him off
Sam. I threw him to the floor; he hit with a heavy thud.

Sam sat up, a little groggily, on the focus grid. His nose was leaking a
thin stream of blood; otherwise he looked okay.

“Sam, are you all right?”

He shook his head slightly. “Nothing rattles. That kid can’t punch worth
shit. Hey,
look out!”

I turned. Woody was on his feet. He slammed a fist onto the control panel
keyboard. “Die, spawn of Satan!” he screamed.

The power thrummed, the plasma chamber pulsed, the overhead lights dimmed
and then went dark. The emergency backup lights came on. But nothing else
happened. Sam still sat on the focus grid, with that damned sheet of monofilament
beneath his butt.

I swung around on Woody and socked him in the jaw as hard as I could. His
head snapped back, his knees folded, and he collapsed to the floor,
unconscious.

Sam whistled appreciatively. “That’s a helluva punch you’ve got there,
Dan-o.” He jumped down from the bench and bent over Woody. “He’s out like a
light.”

And from across the lab, where the receiving grid was, Sam Gunn said, “What’m
I doing over here?”

I stared at Sam, clear
on the other side of the lab. Then I turned back to Sam, who was still standing
by the bench, right beside me.

Two of them!

I think I fainted.

When I came to, both
Sams were standing over me. I was sitting on the floor next to Woody’s
still-unconscious body, my back propped against the lab bench.

“Are you okay?” one of
the Sams asked me.

“You need a doctor?”
asked the other one.

I looked from one to the
other. Identical, down to the number and location of his freckles.

“It worked,” I said. “The
experiment. It worked!”

“Of course it worked,”
said Sam I.

“Once this bozo stopped
sabotaging it,” Sam II said, casting a frown at Woody.

My erstwhile lab
assistant was groaning now, his legs shuffling back and forth. His eyes
fluttered open.

Both Sams grabbed his
arms
and
helped him up to a sitting position.

Woody looked at each of
them in turn, his eyes widening with horror, his face going pasty white. He
screeched like a giant fingernail scraping across a chalkboard, scrambled to
his feet, and bolted for the door. My two other grad students were right behind
him. They all looked terrified.

“Unclean!” Woody yelled
as he tore out of the lab. “Unclean!”

Both Sams shook their
heads. “He should’ve said ‘Eureka.’“

I struggled to my feet
unassisted. I felt a little woozy, my legs rubbery, but my mind was whirling madly.
I did it! I proved that entanglement can be used not merely to transmit macroscopic
objects but to duplicate them: a human being, no less!

Visions of the Nobel danced
through my head.

But then I thought of
Ingrid. What would her reaction be?

A little unsteadily, I headed
for my desk and the phone. Both Sams trailed along behind me.

Time for the moment of
truth.

I
PHONED INGRID
right then and there, and asked her to come to my lab. In the phone’s smallish
screen, her exquisite face looked more curious than anything else.

“To your lab?” she asked. “Right now?”

I nodded. “Big news. I want you to see it before anyone else does.”

Her expression changed immediately. To dread. “I’ll be there in a few moments.”

I paced the lab from one end to the other while the Sams got themselves
into an argument.

“First thing we do is set up the tax shelter.”

“Better secure the spacecraft first. That Bishop MacTavish is going to try
to seize it.”

“Let her! Once the tax shelter’s in operation we’ll have money pouring in.”

“Never let the enemy cut off your line of retreat.”

“We don’t need the ship anymore! We can just about print money, for God’s
sake.”

“Print money?” Whichever Sam it was suddenly got a thoughtful, crafty look
on his snub-nosed face. “Print money.”

The other Sam grinned at his twin. “Duplicate financial instruments. Ought
to be a pile of money there.”

“Duplicate women!”

“Wow! Twins!”

“Made to order.”

“Now wait a minute,” I said. “The duplicator is mine, not yours.”

They both turned to me, their faces identically disappointed, stunned with
betrayal.

“You wouldn’t refuse me the use of your contraption, would you, Dan-o?”

“After all, I’m the one who got you started on this experiment. Without me,
you’d still be doodling with theory and equations.”

Before I could reply the lab door swung open and Ingrid strode in, looking
like an avenging angel in a gold sweater and hip-hugging jeans. I nearly
fainted again.

She said not a word, but stared at the two Sams for what seemed like an
hour and a half. Both Sams grinned impishly at her and then bowed,
simultaneously.

“You did it,” she said to me in a near-whisper.

“It was sort of an accident,” I began. “I had no intention of duplicating
Sam.”

Ingrid sank to the nearest stool. I thought I saw tears in her eyes.

“Oh, Daniel,” she said, in a sorrowful moan. “Now all hell is going to
break loose over you.”

TO SAY THAT
all hell broke loose would be an exaggeration, but not much
of one. News of my success spread throughout Selene in a microsecond, it
seemed. My grad students must have shouted it out to everyone they passed in
the corridors, like Paul Revere warning of the redcoats.

Ingrid looked truly
heartbroken, but when the Sams told her about Woody her chin snapped up and her
eyes suddenly turned fiery.

“The New Morality?” she
asked. “He said he was sent here directly by the New Morality?”

“Straight from their
headquarters,” Sam I replied. Or was he Sam II?

“In Atlanta,” the other
Sam added.

“They bypassed me to
plant a spy in your laboratory?” Ingrid asked.

“That’s what he told us,”
I said.

“They never told me
about it,” she murmured. “They knew I’d be opposed to such a low trick.”

“They didn’t trust you,”
said a Sam.

“No, they didn’t, did
they?” Ingrid looked crestfallen, heartbroken. “They merely used me as a
distraction while their spy did his best to ruin your experiment.”

“But they failed,” I said.
“And I succeeded.”

She nodded, her
expression turning even bleaker. “And what happens now, Daniel? What happens to
you, my love? What happens to us?”

Before I could even
begin to think of an answer, a quartet of Selene security police strode into
the lab.

“By order of the
council,” their leader pronounced, “these premises are to be evacuated and
sealed until further notice.”

The Sams started to
object, but the officer went on, “And Sam Gunn is hereby placed under
protective custody.”

“You mean I’m going to
jail?” both Sams yelped.

All four policemen fixed
the two Sams with beady gazes. “Which of you is Sam Gunn?” their leader asked.

“I am,” said both Sams
in unison.

The officer looked from
one Sam to the other, obviously trying to decide what to do. Then he turned to
his cohorts and commanded, “Bring ‘em both in.”