The Sam Gunn Omnibus (78 page)

My first inkling that Sam was
approaching was a message I found typed on my comm screen. I had been outside,
uselessly fingering my carvings. When I came in and took off my helmet I saw on
the screen:

have
no fear, sam is here.

will
rendezvous with you in one hour.

My eyes flicked to the digital
clock reading. He would be here in a matter of minutes! At least this time I was
wearing clothes, but still I looked a mess.

By the time his transport was
hovering in a matching orbit and the pumps in my airlock were chugging, I was
decently dressed in a set of beige coveralls he had not seen before, my hair
was combed and neatly netted, and I had applied a bit of makeup to my face. My
expression in the mirror had surprised me: smiling, nearly simpering, almost as
giddy as a schoolgirl. Even my heart was skipping along merrily.

Sam came in, his helmet already
off. I propelled myself over to him and kissed him warmly on the lips. He
reacted in a typical Sam Gunn way. He gave a whoop and made three weightless
cartwheels, literally heels over head, with me gripped tightly in his arms.

For all his exuberance and energy,
Sam was a gentle, thoughtful lover. Hours later, as we floated side-by-side in
my darkened quarters, the sweat glistening on our bare skins, he murmured:

“I never thought I could feel
so ... so
..

Trying to supply the missing word,
I suggested, “So much in love?”

He made a little nod. In our
weightlessness, the action made him drift slightly away from me. I caught him
in my arms, though, and pulled us back together.

“I love you, Sam,” I whispered, as
though it were a secret. “I love you.”

He gave a long sigh. I thought it
was contentment, happiness even.

“Listen,” he said, “you’ve got to
come over to the ship. Those two nutcases who want to paint the ionosphere are
on their way to the Moralists’ habitat.”

“What does that have to do
with ...”

“You gotta meet them,” he insisted.
Untangling from me, he began to round up his clothes, floating like weightless
ghosts in the shadows. “You know what those Moralist hypocrites are going to
call their habitat, once it’s finished? Eden! How’s that for chutzpah?”

He had to explain the Yiddish word
to me. Eden. The Moralists wanted to create their own paradise in space. Well,
maybe they would, although I doubted that it would be paradise for anyone who
deviated in the slightest from their stern views of right and wrong.

We showered, which in zero-gee is
an intricate, intimate procedure. Sam washed me thoroughly, lovingly, using the
washcloth to tenderly push the soapy water that clung to my skin over every inch
of my body.

“The perfect woman,” he muttered. “A
dirty mind in a clean body.”

Finally we dried off, dressed and
headed out to Sam’s ship. But first he maneuvered the little scooter along the
length of my asteroid.

“Doesn’t seem to be much more done
than the last time I was here,” he said, almost accusingly.

I
was glad we were in the space suits and he could not
see me blush. I remained silent.

As
we moved away from The Rememberer, Sam told me, “The lawyers aren’t having much
luck with the arbitration board.” In the earphones of my helmet his voice
sounded suddenly tired, almost defeated.

“I
didn’t think they would.”

“The
board’s gonna hand down its decision in two weeks. If they decide against you,
there’s no appeal.”

“And
they will decide against me, won’t they?”

He
tried to make his voice brighter. “Well, the lawyers are doing their damnedest.
But if trickery and deceit won’t work, maybe I can bribe a couple of board members.”

“Don’t
you dare! You’ll go to jail.”

He
laughed.

As
we came up to Sam’s transport ship, I saw
its
name stenciled in huge letters beneath the insect-eye canopy of the command module:
Klaus Heiss.

“Important
economist,” Sam answered my question. “Back fifty years or so. The first man to
suggest free enterprise in space.”

“I
thought that writers had suggested that long before space flight even began,” I
said as we approached the ship’s airlock.

Sam’s
voice sounded mildly impatient in my earphones. “Writers are one thing. Heiss
went out and raised money, got things started. For real.”

KLAUS HEISS
WAS
fitted out more
handsomely than
Adam Smith,
even though it seemed no
larger. The dining lounge was more luxurious, and apparently the crew ate
elsewhere. There were four of us for dinner: Sam and myself, and the two “nutcases,”
as he had called them.

Morton
McGuire and T. Kagashima did not seem insane to me. Perhaps naive. Certainly
enthusiastic.

“It’s
the greatest idea since the invention of writing!” McGuire blurted as we sat
around the dining lounge table.

He
was speaking about their idea of painting the ionosphere with advertisements.

McGuire
was a huge mass of flesh, bulging in
every
direction, straining the metal snaps of his bilious green coveralls. He looked
like a balloon that had been overfilled to the point of bursting. He proudly
told me that he was known as “Mountain McGuire,” from his days as a college
football player. He had gone from college into advertising, gaining poundage
every passing day. Living on Earth, he could not be classified as an agravitic
endomorph. He was simply fat.
Ex
tremely so.

“I’m
just a growing boy,” he said happily as he jammed fistfuls of food into his mouth.

