The Sam Gunn Omnibus (42 page)

There was nobody else in the damned tube, nobody there to grab him or
break his fall or even slow him down a little.

I started using the ladder rungs to propel myself faster, grabbing the
rungs with my fingertips and pushing off them, one after another, faster and
faster. Like the Lone Ranger chasing a runaway horse. Damned Coriolis force was
getting to me, though, making me kind of dizzy.

As I got closer and closer, I saw that little T.J. wasn’t screaming with
fear. He was screeching with delight, happy as a little cannonball, kicking his
arms and legs and tumbling head over bare ass, laughing hard as he could.

Next time he hits the wall he won’t be laughing anymore, I thought. Then I
wondered if I could reach him before he slammed into the hatch at the bottom of
this level of the tube. At the speed I was going I’d come down right on top of
him, and the kid wouldn’t be much of a cushion.

Well, I caught up with him before either of us reached the next hatch,
tucked him under one arm like he was a wriggling football, and started trying
to slow my fall with the other hand. It wasn’t going to work, I saw, so I flipped
myself around so I was coming down feet-first and kept grabbing at rungs with my
free hand, getting dizzier and dizzier. Felt like my shoulder was going to come
off, and my hand got banged up pretty good, but at least we slowed down some.

The baby was crying and struggling to get loose. He’d been having fun,
dropping like an accelerating stone. He didn’t like being saved. I heard Larry
yelling and looked up; he was clambering down the ladder, all skinny arms and
legs, jabbering like a demented monkey.

I hit the hatch feet-first like I’d been dropped out of an airplane. I mean,
I did my share of parachute jumps back when I was in astronaut training, but
this time I hit a hell of a lot harder. Like my shinbones were shattering and my
knees were trying to ram themselves up into my ribcage. I saw every star in the
Milky Way, and the wind was knocked out of me for a moment.

So I was sprawled on my back, kind of dazed, with the kid yelling to get
loose from me, when Larry comes climbing down the ladder, puffing like
he’d
been trying to save the kid, and takes the
yowling little brat in his arms.

“Gee, thanks, Sam,” he says. “I was changing his diaper when he got loose
from me. Sorry about the mess.”

That’s when I realized that the ungrateful little so-and-so had peed all
down the front of my shirt.

So I was late for my lunch date with Senator Meyers. My hand was banged up
and swollen, my legs ached, my knees felt like they were going to explode, and
the only other shirt I had brought with me was all wrinkled from being jammed
into my travel bag. But at least it was dry. Even so, I got to the restaurant
before she did. Jill was one of those women who has a deathly fear of arriving
anywhere first.

I was so late, though, that she was only half a minute behind me. I hadn’t
even started for a table yet; I was still in the restaurant’s teeny little
foyer, talking with my buddy Omar.

“Am I terribly late?” Jill asked.

I turned at the sound of her voice and, I’ve got to admit, Jill looked ter
rific.
I mean,
she was as plain as vanilla, with hardly any figure at all, but she still
looked bright and attractive and, well, I guess the right word is
radiant.
She was wearing a one-piece zipsuit,
almost like the coveralls that we used to wear back on the NASA shuttle. But
now her suit was made of some kind of shiny stuff and decorated with color
accents and jewels. Like Polonius said: rich, not gaudy.

Her hair was a darker shade than I remembered it from the old days, and
impeccably coiffed. She was dyeing it, I figured. And getting it done a lot
better than she did when she’d been a working astronaut.

“You look like a million dollars,” I said as she stepped through the hatch
into the restaurant’s foyer.

She grinned that freckle-faced grin of hers and said, “It costs almost
that much to look like this.”

“It’s worth it,” I said.

Omar, my buddy from years back, was serving as the maitre d’ that
afternoon. He was the general manager of the hotel, but everybody was pulling
double or triple duty, trying to keep the place afloat. He loomed over
us,
painfully
gaunt and tall as a basketball star, his black pate shaved bald, a dense goatee
covering his chin. In the easy lunar gravity Omar could walk normally with
nothing more than the lightest of braces on his atrophied legs. Omar had more
to lose than I did if the hotel went bust. He’d have to go back to Earth and be
a cripple.

As he showed us to our table, all dignity and seriousness, Jill cracked, “You’re
getting gray, Sam.”

“Cosmic rays,” I snapped back at her. “Not age. I’ve been in space so much
that primary cosmic rays have discolored my pigmentation.”

Jill nodded as if she knew better but didn’t want to argue about it. The
restaurant was almost completely empty. It was the only place aboard the
station to eat, unless you were a Rockledge employee and could use their
cafeteria, yet still it was a sea of empty tables. I mean, there wasn’t any
other place for the tourists to eat—it was lunch hour for those who came up
from the States—but the Eclipse had that forlorn look. Three tables occupied,
seventeen bare. Twelve human waiters standing around with nothing to do but run
up my salary costs.

As Omar sat us at the finest table in the Eclipse (why not?) Jill said, “You
ought to get some new clothes, Sam. You’re frayed at the cuffs, for goodness
’
sake.”

I refrained from telling her about T.J.’s urinary gift. But I gave her the
rest of the story about my thrilling rescue, which nobody had witnessed except
the butterfingered Jack Spratt.

“My goodness, Sam, you saved that baby’s life,” Jill said, positively
glowing at me.

“I should’ve let him go and seen how high he’d bounce when he hit the
hatch.”

“Sam!”

“In the interest of science,” I said.

“Don’t be mean.”

“He’s supposed to be a bouncing baby boy, isn’t he?”

She did not laugh.

“Dammit, Jill, they shouldn’t have brought a kid up here,” I burst. “It’s
not right. There ought to be a regulation someplace to prevent idiots from
bringing their lousy brats to my hotel!”

