The Sam Gunn Omnibus (73 page)

Been fourteen days since we lit off
the second nuke. Hubble says we’ll cross Mars’s orbit in ten weeks. Definitely.
He thinks.

Dome’s starting to smell bad. I think
the air recycler’s breaking down. Food’s holding out okay; nobody has much of
an appetite.

THE AIR RECYCLER’S
definitely on the fritz. All of us
are dopey, sluggish. And irritable! Even sweet-tempered me is—am?—snapping at
the others.

There’s nothing to do. Terminal
boredom. We just lay around and try to avoid each other. Munch on a crapburger
now and then. And wait.

Disk’s almost full. I won’t say
anything else until it’s the end.

THE AIR
IN
here’s as bad as Los Angeles before they went to electric cars. Grace is
coughing all the time. My eyes burn and I feel as slow and stupid as a
brain-damaged cow on downers.

Most of the others sleep almost all
the time. Like babies. They only get up to eat and use the toilet. And snarl at
each other.

Hubble’s looking grim. We’re
nowhere near the orbit of Mars yet and he knows as well as I do that the air’s
giving out.

DARLING POPPED THE
question. Said it was his dying
wish. I gave him a backhand smack across the chops and told him to get lost. He
burst into tears and skittered away. Should’ve been kinder to him, I guess. We
are
dying.
Not much farther to go.

THE LORD
HELPS those who help themselves!

I
am sitting in a
private cubicle aboard the bridge ship
Bosporus. A
friggin’ luxury yacht, compared even to the good old
Argo.

You know the IAA intends to place
five bridge ships in constant transit between Earth and Mars. Like trains
running on a regular schedule. They’ll be loaded up in the Earth-Moon region
and then ply their way out to Mars with all the supplies and personnel that the
scientists need for their ongoing exploration of the Red Planet.

And the bridge ships will make it
safer and a lot cheaper for settlers to move out past the Earth-Moon system. I had
thought that they’d help a lot with the eventual spread of the frontier into
the Asteroid Belt and even beyond.

Well, anyway,
Bosporus
is the first of the bridge ships, and she’s on her shakedown cruise. The IAA
diverted her to come out and take a look at Pittsburgh.

Why? Because the old automated
surveillance satellites still orbiting the Earth detected our two nuclear
blasts, that’s why! Three cheers for bureaucracy!

Way back in the middle of the last
century, when there was something called a Cold War simmering between the U.S.
of A. and what used to be the Soviet Union, both sides were worried sick about
the other guy testing nuclear weapons. So they each put satellites into orbit
to spot nuke tests anywhere on Earth—or even in space.

Well, the Cold War ended but the
surveillance satellites kept being replaced and even upgraded. The bureaucracy
just kept rolling along, building new and better satellites and putting them on
station regular as clockwork. Oh, they gave a lot of excuses for doing it: making
sure that small nations didn’t develop nuclear weapons, using the satellites to
make astronomical observations, that kind of garbage. I think the satellites
are now tied into the IAA’s overall surveillance net: you know, the sensors
that look for meteoroids that might hit the Earth or endanger habitats in the
Earth-Moon region.

Whatever—our two nuclear blasts
rang alarm bells all over the IAA’s sensor net. Then they saw good old
Pittsburgh all of a sudden trucking toward the inner solar system. The
Argo
was on its preplanned trajectory, cruising back toward lunar orbit with its
cargo of metals, water, and volat
i
les.
Erik, bless him, had already reported a fatal accident that had killed the
eight of us.

Somebody pretty high up in the IAA
decided to send the
Bosporus
out for a look at
Pittsburgh. We got saved. It wasn’t just in the nick of time; we could have
probably lasted another few days, maybe a week.

But good enough for government
work.

YOU NEVER
SAW
such a commotion. I’m not only rich, I’m a friggin’ hero!

The media swarmed all over us. They
didn’t wait for the
Bosporus
to make its way back to
the Earth-Moon area. They bombarded us electronically; interviews, book
contracts, video deals. And right behind them came the lawyers:
I
AA red-tape types wanting to know how dare I
set off unauthorized nuclear explosions in space. Litigation sharpies trying to
get their slice of the profits that both Rockledge and S. Gunn Enterprises,
Unlimited, are now claiming. Criminal prosecutors, too, once they learned about
Bo Williams’s death and heard me screaming about piracy.

Sheena’s a star again. She’s
already shooting footage for a docudrama about the flight. Grace is negotiating
a book contract. Marj has seventeen design salons from around the world begging
for her talents.

Hubble—well, he’s an academic,
really. He’ll go back to his university and try to live down the notoriety.
Rick Darling. I just don’t know what he’s going to do. He’s independently
wealthy now; or he will be, once we sort out the legalities and split the
profits. He hasn’t made another pass at me. In fact, he’s been staying as far
away from me as he can.

Which suits me okay. I took Jean to
dinner in the
Bosporus
s one and only wardroom
last night, fed her a bottle of their best wine, and relocated that vulnerable
spot of hers. We spent the night making the stars dance.

They’re treating us for radiation
disease, of course. When the
Bosporus’
s
medical officer found out how much radiation I had absorbed, he put on a long
face and tried to break it to me gently that I would never be able to father
any children. I grinned at that, which I guess puzzled him. Until he asked me
to strip and he saw the neat lead-lined jockstrap I wear.

