The Sam Gunn Omnibus (102 page)

Sam
shrugged. “I’m not out to punish anybody. Live and let live has always been my
motto.”

“I
see.”

“Of
course,” Sam went on, grinning impishly, “once you admit publicly that the
lichenoids on Europa are a genetic experiment and not native life-forms, then
the embargo on commercial development in the Jupiter system ends. Right?”

This
time Weatherwax kept his froggy eyes closed for several moments before he
conceded, “Right.”

Sam
jumped to. his feet. “Good! That oughtta do it.”

The
Toad remained seated. There was no attempt on the part of either of them to
shake hands. Sam scuttled toward the door and I got up and went after him.

But
Sam stopped at the door and turned back to the Toad. “Oh, yeah, one other
thing. Now that we’ve come to this agreement, there’s no further need for you
to keep the scientists bottled up on Europa. Let Dr. O’Toole come back here.”

Weatherwax
tried to glare at Sam but it was pathetically weak.

“And
tell your sexy lawyer underling to take her claws off O’Toole’s husband,” Sam
added, with real iron in his voice. “Give those two kids a chance to patch up
their marriage.”

Without
even waiting for a response from the Toad, he yanked the door open and stepped
outside. With me right behind him.

BY DINNERTIME THAT
evening the media were running
stories about how Wankle’s chief public-relations consultant, Dr. Clyde Erskine
of the University of Texas at Austin, had made a slight misinterpretation about
the lichenoids on Europa. Sam whooped gleefully as we watched the report in our
hotel suite.

He
switched to the business news, which was also about the Europa “misinterpretation,”
but which included the fact that the IAA had decided to lift the embargo on
commercial development of the Jupiter system.

Sam
howled and yelped and danced across our dinner table.

“Weatherwax
moved fast,” I said, still sitting on the hard-backed chair while Sam did a soft-shoe
around our dinner plates.

We
had already been notified by the IAA that Sam’s ore carriers were no longer
embargoed and Asteroidal Resources, Inc. was back in business.

Sam
deftly jumped down to the floor and sat on the edge of the table, facing me.

“He’s
got the power to move fast, Orville. The Toad has a reputation for
good-deed-doing, but he’s really a power-clutching sonofabitch who’s spent the
past ninety years or so worming his way into the top levels of a dozen of the
solar system’s biggest corporations.”

“And
the IAA,” I added.

“And
he founded DULL to serve as a cloak for his plan to grab the whole Jupiter
system for himself,” Sam went on, a little more soberly. “This plot of his has
been years in the making. Decades.”

“And
now it’s unraveled, thanks to you.”

Sam
pretended to blush. “I am quietly proud,” he said softly.

I
leaned back in my chair. “To think that none of this
would have happened if it hadn’t been for the Porno Twins....”

Sam’s
face went quizzical. “Oh, it would have happened, one way or the other,” he
said, with a puckish grin. “The Twins just provided the opportunity.”

I
gaped at him. “You mean you were after Weatherwax
all along? From before ...” His grin told me more than any words. “Then your
testimony was a fabrication?”

“No,
no, no,” Sam insisted, jumping to his feet so he could loom over me. That’s
hard to do, at his height, so I stayed seated and let him loom. “The Twins’
emergency was real and the only way I could save them was to make that dash out
to Jupiter, just like I testified.”

“Really?”

He
shrugged. “More or less.”

“You
had this all scoped out from the beginning, didn’t you? You
knew
the
whole business
and ...”
I
stopped talking, lost in stunned admiration for Sam’s long-range planning. And
guts.

He
was making like a Jack-o’-lantern again. “Why do you think Weatherwax got
himself appointed a judge?”

“So
he could make sure you were found guilty,” I said.

“Yeah,
maybe, if things worked out the way he wanted them to. But he also wanted to be
on the judge’s panel so that if things didn’t work out his way, he could stop
the trial and cut a deal with me.”

“Which
is what he did.”

“You
betcha!”

“But why didn’t you take Dr. O’Toole
back with you? You left her on Europa.”

“Had to,” Sam said. “Majerkurth
showed up with his team and threatened to blow holes in
Joker
if I didn’t let her go. I tried to drop an empty oxygen bottle on him, but it missed
him and hit one of the PR flacks he had brought along with him.”

I
laughed. “So that
was the basis of the assault charge.”

“And the attempted murder, too. I would’ve
offed Majerkurth if I’d thought it would’ve helped Anitra. As it was, I was
outgunned. So I had to let her go—after promising her that I’d fix everything
toot sweet.”

“Well, you did that, all right. I’ll
bet she’s on her way home to her husband right now.”

“I hope so.”

I
reached for my
glass of celebratory champagne and took a sip. Then I remembered:

“The Twins! What happened to them?”

THAT WAS KINDA
sad—Sam told me.

I
zoomed back to
Vesta at three-plus gs with
Clementine
full of European ice that
Jokers
electrolysis system was converting into oxygen for
them and hydrogen for her own fusion torch.

