The Sam Gunn Omnibus (82 page)

Goodman sat slouched in a
pseudo-leather couch, his long legs stretched out, almost touching Jade’s booted
feet. She pictured him as a skinny, gangling student even though he was now
getting pudgy, potbellied. His hair was still quite dark and thickly curled;
his slightly puffy face could look quite pleasant when he smiled.

A
robot had brought a tray of tea things and deposited them on the low table
between the couch and the padded chair on which Jade was sitting.

“One of the perks of university
life,” Goodman said, almost defensively. “Real old English tea in the
afternoon. I got into the habit when I was at Oxford. Really gives you a lift
for the later part of the day.”

Jade let him pour a cup of steaming
tea for her, then added a bit of milk herself. The tea service was real china,
brought in all the way from Earth. The Nobel prize brought its privileges, she
thought.

“So what do you want to know about
Sam?” Goodman asked, smiling at her. Jade noticed that he had large hands; they
dwarfed the delicate cup and saucer he was holding.

“Well,” Jade said, turning on the
recorder in her belt, “you were the last person to see him alive, weren’t you?”

His smile faded. He put the cup and
saucer down on the tray in front of him.

Looking up at Jade with an almost
guilty expression on his face, Goodman said, “I guess you could say that I killed
Sam Gunn.”

GOODMAN LEANED EVEN DEEPER INTO THE COUCH, HEAD
tilted
back, eyes focused on something, someplace far beyond the ceiling of his
office.

You can’t pace the floor in zero
gravity—he said, almost to himself. So Sam was flitting around the cramped
circular control center of our ship like a crazed chipmunk, darting along madly,
propelling himself by grabbing at handgrips, console knobs, viewport edges,
anything that could give him a moment’s purchase as he whirled by.

I
was sweating over
my instruments, but every nine seconds Sam whizzed past me like a demented monkey,
jabbering, “It’s gotta be there. It’s
gotta
be there!”

“There’s
something
out there,” I yelled over my shoulder, annoyed with him. Angry at myself,
really. It was my calculations that had put us into this fix.

The instruments were showing a
definite gravitational flux, damned close to what I had calculated when I was
still back on campus. But out here, well past the orbit of Pluto—farther than
anybody had gone before—what I needed to see was a planet, a fat little world
orbiting out in that darkness more than seven billion miles from Earth.

Planet X. The tenth planet. Not a
cometary body, an icy dirtball like so many of the objects out there in the
Kuiper Belt. A planet, a real solid body with a gravitational flux considerably
stronger than Earth’s.

I m
ean, they can
argue about whether Pluto or those other icy bodies should be considered
planets. But from the gravitational flux I’d detected, this one had to be a
real, sizeable planet. Bigger than Earth, most likely.

Astronomers had been searching for
Planet X since before Percival Lowell’s time, but I had worked out
exactly
where it should be, me and the CalTech/MIT/Osaka linked computers. And Sam Gunn
had furnished the money and the ship to go out and find it.

Only, it wasn’t there.

“It’s gotta be there.” Sam orbited
past me again.”
Gotta
be.”

The first time I met Sam, I thought
he was nuts. Chunky little guy. Hair like a nest of rusted wire. Darting,
probing eyes. Kind of shifty. The eyes of a politician, maybe, or a confidence
man.

“Fly out there?” I had asked him. “Why
not just rent time on an orbital telescope, or use the lunar observa—”

“To claim it, egghead!” Sam had
snapped. “A whole planet. I want it.”

He couldn’t have been that dumb, I thought.
He’d amassed several fortunes, and lost all but the latest one. To fly out
beyond Pluto would cost every penny he had, and more.

“You can’t claim a planet,” I explained
patiently. “International agreements from back in ...”

“Puke on international agreements!”
he shouted. “I’m not a national government. I’m S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited.
And a whole planet’s
gotta
be worth a fortune.”

Sam had a reputation for shady
schemes, but I couldn’t for the life of me see how he planned to profit from
claiming Planet X. Nor any reason for me to leave my home and job at the
university to go out to the end of the solar system with him.

I
didn’t reckon on
Sam’s persuasiveness. He didn’t have a silver tongue. Far from it. His language
was more often crude, even obscene, rather than eloquent. But he was a nonstop
needier, wheedler, pleader, seducer. In the language of my forefathers, he was
a
nudge.
His tongue didn’t have to be
silver; it was heavy-duty, long-wearing, blister-proof, diamond-coated solid muscle.

So I found myself ducking through
the hatch of the special ship he had commissioned. Only the two of us as crew;
I was to do the navigating, while Sam did everything else, including the
cooking. Before I could ask myself why I was doing this, I was being flattened
into the acceleration couch as we roared out into the wild black yonder.

But Planet X wasn’t there.

Sam slowed down, puffing, until he
was dangling right behind me, his feet half a meter off the floor. My softboots
were locked in the foot restraints and still he barely came up to my height. He
was wheezing, and I realized there was a lot of gray in his reddish hair. His
face looked tired, old, eyes baggy and sad.

“Of all the eggheads in all the
universities in all the solar system,” he groaned, “you’ve ...”

Suddenly I realized what the
instruments were telling me. I shouted, “It’s a black hole!”

