The Sam Gunn Omnibus (45 page)

D’Argent reached for the carafe on
his desk. Stalling for time, I thought. He poured himself a glass of water,
never offering any to Larry or me. In the soft lunar gravity of the inner
wheel, the water poured at a gentler angle than it would on Earth. D’Argent managed
to get most of the water into his glass; only a few drops messed up his desk.

He pretended not to notice it. “What
makes you think we’ve developed a cure for space sickness?” And he gave Larry a
cold eye.

“Senator Meyers told me,” I said
calmly. D’Argent looked surprised. “Jill and I are old friends. Didn’t you
know?”

“You and Senator Meyers?” I could
read the expression on his face. A new factor had entered his calculations.

We went around and around for
hours. D’Argent was playing it crafty. He wanted the magnetic bumper business,
that was clear to see. And Larry was positively avid to call them Karsh
Shields. I pretended that I wanted the space sickness cure to save my hotel,
while all the time I was trying to maneuver D’Argent into buying Heaven and
taking it off my hands.

But he was smarter than that. He
knew that he didn’t have to buy the hotel; it was going to sink of its own
weight. In another two weeks I’d be in bankruptcy court.

So he blandly kept insisting, “The
space-sickness cure isn’t ready for public use, Sam. It’s still in the
experimental stage.”

I
could see from
the embarrassed red of Larry’s face that it was a gigantic lie.

“Well then,” I suggested, “let me
use it on my hotel customers as a field trial. I’ll get them to sign waivers,
take you off the hook, legally.”

But D’Argent just made helpless
fluttering gestures and talked about the Food and Drug Administration, this
law, that regulation, scientific studies, legal red tape, and enough bullcrap
to cover Iowa six feet deep.

He was stalling, waiting for my
hotel to collapse so he could swoop in, grab Heaven away from me, and get the magnetic
bumper business at a bargain.

But while he talked in circles, I started
to think. What if I could get my hands on his space-sickness cure and try it
out on a few of my customers? What if I steal the damned cure right out from
under D’Argent’s snooty nose and then get a tame chemist or two to reproduce
whatever combination of drugs they’ve got in their cure? That would put me in a
better bargaining position, at least. And it would drive the smooth-talking
sonofabitch crazy!

So I decided to steal it.

It was no big deal. D’Argent and
his Rockledge security types were too Earthbound in their attitudes. They
thought that by guarding the corridor access to the laboratory area they had
the lab adequately protected. But there were four emergency airlocks strung
along that wheel of the station. Two of them opened onto the restaurant; the
other two opened directly into the Rockledge research laboratory.

All I had to do was wait until
night, get into a space suit, and go EVA to one of those airlocks. I’d be
inside the lab within minutes and the guards out in the corridor would never
know it.

Then I had a truly wicked idea. A
diversion that would guarantee that the Rockledge security troops would be busy
doing something else instead of guarding the access to their lab.

The meeting with D’Argent ran out
of steam with neither one of Us making any real effort to meet the other
halfway. Halfway? Hell, neither D’Argent nor I budged an inch. Larry looked miserably
unhappy when we finally decided to call it quits. He saw his Karsh Shield
immortality sliding away from him.

I
went straight
from D’Argent’s office to the station’s gym. Nothing had changed there, except
that T.J. was gone. The place still looked like a perpetual-motion
demonstration, kids flapping and yelling everywhere. All except that surly
teenaged boy.

I
glided over to
him.

“Hi!” I said brightly.

He mumbled something.

“You don’t seem to be having a good
time,” I said.

“So what?” he said sourly.

I m
ade a shrug. “Seems
a shame to be up here and not enjoying it.”

“What’s to enjoy?” he grumbled. “My
mother says I have to stay here with all these brats and not get in anybody’s
way.”

“Gee, that’s a shame,” I said. “There’s
a lot of really neat stuff to see. You want a tour of the place?”

For the first time his face
brightened slightly. “You mean, like the command center and all?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“They threw me out of there when I tried
to look in, a couple days ago.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I assured
him. “I’ll get you in with no trouble.”

Sliding an arm across his skinny
shoulders as we headed for the command center, I asked him, “What’s your name,
anyway, son?”

“Pete,” he said.

“Stick with me, Pete, and you’ll
see stuff that hardly any of the adults ever see.”

So I took him on a tour of the
station. I spent the whole damned afternoon with Pete, taking him all over the
station. I showed him everything from the command center to my private office.
While we were in the command center I booted up the station security program
and found that Rockledge didn’t even have intruder alarms or motion sensors
inside their lab area. Breaking in through the airlock was going to be easy.

It would have been nifty if I could’ve
used Pete as an excuse to waltz through the Rockledge lab, just to get a look
at the layout, but it was off-limits, of course. Besides, Pete grandly informed
me that he had already seen them. “Just a bunch of little compartments with all
kinds of weird glass stuff in them,” he said.

He wasn’t such a bad kid, it turned
out. Just neglected by his parents, who had dragged him up here, shown off
Daddy’s place of work, and then dumped him with the other brats. Like any
reasonable youth, he wanted to be an astronaut. When he learned that I had been
one, he started to look up to me, at least a little bit. Well, actually he was
a teeny bit taller than I, but you know what I mean.

