The Sam Gunn Omnibus (119 page)

So we lived inside the
suits for the next day and a half. It wasn’t all that bad, except we couldn’t
eat any solid food. Water and fruit juices, that was all we could get through
the feeder tube. I started to feel like a Hindu ascetic on a hunger strike.

We tried the comm
system, but it was intermittent at best. The emergency beacon was faithfully
sending out our distress call, of course, with our position. It could be heard
all the way back to Ceres, I was sure. Somebody would come for us. Nothing to
worry about. We’ll get out of this okay. Someday we’ll look back on this and
laugh. Or maybe shudder. Good thing we had to stay in the suits; otherwise I would
have gnawed all my fingernails down to the wrist.

And then the earphones
in my helmet suddenly blurted to life.

“Sam! Do you read me? We
can see your craft!” It was Judge Meyers. I was so overjoyed that I would have
married her myself.

Her ship was close
enough so that our suit radios could pick up her transmission.

“We’ll be there in less
than an hour, Sam,” she said.

“Great!” he called back.
“But hold your nose when we start peeling out of these suits.”

Judge Meyers laughed and she and Sam chatted away like a pair of
teenagers. But then Sam looked up at me and winked.

“Jill, I’m sorry this has messed up the wedding,” he said, making his
voice husky, sad. “I know you were looking forward to—”

“You haven’t messed up a thing, Sam,” she replied brightly. “After we’ve
picked you up—and cleaned you up—we’re going back to The Rememberer and have
the ceremony as planned.”

Sam’s forehead wrinkled. “But haven’t your guests gone back home? What
about the boys’ choir? And the caterers?”

She laughed. “The guests are all still here. As for the entertainment and
the caterers, so I’ll have to pay them for a few extra days. Hang the expense,
Sam. This is our wedding we’re talking about! Money is no object.”

Sam groaned.

In a matter of hours we were aboard Judge Meyers’s ship,
Parthia,
showered, shaved, clothed and fed, heading
to The Rememberer and Sam’s wedding. Sam was like Jekyll and Hyde: while he and
I were alone together he was morose and mumbling, like a guy about to face a
firing squad in the morning. When Judge Myers joined us for dinner, though, Sam
was chipper and charming, telling jokes and spinning tall tales about old
exploits. It was quite a performance; if Sam ever goes into acting he’ll win
awards, I’m sure.

After dinner Sam and Judge Meyers strolled off together to her quarters. I
went back to the compartment they had given me, locked the door, and took out
the chip.

It was easier this time, since I remembered the keys to the encryption. In
less than an hour I had Amanda’s hauntingly beautiful face on the display of my
compartment’s computer. I wormed a plug into my ear, taking no chances that
somebody might eavesdrop on me.

The video was focused tightly on her face. For I don’t know how long I just
gazed at her, hardly breathing. Then I shook myself out of the trance and
touched the key that would run her message.

“Lars,” she said softly, almost whispering, as if she were afraid somebody
would overhear her, “I’m going to have a baby.”

Holy mother in heaven! It’s a good thing we didn’t deliver this message to
Fuchs. He would’ve probably cut us into little pieces and roasted them on a
spit.

Amanda Cunningham Humphries went on, “Martin wants another son, he already
has a five-year-old boy by a previous wife.”

She hesitated, looked over her shoulder. Then, in an even lower voice, “I want
you to know, Lars, that it will be your son that I bear, not his. I’ve

had myself implanted
with one of the embryos we froze at Selene, back before all these troubles
started.”

I felt my jaw drop down
to my knees.

“I love you, Lars,”
Amanda said. “I’ve always loved you. I married Martin because he promised he’d
stop trying to kill you if I did. I’ll have a son, and Martin will think it’s
his, but it will be your son, Lars. Yours and mine. I want you to know that,
dearest. Your son.”

Humphries would pay a
billion for that, I figured.

And he’d have the baby
Amanda was carrying aborted. Maybe he’d kill her, too.

“So what are you going
to do about it, Gar?”

I whirled around in my
chair. Sam was standing in the doorway.

“I thought I locked—”

“You did. I unlocked it.”
He stepped into my compartment and carefully slid the door shut again. “So,
Gar, what are you going to do?”

I popped the chip out of
the computer and handed it to Sam.

He refused to take it. “I
read her message the first night on our way to the Belt,” Sam said, sitting on
the edge of my bed. “I figured you’d try to get it off me, one way or another.”

“So you gave it to me.”

Sam nodded gravely. “So
now you know what her message is. The question is, what are you going to do
about it?”

I offered him the chip
again. “Take it, Sam. I don’t want it.”

“It’s worth a lot of money,
Gar.”

“I don’t want it!” I repeated,
a little stronger.

Sam reached out and took
the chip from me. Then, “But you know what she’s doing. You could tell
Humphries about it. He’d pay a lot to know.”

I started to reply, but
to my surprise I found that I had to swallow hard before I could get any words
out. “I couldn’t do that to her,” I said.

Sam looked square into my
eyes. “You certain of that?”

I almost laughed. “What’s
a few hundred million bucks? I don’t need that kind of money.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yes, dammit, I’m
certain!” I snapped. It wasn’t easy to toss away all that money, and Sam was
starting to irritate me.

“Okay,” he said,
breaking into that lopsided smile of his. “I believe you.”

Sam got to his feet, his
right fist closed around the chip.

“What will you do with
it?” I asked.

“Pop it out an airlock.
A few days in hard UV should degrade it so

badly that even if
somebody found it in all this emptiness they’d never be able to read it.”

I got up from my desk
chair. “I’ll go with you,” I said.

