The Sam Gunn Omnibus (58 page)

“It won’t make them poorer,”
replied Sam. “It may put only a few sucres into their pockets, but that’ll make
life a little sweeter for them, won’t it?”

Sam had made a bilingual pun! I was
impressed, even if Ric was not.

“And we’ll be buying all our
foodstuffs for OrbHotel from Ecuadorian producers, naturally,” Sam went on. “And
I’ll sell Ecuadorian produce to the other orbital facilities, too. Make a nice
profit from it, I betcha. Sure, there’s only a few hundred people living in
orbit right now but that’s gonna grow. There’ll be thousands pretty soon, and
once the Japanese start building their solar power satellites they’re going to
need food for a lot of workers.”

Without seeming to draw a breath
Sam went on, “Then there’s the hotel training facility we’re gonna build just
outside Quito. We’ll hire Ecuadorians preferentially, of course. Your father
drove a hard bargain, believe me, Esmeralda.”

My father smiled wanly.

“And one of these days we could
even build a skyhook, an elevator tower up to GEO,” Sam continued. “That’d make
Ecuador the world’s

center
for space transportation. People won’t need rockets; they’ll ride the elevator,
starting in Ecuador. It’ll cost peanuts to get into space that way.”

He
talked on and on until even Ric was at least halfway convinced that Sam would
be good for the people of Ecuador.

It
was growing dark before Sam finally said, “Why don’t we find a good restaurant
and celebrate our new partnership?”

I
looked at Ric. He wavered.

So
I said, for both of us, “Very well. Dinner tonight. But tomorrow Ric and I leave
for Quito. We have much work to do if Quintana is to be prevented from
cementing his hold on the government.”

Sam
smiled at us both. “You’ll be going to Quito as representatives of Sam Gunn
Enterprises, Unlimited. I don’t want this Quintana character to think you’re
revolutionaries and getting you kids getting into trouble.”

“But
we are revolutionaries,” Ric insisted.

“I
know,” said Sam. “The best kind of revolutionaries. The kind that’re really
going to change things.”

“Do
you think we can?” I asked.

My
father, surprisingly, said, “You must. The future depends on you.”

“Don’t
look so gloomy, Carlos, old buddy,” Sam said. “You’ve got to understand the big
picture.”

“The
big picture?”

“Sure.
There’s money to be made in space. Lots of money.”

“I
understand that,” said my father.

“Yeah,
but you gotta understand the rest of it.” And Sam looked squarely at Ric as he
said, “The money is made in space. But it gets spent here on Earth.”

My
father brushed thoughtfully at his mustache with a fingertip. “I see.”

“So
let’s spread it around and do some good.”

Ric
almost smiled. “But I think you will get more of the money than anyone else,
won’t you?”

Sam
gave him a rueful look. “Yeah, that’s right. And I’ll spend it faster than anybody
else, too.”

So
Ric and I returned to Ecuador. General Quintana reluctantly stepped aside and
allowed elections. Democracy returned to Ecuador, although Ric claimed it
arrived in our native land for the first time. Quintana retired gracefully,
thanks to a huge bribe that Sam and my father provided. My father actually was
voted back into the presidency, in an election that was mostly fair and open.

Spence and Bonnie Jo eventually
were divorced, but that happened years later. By that time I had married Ric
and he was a rising young politician who would one day be president of Ecuador
himself. The country was slowly growing richer, thanks to its investment in
space industries. Sam’s orbital hotel was only the first step in the constantly
growing commerce in space.

I
never saw Sam
again. Not face-to-face. Naturally, we all saw him in the news broadcasts time
and again. Just as he said, he spent every penny of the money he made on
OrbHotel and went broke.

But that is another story. And,
gracias a dios,
it is a story that does not involve me.

“SURE, I KNEW SAM—BRIEFLY,” RUSSELL CHRISTOPHER SAID
as
he and Jade stood on the edge of the playground. “This ball field wouldn’t be
here if it weren’t for Sam.”

Jade was at Solar News’s virtual reality
center. Like Christopher, she was wearing a full-sensor VR helmet and gloves.
While she was still in the low lunar gravity of Selene, she could see and feel
everything that Christopher saw and felt, standing at the playground in the New
Chicago habitat, a quarter-million miles from the Moon.

“You said something about Sam being
a grandfather?” Jade asked. Then she had to wait for an annoying three seconds
for Christopher’s reply to reach her.

He was a good-looking man, Jade
thought: tall and lean, with an earnest, honest-looking face and clear light
blue eyes. He reminded Jade of Spence.

“Grandfathered,” Christopher
replied at last. “I said Sam was grandfathered, not a grandfather.”

“What do you mean?”

Again the interminable three-second
delay.

“It’s kind of complicated,” said
Christopher.

I’ll never get the story out of him
like this, Jade thought. It’ll take a week, with this time lag.

“Look,” she said, “why don’t you
just tell me the whole story in your own words. Can you do that?”

“Sure,” Christopher answered, after
another three seconds.

IT LOOKED EXTREMELY ROCKY FOR THE NEW CHICAGO CUBS
that
day. Okay, so I stole the line from “Casey at the Bat.” But it really was the
bottom of the ninth, and the New White Sox were ahead of us, 14-13, there were
two out, and little Sam Gunn was coming up to bat.

To everybody except Hornsby and me
it was just a pickup game being played on the last unzoned open space in New
Chicago. Nobody was playing for anything except fun. Except him and me. And
Sam, although I didn’t know it then.

