The Sam Gunn Omnibus (29 page)

Sam nodded dumbly, his jaw hanging
open. I thought I saw a bit of saliva foaming at the corner of his mouth.

“Why
do you want to leave us, Sam? Don’t you
like
us anymore?”

It
took three tries before he could make his voice
work. “It’s
...
not that.
I... I...
I
want to go
into ...
uh, into
business
...
for myself.”

“But
your employment contract has almost two full years more to run.”

“I
can’t wait two years,” he said, in a tiny voice. “This opportunity won’t
keep....”

“Sam,
you’re a very valued employee of Rockledge Industries, Incorporated. We want
you to stay with us. I want you to stay with us.”

“I...
can’t.”

“But
you signed a contract with us, Sam. You gave us your word.”

I
stuck in my dime’s worth. “The contract doesn’t
prohibit Sam from quitting. He can leave wherever he wants to.” At least, that’s
what the lawyers Sam had hired had told us.

“But
he’ll lose-all his pension benefits and health care provisions.”

“He
knows that.”

She
turned those heartbreakingly blue eyes on Sam again. “It will be a big
disappointment to us if you leave, Sam. It will be a
personal
disappointment to me.”

To
his credit, Sam found the strength within himself to hold his ground. “I’m
awfully
sorry...
but I’ve worked very
hard to create this opportunity and I can’t let it slip past me now.”

She
nodded once, as if she understood. Then she asked, “This opportunity you’re
speaking about: does it have anything to do with the prospect of opening a
tourist hotel on Space Station Alpha?”

“That’s
right! But not just a hotel, a complete tourist facility. Sports complex,
entertainment center, zero-gravity honeymoon
suites...”
He
stopped abruptly and his face turned red. Sam blushed! He
actually blushed.

Miss
Beryllium smiled her dazzling smile at him. “But Sam dear, that idea is the
proprietary intellectual property of Rockledge Industries, Incorporated.
Rockledge owns the idea, not you.”

For
a moment the little conference room was absolutely silent. I could hear nothing
except the faint background hiss of the air circulation fans. Sam seemed to
have stopped breathing.

Then
he squawked, “WHAT?”

With
a sad little shake of her gorgeous head, the Blonde replied, “Sam, you
developed that idea while an employee of Rockledge Industries. We own it.”

“But
you turned it down!”

“That makes no difference, Sam.
Read your employment contract. It’s ours.”

“But I made all the contacts. I raised
the funding. I worked everything out—on my own time, goddammit!
On my own time!

She shook her golden locks again. “No,
Sam. You did it while you were a Rockledge employee. It is not your possession.
It belongs to us.”

Sam leaped out of my grasp and
bounded to the ceiling. This time he was ready to make war, not love. “You can’t
do this to me!”

The Blonde looked completely
unruffled by his display. She stood there patiently, a slightly disappointed
little pout on her face, while I calmed Sam down and got him back to the table.

“Sam, dear, I know how you must
feel,” she cooed. “I don’t want us to be enemies. We’d be happy to have you
take part in the tourist hotel program as a Rockledge employee. There could
even be a raise in it for you.”

“It’s mine, dammit!” Sam screeched.
“You can’t steal it from me! It’s mine!”

She shrugged deliciously. “I suppose
our lawyers will have to settle it with your lawyers. In the meantime I’m
afraid there’s nothing for us to do but to accept your resignation. With
reluctance, of course. With my own personal and very sad reluctance.”

That much I saw and heard with my
own eyes and ears. I had to drag Sam out of the conference room and take him
back to his own quarters. She had him whipsawed, telling him that he couldn’t
claim possession of his own idea and at the same time practically begging him
to stay on with Rockledge and run the tourist project for them.

What happened next depends on who
you ask. There are as many different versions of the story as there are people
who tell it. As near as I can piece it all together, though, it went this way:

The Beryllium Blonde was hoping
that Sam’s financial partners would go along with Rockledge Industries once
they realized that Rockledge had muscled Sam out of the hotel deal. But she
probably wasn’t as sure of everything as she tried to make Sam think. After
all, those backers had made their deal with the little guy; maybe they didn’t
want to do business with a big multinational corporation. Worse still, she didn’t
know exactly what kind of a deal Sam had cut with his backers. If Sam had
legally binding contracts naming him as their partner they just might scrap the
whole project when they learned that Rockledge had cut Sam out. Especially if
it looked like a court battle was shaping up.

So she showed up at Sam’s door that
night. He told me that she was still wearing the same skintight jumpsuit, with
nothing underneath it except her own luscious body. She brought a bottle of
incredibly rare and expensive cognac with her. “To show there’s no hard
feelings.”

The Blonde’s game was to keep Sam
with Rockledge and get him to go through with the tourist hotel deal.
Apparently, once Rockledge’s management got word that Sam had actually closed a
deal for creating a tourist facility on Alpha, their greedy little brains told
them they might as well take the tourist business for themselves. Alpha was
still badly underutilized; a tourist facility suddenly made sense to those
jerkoffs.

So instead of shuttling back to
Phoenix, as we had thought she would, the Blonde knocked on Sam’s door that
night. The next morning I saw him floating along the Shack’s central corridor.
He looked kind of dazed.