We had a great time in one of the
escape pods. I sat Pete at the little control panel and he played astronaut for
more than an hour. It only took a teeny bit of persuasion to get him to agree
to what I wanted him to do. He even liked the idea. “It’ll be like being a real
astronaut, won’t it?” he enthused.

“Sure it will,” I told him.

While he was playing astronaut in
the escape pod I ducked out to my office and made two phone calls. I invited
Jill to an early dinner at the Eclipse. She accepted right away, asking only
why I wanted to eat at five o’clock.

“I’ll be babysitting later,” I said.

Her face on my display screen
looked positively shocked. “Babysitting? You?”

“There are more things in Heaven
and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” That was all I could
think of to say. And at that, it was probably too much.

Then I tracked down Melinda by
phone and invited her and Larry to have dinner, on me, in the Eclipse at eight
o’clock.

She was back in the damned exercise
room, walking on one of the treadmills. “Dinner?” she puffed. “I’d love to,
Sam, but by eight T.J.’s usually in bed for the night.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” I said as
casually as I could manage. “I’ll take care of him.”

“You?” Her eyes went round.

“Sure. We’re old pa
l
s now. I’ll babysit while you and Larry have
a decent meal for a change. Why should D’Argent and the old farts on his board
of directors be the only ones to enjoy good food?”

“I don’t know....” She wavered.

“The best cooking in the solar
system,” I tempted her. “My chef is
cordon bleu
.”
Which was almost true. He had worked in Paris one summer. As a busboy.

“I’ll have to check with Larry,”
she said.

“Sure. Do that.”

I
noticed that she
turned up the speed on her treadmill. Like I said, taking apples off a blind man’s
fruit stand.

So I had a nice, relaxed dinner
with Jill early that evening. Then I escorted her back to her mini-suite in the
zero-gee section. Some of the kids were still in the gym area, whizzing around
and screaming at each other.

“You’re not going to get much sleep
until they get put away,” I said to Jill.

She gave me a crooked grin as she
opened the door to her suite. “I wasn’t planning to sleep—not yet.”

I
didn’t like the
sly look in her eye. “Uh, I promised Larry and Melinda I’d watch their baby....”

“When do you have to be there?”
Jill asked, gliding through the doorway and into her zero-gee love nest.

I
glided in after
her, naturally, and she maneuvered around and shut the door, cutting off the
noise of the kids playing outside.

I
can recognize a
trap when I see one, even when the bait is tempting. “Jill—uh, I’ve got to go.
Now.”

“Oh, Sam.” She threw her arms
around my neck and kissed me passionately. I’ve got to admit that while I was
kissing her back a part of my brain was calculating how much time I had left before
I had to show up at Larry and Melinda’s door. Which was just on the opposite
side of the wailing banshees in the gym.

Reluctantly I disengaged from Jill
and said, “I don’t have the time. Honest.” My voice sounded odd, like some
embarrassed acne-faced teenager’s squeak.

Jill smiled glumly and said, “A
promise is a promise, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” I answered weakly. And I didn’t
want to make any promises to a United States Senator that I didn’t intend to
keep.

So I left Jill there in her suite,
looking sad and disappointed, and zipped through the gym area, heading straight
for the Karshes’ suite.

Larry and Melinda were waiting for
me. He was wearing an actual suit, dark blue, and a tie that kept floating
loose from his shirt front. Melinda had a dress full of flounces that billowed
in zero-gee like a waterfall of lace. Jack Spratt and the Missus. They’d look
better in the restaurant’s lunar gravity.

Melinda floated me into the bedroom
of their suite, where T.J. was zippered into a sleep cocoon. They had stuffed
it with pillows because it was way too big for him. The kid was sound asleep
with a thumb in his mouth. I’ve got to admit, he looked like a little angel.

“He won’t wake up for at least four
hours,” she assured me. “We’ll be back by then.” Still, she gave me the whole
orientation demonstration: bottle, milk, diapers, ass wipes, the whole ugly
business.

I
kept a smile on my
face and shooed them out to their dinner. Then I went back into T.J.’s room.

“Okay, kid,” I whispered. “It’s you
and me now.”

I
fidgeted around
their suite for more than an hour, waiting for Larry and Melinda to get through
most of their meal, thinking that I might swing back to Jill’s suite and—no,
no; there lay madness. Finally I went into the baby’s room and gendy, gentiy
picked up T.J., blankets and all, and headed for the escape pod where I had
stashed Pete.

The baby stirred and half woke up
when I lifted him, but I shushed and rocked him. He kind of opened one eye,
looked at me, and made a little smile. Then he curled himself into my arms and
went back to sleep. Like I said, we were old pals by now.

I’ve got to admit that I felt a
slight pang of conscience when I thought about how Larry and especially Melinda
would feel when they came back from dinner and found their darling baby missing.
I’d be missing, too, of course, and probably at first they’d be more miffed
than scared. They’d phone around, trying to find me, figuring I had their kid
with me, wherever I was. But after fifteen minutes, half an hour at most, they
would panic and call for the security guards.

I
grinned to myself
at that. While the goons were searching the station I’d be in a space suit,
breaking into the Rockledge lab from the outside. The one place nobody would
bother looking for me because it was already so heavily guarded. Hah!