The Sam Gunn Omnibus (34 page)

The kid’s face reddened. “I get kind of tongue-tied when I t-try to t-talk
sw-sw-sweet to her.”

Sam stared at the kid. A stuttering lover? It didn’t look good.

Then I got the idea of the century. “Why don’t you talk to her through
your computers?”

Larry got really excited about that. Computers were something he
understood and trusted. As long as he didn’t have to actually speak to her
face-to-face he could say anything we gave him.

“Okay,” Sam said, glancing at his wristwatch. “Mutt, you take our lovesick
friend here to the library and borrow as many poetry books as they’ll let you
take out. I gotta get to the airport and meet Bonnie Jo.”

Melinda looked surprised when we came back into the office; those big
brown eyes of hers flashed wide. But then she stuck her nose into her computer
screen and began pecking at the keyboard as fast as her chubby little fingers
would go.

It was getting near to noon. I went to my desk and ran off the phone’s
answering machine. There was only one call, from Sam. Bonnie Jo’s plane from
Salt Lake City was running late. Delays and congestion in Dallas.

So what else is new? I sat Larry down at his desk and helped him unfold
his computer and set it up again. Melinda glanced at us from time to time, but
whenever she saw me looking she quickly snapped her eyes back to her own
screen.

Larry hadn’t said a word to her. While he checked out his machine I thumbed
madly through one of the poetry books. God almighty, I hadn’t even looked at
that stuff since they made me read it in high school English classes. I ran
across one that I vaguely remembered.

Without speaking, I showed the page to Larry, then left the book on his
desk and went over to my own, next to the window. As nonchalantly as I could I booted
up my own machine, waiting to see if the kid actually worked up the nerve to
send the poem to Melinda, sitting four and a half feet away from him.

Sure enough, the words began to scroll across the screen: “Come live with
me and be my Love ...”

I don’t know what Melinda was working on, but I guess when she saw the message
light blink on her machine she automatically set the screen to receive it.

Her eyes went
really
wide. Her mouth
dropped open as she read the lines of poetry scrolling onto her screen. To make
sure she didn’t think they were coming from me, I picked up the telephone and
tapped the first button on my automatic dialer. Some guy’s bored voice told me
that the day’s high would be eighty-two, with a seventy-five percent chance of
showers in the afternoon.

Melinda looked at me kind of puzzled. I ignored her and looked out my
window, where I could watch her reflection without her knowing it. I saw a
suspicion on her face slowly dawn into certainty. She turned and looked at
Larry, who promptly turned flame-red.

A good beginning, I thought.

Then Sam burst into the office, towing Bonnie Jo Murtchison.

When it came to women Sam was truly democratic. Tall or short, plump or
anorexic, Sam made no distinctions based on race, creed, color, or previous
condition of servitude. But he did seem to hit on blondes preferentially.

Bonnie Jo Murtchison was blonde, the kind of golden blonde with almost
reddish highlights that is one of the triumphs of modern cosmetic chemistry.
Her hair was frizzed, shoulder length, but pushed back off her face enough to
show two enormous bangle earrings. She had a slight figure, almost boyish. Good
legs, long and strong and nicely tanned. A good tennis player, I thought. That
was the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw her.

She was wearing a neat little miniskirted sleeveless frock of butter
yellow, the kind that costs a week’s pay. More jewelry on her wrists and
fingers, necklaces dangling down her slim bosom. She clattered and jangled as
she came into the office, towering over Sam by a good five-six inches.

The perfect spoiled princess, I thought at once. Rich father, beautiful mother,
and no brothers or sisters. What a pain in the butt she’s going to be.

I was right, but for all the wrong reasons.

The first thing that really jolted me about Bonnie Jo was her voice. I expected
the kind of shrill yapping that you hear from the cuties around the condo
swimming pool; you know, the ones who won’t go into the water because it’d mess
up the hairdo they just spent all morning on.

Bonnie Jo’s voice was low and ladylike. Not quite husky, and certainly not
soft. Controlled. Strong. She didn’t hurt your ears when she talked.

Sam introduced her to Larry, who mumbled and avoided her eyes, and to
Melinda, who looked her over like a professional prizefighter assessing a new
opponent. Then he brought her across the room to my desk.

“This is our president, Spence Johansen,” Sam said. “I call him Mutt.”

She reached across the desk to take my hand in a firm grip. Her eyes were
gray-green, a color that haunted me so much I looked it up in a book on
precious stones at the local library. The color of Brazilian tourmaline: deep,
mysterious, powerful grayish green.

“And what would you like me to call you, Mr. Johansen?” she asked in that
marvelous voice.

She just sort of naturally drew a smile out of me. “Spence will be fine,”
I said.

“Good. I’m Bonnie Jo.”

I think I fell in love
with her right then and there.

“THAT WAS PRETTY
quick,” Jade sniffed.

Johansen shrugged. “It
happens that way, sometimes.”

“Really?”

“Haven’t you ever fallen
in love at first sight?”

She tried to conjure up
Rak
i
’s image in her mind. The drinks
she had been swilling made her head spin slightly.

“Yes, I guess I have, at
that,” she said at last. That smile of his made her head swim even more.

Johansen looked out
across the grassy hills that stretched below them to the edge of the toylike
village. Sunlight filtering through the big solar windows slanted long shadows
down there.

“It’s going to be sunset
pretty soon,” he said. “I know a fine little restaurant down in Gunnstown, if
you’re ready for dinner.”

“Gunnstown?” she asked.

“That’s the name of the
village down there.” He pointed with an outstretched arm.

“Should I change?”

Grinning, “I like you
the way you are.”

“My clothes,” she said.