“She’s staying here for a few more
days,” Sam mumbled. It was like he was talking to himself instead of to me.

But there was that happy little
grin on his face.

Everybody in the Shack started to make
bets on how long Sam could hold out. The best odds had him capitulating in
three nights. Jokes about Delilah and haircuts became uproariously funny to
everybody—except me. My future was tied up with Sam’s. If the tourist project
collapsed it wouldn’t be long before I got shipped back to Earth, I knew.

After three days there were dark
circles under Sam’s eyes. He looked weary. Dazed. The grin was gone.

After a week had gone by I found
Sam snoring in the Blue Grotto. As gently as I could I woke him.

“You getting any food into you?” I asked.

He blinked, gummy-eyed. “Chicken soup.
I been taking chicken soup. Had some
yesterday....
I
think it was yesterday....”

By the tenth day more money had
changed hands among the bettors than on Wall Street. Sam looked like a case of
battle fatigue. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes haunted.

“She’s a devil, Omar,” he whispered
hoarsely. “A devil.”

“Then get rid of her, man!” I urged.
“Send her packing!”

He smiled wanly, like a man who
knew he was addicted. “And quit show business?” he said weakly.

Two weeks to the day after she
arrived, the Blonde packed up and left. Her eyes were blazing with anger. I saw
her off at the docking port. She looked just as perfectly radiant as the day
she had first arrived at the Shack. But what she was radiating now was rage.
Hell hath no
fury...
I thought. But I was happy to see
her go.

Sam
slept for two days straight. When he managed to get up and around again he was
only a shell of his old self. He had lost ten pounds. His eyes were sunken into
his skull. His hands trembled. His chin was stubbled. He looked as if he had
been through hell and back. But his crooked little grin had returned.

“What
happened?” I asked him.

“She
gave up.”

“You
mean she’s going to let you go?”

He
gave a deep, soulful, utterly weary sigh. “I guess she finally figured out that
she couldn’t change my mind and she couldn’t kill me—at least not with the method
she was using.” His grin stretched a little wider.

“We
all thought she was wrapping you around her little finger,” I said.

“So
did she.”

“You
outsmarted her!”

I outlasted
her,” Sam said, his voice low and truly sorrowful. “You know, at one point
there, she almost had me convinced that she had fallen in love with me.”

“In
love with you?”

He
shook his head slowly, like a man who had crawled across miles of burning
desert toward an oasis that turned out to be a mirage.

“You
had me worried, man.”

“Why?”
His eyes were really bleary.

“Well...
she’s a powerful hunk of woman. Like you said, they sent her up here because
you’re susceptible.”

“Yeah.
But once she tried to steal my idea from me I stopped being so susceptible. I kept
telling myself, ‘She’s not a gorgeous hot-blooded sex-pot of a woman. She’s a
company stooge, an android they sent here to nail you, a bureaucrat with boobs.
Great boobs.”

“And
it worked.”

“By
a millimeter. Less. She damned near beat me. She damned near did. She should never
have mentioned marriage. That woke me up.”

What
had happened, while Sam was fighting the Battle of the Bunk, was that when Sam’s
partners-to-be realized that Rockledge was interested in the tourist facility,
they became absolutely convinced that they had a gold mine on their hands. They
backed Sam to the hilt.
Their
lawyers challenged
Rockledge’s lawyers, and once the paper-shufflers down in Phoenix saw that,
they understood that Miss Berylliums mission to the Shack was doomed. The
Blonde left in a huff when Phoenix ordered her to return. I guess she was
enjoying her work. Or maybe she thought she had Sam weakening.

“Now lemme get another week’s worth
of sleep, will you?” Sam asked me. “And, oh yeah, find me about a ton and a
half of vitamin E.”

So Sam became the manager and part
owner of the human race’s first extraterrestrial tourist facility. I was his
partner and, the way things worked out, a major shareholder in the project.
Rockledge got some rent money out of it. Actually, so many people enjoyed their
vacations and honeymoons aboard the Big Wheel that a market eventually opened
up for low-gravity retirement homes. Sam beat Rockledge on that, too. But that’s
another story.

MALONE WAS HANGING
weightlessly near the curving
transparent dome of his chamber, staring out at the distant Moon and cold
unblinking stars.

Jade had almost forgotten her fear
of weightlessness. The black man’s story seemed finished. She blinked and
turned her attention to here and now. Drifting slightly closer to him, she
turned off the recorder with an audible click, then thought better of it and
turned it on again.

“So that’s how this hotel came into
being,” she said.

Malone nodded, turning in midair to
face her. “Yep. Sam got it started and then lost interest in it. He had other
things on his mind, bigger fish to fry. He went into the advertising business,
you know.”

“Oh yes, everybody knows about
that,” she replied. “But what happened to the woman, the Beryllium Blonde? And
why didn’t Sam ever return to Earth again?”

“Two parts of the same answer,”
Malone said tiredly. “Miss Beryllium thought she was playing Sam for a fish,
using his Casanova complex to literally screw him out of his hotel deal. Once
she realized that
he
was playing
her,
fighting a delaying action until his partners got their lawyers into action,
she got damned mad. Powerfully mad. By the time it finally became clear back at
Phoenix that Sam was going to beat them, she took her revenge.”