The Sam Gunn Omnibus (27 page)

He proceeded to cause absolute
havoc among the nurses. With the single-minded determination of a sperm cell
seeking blindly for an ovum, Sam pursued them all: the fat little redhead, the
cadaverous ash-blonde, the really good-looking one, the kid who still had
acne—all of them, even the head nurse, who threatened to inject him with enough
estrogen to grow boobs on him if he didn’t leave her and her crew alone.

Nothing deterred Sam. He would be
gone for long hours from the ward, and when he’d come back he would be grinning
from ear to ear. As politely as I could I’d ask him how he made out.

“It matters not if you win or lose,”
he would say. “It’s how you play the
game....
as long as you get laid.”

When he finally left the isolation
ward it seemed as if we had been friends for years. And it was damned quiet in
there without him. I was alone again. I missed him. I realized how many years
it had been since I’d had a friend.

I
sank into a real
depression of self-pity and despair. I had caught Sam’s cold, sure enough. I was
hacking and sneezing all day and night. One good thing about zero gravity is
that you can’t have a postnasal drip. One bad thing is that all the fluids
accumulate in your sinuses and give you a headache of monumental proportions.
The head nurse seemed to take special pleasure in inflicting upon me the
indignity of forcing tubes up my nose to drain the sinuses.

The medics were overjoyed. Their
guinea pig was doing something interesting. Would I react to the cold like any
normal person and get over it in a few days? Or would the infection spread
through my body and worsen, turn into pneumonia or maybe kill me? I could see
them writing their learned papers in their heads every time they examined me,
which was four times a day.

I
was really unfit
company for anyone, including myself. I went on for months that way, just
wallowing in my own misery. Other patients came and went: an African kid with a
new strain of polio; an asthmatic who had developed a violent allergy to dust;
a couple of burn victims from the Alpha construction crew who had to be
suspended in zero-gee. I stayed while they were treated in the other wards and
sent home.

Then, without any warning at all,
Sam showed up again.

“Hello, Omar, how’s the tent-making
business?” My middle name had become Omar, as far as he was concerned.

I
gaped at him. He
was wearing the powder-blue coveralls and shoulder insignia of Rockledge
Industries, Inc., which in those days was just starting to grow into the
interplanetary conglomerate it has become.

“What the hell you doing back here?”
My voice came out a full octave higher than normal, I was so surprised. And
glad.

“I work here.”

“Say what?”

He ambled over to me in the zero-gee
strides we all learn to make: maintain just enough contact with the carpeted
flooring to keep from floating off toward the ceiling. As Sam approached my
bunk the head nurse pushed through the ward’s swinging doors with a trayful of
the morning’s indignities for me.

“Rockledge Industries just won the
contract for running this tin can. The medical staff still belongs to the
government, but everybody else will be replaced by Rockledge employees. I’m in
charge of the whole place.”

Behind him, the head nurse’s eyes
goggled, her mouth sagged open, and the tray slid from her hand. It just hung
there, revolving slowly as she turned a full one-eighty and flew out of the
ward without a word. Or maybe she was screaming so high that no human ear could
hear it, like a bat.

“You’re in charge of this place?” I
was laughing at the drama that had been played out behind Sam’s back. “No shit?”

Sam seemed happy that I seemed
pleased. “I got a five-year contract.”

We got to be
really
friends then. Not lovers. Sam was the most heterosexual man I have ever seen.
One of the shrinks aboard the station told me Sam had a Casanova complex: he
had to take a shot at any and every female creature he saw. I don’t know how
good his batting average was, but he surely kept busy—and grinning.

“The thrill is in the chase, Omar,
not the capture,” he said to me many times. Then he would always add, “As long
as you get laid.”

But Sam could be a true friend,
caring, understanding, bringing out the best in a man. Or a woman, for that matter.
I saw him help many of the station’s female employees, nurses, technicians,
scientists, completely aside from his amorous pursuits. He knew when to put his
Casanova complex in the back seat. He was a surprisingly efficient
administrator and a helluva good leader. Everybody liked him. Even the head
nurse grew to grant him a grudging respect, although she certainly didn’t want
anybody to know
it,
especially Sam.

Of course, knowing Sam you might
expect that he would have trouble with the chain of command. He had gotten
himself out of the space agency, and it was hard to tell who was happier about
it, him or the agency. You could hear sighs of relief from Houston and
Washington all the way up to where we were, the agency was so glad to be rid of
the pestering little squirt who never followed regulations.

It didn’t take long for Sam to find
out that Rockledge Industries, Inc. had its own bureaucracy, its own sets of
regulations, and its own frustrations.

“You’d think a multibillion-dollar
company would want to make all the profits it can,” Sam grumbled to me, about
six months after he had returned to the Shack. “Half the facilities on Alpha
are empty, right? They overbuilt, right? So I show them how to turn Alpha into
a tourist resort and they reject the goddamned idea. ‘We are not in the tourism
business,’ they say. Goddamned assholes.”

I
found it hard to
believe that Rockledge didn’t understand what a bonanza they could reap from
space tourism. It’s not just twenty-twenty hindsight; Sam had me convinced then
and there that tourism would be worth a fortune to Alpha. But Rockledge just
failed to see it, no matter how hard Sam tried to convince them. Maybe the
harder he tried the less they liked the idea. Some outfits are like that. The
old Not-Invented-Here syndrome. Or more likely, the old If-Sam’s-For-It-I’m-Against-It
syndrome.

