The Sam Gunn Omnibus (30 page)

“What do you mean?”

“Sam wasn’t the only one who could
riffle through old safety regulations and use them for his own benefit. She
found a few early NASA regs, then got some bureaucrats in Washington—from the
Office of Safety and Health, I think—to rewrite them so that anybody who’d been
living in zero-gee for a year or more had to undertake six months’ worth of
retraining and exercise before he could return to Earth.”

“Six months? That’s ridiculous!”

“Is
it?” Malone smiled with humor. “That regulation is still on the books, lady.
Nobody pays attention to it anymore, but it’s still there.”

“She
did that to spite Sam?”

“And
she made sure Rockledge put all its weight behind enforcing it. Made people
think twice before signing an employment contract to work up here. Stuck Sam,
but good. He wasn’t going to spend no six months retraining! He just never
bothered going back to Earth again.”

“Did
he want to go back?”

“Sure
he did. He wasn’t like me. He
liked
it back there. There
were billions of women on Earth! Sam wanted to return but he just could never
take six months out of his life to do it.”

“That
must have hurt him terribly.”

“Yeah,
I guess. Hard to tell with Sam. He didn’t like to bleed where other people
could watch.”

“And
you never went back to Earth.”

“No,”
Malone said. “Thanks to Sam I stayed up here. He made me manager of the hotel,
and once Sam bought the rest of this Big Wheel from Rockledge, I became manager
of the whole Alpha Station.”

“And
you’ve never had the slightest yearning to see Earth again?”

Malone
gazed at her solemnly for long moments before answering. “Sure I get the itch.
But when I do I go down to the one-g section of the Wheel here. I sit in a
wheelchair and try to get around with these crippled legs of mine. The itch
goes away then.”

“But
they have prosthetic legs that you can’t tell from the real thing,” she said. “Lots
of paraplegics ...”

“Maybe
you
can’t tell them
from the real thing, but I guarantee you that any paraplegic who uses those
legs can tell.” Malone shook his head stubbornly. “Naw, once you’ve spent some
time up here in zero-gee you realize that you don’t need legs to get around.
You can live a good and useful life here instead of being a cripple down there.”

“I
see,” Jade said softly.

“Yeah.
Sure you do.”

“Sure
I do,” Jade said softly. “I can never go to Earth, either.”

“Never?”
Malone sounded skeptical.

“Bone
disease. I was born with it.”

An
uncomfortable silence rose between them. She turned off the recorder in her
belt buckle, for good this time.

Finally
Malone softened. “Hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve been nasty with you. It’s just
that...
thinking about Sam
again. He was a great guy, you know. And now he’s dead and everybody thinks he
was just a troublemaking bastard.”

“I
don’t,” she said. “A womanizing sonofabitch, like you said. A male chauvinist
of the first order. But after listening to you tell
it,
even at that he doesn’t seem so awful.”

The
black man smiled at her. “Look at the time! No wonder I’m hungry! Can I take
you down to the dining room for some supper?”

“The
dining room in the lunar-gravity section?”

“Yes,
of course.”

“Won’t
you be uncomfortable there? Isn’t there a galley in the micro-gravity section?”

“Sure,
but won’t you be uncomfortable there?”

She
laughed. “I think I can handle it.”

“Really?”

“I
can try. And maybe you can tell me how Sam got himself into the retirement home
business.”

“All
right. I’ll do that.”

As
she turned she caught sight of the immense beauty of Earth sliding past the
observation dome; the Indian Ocean a breathtaking swirl of deep blues and
greens, the subcontinent of India decked with purest white clouds. The people
who lived there, she thought. All those people. And the two, in particular, who
were hiding away from her.

“But...”
She looked at Malone, then asked in a whisper, “Do you ever miss being home,
being on Earth? Don’t you feel isolated here, away
from ...”

His
booming laughter shocked her. “Isolated? Up here?” Malone pitched himself
forward into a weightless somersault, then pirouetted in midair. He pointed
toward the ponderous bulk of the planet and said,
“They’re
the ones who’re isolated. Up here, I’m free!”

Then
he offered his arm to her and they floated together toward the gleaming metal
hatch, their feet a good eight inches above the chamber’s floor.

Still,
Jade glanced back over her shoulder at the gleaming expanse of cloud-decked
blue. She thought of the two women who lived among the billions down there, the
two women who would never see her, whom she could never see. There are many
kinds of isolation, Jade thought. Many kinds.

THE DINING ROOM IN ALPHA’S ZERO-GRAVITY SECTION WAS
actually
a self-service galley. Malone helped Jade to fill her tray with prepackaged
courses, then they fit their slippered feet into loop restraints on the spindly
legs of a table, Jade using the highest level of the plastic loops, long-legged
Malone the lowest.

Their
dinner together was relaxed and pleasant. Malone recommended for dessert what
he called “the Skylab bomb”: a paper-thin shell of vanilla ice cream filled
with strawberries.

“You
can only make it this thin in zero-gee,” he pointed out.

