The Sam Gunn Omnibus (97 page)

THE OUTLOOK WASN’T
brilliant that evening. The
prosecution had presented what looked like an airtight case. I had no witnesses
except Sam, and in our discussions of the case he hadn’t once refuted the
prosecution’s testimony.

“You really wiped out the colony of
lichenoids?” I asked him repeatedly.

His only answer was a shrug and an
enigmatic, “They’re not there, are they?”

“And
you actually banged that scientist on the head with an oxy bottle?”

He
grinned at the memory of it. “I sure did,” he admitted, impishly.

We
were having dinner in our hotel suite. Sam couldn’t show his face in a
restaurant, that’s how much public opinion had turned against him. We had
needed six security guards just to walk us from the courtroom to the hotel.

“But
he wasn’t a scientist,” Sam added, heaping broiled scungilli on his plate.
Selene’s aquaculture produced the best shellfish off-Earth, and the hotel’s
chef was a Neapolitan master artist.

“He
was a science writer for DULL,” Sam went on. “Most of the so-called scientists
on Europa were public-relations flacks and administrators.”

“Like
Erskine?”

He
nodded. “They weren’t doing research. They were busy pumping out media hype
about their great green discovery.”

“That’s
neither here nor there, Sam,” I said, picking at my own clams
posilipo.

“Isn’t
it?” He made a know-it-all smile.

“Sam,
are you keeping something from me?” I asked.

“Me?”

“If
you’ve got some information that will help win this case, some facts,
witnesses—anything! We need it now, Sam. I’m supposed to open your defense
tomorrow morning and I don’t have a thing to go on.”

“Except
my testimony,” he said.

That’s
what I was afraid of.

YET THE NEXT
morning I put Sam on the witness
chair and asked him one single question: “Mr. Gunn, can you tell us in your own
words what took place on Europa during the time you were there?”

“Soitinly!”
Sam said, grinning.

The
judges were not amused. Neither was the Beryllium Blonde, sitting at the
prosecution’s table, watching Sam intently, her blue eyes focused on him like
twin lasers.

THE WHOLE THING
started—Sam said—with the Porno
Twins. Cindy and Mindy.

You
gotta understand that working those mining ships out there in the Asteroid Belt
is hard, lonely work. Sure, there are women among the crews, but there’s always
eight or nine more guys than gals on those factory ships, and the guys
get—well, the polite word for it is horny.

(The chief judge huffed at that but
didn’t interrupt. The Toad snorted. The Beryllium Blonde smiled.)

The Porno Twins supplied a needed
service for the miners. Virtual sex, on demand. Oh sure, there were VR services
from Earth-Moon, but the time lag meant that you couldn’t do real-time
simulations: you had to buy a VR program that was prepackaged. It might have a
few variables, but you more or less got a regular routine, take it or leave it.

The Porno Twins had come out to the
belt and established themselves in a spacecraft that could swing around the area
and maneuver close enough to the factory ships to do real-time simulations. You
know, positive feedback and all that. You could
talk
with ‘em, and they’d respond to you. It was great!

Well, anyway, the guys told me it
was great. Some of the women used them, too, but that’s their business. I never
did. Virtual reality is terrific and all that, but I prefer the real thing. I want
to feel some warmth instead of grappling with an electronic fantasy.

I
saw the twins’
advertisements, of course. They were really attractive: two very good-looking
dolls who were identical down to their belly buttons, except that one was
right-handed and the other was a lefty. Mindy and Cindy. Geniuses at what they
did. They were natural redheads, but with VR they could be any color or shade
you wanted.

It was the idea of their being
twins that made them so popular. Every guy’s got a fantasy about that and they
were happy to fulfill your wildest dreams, anything you asked for. And it was
all perfectly safe, of course: they were usually a million kilometers away,
feeding your fantasy at the speed of light with a real-time virtual reality
link.

I
had thought about
dropping in on them for a real visit, you know, in the flesh. Me and every
other guy in the belt. But they stayed buttoned up inside their own spacecraft;
no visitors. None of us knew what kind of defenses they might have on their
craft, but I guess we all realized that their best defense was the threat of
leaving the belt.

So nobody molested them. If anybody
gave even a hint that he might try to sneak out to their ship, his fellow miners
dissuaded him—as they say—forcefully. Nobody wanted the Twins to leave us alone
out in the dark and cold between Mars and Jupiter.

It was sheer coincidence that I happened
to be the closest ship to theirs when their life-support system malfunctioned.
I guess I’m lucky that way, if you can call it lucky when lightning strikes
you.

I
was trying to
repair the mining boat
Clementine
when I heard their distress
call. Most mining boats have minimal crews;
Clementine
was the first to be designed to run with no crew at
all. Except it didn’t work right.

Mining boats attach themselves to
an asteroid and grind up the rock or metal, sort it by chemical composition,
and store it in their holds until they make rendezvous with a factory boat and
unload the ores.
Clementine
was chewing up its
target asteroid all right, but there was a glitch in the mass spectrometer and
the idiot computer running the boat couldn’t figure out which stream of ore
should go into which hold, so it stopped all operations halfway into the
program and just clung to the asteroid like a scared spider, doing absolutely
nothing except costing me money.

