The Sam Gunn Omnibus (40 page)

“But it’s all still there,” Jade said. “I’ve been to Tranquility Base. And
Gamma and all the
others
...”

“That’s right.” Johansen’s smile broadened, genuinely pleased. “Sam’s
original thought was to auction the stuff off to the highest bidder. The
Japanese were hot for it. So was the Smithsonian, of course. And some group of
high-tech investors from Texas.”

“So who bought them?”

“Nobody,” Johansen said. “Because Sam got the bright idea of offering it
for free to Selene. I think it was still called Moonbase then. Anyway, the
people there loved him for it. Thanks to Sam, Selene legally owns all the
Apollo hardware resting on the Moon. Those landing sites are big tourist
attractions for them.”

“That was generous.”

“Sure was. And, of course, Sam could get just about anything he wanted
from Selene for years afterward.”

“I see,” said Jade.

Johansen signaled for the bill. The robot trundled over, digits lighting
up on the screen set into its torso. Johansen tapped out his okay on the robot’s
keyboard and let the photocell take an impression of his thumbprint. Jade
turned off her recorder.

Johansen moved gracefully around the little table and held her chair

while she stood up,
feeling strangely unhappy that this interview was at an end.

As they strolled slowly
down the footpath that led to the hotel where she was staying, Johansen suggested,
“How’d you like to go hang gliding tomorrow morning? In this low gravity there’s
no danger at all.”

Jade was surprised at
how much she wanted to say yes.

“I can’t,” she heard
herself say. “I’m leaving tomorrow morning.”

“Oh,” said Johansen,
sounding disappointed.

They walked along the
footpath in the man-made twilight toward the little cluster of low buildings
that was Gunnstown, where her hotel was situated. Johansen pointed out the
lights of other towns overhead. In the darkness they could not see that the
habitat’s interior curved up and over them.

“They’re like stars,”
Jade said, gazing up at the lights.

“Some people even see
constellations in them,” he told her. “See, there’s a cat—over there. And the mouse,
down further ...”

She leaned closer to him
as he pointed out the man-made constellations.

“Do you think you’ll
ever marry again?” she asked in a whisper.

“Not until I’m certain
it will last,” he answered immediately. “I’ve had enough hit-and-runs in my
life. I want somebody I can settle down with and live happily ever after.”

Happily ever after, Jade
said to herself. Does anyone ever do that? She pulled away from Johansen
slightly, thinking of Raki and what she owed him, what she owed herself.

I’m leaving tomorrow.
Good. I’ll leave and go out and interview more of Sam’s friends and enemies.
I
’ll leave and never see this man again. It’s
better that way. Six wives! Who can trust a man who’s had six wives?

She felt almost glad
that she was leaving habitat
Jefferson
in
the morning.

Almost glad.

WHEN JADE GOT BACK TO HER OFFICE THE NEXT MORNING
there was a message waiting for her. From Spence!

Her heart thumping, she hit the playback tab on her desktop keyboard.
Spence’s handsome face appeared on her screen, crinkling a smile at her.

“Hi, Jade. Guess who I ran into right after I saw you off? Larry Karsh.
You know, the VCI engineer I told you about. He’s on his way to Selene and he
says he has an audio disk that Sam himself recorded. About the time when he
opened his honeymoon hotel in Earth orbit. Thought you’d want to listen to it.”

Jade nodded eagerly at Spence’s image.

“Okay, that’s it. Thought you ought to know about it. Larry’s on his way
to Selene. Maybe you can get him to let you hear the disk. ‘Bye.”

And his image winked out.

Not a word about me, she thought as she stared at the blank screen. Not a
word about us. He’s just doing a favor for a friend. Nothing more.

She felt crushed, terribly let down. For long moments she simply sat at
her desk trying to fight back the disappointment that threatened to engulf her.

He doesn’t care about me. Not the way I want him to. Not the way I care
about him.