Jill was not helpful at all. “Sam,” she told me, her expression severe, “we
made age discrimination illegal half a century ago.”

“This isn’t age discrimination,” I protested. “That baby isn’t a voting
citizen.”

“He’s still a human being who has rights. And so do his parents.”

I am not a gloomy guy, but it felt like a big rain cloud had settled over
my head. Little T.J. was not the only one pissing on me.

But I had work to do. As long as Jill was here, I tried to make the best
of it. I started spinning glorious tales of the coming bonanza in space manufacturing,
once we could mine raw materials from the Moon or asteroids.

I never mentioned our weightless escapades, but she knew that I held that
trump card. Imagine the fuss the media would make if they discovered that the
conservative Senator from New Hampshire had once been a wild woman in orbit.
With the notorious Sam Gunn, of all people!

“What is it you want, Sam?” Jill asked me. That’s one of the things I liked
best about her. No bull-hickey. She came straight to the point.

So I did, too. “I’m trying to raise capital for a new venture.”

Before I could go any farther, she fixed me with a leery eye. “Another new
venture? When are you going to stop dashing around after the pot of gold at the
end of the rainbow, Sam?”

I gave her a grin. “When I get my hands on the gold.”

“Is that what you’re after, money? Is that all that you’re interested in?”

“Oh no,” I said honestly. “What I’m really interested in is the things money
can buy.”

She frowned; it was part annoyance, part disappointment, I guess. Easy for
her. She was born well-off, married even better, and now was a wealthy widowed
United States Senator. Me, I was an orphan at birth, raised by strangers. I’ve
always had to claw and scrabble and kick and bite my way to wherever I had to
go. There was nobody around to help me. Only me, all five foot three—excuse me,
five foot five inches of me. All by myself. You’re damned right money means a
lot to me. Most of all, it means respect. Like that old ballplayer said, the
home-run hitters drive the Cadillacs. I also noticed, very early in life, that
they also get the best-looking women.

“Okay,” I backpedaled. “So money can’t buy happiness. But neither can
poverty. I want to get filthy rich. Is there anything wrong
with
that?”

Despite her New England upbringing, a faint smile teased at the corners of
Jill’s mouth. “No, I suppose not,” she said softly.

So I went into the details about my hopes for lunar mining and asteroid
prospecting. Jill listened quietly; attentively, I thought, until I finished my
pitch.

She toyed with her wine glass as she said, “Mining the Moon. Capturing
asteroids. All that’s a long way off, Sam.”

“It’s a lot closer than most people realize,” I replied, in my best-behaved,
serious man of business attitude. Then I added, “It’s not as far in the future
as our own space shuttle missions are in the past.”

Jill sighed, then grinned maliciously. “You always were a little bastard,
weren’t you?”

I grinned back at her. “What’s the accident of my birth got to do with it?”

She put the wine glass down and hunched closer to me. “Just what are you
after, Sam, specifically?” I think she was enjoying the challenge of dealing
with me.

I answered, “I want to make sure that the big guys like Rockledge and
Yamagata don’t slit my throat.”

“How can I help you do that?”

“You’re on the Commerce Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee,
right? I need to be able to assure my investors that the Senate won’t let my
teeny little company be squashed flat by the big guys.”

“Your investors? Like who?”

I refused to be rattled by her question. “I’ll find investors,” I said
firmly, “once you level the playing field for me.”

Leaning back in her
chair, she said slowly, “You want me to use my influence as a United States
Senator to warn Rockledge and the others not to muscle you.”

I nodded.

Jill thought about it
for a few silent moments, then she asked, “And what
’
s in it for me?”

Good old
straight-from-the-shou
l
der Jill. “Why,”
I said, “you get the satisfaction of helping an old friend to succeed in a
daring new venture that will bring the United States back to the forefront of
space industrialization.”

She gave me a look that
told me that wasn’t the answer she had wanted to hear. But before I could say
anything more, she muttered, “That might win six or seven votes in New
Hampshire, I guess.”

“Sure,” I said. “You’ll
be a big hero with your constituents, helping the little guy against the big,
bad corporations.”

“Cut the serenade, Sam,”
she snapped. “You’ve got something else going on in that twisted little brain
of yours; I can tell. What is it?”

She was still grinning
as she said it, so I admitted, “Well, there’s a rumor that Rockledge is
developing an anti-nausea remedy that’ll stop space sickness. It could mean a
lot for my hotel.”

“I hear your zero-gee
sex palace is on its way to bankruptcy.”

“Not if Rockledge will
sell me a cure for the weightless whoopies.”

“You think they’d try to
keep it from you?”

“Do vultures eat meat?”

She laughed and started
in on her plate of soyburger.

After lunch I took Jill
down to her mini-suite in the hub and asked how she liked her accommodations.

“Well,” she said,
drawing the word out, “it’s better than the old shuttle mid-deck, I suppose.”

“You suppose?” I was
shocked. “Each one of Heaven’s rooms is a luxurious, self-contained mini-suite.”
I quoted from our publicity brochure.

Jill said nothing until
I found her door and opened it for her with a flourish.

“Kind of small, don’t
you think?” she said.

“Nobody’s complained
about the size,” I replied. Then I showed her the controls that operated the minibar,
the built-in sauna, the massage equipment, and the screen that covered the
observation port.

“A real love nest,” Jill
said.

“That’s the idea.”

I opened the observation
port’s screen and we saw the Earth hanging

out there, huge and blue
and sparkling. Then it slid past as the station revolved and we were looking at
diamond-hard stars set against the velvet black of space. It was gorgeous,
absolutely breathtaking.

And then we heard somebody vomiting in the next compartment. The hotel’s
less than one-quarter full and my crackbrained staff books two zero-gee
compartments next to one another!