Sam spent weeks muttering about
faceless bureaucrats who sat on their brains, and how much money a zero-gravity
honeymoon hotel could make. At least, that’s what I thought he was doing.

The big crisis was mostly my fault.
Looking back on it, if I could have figured out a different way to handle
things, I would have. But you know how it is when your emotions are all churned
up; you don’t see any alternatives. Truthfully, I still don’t see how I could
have done anything else except what I did.

They told me I was cured.

Yeah, I know I said they never used
words like that, but they changed their tune. After more than five years in the
isolation ward of the station, the medics asked me to join them in the
conference room. I expected another one of their dreary meetings; they made me
attend them at least once a month, said it was important for me to “maintain a
positive interaction with the research staff.” So I dragged myself down to the
conference room.

They were all grinning at me,
around the table. Buckets of champagne stood at either end, with more bottles
stashed where the slide projector usually hung.

I
was cured. The
genetic manipulations had finally worked. My body’s immune system was back to
normal. My case would be in the medical journals; future generations would
bless my memory (but not my name: they would protect my anonymity). I could go
back home, back to Earth.

Only, I didn’t want to go.

“You don’t want to go?” Sam’s pudgy
little face was screwing up into an incredulous expression that mixed equal
amounts of surprise, disapproval, and curiosity.

“Back to Earth? No, I don’t want to
go,” I said. “I want to stay here. Or maybe go live on Alpha or one of the new
stations they’re building.”

“But why?” Sam asked.

We were in his office, a tiny
cubbyhole that had originally been a storage locker for fresh food. I mean,
space in the Shack was
tight.
I thought I could still
smell onions or something faintly pungent. Sam had walled the chamber with
blue-colored spongy plastic, so naturally it came to be known as the Blue
Grotto. There were no chairs in the Grotto, of course; chairs are useless in
zero-gee. We just hung in midair. You could nudge your back against the
slightly rough wall surfacing and that would hold you in place well enough.
There wasn’t any room to drift around. Two people were all the chamber could
hold comfortably. Sam’s computer terminal was built into the wall; there was no
furniture in the Grotto, no room for any.

“I got nothing to go back for,” I answered,
“and a lot of crap waiting for me that I’d just as soon avoid.”

“But it’s
Earth,”
he said. “The world ...”

So I told him about it. The whole story,
end to end.

I
had been a
soldier, back in that nasty little bitch of a war in Mexico. Nothing glamorous,
not even patriotism. I had joined the Army because it was the only way for a
kid from my part of Little Rock to get a college education. They paid for my
education and right afterward they pinned a lieutenant’s gold bars on my
shoulders and stuck me inside a heavy tank.

Well,
you know how well the tanks did in those Mexican hills. Nothing to shoot at but
cactus, and we were great big noisy targets for those smart little missiles
they brought in from Korea or wherever.

They knocked out my tank, I was the
only one of the crew to survive. I wound up in an Army hospital in Texas where
they tried to put my spine back together again. That’s where I contracted AIDS,
from one of the male nurses who wanted to prove to me that I hadn’t lost my
virility. He was a very sweet kid, very caring. But I never saw him again once
they decided to ship me to the isolation ward up in orbit.

Now it was five years later. I was
cured of AIDS, a sort of anonymous hero, but everything else was still the
same. Earth would be still the same, except that every friend I had ever known
was five years’ distance from me. My parents had killed themselves in an
automobile wreck when I was in college. I had no sisters or brothers. I had no
job prospects. Soldiers coming back five years after the war weren’t greeted
with parades and confetti, and all the computer stuff I had learned in college
was obsolete by now. Not even the Army used that generation of software any more.

And Earth was dirty, crowded,
noisy, dangerous—it was also
heavy,
a full one g. I tried a
couple days in the one-g wheel over at Alpha and knew that I could never live
in Earth’s full gravity again. Not voluntarily.

Sam listened to all this in
complete silence, the longest I had ever known him to go without opening his mouth.
He was totally serious, not even the hint of a smile. I could see that he
understood.

“Down there I’ll be just another
nobody, an ex-soldier with no place to go. I can’t handle the gravity, no matter
what the physical therapists think they can do for me. I want to stay here,
Sam. I want to make something of myself and I can do it here, not back there.
The best I can be back there is another veteran on a disability pension. What
kind of a job could I get? I can
be
somebody up here, I know
I can.”

He put his hand on my shoulder. Had
to rise up off the floor a ways to do it, but he did it. “You’re sure? You’re
absolutely certain that this is what you want?”

I
nodded. “I can’t
go back, Sam. I just can’t.”

The faintest hint of a grin
twitched at the corners of his mouth. “Okay, pal. How’d you like to go into the
hotel business with me?”

You see, Same had already been
working for some time on his own ideas about space tourism. If Rockledge wouldn’t
go for a hotel facility over on Alpha, complete with zero-gee honeymoon suites,
then Sam figured he could get somebody else interested in the idea. The people
who like to bad-mouth Sam say that he hired me to cover his ass so he could
spend his time working on his tourist hotel deal while he was still collecting
a salary from Rockledge. That isn’t the way it happened at all; it was really
the other way around.