The Sam Gunn Omnibus (43 page)

But Jill just laughed. “This hotel isn’t going to prosper until somebody
comes up
with
a cure for space sickness.”

“That’s what Rockledge is doing,” I grumbled. “Right aboard this station.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Jill pursed her lips. Then, “Let me ask D’Argent about that. Unofficially,
of course. But maybe I can find out something for you.”

My eyes must have widened. “You’d do that for me?”

Jill touched my cheek with cool fingertips. “Of course I would, Sam. You
have no idea of the things I’d do for you, if you’d only let me.”

That sounded dangerous to me. So I bid her a hasty adieu and pushed
through her doorway, heading for my cubbyhole of an office. Jill just gave me a
sphinx-like inscrutable smile as I floated out of her compartment.

When I
got
back to my office there was more depressing news on my computer screen. A
contingent of Rockledge board members and junior executives were scheduled for a
tour of the station and its facilities. They would be staying for a week and
had booked space in my hotel—at the discount prices Rockledge commanded as my
landlord. Those prices, negotiated before I had ever opened Heaven, were lower
than the rent D’Argent was now charging me. If I filled the hotel with
Rockledge people I could go bankrupt even faster than I already was.

And they were all bringing their wives. And children! Larry, Melinda, and
their bouncing baby boy were just the first wave of the invasion of the
weightless brats. I began to think about suicide. Or murder.

I can’t describe the horrors of that week. By actual count there were only
twenty-two kids. The oldest was fifteen and the youngest was little T.J., ten months
or so. But it seemed like there were hundreds of them, thousands. Everywhere I turned
there were brats getting in my way, poking around the observation center,
getting themselves stuck in hatches, playing tag along the tubes that connected
the station’s hub with its various wheels, yelling, screaming, tumbling,
fighting, throwing food around, and just generally making my life miserable.

Not only my life. Even the honeymooners started checking out early, with
howls of protest at the invasion of the underage monsters and dire threats
about lawsuits.

“You’ll pay for ruining our honeymoon,” was the kindest farewell statement
any of them made.

The brats took over the zero-gee gym. It looked like one of those old martial
arts films in there, only in weightlessness. They were swarming all over the
padded gym, kicking, thrashing, screaming, arms and legs everyplace, howls and
yelps and laughing and crying. One five-year-old girl, in particular, had a
shriek that could cleave limestone.

I tried to get the three teenagers among them to serve as guardians—
guards, really—for the younger tots. I offered them damned good money to look
after the brats. The two girls agreed with no trouble. The one boy—fourteen,
sullen, face full of zits—refused. He was the son of one of the board members. “My
mother didn’t bring me up here to be a babysitter,” he growled.

As far as I could see, the only thing the pizza-faced jerk did was hang
around the hub weightlessly and sulk.

I couldn’t blame the honeymooners for leaving. Who wants to fight your way
through a screaming horde of little monsters to get to your zero-gee love nest?
It was hopeless. I could see D’Argent smiling that oily smile of his; he knew I
was going down in flames and he was enjoying every minute of it.

And right in the middle of it were Larry and Melinda and their bouncing
baby boy—who really did bounce around a lot off the padded walls of the gym.
T.J. loved it in there, especially with all the other kids to keep him company.
The two teen-aged girls made him their living doll. And T.J. seemed to look out
with his ten-month-old eyes at the whole noisy, noisome gang of kids as if they
were his personal play-toys, a swirling, riotous, colorful mobile made up of
twenty-two raucous, runny-nosed, rotten kids.

Make that twenty-one kids and one fourteen-year-old moper.

I found that Larry and Melinda started feeding the baby in the gym. “It’s
easier than doing it in the restaurant or in our own quarters,” Melinda said,
as T.J. gummed away at some pulpy baby goop. “Practically no mess at all.”

