The Sam Gunn Omnibus (114 page)

That was before Sam’s final message
reached me.

I
was heading
glumly out to the rocket port for the ride back to Earth and my lonely, dusty,
empty apartment in Florida’s sprawling Tampa-Orlando-Jacksonville industrial
belt. No job and no prospects. No friends, either. Just about everyone I knew
worked at the ISC. They would all shun me, fearful of C.C.’s wrath.

There were two messages waiting for
me at the port’s check-in counter. The clerk there—a lissome young woman whom
Sam had introduced me to scarcely a week earlier—showed me to a booth where I could
take my messages in privacy.

The first was from someone I had
never seen before. He was white-haired, with a trim beard and the tanned,
leathery look of a man who had spent a good deal of his life outdoors. Yet he
wore the rumpled tweeds of an academic.

“Mr. Hashimoto, this is rather a
strange situation,” he said into the camera. He was recording the message, not
knowing where I was or when I would hear his words. “I am Hickory J. Gillett,
dean of the University of New Mexico Archeology Department. We have just
received a bequest of two hundred million dollars from an anonymous donor who
wants us to create an endowed chair of archeology. His only requirement is that
you accept the position as our first Professor of Martian Archeology.”

I
nearly fainted.
Professor of Martian Archeology. Endowed chair. It was my dream come true.

Hardly conscious of what I was
doing, I touched the keypad for my second message.

Sam Gunn’s impish face grinned at me
from the screen. “So I pulled off one final stunt,” he said. “See you on Mars,
Prof. Save one of the female students for me.”

And he slashed one pointed finger
through the air in the zigzag of a letter zee.

“IT’S A PLEASURE HAVING SOMEONE SO FAMOUS ON BOARD
with
us,” said the maitre d’ as he showed Jade and Spence to their table in
Hermes
s
small but luxuriously decorated dining salon.

“Me?” Jade felt surprised. “I’m not
famous. Not like Senator Meyers.”

The maitre d’ smiled patiently. He
was a portly man, his hair receding from his forehead but still dark, as was
his trim mustache and pointed Vandyke. Aside from the cooks, he was the only
human working in the dining salon. The waiters were all utilitarian robots,
their flat tops exactly the same height as the tables. They rolled noiselessly
across the carpeting on tiny trunions.

“You are the producer of the Sam
Gunn biography, aren’t you?” he asked in a deferential, sibilant near-whisper.

“Yes, that’s true,” Jade replied as
she sat on the chair he was holding for her.

“I knew Sam,” the maitre d’ said. “And
Senator Meyers, too, although she doesn’t recognize me. I looked somewhat
different back in those days.”

Jade recognized a come-on. “You’ll
have to tell me about it,” she said guardedly.

Glancing about at the salon’s six
tables, all of them filled with passengers, the maitre d’ said, “Perhaps after
dinner? You could linger over a cognac and after these other guests have left I
could tell you about it.”

Jade glanced at Spence, who was
scowling suspiciously.

“All right,” she said. “After
dinner.”

The maitre d’ bowed politely and
left their table.

“You trust him?” Spence asked,
almost in a growl.

“You don’t?”

“He’s too oily for my taste.”

Jade laughed softly. “We’re not
going to eat him, Spence. Just listen to what he has to say.”

Spence nodded, but he still did not
seem happy about it.

Their dinner was excellent. Jill
Meyers stopped at their table on her way out and for a few moments Jade was
afraid that the former Senator would invite herself for an after-dinner drink.
But she left soon enough and Jade saw that she and Spence were the only guests
remaining in the salon.

The
maitre d’ came to their table with a magnum of cognac in one hand and three
snifters in the other. He had pulled his black tie loose and unbuttoned his
collar.

“If
I may?” he asked.

“Please
do,” said Jade, gesturing to the empty chair he was standing by.

As the man put the bottle and glasses down
on the table and pulled out the chair, Spence asked, “So when did you know Sam?”

IT WAS A LONG TIME AGO-SAID THE MAITRE D’ AS HE
poured
cognac into the snifters. I was working for Sam at the L-5 habitat Beethoven.
Of course, there was a beautiful woman right in the middle of everything.

I
ushered her into
Sam’s office and helped her out of the bulky dark coat she was wearing. Once
she let the hood fall back I damned near dropped the coat. I recognized her.
Who could forget her? She was exquisite, so stunningly beautiful that even
irrepressible Sam Gunn was struck speechless. More beautiful than any woman I had
ever seen.

But haunted.

It was more than her big, soulful
eyes. More than the almost frightened way she had of glancing all around as she
entered Sam’s office, as if expecting someone to leap out of hiding at her. She
looked
tragic,
lovely and doomed and
tragic.

“Mr. Gunn, I need your help,” she
said to Sam. Those were the first words she spoke, even before she took the
chair that I was holding for her. Her voice was like the sigh of a breeze in a
midnight forest.

Sam was standing behind his desk,
on the hidden little platform back there that makes him look taller than his
real 161 centimeters. As I said, even Sam was speechless. Leather-tongued, clatter-mouthed
Sam Gunn simply stood and stared at her in stupefied awe.

Then he found his voice. “Anything,”
he said, in a choked whisper. “I’d do anything for you.”

Despite the fact that Sam was
getting married in just three weeks’ time, it was obvious that he’d tumbled
head over heels for Amanda Cunningham the minute he saw her. Instantly. Sam
Gunn was always falling in love, even more often than he made fortunes of money
and lost them again. But this time it looked as if he’d really been struck by
the thunderbolt.

