The Sam Gunn Omnibus (39 page)

She waltzed up between
the beds and gave us each a peck on the cheek.

“Sorry I couldn’t get
here sooner,” she said. “The agency wouldn’t answer any questions about you
until my Uncle Ralph issued a writ.”

“Your Uncle Ralph?” Sam
and I asked in unison.

“Justice Burdette,” she
said, sounding a little surprised that we didn’t recognize the name. “The
Supreme Court. In Washington.”

“Oh,” said Sam.”
That
Uncle Ralph.”

Bonnie Jo pulled up a
chair between our beds, angling it to face Sam more than me. She placed her
slim briefcase neatly on the tiled floor at her feet.

“Sam, I want you to sign
the secrecy agreement,” she said.

“Nope.”

“Don’t be stubborn, Sam.
You know it wouldn’t be in the best interests of VCI to leak this story to the
media.”

“Why not? We saved the
friggin’ space station, didn’t we?”

“Sam—you have proved the
feasibility of the magnetic bumper concept. In a few months the agency will
give out a contract to run the facility. If you don’t sign the secrecy
agreement they won’t give the contract to VCI. That’s all there is to it.”

“That’s illegal!” Sam
shot upright in his bed. “You know that! We’ll sue the bastards! Call the news
networks!
Call...”

She reached out and put
a finger on his lips, silencing him and making me feel rotten.

“Sam, the more fuss you
make the less likely it is that the government will award you the contract.
They can sit there with their annual budgets and wait until you go broke paying
lawyers. Then where will you be?”

He grumbled under his
breath.

Bonnie Jo took her
finger away. “Besides, that’s not really what you want, is it? You want to
operate the debris removal system, don’t you? You want to sell the Vanguard
satellite to the Smithsonian, don’t you?”

He kind of nodded, like
a kid being led to the right answer by a kindly teacher.

“And after that?”

“Remove defunct commsats
from GEO. Retrieve the Eagle from Tranquility Base and sell it to the highest
bidder.”

Bonnie Jo gave him a
pleased smile. “All right, then,” she said, picking

up the briefcase. She
placed it on her lap, opened it, and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “You have
some signing to do.”

“What about me?” I asked, kind of sore that she had ignored me.

Bonnie Jo peeled the top sheet from the pile and held it up in the air by
one corner. “This one’s for Sam. It’s the secrecy agreement. There’s one for
you, too, Spence. All the others have to be signed by the president of VCI.”

“Over my dead body,” Sam growled.

“Don’t tempt me,” Bonnie Jo answered sweetly. “Read them first. All of
them. Engage brain before putting mouth in gear.”

Sam glared at her. I tried not to laugh and wound up sputtering. Sam
looked at me and then he grinned, too, kind of self-consciously.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ll read.”

He put the secrecy agreement on the bed to one side of him and started
going through the others. As he finished each document, he handed it to me so I
could read
it,
too.

The first was a sole-source contract from the agency to run the debris
removal system for space station Freedom for five years. Not much of a profit margin,
but government contracts never give a high percentage of profit. What they do is
give you a steady income to keep your overhead paid. On the money from this
contract Larry and Melinda could get married and take a honeymoon in Tasmania,
if they wanted to.

The second document made my eyes go wide. I could actually feel them
dilating, like camera lenses. It was a contract from Rockledge International
for VCI to remove six of their defunct commsats from geosynchronous orbit. I paged
through to the money numbers. More zeroes than I had seen since the last time I
had read about the national debt!

When I looked up, Bonnie Jo was grinning smugly at me. “That’s D’Argent’s
peace offering. You don’t blab about the Nerf ball incident and you can have
the job of removing their dead commsats.”

“What about retrieving the Nerf balls before they reenter the atmosphere?”
I asked. “I’d think that Rockledge would want to get their hands on them, see
why they failed.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “I want a separate contract from Rockledge to retrieve
their Nerf balls
and ...”

“Keep reading,” Bonnie Jo said. “It’s in the pile there.”

She had done it all. VCI would be the exclusive contractor for garbage
removal not only for the government, but for Rockledge as well. With that kind
of a lead, we’d be so far ahead of any possible competitors that nobody would
even bother to try to get into the business against us.

I signed all the
contracts. With a great show of reluctance, Sam signed the secrecy agreement.
Then I signed mine.

“You’re marvelous,” I said
to Bonnie Jo, handing her back all the documents. “To do all
this ...”

“I’m just protecting my
daddy’s investment,” she said coolly. There was no smile on her face. She was
totally serious. “And my own.”

I couldn’t look into
those gray-green eyes of hers. I turned away.

Somebody knocked at the
door. Just a soft little tap, kind of weak, timid.

“Now what?” Sam snapped.
“Come on in,” he yelled, exasperated. “Might as well bring the Mormon
Tabernacle Choir with you.”

The door opened about
halfway and Albert Clement slipped in, thin and gray as ever, back in his usual
charcoal three-piece undertaker’s suit.

“I’m sorry if I’m
intruding,” he said, softly, apologetically.

Sam’s frown melted. “You’re
not intruding.”

Clement sort of hovered
near the door, as if he didn’t dare come any further into the room.

“I wanted to make
certain that you were all right,” he said.

“You came all this way?”
Sam asked. His voice had gone tiny, almost hollow.

Clement made a little
shrug. “I had a few weeks’ annual leave coming to me.”

“So you came out to
Guam.”

“I wanted
to ...
that was
a very courageous thing you did, son. I’m proud of you.”

