The Sam Gunn Omnibus (125 page)

Jade sputtered, “But...
two
Sams?”

The physicist nodded
somberly. “I don’t know if one solar system is enough to hold two Sam Gunns.
Maybe one of them would be better off going through that black hole.”

He turned toward the
door to Jade’s office.

“Wait!” she cried,
getting up and starting around her desk. “I’ve got half a million questions I need
answered!”

Townes shook his head. “Sorry.
No time. I just thought you ought to know what Sam’s been up to since he
returned to Selene.”

He dipped his chin in a
brief nod, then ducked through the door and was gone.

Leaving Jade standing in
her cubbyhole office, her thoughts in a whirl.

Two Sams? she asked
herself. Can I believe that? Was Townes telling the truth?

She sank back into her
swivel chair. For a long while she simply sat there while her mind spun out
questions to which she had no answers.

But at last she muttered
to herself, “Sam’s here. In Selene. One of them is, at least. He’s here. And I’ve
got to find him.”

But how? she wondered. I
need help. And then it hit her: There’s somebody else who wants to find Sam
really badly. Turning to her desktop console, Jade said, “Phone, find Senator
Jill Meyers. I need to speak with her.”

JADE WAS SURPRISED AT HOW NERVOUS SHE FELT AS SHE
waited in the arrivals lounge at Selene’s Armstrong Spaceport. In
ten minutes the shuttle from Space Station Epsilon would arrive, and her plan
to smoke Sam
Gunn
out of hiding would start to unfold.
She hoped.

Rocket shuttles from the space stations orbiting Earth were never delayed
by weather or traffic. Once they broke orbit they were essentially in a dead
fall that ended at Armstrong’s scoured and blasted concrete pads out on the
floor of the giant crater Alphonsus.

Too nervous to remain seated, Jade paced along the curving glassteel
window that looked out at the landing area. Two spindly-looking shuttles were
standing on their pads. Beyond them the sky was as black as infinity but
studded with brilliant hard pinpoints of stars and the streaming whiteness of
the Milky Way. Out on the horizon she could see the low, slumped, tired-looking
mountains that formed Alphonsus’s ringwall.

Jane Avril Inconnu was a petite, slim young woman with jade-green eyes and
flaming red hair that she had allowed to curl down to her shoulders. In her
fitted tunic and slacks of grayish green she looked almost elfin. Several of
the other people waiting in the lounge seemed to recognize her from the videos
she had hosted, but none of them had the courage to come up and speak to her.
For which she was grateful; she had enough on her mind without trying to make
friendly chitchat.

Can we do it? she asked herself for the thousandth time. Can we get him to
come out into the open? Despite having spent the past several years of her life
producing biographical videos about Sam Gunn, she had never met the wily,
devious little imp himself.

A glint of light caught her eye. Again, another sparkle against the starry
black sky. As she watched, her nose almost pressed against the cold glassteel
window, she saw the shuttle take shape, its ungainly silhouette glittering in
the harsh light of the distant Sun.

The shuttle touched down, feather soft, on the hot jets of its retros,
blowing dust and grit across the landing pad. An access tunnel wormed out like
a wheeled caterpillar and connected to its main hatch.

Jade ran to the reception area, suddenly as impatient as a schoolgirl.
Working her way to the front of the small crowd waiting for the arrivals to get
through customs, she wondered yet again if she could carry her plan through to
success.

At last Jill Meyers appeared in the doorway, a small travel bag clutched
in one hand. She saw Jade and grinned maliciously. Meyers was short and stubby,
her face round and snub-nosed, with a sprinkling of freckles. Her light brown
hair was cut short, and she wore a nondescript beige travel suit.

The older woman hugged Jade with her free arm while several of the other
debarking passengers stared. Jill Meyers, former U.S. Senator and a respected
judge on the International Court of Justice, was immediately recognizable.

Before Jade could say hello or even take a breath, Meyers whispered into
her ear, “Now we get that little SOB to marry me!”

