The Sam Gunn Omnibus (59 page)

His friends—who were few but
loyal—said that Sam’s one big weakness was that he couldn’t stand by and let
the big guys in business or government push the little guys around. His
enemies—who were legion and powerful—howled that Sam was a king-sized pain in
the butt.

I
had to laugh
about the “king-sized.” Sam was tiny, an elf, a chunky, fast-talking little guy
with bristling red hair and a sprinkling of Huck Finn freckles across his nub
of a nose. His eyes were sort of hazel, sometimes they looked blue, sometimes
green, sometimes something in between. Shifty eyes, the kind a gambler or cat
burglar might have.

“So naturally,” he was saying to
the Zoning Board, “I thought that New Chicago would be the ideal place for me
to build my amusement center.”

The members of the Zoning Board
glanced back and forth among themselves.

“Amusement center, Mr. Gunn?” asked
the chairperson, Bonnie McDougal. She was an elegant blonde, tall, cool, very much
in possession of herself. No doubt Sam wanted to possess her, too. There was
hardly a woman he’d ever met that he didn’t try to bed—according to his legend.

“Aren’t you the guy who built that
orbital whorehouse a few years back?” growled Arrant, who was known as the
Zoning Board’s bulldog. His first reaction to any request was always a loud, “No!”
Then he’d get really negative.

“It was a zero-gravity honeymoon
hotel,” Sam replied politely. “Perfectly legitimate, sir. Our motto was, ‘If
you like waterbeds, you’ll love zero-gee.’“

“Zero-gee?” McDougal asked, a cool
smile on her lips. “Like we have along the centerline here in New Chicago?”

Sam smiled back at her; it looked more
like a leer. “Exactly the same. Precisely. You can float around weightlessly up
there.”

Their eyes met. She turned away
first.

“You see,” Sam went on in his
oh-so-reasonable manner, “I really want to give this community something it
needs, something that will be useful.”

“Like a gambling casino,” Rick Cole
said. Cole had a reputation for being the smartest member of the five-person
board. He was about my own age: pushing eighty, calendar-wise, but physically
as youthful as a thirty-year-old, thanks to rejuvenation therapy. A former
lawyer who had renounced the legal profession when he came up to New Chicago
and took up a new career in public service. In other words, he’d made his money,
and now he wanted respect.

“What’s wrong with a gambling
casino?” asked Pete Nostrum, sitting next to Cole. “We don’t have one yet, do
we?”

Cole gave him a look that would
shrivel Mount Everest, but it just bounced off Nostrum’s silly face.

Nostrum couldn’t get respect if he paid
for it. God knows he’d tried that route. Nostrum was a mental lightweight who’d
won a seat on the Zoning Board by spending enough money to buy a majority of
the community council that appointed the Board. He wanted any public off
i
ce he could find, so he could have a
platform to push his one, single-minded passion: holiday bonfires. No matter
how many times the safety people nixed the idea, no matter how many times the
New Chicago council of directors pushed his nose into the habitat’s book of
regulations, Nostrum still pushed for bonfires in the big central park to
celebrate every holiday from Christmas to Bastille Day to the return of Halley’s
Comet.

“Surely this board won’t permit a
gambling casino to be erected in New Chicago!” Hornsby protested in a high,
almost girlish voice, raising a chubby hand over his head as he spoke. He was
badly overweight, a fact that his coral pink micromesh suit emphasized; he had
piggy little eyes set deep in a puffy-cheeked pink face and tight little ears
plastered flat against the sides of his head.

“It’s not a gambling casino,” Sam
corrected.

“Mr. Hornsby, you are out of order,”
said Chairperson McDougal, but so sweetly that Hornsby just sort of grinned
foolishly and muttered an apology.

Turning to Sam, she said, “Your
application is very vague as to just what this ‘amusement center’ is to be, Mr.
Gunn.”

Sam got his feet, all five-four or
thereabouts of him, and announced grandly, “Because, oh most gracious of
chairpersons, I want to leave it to the good citizens of New Chicago to decide
for themselves what kind of entertainments they would like to have.”

John Morris, the crafty-eyed board
member at the end of the table, steepled his fingers in front of his face as he
asked, “And just what do you mean by that, Mr. Gunn?”

Morris had recently been accused of
accepting bribes in return for his vote. He’d denied the charge, claiming that
the sudden spurts in his bank account had been all pure luck in the stock market.

“I mean, sir,” Sam replied, “that I
intend to furnish a fifty-storey building in which each floor consists of an
open area in which all four walls are covered with hologrammic smart screens.
The floors and ceilings, too. The citizens of New Chicago will be able to
program their amusement center for whatever kinds of recreation they seek....”

Sam strode out from behind the
applicants’ table as he talked, his voice rising in fervor as he extolled the
wonders of his idea: “Think of it! The finest symphony orchestras of Earth can
perform here. The greatest sports teams! Pop singers! Ballet! Great dramas,
dance, athletic competitions, virtually anything at all! In the amusement
complex.”

“We can get all that in our own
homes,” Arrant groused, “through virtual reality.”

“Without having to buy a ticket
from you, or anyone else,” Cole added.

“Yes, that’s true,” Sam replied,
sweetly reasonable. “But home entertainment doesn’t provide the thrill of the
crowd, the amplified excitement of being together with thousands of other
people, the sheer exhilaration of interacting with other people.”

Sam spread his stubby arms as wide
as they would go. “Study after study has shown that home entertainment doesn’t
compare in emotional impact with theater performances. Let me show...”

