The Sam Gunn Omnibus (61 page)

“What do you think I was doing with
my faithful pocket whiz-bang just before I came up to bat?” he asked.

I
had forgotten
about that. Before I could think of an answer, Sam told me, “I was calculating
the precise time when the sun would shine through the habitat window, old
Straight Arrow. That’s why I was trying to hit a pop-up.”

“You deliberately—” I couldn’t
believe it.

“I had to get you home with the
tying run, didn’t i? I’m no slugger; I have to use my smarts.” Sam tapped his
temple.

I
didn’t believe
it. “Sam, nobody can deliberately hit a pop-up. Not deliberately.”

He screwed up his face a little. “Yeah,
maybe you’re right. I figure you’ve got only one chance in three to get it
right.”

“One chance in three,” I echoed. He
had swung and missed twice, I remembered.

“So,” Sam finished his drink and
put it down on the table in front of him, “you’ve got your playground, in
perpetuity.”

“Thanks to you, Sam.”

He shrugged. “I guess we’re kind of
partners, huh?”

“I guess so.”

He stuck his hand out across the
little table. I took it and we shook hands. But even as we were doing that, Sam
was looking past my shoulder. He broke into a big grin and scrambled to his
feet.

I
turned in my
chair. Bonnie McDougal was coming along the walk, looking coolly elegant in a
white sheath dress decorated with gold thread.

“You know,” she said as she came up
to our table, “my fellow Zoning Board members might take our having dinner
together as an inappropriate act.”

Holding a chair for her, Sam said
innocently, “But I have dinner every evening.”

“Inappropriate for me, Sam,” she
said as she sat down.

I
was wondering when he’d had the chance to invite her
to dinner.

“But
the vote’s over and done with,” Sam said, returning to his chair. “This isn’t a
payoff. We won the ball game, fair and square.”

“You
won,” Bonnie said, smiling.

Sam
grinned hugely and tapped me on the shoulder. “The gold dust twins, Chris and me.
Partners.”

I
grinned back at him. “Partners.”

“And
the amusement center won’t interfere with the playground at all,” Sam said.

“Amusement
center?” Bonnie and I both asked.

“It’ll
be way up above the playground,” Sam said genially. “It’ll start roughly one
hundred fifty-two point four meters above the grass and go up to the habitat’s
centerline. You’ll hardly notice the support piers.”

“Sup
... support piers?” I sputtered.

“Roughly
one hundred fifty-two point four meters?” Bonnie asked, with a sardonic smile.

“That’ll
give me almost eighteen hundred and forty-eight meters to build in,” Sam said,
pulling out his pocket computer.

“Build?
Build what?”

“Our
entertainment center, partner.” His fingers tapping furiously on the computer’s
tiny keypad, Sam muttered, “Figuring four meters per floor, we can put in—wow!
That’s enormous!”

“But,
Sam, you can’t build over the park!”

“Why
not? It won’t hurt anything. And it’ll protect the kids from getting the sun in
their eyes.” He laughed heartily.

I
sank back in my chair.

“You’ll
get half the earnings, partner. Ought to be able to help a lot of kids with
that kind of income.”

Bonnie’s
smile vanished. “Sam, you can’t build over the playground. It’s—”

“Sure
I can,” he countered. “There’s nothing in your zoning regulations that forbids
it.”

“There
will be tomorrow!” she snapped.

“Yes,
but I’ve already registered my plan with your computer. You can’t apply a new
regulation to a preexisting plan. I’m grandfathered in.”

“Sam,
you ... that’s ... of all...” She ran out of words.

I
looked him in his shifty eyes. “It won’t affect the
playground?”

Sam
raised his right hand solemnly. “I swear it won’t. Honest injun. Hope to die.
The support piers will be at the corners of the field. The building will shade
the playground, that’s all.”

Bonnie
was still looking daggers at him.

Sam
smiled at her. “The top floor of the complex, up near the centerline, will be
in microgravity. Not zero-gee, exactly, but so close you’ll never tell the
difference.”

“Never!”
she snapped. “You’ll never get me up there. Never in a million years.”

Sam
sighed. “Never?” he asked, in a small, forlorn voice. I swear there was a tear
in the comer of his left eye.

“Never
in a million years,” Bonnie repeated. Less vehemently than a moment before.

“Well,”
he said softly, “at least we can have this one dinner together.”

With
a sad little smile, Sam got to his feet again and held Bonnie’s chair as she
stood.

As
they walked away I heard Sam ask, “Have you ever slept on a waterbed?”

“Well,
yes,” Bonnie replied. “As a matter of fact, that’s what I have in my home.”

I
doubted that it would take Sam a million years.

“BUT NONE OF THEM WILL SEE ME!” JADE BLURTED. “Not
one of them!”

“Out of six survivors of the mission,
not one will talk to you?” Jim Gradowsky demanded.

“Not one,” Jade replied glumly.

Jumbo Jim leveled a stern finger at
her. “You mean you haven’t gotten to any of them, that’s what you’re really
saying.”

“I’ve tried, Jim, I’ve really
tried.”