We had acquired quite a crowd,
considering this was just a sandlot game. Not even sandlot. There wasn’t a real
infield, nothing but grass and a few odd pieces to mark the bases. Sam’s
expensive suede jacket was second base, for instance. My old cap was home
plate. You didn’t need a cap to play baseball in New Chicago, or sunglasses,
either. Sunlight comes into the habitat through long windows; it’s not a big
glaring ball in the sky, except once in a while when a window happens to be
facing directly sunward.

New Chicago was—is—an O’Neill-type
space habitat. You know, a big cylinder built along the Moon’s orbit at the L-5
point, just hanging there like an oversized length of pipe. About the length of
Manhattan island and a couple of kilometers in diameter, New Chicago spins
along its central axis a lazy once per minute; that’s enough to produce an
artificial gravity inside that’s almost exactly the same as Earth’s.

Newcomers get a little disconcerted
the first time they come out into the open and look up. Instead of sky, there’s
more of New Chicago up there. The landscaped ground just curves up along the
inside of the cylinder, all the way around. With binoculars you can see people
standing upside-down up there, staring at you through their binoculars because
you look upside-down to them.

New Chicago is really a lovely
place, or it was until the real-estate tycoons got their hooks into it. It was
nowhere as big as sprawling Old Chicago had been before the greenhouse floods,
of course. It was beautifully landscaped on the inside with hills and woods and
small, livable villages scattered here and there with plenty of open green
space in between.

It was that green space that had
attracted Sam and me and the other applicant—Elrod Hornsby, a lawyer
representing a big construction firm from Selene City—to this morning’s meeting
of the Zoning Board. To developers like Sam and Hornsby, open green space was
an open invitation to making money. Convert the green space into something
profitable, like an extra condo complex or an amusement center. Why not? New
Chicago was originally spec’d to hold fifty thousand families, with plenty of
living space for everybody.

But the builders, developers,
lawyers, politicians, they all saw that the habitat could actually hold a lot more
people. Millions, if they had the same average living space that people once
had in Old Chicago. Tens of millions, if they were packed in the way they were
in Delhi or Mexico City or Port Nairobi.

Go on, pack
‘
em in! That’s what the developers wanted. They made their money
by overbuilding in the space habitats and then moving back Earthside, to some
quiet little gated community on a mountaintop where nobody but megam
i
llionaires were allowed in, while the communities
they wrecked sank into slums rife with crime and disease.

What do they care?

Like I said, Sam and Hornsby both
had their eyes on this open green field. I did too, but for a very different
reason.

So there I was, standing on first
base, puffing hard from running out a dribbler of a ground ball to shortstop. A
real ballplayer would have pegged me out by twenty feet, but the teenager
playing short for the White Sox had a scattergun for an arm; when he threw the
ball, the crowd behind first base hit the ground. I think maybe even the people
watching from overhead through their binoculars might have ducked. That’s how I
got to first.

Now, Sam wasn’t much of a hitter.
So far, he’d produced a couple of pop flies to the infield, struck out once
(but got to first when he dropped his bat on the catcher’s foot and the poor
kid, howling and hopping in pain, dropped the ball) and had a pair of bunt
singles. Hadn’t hit the ball farther than forty feet, except for the pop-ups,
which went pretty high, but not very far.

Oh yeah, and Sam had walked a
couple of times. After all, he was a small target up there at the plate.

Board member Pete Nostrum was
grinning like a clown from the pitcher’s mound. It wasn’t a mound, really, just
a scuffed-up part of the grass field. See, Hornsby and the whole Zoning Board
were on the White Sox side of the game, while Sam and I were on the Cubs. Both
sides filled in their teams with some of the kids who’d been playing when the
Zoning Board meeting adjourned to this open field.

So there was Nostrum on the mound,
Bonnie McDougal creeping in toward the plate from her position at third base,
anticipating another bunt, and the rest of the Zoning Board scattered through
the field.

This was all Sam’s idea. The morning
had started in the Zoning Board’s regular meeting chamber, with Sam, me, and
Hornsby all petitioning the Board for a zoning change for this chunk of open
ground. Hornsby wanted to build a fancy high-rise condo complex, with towers
that went up a hundred flights, almost up to the habitat’s centerline, where
the spingrav dwindled down to almost nothing.

Sam wanted permission to build what
he called an amusement center. And he’d had the gall to start his presentation
by referring to Old Chicago.

“I was born and raised in Old
Chicago, y’know,” Sam said to the assembled savants of Zoning Board. “That’s
why I want to settle here and add something to the community.”

The assembled savants, up there
behind their long table, said nothing, although grumpy old Fred Arrant, at the
end of the table, looked as if he wanted to puke.

I m
yself thought the
“born in Chicago” line was probably a bit much. Sam Gunn must have been born
somewhere, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t in Old Chicago.

Sam Gunn was a legend and he knew
it. He just sat there between me and Hornsby, the third applicant, with a
choirboy’s angelic smile on his round hobgoblin’s face. He was wearing a
faun-tan collarless suede jacket and neatly pressed slacks, with an open-necked
shirt of pale lemon. It made my faithful old olive-drab coveralls look
positively crummy, by comparison. Hornsby, overweight and completely bald, wore
an awful micromesh suit of coral pink; it made him look like a giant newborn
rat.

Being a legend carries a great deal
of freight with it. Sam was known throughout the settled parts of the solar
system as a pioneer, an entrepreneur, a guy with a vision as wide as the skies
and a heart to match. He had made who knew how many fortunes and lost every
last one of them, usually because he was such a soft touch that he couldn’t
refuse a friend in need. But he was also known as a loudmouthed, womanizing,
scheming wheeler-dealer who wouldn’t think twice about bending the law to the
snapping point if he thought he could get away with it. He’d left a trail of
broken hearts and fuming, furious tycoons, lawyers, corporate bigwigs and
government officials all the way out to Saturn and back again.