He cocked his head
slightly. “It’s a very nice little continental restaurant. Tablecloths and
candles, that sort of thing.”

She said, “Meet me at my
hotel room in an hour.”

When he called for her,
precisely one hour later, Johansen was wearing a comfortable pair of soft blue
slacks and a slate-gray velour pullover, the closest thing to formal attire on
the space habitat. Jade had shopped furiously in Gunnstown’s only two boutiques
until she found a miniskirted sleeveless frock of butter-yellow.

Once they were sitting
across a tiny table, with a softly glowing candle between them, she saw that
Johansen was staring at her intently.

Almost uncomfortable,
Jade tried to return to the subject of Sam Gunn.

But Johansen said, “Your
eyes are beautiful, you know? The prettiest I’ve ever seen.”

Silently Jade retorted,
Prettier than Bonnie Jo’s? But she dared not say it aloud. Instead, she said:

“Just before you
suggested dinner, you were telling me about Bonnie Jo.” Jade struggled to keep
her voice even. “About falling in love with her.”

IT
WASN’T
A tough thing to do—Johansen replied. I had expected a spoiled rich kid.
Her father, the banker, had insisted on having one of his own people join the
VCI team as treasurer. Apparently his daughter insisted just as stubbornly that
she take the job. So there she was, at the desk we shoehorned into our one
little office, two feet away from mine.

She had degrees in economics and finance from BYU, plus an MBA from Wharton.
She really knew her business. And she was strictly no-nonsense. Sam wined and
dined her, of course, but it didn’t go any further than that, far as I could
tell. I knew Sam had no real intention of getting married to anybody. I didn’t
think she did, either. Or if she did, she was willing to wait until VCI started
making big bucks.

We were all living practically hand-to-mouth, with every cent we got from
the government and from Bonnie Jo’s father’s bank poured into building the
hardware for removing debris from orbit. Bonnie Jo was never hurting for
spending money, of course, but she never lorded it over us. The weeks rolled by
and we sort of became a real team: you know, working together every day, almost
living together, you come to know and respect each other. Or you explode.

Bonnie Jo even started helping Melinda in her personal life. Gave her
hints about her clothes. Even went on a diet with her; not that Bonnie Jo
needed it, but Melinda actually started to slim down a little. They started
going to exercise classes down the way in the shopping ma
l
l.

I was giving myself a cram course in romantic poetry and passing it all on
to Larry. On Valentine’s Day he wanted to give Melinda a big heart-shaped box
of chocolates. I suggested flowers instead. I figured she wouldn’t eat flowers,
although I wasn’t altogether certain.

“And write a note on the card they put in with the flowers,” I insisted.

He gulped. “Sh-should I s-s-s-sign my n-n-name?”

“Damned right.”

Larry turned pale. But I marched him to the florist section of the
supermarket and we picked out a dozen posies for her. I towed him to the
counter where they had a little box full of blank cards. I handed him my
government-issue ballpoint pen, guaranteed to write under water or in zero
gravity.

He looked at me, panic-stricken. “Wh-what’ll I say?”

I thought for a second.” ‘To the woman who has captured my heart,’“ I told
him.

He scribbled on the little card. His handwriting was awful.

“Sign it.”

He stared at me.

“Better yet,” I said. “Just put your initial. Just an ‘L.’“

He did that. We snuck the bouquet into the office while Melinda and Bonnie
Jo were out at their exercise class. Larry laid the flowers on her desk with a
trembling hand.

Well, the last time I had watched a scene like what followed was in an old
video called “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.” Melinda sort of went into shock
when she saw the flowers on her desk, but only for a moment. She read the card,
then spun around toward Larry—who looked white as a sheet, scared—and launched
herself at him. Knocked him right off his desk chair.

Sam gave them the rest of the day off. It was Friday, so they had the
whole weekend to themselves.

A few minutes after the lovers left the office, Sam frowned at his computer
screen.

“I gotta check out the superconducting coils down at the Cape,” he said. “Those
suckers in Massachusetts finally delivered them. Arrived this morning.”

Two weeks late. Not good, but within the tolerable limits we had set in
our schedule. The manufacturer in Massachusetts had called a couple months
earlier and said that delivery would be three months late, due to a big order
they had to rush for Rockledge International.

Sam had screamed so loud and long into the phone that I thought every fiber-optic
cable between Florida and Massachusetts would have melted. The connection
actually broke down three times before he finished convincing our manufacturing
subcontractor that: (a) their contract with us had heavy penalty clauses for
late delivery; (b) since this order from Rockledge had come in
after
our order we clearly had priority; and (c)
this was obviously an attempt by Rockledge to sabotage us.

“Tell your goddamned lawyers to stock up on NoDoz,” Sam yelled into the
phone. “I’m going to sue you sneaking, thieving bastards sixteen ways from
Sunday! You’ll go down the tubes, buddy. Bankrupt. Broke. Dead in the water.
Kaput! You just watch!”

He slammed the phone down hard enough to make the papers on my desk
bounce.

“But Sam,” I had pleaded, “if you tie them up or shut them down
we’ll
go out of business with them. We need that
superconducting coil. And the backup.”

A sly grin eased across his face. “Don’tcha think I know that? I’m just
putting the fear of lawyers into them. Now” he reached for the phone again, “to
put the fear of God almighty into them.”

I didn’t eavesdrop on purpose, but our desks were jammed so close together
that I couldn’t help hearing him ask for Albert Clement. At the Department of
Commerce.

Sam’s tone changed enormously. He was stiffly formal with Clement, almost
respectful, explaining the situation and his suspicion that Rockledge was
trying to club us to death with their money. I wondered if this guy Clement was
the same Commerce Department undertaker who had been at the evaluation hearing
in D.C.