The Sam Gunn Omnibus (76 page)

It would be difficult to capture
his face in a sculpture. His features were too mobile for stone or even clay to
do him justice. There was something slightly irregular about Sam’s face: one
side did not quite match the other. It made him look just the tiniest bit
off-center, askew. It fitted his personality very well.

His eyes could be blue or gray or
even green, depending on the lighting. His mouth was extremely mobile: he had a
thousand different smiles, and he was almost always talking, never silent.
Short-cropped light brown hair, with a tinge of red in it. A round face, a
touch unbalanced toward the left. A slightly crooked snub nose; it looked as if
it had been broken, perhaps more than once. A sprinkling of freckles. I thought
of the
Norte Americano
character from
literature, Huckleberry Finn, grown into boyish manhood.

He hung there, framed in the open
hatch, his booted feet dangling several centimeters from the grillwork of the
floor. He was staring at me.

Suddenly I felt enormously
embarrassed. My quarters were a shambles. Nothing but a cramped compartment
filled with junk. Equipment and computer consoles scattered everywhere,
connecting wires looping in the microgravity like jungle vines. My hammock was
a twisted disaster area; the entire little cabin was filled with the flotsam of
a hermit who had not seen another human being in three years. I was bone-thin,
I knew. Like a skeleton. I could not even begin to remember where I had left my
last lipstick. And my hair must have looked wild, floating uncombed.

“God, you’re
beautiful!”
said Sam, in an awed whisper. “A goddess made of copper.”

Immediately I distrusted him.

“You have a legal paper for me?” I asked,
as coldly as I could. I had no idea of what it was; perhaps something from the
university in La Paz about the new grant I had applied for.

“Uh,
yeah ...”
Sam seemed to be half dazed, unfocused. “I, uh, didn’t bring it with me. It’s
back aboard my ship.”

“You told me you had it with you.”

“No,” he said, recovering slightly.
“I said I was supposed to hand it to you personally. It’s back on the ship.”

I
glared at him.
How dare he invade my privacy like this? Interrupt my work? My art?

He did not wilt. In fact, Sam
brightened. “Why don’t you come over and have a meal with me? With us, I mean.
Me and my crew.”

I
absolutely
refused. Yet somehow, several hours later, I was on my way to his transfer
ship, riding on the rear saddle of a two-person jet scooter. I had bathed and
dressed while Sam had returned to his ship for the scooter. I had even found a
bright golden yellow scarf to tie around the waist of my best green coveralls,
and a matching scarf to tie down my hair. Inside my space suit I could smell
the perfume I had doused myself with. It is surprising how you can find things
you thought you had lost, when the motivation is right.

What was my motivation? Not to
accept some legal document, certainly. Sam’s sudden presence made it painfully
clear to me that I had been terribly alone for such a long time. I had not minded
the loneliness at all—not until he punctuated it as he did. My first reaction
had been anger, of course. But how could I remain angry with a man who was so
obviously taken with my so-called beauty?

My asteroid was in shadow as we
sailed toward his ship, so we could not see the figures I had already carved
upon it. It bulked over us, blotting out the Sun, like some huge black pitted mountain,
looming dark and somehow menacing. Sam kept up a steady chatter on the
suit-to-suit radio. He was asking me questions about what I was doing and how my
work was going, but somehow he did all the talking.

His ship was called
Adam Smith,
a
name that meant nothing to me. It looked like an ordinary transfer vehicle,
squat and ungainly, with spidery legs sticking out and bulbous glassy
projections that housed the command and living modules. But as we approached it
I saw that Sam’s ship was large. Very large. I had never seen one so big.

“The only one like it in the solar
system, so far,” he acknowledged cheerfully. “I’m having three more built.
Gonna corner the cargo business.”

He rattled on, casually informing me
that he was the major owner of the orbital tourist facility, the Earth View
Hotel.

“Every room has a view of Earth. It’s
gorgeous.”

“Yes, I imagine it is.”

“Great place for a honeymoon,” Sam
proclaimed. “Or even just a weekend. You haven’t lived until you’ve made love
in zero-gee.”

I
went silent and
remained so the rest of the short journey to his ship. I had no intention of
responding to sexual overtures, no matter how subtle. Or blatant.

Dinner was rather pleasant. Five of
us crowded into the narrow wardroom that doubled as the mess. Cooking in zero
gravity is no great trick, but presenting the food in a way that is appetizing
to the eye without running the risk of its floating off the plate at the first
touch of a fork—that calls for art. Sam managed the trick by using plates with
clear plastic covers that hinged back neatly. Veal piccata with spaghetti, no
less. The wine, of course, was served in squeeze bulbs.

There were three crew persons on
Adam Smith.
The only woman, the communications engineer, was married to the propulsion
engineer. She was a heavyset blonde of about thirty who had allowed herself to
gain much too much weight. Michelangelo would have loved her, with her thick
torso and powerful limbs, but by present standards she was no great beauty. But
then her husband, equally fair-haired, was also of ponderous dimensions.

It is a proven fact that people who
spend a great deal of time in low gravity either allow themselves to become
tremendously fat, or thin down to little more than skin and bones, as I had.
The physiologists have scientific terms for this: I am an
agravitic
ectomorph,
so I am told. The two oversized
engineers were
agravitic endomorphs.
Sam,
of course, was neither. He was Sam—irrepressibly unique.

