The Sam Gunn Omnibus (46 page)

Okay, so Larry and Melinda would
have a rough hour or two. They’d forget it when I returned their kid to them
and they saw he was none the worse for wear. And if Larry wanted to call the
bumpers Karsh Shields he owed me some kind of payment, didn’t he?

Pete was in the escape pod waiting
for me. I had told him only that he could play astronaut in the pod for a
couple of hours, as long as he watched the baby. I had some work to do but I’d
be back when I was finished. The kid was as happy as an accordion player in a
Wisconsin polka bar. Little T.J. was snoozing away, the picture of infant
innocence.

“I’ll take good care of him, Mr.
Gunn,” Pete assured me. He had come a long way from the surliness he had shown
earlier. He was even grinning at the thought of playing inside the pod for
hours.

I’m not a complete idiot, though. I
carefully disconnected the pod’s controls. Pete could bang on the keyboard and
yank at the T-yokes on the control panel till his arms went numb; nothing would
happen—except in his imagination. I disconnected the communications link, too,
so he wouldn’t be able to hear the commotion that was due to come up. Wouldn’t
be able to call to anybody, either.

“Okay, captain,” I said to Pete. “You’re
in charge until I return.”

“Aye, aye, sir!” And he snapped me
a lopsided salute. The grin on his face told me that he knew what we were doing
was not strictly kosher, and he loved it.

I
carefully sealed
the pod’s hatch, then closed the connecting airlock hatch and sealed it. I hustled
down the corridor to the emergency airlock and my personal space suit, which I had
stashed there. It was going to be a race to get into a suit and out the airlock
before any of the security types poked their noses in this section of the
corridor. I had disabled the surveillance cameras earlier in the afternoon and
duly reported the system malfunction in the station’s log. By the time they got
them fixed I’d be long gone.

As if on cue, the intercom
loudspeakers in the corridor started blaring, “SAM GUNN, PLEASE REPORT TO
SECURITY AT ONCE. SAM GUNN, PLEASE REPORT TO SECURITY AT ONCE.”

They had found T.J. was missing and
had called security. The panic was on.

You know, the more you hurry the
slower things seem to go. Felt like an hour before I had the suit sealed up,
the helmet screwed on, and was opening the emergency airlock.

But once I popped outside, I got
that rush I always get when I’m back in space, on my own. My suit was old and
smelled kind of ripe, but it felt homey inside it. And there was the big curving
ball of Earth, huge and blue and sparkling in the sunlight. I just hung there
for a minute or so and watched the sunset. It happens fast from orbit, but the
array of colors are dazzling.

Now we were in shadow, on the night
side. All the better to sneak around in. The controls to my maneuvering pack
were on the equipment belt of my suit. I worked them as easily and
unconsciously as a pianist playing scales and jetted over to the laboratory
airlock on the innermost wheel.

I
kept my suit
radio tuned to the station’s intercom frequency. Plenty of jabbering going on.
They were looking for me and T.J. Starting a compartment-to-compartment search.
There would be plenty more disgruntled customers before this night was through,
but most of them were

Rockledge
people staying at my hotel at a ruinous discount, so what the hell did I care?

I
got to the lab’s
emergency airlock with no trouble. The light was dim, and I didn’t want to use
my helmet lamp. No sense advertising that I was out here. Over my shoulder the lights
of night-side cities and highways twinkled and glittered like a
connect-the-dots map of North America.

I
was just starting
to work the airlock’s control panel when the station shuddered. At first I thought
I had hiccupped or something, but almost immediately I realized that the
airlock hatch had shaken, shivered. Which meant that the whole damned station must
have vibrated, quivered for some reason.

Which meant trouble. The station
was big, massive. It wouldn’t rattle unless it had been hit by something
dangerous, or somebody had set off an explosion inside it, or—

I
spun around and my
eyes damn near popped out of my head. An escape pod had just fired off.
Somebody had set off the explosive separation bolts and detached it from the
station. It was floating away like a slow-motion cannonball.

And I knew exactly which pod it
was. Pete must have figured out how to override my disconnect and booted up the
pod’s mother-loving systems. Now he was riding off into the sunrise, on an
orbit of his own, with T.J. aboard. Son of a motherless she-dog!

I
jetted after the
goddamned pod. I didn’t stop to think about it, I just went out after it.
Everything else dropped out of my mind. All I could think of was that little
T.J. and Pete were in there and they stood a better than even chance of getting
themselves killed if somebody didn’t get to them before they sailed out beyond
reach. And it was all my fault.

If I had been really smart, I would
have just reported the loose pod over my suit radio and gone about my business
of burglarizing the Rockledge lab. The security people would have fired up
another pod to go out and rescue the kids, everybody in the station would be
plastered to the view ports or display screens to watch the scene, and I could
pilfer away inside the lab without being disturbed.

But I’m not that smart. I went
chasing after the damned pod. It was only after I had been barreling toward it
for a few minutes that I realized I had damned well better reach it because I didn’t
have enough juice in my jet pack to get me back to the station again.

Pete must be scared purple, I thought,
floating off into his own orbit. He apparently hadn’t figured out how to
reconnect the radio, because I

heard
nothing from the pod when I tapped into its assigned frequency. Maybe he was
yelling himself hoarse into the microphone, but he was getting no response.
Poor kid must have been crapping his pants by now.

