The Sam Gunn Omnibus (83 page)

“But it’ll just disappear into the
black hole!”

“So what?”

“It won’t be an operational
facility.”

“How do you know what it’ll be
doing inside the event horizon? The gravity field will stretch out its signals,
won’t it?”

“Theoretically,” I answered.

“Then we’ll be getting signals from
the probe for years, right? Even after it goes past the event horizon.”

“I guess so. But that doesn’t prove
the probe will be operating inside the black hole, Sam.”

“If the mother-humping lawyers want
to prove that it’s not working, let ‘em jump into the black hole after it. And
kiss my ass on the way down!”

I
argued with him
for more than an hour while he got the instrument pod together and revved up
the EVA craft. What he wanted to do was
dangerous.
Maybe adventure freaks would like to skim around
the event horizon of a black hole. Me, I don’t feel really safe unless there’s
good California soil shaking beneath my feet.

But Sam would not be denied. Maybe
he was a danger freak himself. Maybe he was desperate for the money he thought
he could make. Maybe he just wanted to screw all the lawyers on Earth,
especially that blonde.

He didn’t even put on a pressure
suit. He just clambered up into the

cockpit
of the EVA craft, slammed its hatch, and worked one of its spidery arms to pick
up the instrument pod.

Reluctantly
I went back to the control center to monitor Sam’s mission.

“Stay
well clear of the event horizon,” I warned him over the radio. “I don’t know
enough about Einstein to give you firm parameters....”

Sam
was no fool. He listened to my instructions. He released the instruments well
clear of the event horizon. But the pod just orbited around the faint violet
haze that marked Einstein’s position. It didn’t go spiraling into it.

“Goddam
mother-humping no-good son of a lawyer!”

Sam
jockeyed the EVA craft into a matching orbit and gave the pod a push inward.
Not enough. Then another, swearing a blue streak every instant.

“That’s
close enough,” I yelled into the microphone, sweating bullets. “The event
horizon fluctuates, Sam. You mustn’t...”

I
swear the black hole reached out and grabbed him.
The event horizon sort of burped and engulfed Sam’s craft. I know it’s
impossible, but that’s what happened.

“Hey!”
he yelled. “Heyyyyyy!”

According
to everything we knew about black holes up to that moment, Sam was being
squeezed by Einstein’s immense gravitational forces, torn apart, crushed, mashed,
squashed, pulverized.

“What’s
going onnnn?” Sam’s radio voice stretched out eerily, like in an echo chamber.

“What’s
going on?” I asked back.

“It’s
like sliding down a chuuute!”

“You’re
not being pulled apart?”

“Hell
nooo! But I can’t see anything. Like falling down an elevator shaaaft!”

Sam
should have been crushed. But he wasn’t. His radio messages were being
stretched out, but apparently he himself was not. He was falling into the black
hole on a one-way trip, swallowed alive.

I
started to laugh. We had named the black hole
exactly right. Inside the event horizon space-time was being warped, all right.
But Sam was now part of
that
continuum and to him,
everything seemed normal. Our universe, the one we’re in, would have seemed
weirdly distorted to him if he could see it.

It
had all been there in old Albert’s equations all along, if we had only had the
sense enough to realize it.

Sam Gunn, feisty, foulmouthed,
womanizing, fast-talking Sam Gunn had discovered a shortcut to the stars, a
space-time warp that one day would allow us to get around the limits of
speed-of-light travel. That black hole was not a dead-end route to oblivion; it
was a space-time warp that opened somewhere/somewhen else in the universe. Or maybe
in another universe altogether.

But it was a
one-way
route.

Sam gave his life to his discovery.
He was on a one-way trip to God knows where. Maybe there’d be kindly aliens at
the other end of the warp to greet him and give him their version of the Nobel
Prize.

I
got the
terrestrial Nobel, of course. And now I’m heading up an enormous team of
scientists who’re studying Einstein and trying to figure out how to put black
hole warps to practical use.

And Sam? Who knows where he is?

But you can still hear him. Thanks
to Einstein’s time-stretching effects, you can hear Sam swearing and cussing
every moment, all the way down that long, long slide to whatever’s on the other
side of the warp.

And according to Einstein (Albert),
we’ll be able to hear Sam yelling forever. Forever.

JADE LEANED BACK IN THE YIELDING WARMTH OF THE FORM-
shaping
chair, suddenly weary and drained. She turned off the computer on her lap. The
interview with Professor Goodman was on its way to Selene. The final interview.
Her long trek after Sam Gunn’s story was at last finished.

She felt as if she had been
struggling all her life to reach the top of a mountain, and now that she had
done it, there was nothing to see, nothing more to do. The challenge had been met,
and now she was surrounded by emptiness. There was no feeling of triumph, or
even accomplishment. She was merely tired and empty and alone on a pinnacle
with nowhere else to go.

She leaned her head back into the
chair’s comforting warmth. The dormitory room that the university had given her
was more luxurious than most of the hotels she had slept in. The chair adjusted
itself to her body shape and temperature, enfolding her like a gently pulsating
womb. How pleasant it would be, Jade thought, to just close my eyes and
sleep—forever.

