The Sam Gunn Omnibus (22 page)

She
blushed. Even beneath her deep suntan I could see her cheeks reddening.

“Uh
... well, I wanted to stay on Sam’s tail and make certain he closed up his
operation when he promised he would.”

Sam
hadn’t closed Space Adventure Tours, I knew. He had suspended operations in
Panama and returned to the agency. Gone back on duty. He was scheduled for a
classified Air Force mission, of all things. I had talked myself blue in the
face, trying to get the astronaut office in Houston to replace him with
somebody else, but they kept insisting Sam was the best man they had for the mission.
Lord knows who he bribed, and with what.

“You
didn’t have to stay in Panama all that time,” I pointed out to my niece. “You
could have kept tabs on him from here in Washington.”

She
blushed even more deeply. “Well, Uncle Griff, to tell the truth ... it was sort
of like a, you know, kind of like a honeymoon.”

I
snorted. Couldn’t help it. The thought of my own
little niece shacked up with ...

“You
were
living with
him?” I bellowed.

She
just smiled at me. “Yes,” she said, dreamily.

I
was furious. “You let Sam Gunn—”

“Not
Sam!” Ramona said quickly. Then she grinned at me. “You thought I was living
with Sam?” She laughed at me.

Before
I could ask, she told me, “Hector! We fell in love, Uncle Griff! We’re going to
get married.”

That
was different. Sort of. “Oh. Congratulations, I suppose. When?”

“Next
year,” my niece answered. “When Sam starts
real
flights into orbit, Hector and I are going to spend our official honeymoon in
space!”

I
wanted to puke.

So
that’s why we had to fire Sam Gunn. Government regulations specifically state
that you can’t be running a business of your own while you’re on the federal
payroll. Besides, the little SOB made a shambles of everything he touched.

It wasn’t easy, though. Actually
firing somebody from a government job is never easy, and Sam played every
delaying trick in the book. Just to see if he could give me apoplexy, I’m sure.

The little conniving sneak was even
working out an arrangement to rent a section of a new space station and turn it
into an orbiting honeymoon hotel before I finally got all the paperwork I needed
to fire his butt out of the agency.

And he didn’t leave quietly. Not
Sam. Know what his final masterstroke was? He left me a prepaid ticket to ride
his goddamned Clipper-ship into orbit and spend a full week in his orbiting
hotel.

He knew damned well I’d never give
him the satisfaction! Probably the little bastard thought I was too old to
enjoy sex. Or maybe he expected me to bust a blood vessel while I’m making love
in weightlessness.

But I fooled him. Good and proper.
I grew a beard. I got hair implants. The little wiseass never recognized me.

When they opened this retirement
center here at Copernicus I was one of the first residents. I thought maybe Sam
would come here, sooner or later, if and when he finally retired.

That’s what I’m waiting for. I know
he’s not dead. Sooner or later he’s going to show up again, and sooner or later
he’ll end up here in this low-gravity old folks’ home. Retired, with nothing to
do. Then I can drive him nuts, for a change.

That’s something worth living for!

“PRETTY SHAKY,” GRADOWSKY MUTTERED, AFTER LISTENING
to Griffith’s narration. “Even with his sworn testament the lawyers aren’t
going to like this.”

Jade
slumped in the battered old couch, feeling exhausted from her weeks of travel
and tension.

“You
don’t mean that we can’t use
any
of it, do you?”

“That’s
not my decision, kid,” said Gradowsky from behind his desk. “We’ll have to let
the lawyers listen to what you’ve got.”

She
nodded glumly, too tired to argue. Besides, it would do no good to fight
Gradowsky on this. His hands were tied. She began to get an inkling of how Sam
Gunn had felt about being hemmed in by office procedures and red tape.

“So
where do you go from here?” Gradowsky asked her.

Jade
pulled herself up straighter in the chair, startled by the question. “You mean
we’re going on with the project?”

“Sure.
Until the lawyers pull the plug on us. Why not? I think what you’re getting is
great stuff. I just worry about people suing us, that’s all.”

Jade’s
weariness seemed to wash away like water-paint under a fire hose.

“Well,”
she said, “several of the people I talked to said there’s a man at space
station Alpha who—”

“Alpha?
That’s in Earth orbit.” “Right.”

“We
don’t have the budget to send you out there,” Gradowsky said.

“We
don’t?”

“Hell,
kiddo, you’ve just about used up the whole expense budget I gave you just
traipsing around the different lunar settlements. Do you have any idea of what
it costs to fly back Earthside?”

“I
wouldn’t be going all the way to Earth,” Jade answered. “Just to the space
station.”

“Yeah,
I know.” Gradowsky seemed embarrassed with the recollection that Jade could not
go to Earth even if she wanted to.

“I’ve
covered just about everybody I could find here on the Moon,” she

said.
“But there are plenty of people elsewhere: on Alpha, in the Lagrange habitats,
even out in the Belt.”

Gradowsky puffed his cheeks and
blew out a heavy sigh. “The Asteroid Belt. Christ!”

Jade knew she had to do something,
and quickly, or the Sam Gunn project was finished.

“When I first started this job,”
she said to her boss, “you told me that a good reporter goes where the story
is, regardless of how far or how difficult it might be.”

He grinned sheepishly at her. “Yeah,
I know. But I forgot to tell you the other half of it—
as long as the
big brass okays the expenses.”

