The Sam Gunn Omnibus (79 page)

“Okay, if you want the worms to
die, it’s your seventy million dollars, not mine,” said Sam to the young
lawyer.

To the lawyer’s superior, Sam spoke
sweetly, “Your boss signed the contract. All I’m doing is informing you of the
problem, as specified in clause
22.1,
section C.”

To
his
boss, “All right! I’ll dump the whole load right here in the middle of nowhere
and cut my losses. Is that what you want?”

To Rev. Dabney’s astonished
assistant administrator, “The lawsuit will tie you up for
years,
wiseass! You’ll
never
finish your Eden! The
creditors will take it over and make a Disney World out of it!”

To the special assistant to the
High Pastor of the Moralist Sect, “This has gone beyond lawyers. It’s even
beyond the biologists’ abilities! The damned worms are dying! They’re withering
away! What we need is a miracle!”

That, finally, brought the Right
Rev. Virtue T. Dabney to the screen.

I
instantly
disliked the man. His face was largely hidden behind a dark beard and mustache.
I suppose he thought it made him look like an Old Testament patriarch. To me he
looked like a conquistador; all he needed was a shining steel breastplate and
helmet. He seemed to me perfectly capable of burning my people at the stake.

“Mr. Gunn,” he said, smiling
amiably. “How may I help you?”

Sam said lightly, “I’ve got another
ten tons of worms for you, as per contract, but they’re dying. I don’t think
any of ‘em are gonna survive long enough to make it to your habitat.”

It took more than a minute for the
messages to get back and forth from Earth to the
Klaus Heiss.
Dabney spent the time with hands folded and head bowed prayerfully. Sam hung
onto the handgrips of the comm console to keep himself from bobbing around
weightlessly. I stayed out of range of the video and fidgeted with seething,
smoldering nervous fury.

“The worms are dying, you say? What
seems to be the matter? Your first shipment made it to Eden with no trouble at
all, I believe.”

“Right. But something’s gone wrong
with this load. Maybe we got bad worms to start with. Maybe there’s a fault in
the cargo containers’ radiation shielding. The worms are dying.” Sam reached
into his hip pocket and pulled out a blackened, twisted, dried out string of
what must have once been an earthworm. “They’re all going like this.”

I
watched intently
for all the long seconds it took the transmission to reach Dabney’s screen.
When it did, his eyes went wide and his mouth dropped open.

“All of them? But how can this be?”

Sam shrugged elaborately. “Beats
the hell out of me. My biologist is stymied, too. Maybe it’s a sign from God
that he doesn’t want you to leave the Earth. I dunno.”

Dabney’s bearded face, when
that
line of Sam’s finally hit him, went into even greater shock.

“I cannot believe the Lord would
smite his faithful so. This is the work of evil.”

“So what do we do about it?” Sam
asked cheerfully. “My contract guarantees full payment for delivery. I’m not
responsible for the condition of the cargo after your people inspected my cargo
bay and okayed the shipment.”

Sam blanked out the screen and
turned to me. “Have you made up your mind, kiddo?”

“Made
up my mind?”

“About
the ads in the ionosphere.”

“What
do his dying worms have to do with me? Or with painting an advertisement on the
ionosphere?”

“You’ll
see!” he promised. “Will you do it?”

“No!
Never!”

“Even
if it means saving your asteroid?”

I
was too angry even to consider it. I turned my back
to Sam and gritted my teeth with fury.

Sam
sighed deeply, but when I whirled around to face him once more, he was grinning
at me in that lopsided cunning way of his. Before I could say anything, he
flicked on the screen again. Dabney’s expression was crafty now. His eyes were
narrowed, his lips pressed tight.

“What
do you suggest as a solution to this problem, Mr. Gunn?”

“Damned
if I know,” said Sam. “Seems to me you need a miracle, Reverend.”

He
took special delight in Dabney’s wince when that “damned” reached him.

“A
miracle, you say,” replied the Moralist leader. “And how do you think we might
arrange a miracle?”

Sam
chuckled. “Well—I don’t know much about the way religions work, but I’ve heard
that if somebody is willing to make a sacrifice, give up something that he
really wants or even needs, then God rewards him. Something about casting bread
upon the waters, I think.”

I
began to realize that there was nothing at all wrong
with the Moralists’ worms. Sam was merely holding them hostage. For me. He was
risking lawsuits that could cost him everything he owned. For me.

Dabney’s
expression became even more squint-eyed than before. “You wouldn’t be Jewish by
any chance, would you, Mr. Gunn?”

Sam’s
grin widened to show lots of teeth. “You wouldn’t be antiSemitic, would you,
Reverend?”

Their
negotiation went on for the better part of three hours, with those agonizing
long pauses in between each and every statement they made. After an hour of
jockeying back and forth, Dabney finally suggested that he—and his sect—might
give up their claim to an asteroid that they wanted to use for building material.

“That
might be just the sacrifice that will save the worms,” Sam allowed.

More
offers and counteroffers, more tiptoeing and verbal sparring. It was all very
polite. And vicious. Dabney knew that there was nothing

wrong
with the worms. He also knew that Sam could open his cargo bay to vacuum for
the rest of the trip to Eden, and the Moralists would receive ten tons of very
dead and desiccated garbage.