I
found myself
instinctively disliking both of the bloated engineers until I thought of the
globulous little Venus figures that prehistoric peoples had carved out of
hand-sized round rocks. Then they did not seem so bad.

The third crewman was the payload
specialist, a lanky dark taciturn biologist. Young and rather handsome, in a
smoldering sullen way. Although he was slim, he had some meat on his bones. I found
that this was his first space mission, and he was determined to make it his
last.

“What is your cargo?” I asked.

Before the biologist could reply,
Sam answered, “Worms.”

I
nearly dropped my
fork. Suddenly the spaghetti I had laboriously wound around it seemed to be
squirming, alive.

“Worms?” I echoed.

Nodding brightly, Sam said, “You
know the Moralist Sect that’s building an O’Neill habitat?”

I
shook my head,
realizing I had been badly out of touch with the rest of the human race for
three years.

“Religious group,” Sam explained. “They
decided Earth is too sinful for them, so they’re building their own paradise, a
self-contained, self-sufficient artificial world in a Sun-circling orbit, just
like your asteroid.”

“And they want worms?” I asked.

“For the soil,” said the biologist.

Before I could ask another question
Sam said, “They’re bringing in megatons of soil from the Moon, mostly for
radiation shielding. Don’t want to be conceiving two-head Moralists, y’know. So
they figured that as long as they’ve got so much dirt they might as well use it
for farming, too.”

“But lunar soil is sterile,” the
biologist said.

“Right. It’s got plenty of
nutrients in it, all those chemicals that crops need. But no earthworms, no
beetles, none of the bugs and slugs and other slimy little things that make the
soil
alive”

“And they need that?”

“Yep. Sure do, if they’re gonna
farm that lunar soil. Otherwise they’ve gotta go to hydroponics, and that’s
against their religion.”

I
turned from Sam
to the biologist. He nodded to confirm what Sam had said. The two engineers
were ignoring our conversation, busily shoveling food into their mouths.

“Not many cargo haulers capable of
taking ten tons of worms and their friends halfway around the Earth’s orbit,”
Sam said proudly. “I got the contract from the Moralists with hardly any
competition at all. Damned profitable, too, as long as the worms stay healthy.”

“They are,” the biologist assured
him.

“This is the first of six flights
for them,” said Sam, returning his attention to his veal and pasta. “All worms.”

I
felt myself
smiling. “Do you always make deliveries in person?”

“Oh no.” Twirling the spaghetti on
his fork beneath the plastic cover of his dish. “I just figured that since this
is the first flight, I ought to come along and see it through. I’m a qualified
astronaut, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Yeah. Besides, it lets me get away
from the hotel and the office. My buddy Omar can run the hotel while I’m gone.
Hell, he runs it while I’m there!”

“Then what do you do?”

He
grinned at me. “I look for new business opportunities. I seek out new worlds,
new civilizations. I boldly go where no man has gone before.”

The biologist muttered from behind
a forkful of veal, “He chases women.” From his dead-serious face I could not
tell if he was making a joke or not.

“And you deliver ten tons of worms,”
I said.

“Right. And the mail.”

“Ah. My letter.”

Sam smiled broadly. “It’s in my
cabin, up by the bridge.”

I
refused to smile
back at him. If he thought he was going to get me into his cabin, and his
zero-gee hammock, he was terribly mistaken. So I told myself. I had only taken
a couple of sips of the wine; after three years of living like a hermit, I was
careful not to make a fool of myself. I wanted to be invulnerable, untouchable.

Actually, Sam was an almost perfect
gentleman. After dinner we coasted from the wardroom along a
l
ow
-
cei
l
inged corridor that opened into the command
module. I had to bend over slightly to get through the corridor, but Sam sailed
along blithely, talking every millimeter of the way about worms, Moralists and
their artificial heaven, habitats expanding throughout the inner solar system
and how he was going to make billions from hauling specialized cargos.

His cabin was nothing more than a
tiny booth with a sleeping hammock fastened to one wall, actually just an
alcove built into the command module. Through the windows of the bridge I could
see my asteroid, hovering out there with the Sun starting to rise above it. Sam
ducked into his cubbyhole without making any suggestive remarks at all, and
came out a moment later with a heavy, stiff, expensive-looking white envelope.

It bore my name and several smudged
stamps that I presume had been affixed to it by various post offices on its way
to me. In the corner was the name and address of a legal firm: Skinner,
Flaymen, Killum and Score, of Des Moines, Iowa,
USA,
Earth.

Wondering why they couldn’t have
sent their message electronically, like everyone else, I struggled to open the
envelope.

“Let me,” Sam said, taking one
corner of it in two fingers and deftly slitting it with the minuscule blade of
the tiniest pocket knife I had ever seen.

I
pulled out a
single sheet of heavy white parchment, so stiff that its edges could slice
flesh.

It was a letter for me. It began, “Please
be advised ...”

For several minutes I puzzled over
the legal wordings while Sam went over to the control console and busied
himself checking out the instruments. Slowly the letter’s meaning became clear
to me. My breath gagged in my throat. A searing, blazing knot of pain sprang up
in my chest.