The Sam Gunn Omnibus (41 page)

The Clipper took off normally; we pulled about three gs for a minute or
so. The cabin was less than half full; plenty of empty seats staring at me like
the Ghost of Bankruptcy To Come. I scrunched deeper in my seat so Jack Spratt
and his wife wouldn’t see me. But I was listening for the yowling that I knew
was on its way.

Sure enough, as soon as the engines cut off and we felt weightless, the
baby started screaming. The handful of paying passengers all turned toward the
kid, and Larry unbuckled himself and drifted out of his seat.

“Hey, T.J., don’t holler,” he said, in the kind of voice that only an
embarrassed father can put out. While he talked, he and Melinda unbuckled the
brat from his car seat.

The baby kicked himself free of the last strap and floated up into his
father’s arms. His yowling stopped. He gurgled. I knew what was coming next:
his breakfast.

But instead the kid laughed and waved his chubby little arms. Larry barely
touched him, just sort of guided him the way you’d tap a helium-filled balloon.

“See?” he cooed. “It’s fun, isn’t it?”

The baby laughed. The passengers smiled tolerantly. Me, I was stunned that
Jack Spratt had learned how to coo.

Then he spotted me, slumped down so far in my seat I was practically on
the floor. And it’s not easy to slump in zero-gee; you really have to work at
it.

“Sam!” he blurted, surprised. “I didn’t know you were on this flight.” And
Melinda turned around in her chair and gave me a strained smile.

“I didn’t know you had a baby,” I said, trying not to growl in front of
the paying customers.

Larry floated down the aisle to my row, looking so proud of his
accomplishment you’d think nobody had ever fathered a son before. “Timothy
James Karsh, meet Sam Gunn. Sam, this is T.J.”

He glided T.J. in my direction, the baby giggling and flailing both his
arms and legs. For just the flash of a second I thought of how much fun it
would be to play volleyball with the kid, but instead I just sort of held him
like he was a Ming vase or something. I didn’t know what the hell to do with a
baby!

But the baby knew. He looked me straight in the eye and spurted out a
king-sized juicy raspberry, spraying me all over my face. Everybody roared with
laughter.

I shoved the kid back to Larry, thinking that baseball might be more fun
than volleyball.

In the fifty-eight minutes it took us to go from engine cutoff to docking
with the space station, T.J. did about eleven thousand somersaults,
seventy-three dozen midair pirouettes, and God knows how many raspberries.
Everybody enjoyed the show, at first. The women especially gushed and gabbled
and talked baby talk to the kid. They reached out to hold him, but little T.J.
didn’t want to be held. He was having a great time floating around the tourist
cabin and enjoying weightlessness.

I had feared, in those first few moments, that seeing this little bundle
of dribble floating through the cabin would make some of the passengers queasy.
I was just starting to tell myself I was wrong when I heard the first retching
heave from behind me. It finally caught up with them; the baby’s antics had
taken their minds off that falling sensation you get when zero-gee first hits
you. But now the law of averages took its toll.

One woman. That’s all it took. One of those gargling groans and inside of
two minutes almost everybody in the cabin is grabbing for their whoopie bags
and making miserable noises. I turned up the air vent over my seat to max, but
the stench couldn’t be avoided. Even Melinda started to look a little green,
although Larry was as unaffected as I was and little T.J. thought all the noise
was hysterically funny. He threw out raspberries at everybody.

When we finally got docked we needed the station’s full medical crew and a
fumigation squad to clean out the cabin. Three couples flatly refused to come
aboard Heaven; green as guacamole, they cancelled their vacations on the spot,
demanded their money back, and rode in misery back to Earth. The other eight
couples were all honeymooners. They wouldn’t cancel, but they looked pretty
damned unhappy.

I went straight from the dock to my cubbyhole of an office in the hotel.

“There’s gotta be a way to get rid of that baby,” I muttered as I slid my
slippered feet into their restraint loops. I tend to talk to myself when I’m
upset.

