The Sam Gunn Omnibus (94 page)

Which is how William I became the
first Pope to celebrate a public mass on the Moon. On Christmas Eve, in Selene’s
main plaza. The whole population turned out, even Sam.

“I figure about five percent of
this crowd is Roman Catholic,” Sam said, looking over the throng. We were
seated up on the stage of the theater shell, behind the makeshift altar.
Several thousand people jammed the theater’s tiers of seats and spilled out
onto the grass of the plaza’s greenway.

“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “For
one hour, we’re all united.”

Sam grinned. The Pope didn’t have
his best ceremonial robes with him; he offered the mass in a plain white outfit.
“They’re doing The Nutcracker this evening,” Sam whispered to me. “Wanna see
it?”

Low-gravity ballet. Once I had
dreams of becoming a dancer on the Moon. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

“Good,” said Sam.

We watched the elaborate ritual of
the mass, and the thousands of transfixed men and women and children standing
out on the plaza, their eyes on the Pope. I spotted a slim, dark-skinned young
man in a trim mustache and beard who looked awfully familiar.

“Y’know,” Sam whispered, “maybe I’ve
been wrong about this all along.”

I
nodded.

“I mean,” he went on, “if a guy
really wants to make a fortune, he ought to start a religion.”

I
turned and stared
at him. “You wouldn’t!”

“Maybe that’s what I ought to do.”

“Oh Sam, you devil! Start a
religion? You?”

“Who knows.”

I
tried to glare at
him but couldn’t.

“And another thing,” he whispered. “If
we ever do get married, you’ll have to live here on the Moon with me. I’m not
going back to Earth; it’s too dangerous down there.”

My heart skipped
a couple of beats. That was the first time Sam had ever admitted there was
any kind of chance he’d marry me. He shrugged good-naturedly. “Merry
Christmas, Jill.” “Merry Christmas,” I replied, thinking that it might turn out
to be a very interesting new year indeed.

“SO DID YOU AND SAM EVER GET MARRIED?” JADE ASKED.

Sitting
in one of the comfortable armchairs in the torch ship’s lounge, Jill Meyers
smiled enigmatically. “Not yet. I got the little SOB to within an eyelash of
saying ‘I do’ a couple of times, but both times he scampered out on me before
we could make it official.”

“And
now ... ?”

“Why
do you think I’ve hired this ship? I’ll get him this time. I want to see the
look on his face when he sees me—with a minister at my side.”

Despite
herself Jade laughed.

“You
know, there’s somebody else on this ship you should talk to,” Meyers said. “He
was working with Sam when Sam got accused of genocide.”

“Genocide!”

“You
haven’t heard about that one? Well, I guess they did hush it up afterward. But
still—”

“He’s
on this ship? I’ve got to interview him!”

Meyers nodded. “I’ll introduce you to him. His name’s Steve Wright.”

WITHOUT HESITATION, JILL MEYERS PHONED STEVE WRIGHT
and
invited him to the ship’s lounge for a drink. He turned out to be a pleasant
enough fellow, somewhere near fifty, Jade judged. He had a shy, almost boyish manner,
and unruly sandy hair that tended to flop over his forehead at the slightest
excuse.

Once Jade started asking questions
about Sam Gunn, his shyness turned to a reluctant, almost hostile series of monosyllabic
grunts.

Until Jill Meyers told him, “Jade
produced the video biography about Sam.”

A new light dawned in Wright’s
eyes. “I haven’t seen it, but I heard it treated Sam pretty well.”

A little more conversation and a
couple of drinks from the robot-tended bar, and Wright began to relax and talk
nonstop.

“Look, I was the closest thing to a
lawyer that Sam ever had. I mean, he
hated
lawyers. Probably that’s because he was always getting himself into legal
troubles, you know, operating out at the edge of the law the way he always did.

“I don’t know if he really fell
into that black hole or not. And I guess I don’t really care. Maybe he found
real aliens out there and maybe not. We’ll see if he brings any back with him.”

Jade made a sympathetic smile, then
asked, “Why are you running all the way out to the Kuiper Belt to meet Sam?”

“Why? Because I feel responsible
for the little guy, that’s why. He went tootling off to find Planet X with that
university geek and left behind, like, a ton and three-quarters of lawsuits.”

“But he’s been away so long the
statute of limitations on all the suits has run out,” Jill Myers pointed out.

“Maybe not. That Beryllium Blonde
that he’s tangled with has come up with the idea that since Sam claims he was
in a space-time warp, time hasn’t passed for him the way it has for the rest of
us and therefore the statutes of limitations should be considered suspended for
all the time Sam was allegedly in the warp!”

“What?”
Meyers snapped. “That’s ridiculous!”

“Is
it? She’s claiming that if time hasn’t elapsed for him then it shouldn’t elapse
for the lawsuits. And the courts are taking it very seriously.” “No!”

“So
I’m going out there to warn the little bugger that his legal troubles aren’t
over. Not by a long shot.”

“The
Beryllium Blonde?” asked Jade. “Is her name Jennifer something?” “Marlow,”
Wright said. “You don’t know about her?” “A little
,
”
said Jade.

“Or about the Toad, either? Cheez, what kind of a producer are you? Didn’t
you do any research before you came aboard this torch ship?

YOU MIGHT HAVE KNOWN-SAID STEVE WRIGHT-THAT THE
very
first person to be hauled in to trial by the spanking-new Interplanetary
Tribunal would be Sam Gunn. And on trial for his life, at that.