If she weren’t so beautiful, so
troubled, seeing the two of them together would have been almost ludicrous.
Amanda Cunningham looked like a Greek goddess, except that her shoulder-length
hair was radiant golden blonde. She wore a modest knee-length sheath of
delicate pink that couldn’t hide the curves of her ample body. And those eyes!
They were bright china blue, but deeply, terribly troubled, unbearably sad.

And there was Sam: stubby as a worn
old pencil, with a bristle of red hair and his gap-toothed mouth hanging open.
Sam had the kind of electricity in him that made it almost impossible for him
to stand still for more than thirty seconds at a time. Yet he stood gaping at
Amanda Cunningham, as tongue-tied as a teenager on his first date.

And me. Compared to Sam I’m a
rugged outdoorsy type of guy. Of course, I wear lifts in my boots and a tummy
tingler that helps keep my gut flat. Women have told me that my face is kind of
cute in a cherubic sort of way, and I believe them—until I look in the mirror
and see the pouchy eyes and the trim black beard that covers my receding chin.
What did it matter? Amanda Cunningham didn’t even glance at me; her attention
was focused completely on Sam.

It was really comical. Yet I wasn’t
laughing.

Sam just stared at her, transfixed.
Bewitched. I was still holding one of the leather-covered chairs for her. She
sat down without looking at it, as if she were accustomed to there being a
chair wherever she chose to sit.

“You must understand, Mr. Gunn,”
she said softly. “What I ask is very dangerous....”

Still standing in front of his
high-backed swivel chair, his eyes never leaving hers, Sam waved one hand as if
to scoff at the thought of danger.

“It involves flying out to the
Belt,” she continued.

“Anywhere,” Sam said. “For you.”

“To find my husband.”

That broke the spell. Definitely.

Sam’s company was S. Gunn
Enterprises, Unlimited. He was involved in a lot of different operations,
including hauling freight between the Earth and Moon, and transporting
equipment out to the Asteroid Belt. He was also dickering to build a gambling
casino and hotel on the Moon, but that’s another story.

“To find your husband?” Sam asked
her, his face sagging with disappointment.

“My ex-husband,” said Amanda
Cunningham. “We were divorced several years ago.”

“Oh.” Sam brightened.

“My current husband is Martin
Humphries,” she went on, her voice sinking lower.

“Oh,” Sam repeated, plopping down
into his chair like a man shot in the heart. “Amanda Cunningham Humphries.”

“Yes,” she said.

“The
Martin Humphries?”

“Yes,” she repeated, almost
whispering it.

Mrs. Martin Humphries. I’d seen
pictures of her, of course, and vids on the society nets. I’d even glimpsed her
in person once, across a ballroom crowded with the very wealthiest of the
wealthy. Even in the midst of all that glitter and opulence she had glowed like
a beautiful princess in a cave full of trolls. Martin Humphries was towing her
around the party like an Olympic trophy. I popped my monocle and almost forgot
the phony German accent I’d been using all evening. That was a couple of years
ago, when I’d been working the society circuit selling shares of nonexistent
tritium mines. On Mars, yet. The richer they are, the easier they bite.

Martin Humphries was probably the
richest person in the solar system, founder and chief of Humphries Space
Systems, and well known to be a prime SOB. I’d never try to scam him. If he bit
on my bait, it could be fatal. So that’s why she looks so miserable, I thought.
Married to him. I felt sorry for Amanda Cunningham Humphries.

But sorry or not, this could be the
break I’d been waiting for. Amanda Cunningham Humphries was the wife of the
richest sumbitch in the solar system. She could buy anything she wanted,
including Sam’s whole ramshackle company, which was teetering on the brink of
bankruptcy. As usual. Yet she was asking Sam for help, like a lady in distress.
She was scared.

“Martin Humphries,” Sam repeated.

She nodded wordlessly. She
certainly did not look happy about being married to Martin Humphries.

Sam swallowed visibly, his Adam’s
apple bobbing up and down twice. Then he got to his feet again and said, as
brightly as he could manage, “Why don’t we discuss this over lunch?”

Sam’s office in those days was on
Beethoven. Funny name for a space structure that housed some fifty thousand
people, I know. It was built by a consortium of American, European, Russian and
Japanese corporations. The only name they could agree on was Beethoven’s,
thanks to the fact that the head of Yamagata Corp. had always wanted to be a
symphony orchestra conductor.

To his credit, Sam’s office was not
grand or imposing. He said he didn’t want to waste his money on furniture or
real estate. Not that he had any money to waste, at the time. The suite was
compact, tastefully decorated, with wall screens that showed idyllic scenes of
woods and waterfalls. Sam had a sort of picture gallery on the wall behind his
desk, S. Gunn with the great and powerful figures of the day—most of whom were
out to sue him, if not have him murdered—plus several photos of Sam with
various beauties in revealing attire.

I, as his “special consultant and
advisor,” sat off to one side of his teak and chrome desk, where I could swivel
from Sam to his visitor and back again.

Amanda Humphries shook her lovely
head. “I can’t go out to lunch with you, Mr. Gunn. I shouldn’t be seen in
public with you.”

Before Sam could react to that, she
added, “It’s nothing personal. It’s
just...
I don’t want my husband to know
that I’ve turned to you.”

Undeterred, Sam put on a lopsided
grin and said, “Well, we could have lunch sent in here.” He turned to me. “Gar,
why don’t you rustle us up some grub?”