My office was a marvel of zero-gee ergonomic engineering: compact as a
fighter plane’s cockpit, cozy as squirrel’s nest, with everything I needed at my
fingertips, whether it was up over my head or wherever. I scrolled through
three hours worth of rules and regulations, insurance, safety, travel rights,
even family law. Nothing there that would prevent parents from bringing babies
onto a space station.

I was staring bleary-eyed at old maritime law statutes on my display
screen, hoping that as owner of the hotel I had the same rights as the captain
of a ship and could make unwanted passengers walk the plank. No such luck. Then
the phone light blinked. I punched the key and growled, “What?”

A familiar voice said coyly, “Senator Meyers would like the pleasure of
your company.”

“Jill? Is that you?” I cleared my display screen and punched up the phone
image. Sure enough, it was Sen. Jill Meyers (R-NH).

Everybody said that Jill looked enough like me to be my sister. If so,
what we did back in our youthful NASA days would have to be called incest. Jill
had a pert round face, bright as a new penny, with a scattering of freckles
across her button of a nose. Okay, so I look kind of like that, too. But her
hair is a mousy brown and straight as a plumbline, while mine is on the russet
side and curls so tight you can break a comb on it.

Let me get one thing absolutely clear. I am taller than she. Jill is not
quite five-foot three, whereas I am five-five, no matter what my detractors
claim.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Roughly fifty meters away from you,” she said, grinning.

“Here? In Heaven?” That was not the best news in the world for me. I had
come up to my zero-gee hotel to get away from Jill.

See, I had been sort of courting her down in Washington because she’s a
ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee and I needed a favor or two
from her. She was perfectly happy to do me the favor or two, but she made it
clear she was looking for a husband. Jill had been widowed maybe ten years
earlier. I had never been married and had no intention of starting now. I like
women way too much to marry one of them.

“Yes, I’m here in Heaven,” Jill said, with a big grin. “Came up on the
same flight you did.”

“But I didn’t see you.”

“Senators ride first class, Sam.”

I made a frown. “At the taxpayers’ expense.”

“In this case, it was at the expense of Rockledge International
Corporation. Feel better?”

No, I didn’t feel better. Not at all. “Rockledge? How come?”

“I’ve been invited to inspect their research facilities here at their
space station,” Jill said. “Pierre D’Argent himself is escorting me.”

I growled.

Maybe I should tell you that the Rockledge space station was built of
three concentric wheels. The outermost wheel spun around at a rate that gave it
the feeling of regular Earth gravity: one g. The second wheel, closer to the
hub, was at roughly one-third g: the gravity level of Mars. The innermost wheel
was at one-sixth g, same as the Moon. And the hub, of course, was just about
zero gravity. The scientists call it microgravity but it’s so close to zero-gee
that for all intents and purposes you’re weightless at the hub.

I had rented half the hub from Rockledge for my Hotel Heaven. Zero-gee for
lovers. Okay, so it’s not exactly zero-gee, so what? I had built thirty lovely
little mini-suites around the rim of the hub and still had enough room left
over to set up a padded gym where you could play anything from volleyball to
blind man’s bluff in weightlessness.

Once I realized that most tourists got sick their first day or so in
orbit, I tried to rent space down at the outermost wheel, so my customers could
stay at normal Earth gravity and visit the zero-gee section when they wanted to
play—or try weightless sex. No dice. D’Argent wouldn’t rent any of it to me. He
claimed Rockledge was using the rest of the station— all of it—for their
research labs and their staff. Which was bullcrap.

I did manage to get them to rent me a small section in the innermost
wheel, where everything was one-sixth g. I set up my restaurant there, so my
customers could at least have their meals in some comfort. Called it the Lunar
Eclipse. Best damned restaurant off Earth. Also the only one, at that time.
Lots of spilled drinks and wine, though. Pouring liquids in low gravity takes
some training. We had to work hard to teach our waiters and waitresses how to
do it. I personally supervised the waitress training. It was one of the few
bright spots in this black hole that was engulfing me.