(I noticed that Sam didn’t slip in
a sales pitch for
Joker.
He was feeling much
better now.)

Once I got there, I could’ve patched
their leaky air tank and booted up their recycling system and even fixed their
stupid maintenance robot—all from the comfort of my bridge in
Joker.
But I wanted to see them! In the flesh! I was so doggone close to them that I fibbed
a little and told them I had to come aboard to make the necessary repairs.

Mindy and Cindy stared at me from my
display screen for a long time, not moving, not even blinking. All I could see
of them was their beautiful identical faces with their cascading red hair and their
bare suggestive shoulders. It was enough to start me perspiring.

“We never let
anyone
come aboard our ship, Mr. Gunn,” said the one on the left. The one on the right
shook her head, as if to reinforce her twin’s statement.

“Call me Sam,” I said. “And if I can’t
come aboard, I can’t fix your life-support system.”

Well, we yakked back and forth for
hours. They really wanted to stick to their guns, but we all knew that the
clock was ticking and they were going to run out of air. Of course, I wouldn’t
have let them die. I would’ve done the repairs remotely, from
Jokers
bridge, if I had to.

But I didn’t let them know that.

“All right,” Mindy said at long
last. Maybe it was Cindy. Who could tell. “You can come aboard, Mr.—”

“Sam,” breathed Cindy. I think.

“You can come aboard, but only if
you agree to certain conditions.”

The deal was, I could come aboard
their ship but I couldn’t have any contact with them. They were going to lock
themselves in their compartments and I was forbidden to even tap at their doors.

I
was disappointed,
but hoped that they’d relent once I’d finished repairing their ship. They
offered me virtual reality sex, of course, but I was looking forward to the
real thing. The only man in the solar system to make it with the Porno Twins in
person! That was a goal worthy of Sam Gunn.

So even though I was bone-weary
from being squashed by three-plus gs for several days, and still sore from the
tubes that I had to insert into various parts of my anatomy, I was as eager and
energetic as a teenager when I finally docked
Joker
to
SEX069.
Great stuff, testosterone.

I
went straight to
their bridge like a good little boy and got their maintenance robot working
again. Just a little glitch in its programming; I fixed that and within minutes
the dim-witted collection of junk was welding a patch onto the puncture hole in
the air tank that the meteoroid had made. There really wasn’t anything much
wrong with the ship’s air recycling system, but I took my time starting it up
again, thinking all the while about getting together with Cindy and Mindy for a
bit of horizontal celebration.

Once I started pumping oxygen from
Clementine
into their air tanks, I began wondering how I could coax the Twins out of their
boudoirs. I checked out their internal communications setup and—voila!—there
were the controls for the security cameras that looked into every compartment
in the ship.

The first step toward getting them
to come out and meet me, I thought, would be to peek into their chambers and
see what they were up to.

Wrong! Bad mistake.

They were both in one little
compartment, huddled together on the bed, clutching each other like a pair of
frightened little kids. And they were
old\
Must’ve been in their second century, at least: white hair, pale skin that looked
like parchment, skinny and bony and—well, old.

The teeth nearly fell out of my mouth,
that’s how far my jaw dropped. Yet, as I stared at them hugging each other like
Hansel and Gretel lost in the forest, I began to see how beautiful they really
were. Not sexy beautiful, not anymore, but the bone structure of their faces,
the straight backs, the long legs. The irresistible Cindy and Mindy that we’d
all seen on our comm screens were what they had really looked like a century
ago.

I
should have felt
disappointed, but I just felt kind of sad. And yet, even that passed pretty
quickly. Here were two former knockouts who were still really quite beautiful
in an elderly way. I know a sculptress who would’ve made a wonderful statue
portrait of the two of them.

They were living by themselves,
doing their own thing in their own way, bringing joy and comfort to a lot of
guys who might have gone berserk without them and their services. And now they
were huddled together, terrified that I was gonna break in on them and find out
who and what they really were.

So I swallowed hard and tapped the
intercom key and said, “I’m finished. Your ship is in fine shape now, although
you ought to buy some nitrogen to mix with the oxygen I’ve left for you.”

“Thank you, Sam,” they said in
unison. Now that I could see them, I heard the quaver in their voices.

“I’m leaving now. It’s been a
pleasure to be able to help you.”

They were enormously grateful.
Grateful not only that I had saved their lives, but that I hadn’t intruded on
their privacy. Grateful that they could keep up the fantasy of Mindy and Cindy,
the sexy Porno Twins.

“WOW,” I SAID,
once Sam finished. “You were
downright noble, Sam.”

“Yeah,” he answered softly. “I was,
wasn’t I?”

“And that was the last you saw of
the Twins?”

“Not exactly.”

I
felt my brows
rise.

With a self-deprecating shrug, Sam
admitted, “They were so super-duper grateful that they insisted on giving me a
blank check: I can have a virtual reality session with the two of ‘em whenever
I want to.”

“So?”

Sam’s grin went from ear to ear. “So
I gave in and tried it. I’ve never been a fan of VR sex; I prefer the real
thing.”