IT WASN’T EASY
to keep Jill Meyers’s arrival in Selene a secret, but Jade
figured that if Sam did find out that she was on the Moon it might help to
smoke him out of hiding. She even half-expected Sam to show up in her office,
sooner or later, brash and breezy, ready to embark on some twisty scheme or other.

Jade was not prepared, however, for the Beryllium Blonde.

She recognized Jennifer Marlowe immediately from the disks she had
reviewed while producing her Sam Gunn bios. She was golden blonde, radiantly
so, with long legs, wide innocent eyes of cornflower blue, and a figure that
would drive any man to wild testosterone-soaked fantasies. Dressed in a
glittering metallic sheath that hugged her curves deliciously, she swept
unannounced into Jade’s cubbyhole of an office.

“Good morning,” she said, with a gleaming smile. “I’m Jennifer Marlowe, of
the law firm of Raippe, Pillage and Burns.”

Astonished, Jade slowly rose from her desk chair and said, “Yes, you are,
aren’t you?”

Marlowe sat on the spindly chair before Jade’s desk, still smiling enough
wattage to light a shopping mall. But there was something cold behind her
smile, Jade thought. Something hard and hostile.

“What can I do for you?” Jade asked, settling back into her own swivel
chair.

The smile dimmed somewhat. “I’m here on a rather delicate matter, Ms.
Inconnu.”

“Call me Jade; everybody
does.”

“Your eyes. Of course.”

“Does this ‘delicate matter’
have anything to do with Sam Gunn?”

The Blonde sighed
dramatically. “Of course. Who else?”

“I thought all those
lawsuits against Sam had been settled,” said Jade.

“All but one,” the
Blonde replied.

Jade raised her eyebrows
a notch, waiting.

“A breach of promise
suit,” the Blonde explained. “Sam promised to marry me—”

“Marry you!” Jade
blurted, shocked. “Marry you?”

“That’s right,” the
Blonde replied gravely. “And I’m here to see that he makes good on his promise.
Or else.”

“Or else what?”

“Or else I’ll take all
his assets. Every penny. I’ll leave him with nothing but the clothes on his
back. Maybe not even that much.”

“NO WONDER SAM’
S in hiding,” said Jill Meyers that evening. She had
invited Jade to dinner in the suite she had rented under an assumed name:
Minerva de Guerre.

“This is going to make
him burrow even deeper, wherever he is,” Jade said unhappily, picking at the
salad before her.

Meyers shook her head,
equally dismayed. “I had a talk with Doug Stavenger this afternoon. Strictly
informal, of course. You’d think in a community as small and tight as Selene it’d
be impossible for Sam to hide for long.”

Jade said, “There’ve been
people living in the equipment and storage levels for years, castoffs and
hideaways existing on their wits. I’ve even heard that sometimes they break
into the emergency shelters up on the surface and live there for as long as
they dare.”

“Stavenger didn’t mention
that.”

“He wouldn’t, not to a
distinguished visitor. He wouldn’t want you to know there’s an underground
subculture in Selene.”

“Why does the governing
council permit it?”

Jade shrugged. ”It’s
small enough so that it would be more trouble to root out than it’s worth. At
least, that’s the official line.”

“This isn’t going to
help us find Sam.”

“No,” Jade agreed. “It
isn’t.”

Meyers drummed her
fingers on the table top. “There’s
got
to
be a way to find Sam.”

“But if we do, La Marlowe will get him. One way or the other.”

“What’s she really after?” Meyers wondered aloud. “I mean, Sam doesn’t
have anything in the way of assets, does he? He must be pretty close to broke.”

With a slight shake of her head, Jade answered, “He must have something
that she’s interested in.”

“But what could it be?”

JUMBO JIM GRADOWSKY
was a large man, terminally untidy in his clothing and
personal habits, his desk a perpetual disaster area. And he was clearly
unhappy.