Things might not have been too bad,
even so, if it weren’t for Sam’s old nemesis, the Beryllium Blonde. She wanted
Sam’s hide tacked onto her office wall. Sam, of course, wanted her body.
Anyplace.

And then there was the Toad, as
well.

Sam’s voice had been the loudest
one in the whole solar system against letting lawyers get established
off-Earth.

“When it comes to interplanetary
jurisprudence,” he often said—at the top of his leathery lungs—”what we need is
less juris and more prudence!”

But it was inevitable that the
Interplanetary Astronautical Authority would set up a court to enforce its
rulings and carry Earth-style legalities out to the edge of the frontier. After
all, the Asteroid Belt was being mined by little guys like Sam and big
corporations like Rockledge Industries.

And major consortiums like
Diversified Universities & Laboratories, Ltd. (which Sam called DULL) were
already pushing the exploration of Jupiter and its many moons.

When the scientists announced the
discovery of life on the Jovian moon Europa, of course, the environmentalists
and theologians and even the Right To Lifers
demanded
that
laws—and lawyers—be established in space to protect it.

And Sam wound up on trial. Not just
for murder. Genocide.

Me, I was the closest thing to a
lawyer in Sam’s then-current company, Asteroidal Resources, Inc. Sam had
started up and dissolved more corporations than Jupiter has moons, usually making
a quick fortune on some audacious scheme and then blowing it on something even
wilder. Asteroidal Resources, Inc. was devoted to mining heavy metals from the
Asteroid Belt, out beyond Mars, and smelting them down to refined alloys as his
factory ships sailed back to the Earth-Moon system.

The company was based on solid
economics, provided needed resources to the Earth-Moon system’s manufacturers,
and was turning a tidy—if not spectacular—profit. For Sam, this was decidedly
unusual. Even respectable.

Sam ran a tight company. His ships
were highly automated, with bare-bones skeleton crews. There were only six of
us in ARI’s headquarters in Ceres, the largest of the asteroids. None of us was
a real lawyer; Sam wouldn’t allow any of them into his firm. My paralegal
certificate was as far as Sam was willing to go. He snarled with contempt when
other companies began bringing their lawyers into the belt.

And when I said that the office was
in
Ceres, that’s exactly what I mean. Even though it’s the biggest chunk of rock
in the belt, Ceres is only a little over nine hundred kilometers across; barely
big enough to be round, instead of an irregular lump, like the other asteroids.
No air, hardly any gravity. Mining outfits like Sam’s and big-bad Rockledge and
others had honeycombed the rock to set up their local headquarters inside it.

My official title was Director,
Human Resources. That meant that I was the guy who handled personnel problems,
payroll, insurance, health claims, and lawsuits. Sam always had three or four
lawsuits pending; he constantly skirted the fringes of legality—which was why
he didn’t want lawyers in space, of course. He had enough trouble with the
Earthbound variety.

The Beryllium Blonde, by the way,
was a corporate lawyer, one of the best, with a mind as sharp and vindictive as
her body was lithe and curvaceous. A deadly combination, as far as Sam was
concerned.

The entire Human Resources
Department in ARI consisted of me and a computer. I had very sophisticated
programs to work with, you know, but there was no other human in Human
Resources.

Still, I thought things were humming
along smoothly enough in our underground offices until the day Sam came
streaking back home on a high-g burn, raced straight from the landing pad to my
office without even taking off his flight suit, and announced: “Orville, you’re
gonna be my legal counsel at the trial. Start boning up on interplanetary law.”

My actual name is Steven. Steven
Achernar Wright. But for some reason Sam called me Orville. Sometimes Wilbur,
but mostly Orville.

“Legal counsel?” I echoed, bounding
out of my chair so quickly that I sailed completely over my desk in the low
gravity. “Trial? For what? What’re you charged with?”

He shook his head. “Murder, I think.
Maybe worse.”

And he scooted into his office. All
I really saw of the little guy was a sawed-off blur of motion topped with
rusty-red hair. Huckleberry Finn at Mach 5.

I
learned about the
charges against Sam almost immediately. My phone screen chimed and the
impressive black and silver seal of the International Astronautical Authority
appeared on its screen, followed an eye-blink later by a very legal-looking
summons and an arrest warrant.

The charges were attempted murder,
grand larceny, violation of sixteen—count ‘em, sixteen—different IAA
environmental regulations and assault and battery with willful intent to cause grievous
bodily harm.

Oh yes, and the aforementioned
charge of genocide.

All that happened before lunch.

I
TAPPED INTO
the best legal programs on the sys
and, after half a day’s reading, arranged to surrender Sam to the IAA
authorities at Selene City, on the Moon. He yowled and complained every
centimeter of the way. Even when we landed on the Moon Sam screeched loud
enough to set up echoes through Selene City’s underground corridors, right up
to the headquarters of the IAA.

The IAA chief administrator cheerfully
released Sam on his own recognizance. He and Sam were old virtual billiards
buddies, and besides Sam couldn’t get away; his name, photo, fingerprints,
retinal patterns, and neutron scattering index were posted at every rocket port
on the Moon. Sam was stuck on the Moon, at least until his trial.

Maybe longer. The World Government’s
penal colony was at Farside, where convicts couldn’t even see Earth in their
sky and spent their time trying to scrounge helium-three from the regolith,
competing with nanomachines that did the job for practically nothing for the
big corporations like Masterson and Wankle.