The
other one, Kagashima, was almost as lean as I myself. Quiet too, although his
oriental eyes frequently flashed with suppressed mirth. No one seemed to know
what Kagashima’s first name was. When I asked what the “T” stood for he merely
smiled enigmatically and said, “Just call me Kagashima; it will be easier for
you.” He spoke English very well: no great surprise since he was born and
raised in Denver, USA.

Kagashima
was an electronics wizard. McGuire an advertising executive. Between them they
had cooked up the idea of using electron guns to create glowing pictures in the
ionosphere.

“Just
imagine it,” McGuire beamed, his chubby hands held up as if framing a camera
shot. “It’s twilight. The first stars are coming out. You look up
and—POW!—there’s a huge red and white sign covering the sky from horizon to
horizon:
Drink Coke!”

I
wanted to vomit.

But
Sam encouraged him. “Like skywriting, when planes used to spell out words with
smoke.”

“Real
skywriting!” McGuire enthused.

Kagashima
smiled and nodded.

“Is
it legal,” I asked, “to write advertising slogans across the sky?”

McGuire
snapped a ferocious look at me. “There’s no laws against it! The lawyers can’t
take the damned
sky
away from us, for god’s
sake! The sky belongs to everyone.”

I
glanced at Sam. “The lawyers seem to be taking my
asteroid away from me.”

His
smile was odd, like the smile a hunter would have on his face as he saw his
prey coming into range of his gun.

“Possession
is nine-tenths of the law,” Sam muttered.

“Who
possesses the sky?” Kagashima asked, with that oriental ambiguity that passes
for wisdom.

“We
do!” snapped McGuire.

Sam
merely smiled like a cat eying a fat canary.

AT SAM’S INSISTENCE I
spent the night hours
aboard his ship. His quarters were much more luxurious than mine, and since
practically all

space
operations kept Greenwich Mean Time, there was no problem of differing clocks.

His cabin was much more than an
alcove off the command module. It was small, but a real compartment, with a
zipper hammock for sleeping and a completely enclosed shower stall that jetted
water from all directions. We used the shower, but not the hammock. We finally
fell asleep locked weightlessly in each other’s embrace and woke up when we
gently bumped into the compartment’s bulkhead, many hours later.

“We’ve got to talk,” Sam said as we
were dressing.

I
smiled at him. “That
means you talk and I listen, no?”

“No. Well, maybe I do most of the
talking. But you’ve got to make some decisions, kiddo.”

“Decisions? About what?”

“About your asteroid. And the next
few years of your life.”

He did not say that I had to make a
decision about us. I barely noticed that fact at the time. I should have paid more
attention.

Glancing at the digital clock set
into the bulkhead next to his hammock, Sam told me, “In about half an hour I’m
going to be conversing with the Right Reverend Virtue T. Dabney, spiritual
leader of the Moralist Sect. Their chief, their head honcho, sitteth at the
right hand of You-Know-Who. The Boss.”

“The head of the Moralists?”

“Right.”

“He’s calling you? About my
asteroid?”

Sam’s grin was full of teeth. “Nope.
About his worms. We’re carrying another load of ‘em out to his Eden on this
trip.”

“Why would the head of the
Moralists call you about worms?”

“Seems that the worms have become
afflicted by a rare and strange disease,” Sam said, the grin turning
delightfully evil, “and the hauling contract the Moralists signed with me now
contains a clause that says I’m not responsible for their health.”

I
was hanging in midair,
literally and mentally. “What’s that got to do with me?”

Drifting over so close that our
noses were practically touching, Sam asked in a whisper, “Would you be willing
to paint the world’s first advertisement on the ionosphere? An advertisement
for the Moralists?”

“Never!”

“Even if it means that they’ll let
you keep the asteroid?”

Ah, the emotions that surged
through my heart! I felt anger, and hope, and disgust, even fear. But mostly
anger.

“Sam, that’s despicable! It’s a
desecration! To turn the sky into an advertising
poster...”

Sam was grinning, but he was
serious about this. “Now don’t climb up on a high horse,
kid....”

“And do it for the Moralists?” My
temper was boiling over now. “The people who want to take my asteroid away from
me and destroy the memory of my own people? You want me to help
them?”

“Okay, okay! Don’t pop your cork
over it.” Sam said, taking me gently by the wrist. “I’m just asking you to
think about it. You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”

Completely bewildered, I allowed
Sam to lead me up to the ship’s command module. The same two husband-and-wife
engineers were there at their consoles, just as blond and even more bloated
than they had been the last time I had seen them, it seemed to me. They greeted
me with smiles of recognition.

Sam asked them to leave and they
wafted out through the main hatch like a pair of hot-air balloons. On their way
to the galley, no doubt.

We drifted over to the comm
console. No one needs chairs in zero gravity. We simply hung there, my arms
floating up to about chest height, as they would in a swimming pool, while Sam
worked the console to make contact with the Moralist Sect headquarters back on
Earth.

It took more than a half hour for
Sam to get Rev. Dabney on his screen. A small army of neatly scrubbed, earnest,
glittering-eyed young men and women appeared, one after the other, and tried to
deal with Sam. Instead, Sam dealt with them.