The Sam Gunn Omnibus (44 page)

So now I toadied up to Larry, in the middle of the mayhem of the station’s
gym. The kids had taken it over completely. Larry and I were the only adults
among the yowling, zooming, screeching, barfing little darlings. Even the two teenaged
girls who were supposed to be watching the kids were busy playing free-fall tag
and screaming at the top of their considerable voices.

Larry gave me a guarded look. He was feeding T.J., who was happily
spraying most of his food into weightless droplets that hovered around him like
tiny spheres of multicolored glop before drifting slowly toward the nearest
ventilator grid.

“Where’s Melinda?” I asked, trying to radiate good cheer and sincerity
while dodging the goo that the baby was spewing out.

“She’s down in the second wheel, doing aerobics,” he said. He spooned a
bit of puke-colored paste out of a jar and stuck it in front of T.J.’s face.
The baby siphoned it off with a big slurping noise and even managed to get some
of it past his two visible teeth and into his mouth.

Gradually, with every ounce of self-control and patient misdirection I
could muster, I edged the
topic of conversation to the Gunn Shields. All the time we were both dodging
flying kids and the various missiles they were throwing at each other, as well
as T.J.’s pretty constant spray of food particles. And I had to shout to make myself
heard over the noise the brats were making.

I
only hoped that
none of them figured out the combinations for the electronic locks on the
zero-gee mini-suites. I could just see the little SOBs breaking into the mini-bars
and throwing bottles all over the place or scalding themselves in the saunas.
Come to think of it, boiling a couple of them might have been fun.

But I had work to do.

The more I talked to Larry about
the magnetic shields, though, the more he seemed to drift away from me. I mean,
literally move away. He kept floating backward through the big, padded zero-gee
compartment and I kept pushing toward him. We slowly crossed the entire gym,
with all those kids whooping and zooming around us. Finally I had him pinned
against one of the padded walls, T.J. floating upside-down above him and the
jar of baby food hovering between us. It was only then that I realized Larry
was getting red in the face.

“What’s the matter?” I asked,
earnestly. “Are you getting sick?”

“Dammit, Sam, they shouldn’t be
called Gunn Shields!” Larry burst out. “I designed the bumpers, not you! They
ought to be called Karsh Shields!”

I
was stunned. I had
never even thought of that. And he certainly had never mentioned it to me
before.

“You mean, all this time you’ve
been sore at me over a public relations title?”

“It means a lot to me,” he said, as
surly as that teenaged grump.

“Is that why you left me for
Rockledge?”

Larry nodded petulantly.

It was my big chance. Maybe my only
chance. I let my head droop as if I had suddenly discovered religion and was
ashamed of my past life.

“Gee, Larry,” I said, just loudly
enough to be heard over the screams of the kids, “I never realized how much it
meant to you.”

“Well,” it’s my invention but you
took out the patent and you took all the credit, too.”

I
noticed that he
had not spoken a word about money. Not a syllable. Larry was pure of heart,
bless his unblemished soul.

I
looked him in the eye with the most contrite
expression I could manage. It was hard to keep from giggling; this was going to
be like plucking apples off a blind man’s fruit stand.

“If that’s the way you feel about
it, kid,” I said, trying to keep up the hangdog expression, “then we’ll change
the name. Look—I—I’ll even license Rockledge to manufacture and sell the shields.
That’s right! Let Rockledge take it over completely! Then you can call them
Karsh Shields with no trouble at all!”

His eyes goggled. “You’d do that
for me, Sam?”

I
slid an arm
around his shoulder. “Sure I would. I never wanted to hurt you, Larry. If only
you had told me sooner...” I let my voice fade away. Then I nodded, as if I had
been struggling inside myself. “I’ll sell Rockledge the hotel, too.”

“No!” Larry gasped. “Not your
hotel.”

“I know D’Argent wants it.” That
wasn’t exactly the truth. But I had a strong suspicion the silver-haired
bastard would be happy to take the hotel away from me—as long as he thought it
would break my heart to part with it.

Larry’s face turned red again, but
this time he looked embarrassed, not angry. “Sam ...” He hesitated, then went
on, “Look, Sam, I’m not supposed to tell you this, but the company’s been
working on a cure for space sickness.”

I
blinked at him,
trying to generate a tear or two. “Really?”

“If it works, it should help to make
your hotel a success.”

“If it works,” I said, with a big
sigh.

The way I had it figured, Rockledge
would pay a nice royalty for the license to manufacture and sell the magnetic
bumpers. Not as much as VCI was making in profits from the shields, but the
Rockledge royalties would go to me, personally, as the patent-holder. Not to
VCI. The damned hotel’s debts wouldn’t touch the royalties. VCI would go down
the tubes, but what the hell, that’s business. I’d be moving on to lunar mining
and asteroid hunting. ET Resources, Inc. That’s what I would call my new
company.

Let Larry call them Karsh Shields,
I didn’t give a fart’s worth about that. Let D’Argent do everything he could to
make the world forget I had anything to do with them, as long as he sent me the
royalty checks on time. What I really wanted, what I desperately needed, was
the money to start moving on ET Resources, Inc.

“Maybe I can talk D’Argent into
letting you use their new drug,” Larry suggested. “You know, try it out on your
hotel customers.”

I
brightened up a
little. “Gee,” I said, “that would be nice. If only I could keep my hotel.” I sighed
again, heavier, heavy enough to nudge me slightly away from Larry and the baby.
“It would break my heart to part with Heaven.”

Larry gaped at me while T.J. stuck
a sticky finger in his father’s ear.