Gradowsky leaned both his heavy
forearms on his desktop, nearly flattening a chocolate bar that lay there half
unwrapped. Jade, sitting tensely on the cubbyhole office’s shabby couch,
unconsciously leaned back away from his ponderous form.

“They’re all on Earth, aren’t they?”
he asked, his voice slightly softer.

Jade defended herself. “But I’ve
been hounding them, Jim. I could interview them by videophone, but not one of
them will even answer my calls! The best I’ve gotten is a return call from one
of their lawyers telling me to stop annoying them.”

“Orlando claims that some private
detective agency ran a check on you.”

“To see if I’m really a Solar News
reporter?”

Gradowsky knitted his brows
slightly. “More than that, looks like. They wanted a complete dossier on you:
age, date and place of birth, previous employment, the whole nine yards.”

“Who was the agency working for?”

“One of the people you’re trying to
interview.”

“Which one?”

“The Margaux woman; the recluse who
lives in Maine.”

“Why would she ... ?”

“Who the hell knows? That’s why you’ve
got to get to these people, Jade. They’re trying to hide something. I can feel
it in my bones. There’s something big they’re hiding down there!”

“But I can’t go to Earth, Jim. You
know that. Raki knows it, too.”

Gradowsky fixed her with an unhappy
frown. “How many time have I told you, kid? A reporter has to go to where the
story is. You’ve got to camp on their doorsteps. You’ve got to
f
orce
them to see you.”

“On Earth?”

He shrugged so hard that his wrinkled
short-sleeved shirt almost pulled free of his pants.

“On Earth,” Jade repeated.

“Raki’s under pressure to get this
show finished, one way or the other. What you’ve got so far is fine, but if you
could get an interview with one of the survivors of that asteroid jaunt—just
one of them—both of you would look like angels to the board of directors.”

“I’d have to wear an exoskeleton,”
Jade said. “Get a powered wheelchair. A heart-booster pump.”

Gradowsky’s fleshy face broke into
a grin. “That’s the stuff! They couldn’t turn you down if you showed up like
that! They’d have to talk to you. Hell, you might drop dead right on their
doorsteps!”

“Yes,” Jade muttered. “I might.”

“So? What’s keeping you?”

“There’s one survivor living
off-Earth,” she said.

“Yeah, you told me. On a bridge
ship. That’s too far away, kid.
I
t’d
cost a fortune to send you there, all the way out to Mars. And we can’t wait
for the ship to loop back here.”

“The ship goes past Mars and on to
the Belt.”

“I know.”

“The sculptress lives on an asteroid
out there. The woman who worked with Sam when he got into the advertising
business.”

Gradowsky shook his head. “We can’t
let you spend two years tootling around on a bridge ship.”

“I could hire a high-boost shuttle.
They run back and forth to the bridge ships all the time.”

With an exaggerated show of
patience, Gradowsky said, “Jade, honey, there are six survivors of Sam’s first
expedition to the asteroids. Five of them live on Earth. Any other reporter
would be there now, chasing them down.”

“I can’t go to Earth!”

“Then you’re off the assignment,”
Gradowsky said flatly. “I can’t help it, but those are the orders from Orlando.
Either you get the job done or they’ll give the assignment to another reporter.”

“Is that what Raki said?”

“It’s out of his hands, kid. There’s
a dozen staff reporters down there salivating for the chance to get in on this.
You’ve opened a big can of worms, Jade. Now they’re all hot to grab the story
away from you.”

Jade felt cold anger clutching at
her heart. “So either I go to Earth or I’m off the Sam Gunn bio?”

“That’s the choice you have, yeah.”
Gradowsky tried to look tough, but instead he simply looked upset.

Without another word Jade got up
from the chair and made her way from Gradowsky’s office to Monica’s. There was
nowhere else for her to run.

Before Jade could say anything
Monica handed her palmcomp to her. “There was a call for you. From Earth.
Maine, USA.”

“Jean Margaux lives in Maine,” Jade
said, suddenly breathless with expectation. She sat in Monica’s spare chair and
tapped the proper keys on the board.

A man’s long, hound-sad face
appeared on the wall screen. He was sitting behind a huge desk of polished
wood, bookcases neatly lined with leather volumes at his back. He wore a suit
jacket of somber black and an actual necktie, striped crimson and deep blue.

“This message is for Ms. Jane Avril
Inconnu. Would you kindly hold your right thumb up to the screen so that the
scanner can check it? Otherwise this message will terminate now.”

With a glance at Monica, Jade pressed
her right thumb against the palmcomp’s tiny screen. When she lifted it, the
image of the gravely unsmiling man froze for a few seconds. Then:

“Thank you, Ms. Inconnu. I have the
unpleasant task of informing you that Ms. Jean Margaux was killed yesterday in
an automobile accident. As her attorney, I have been empowered by the four
other partners in the
Argo
expedition who live on
Earth to inform you that any further attempts to call, interview, photograph,
or contact them in any way, by any employee of the Solar News Network, Inc.,
will be regarded as a breach of privacy and will result in an appropriate suit
against said Solar News Network, Inc. Thank you.”

The screen went blank.

Jade felt just as blank, empty, as
if her insides had just been pulled out of her, as if she had suddenly stepped
out an airlock naked into the numbing vacuum of deep space.