THIS IS JUST
to put a finish on these
recordings. I’m going to lock them away with orders that they’re not to be
touched by anybody until ten years after my death.

Erik was sentenced to life
imprisonment, which means he’ll be frozen in a vat of liquid nitrogen and kept
like a corpsicle until social scientists prove they can rehabilitate murderers.
Maybe they’ll thaw him out in a century or two. I hope not. I would’ve
preferred it if they’d stuck him on an asteroid and sent him sailing out beyond
the orbit of Mars. See how he’d like it.

I
feel bad about
Lonz and Will. They were both sentenced to twenty years at the penal colony on
Farside. I had to testify at the trial, and even though I put all the blame on
Erik, I had to admit that Will and Lonz went along with him in the whole nasty
deal.

The one thing that frosts me is
that Erik absolutely refused to implicate Rockledge. Took all the blame himself.
They must have threatened his family or something, those fat-cat bastards.

Okay. That’s it. Funny sitting here
listening to my own voice for hours on end. There’s a lot more I could put onto
these disks, more details and stuff, but what the hell, enough’s enough.

They’ll be sore as hell at me if
any of this leaks out. Every one of my erstwhile partners is telling his or her
version of the story. Selling, I should say, not just telling. Sheena’s got a
video series going, “Queen of the Asteroids.” She’s fun to watch, but the
stories are
yecchh.

Oh, yeah. One thing that I shouldn’t
forget. The IAA scientists propositioned each of the women partners. I guess “propositioned”
isn’t the right word.

Once we were landed at the Moonbase
medical facility for further antiradiation therapy and the inevitable
psychological counseling, a group of scientists asked each of the women if they
would consider having a baby. In the interests of science. To see what effect
the radiation exposure would have. Maybe they’d be sterile. Maybe they’d have
two-headed triplets.

It would all be clinically clean
and scientifically pure. Artificial insemination and all that. Two with sperm
from the males who were also on the asteroid, two with donor sperm from
strangers. Maybe they even wanted to throw in a placebo, I don’t know.

Each of the women turned them down
flat. I think. Jean is staying at Moonbase for the time being, which is not
like her at all. Marj set herself up in Bermuda, where she’s franchising
various Dupray space-inspired fashion lines to the highest bidders. Good old
Grace gave me a kiss goodbye and high-tailed it to California as soon as the medics
would let her go. Her book’s going to be a best-seller, I guess, even though
what I’ve managed to see of it looks more like fiction to me than fact. But
what the he
ll!

They’ve all gone their separate
ways. Rick Darling’s bought himself a villa in the big new bridge ship,
Golden Gate.

Me, I’m heading back for
Pittsburgh. The asteroid’s swung around the Sun and she’s heading back toward
the Belt. She’s still got billions and billions of dollars worth of valuable metals,
and I intend to get them, now that the courts have given me clear title.

But this time I’m going alone,
except for some really top-notch robots.

It’ll be lonely, out there all by myself.

Thank God!

JADE SAT IN DEEP SILENCE FOR A LONG WHILE BEFORE SHE
noticed
that the robot had returned, bearing her clothing in its spindly metal arms.

She dressed absently, her thoughts literally
millions of kilometers away. The robot gathered up the scattered recording
disks and left her alone in the big luxurious room.

It can’t be, she told herself over
and over. It just can’t be. If it’s true it m
eans...

“Now you’ve heard Sam’s disks.”

Turning from her pale reflection in
the blank screen above the disk player, she asked Darling, “How did you get
them?”

He shrugged, a seismic movement of
flesh beneath his robes. He had changed into a pure white costume decorated
with gold and silver star bursts.

“I stole them,” Darling said. “How
else?”

“From Sam?”

Laboriously, Darling lowered
himself onto the same pile of pillows he had been sitting on when she had first
entered his chamber. He took a deep breath, like an exhausted athlete, as he
sank into the cushions.

“Oh no, not from Sam. He was far
too clever to allow anyone to steal them from him. But once Sam’s will was
probated, we discovered that he had left the disks to Grace Harcourt. Ever
since she won the Pulitzer for her expose of Rockledge’s industrial
hanky-panky, she’s been living—”

“On Pitcairn Island, I know. I tried
to interview her but she wouldn’t see me.” Jade sat on the other set of
cushions, facing Darling, her mind seething in growing turmoil.

“Yes, of course. I had the disks purloined
from the plane that was taking them out to her.”

“Why?”

Darling’s fleshy face set almost
into hardness. “You heard what he said about me. Do you think I want Grace—or
anyone else in the world—to hear all that?”

“You fell in love with Sam?”

The hardness melted immediately. “I
thought I did. It must have been the radiation. Or the excitement. He certainly
did nothing to deserve love. Mine, or anyone else’s.”

“No one else has heard these disks?”

“No one.”

There were more questions Jade knew
she would have to ask. But she dreaded them, put them off, while the enormity
of what she had just learned from the disks boiled over her like a tidal wave,
smothering her, drowning her. She fought to maintain her composure, her life.
She did not want Darling to see what was tearing away at her innards.