“It would make both of us happy,” I
went on. “I could keep the hotel and Rockledge could take over the magnetic
bumpers and call them Karsh Shields.”

That really turned him on. “I’ll go
find D’Argent right now!” Larry said, all enthusiasm. “Would you mind looking
after T.J. for a couple of minutes?”

And he was off like a shot before I
could say a word, out across the mayhem of all those brats flinging themselves
around the gym. Just before he disappeared through the main hatch he yelled back
at me, “Oh, yeah, T.J.’s going to need a change. You know how to change a
diaper, don’t you?”

He ducked through the hatch before
I could answer. The kids swarmed all through the place and little T.J. stared
after his disappearing father.

I
was kind of stunned.
I wasn’t a babysitter! But there I was, hanging in midair with twenty crazed
kids zipping all around me and a ten-month-old baby hanging a couple of feet
before my eyes, his chin and cheeks smeared with baby food and this weird
expression on his face.

“Well,” I said to myself, “what the
hell do I do now?”

T.J. broke into a bawling cry. He
wanted his father, not this stranger. I didn’t know what to do. I tried talking
to him, tried holding him, even tried making faces at him. He didn’t understand
a word I said, of course; when I tried to hold him he squirmed and shrieked so
loud even the other kids stopped their games to stare at me accusingly. And
when I made a few faces at him he just screamed even louder.

Then I smelled something. His
diaper.

One of the teen-aged girls gave me
a nasty look and said firmly, “I’m going to call his mother!”

“Never mind,” I said. “I’ll bring
the kid to her myself.”

I
nudged squalling
T.J. weightlessly toward the hatch and started the two of us down the connector
tube toward the second-level wheel, where the Rockledge gym was. It had been a
stroke of genius (mine) to put their exercise facility in the wheel that
rotated at about one-third gee, the gravity you’d feel on Mars. You can lift
three times the weight you’d be able to handle on Earth and feel like you’ve
accomplished something without straining yourself. But do you think D’Argent or
any of his Rockledge minions would give me credit for the idea? When hell
freezes over—maybe.

T.J. stopped yowling once I got his
flailing little body through the hatch and into the tube. This was a different
enough place for his curiosity to override the idea that his father had
abandoned him, and whatever discomfort his loaded diaper might be causing him.
He was fascinated with the blinking lights on the hatch control panel. I opened
and shut the damned hatch half a dozen times, just to quiet him down. Then I showed
him the color-coded guide lines on the tube’s walls, and the glowing light
strips. He pointed and smiled. Kind of a goofy smile, with just two teeth to
show. But it was better than crying.

By the time we reached the second
wheel we were almost pals. I let him smear his greasy little hands over the
hatch control panel; like I said, he liked to watch the lights blink, and there
wasn’t much damage he could do to the panel except make it sticky. I even held
his hand and let him touch the keypads that operated the hatch. He laughed when
it started to swing open. After we went through he pointed at the control panel
on the other side and made it clear he wanted to play with that one, too.

There was enough of a feeling of
gravity down at this level for me to walk on the floor, with T.J. crawling
along beside me. I tried to pick him up and carry him, despite his smell, but
he was too independent for that. He wanted to be on his own.

Kind of reminded me of me.

Melinda was sweaty and puffing and
not an ounce lighter than she had been when she entered the exercise room. T.J.
spotted her in the middle of all the straining, groaning women doing their
aerobics to the latest top-forty pop tunes. He let out a squeal and all the
women stopped their workout to surround the kid with cooing gushing baby talk.
Melinda was queen of them all, the mother of the center of their attention. You’d
think the brat had produced ice cream.

I
beat a hasty
retreat, happy to be rid of the kid. Although, I’ve got to admit, little T.J.
was kind of fun to be with. When he wasn’t crying. And if you held your breath.

True to his naive word, Larry
arranged a meeting between D’Argent and me that very afternoon. I was invited
to the section of the station where Rockledge had its lab, up in the lunar
wheel, alongside my restaurant.

You might have thought we were
trying to penetrate a top-secret military base. Between the Lunar Eclipse and
the hatch to the Rockledge Laboratory was a corridor no more than ten meters
long. Rockledge had packed six uniformed security guards, an X-ray scanner,
three video cameras and a set of chemical sniffers into those ten meters. If we
didn’t have a regulation against animals they would have probably had a few
Dobermans in there, too.

“What’re you guys doing in here?” I
asked D’Argent, once they had let me through the security screen and ushered me
into the compartment he was using as an office. “You’ve got more security out
there than a rock star visiting the Emperor of Japan.”

D’Argent never wore coveralls or
fatigues like the rest of us. He was in a spiffy silk suit, pearl gray with
pencil-thin darker stripes, just like he wore Earthside. He gave me one of his
oily little smiles. “We need all that security, Sam,” he said, “to keep people
like you from stealing our ideas”.

I
sat at the
spindly little chair in front of his desk and gave him a sour look. “The day
you have an idea worth stealing, the Moon will turn into green cheese.”

He glared at me. Larry, sitting at
the side of D’Argent’s desk, tried to cool things off. “We’re here to discuss a
business deal, not exchange insults.”

I
looked at him
with new respect. Larry wasn’t a kid anymore. He was starting to turn into a
businessman. “Okay,” I said. “You’re right. I’m here to offer a trade.”

D’Argent stroked his pencil-thin mustache
with a manicured finger. “A trade?”

Nodding, I said, “I’ll license
Rockledge to manufacture and market the magnetic bumpers. You let me buy your
space sickness cure.”