The Sam Gunn Omnibus (28 page)

Sam hired me as a consultant and
paid me out of his own pocket. To this day I don’t know where he got the money.
I suspect it was from some of the financial people he was always talking to,
but you never know, with Sam. He had an inexhaustible fund of rabbits up his
sleeves. Whenever I asked him about it he just grinned at me and told me not to
ask questions.

I
was never an
employee of Rockledge Industries. And Sam worked full time for them, eight
hours a day, six days a week, and then some. They got their salary’s worth out
of him. More. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t spend nights, Sundays, and the
odd holiday here and there wooing financiers and lawyers who might come up with
the risk capital he needed for his hotel. Sure, sometimes he did his own thing
during Rock-ledge’s regular office hours. But he worked plenty of overtime
hours for Rockledge, too. They got their money’s worth out of Sam.

Of course, once I was no longer a
patient whose bills were paid by the government Rockledge sent word up from
corporate headquarters that I was to be shipped back Earthside as soon as
possible. Sam interpreted that to mean, when he was good and ready. Weeks
stretched into months. Sam fought a valiant delaying action, matching every
query of theirs with a detailed memorandum and references to obscure government
health regulations. It would take Rockledge’s lawyers a month to figure out
what the hell Sam was talking about and then frame an answering memo.

In the meantime Sam moved me from
the old isolation ward into a private room—a coffin-sized cubbyhole—and
insisted that I start paying for my rent and food. Since Sam was paying me a monthly
consultant’s stipend he was collecting my rent and food money out of the money
he was giving me himself. It was all done with the Shack’s computer system, so
no cash changed hands. I had the feeling that there were some mighty weird
subroutines running around inside that computer, all of them programmed by Sam.

While all this was going on the
Shack was visited by a rather notorious U.S. Senator, one of the most powerful
men in the government. He was a wizened, shriveled old man who had been in the
Senate almost half a century. I thought little of it; we were getting a
constant trickle of VIPs in those days. The bigwigs usually went to Alpha, so much
so that we began calling it the Big Wheel’s Wheel. Most of them avoided the
Shack. I guess they were scared of getting contaminated from our isolation ward
patients. But a few of the VIPs made their way to the Shack now and then. Sam
took personal charge of the Senator and his entourage and showed him more
attention and courtesy than I had ever seen him lavish on a visitor before. Or
since, for that matter. Sam, kowtowing to an authority figure? It astounded me
at the time, but I laughed it off and forgot all about it soon enough.

Then, some six months after the
Senator’s visit, when it looked as if Sam had run out of time and excuses to
keep me in the Shack and I would have to pack my meager bag and head down the
gravity well to spend the rest of my miserable days in some overcrowded ghetto
city, Sam came prancing weightlessly into my microminiaturized living quarters,
waving a flimsy sheet of paper.

“What’s that?” I knew it was a
straight line but he wasn’t going to tell me unless I asked.

“A new law.” He was smirking,
canary feathers all over his chin.

“First time I ever seen you happy
about some new regulation.”

“Not a regulation,” he corrected me.
“A
law.
A federal law, duly passed by the
U.S. Congress and just today signed by the President.”

I
wanted to play it
cool but he had me too curious. “So what’s it say? Why’s it so important?”

“It says,” Sam made a flourish that
sent him drifting slowly toward the ceiling as he read,” ‘No person residing
aboard a space facility owned by the United States or a corporation or other
legal entity licensed by the United States may be compelled to leave said
facility without due process of law.’ ”

My reply was something profound,
like, “Huh?”

His scrungy little face beaming,
Sam said, “It means that Rockledge can’t force you back Earthside! As long as
you can pay the rent, Omar, they can’t evict you.”

“You joking?” I couldn’t believe
it.

“No joke. I helped write this masterpiece,
kiddo,” he told me. “Remember when old Senator Winnebago was up here, last
year?”

The Senator was from Wisconsin but
his name was not Winnebago. He had been a powerful enemy of the space program
until his doctors told him that degenerative arthritis was going to make him a
pain-racked cripple unless he could live in a low-g environment. His visit to
the Shack proved what his doctors had told him: in zero-gee the pains that
hobbled him disappeared and he felt twenty years younger. All of a sudden he
became a big space freak. That’s how Sam was able to convince him to sponsor
the “pay your own way” law, which provided that neither the government nor a
private company operating a space facility could force a resident out as long
as he or she was able to pay the going rate for accommodations.

“Hell, they’ve got laws to protect
tenants from eviction in New York and every other city,” Sam said. “Why not
here?”

I
was damned glad
of it. Overjoyed, in fact. It meant that I could stay, that I wouldn’t be
forced to go back Earthside and drag my ass around at my full weight. What I didn’t
realize at the time, of course, was that Sam would eventually have to use the
law for himself. Obviously,
he
had seen ahead far enough to
know that he would need such protection sooner or later. Did he get the law
written for his own selfish purposes? Sure he did. But it served
my
purpose, too, and Sam knew that when he was bending the Senator’s tin
ear. That was good enough for me. Still is.