“How about lunch?” Jill asked me, with a bright happy smile.

“Yeah,” I said, feeling trapped. “How about it?”

“What a charming invitation,” said Jill. ‘Til see you at the restaurant in
fifteen minutes.”

Now here’s the deal. The first big industrial boom in orbit was just
starting to take off. Major corporations like Rockledge were beginning to
realize that they could make profits from manufacturing in orbit.

They had problems with workers getting space sick, of course, but they
weren’t as badly affected as I was with Heaven. There’s a big difference
between losing the first two days of a week-long vacation because you’re
nauseated and losing the first two days of a ninety-day work contract. Still,
Rockledge was searching for a cure. Right there on the same space station as my
Hotel Heaven.

Anyway, I figured that the next step in space industrialization would be
to start digging up the raw materials for the orbital factories from the Moon
and the asteroids. A helluva lot cheaper than hauling them up from Earth, once
you get a critical mass of mining equipment in place. The way I saw it, once we
could start mining the Moon and some of the near-approach asteroids, the boom
in orbital manufacturing would really take off. I’d make zillions!

And I was right, of course, although it didn’t exactly develop the way I thought
it would.

I wanted to get there first. Start mining the Moon, grab an asteroid or
two. Mega-fortunes awaited the person who could strike those bonanzas.

But the goddamned honeymoon hotel was bleeding me to death. Unless and
until somebody came up with a cure for space sickness, Heaven was going to be a
financial bottomless pit. I was losing a bundle trying to keep the hotel open,
and the day D’Argent became Rockledge’s Chief of Space Operations, he doubled my
rent, sweetheart that he is.

But I knew something that D’Argent didn’t want me to know. Rockledge was
working on a cure for space sickness. Right here aboard the space station! If I
could get my hands on that, my troubles would be over. Pretty much.

It occurred to me, as I headed for the Lunar Eclipse, that maybe Jill
could do me still another favor. Maybe her being here on the station might work
out okay, after all.

I pushed along the tube that went down to the inner ring. You had to be
careful, heading from the hub towards the various rings, because you were
effectively going downhill. Flatlanders coming up for the first time could
flatten themselves but good if they let themselves drop all the way down to the
outermost wheel. The Coriolis force from the stations spin would bang them
against the tube’s circular wall as they dropped downward. The farther they
dropped, the bigger the bangs. You could break bones.

That’s why Rockledge’s engineers had designed ladder rungs and safety
hatches in the tubes that connected the hub to the wheels, so you had something
to grab on to and stop your fall. I had even thought about padding the walls,
but D’Argent nixed my idea: too expensive, he claimed. He’d rather see somebody
fracture a leg and sue me.

I was almost at the lunar level. In fact, I was pulling open the hatch
when I hear a yell. I look up and a bundle of screaming baby comes tumbling
past me like a miniature bowling ball with arms and legs.

“Catch him! Stop him!”

I look around and here comes Larry Karsh, flailing around like a skinny
spider on LSD, trying to catch up with his kid.

“Sam! Help!”

If I had thought about it for half a microsecond I would’ve let the kid
bounce off the tube walls until he splattered himself on the next set of
hatches. And Larry after him.

But, no—instinct took over and I shot through the hatch and launched myself
after the baby like a torpedo on a rescue mission. S. Gunn, intrepid hero.

It was a long fall to the next set of hatches. I could see the kid
tumbling around like a twenty-pound meteoroid, bare-ass naked, hitting the wall
and skidding along it for a moment, then flinging out into midair again. His
size worked for him: a little guy like he was didn’t hit the wall so hard—at
first. But each bump down the tube was going to be harder, I knew. If I didn’t
catch him real fast, he’d get hurt. Bad.