The Sam Gunn Omnibus (52 page)

“Dictator?” I snapped. “Ecuador is
a democracy.”

“Democracy hell! It’s a
dictatorship, run by a little clique of fascist bastards.”

I
felt myself
shaking from head to toe. My throat went dry with suppressed anger.

“Someday I’ll go back to Ecuador,”
Ricardo Queveda said. “Someday there’s going to be a reckoning. The people won’t
stand for this corrupt regime much longer. Revolution is on the way, you’ll
see.”

In the shadows of the parking lot I
could not make out the expression on his face or the fire in his eyes. But I could
hear it in his voice, his passionate, fervent voice, filled with hatred for my
father. And if he knew who I really was, he would hate me, too.

I SLEPT HARDLY
at all that night, worrying about
my father and the rebels and the seething hatred I had heard in young Ricardo
Queveda’s voice. When I did manage to close my eyes I was racked by terrifying
nightmares in which I was struggling to climb the sheer face of a high cliff
with Sam up above me and Spence below. I saw the rope connecting me to Sam
begin to fray. I tried to shout but no sound would come from my throat. I tried
to scream but I was helpless. The rope snapped and I plunged down into the
abyss, past Spence who reached out to save me, but in vain.

I
woke screaming,
bathed in perspiration, tangled in my bed-sheets. And I realized that in the
last moment of my nightmare the man who reached toward me was not Spence after
all. It was Ricardo.

Dawn was breaking. Time to get up
anyway.

I
was applying the
final dab of mascara when the apartment’s intercom chimed. I called out to it
and Sam’s voice rasped, “Arise Esmeralda. Your knight in shining armor is here
to whisk you away to the promised land.”

I
had seldom heard
such a mixture of metaphors.

We drove to the Cape in Spence’s
reconditioned antique Mustang, gleaming silver, with me crammed into the tiny
rear seat and the top down. My careful hairdo was blown to tatters once we hit
the highway but I did not care; it was glorious to race in the early morning
sunlight.

Despite my VR orientation, I gulped
as we strapped ourselves into the contoured chairs of the Delta Clipper. It was
a big, conical-shaped craft, sitting in the middle of a concrete blast pad. It
reminded me of the ancient round pyramids of Michoacan, in Mexico: massive,
tall and enduring. But this “pyramid” was made of lightweight alloys and
plastics, not stone. And it was intended to fly into space.

After all my fears, the actual
takeoff was almost mild. The roar of the rocket engines was muffled by the
cabin’s acoustical insulation. The vibration was less than my orientation
simulation had led me to believe. Before I fully realized we were off the
ground the ship had settled down into a smooth, surging acceleration.

And then the engines shut off and
we were coasting in zero gravity. My stomach felt as if it were dropping away
to infinity and crawling up my throat, both at the same time. The medicinal
patch Sam had given me must have helped, though, because in a few moments my
feeling of nausea eased. It did not disappear entirely, but it sank to a level
where I could turn to Spence, sitting beside me, and make a weak grin.

“You’re doing fine,” he said,
treating me to that dazzling smile of his. I did not even mind that the loose
end of his shoulder belt was floating in the air, bobbing up and down like a
flat gray snake.

Sam, of course, unclipped his
harness as soon as the engines cut off and floated up to the padded ceiling.

“This is the life!” he announced to
the ten other passengers. Then he tucked his knees up under his chin and did a
few zero-gee spins and tumbles.

The other passengers were mostly
experienced engineers and technicians riding up to Alpha for a stint of work on
the space station. One of them, however, must have been new to zero-gee. I could
hear him retching into one of the bags that had been thoughtfully placed in our
seat-backs. The sound of it made me gag.

“Ignore it,” Spence advised me,
placing a cool, calm hand on my arm. With his other hand he pointed at the
acrobatic Sam. “And ignore him, too. He does this every trip, just to see who
he can get to throw up.”

Once we docked with Alpha and got
down to the main wheel of the station, everyone felt much better. Except Sam. I
believe he truly preferred zero-gee to normal gravity.

Alpha station was a set of three
nested wheels, each at a different distance from the center to simulate a
different level of gravity. The outermost wheel was at one g, normal Earthly
gravity. The second was at one-third gee, roughly the same as Mars. The
innermost was at the Moon’s level of one-sixth gee. The hub of the station was,
of course, effectively zero gravity, although some of the more sensitive
scientific and industrial experiments were housed in “free flyers” that floated
independendy of the space station’s huge, rotating structure.

Much of the main wheel was
unoccupied, I saw. Long stretches of the sloping corridor stood bare and empty
as Sam and I walked through them. Nothing but bare structural ribs and dim
overhead lights. Not even any windows.

“Plenty room for hotel facilities
here,” Sam kept muttering.

Spence had disappeared into the
area on the second wheel that VCI had leased from Alpha’s owner, Rockledge
Industries. He had come up to work on the satellite repair facility we had
established there, not merely to chaperone me.

“But Sam,” I asked as we strolled
through the dismally empty corridor, “why would anyone pay the price of a
ticket to orbit just to be cooped up in cramped compartments in a space
station? It’s like being in a small ocean liner, down in steerage class, below
the water line.”

He smiled as if I had stepped into
his web. “Two reasons, Esmeralda. One—the view. You can’t imagine what it’s
like to see the Earth from up here until you’ve done it for yourself.”