Suddenly she felt the shock of realizing that she truly did care about
Spence. Am I in love with him? she asked herself. She had no answer.

At last she shook her head, as if trying to clear the cobwebs of emotion
that were entangling her. You’re a news reporter, she told herself sternly.
Spence has given you a lead on a hot story. Sam’s own voice!

Without even asking Jumbo Jim, she checked the incoming flight arrivals,
then made her way to Selene’s spaceport.

“YEAH, I WORKED FOR SAM FOR SEVERAL YEARS
BACK IN

the old days,” said
Larry Karsh.

He was a lean, lanky,
long-limbed man with the kind of baby face that would keep him looking youthful
into his seventies, Jade thought. She had just barely arrived at the spaceport
in time to meet him as he disembarked from the shuttle from habitat
Jefferson.

“I’m on my way to the
construction base on Mercury,” he’d told her. “Yamagata Corporation’s building
a set of solar power satellites there, y’know.”

Jade maneuvered him to
the tiny bar set between terminal gates and offered him a drink on Solar News’s
expense. He smiled gratefully and asked for orange juice. Selene’s citrus
groves were famous off-Earth. Jade had South Pole water.

“Y’know, in a way, Sam
was a big factor in my marriage,” Karsh said as he sipped his drink. “But my
wife and I could never forgive him for kidnapping our baby. That ended it
between Sam and me, for good.”

“Kidnapped your baby?”
Jade asked, shocked.

“Oh, T.J.’s none the
worse for the experience. He was still in diapers when it happened. Now he’s
heading up the Ecological Protection Service on Mars, making sure that the
tourists don’t do any harm to the Martian environment so the scientists can
keep on studying the life forms in the rocks. He’s a bright young man, my son
is.

“Y’know, the power we
generate from those sunsats in Mercury orbit will be beamed to the Mars
stations. We’ll be providing electrical power for most of the inner solar system,
how about that? And we’ll still have plenty left over to power the sailships
out to Alpha Centauri and Lalande
21185.”

Jade made approving
noises, then asked, “But about
Sam ... ?”

“Sam? I kinda miss him,
sure. But don’t let my wife hear that! She’d just as soon boil Sam in molten
sulfur, even after all these years.”

“I can understand that,
I guess.”

“Well sure, Sam felt
pretty bad about what happened. Or so he said. He even sent me a long letter
explaining his side of it. Not a written letter,

Sam never liked to
commit very much to writing. It’s an audio disk, from his diary.”

“Sam kept a diary?”

“He sure did. Like a running log of everything he did. No, I haven’t the
faintest idea of where he stored it. Probably carried it with him wherever he
went, knowing Sam. Editing it every day, most likely, changing it to suit his mood
or the needs of the moment, y’know.

“The only part of the diary I’ve got is the bit he sent me, which deals
about the time he kidnapped my son.”

Her insides trembling with anticipation, Jade murmured, “You wouldn’t have
it with you, by any chance?”

“Yeah, sure, I’ve got it here in my stuff someplace. Always carry it with
me. Figured it might be a valuable historical document some day. Wanna hear it?”

It took all Jade’s
energy to keep from grabbing Karsh’s carry-bag off his shoulder and tearing
through it.

TRYING TO HIDE HER EXCITEMENT, JADE SLIPPED THE
thumb-sized disk that Larry Karsh handed her into her digital player
and wormed it into her ear.

I WAS TRYING
to get away from the Senator who wanted to marry me. (Sam’s
voice was a sharp-edged tenor; Jade pictured his freckled, snub-nosed face as
she listened.)

So I’m sitting in the Clipper—riding tourist fare—waiting for the engines
to light off and fly us to my zero-gee hotel, when who traipses into the cabin
but Jack Spratt and his wife.

With a baby.

I scrunched
way
down in my seat. I didn’t
want them to see me. I had enough troubles without a pissed-off former employee
staring daggers at me for the whole ride up to orbit.