And on he talked, on and on and on.
He gave a one-man performance that I’ve never seen equaled in its sheer
bravado, vigor, and elan. The board members sat mesmerized by Sam’s
leather-lunged presentation. He didn’t use slides or videos or VR simulations.
He just talked. And talked. Even grouchy old Arrant had stars in his eyes
before long. Hell, Sam pretty nearly had me convinced.

Bonnie McDouga
l
brought us all down to earth. “So the
essence of your proposal, Mr. Gunn, is to establish a hologrammic facility with
full VR capability?”

Sam teetered for a moment like a man
who’d just stopped himself from falling over a cliff. “Yes, Madam Chairperson,”
he said at last. “That’s putting it very succinctly.”

McDougal smiled brightly at him. “Thank
you for your presentation, Mr. Gunn. And it’s Miss Chairperson.”

Sam’s face lit up.

“Now then,” McDougal said, glancing
at the display screen built into the tabletop before her, “it’s your turn, Mr.
Hornsby.”

Hornsby had slides and videos
aplenty. The developers he represented, Woodruff and Dorril, wanted to build a
three-hundred-unit condo complex on the ground in question, complete with three
swimming pools, tennis courts, and a running track for joggers. There were no
structures higher than four storeys in the entire New Chicago habitat, but
Hornsby extolled the high-rise approach as being environmentally friendly.

“If you put three hundred condo
units into four-storey buildings, it would cover the entire parcel and even
spill over into the adjacent properties.”

Pete Nostrum found this amusing.
Looking down the table to fellow board member Morris, Nostrum said loudly, “Hey,
you own property abutting this parcel, don’t you Johnny? What’s this gonna do
to your property’s value?”

Morris curled his lip at the
laughing Nostrum.

McDougal said softly, “Mr. Hornsby,
the issue here is not how we house three hundred additional families. New
Chicago is not actively seeking more population.”

“But you should, Madam Chairperson,”
Hornsby said earnestly, sweat trickling down his fat cheeks. “You must! A
community must grow or wither! There’s no third choice.”

McDougal sighed. Cole snapped, “That’s
flatland thinking, Mr. Hornsby. We’re quite content with a stable population
here.”

“Maybe you are,” said Morris, “but
I tend to agree with Mr. Hornsby. A little growth would be beneficial.”

“A little growth? Three hundred new
families?”

“A drop in the bucket.”

Arrant spoke up. “A foot in the
door, you mean. If we let this outfit build new housing, how can we deny the
same opportunity to other builders?”

“I don’t see it as a precedent,”
said Morris.

“Of course you don’t....”

“Gentlemen,” said McDougal, “Mr.
Christopher is waiting to make his proposal.”

“Why don’t we break for lunch
first?” Arrant suggested.

“Let’s hear out Mr. Christopher
before lunch,” McDougal said, pleasant but firm.

I
got to my feet,
feeling nervous. “Uh ... this won’t take long. What I’d like to do with the
parcel is ... well, leave it alone. In perpetuity.”

“Leave it alone?” Morris was
shocked.

“Undeveloped?” Arrant asked.

“Forever?” Barney Wilhelm, sitting
at the other end of the table, stared at me in disbelief.

“Yessir....
uh, sirs. And lady. Leave it alone forever. Zone it as a public playground in
perpetuity.”

“We
have plenty of public parks in New Chicago.”

“Lots
of green space.”

“That’s
true,” I admitted, “but there’s no open place where kids can play—”

“What
do you mean?” Cole snapped. “There’s the Little League baseball field, the
Hallas football field—”

“Olympic
Stadium,” Nostrum jumped in, “the soccer field, tennis courts, four golf
courses. And not one of them permits bonfires!”

“I
know all that,” I said. “But all those fields are for organized sports. You
have to be a member of a team. They all have strict rules about who can play on
them, and at what time.”

“So
what do you want?” Wilhelm asked.

“Just
a playground. No regulations. Open all the time to any kids who want to have a
catch, or play a pickup game, or just run around and have fun.”

“No
regulations?”

“No
set hours of operation?”

“Just
anybody could come in and play, whenever they felt like it?”

I
nodded. “That’s exactly what I’m asking for.”

I
could tell from their faces that they thought I was
crazy. As I sat down, Hornsby smirked at me, looking superior. But Sam looked
thoughtful.

He
leaned toward me and whispered, “They’d never pick me for a team when I was a
kid. I always had to be the batboy.”

Bonnie
McDougal looked up and down the table at her fellow Zoning Board members and
said, “Shall we vote on the three proposals now, gentlemen? That would finish
today’s agenda and we could take the rest of the day off.”

They
voted, using the keyboards built into the table before each seat. The tally
came up on McDougal’s screen, flush with the tabletop.

I
knew my proposal didn’t have a chance. It was
between Sam and Hornsby, and with Sam s reputation, I figured Hornsby’s
high-rise condo complex was a shoo-in.

I
was wrong.

McDougal
blinked several times at her screen, then looked up at us and announced, “We
have a tie. Two votes for each applicant. We’ll have to reconvene after lunch
and work this out.”

We got up and left the meeting
room. I was surprised, but not very hopeful. After all, I only got two votes
out of six. I had nothing to offer that would sway the other four. They’d ditch
me after lunch, when they got down to the serious wheeling and dealing.

Sam was at my elbow as we walked
out into the sunlight. “Sonofabitch,” he muttered. “I expected better.”

“Did you?” I said, heading for the
sandwich joint on the corner of the courthouse square.