The Sam Gunn Omnibus (124 page)

THE FOLLOWING MORNING
I was awakened by a phone message inviting me to a meeting
of Selene’s governing council, which would convene at eleven
am
precisely. “Invite” is
a relative term: when the governing council invites you, you show up, on time
and ready to cooperate.

It wasn’t a trial, exactly. More of an executive hearing. It took place in
a windowless conference room up in the executive office tower that rises from
the middle of the Grand Plaza to the roof of the dome. The room’s walls were
paneled with smart screens, much like the screens down at the Earthview
restaurant, but when I entered, shortly before eleven, the walls were dead
blank gray. Not a good sign, I thought.

The entire governing council of Selene was already seated at the oblong
conference table, all six of them. Douglas Stavenger himself sat on one of the
chairs lined along the wall. He hadn’t been on the council for years, but as
the de facto leader of Selene, the man who had led the battle that resulted in
Selene’s independence, he had obviously taken an interest in our case. He
looked much younger than his calendar years: as everyone knew, Stavenger’s body
was f
i
lled with nanomachines.

The council chairman was a prune-faced man with thinning gray hair.
Obviously he didn’t take rejuvenation therapies, which led me to the conclusion
that he was a religious Believer of one sort or another. He directed me to the
empty chair at the foot of the table.

As I sat down I heard a raucous hullabaloo from the corridor outside. All
heads turned toward the door, which burst open. Both Sams stalked in, escorted
by a squad of uniformed security guards. Both Sams were yammering away like
trip-hammers.

“What’s the idea of putting me in jail?”

“Who’s in charge here?”

“What’s this bull droppings about protective custody?”

“I want a lawyer!”

“I want two lawyers!”

“You can’t do this to me!”

One Sam Gunn jabbering nonstop is bad enough; here were two of them.

Pruneface, up at the head of the table, raised both his clawlike hands
over his gray head. “Mr. Gunn!” he shouted, in a much more powerful voice than
I’d have thought him capable of, “please shut up and sit down! There!” And he
pointed to the two empty chairs flanking me.

“Why am I here?”

“What’s going on?”

“This is an emergency meeting of the governing council,” the chairman
explained, in a slightly lower tone. “An informal hearing, if you will.”

Both Sams trudged grudgingly to the foot of the table and sat on either
side of me.

“Now then,” the chairman
said, from the head of the table, “Dr. Townes, could you kindly explain how in
the world you produced a duplicate of Sam Gunn?”

I blinked at him. “You
want me to explain how entanglement works?”

“In layman’s language,
if you please.”

I glanced around at the
other council members. Three women, two men. In their forties or older, I guessed
from their appearances. Probably at least two of them were scientists or
engineers: Selene’s population leans toward the technical professions.

I took a deep breath and
began, “Basically, my device assesses the quantum states of the atoms in the
subject and reproduces those quantum states in the atoms at the receiving end
of the equipment.”

“It is a matter
duplicator, then?”

“It was intended to be a
transmitter, but, yes sir, it has functioned as a duplicator. There are still
some details that are not quite clear, but—”

The door behind the
chairman slid open and Ingrid entered the conference room, wearing a
gold-trimmed white uniform with a choker collar and full-length trousers.

“I’m sorry to be late,”
she said, her face deadly serious. “I wasn’t informed of this hearing until a
few minutes ago.”

Everyone stood up.

“Bishop MacTavish,” murmured
the chairman, indicating an empty chair halfway down the table.

Once we seated ourselves
again, the chairman explained, “Bishop MacTavish is here as a qualified
ethicist.”

“And a representative of
the New Lunar Church,” said the councilman on the chairman’s right.

The Sam on my left
squawked, “What’s the New Lunar Church got to do with this?”

“Excuse me, Mr.
Chairman,” Ingrid said, “but I’m afraid you’re working under a misapprehension.
I am here in my capacity as legal counsel.”

“For Rockledge
Industries, et al,” muttered the Sam on my right.

“No,” Ingrid replied. “I
am representing Dr. Townes.” And she smiled so sweetly at me that my heart
nearly melted.

Both Sams leaned in to me
and whispered, “Watch out. This could be a trap.”

Was Ingrid a Judas goat?
I refused to believe it. But the possibility gnawed at me.

When the council members
started asking me questions about my experiment Ingrid rose to her feet and
said sternly
,
“This council has no
legal right to question Dr. Townes, except as to how his work might affect the
safety of Selene and its citizens.”

“But he’s duplicated a human being!” one of the councilwomen sputtered.

“Sam Gunn, no less,” grumbled the councilman beside her.

“I am morally opposed to such a duplication as much as
any
of you,”
Ingrid said, still on her feet. “I regard it as little short of blasphemy. As a
Believer and a Bishop of the New Lunar Church, I am appalled.”

Here it comes, I thought. She’ll recommend burning me at the stake.

But Ingrid went on, “Yet, as a woman who has lived in the freedom of a
democratic civilization—and as an applicant for citizenship in your nation of
Selene—I cannot support the imposition of limitations on Dr. Townes’s research,
or on the intellectual freedom of any person.”

My eyebrows popped up almost to my scalp. Both Sams looked surprised; so
did most of the council members. I saw Douglas Stavenger nodding his agreement,
a slight smile of satisfaction on his face.

“The New Lunar Church has no objection to this work?” the council chairman
asked.

“I shudder to think that a human being would aspire to usurping God’s
creative powers,” Ingrid said. “But after having thought on the matter and
prayed on it, I have concluded that Dr. Townes has not actually created a human
being; he has merely duplicated one.”