I could see what she meant. They just hovered in midair with the baby.
Three-fourths of what they aimed at the brat’s mouth wound up in his ear or
smeared over his face or spit into the air. Being weightless, most of the stuff
just broke into droplets or crumbs and drifted along in the a
i
r currents until they stuck on one of the
intake ventilator screens. At the end of the meal Larry would break out a hand
vacuum and clean off the screens while Melinda cleaned the baby with pre-moistened
towels. Not bad, I had to admit. Didn
’
t
have to mop the floor or clean any furniture.

The other kids liked to eat in zero-gee, too. Made their food fights more
interesting. It was okay with me; anything that kept them out of the restaurant
or the other areas where adult human beings lived and worked was a score for
our side, far as I was concerned. But zero-gee sex was a thing of the past as
long as they held the station’s gym in their grubby little paws. My honeymoon
hotel had turned into an orbital camp for tots.

“You were right, Sam,” Jill told me over dinner the third or fourth night
of Hell Week.

The restaurant was almost empty. Nearly every one of Rockledge’s junior
executives took their meals in their rooms. Too cheap for the restaurant, they
used the fast-food dispensers and the cafeteria in the Rockledge research
facility.

At least the Eclipse was quiet. No kids. I had thought about trying to make
a rule that nobody under twenty-one was allowed into the Lunar Eclipse, but
Omar, my long-suffering hotel manager, had convinced me that it would just
cause a ruckus with the parents. They were happy as Torquemada in a synagogue
to be in the restaurant without their little darlings. But if I said they weren’t
allowed to bring their kids to the Eclipse they’d get pissed off and
demand
their rights.

So the restaurant was nice and quiet and civilized with all the kids up in
the gym dashing around and playing zero-gee games.

“I was right about what?” I asked. I must have looked as miserable as I felt.
My mind was echoing with the screeches of all those brats yowling at the top of
their lungs and the somber prediction of my accountant that the hotel would
sink beneath the financial waves in another two weeks. All day long I had been
receiving cancellation notices from travel agencies. The word was going around
at the speed of light.

Jill nudged her chair a little closer to mine. “Rockledge really is
working on a preventative for space sickness. Pierre D’Argent showed me the
laboratory studies they’ve done so far. It looks as if they’ve got it.”

No sooner had she mentioned D’Argent’s name than the silver-haired
sonofabitch showed up at the restaurant’s door, leading a contingent of six
senior Rockledge board members and their trophy wives. The men all looked like
grumpy old farts, white-haired or bald; the women were heavy with jewelry. I wondered
which one of them owned that fourteen-year-old sourpuss.

“What lovely women,” Jill said.

I made no response.

“Don’t you think they’re beautiful, Sam?”

I grunted. “Who cares.”

Jill gave me a funny expression. I didn’t realize it at the time, but her
expression was a mixture of surprise and admiration. She thought I had finally
matured to the point where I didn’t salivate like one of Pavlov’s dogs every
time I saw a good-looking woman. What Jill didn’t realize was that I was too
down in the dumps to be interested in a bevy of expensively dressed
advertisements for cosmetic surgery who were already married. I never chased married
women. Never. That’s a point of honor with me. It also saves you a lot of
threats, fights, lawsuits and attempts on your life.

Jill returned to her original subject. “Didn’t you hear me, Sam? Rockledge
is going to market a skin patch that prevents space sickness.”

“Yeah,” I said gloomily. “The day after this hotel closes, that’s when
they’ll put it on the market.”

I was watching D’Argent and his troupe as they sat at the biggest table in
the restaurant. Laughing softly among themselves, happy, relaxed, their biggest
worry was how to evade the taxes that were due on their enormous profits. The more
they ate and drank, at their discount prices, the deeper into the red they
pushed me.

Jill shook me by my wrist and made me look at her. She had a kind of pixie
grin on her face. Almost evil. “Suppose I could get D’Argent to use your hotel
customers as a field trial for their new drug?”

“Suppose you could get the Pope to pee off the roof of the Vatican.”

“Wouldn’t that help you?” she insisted.

I had to admit that it might.