“I’ve seen photos and videos. They’re
breathtaking, yes, but—”

“But not the real experience,” Sam
interrupted. “And then there’s the second reason.” He broke into a lecherous
leer. “Making love in zero gravity. It’s fantastic, lemme tell you.”

I
did not respond
to that obvious ploy.

“Better yet, lemme show you.”

“I think not,” I said coolly. But I
wondered what it would be like to make love in zero gravity. Not with Sam, of
course. With Spence.

Sam’s expression turned instantly
to wounded innocence. “I mean, lemme show you the zero-gee section of the
station.” “Oh.”

“Did you think I was propositioning
you?”

“Of course.”

“How could you? This is a business
trip,” he protested. “I even brought you a chaperone. My intentions are
honorable, cross my heart.” Which he did, and then raised his right hand in a
Boy Scout’s salute.

I
trusted Sam as
far as I could throw the cathedral of Quito, but I followed him down the long
passageway to the hub of the space station. It was a strange, eerie journey.
The passageway was nothing more than a long tube studded with ladder-like
rungs. With each step we descended the feeling of gravity lessened until it
felt as if we were floating, rather than climbing. Sam showed me how to let go
of the rungs altogether, except for the faintest touch against them now and
then to propel myself up the tube. Soon we were swimming, hardly touching the
rungs at all, hurtling faster and faster along the long metal tube.

I
realized why the
standard uniform for the space station was one-piece coveralls that zippered at
the cuffs of the trousers and sleeves. Anything else would have been
undignified, perhaps even dangerous.

The tube was only dimly lit, but I could
see up ahead a brighter glow coming from an open hatch at the end. We were
whipping along by now, streaking past the rungs like a pair of dolphins.

And then we shot into a huge, empty
space: a vast hollow sphere with padded walls. Sam zoomed straight across the
center and dove headfirst into the curving wall. It gave and he bounced back
toward me. I felt as if I had been dropped out of an airplane. I was falling
and there was no way I could control myself.

Then Sam grabbed me as we passed
each other. His hands gripped my flailing arms and I was surprised at how
strong he was. We spun around each other, two astronomical bodies suddenly
caught in a mutual orbit. I was breathless, unable to decide whether I should
scream or laugh. Slowly we drifted to the wall and nudged against it. Sam
flattened his back against the padding, gaining enough traction to bring us
both to a stop.

“Fun, huh?”

It took me several moments to catch
my breath. Once I did, I realized that Sam was holding me in his arms and his
lips were almost touching mine.

I
pushed away,
gently, and floated toward the middle of the huge enclosure. “Fun, yes,” I admitted.

We spent nearly an hour playing
games like a pair of school children let loose for recess. We looped and dived
and bounced off the padded walls. We played tag and blindman’s bluff, although
I was certain that Sam cheated and peeked whenever he felt like it.

Finally we hovered in the middle of
the empty sphere, sweating, panting, an arm’s length from one another.

“Well,” Sam said, running a hand
over his sweaty brow, “whattaya think? Worth the price of a ticket to orbit?”

“Yes! Well worth it. I believe
people will gladly pay to come here for vacations.”

“And
honeymoons,” Sam added, with his impish grin. “You haven’t even tried the best
part of it yet.”

I
laughed lightly. There was no sense getting angry at
him. “I think I can imagine it well enough.”

“Ah,
but the experience, that’s the thing.”

I
looked into his devilish hazel eyes and, for the
first time, felt sad for Sam Gunn. “Sam,” I said as gently as I could, “you must
remember that Esmeralda loves the young poet, not Quasimodo.”

His
eyes widened with surprise for a moment. Then his grin returned. “Hell, you don’t
have to follow the script
exactly,
do you?”

He
was truly incorrigible.

“It
must be time for dinner,” I said. “We should get back to the galley, shouldn’t
we?”

So
we started up the tube and, as the gravity built up, found ourselves clambering
down the rungs of the ladder like a pair of firefighters descending to the
street.

“You
mean you’re in love with somebody else?” Sam’s voice echoed along the metal
walls of the tube.

He
was below me. I could see his face turned up toward me, like a round ragamuffin
doll with scruffy red hair. I pondered his question for a few moments.

“I
think I am,” I answered.

“Somebody
younger? Somebody your own age?”

“What
difference does it make?”

He
fell silent for several moments. At last he said softly, “Well, he better treat
you right. If he gives you any trouble you tell me about it, understand?”

I
was so surprised at that I nearly missed my step on
the next rung. Sam Gunn being fatherly? I found it hard to believe, yet that
was what he seemed to be saying.

Spence
was already in the galley when we got there.

Sam
showed me how to work the food dispensers as he explained, “This glop is barely
fit for human consumption. I think Rockledge has some kind of experiment going
about how lousy the food has to be before people stop eating it and let
themselves starve.”

I
accepted a prepared tray from the machine and went
to the table where Spence was sitting. There were only ten tables in the
galley, and most of them were empty.

“Experienced
workers bring their own food up with them and microwave it,” Sam kept rattling
on. “Of course, when I open the hotel I’ll have a
cordon bleu
chef up here and the best by-damn food service you ever saw. Cocktail lounge,
too, with real waitresses in cute little outfits. None of those idiot robots
like they have down at the
Cape....”