Straightening her spine, Jade
replied, “We’ll have to talk to the big brass, then.”

Gradowsky looked surprised for an
instant. Then he ran both his hands over his ample belly and said, “Yeah. I guess
maybe we will.”

Several weeks later, one of the corporation’s
big brass came to Selene City for the annual “fear of god” meeting that every
branch office of Solar News Network received from management.

His full name was Arak al Kashan,
although he smilingly insisted on being called Raki. “Raki,” he would say,
almost self-deprecatingly, “not Rocky.” Yet Jade overheard Gradowsky mumble to
one of the technicians, “Count your fingers after you shake hands with him.”

Raki was tall and tan and trim,
dark of hair and eye, old enough to be a network vice president yet young
enough to set women’s hearts fluttering. The grapevine had it that he was
descended from very ancient blood; his aristocratic lineage went all the way
back to the earliest Persian emperors. He had the haughtiness to match the
claim. Jade heard him with her own ears saying disdainfully, “The unlamented
Pahlavi Shahs were nothing more than upstart peasants.”

Jade thought he was the handsomest
man she had ever seen. Raki dressed in hand-tailored suits of the latest
fashion, darkly iridescent lapel-less jackets in shades of blue or charcoal
that fit him like a second skin over pale pastel turtlenecks. Tight slacks that
emphasized his long legs and bulging groin.

If Raki noticed Jade among the
half-dozen employees at the Solar office he gave no outward sign of it. His
task, as vice president in charge of human resources, was to have a brief
personal chat with each man and woman at the Selene City office, review their
job performances, and assure them that headquarters, back in Orlando, had their
best interests at heart—even though there were to be no salary increases this
year.

“Be careful of him,” Monica warned
Jade when she saw the look in her young friend’s eyes. “He’s a lady-killer.”

Jade smiled at Monica’s antique
vocabulary. With the Sam Gunn project stalled, Jade had been assigned to
covering financial news. Her current project was a report on the growth in
tourism at Selene. Next she would tackle the consortium that was trying to
raise capital for building a new mass driver that would double Selene’s export
capacity. Hardly as thrilling as tracking down Sam Gunn’s old lovers and
adversaries.

“Jumbo Jim says that Raki could get
headquarters to okay my Sam Gunn project,” Jade told Monica.

“Honey, I’m warning you. All he’ll
want to do is get into your bed.”

They were sitting in Monica’s
cubbyhole office, sipping synthetic coffee before starting the day’s tasks.
Through the window that took up one whole wall they could see the dimly lit
editing room where two technicians were bent over their computers, using the
graphics program to “recreate” the construction of the new mass driver, from
the first ceremonial shovel of excavation to the ultimate finished machine
hurling hundreds of tons of cargo into space per hour.

Monica’s office was too small for a
desk. There were only the two chairs and a computer console built into the back
wall. Its keyboard rested on the floor until Monica needed it.

Jade appreciated Monica’s warning. “Mother
Monica,” she called her older friend. But she had other ideas in mind.

Trying not to smile too broadly,
she told Monica, “You know, Sam Gunn used to say that he wanted to get laid
without getting screwed. Maybe that’s what I’ve got to do.”

Monica gave her a long, troubled
look.

“I mean,” Jade said, “I wouldn’t mind
having sex with him. It might even be fun. The question is: how do I make sure
that he’ll okay the project afterward?”

Shaking her head like the weary mother
superior of a rowdy convent, Monica said, “My god, you kids have it easy
nowadays. When I was your age we had to worry about herpes, and chlamydia—and
AIDS. Sex was punishable by death in those days!”

Somewhat surprised, Jade said, “But
you managed ...”

With a huff, Monica replied, “Sure,
we managed. But you had to get a guy’s blood report first. There were even
doctors making fortunes faking medical records!”

“That must have been tough,” Jade
said.

“Why do you think people got married
back then? And then divorced?”

“But Monica, he’ll only be here for
another three days. I’ve got to get him to okay the Sam Gunn biography by then!”

Monica’s disapproving expression
softened. “I know, honey. I understand. It’s just that I hate to see you using
yourself like this. Meaningless sex might seem like fun at first....”

“Sam always said that there’s no
such thing as meaningless sex.”

“Sam’s dead, child. And he left a
trail of hurt people behind him. Women, mostly.”

Jade had to admit that she was
right. “There was one woman I interviewed. She works at Dante’s Inferno, over
in Hell Crater. She was Sam’s fiancée. She claims he left her at the altar and
went off to the Asteroid Belt.”

“I’ll bet. And what kind of work
does she do at Dante’s?” Monica asked, her eyes narrowing.

ISHTAR’S WAS ACKNOWLEDGED
to be the finest
restaurant not merely in Selene, but the finest in all the Moon. Carved out of
the lunar rock at the end of a long corridor, Ishtar’s interior was shaped like
a dome, with video screens showing views of the heavens so cunningly devised
that it actually looked as though the dome were up on the surface.

The restaurant was small, intimate.
Each table was niched into its own semicircular banquette of high, plush lunar
pseudo-leather, creating a semicircle of virtually complete privacy. Lovers
could snuggle close, although at the prices Ishtar’s charged the restaurant’s
clientele was mostly executives who had access to golden expense accounts. All
the waiters were human; there were no robots at all, not even as busboys.