I thought I saw tears in
the corners of Sam’s eyes. “Thanks, Dad. I—” He swallowed hard. “I’m glad you
came to see me.”

“DAD?” JADE WAS
startled. “That withered old man was Sam’s father?”

“He sure was,” Johansen
replied. “He and Sam’s mother had divorced when Sam was just a baby, from what
Sam told me later on. Sam was raised by his stepfather, took his name. Didn’t
even know who his real father was until just before he started up VC
I
.”

Jade felt her own heart
constricting in her chest. Who is my father? My mother? Where are they? Why did
they abandon me?

“Hey, are you okay?”
Johansen had a hand on her shoulder.

“What? Oh, yes. I’m
fine ... just...
fine.”

“You looked like you
were a million miles away,” he said.

“I’m all right. Sorry.”

He leaned back away from her, but his eyes still looked worried.

“So it was his father who fed him the inside information from the
Department of Commerce,” Jade said, trying to recover her composure.

“Right. That’s how Sam learned that the program had a small business
set-aside,” Johansen explained. “Which was public knowledge, by the way.
Clement didn’t do anything wrong.”

“But he certainly didn’t want anyone to know about their relationship,
either, did he?”

Johansen nodded. “I guess not. You know, I never saw Sam so—I guess
subdued
is the right word. He and Clement spent a
solid week together. Once the hospital people let us get up and walk around,
they even went deep-sea fishing together.”

“I’ll have to check him out,” Jade said, mostly to herself.

“Clement died a few years later. He retired from the Commerce Department
and applied for residency in the first of the
L-4
habitats, the old Island One.
Thought the low gravity would help his heart condition, but he died in his
sleep before the habitat was finished building. Sam gave him a nice funeral.
Quiet and tasteful. Not what you’d expect from Sam at all.”

“And his mother? Is she still alive?”

Johansen shook his head. “He would never talk about his mother. Not a
word. Maybe he discussed her with Clement, but I just don’t know.”

Jade sat back in her chair, silent for a long moment while the candlelight
flickered across her face. She had not seen her adopted mother, not even spoken
with her by videophone, in more than ten years. The link between them was
completely broken.

“So that’s how Sam made his first fortune. With Vacuum Cleaners,
Incorporated,” she said at last.

“VCI,” Johansen corrected. “Yeah, he made a fortune all right. Then he
squandered it all on that bridge-ship deal a couple years later. By then he was
completely out of VCI, though. I stayed on as president until Rockledge
eventually bought us out.”

“Rockledge?”

“Right. The big corporations always win in the end. Oh, I got a nice hunk
of change out of it. Very nice. Set me up for life. Allowed me to buy a slice
of this habitat and become a major shareholder.”

“Did Sam ever marry Bonnie Jo?”

Johansen grimaced.

THAT GOT DECIDED
while we were still on Guam—Johansen replied.

Bonnie Jo hung around, just
like Clement did. Sam seemed to spend more time with his father than with her,
so I wound up walking the hospital grounds with her, taking her out to dinner,
that kind of stuff.

Finally, one night over
dinner, she told me she and Clement would be leaving the next day.

I said something
profound, like, “Oh.”

“When will you and Sam
be allowed to leave the hospital?” she asked. We were in the best restaurant in
the capital city, Agana. It was sort of a dump; the big tourist boom hadn’t
started yet in Guam. That didn’t happen until a few years later, when Sam
opened up the orbital hotel and built the launch complex there.

Anyway, I shrugged for
an answer. I hadn’t even bothered to ask the medics about when we’d be let go.
The week had been very restful, after all the pressures we had been through.
And as long as Bonnie Jo was there I really didn’t care when they sent us
packing.

“Well,” she said, “Albert
and I go out on the morning flight tomorrow.” There was a kind of strange
expression on her face, as if she was searching for something and not finding
it.

“I guess you’ll marry
Sam once we get back to the States,” I said.

She moved her eyes away
from mine and didn’t answer. I felt as low as one of those worms that lives on
the bottom of the ocean.

“Well...
congratulations,” I said.

In a voice so low I could
barely hear her, Bonnie Jo said, “I don’t want to marry Sam.”

I felt my jaw muscles
tighten. “But you still want to protect your father’s investment, don’t you?
And your own.”

Her eyes locked onto mine.
“I could do that by marrying the president of VCI, couldn’t
I
?”

I know how it feels to
have your space suit ripped open. All the air whooshed out of me.

“Spence, you big
handsome lunk,
you’re
my investment,” she
said. “Didn’t you know that?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

I nearly knocked the
table over kissing her. I never felt so happy in all my life.

“WHICH
NUMBER WIFE was
she?” Jade was surprised at the acid in her voice.

Johansen pushed his chair slightly back from the restaurant table. “Number
four,” he said, somewhat reluctantly.

“And it didn’t work out?”

“Wasn’t her fault,” he said. “Not really. I spent more time in orbit than
at home. She met this kid who was an assistant vice president at her father’s
bank. They had a lot more in
common....”

Johansen’s voice trailed off. The candle between them was guttering low.
The table was littered with the crumbs of dessert, emptied coffee cups. The
restaurant was deserted except for one other couple and the stumpy little robot
waiters standing impassively by each table.

Jade had one more question to ask. “I know that nobody ever retrieved the
Apollo 11 lunar module. What happened to Sam’s plan?”

Johansen made a tight grin. “The little guy was nobody’s fool. Once the
world court decided that the right of salvage was pretty much the same in space
as it is at sea, we went to the Moon and laid claim to all the hardware the
Apollo astronauts had left behind, at all six landing sites.”