“Then that’s what I’ll do,” Jill said, as firmly as a U.S. Senator
announcing she was running for reelection.

I had no romantic interest in Jill, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure
out why she was interested in me. What did it matter? I was in such a funk over
those brats infesting my hotel that I wouldn’t have noticed if Helen of Troy
had been sitting naked in my bed with her arms out to me. Well, maybe.

What was going through my mind was an endless vicious circle. The hotel is
failing. When the hotel goes down the tubes it’ll drag my company, VCI, down
with it. VCI was technically in the black, making steady money selling magnetic
bumpers that protected space facilities from orbiting debris. But legally, VCI
owned Hotel Heaven and the hotel’s accumulated debts would force VCI into
bankruptcy. I would be broke. Nobody would lend me a cent. There went my dreams
for mining the Moon and making myself the tycoon of the asteroids. I’d have to
find a job someplace.

Unless—there was only one way I could see out of the black pit that was
staring at me. I had to swallow hard several times before I could work up the
nerve to even put out a feeler. But it was either that or bankruptcy, the end
of all my dreams. So the next morning I gritted my teeth (having swallowed hard
several times) and took the first little step on the road to humiliation.

“Hi, Larry old pal, how’s it going?” The words almost stuck in my throat,
but I had to get started somehow.

Oh, that’s right, I haven’t told you about Larry and Melinda and the Gunn
Shield. Here’s the story.

I had first started VCI, years earlier, to build magnetic bumpers for
space stations, to protect them against the orbiting junk whizzing around up
there. Larry designed them for me. They’re called Gunn Shields, of course.
Without them, a space station would get dinged constantly from the crap zipping
around in orbit. Even a chip of paint hits with the impact of a high-power
bullet, and there’s a helluva lot more than paint chips flying around in the
low orbits.

The Russians finally had to abandon their original Mir space station
because it was starting to look like a target in a shooting gallery. And the more
stations and factories people built in orbit, the more debris they created and
the more they needed Gunn Shields. A nice, steady, growing market. Not
spectacular, not enough to bring in the kind of cash flow I needed, but
dependable.

Back in those days Melinda had a crush on me. Just a kid’s crush, that’s
all it was, but Larry loved her madly and hated me for it. She was kind of
pretty underneath her avoirdupois, but not my type.

That surprises you? You heard that Sam Gunn chases all types of women,
didn’t you. No discrimination at all. Well, that’s about as true as all the
rest of the bull manure they spread about me.

Melinda was not my type. But she had this thing about me and Larry had his
heart set on her. So I hired Melinda to come to work for me at VCI, and then
kind of offhand asked Larry if he’d like to come along too. Larry was the guy I
needed, the one I had to have if VCI was going to be a success. He was the
semi-genius who thought up the idea for magnetic bumpers in the first place.
Poor fish rose to the bait without even stopping to think. They both moved to
Florida and together we put VCI into business.

So while
Larry
was designing the original bumper, I was touting Melinda off me and onto Larry.
Cyrano de Gunn, that’s me. Made her fall in love with him. Voi
l
a. Once we tested the original bumper and it
worked, I got it patented and Larry got Melinda to marry him. Everybody was
happy, I thought. Wrong!

For some unfathomable reason, Larry got pissed at me and went off to work
for D’Argent, the sneaky sleazoid, over at Rockledge. And when he quit VCI,
Melinda did, too.

Oh, yeah, we almost got into a shooting war over the rights to the
geocentric orbit. But that’s another story. Larry only played a minor role in
that one.

Anyway, I had spent a sleepless night tussling over my problems and couldn’t
see a way out. Except to sell the goddamned hotel to Rockledge. And the rights
to the Gunn Shield, too. Dump it all for cash. D’Argent had tried before to
sneak the magnetic bumper design away from me. He had tried bribery and even
theft. Hell, he had hired Larry with the idea of getting the kid to figure out
a way to break my patent. I knew that, even if Larry himself didn’t.