But the smart screen on the wall of
the small room showed a view of Titan’s spaceport out on the murky surface, and
the sleek torch ship that had landed there only minutes earlier. The
retractable dome was rising silently over it. Soon the ship would be disgorging
its payload of passengers and cargo. In another two days it would start back
toward the big scientific base in Mars orbit. And Jade would be on it, heading
back toward Selene, toward the habitats crowding the Earth-Moon system, toward
the world of her birth.

And what then? she asked herself.
What then?

She drifted into an exhausted
dreamless sleep. When the phone buzzed it startled her
;
her nerves jumped as if an emergency klaxon were hooting.

Her laptop had slipped to the
thickly carpeted floor. Thinking idly that the university life had all sorts of
unwritten perquisites, Jade picked up the tiny box and pressed its
on
switch.

Spence
Johansen’s grinning face filled the little screen.

“Hello
there,” he said.

Jade
waited for him to go on, knowing that this was either a recorded message or a
call from the Earth-Moon area, hours distant even at the lightspeed of video
communications.

“Hey,
Jade, say something! I’m here. On Titan. Up in the flight lounge. Surprised?”

She
nearly dropped the computer again.

“Spence?
You’re here? It’s really you?”

“Sure,
I just arrived.”

“I’ll
be right up!”

Jade
tossed the computer onto her bed and dashed for the door, all fatigue
forgotten, all the weariness melted away. By the time she tore through the
corridors and rode the power stairs up to the flight lounge, Spence already had
a pair of tall frosted drinks sitting on the bar, waiting for her.

She
threw herself into his arms. Their long passionate kiss drew admiring stares
and a few low whistles from the other new arrivals and regulars in the lounge.

“Whatever
... how did you ... why ... ?” Jade had a million questions bubbling within
her.

Johansen
smiled, almost sheepishly. “Ol’
Jefferson
got kind of boring after you went away. I missed you, Jade. Missed you a lot.”

“So
much that you came all the way out here?”

He
shrugged.

She
perched on the bar-stool next to his, ignoring the drink standing before her,
all her attention on this man who had traveled across half the solar system. To
be with her.

“I
missed you, too, Spence.”

“Did
you?”

“Enormously.”
She suddenly grinned maliciously. “Considering where we are, I might say
titanically.”

Spence
Johansen threw his head back and laughed a genuine, hearty, full-throated
laugh. And Jade knew that she loved him.

She
took his big hand in her little one and tugged him off the bar-stool. “Come on,”
she said. “There’s so much I’ve got to tell you. Come on to my room where we
can be alone together.”

Without
another word, Spence allowed the elfin little woman to lead him away.

THERE IS NO
natural day/night cycle on Titan.
Ten times farther from the Sun than Earth is, Saturn’s major moon is always in gloomy
twilight, at best. Usually its murky, clouded atmosphere even blots out the
pale light from Saturn itself.

The
university base kept Greenwich Mean Time. The lights in the windowless base’s
corridors and public areas dimmed at 2000 hours and went down to a “night”
equivalent at 2200, then came up to “morning” at 0700.

Jade
and Spence had no way of knowing the time. He had purposely put his shaving kit
in front of the dorm room’s digital clock, so that from the bed they could not
see it. The only light in the room was from the video window, which they had
set on views of the methane sea up on the surface: shadowy, muted, almost
formless.

Jade
told Spence about all her discoveries, and the pain that they brought. He
seemed utterly surprised when she explained that she was probably Sam Gunn’s
daughter.

“Talk
about kismet,” he whispered low. “For both of us.”

“If
Sam were alive he could give the bride away,” Jade said.

“And
then be my best man.” Spence chuckled softly in the shadows. “Just like him to
turn the ordinary rules upside down.”

They
made love again, languidly, unhurriedly. They slept and then made love once more.
And talked. Talked of the past, of the wondrous ways that lives can intertwine,
of the surprises and sheer luck—good or bad—that can determine a person’s fate.
Talked of the pain one person can inflict on another without even knowing it.
Talked of the happiness that can be had when two people click just right, as
they had done.

Suddenly
a new question popped into Jade’s mind. “How many children do you have?” she
asked. “Am I going to be a stepmother?”

In
the darkened room she could barely see him shake his head. “Never stayed married
long enough to have kids. But now...” His voice drifted into silence.

“I
want babies. Lots of them.”

“Me
too,” he said. “At least two.”

“A
boy and a girl.”

“Right.”

“And
then maybe two more.”

He
laughed softly. “Maybe we ought to have twins “

“That
would be more efficient, wouldn’t it?”

“Want
a big wedding? The main chapel at Selene and all the trimmings?” ]ade shook her
head. “I never even thought about it. No, I don’t think I know enough people to
invite.”

“My
parents are gone, but we could ask your adoptive mother to come up.”

“No!”
Jade snapped. “She abandoned me. I haven’t seen her for seventeen years. Let it
stay that way.”

“But
she’s the only kin you have.”