Fortunately, he hadn’t lit off the
pod’s main thruster. That would’ve zoomed him out so far and so fast that I wouldn’t
have had a prayer of reaching him. He had just fired the explosive disconnect
bolts, which blew the pod away from the station. If he fired the main thruster
without knowing how to use the pod’s maneuvering jets, he’d either blast the
damned cannonball down into the atmosphere so steeply that he’d burn up like a
meteor, or he’d rocket himself out into a huge looping orbit that would take
days or even weeks to complete.

As it was, he was drifting in an
independent orbit, getting farther from the station every second. And I was
jamming along after him, hard as I could.

I
knew I had to
save enough of my fuel to slow myself down enough to latch onto the pod.
Otherwise I’d go sailing out past them like some idiotic jerk and spend the
rest of my numbered hours establishing my own personal orbit in empty space. I wondered
if anybody would bother to come out and pick up my body, once they knew what
had happened to me.

Okay, I was on-course. The pod was
growing bigger, fast, looming in front of me. I turned myself around and gave a
long squirt of my maneuvering jet to slow me down. Spun around again and saw
the pod coming up to smack me square in the visor. I was still coming on too
fast! Christ, was my flying rusty.

I
had to jink over
sideways a bit, or splatter myself against the pod. As the jets slid me over, I
yanked out the tether from my equipment belt and whipped it against the curving
hull of the pod as I zoomed by. Its magnetized head slid along the hull until
it caught on a handhold. The tether stretched a bit, like a bungee cord, and
then held.

As I pulled myself hand over hand
to the pod, I glanced back at the station. It was so far away now it looked
like a kid’s toy hanging against the stars.

Grunting, puffing, totally out of
shape for this kind of exercise, I finally . got to the pod’s airlock and
lifted open its outer hatch. I was pouring sweat from every square inch of my
skin. Got the hatch shut again, activated the pump, and as soon as the telltale
light turned green I popped the inner hatch with one hand and slid my visor up
with the other.

There sat Pete at the controls,
ecstatic as a Hungarian picking pockets. And little T.J. was snoozing happily
in the arms of Senator Jill Meyers.

“Hello,
Sam,” she said sweetly to me. “What kept you?”

It
was then that I realized I had been nothing but the tool of a superior brain.

Jill
had reconnected the pod’s systems and blown the explosive bolts. She had known
exactly what I was doing because she had stuck a microminiaturized video homing
beacon on the back of my shirt when she had clutched me so passionately there
in the doorway of her suite.

“It’s
standard equipment for a U.S. Senator,” she quipped, once she had plucked it
off my shirt.

For
once in my life I was absolutely speechless.

“When
you told me you were babysitting—
voluntarily
—I
started to smell a rodent,” Jill said as she almost absently showed Pete how to
maneuver the pod back to the station. “I knew you were up to something,” she
said to me.

I
just hung there in midair, all my hopes and plans in
a shambles.

“I’ve
got to be invisible now,” Jill said as we neared the station. She glided over
to the equipment locker built into the pod’s curving bulkhead and slid its
hatch open. “It’ll be a snug fit,” she said, eying it closely. “Glad I didn’t
have dessert tonight.”

“Wait
a minute!” I burst. “What’s going on? How did you—I mean, why—what’s going on?”
I felt like a chimpanzee thrown into a chess tournament.

As
she squeezed herself into the equipment locker, Jill said, “It’s simple, Sam.
You were walking with the baby when Pete here accidentally set off the pod.”

Pete
turned in his pilot’s chair and grinned at me.

“And
then you got into your suit, with little T.J., and rescued Pierre D’Argent’s
only son. You’re going to be a hero.”

“Pete
is D’Argent’s son?” I must have hit high C.

“In
return for your bravery in this thrilling rescue, D’Argent will let you have
the space-sickness cure. So everything works out fine.”

Like
I said, I was just the tool of a superior brain.

“Now,”
said Jill, “you’d better help Pete to make rendezvous with the station and
re-berth this pod.” And with that she blew me a kiss, then slid the hatch of
the equipment locker shut.

It
didn’t work out exactly as Jill had it figured. I mean, D’Argent was furious,
at first, that I’d let his kid into one of the pods and then left him alone.
But his wife was enormously grateful, and Pete played his role to a T. He lied
with a straight face to his own father and everybody else. I figured that one
day, when D’Argent realized how his son had bamboozled him, he’d be truly proud
of the lad. Probably send him to law school.

In the meantime, D’Argent did
indeed let me have the space-sickness cure. Grudgingly. “Only for a limited
period of testing,” he growled. Mrs. D’Argent had prodded him into it, in
return for my heroic rescue of their only son. She got a considerable amount of
help from Jill—who sneaked off the pod after all the commotion had died down.

Larry and Melinda didn’t know
whether they should be sore at me or not. They had been scared stiff when T.J.
turned up missing, and then enormously relieved when I handed them their little
bundle of joy, safe and sound, gurgling happily. I knew Larry had forgiven me
when he reminded me, almost sheepishly, about changing the name of the magnetic
bumpers to Karsh Shields.

So we all got what we wanted. Or
part of it, at least.

The space-sickness cure helped
Heaven a lot. The hotel staggered into the black, not because honeymooners took
a sudden fancy to it, but because the word started to spread that it was an
ideal spot for children! It still cost more than your average luxury vacation,
but wealthy families started coming up to Heaven. My zero-gee sex palace
eventually became a weightless nursery. And—many years later—a retirement home.
But that’s another story.

I
licensed the
Karsh
Shields to Rockledge. A promise is a promise, and
the money was good because Rockledge had the manufacturing capacity to make
three times as many of the shields as I could. And, once the hotel started
showing a profit, I let D’Argent buy it from me. He’s the one who turned it
into a nursery. I was long gone by then.