“So the council has no moral right to object to his work?” asked the
chairman.

“Not in my view, nor in the view of the New Lunar Church.”

“Very well,” said the chairman, a grin spreading across his face. “Now let’s
get down to the real reason for this hearing. Dr. Townes, you caused a power
outage through three-quarters of Selene. Is the university going to pay for
that?”

“Power outage?” I gasped. “I thought it was only in my own lab.”

“Surely you noticed that the emergency lights were on throughout several
levels for four hours after your experiment.”

“That contraption of yours drained the system,” grumped one of the
councilmen, “knocked out two inverters, and overheated the coolant in the
cryogenic transmission lines from our main solar panel farm, up on the surface.”

“It did?” Now that he mentioned
it,
I realized that after our little
fracas in my lab the corridors had been lit by the emergency lamps. Even my
quarters had been, when I got there after the police took Sam away.

“We can’t have that kind
of drain on our power system,” said the chairman. “I think the council will
agree that you must be prohibited from running your equipment again.”

“Until you can provide
your own electrical power for it,” said the grumpy councilman.

Ingrid hadn’t sat down
yet. Raising her voice over the murmurs of conversation buzzing around th
e
table, she said, “If I may, I would like to
take this opportunity to serve Mr. Gunn with the subpoenas I’ve been carrying.”

The chairman gestured
grandly. “Go right ahead.”

“You can’t do that!”
yelped one of the Sams.

The other, just as
red-faced, added, “Selene’s constitution specifically states—”

“Our constitution,” said
the chairman sternly, “allows specific exceptions to the extradition clause,
Mr. Gunn.”

Both Sams snapped their
jaws shut with audible clicks.

Turning to the Sams,
Ingrid asked, “Which of you is the original?”

“He is,” said both Sams
in unison, pointing at one another.

Ingrid frowned at them. “One
of you is a copy. I have to serve these papers to the original.”

“That’s him,” they both
said.

Ingrid looked from one
of them to the other. Then she turned back to the chairman. “As you can see,
although no one has the right to curtail Dr. Townes’s intellectual freedom, his
experiment has created certain practical difficulties.”

I
REALIZED THAT
I’d created a Pandora’s Box. So I compromised. Actually, I caved in. I promised
the council that I’d dismantle my equipment and scrap it. I would not publish
anything about my experiment. I would forget about entanglement and study other
aspects of quantum physics.

Which meant I could kiss
the Nobel Prize goodbye.

The council was very
relieved. Ingrid, though, seemed strangely unhappy.

That evening in the
cafeteria, as we nibbled at a dinner neither one of us had any appetite for, I said
to her, “I thought you wanted me to scrap the duplicator.”

She gazed at me with
those luminous azure eyes of hers. “I did, Daniel. But now I realize that I’ve
ruined your life.”

“It’s not ruined,
exactly.” “I’m dreadfully sorry.”

I tried to put a good
face on the situation. “It’s a big universe, Ingrid. There are plenty of other
questions for me to work on.”

“But you—”

A hubbub over by the
doorway distracted us. Both Sams were scurrying through the cafeteria like a
pair of spaniels hunting for a bone.

“Hey! There they are!”
said Sam I to Sam II. Or vice versa.

They rushed to our table
and pulled up chairs. “Gotta hurry Dan-o. My ship’s ready to leave.”

“Leave? For where?”

The other Sam replied, “Back
to that black hole in the Kuiper Belt. Wanna come with me?”

Ingrid was immediately
suspicious. “How did you get the money to—”

“Rockledge!” both Sams
crowed. “And Masterson Aerospace and all those other big buffoons who were
suing me.”

“They’re financing your
mission to the Kuiper Belt?”

“Yeah.” The Sams’ grins
were ear-to-ear. It was eerie: they were
exactly
alike.
“They’re willing to pay mucho dinero to get rid of me.”

I got their meaning. “They’re
hoping that this time you go away and stay away.”

Nodding and laughing,
one of the Sams said, “Yeah. But what they don’t know is that only one of me is
going.”

“And the other?”

They both shrugged.

“I don’t know,” said
one. “Maybe I’ll go back into the zero-gee hotel business.”

“Or go back to the
resort at Hell Crater,” said the other one.

“Or
turn
Selene into
a tax shelter. How’s the Church of Rightful
In
vestments sound to you?” They both
winked at Ingrid simultaneously.

“You’ve stolen my matter
transmitter!” I snapped.

A Sam raised both his
hands in a gesture of innocence. “Me? Steal? No way!”

Before I could let out a
satisfied sigh, though, the other Sam added, “But now that we know a
transmitter can work, there oughtta be some bright physicist who’s willing to
build me a new one.”

“Sam, you can’t!” Ingrid
and I objected together.

They both grinned at us.
“Maybe not. We’ll see.”

So I’m going out to the
Kuiper Belt with one of the Sams. Much to my

surprise and delight,
Ingrid wants to go with me. She really does love me! We’re going to be married
over an electronic link to the Vatican, no less, while we’re on our way out.

The Kuiper Belt. A mini-black hole. Maybe there really are aliens out
there. Of course, that might be one of Sam’s ta
l
l
tales, but what the hell, Ingrid’s with me and we’re bound to find something
worth a Nobel out there.

It’s a big universe!

DANIEL
C. TOWNES IV GOT TO HIS FEET LIKE A LONG, LANKY
ladder unfolding.

“That’s about it,” he
said. “Sam’s already aboard his torch ship. Ingrid and I will shuttle out to it
an hour from now.”