For the better part of another year
I served as Sam’s leg man—a job I found interesting and amusingly ironic. I shuttled
back and forth from the Shack to Alpha, generally to meet bigshot business
persons visiting the Big Wheel. When Sam was officially on duty for Rockledge,
which was most of the time, he’d send me over to Alpha to meet the visitors,
settle them down, and talk about the money that a tourist facility would make.
I would just try to keep them happy until Sam could shake loose and come over
to meet them himself. Then he would weave a golden web of words, describing how
fantastic an orbital tourist facility would be, bobbing weightlessly around the
room in his enthusiasm, pulling numbers out of the air to show how indecently
huge would be the profit that investors would make.

“And the biggest investors will get
their own suites, all for themselves,” Sam promised, “complete with every
luxury—every service that the well-trained staff can provide.” He would wink
hard enough to dislocate an eyeball at that point, to make certain the
prospective investor knew what he meant.

I m
et some pretty
interesting people that way: Texas millionaires, Wall Street financiers,
Hollywood sharks, a couple of bull-necked types I thought might be Maf
i
a but turned out to be in the book and magazine
distribution business, even a few very nice middle-aged ladies who were looking
for “good causes” in which to invest. Sam did not spare them his “every service
that the staff can provide” line, together with the wink. They giggled and
blushed.

“It’s gonna happen!” Sam kept
saying. Each time we met a prospective backer his enthusiasm rose to a new
pitch. No matter how many times a prospect eventually turned sour, no matter
how often we were disappointed, Sam never lost his faith in the idea or the
inevitability of its fruition.

“It’s gonna happen, Omar. We’re
going to create the first tourist hotel in orbit. And you’re going to have a
share of
it,
pal. Mark my words.”

When we finally got a tentative
approval from a consortium of Greek and Italian shipping magnates Sam nearly
rocked the old Shack out of orbit. He whooped and hollered and zoomed around
the place like a crazy billiard ball. He threw a monumental party for everybody
in the Shack, doctors, nurses, patients, technicians, administrative staff,
security guards, visitors, even the one consultant who lived there—me. Where he
got the caviar and fresh brie and other stuff I still don’t know. But it was a
party none of us will ever forget. The Shack damned near exploded with merriment.
It started Saturday at five
pm
, the close of the
official work week. It ended, officially, Monday at eight
am
.
There are those who believe, though, that it’s still going on over there at the
Shack.

Several couples sort of disappeared
during the party. The Shack wasn’t so big that people could get lost in it, but
they just seemed to vanish. Most of them showed up by Monday morning, looking
tired and sheepish. Three of the couples eventually got married. One pair of
them was stopped by a technician when they tried to go out an airlock while
stark naked.

Sam himself engaged in a bit of EVA
with one of the nurses, a tiny little elf of fragile beauty and uncommon
bravery. She snuggled into a pressure suit with Sam and the two of them made
several orbits around the Shack, outside, propelled by nothing more than their
own frenetic pulsations and Newton’s Third Law of Motion.

Two days after the party the
Beryllium Blonde showed up.

Her real name was Jennifer Marlow,
and she was as splendidly beautiful as a woman can be. A figure right out of a
high school boy’s wettest dreams. A perfect face, with eyes of china blue and
thickly glorious hair like a crown of shining gold. She staggered every male
who saw her, she stunned even me, and she sent Sam into a complete tailspin.
She was Rockledge Industries’s ace troubleshooter. Her official title was
Administrative Assistant (Special Projects) to the. President. The word we got
from Earthside was that she had a mind like a steel trap, and a vagina to match.

The official excuse for her visit
was to discuss Sam’s letter of resignation with him.

“You stay right beside me,” Sam
insisted as we drifted down the Shack’s central corridor toward the old
conference room. “I won’t be able to control myself if I’m in there alone with
her.”

His face was as white as the Moon’s.
He looked like a man in shock.

“Will you be able to control
yourself
with
me in there?” I wondered.

“If I can’t, rap me on the head.
Knock me out. Give me a Vulcan nerve pinch. Anything! Just don’t let me go
zonkers over her.”

I
smiled.

“I’m not kidding, Omar!” Sam
insisted. “Why do you think they sent her up here instead of some flunky? They
know I’m susceptible. God knows how many scalps she’s got nailed to her teepee.”

I
grabbed his
shoulder and dug my Velcroed slippers into the floor carpeting. We skidded to a
stop.

“Look,” I said. “Maybe you want to
avoid meeting with her altogether. I can represent you. I’m
not...
uh, susceptible.”

His eyes went so wide I could see
white all around the pupils. “Are you nuts? Miss a chance to be in the same
room with her? I want to be protected, Omar, but not that much!”

What could I do with him? Sam was
torn in half. He knew the Beryllium Blonde was here to talk him out of
resigning but he couldn’t resist the opportunity of letting her try her wiles
on him any more than Odysseus could resist listening to the Sirens.

Like a couple of schoolboys dragging ourselves down to the principal’s
office, we made our way slowly along the corridor and pushed through the door
to the conference room. She was already standing at the head of the table,
wearing a Chinese red jumpsuit that fit her like skin. I gulped down a lump in
my throat at the sight of her. I mean, she
was
something.
She
smiled a dazzling smile and Sam gave a weak little moan and
rose
right up off the
floor.

He would have launched himself at
her like a missile if I hadn’t grabbed his belt and yanked him down to the
table level. Being in zero-gee, there was no need for chairs around the table.
But I sure wished I had one then; I would have tied Sam into it. As it was, I hovered
right next to him and kept the full length of the polished imitation wood table
between us and the Blonde.

“I think you know why I’m here,”
she said. Her voice was music.