As
they finished their squeezebulbs of coffee, Malone said, “Y’know, there’s a guy
over in the new habitat at
L-5,
the one they’ve named
Jefferson. You’d do well to talk to him.”

Jade
turned on her belt recorder to get the man’s name and location.

“Yeah.
Spence Johansen,” Malone continued. “He knew Sam when they were both astronauts
with the old NASA. Then they went into business together.”

“What
kind of business?” Jade asked.

Malone
grinned at her. “Junk collecting.”

“IT’S JUST A
small increment on the fare,” Jade
said to Raki’s image on the phone screen. She was leaning against the side wall
of the cubicle she had rented aboard Alpha, her bags packed, ready to head back
to Selene by way of habitat Jefferson.

Raki
had a strange smile on his darkly handsome face. “You got the story from this man
Malone?” he asked.

“Yes.
It’s really good, Raki. Very personal stuff. Great human interest. And Malone
told me about this Spencer Johansen who’s living at Jefferson. I can get there
on the transfer ship that’s leaving in half an hour.”

He
shook his head. “What would you do if I said no?”

She grinned at his image. “I’d go
there anyway; the difference in fare is so small I’d pay it myself.”

He puffed out a sigh. “Do you
realize how far out on a limb I am with you? The CEO
hates
Sam Gunn. If Sam were alive today the old man would want to have him murdered.”

Jade said nothing. She merely hung
there weightlessly, her back plastered to the wall to prevent her from drifting
out of range of the phone’s camera eye.

“All right,” Raki said finally,
with a little shrug of acquiescence. “I think it’s crazy. I think maybe
I’m
crazy. But go ahead, get everything you can.”

“Thanks!” Jade said. “You won’t
regret it, Raki.”

“I already regret it.”

“CALL ME SPENCE,”
he said, dropping his lanky,
sweaty frame onto the bench beside her.

In spite of herself, Jade felt her
heart skip a couple of beats. She was breathless, but
not
merely
from the exertion of a hard game of low-g tennis.

Spencer Johansen was tall and lean,
with the flat midsection and sharp reflexes that come only from constant
exercise. His eyes were sky blue, his face handsome in a rugged, clean-cut,
honest way. When he smiled, as he was doing now, he looked almost boyish
despite his silver-gray hair. He was older than Raki, she knew. Yet he seemed more
open; innocent, almost.

His smile was
deadly.
Jade had to remind herself that this man was the subject of an interview, not
an object of desire. She was here to get a story out of him, and he was
refusing to talk.

Jefferson was the newest of the
Lagrange habitats being built at the
L-4
and
L-5
libration points along
the Moon’s orbit. A vast tube of asteroidal steel, twenty kilometers long and
five wide, its interior was landscaped to look like a pleasant Virginia
countryside,
with
rolling wooded hills
and picturesque little villages dotting the greenery here and there. Best of
all, from Jade’s point of view, was that Jefferson rotated on its long axis
only fast enough to give an almost lunar feeling of weight inside. The entire
habitat, with its population of seventy-five thousand, was pleasantly low-gee.

“Why Sam?” Johansen asked, still
smiling. But those clear blue eyes were wary, guarded.

They were both still puffing from
their punishing game. Out on the huge low-gee court, safely behind a
shatterproof transparent wall, the next two players were warming up with long
slow low-gravity lobs and incredible leaps to hit the ball five meters above
the sponge metal surface of the court.

“Solar Network wants to do his
biography,” Jade replied, surreptitiously pressing the microswitch that
activated the recorder built into her belt buckle.

“Solar, huh?” Spencer Johansen
huffed.

“Well...
it’s really me,” Jade
confessed. “I’ve become fascinated by the man. I want to get Solar to do a
special on him. I need all the help I can get. I need your story.”

Johansen looked down at her.
Sitting beside him she looked small, almost childlike, in a loose-fitting
sleeveless gym top and shorts of pastel yellow.

“You’re not the first woman to be
fascinated by ol’ Sam,” he muttered. His own tennis outfit was nothing more
than an ancient T-shirt and faded denim cutoffs.

“Couldn’t you tell me
something
about him? Just some personal reminiscences?”

“We made a deal, you and me.”

She sighed heavily. “I know. And I lost.”

His smile returned. “Yeah, but you
played a helluva game. Never played in
l
ow-g
before?”

“Never,” she swore. “There’s no
room for tennis courts in Selene. And this is my first time to a Lagrange
habitat.”

He seemed to look at her from a new
perspective. The smile widened. “Come on, hit the showers and put on your
drinking clothes.”

“You’ll give me the interview? Even
though I lost the game?”

“You’re too pretty to say no to.
Besides, you played a damned good game. A couple days up here and you’ll be
beating me.”

BACK IN THE OLD NASA DAYS SAM GUNN
AND I WERE
buddies—said
Johansen to Jade over a pair of L-5 “libration libations.”

They had height limitations for
astronauts back then, even for the old shuttle. I just barely made it under the
top limit. Little Sam just barely made it past the low end. Everybody used to
call us Mutt and Jeff. In fact, Sam himself called me Mutt most of the time.