So the two of us marched
down to the nearest airlock and got rid of the chip. I had a slight pang when I
realized how much money we had just tossed out into space, but then I realized
I had saved Amanda’s life, most likely, and certainly the life of her baby.
Hers and Fuchs’s.

“Fuchs will never know,”
Sam said. “I feel kind of sorry for him.”

“I feel sorry for her,”
I said.

“Yeah. Me too.”

As we walked down the
passageway back toward my compartment, curiosity got the better of me.

“Sam,” I asked, “what if
you weren’t sure that I’d keep her message to myself? What if you thought I’d
sneak off to Humphries and tell him what was on that chip?”

He glanced up at me. “I’ve
never killed a man,” he said quietly, “but I’d sure stuff you into a lifeboat
and set you adrift. With no radio.”

I blinked at him. He was
dead serious.

“I wouldn’t last long,”
I said.

“Probably not. Your ship
would drift through the Belt for a long time, though. Eons. You’d be a real
Flying Dutchman.”

“I’m glad you trust me.”

“I’m glad I can trust
you, Gar.” He gave me a funny look, then added, “You’re in love with her, too,
aren’t you?”

It took me a few moments
to reply, “Who wouldn’t be?”

SO WE FLEW
to The Rememberer with Judge Meyers and all the wedding
guests and the minister and boys’ choir, the caterers and all the food and
drink for a huge celebration. Six different news nets were waiting for us: the
wedding was going to be a major story.

Sam snuck away, of
course. He didn’t marry Jill Meyers after all. That’s why she’s on this ship,
the
Herme
s
,
to meet him all the way out in the Kuiper
Belt at that black hole he supposedly discovered.

She still wants to marry
Sam. Don’t ask me why. All I know is that she’ll have to be pretty damned
clever to get him to hold still for it.

IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT WHEN THE MAITRE D’
FINISHED
his tale.

“So Lars Fuchs never
knew that Amanda’s baby was his own son?” Jade asked, her voice slightly hollow
with thoughts of her own birth, her own parents.

“Neither did Martin
Humphries,” the maitre d’ replied somberly.

Spence asked, “Fuchs
died on that Venus expedition, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” said Jade. “And
Amanda died in childbirth, according to the nets. But Humphries is still alive.”

“He hasn’t been seen in
public in years,” the maitre d’ pointed out. “The rumor is that he had some
sort of mental breakdown.”

“Still, I don’t know if
we can use your story. I’ll have to check with our legal department.”

The maitre d’ nodded. “I
understand. Frankly, I wouldn’t want Martin Humphries’s people coming after me.”

“Then why’d you tell us?”
Spence asked.

The portly man shrugged.
“It seemed like the thing to do. For Sam, I guess. To set the record straight.
He wasn’t the bastard everybody thinks he was.”

Jade smiled at him, but
then she said, “I can’t pay you for the story unless our lawyers say we can use
it.”

The maitre d’ smiled
back. “That’s okay. I’m doing well enough here. When we get back to Selene I’ll
have enough to open my own business.”

“Oh?”

“Selling Martian
artifacts.”

“You can’t do that! It’s
forbidden by the IAA!”

The maitre d’ s smile
widened, showed teeth. “I’ve hired a squad of students who spend their summers
with the Mars exploration teams. They make cups and bowls and stuff out of native
Martian rock. Voila! Martian artifacts.”

Spence gaped at
him. “That...
that’s fraud.”

“No, it clearly states on every bill of sale that the artifact was made on
Mars. I give no guarantee of age, or of—”

The ship’s captain came bustling into the salon, looking tense, upset. He
hurried straight to the table where Jade, Spence and the maitre d’ were
sitting.

Spence got to his feet.

To Jade, the captain
said, “We just received a message.” “Oh?”

“From Sam Gunn.”

“From Sam?” all three of them asked in unison.

“The little scoundrel is flying back to Earth! He’s popped out of that
black hole and he’s heading Earthward at a full g acceleration!”

“That’s impossible!” Spence snapped.

Instead of replying the captain aimed a palm-sized remote at the smart
wall.

Sam Gunn’s round, freckled face appeared on the screen. “To whom it may
concern,” he said cheerfully. “I’m back from the mini-black hole and on my way
toward Earth. See ya there!”

The image winked off.

“That’s all?” Spence demanded.

“We tracked the source of the message. It’s a torch ship heading inbound
at one full g.”

“Where’d he get a torch ship?”

“Sacre dieu,
” said Jade. “Every lawyer in the
solar system’s going to be waiting for Sam when he gets to Earth.”

“Including the Beryllium Blonde,” Spence muttered.

“Have you told Senator Meyers?”

The captain nodded. “Before anyone else.”

“She must be furious,” said the maitre d’.

A puzzled, disbelieving expression on his face, the captain replied, “She
laughed! She laughed out loud. I thought she’d snapped.”

“Not Jill Meyers,” Jade said.

“She’s given orders to turn around and get back to Earth,” the captain
said. “As fast as we can.”

TORCH SHIP
HERMES
orbited the Moon exactly once,
just long enough for Jade and Spence to be picked up by a shuttle from Selene.
Then the ship—with Jill Meyers and her entourage still aboard— returned to
Earth.

But Sam Gunn was nowhere to be found. His ship had arrived in Earth orbit,
but when customs inspectors boarded it the ship was empty. They impounded it,
sealed it, and told the authorities—and the news media— that Sam Gunn had
disappeared.

That started a feeding frenzy in the media. Jumbo Jim Gradowsky conferred
with Solar News’s corporate bigwigs and released Jade’s hurriedly edited
follow-on series about Sam. It was a smash hit, top of the audience ratings.
Solar rereleased Jade’s original biography, then packaged the two shows
together and scored still another smashing success.