“And I’m the tooth fairy.”

“No, really! It’s not a planet at
all. It’s a black hole. Look!”

Sam snarled, “How in hell can I see
something that’s invisible by definition?”

With trembling fingers I pointed to
the gravitational flux meters and the high-energy detectors. We even went over
to the optical telescope and bumped our heads together like Laurel and Hardy,
trying to squint through the eyepiece together.

Nothing to see. Except a faint
violet glow, the last visible remains of the thin interplanetary gas that was
being sucked into the black hole on a one-way trip to oblivion.

It really was a black hole! The
final grave of a star that had collapsed, God knows how many eons ago. A black
hole! Practically in our backyard! And I had discovered it! Visions of the
Nobel Prize made me giddy.

Sam sprang straight to the
communications console and started tapping frantically at its keyboard, muttering
about how he could rent time to astronomers to study the only black hole close
enough to Earth to see firsthand.

“It’s worth a freakin’ fortune,” he
chortled, his fingers racing along the keys like a concert pianist trying to do
Chopin’s
Minute Waltz
in thirty seconds. “A dozen
fortunes!”

He filed his claim and even gave
the black hole a name: Einstein. I grinned and nodded agreement with his
choice.

It took nearly eleven hours for Sam’s
message to get to Earth, and another eleven for their reply to reach us. I spent
the time studying Einstein while Sam proclaimed to the universe how he was
going to build an orbiting hotel just outside Einstein’s event horizon and
invent a new pastime for the danger nuts.

“Space surfing! A jetpack on your
back and good old Einstein in front of you. See how close you can skim to the
event horizon without getting sucked in! It’ll make billions!”

“Until somebody gets stretched into
a bloody string of spaghetti,” I said. “That grav field out there is
powerful,
Sam, and I think it fluctuates....”

“All the better,” said Sam,
clapping his hands like a kid in front of a Christmas tree. “Let a couple of
the risk freaks kill themselves and all the others will come boiling out here
like lemmings on migration.”

I
shook my head in
wonder.

When the comm signal finally chimed
I was still trying to dope out the basic parameters of our black hole. Yes, I was
thinking of Einstein as ours; that’s what being near Sam does to you.

His round little face went
pugnacious the instant he saw the woman on the screen. I felt an entirely
different reaction. She was beautiful, with thick platinum blonde hair and the
kind of eyes that promised paradise.

But her voice was as cold as a
robot’s. “Mr. Gunn, we meet again. Your claim has been noted and filed with the
Interplanetary Astronautical Authority. In the meantime, I represent the
creditors from your most recent bankruptcy. To date ...”

She droned on while Sam’s face went
from angry red to ashy grey. This far from Earth, all messages were one-way.
You can’t hold a conversation with an eleven-hour wait between each
transmission. The blonde went into infinite detail about how much money Sam
owed, and to whom. Even though I was only half listening, I learned that our
ship was not paid for, and my own university was suing Sam for taking my
instrumentation without authorization!

Finally she smiled slightly and
delivered the knockout. “Now Mr. Gunn—aside from all the above unpleasantness,
it may interest you to realize that your claim to this alleged black hole is
without merit or substance.”

Sam made a growl from deep in his
throat.

“International law dating back to
1967 prohibits claiming sovereignty to any body found in space....”

“I’m not claiming sovereignty,” Sam
snapped to the unhearing screen. “And this ain’t a body, it’s a black hole.”

She serenely continued,”...
although it is allowed to claim the
use
of a body found in
space, I’m afraid that the law clearly states that you must establish an
operational facility on the body in question before such a claim will be
recognized by the Interplanetary Astronautical Council.”

Sam snorted like a bull about to
charge. Me, I thought about establishing an operational facility on the body
attached to that incredibly beautiful face.

“So I’m afraid, my dear Mr. Gunn,”
her smile widened to show dazzlingly perfect teeth, “that unless you establish
an operational facility on your so-called black hole, your claim is worthless.
And, oh yes! one more thing—an automated ship is on its way to you, filled with
robot lawyers who will have authorization to take possession of your ship and
all its equipment, in the name of your creditors. Good-bye. Have a nice day.”

The screen went blank.

Sam gave a screech that would make
an ax-murderer shudder and flung himself at the dead screen. He bounced off and
scooted weightlessly around the control center again, gibbering, jabbering,
screaming insults

and
obscenities at the blonde, the IAA, the whole solar system in general, and all
the lawyers on Earth in particular.

“I’ll show ‘em!” he raged. “I’ll
show ‘em all!”

I
stayed close to my
instruments—actually, they were still the university’s instruments, I guess.

After God knows how many orbits
around the control center, screaming and raging, Sam propelled himself toward
the hatch in the floor that led down to the equipment bay.

“They want an operational facility,
they’ll get an operational facility!”

I
wrenched my feet
free so fast I twisted an ankle, and went diving after him.

“Sam, what the hell are you
thinking of?”

He was already unlocking the hatch
of our EVA scooter, a little one-man utility craft with a big bubble canopy and
so many extensible arms it looked like a metal spider.

“I’m gonna pop an instrument pod
down Einstein’s throat. That’s gonna be our operational facility.”