So I jetted out to
Clementine
from Ceres in my personal torch ship, leaving the company’s important business
in the capable and well-trained hands of my crackerjack staff. I figured they
could run things for maybe four-five days before driving me into bankruptcy.

So I’m in a battered old hard suit
hanging weightless with my head stuck in the computer bay and my feet dangling
up near the navigation sensors when the radio bleeps.

“This is SEX069,” said a sultry
female voice. “We have an emergency situation. Our life support system has
suffered a malfunction. Our computer indicates we have only eleven point four
days until the air recycling scrubbers fail completely. We need help
immediately.”

I
didn’t have to
look up the IAA registry to find out who
SEX069
was. That was the Porno Twins’ spacecraft! I pulled
my head out of the computer bay, cracking my helmet on the edge of the hatch
hard enough to make me see stars, and jack-knifed myself into an upright
position by the set of navigation sensors. Not easy to do in a hard suit, by
the way.

Being designed to operate uncrewed,
Clementine
didn’t have an observation port or even cameras outside its dumb hull. But it
had a radio, so I squirted off a message to the Twins as fast as my gloved
fingers could hit the keypad.

“This is Sam Gunn,” I said, in my
deepest, manliest voice. “Received your distress call and am on my way to you.”
Then I couldn’t resist adding, “Have no fear, Sam is here!”

I
got out of
Clementine
fast as I could and into my personal torch ship,
Joker.
While I was taking off my hard suit I had the Twins
squirt me their location and their computer’s diagnostic readings.

Their craft was several million
kilometers away, coasting in a Sun-centered orbit not far from the asteroid
Vesta.

Now,
Joker’s
built for my comfort—and for speed. Her fusion-MHD drive could accelerate at a
full g continuously, as long as she had reaction mass to fire out her nozzles.
Any other rock jockey in the belt would have had to coast along for weeks on
end to reach the Twins. I could zip out to Vesta in a matter of hours,
accelerating like a bat out of sheol.

“SPARE US THE
profanity, Mr. Gunn,” said the
Toad.

“And kindly stick to the facts of
the case,” the chief judge added, frowning. “We don’t need a sales pitch for
your personal yacht.”

Sam shrugged and glanced at me. I realized
that if he was trying to drum up interest in
Joker,
he must be feeling pretty desperate, financially.

THE POINT IS
—Sam blithely continued—that
Joker
was the only craft in the belt that had a chance
in ...
in the solar system, of helping
the Twins. Nobody else could get to them in eleven days or less.

But as I sat in the bridge, in my
form-accommodating, reclinable swiveling command chair, which has built-in massage
and heat units (the chief judge glowered at Sam), and looked into the details
of the Twins’ diagnostics, I realized they were in even deeper trouble than I had
thought. The graphs on the screens showed that not only had their recycler
failed, they were also losing air; must’ve been punctured by a centimeter-sized
asteroid, punched right through their armor and sprung a leak in their main air
tank. Maybe it knocked out their recycling system, too.

Their real problem was with their
automated maintenance equipment. How could their system allow the air recycling
equipment to go down? And their damned outside robot was supposed to fix
punctures as soon as they happened. Theirs didn’t. It was just sitting on the
outer skin of the hull, frozen into immobility. Maybe an asteroid had dinged
it, too. Their diagnostics didn’t show why the robot wasn’t working.

They needed air, or at least
oxygen. And they needed it in a hurry. Even if I got to them in a day or so and
fixed the leak and repaired their recycling system they wouldn’t have enough
air to survive.

I
spent the next
few hours chewing on their problem. Or really, getting the best computers I could
reach to chew on it.
Joker
has some really sophisticated
programs in its access (the chief judge scowled again) but I also contacted my
headquarters on Ceres and even requested time on the IAA system. I had to come
up with a solution that would work. And fast.

By the time I had showered, put on
a fresh set of coveralls, and taken a bite of food, the various analyses
started showing up on the multiple display screens in
Jokers
very
comfortable yet efficiently laid-out bridge. (“Mr. Gunn!” all three judges
yelped.)

Okay, so here’s the situation. The
Twins’ air is leaking out through the puncture. I can fix the puncture in ten minutes,
while their dumb robot sits on its transistors and does nothing, but they’ll
still run out of air in a couple of days. I can give them oxygen from
Jokers
water tanks— electrolyze the water, that’s simple enough. But then I won’t have
enough reaction mass to get away and we’ll both be in trouble.

Now, I’ve got to admit, the thought
of being marooned off Vesta with the Porno Twins had a certain appeal to it.
But when I thought it over, I figured that although being with them could be
great fun,
dying
with them wasn’t what I
wanted to do.

Besides,
they flatly refused to even consider letting me inside their leaking craft.

“Oh,
no, Mr. Gunn!” they said, in unison. “We could never allow you to board our
.ship.”

Cindy and Mindy were on my main
display screen, two lovely redheads with sculpted cheekbones and emerald-green
eyes and lips just trembling with emotion.