Finally, “If my people make this
enormous sacrifice, if we give up our claim to this asteroid that we so
desperately need, what will you be willing to do for m
e ...
er,
us,
in return?”

Sam rubbed his chin. “There’s
hundreds of asteroids in the Aten group, and more in the Apollos. They all cut across
Earth’s orbit. You can pick out a different one. It’s no great sacrifice to
give up this one little bitty piece of rock that you’re claiming.”

Dabney was looking down, as if at
his desktop. Perhaps an aide was showing him lists of the asteroids available
to help build his Eden.

“We picked that particular asteroid
because its orbit brings it the closest to Eden and therefore it is the
easiest—and least expensive—for us to capture and use.”

He held up a hand before Sam could
reply, an indication of very fast reflexes on his part. “However, in the
interests of charity and self-sacrifice, I am willing to give up that
particular asteroid. I know that some Latin American woman has been carving
figures on it. If I—that is, if
we
allow her to remain and
give up our claim to the rock, what will you do for the Moralist Sect in
return?”

Now Sam’s smile returned like a cat
slinking in through a door open merely the barest crack. I realized that he had
known all along that Dabney would not give in unless he
got
something more out of the deal than merely the delivery of the worms he had
already paid for. He wanted icing on his cake.

“Well now,” Sam said slowly, “how
about an advertisement for the Moralist Sect that glows in the sky and can be
seen from New England to the Mississippi valley?”

No! I screamed silently. Sam couldn’t
help them do that! It would be sacrilegious.

But when the transmission finally
reached Dabney, his shrewd eyes grew even craftier. “What are you talking
about, Mr. Gunn?”

Sam described the concept of
painting the ionosphere with electron guns. Dabney’s eyes grew wider and
greedier with each word.

Finally his bearded face broke into
a benign smile. “Mr. Gunn, you were right. The Bible describes our situation
perfectly.
‘
Cast thy bread upon the
waters and it shall be returned unto you a thousand fold.’“

“Does that mean we’ve got a deal?”
Sam asked flatly.

I
pushed over
toward him and banged the blank key hard enough to send me recoiling toward the
overhead. Sam looked up at me. There was no surprise on his face. He looked as
if he had expected me to fight him.

“You can’t do this!” I said. “You’re
playing into his hands! You
can’t...”

“You want to stay on the asteroid
or not?”

I
stopped in mid-sentence
and stared at him. Sam’s eyes were flat gray, boring into me.

“This is the way business is done,
kid,” he said. “You want the asteroid. They want the asteroid. I make a threat
they know is phony, but they pretend to consider it—as long as they get
something they don’t have now. What it boils down to is, you can stay on the
asteroid if Ho
l
ier-Than-Thou gets to
paint his advertisements across the ionosphere. That’s the deal. Will you go
for it or riot?”

I
couldn’t speak. I
was too furious, too confused, torn both ways and angry at Sam for putting me
in this agony of indecision. I wanted to stay on the asteroid, yes, but not at
the price of allowing the Moralists to deface the sky!

The message light on the screen
began blinking. Sam touched the blank key again, and Dabney’s face filled the
screen once more, smiling an oily smile, the kind of unctuous happiness that a
salesman shows when he’s finally palmed off some shoddy goods at a shameful
price.

“We have a deal, Mr. Gunn. We will
rethink our options on acquiring that particular asteroid. Your,
ah ...
friend,” he made a nasty smirk, “can stay and chip away at the rock to her
heart’s content. In return, you will help us to produce our ads in the ionosphere.”

Sam glanced at me. I could negate
the whole thing with merely a shake of my head. Instead, I nodded. And bit my
lip so hard I tasted blood in my mouth.

Sam grinned at the display screen. “We’ve
got a deal, Bishop.”

“Reverend,” corrected Dabney. Then
he added, “And I presume our cargo of worms will arrive at Eden in a healthy
condition?”

“That’s up to you,” said Sam,
straight-faced. “And the power of prayer.”

They chatted amiably for a few minutes
more, a pair of con men congratulating each other. Each of them had what he
wanted. I began to realize that Sam would make a considerable amount of money
from producing the Moralists’ ionospheric advertisements. My anger took a new
turn. I could feel my face turning red, my cheeks burning with rage.

Sam finally ended his conversation
with Rev. Dabney and turned off the comm console. It seemed to me that Dabney’s
bearded image remained on the screen even after it went dark and dead. It
burned in my vision like the afterimage of an explosion.

Sam turned to me with a wide grin
splitting his face. “Congratulations! You can stay on the asteroid.”

“Congratulations yourself,” I said,
my voice trembling, barely under control. “You have put yourself into the
advertising business. You should make a great deal of profit out of defacing
the sky. I hope that makes you happy.”

I
stormed out of
the bridge and headed for the locker where I had left my space suit. Yes, I could
stay on my asteroid and finish my work. But my love affair with Sam Gunn was
shattered completely.

He let the fat engineer fly me back
to my quarters. Sam knew I was furious and it would be best for him to leave me
alone.

But not for long. After four or
five sleepless hours, bobbing around my darkened quarters like a cork tossed on
a stormy sea, I saw the message light of my comm console flick bright red. I reached
out and turned it on.