His name wasn’t really Jack Spratt, of course. It was Larry Karsh, and he
had been a pretty key player in my old company, VCI. But that god-damnable
Pierre D’Argent, the silver-haired slimeball, had hired him away from me, and
Larry wouldn’t have gone to work at Rockledge if he hadn’t been sore at me for
some reason. Damned if I knew what.

Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have called them the Spratts. But you know, Larry
was so skinny he hardly cast a shadow and Melinda was—well, the kindest word is
zaftig,
I guess. She could just look at a potato
chip and gain two kilos. Larry could clean out a whole shopping mall’s worth of
junk food and never put on an ounce. So with him such a classic ectomorph and
Melinda so billowy despite every diet in the world, it just seemed natural to
call them Jack Spratt and his wife.

I guess it irritated Larry.

Well, I didn’t like the idea of bringing a baby up to my zero-gee hotel.
Business was lousy enough up there without some mewling, puking ball of dirty
diapers getting in everybody’s way. Heaven—that was my name for the hotel—was
supposed to be for honeymooners. Oh, I’d take tourists of any sort, but I always
thought of Heaven as primarily a honeymoon hotel. You know, sex in free fall;
weightless lovemaking.

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why people didn’t flock to
Heaven. I thought I had a terrific motto for the hotel: “If you like water
beds, you’ll love zero-gee.”

Okay, okay, so most people got sick their first day or so in
weightlessness. It’s a little like seasickness: you feel kind of nauseated,
like you’re coming down with the flu. You feel like you’re falling all the time;
you want to upchuck and just generally die. Of course, after a while it all
goes away and you’re floating around in zero-gee and you start to feel
terrific. Scientists have even written reports about what they call “microgravity
euphoria.” It’s wonderful!

But first you’ve got to get over the miseries. And I knew damned well that
Rockledge was working on a cure for space sickness, right there in the same
space station as my Hotel Heaven. But even if they found the cure, who do you
think would be the
last
person in the solar
system that Pierre D’Argent would sell it to?

That’s right. Sam Gunn, Esq. Me.

Me, I love weightlessness. God knows I’ve spent enough time in zero-gee.
The idea for the honeymoon hotel came out of plenty of practical experience,
believe me. In fact, the Senator who wanted to marry me had been one of my
first datum points in my research on zero-gee sex, years ago. She had been a
fellow astronaut, back in the days when we both worked for the old NASA.

But it only takes a few newlyweds tossing their cookies when free-fall
first hits them to sour the whole damned travel industry on the idea of
honeymooning in Heaven. As one travel agent from North Carolina told me,
sweetly, “Even if you don’t get sick yourself, who wants to spend a vacation
listening to other people puking?”

I tried beefing up the acoustical insulation in the suites, but Heaven got
the reputation of being like an ocean liner that’s always in rough seas. And to
this day I’m still convinced that D’Argent used Rockledge’s high-powered public
relations machine to badmouth Heaven. D’Argent hated my guts, and the feeling
was mutual.

And now Jack Spratt and his wife were bringing a baby up to Heaven.
Perfect.

They sat two rows in front of me: Larry Karsh, Melinda, and a squirming
dribbling baby that couldn’t have been more than nine or ten months old. Larry
had filled out a little in the couple of years since I had last seen him, but
he still looked like an emaciated scarecrow. Melinda had slimmed down a trace.
Maybe. They still looked like Jack Spratt and his wife. And baby.

I could feel my face wrinkling into the grandfather of all frowns. A baby
aboard a space station? That’s crazy! It’s sabotage! Yet, try as I might, I couldn’t
think of any company rules or government regulations that prohibited people
from bringing babies to Heaven. It just never occurred to me that anybody
would. Well, I’ll fix
that,
I told myself.
What the hell kind of a honeymoon hotel has a baby running around in it?
Upchucking is bad enough; we don’t need dirty diapers and a squalling brat in
orbit. They’re going to ruin the whole idea of Heaven.