“You’re moping,” he said to Jade. Despite the successes of Jade’s series
on Sam Gunn, Solar News’s corporate headquarters on Earth had not deigned to
enlarge the office space in Selene. Profits first, was the motto in Orlando.

Sitting in front of Jumbo Jim’s messy, cluttered desk, Jade nodded
despondently. “I guess I am moping,” she admitted.

“You’re going through your assignments like a sleepwalker,” Jim added,
pushing aside a small mountain of reports and memos to reach for the milkshake
mug on the corner of his desk. Several of the monomolecular sheets slid languidly
to the floor.

“I guess I am,” Jade repeated. Then, pulling herself up straighter, she
said, “It’s this Sam Gunn thing. I can’t get it out of my mind.”

Gradowsky took a long pull on his milkshake. Wiping chocolate foam from
his lips with the back of his hand, he said, “All right, here’s what I’m going
to do. You’re off all assignments for the next three days. You spend the time
tracking Sam down.”

“Three days? Jim! Thanks!” Jade wanted to jump over the desk and kiss him.

“Three days,” Gradowsky warned, holding up three fingers. “Then I want you
here with all your brains working.”

“Thanks, Jim,” she repeated, bolting from the chair and heading for the
door.

Monica Bianco was sympathetic but not terribly helpful. Her office, like
Jade’s, was nothing more than a cubicle with shoulder-high partitions, although
she had adorned the wobbly walls with photos of her abundant family back
Earthside. Every timeJade saw the pictures she thought about how much she
wished she had a family. But she had no one—except, maybe, Sam Gunn.

“I don’t see how you can flush him out,” Monica was saying. “If he’s
squirreled away in the maintenance level or out in one of the emergency
shelters it’d take a small army to find him.”

Jade agreed gloomily. But she insisted, “There’s got to be some way.”

“Like what?”

“Like ...
I don’t know.”

Monica leaned back in her chair. “You’ve been following Sam’s life for the
past three years. Don’t you have a feeling for how he thinks? How his mind
works?”

“Well, sort of.”

“So?”

Jade thought about it for several silent moments. Then it hit her. “That’s
it!” she shouted, and ran from Monica’s office, leaving the older woman sitting
open-mouthed behind her desk.

Sam wouldn’t hide out in some ratty corner of a warehouse, she told herself
as she slid behind the desk in her own cubicle. Not Sam!

She called up the guest list of the Selenite Hotel, the poshest hostelry
on the Moon. He wouldn’t use his own name, of course, Jade told herself as she
scanned the list. Some of the names were blanked out and photo IDs missing,
guests who wanted complete privacy.

Then she spotted a face that was obviously phony. A gold turban wrapped
around the head of a man whose luxuriant black beard was so thick that all she
could see of his face was a generous beak of a nose and tiny, squinty eyes of
some indeterminate light color.

Who else? Jade asked herself.

The name beneath the image read “Sri Malabar Singh Satay.” Jade laughed
aloud. A phony if I ever saw one! she told herself. Just as phony as that snout
and beard.

To make sure, she looked up his biography. It was impressive. If the data
could be believed, Malabar Singh Satay was one of Earth’s foremost musicians, a
concert pianist, and scion of a fabulously wealthy Sikh family that had fled
the biowar that had depopulated the Indian subcontinent and now made their
principal residence on the island of Malabar in the East Indies.

Yeah, right! Jade said to herself. So what’s he doing on the Moon?

She contacted the Selenite Hotel and was put through to Mr. Satay’s suite
with only a minimum of delay. A darkly beautiful woman with large, lustrous
eyes answered her call and agreed, in a silky voice that carried an exotic
slightly singsong lilt, to allow Jade to interview Mr. Satay that very
afternoon.

Jade laughed to herself all the way to the hotel. He thinks he can fool me
with that phony beard and schnozzola, she thought. Fingering the voice analyzer
she was carrying in her purse, Jade told herself, I’ve got his voiceprint on
the chip; no matter what kind of crazy accent he tries to use, the analyzer
will pin him down. Once it chimes, Sam’s game is up.